Vladimir Putin has agreed to a limited ceasefire that would stop Russia targeting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure after a high-stakes phone call with Donald Trump.

But the Russian leader declined to commit to a 30-day full ceasefire, a plan pitched by Trump that Ukraine agreed to last week, denting the US president’s hope of bringing a quick end to hostilities. The Kremlin said Putin demanded that the west halt all military aid to Kyiv before it could implement such a plan.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, speaking after the call, said Ukraine was favourable to the idea of both sides halting attacks on each other’s infrastructure but he was waiting for “details” of what had been agreed first.

Trump put a positive spin on the discussion, writing on his Truth Social platform shortly after the call ended that he had had a “very good and productive” conversation with Putin.

“We agreed to an immediate Ceasefire on all Energy and Infrastructure, with an understanding that we will be working quickly to have a Complete Ceasefire and, ultimately, an END to this very horrible War between Russia and Ukraine,” he added.

A Kremlin statement said Putin had issued an order to the Russian military to suspend strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure. Within hours of the call ending, however, air raid alerts sounded in Kyiv, followed quickly by fresh explosions as Ukrainian air defence targeted Russian drones around the capital.

A few hours later, Zelenskyy said in a statement on Telegram that Russia had launched more than 40 drones against civilian infrastructure, including a hit on a hospital in the city of Sumy.

“In many regions we can exactly hear what it is that Russia wants,” wrote Zelenskyy.

In a briefing with journalists, Zelenskyy said he was waiting for further information from Washington.

“I think it will be right that we will have a conversation with President Trump and we will know in detail what the Russians offered the Americans or what the Americans offered the Russians,” he said.

“After we get details from the American president, from the American side, we will give our answer, prepare it, and our team will be ready for technical discussions.”

If upheld by both sides, a halt to attacks on energy infrastructure would mark the first partial ceasefire in more than three years since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Russia has been relentlessly targeting Ukraine’s infrastructure for the past three years, while in recent months Ukraine has been increasingly able to hit targets deep inside Russia with long-range drones.

In his first public appearance since the call, Trump told Fox News interviewer Laura Ingraham: “Right now you have a lot of guns pointing at each other and a ceasefire without going a little bit further would have been tough. Russia has the advantage. As you know, they have encircled about 2,500 soldiers. They are nicely encircled and that’s not good. And we want to get it over with.”

Asked by Ingraham about Russian media reports that Putin demanded an immediate cessation of aid to Ukraine in order to get to a deal, the president insisted: “No, we didn’t talk about aid, actually, we didn’t talk about aid at all. We talked about a lot of things but aid was never discussed.”

During the interview Trump described himself as a “nationalist” who has “very good” relationships with Putin, Chinese president Xi Jinping and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un.

In his earlier statement, Trump said: “Many elements of a Contract for Peace were discussed, including the fact that thousands of soldiers are being killed, and both President Putin and President Zelenskyy would like to see it end. That process is now in full force and effect, and we will, hopefully, for the sake of Humanity, get the job done!”

A White House statement said Washington and Moscow had also agreed to begin negotiations on the “implementation of a maritime ceasefire in the Black Sea, full ceasefire and permanent peace”. It said these negotiations would begin “immediately” in the Middle East.

During the call with Trump, which lasted two and a half hours, Putin reiterated his concerns over a range of issues that he said must be addressed before a more wide-ranging ceasefire could be implemented, according to the Kremlin statement.

The “series of significant issues” included how such a ceasefire would be enforced and whether it would give Ukraine an opportunity to strengthen its forces and receive western military aid, it said.

The Kremlin’s account of the call said Putin set several maximalist conditions for a lasting ceasefire, including the suspension of western arms and intelligence support for Ukraine. Putin also demanded that Ukraine halt the mobilisation of new recruits.

“It was emphasised that a key condition for preventing the escalation of the conflict and working toward its resolution through political and diplomatic means must be the complete cessation of foreign military aid and the provision of intelligence to Kyiv,” the Kremlin said.

There was no indication that Putin had abandoned any of his most hardline objectives in the war in Ukraine. He told Trump that peace talks must “take into account the unconditional necessity to remove the initial reasons for the crisis and Russia’s legal security interests”.

In recent statements Putin outlined these demands, which include a commitment to keeping Kyiv out of Nato, the demilitarisation of Ukraine, and full control over the four regions Moscow annexed in 2022 – effectively undermining Ukraine’s independence.

Some of Trump’s recent remarks have raised concerns that the US may prioritise securing a deal over protecting Kyiv’s interests. Before the call, he posted on Truth Social that “many elements of a Final Agreement have been agreed to, but much remains”.

Europe would be uneasy about a suspension of all weapons deliveries to Ukraine as the UK and EU are stepping up efforts to deliver fresh military aid packages to Kyiv as soon as possible.

At a news conference in Berlin with the French president, Emmanuel Macron, Olaf Scholz, the outgoing German chancellor, called an end to Russian attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure “a good start” but stressed that “there cannot be an agreement without Ukraine”.

“The next step must be a complete ceasefire for Ukraine and as quickly as possible,” he said.

Downing Street welcomed the “progress President Trump has made towards a ceasefire” in his call with Putin, according to a spokesperson, but said negotiations must lead to a “just and lasting peace for Ukraine”.

Before the call, Trump said Russian and American negotiators had already talked about “dividing up certain assets”.

The US outlet Semafor reported on Monday that the White House was considering officially recognising Crimea – annexed by Moscow in 2014 – as Russian territory as part of a potential peace deal. Washington is also reportedly discussing the possibility of putting pressure on the UN to follow suit, it said.

In Moscow, senior Russian officials signalled their satisfaction with Putin’s conversation with Trump.

“It is official now – a PERFECT call,” Kirill Dmitriev, a senior aide close to Putin, wrote on X.

Donald Trump began his conversation with Vladimir Putin with a simple demand: a 30-day ceasefire on land, sea and air which Ukraine has already signed up to, as an initial measure on which to build towards a peace.

Instead, what the US president got from Putin were questions, half-offers and limited concessions – and, above all, an extraordinary demand from the Russian leader to weaken Ukraine that would make a mockery of any peace agreement.

The “key condition” for resolving the conflict, the Kremlin said in a statement after the call, should be “the complete cessation of foreign military aid and the provision of intelligence information to Kyiv”.

That means halting military support not just from the US but from all Ukraine’s foreign backers, including Britain, France and all those putting together plans for a post-conflict “reassurance force” intended to provide a long-term security guarantee to Kyiv, allowing it to open its ports and airports, and safeguard utility supplies.

It is nowhere near a position Ukraine can accept. Kyiv has spent three years fighting off Russia, incurring tens of thousands of casualties and successfully preventing a full takeover of the country – albeit for loss of around a fifth of its territory, which it accepts it cannot win back through fighting.

So bold is the demand, it is hard to believe that Putin is entirely serious. “It sounds like the Russians are projecting their desires,” said Matthew Savill, an analyst with the Royal United Services Institute thinktank, simply describing the Kremlin position as “incompatible” with the European-led security plan.

It is not yet clear how far Trump pressed the full 30-day ceasefire proposal, negotiated a week earlier with Ukraine by his secretary of state, Marco Rubio. Lord Ricketts, a former UK national security adviser, said: “We need to know how Trump reacted to it. But I can only assume it was designed to ensure a Zelenskyy rejection, taking the pressure off Putin.”

Key European leaders did not appear too impressed either. France and Germany’s leaders, hosting a press conference, reiterated their continuing support for Ukraine. “We will continue to support the Ukrainian army in its war of resistance,” the French president, Emmanuel Macron, said, speaking alongside Germany’s Olaf Scholz.

What Trump did obtain was something considerably more modest than a full ceasefire: an immediate commitment from Putin to cease bombing Ukraine’s energy infrastructure if Kyiv would “mutually refrain” from similar attacks of its own.

Over the past three years, Russia has repeatedly bombed Ukraine’s power plants to the point where there is little energy generation left that is not nuclear, too risky for even Moscow’s forces to attack. Ukraine, meanwhile, is being asked to halt a destabilising campaign of refinery attacks in the Russian rear that probably has some way to run – though any cooling of hostilities has to be welcomed.

Orysia Lutsevych, a Ukraine expert at the Chatham House thinktank, adds that the arrival of spring means that Kyiv gains relatively little from a 30-day halt to energy attacks. She described Putin’s offer as “a kind of goodwill gesture to keep Trump interested and get a bigger prize: [the] US abandoning Ukraine”.

Nevertheless, the White House said both sides would begin “technical negotiations on implementation of a maritime ceasefire”. Trump himself added that came “with an understanding that we will be working quickly to have a complete ceasefire” though this latter point was obscured by Russia.

Instead, the Kremlin emphasised that Ukraine would remain shut out from the talks. “The leaders confirmed their intention to continue efforts to achieve a Ukrainian settlement in a bilateral mode,” negotiations that also restore legitimacy to a country whose aggression and war crimes had left it isolated and sanctioned by the west.

The positive is that talks continue, though the concern must be that Russia will use them to try to detach the US from Europe. In the meantime, Trump and Putin did also agree to organise ice hockey matches between players in the American and Russian leagues. The puck, at least, does not stop here.

• A hospital in Sumy was bombed in a wave of attacks on Ukraine that led Volodymyr Zelenskyy to declare Vladimir Putin had “effectively rejected” a ceasefire – immediately after the Russian president told Donald Trump he would halt strikes against Ukraine’s energy grid and infrastructure. The Kremlin said after Trump and Putin’s call that the Russian president had given immediate orders for such strikes to stop.

• Soon after the call, air raid sirens wailed and explosions rang out in Ukraine. Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s president, said “there have been hits, specifically on civilian infrastructure”. Local reports said the city of Slovyansk was partly blacked out after power infrastructure was damaged. Zelenskyy said more than 40 Russian drones were launched by Russia. He added: “It is precisely such night attacks by Russia that destroy our energy systems, our infrastructure, the normal life of Ukrainians. Today, Putin de facto rejected the proposal for a complete ceasefire. It would be right for the world to reject in response any attempts by Putin to drag out the war.”

• Zelenskyy said he would support stopping strikes on energy targets but was waiting for further information from Washington. “I think it will be right that we will have a conversation with President Trump and we will know in detail what the Russians offered the Americans or what the Americans offered the Russians. After we get details from the American president, from the American side, we will give our answer, prepare it, and our team will be ready for technical discussions.” Ukraine last week offered a full 30-day ceasefire, which Putin has rejected. Zelenskyy said: “They are not ready to end this war, and we can see that. They are not ready even for the first step, which is a ceasefire. [Putin’s] whole game is to weaken [Ukraine].”

• Ukraine’s troops attacked along the border with Russia’s Belgorod region on Tuesday, just south-east of the remaining Ukrainian positions in Kursk. The Institute for the Study of War said that according to Russian bloggers, Ukrainian forces moved from Sumy oblast to reach south-west of Demidovka in Belgorod before they were pushed back. Ukraine made up to five attacks using up to 200 fighters with tanks, armoured combat vehicles and demolition vehicles, the Russian defence ministry said. Kyiv did not comment.

• Zelenskyy on Tuesday said Ukrainian troops were still fighting in Russia’s Kursk region and would stay there “as long as we need”, following days of Russian advances in the area. “Ukraine is fulfilling its task in the Kursk region. The Ukrainian military are there.”

• Olaf Scholz, the outgoing German chancellor, said at a news conference in Berlin with the French president, Emmanuel Macron, that ending Russian attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure would be “a good start” and first step but “there cannot be an agreement without Ukraine”. “The next step must be a complete ceasefire for Ukraine and as quickly as possible.” Macron said: “We have been promoting peace since day one and that cannot be achieved without Ukraine taking part in talks.”

• Germany’s parliament voted in favour of unleashing historic levels of spending to boost its military against Russian aggression. The incoming chancellor, Friedrich Merz, and his party joined with likely coalition partners to create a €500bn fund and relax Germany’s rules on government debt.

• The Kremlin said Russia and Ukraine would exchange 175 prisoners of war each on Wednesday, and Russia would also hand over to Ukraine 23 badly wounded soldiers.

• The US envoy Steve Witkoff said on Tuesday that more talks with Russia on the Ukraine war would take place on Sunday in Jeddah. He told told Fox News: “The devil is in the details. We’ve got a team going to Saudi Arabia, led by our national security adviser [Mike Waltz] and our secretary of state [Marco Rubio], and I think, you know, we’ve got to figure out those details.”

The wave of deadly airstrikes that shattered the pause in hostilities in Gaza is “only the beginning”, Benjamin Netanyahu has warned, also promising that the new offensive would continue until Israel achieved all of its war aims – destroying Hamas and freeing all hostages held by the militant group.

Any further ceasefire negotiations would take place “under fire”, the Israeli prime minister said in a televised address on Tuesday night, his first after Israel launched attacks that killed more than 400 people in the devastated Palestinian territory, in the bloodiest single day of violence since the first months of the war in 2023.

“Hamas has already felt the strength of our hand in the past 24 hours. And I want to promise you – and them – this is only the beginning,” Netanyahu told viewers.

Earlier, Israel’s defence minister raised the prospect of many weeks or even months of war in Gaza.

“Hamas must understand that the rules of the game have changed,” Israel Katz told reporters during a visit to an airbase, adding that “the gates of hell will open and it will face the full might of the IDF in the air, at sea and on land” if hostages were not freed.

The Israeli army has issued evacuation orders covering the northernmost and eastern parts of Gaza, suggesting renewed ground attacks could be launched soon.

Palestinian health authorities reported 404 deaths in the strikes, which Israeli military officials said targeted Hamas military commanders and political officials. More than 600 were reported injured. Air attacks and artillery fire were reported to be continuing across much of Gaza during the afternoon and into the evening.

Aid officials in Gaza said hundreds, possibly thousands, of people were on the move to comply with the Israeli evacuation orders. “There is no resilience. People … are in a very weak state, physically and psychologically,” one aid official in Gaza told the Guardian.

In Washington, a White House spokesperson said Israel had consulted the US administration before carrying out the strikes.

Attacks were reported in northern Gaza and in the central cities of Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis. One strike was reported to have killed 17 members of a family in Rafah. The dead included five children, their parents, and a man and his three children, medics at the hospital that received the bodies said.

Witnesses said patients lay on the floor of the Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, some screaming, and a young girl cried as her bloody arm was bandaged. At al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City, survivors held rushed funeral rites for dozens of body bags lining the yard. Mothers sobbed over the bloodied bodies of children, as warplanes hummed in the sky. Doctors struggled to treat the flow of wounded.

Casualties included senior Hamas officials, including the most senior political leader in Gaza and ministers, as well as many women and children, Palestinian officials said.

Lt Col Nadav Shoshani, a military spokesperson, said Israel had launched strikes after discovering Hamas was planning new raids to capture or kill Israeli civilians or soldiers and because Hamas had refused to release more of the 59 hostages held in Gaza, thus breaking the ceasefire agreement that came into effect in January.

“Hamas could have chosen a different path. It could have chosen to release all the hostages but instead chose refusal, terror, and war,” Shoshani said in a statement.

Netanyahu’s office said Hamas had rejected proposals from Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, for an extension of the pause in hostilities.

Hamas said hostage releases were due only during a scheduled second phase that Israel agreed in January but has since refused to discuss or implement.

The first phase of the ceasefire agreed in January involved 25 living Israeli hostages and the remains of eight dead Israelis returned by militant groups in Gaza in exchange for about 1,900 Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails.

Under the scheduled second phase of the ceasefire, there would have been a total Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, the release of all hostages and a definitive end to hostilities. With the backing of the US, Israel has been pushing instead for the return of all remaining hostages in exchange for further prisoner releases and a 30- to 60-day truce, in line with Witkoff’s proposal.

Earlier this month, Israel blocked deliveries of aid from entering Gaza and cut off remaining electricity supplies in an effort to pressure Hamas.

Taher al-Nunu, a Hamas official, said the international community faced “a moral test”.

“Either it allows the return of the crimes committed by the occupation army or it enforces a commitment to ending the aggression and war against innocent people in Gaza,” Nunu said.

The strikes come at a tense moment in Israeli domestic politics. Netanyahu said on Sunday he would fire Ronen Bar, the head of the Shin Bet internal security service, a controversial move that immediately prompted accusations of authoritarianism and plans for protests on Wednesday. Critics accuse Netanyahu of using war to reinforce the support of far-right allies for his coalition government and so maintain his own grip on power.

Thousands of people took part in a protest in Tel Aviv on Tuesday night against Netanyahu’s plans to dismiss Bar, along with Gali Baharav-Miara, Israel’s attorney general, who is a fierce critic of the prime minister.

Much of Gaza lies in ruins after 15 months of fighting, which erupted on 7 October 2023 when thousands of Hamas-led gunmen attacked Israeli communities around the Gaza Strip, killing 1,200 people and abducting 251 hostages.

The Israeli campaign in response has killed more than 48,000 people and reduced much of the territory to ruins. Ninety per cent of houses are damaged or destroyed, and much of the population is displaced. Roads, hospitals, schools, sanitation systems and much else have been reduced to rubble.

As the ceasefire in Gaza extended from days into weeks, and newly freed hostages began sharing grim details of their captivity, Benjamin Netanyahu’s political room for manoeuvre seemed to shrink.

He was caught between the far-right parties propping up his government, keen to return to war in Gaza, and the majority of Israelis who prioritised the fate of the remaining hostages over the “total defeat” of Hamas demanded by their prime minister.

Public opinion polls showed broad support for a second stage of the ceasefire deal, which would mean a full withdrawal of Israeli troops from the Gaza Strip and the return of all living hostages.

But his finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, who opposed the ceasefire deal from the start, had repeatedly threatened to quit if fighting didn’t resume, and Netanyahu has to coral his fractious coalition through a critical vote this month. If the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, doesn’t approve an overdue budget for 2025 by 31 March, the government will be automatically dissolved and the country will hold early elections.

For many in Israel, the overnight bombardment of Gaza, the deadliest since the early months of the war in 2023, was a clear sign Netanyahu had made a political decision about the future of the conflict.

Campaigners for hostages still held in Hamas captivity attacked it as an immense betrayal. Ayala Metzger, whose father-in-law Yoram Metzger was kidnapped to Gaza and killed in Hamas captivity, challenged Smotrich in parliament on Tuesday.

“There are deals on the table, and you are choosing to continue sacrificing more hostages and soldiers,” Metzger shouted at him in parliament, the Times of Israel reported. He ordered security to remove her, saying: “We paid [a price] too. Let’s not have a competition.”

Nor did criticism come only from the left, or the families most directly traumatised by the Hamas attacks on 7 October 2023 that began the war.

Retired Maj Gen Amos Yadlin, former head of Israel’s military intelligence directorate, said that restarting the war while hostages were still in Gaza would undermine the military’s effectiveness in operations there and damage morale.

“A responsible Israeli leader, who has no internal political consideration, would bring all the hostages back in one group, up front, [in return] for ending the war, and then will take care of the second goal of the war to dismantle Hamas,” he said in a briefing to journalists on Tuesday.

“When Israeli reservists came [to serve] in October 2023, their main motivation was to bring back the hostages. Now someone has to convince them that the ground operation will bring back the hostages [alive], not bring them back dead. This is a tough job,” he added.

Those cracks in morale have already started showing. The military announced on Tuesday it had dismissed a combat navigator from the reserves who said he would not report for duty in protest at the government’s conduct, the Haaretz newspaper reported. The air force said it was an isolated case, but some senior officials are concerned that others will follow suit.

Netanyahu’s resistance to a state commission of inquiry into failings on 7 October has added to anger inside Israel and fuelled critics who say he is managing the war for political rather than patriotic ends.

The prime minister has always strongly rejected these accusations, arguing from the early days of the war that military pressure was the best way to bring hostages home – even though most of those who are back have returned in ceasefire deals – and that only the “total destruction” of Hamas would ensure Israel’s future security.

His office blamed the militant group for the collapse in the ceasefire, saying it launched the strikes because the group “repeatedly” refused to release hostages, and rejected proposals from US envoy Steve Witkoff.

The deal, always fragile and violated repeatedly by both parties, had slid into limbo this month after a deadline for the end of the first phase passed without any progress to a second phase.

Netanyahu delayed starting negotiations on that second phase as scheduled in February, pushing instead to draw out the first stage. Yadlin said that had undermined Israel’s longer-term position.

“I think Hamas would have broken [the] negotiations anyway, by a very, very tough position. But legitimacy is important, and if you sign an agreement you have to negotiate.”

Regardless of motivation, the political dividends of restarting the war were clear almost immediately. Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right party leader who quit his cabinet post in January over the ceasefire deal, announced his return to government within hours.

He hailed the overnight attacks as “the right moral, ethical and justified step”, in a statement that suggested he expected them to be the start of a wider campaign. That was confirmed by foreign minister, Gideon Saar, who told visiting members of the US lobby group the American Israel Public Affairs Committee that the overnight bombing was not part of a “one-day attack”.

Evacuation orders issued for parts of Gaza suggested that Israel was preparing for a ground war, even if no decision has yet been made on sending troops in. Israel’s new chief of defence staff, Eyal Zamir, approved Gaza attack plans on his first day in command earlier this month, Israeli media reported.

The latest attack brought a chorus of condemnation from around the world, with close allies including the UK, the United Nations and humanitarian groups among those warning of the catastrophic consequences for over 2 million Palestinians in Gaza.

However, Saar said Washington was told about the strikes in advance and backed them. The US is Israel’s main supplier of weapons and its diplomatic protector in international forums such as the United Nations.

Donald Trump has previously warned there would be “hell to pay” if Hamas didn’t release all the hostages. If he is onboard with a new phase of fighting, there may be little that Netanyahu’s domestic or international critics can do to quiet the guns.

Two Nasa astronauts stuck onboard the International Space Station (ISS) since June 2024 finally arrived back on Earth on Tuesday evening, more than nine months after the failure of Boeing’s pioneering Starliner capsule scuppered their originally scheduled week-long mission.

A SpaceX Dragon capsule containing four astronauts, including Starliner’s test pilots Sunita Williams and Barry “Butch” Wilmore, splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico, off the coast of Tallahassee, at 5.57pm ET (9.57pm GMT) after a 17-hour descent.

The spacecraft slowed from 17,000mph (27,359 km/h) as it entered Earth’s atmosphere and emerged into a clear blue Florida sky before coasting under four parachutes to a gentle splashdown on what a Nasa commentator said was a “calm, glasslike ocean”.

“And splashdown. Crew-9 back on Earth. Nick, Aleksandr, Butch and Suni, on behalf of SpaceX, welcome home,” a voice from mission control said, shortly before a pod of frolicking dolphins appeared and swam around the bobbing craft.

“What a ride. I see a capsule full of grins, ear to ear,” Nicholas Hague, the third American onboard, replied.

Williams and Wilmore arrived at the ISS on 6 June last year, intending to stay long enough to evaluate Starliner’s docking and operational capabilities during its first crewed flight and return home no more than 10 days later.

But a series of technical issues and safety fears led Nasa and Boeing to send the capsule back to Earth empty in September, and extend the pair’s stay by making them crew members onboard the space station in place of two other astronauts still on the ground who were reassigned to other future missions.

The Dragon capsule, called Freedom, undocked from the orbiting outpost at 1.05am ET on Monday, containing Williams, Wilmore, Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov.

“We’ll miss you, but have a great journey home,” Nasa’s Anne McClain had called out earlier from the space station as the capsule pulled away 260 miles (418km) above the Pacific.

Hague, who arrived at the space station with Gorbunov in September, said it had been a privilege to “call the station home” as part of an international effort for the “benefit of humanity”.

Dressed in re-entry suits, boots and helmets, the astronauts were seen earlier on Nasa’s live footage laughing, hugging and posing for photos with their colleagues from the station shortly before they were shut into the capsule for two hours of final pressure, communications and seal tests.

The capsule was lifted on to a recovery vessel about 30 minutes after the splashdown.

“Awesome job, both uphill and downhill,” Hague told mission controllers, referring to his flights to and from the space station, immediately before a side hatch was opened and the astronauts were lifted out on stretchers, a routine practice, and taken for medical evaluation.

Hague was first to emerge, smiling and waving, followed by Gorbunov, then Williams and Wilmore to cheers and applause from the recovery crew. Williams grinned and waved a thumbs-up sign; Wilmore shook the hand of a crew member and waved as he was led away.

Williams returned home as the American astronaut with the second-longest combined time in space, 608 days over three visits to the space station, the first in 2006. Only Peggy Whitson, a former chief of Nasa’s astronaut office, has more, with 675 days over four space flights.

Williams and Wilmore’s odyssey became something of a political football, with the SpaceX founder and Donald Trump acolyte Elon Musk insisting without evidence they had been “abandoned” by the Biden administration, and Trump attempting to paint last week’s long-scheduled routine crew rotation flight as a special rescue mission ordered by the White House.

The fallout left the astronauts in an awkward position, with Wilmore telling reporters from space earlier this month that Musk’s claim he offered to bring them home last year, but was rebuffed by Joe Biden, was “absolutely factual”, while admitting: “We have no information on … what was offered, what was not offered, who it was offered to, how that process went.”

Yet in February he told CNN: “We don’t feel abandoned, we don’t feel stuck, we don’t feel stranded. I understand why others may think that … if you’ll help us change the rhetoric, help us change the narrative, let’s change it to ‘prepared and committed’, that’s what we prefer.”

Musk, meanwhile, became embroiled in a public dispute with the Danish astronaut and space station veteran Andreas Mogensen, who accused him of lying, and pointed out that Tuesday’s return of Williams and Wilmore, alongside their ISS Crew 9 colleagues was scheduled as long ago as September.

In response, Musk posted to the X platform he owns that Mogensen was “fully retarded”, drawing him deeper into conflict with retired astronauts and ISS veterans and brothers Scott and Mark Kelly, who defended their European colleague.

The bad blood has continued, with Musk calling Mark Kelly, Democratic senator for Arizona, “a traitor” for visiting Ukraine and urging US military and humanitarian support for the country in its war against Russia; and the politician retorting that Musk was “not a serious guy”. Kelly has also ditched his Tesla car, manufactured by another of Musk’s companies, in protest at the billionaire’s role in slashing federal budgets and staffing.

The future of Boeing’s Starliner capsule, developed as part of Nasa’s commercial crew program, remains uncertain. Engineers have examined the spacecraft at its White Sands, New Mexico, base attempting to find the cause of problems that arose during its maiden crewed flight, including thruster issues and a series of small helium leaks.

Aviation Week reported that Starliner was unlikely to fly again in 2025, but that the company retained confidence in its product and was working towards earning a new flight readiness certification.

Nasa has released the first high-definition images of a sunset on the moon, two striking photographs taken by the private lander Blue Ghost that could offer scientists further clues to the mysterious phenomenon known as lunar horizon glow.

The agency presented the images to a press conference on Tuesday at Houston’s Johnson Space Center, marking the conclusion of a 14-day mission conducted in partnership with Texas company Firefly Aerospace.

The commercial lander, which touched down on 2 March near Mons Latreille, a volcanic formation in Mare Crisium on the moon’s north-eastern near side, is part of a $2.6bn investment by Nasa in commercial payload operators aiming to cut costs and support Artemis, the program scheduled to return humans to the moon in 2027.

The two images, taken to the west and with Earth and Venus also visible, show the spread of the glow along moon’s horizon as the sun appears about halfway set.

“These are the first high-definition images taken of the sun going down and then going into darkness at the horizon,” said Joel Kearns, Nasa’s deputy associate administrator for exploration, science mission directorate.

“The images themselves are beautiful, they’re really aesthetic, but I know there are a bunch of folks looking at them now that study the moon … Now its time for the specialists in the field to examine it and compare it to the other data we have from the mission and see what conclusions they can propose and draw from.”

Lunar horizon glow was first documented by the astronaut Eugene Cernan, one of the last two men to set foot on the moon during the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. Subsequent observations concluded that the phenomenon was due to tiny dust particles in the moon’s thin atmosphere glowing at lunar sunrise and sunset, while some theories suggest the particles levitated.

Blue Ghost also captured high-definition imagery of a total eclipse on 14 March, when the Earth blocked the sun from the moon’s horizon.

A SpaceX Falcon rocket launched the lander, which is about the size of a hippopotamus, on a 2.8-mile journey on 15 January. Blue Ghost was carrying an array of scientific experiments, including a lunar soil analyzer, a radiation-tolerant computer and an experiment testing the feasibility of using the existing global satellite navigation system to navigate the moon.

“Firefly Aerospace is extremely proud to have accomplished this first fully successful commercial moon landing,” Jason Kim, the company’s chief executive, said.

“I truly believe Firefly and Blue Ghost’s historic mission will be a new chapter in textbooks and become a beacon of what humanity can achieve.”

A separate mission by a private company to land a spacecraft carrying scientific equipment on the moon ended in failure earlier this month when the Athena probe launched by Intuitive Machines toppled upon landing and was declared dead.

A federal judge on Tuesday ruled that Elon Musk and the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) likely violated the US constitution by shutting down USAid, ordering the Trump administration to reverse some of the actions it took to dismantle the agency.

The decision by US district judge Theodore Chuang was sweeping in its scope and marked a major setback for the administration’s signature takedown in its effort to bulldoze through the federal government.

As part of an injunction that directed the Trump administration to reverse course, the judge halted efforts to terminate USAid officials and contractors, and reinstate former employees’ access to their government email, security and payment systems.

The judge also compelled the administration to allow USAid to return to its currently shuttered headquarters at the Ronald Regan building in the event that the underlying case challenging the closure of the agency was successful. The administration is expected to appeal the ruling.

At issue in the lawsuit, brought by more than two dozen unnamed former USAid employees in federal district court in Maryland, was Musk’s role in overseeing the deletion of the USAid website and the shut down of its headquarters.

Chuang wrote in his 68-page opinion that Musk had likely violated the appointments clause of the constitution by effectively acting with the far-reaching powers of an “officer of the United States”, a designation that requires Senate confirmation.

“If a president could escape appointments clause scrutiny by having advisers go beyond the traditional role of White House advisors who communicate the president’s priority to agency heads,” Chuang wrote, “the appointments clause would be reduced to nothing more than a technical formality.”

The Trump administration has said for weeks that the moves to dismantle USAid were carried out by the agency’s leaders – currently secretary of state Marco Rubio and acting administrator Pete Marocco – who were implementing recommendations from Musk.

But Chuang rejected that contention with respect to the closure of USAid headquarters and the erasure of its website, saying that the administration provided no evidence that they were formally authorized by a USAid official.

“Under these circumstances, the evidence presently favors the conclusion that contrary to defendants’ sweeping claim that Musk acted only as an advisor, Musk made the decisions to shutdown USAID’s headquarters and website even though he ‘lacked the authority to make that decision,’” Chuang wrote.

The injunction follows six weeks of unprecedented turmoil at USAid, where 5,200 of 6,200 global programs were abruptly terminated, staff were locked out of facilities and systems, and employees reportedly received directives to destroy classified documents using shredders and “burn bags”.

The agency’s workforce has been decimated from over 10,000 to just 611 employees, with Rubio characterizing the remaining programs as “set for absorption” by the state department – what he recently praised as “overdue and historic reform”.

USAid’s headquarters became central to the controversy when multiple staffers told the Guardian in February that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials had been conducting extensive “walkthrough” tours to potentially take over the facility while agency employees remained barred entry.

Politico later reported that CBP had officially taken over the office space and signed a lease agreement, according to a CBP spokesperson. The court order’s 14-day deadline for the administration to confirm USAid could return to its building suggested the space may have already been reallocated.

The injunction also prohibits Doge from publishing unredacted personal information of USAid contractors and halts further dismantling actions, including terminations, contract cancellations, and permanent deletion of electronic records.

That may already be a serious exposure problem for Musk and the rest of Doge, as an internal email obtained by the Guardian revealed how staff had been instructed to spend the day destroying classified “SECRET” documents – potentially breaking compliance with the Federal Records Act, which prohibits destroying government records before their designated retention period, which is typically two years.

A federal judge on Tuesday ruled that Elon Musk and the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) likely violated the US constitution by shutting down USAid, ordering the Trump administration to reverse some of the actions it took to dismantle the agency.

The decision by US district judge Theodore Chuang was sweeping in its scope and marked a major setback for the administration’s signature takedown in its effort to bulldoze through the federal government.

As part of an injunction that directed the Trump administration to reverse course, the judge halted efforts to terminate USAid officials and contractors, and reinstate former employees’ access to their government email, security and payment systems.

The judge also compelled the administration to allow USAid to return to its currently shuttered headquarters at the Ronald Regan building in the event that the underlying case challenging the closure of the agency was successful. The administration is expected to appeal the ruling.

At issue in the lawsuit, brought by more than two dozen unnamed former USAid employees in federal district court in Maryland, was Musk’s role in overseeing the deletion of the USAid website and the shut down of its headquarters.

Chuang wrote in his 68-page opinion that Musk had likely violated the appointments clause of the constitution by effectively acting with the far-reaching powers of an “officer of the United States”, a designation that requires Senate confirmation.

“If a president could escape appointments clause scrutiny by having advisers go beyond the traditional role of White House advisors who communicate the president’s priority to agency heads,” Chuang wrote, “the appointments clause would be reduced to nothing more than a technical formality.”

The Trump administration has said for weeks that the moves to dismantle USAid were carried out by the agency’s leaders – currently secretary of state Marco Rubio and acting administrator Pete Marocco – who were implementing recommendations from Musk.

But Chuang rejected that contention with respect to the closure of USAid headquarters and the erasure of its website, saying that the administration provided no evidence that they were formally authorized by a USAid official.

“Under these circumstances, the evidence presently favors the conclusion that contrary to defendants’ sweeping claim that Musk acted only as an advisor, Musk made the decisions to shutdown USAID’s headquarters and website even though he ‘lacked the authority to make that decision,’” Chuang wrote.

The injunction follows six weeks of unprecedented turmoil at USAid, where 5,200 of 6,200 global programs were abruptly terminated, staff were locked out of facilities and systems, and employees reportedly received directives to destroy classified documents using shredders and “burn bags”.

The agency’s workforce has been decimated from over 10,000 to just 611 employees, with Rubio characterizing the remaining programs as “set for absorption” by the state department – what he recently praised as “overdue and historic reform”.

USAid’s headquarters became central to the controversy when multiple staffers told the Guardian in February that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials had been conducting extensive “walkthrough” tours to potentially take over the facility while agency employees remained barred entry.

Politico later reported that CBP had officially taken over the office space and signed a lease agreement, according to a CBP spokesperson. The court order’s 14-day deadline for the administration to confirm USAid could return to its building suggested the space may have already been reallocated.

The injunction also prohibits Doge from publishing unredacted personal information of USAid contractors and halts further dismantling actions, including terminations, contract cancellations, and permanent deletion of electronic records.

That may already be a serious exposure problem for Musk and the rest of Doge, as an internal email obtained by the Guardian revealed how staff had been instructed to spend the day destroying classified “SECRET” documents – potentially breaking compliance with the Federal Records Act, which prohibits destroying government records before their designated retention period, which is typically two years.

Donald Trump’s presidential administration in court filings has for the first time acknowledged that it fired nearly 25,000 recently hired workers – and said agencies were working to bring all of them back after a judge ruled that their terminations were likely illegal.

The filings made in Baltimore’s federal courthouse late Monday include statements from officials at 18 agencies, all of whom said the reinstated probationary workers were being placed on administrative leave at least temporarily.

The mass firings, part of Trump’s broader purge of the federal workforce carried out by the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) led by billionaire businessman Elon Musk, were widely reported. But the court filings are the first full accounting of the terminations by the administration.

Here are the key US politics story from Monday:

In January, Canadian pollsters and political pundits struggled to find fresh ways to describe the bleak prospects of Justin Trudeau’s Liberal party, musing whether it would be a wipeout of existential proportions, or merely a catastrophic blowout.

But fresh polling released by three companies this week shows a stunning reversal of fortunes for the party: newly minted prime minister Mark Carney’s Liberals are projected to secure a majority government.

The outcome has little precedent in Canadian history, reflecting the outsized role played by an unpredictable US president, and it underscores the incentives for Carney to call a snap election in the coming days.

On Tuesday, the political analyst Philippe Fournier updated his closely watched website 338Canada, which tracks and aggregates national polls, converting those figures into projected election results.

For the first time, his projection showed the Liberals with a 55% chance of a majority government. In January, the odds stood at less than 1%.

For the last two years, the Conservative leader, Pierre Poilievre, has used a controversial carbon levy and Trudeau, a deeply unpopular outgoing prime minister, to propel his Tories to what promised to be one of the most lopsided political wins in recent memory. Pollsters predicted his party would seize a commanding majority of seats. For more than a year and a half, the Conservatives’ win probabilities stood at more than 99%.

As recently as January, for example, the most sympathetic polling firm had Trudeau’s party trailing the Conservatives by 20 points. Others had the gap as high as 27 points.

But Trudeau’s resignation days later, and Donald Trump’s threats to take over Canada, changed everything.

In a recent column for the Walrus magazine on the “stunning Conservative collapse”, Fournier warned the Tories, whose odds of winning stood at 15%, were “suddenly at risk of blowing one of the largest polling leads in modern Canadian history”.

Virtually all Canadian polling companies have shown a sharp trend towards the Liberals, at the expense of the Conservative party and the leftwing New Democratic party. If current polling predictions are reflected in the results of the upcoming federal election, the NDP would collapse and lose party status in the House of Commons.

“This shift would be among the biggest we’ve seen in such a short period of time in Canadian history,” said Éric Grenier, a political analyst at the Writ. Unlike other notable shifts in public sentiment, he says, the result is heavily skewed by threats from Donald Trump.

“It isn’t just a question of a leadership honeymoon … But that adds a level of volatility to the public opinion environment that makes things unpredictable.”

For Poilievre, who had harnessed a populist current in the country and drawn comparisons with Trump, the avenues forward are less clear after losing the easy political targets of Trudeau and the carbon tax.

While the Conservative leader’s combative politics have served him well as opposition leader, that same strategy appear to be faltering as nationalism supplants partisanship.

Poilievre this week held an event with an “Axe the Tax” sign – days after Carney had dismantled the consumer-facing carbon tax.

The political columnist Robyn Urback posted on social media that the Conservatives “are still waging the election campaign they never got to have”.

In more grim data points for the Tories, polling from the Angus Reid Institute released on Monday found Canadians preferred Carney over Poilievre on all questions relating to the ongoing trade war and the future of Canada’s economy.

“More bluntly, 41% now view Carney as best suited to be prime minister compared to 29% for Poilievre,” the company said in its new release. “At least measurement, with Trudeau sitting in the PM chair, Poilievre led the Liberal leader by 19 points on this question.”

If the polling holds, “what was a tired, discardable brand just three months ago would be on its way to a fourth term, this time with a majority”.

The firm notes the profound effect Trump has had on Canadian politics. After staring down a US-led trade war and giving impassioned speeches about the need to fight for Canada’s independence, Trudeau left with the approval of 47% of Canadians – a 25-point jump compared with an all-time low of 22% just weeks before he announced his resignation.

The Trump administration on Tuesday released thousands of pages of files concerning the assassination of John F Kennedy, the 35th president who was shot dead in Dallas, Texas, in November 1963.

“So people have been waiting decades for this,” Donald Trump told reporters on Monday while visiting the Kennedy Center, “and I’ve instructed my people that are responsible, lots of different people, put together by [director of national intelligence] Tulsi Gabbard, and that’s going to be released tomorrow.”

Experts doubted the new trove of information will change the underlying facts of the case, that Lee Harvey Oswald opened fire at Kennedy from a window at a school book deposit warehouse as the presidential motorcade passed by Dealey Plaza in Dallas.

The digital documents included PDFs of memos, including one with the heading “secret” that was a typed account with handwritten notes of a 1964 interview by a Warren Commission researcher who questioned Lee Wigren, a CIA employee, about inconsistencies in material provided to the commission by the state department and the CIA about marriages between Soviet women and American men.

The documents also included references to various conspiracy theories suggesting that Oswald left the Soviet Union in 1962 intent on assassinating the popular young president.

Department of Defense documents from 1963 covered the cold war of the early 1960s and the US involvement in Latin America, trying to thwart Cuban leader Fidel Castro’s support of communist forces in other countries.

The documents suggest that Castro would not go so far as to provoke a war with the United States or escalate to the point “that would seriously and immediately endanger the Castro regime”.

“It appears more likely that Castro might intensify his support of subversive forces in Latin America,” the document reads.

Trump signed an order shortly after taking office in January related to the release, prompting the US Federal Bureau of Investigation to find thousands of new documents related to the Kennedy assassination in Dallas.

“President Trump is ushering in a new era of maximum transparency,” Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, said in a post on X.

ABC News reported that Trump’s announcement prompted an all-night scramble at the justice department.

John F Kennedy was killed during a motorcade through Dallas on 22 November 1963. Oswald was killed two days later by Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner.

Ever since, Kennedy’s death has been the subject of immense scholarship, cultural commentary and spiraling conspiracy theories.

Files have been released before, including three releases in 2017, when Trump was first in power. One document released then was a 1975 CIA memo that said a thorough search of records showed Oswald was not in any way connected to the intelligence agency, as posited by numerous authors and hobbyists.

Trump’s latest JFK files release comes weeks after the death at 93 of Clint Hill, a Secret Service agent who leapt onto Kennedy’s car, a moment of history famously captured on film by Abraham Zapruder, a home movie enthusiast.

Trump survived an assassination attempt of his own in Pennsylvania last year, during a campaign event. In office, he has also promised to release files on the assassinations of Kennedy’s brother, the US attorney general and New York senator Robert F Kennedy, and the civil rights leader Martin Luther King, both in 1968.

Robert F Kennedy’s son, Robert F Kennedy Jr, is now US health secretary. He has voiced conspiracy theories, including saying he thinks his father was probably killed by the CIA and his uncle, the president, certainly was.

King’s family has expressed the fear that genuine FBI attempts to smear him will again be brought to the light.

Last month, directed by Trump, the US justice department released files about Jeffrey Epstein, the financier, convicted sex offender and Trump associate who killed himself in prison in New York in 2019. Aggressively touted and targeted to rightwing social media influencers, the release proved a damp squib.

On Monday, Larry Sabato, the director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia and the author of a book on Kennedy, told Reuters: “People expecting big things are almost certain to be disappointed” by the new files release.

Reuters contributed reporting

In his first public remarks since being detained by federal immigration authorities, Palestinian activist and recent Columbia graduate, Mahmoud Khalil, spoke out against the conditions facing immigrants in US detention and said he was being targeted by the Trump administration for his political beliefs.

“I am a political prisoner,” he said in a statement provided exclusively to the Guardian. “I am writing to you from a detention facility in Louisiana where I wake to cold mornings and spend long days bearing witness to the quiet injustices underway against a great many people precluded from the protections of the law.”

Khalil, a permanent US resident who helped lead Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian protests last spring, was arrested and detained in New York on 8 March by federal immigration authorities who reportedly said that they were acting on a state department order to revoke his green card.

The Trump administration, he said, “is targeting me as part of a broader strategy to suppress dissent”, warning that “visa-holders, green-card carriers and citizens alike will all be targeted for their political beliefs.”

The statement, which Khalil dictated to his friends and family over the phone from an Ice detention facility in Jena, Louisiana, railed against the US’s treatment of immigrants in its custody, Israel’s renewed bombardment of the Gaza Strip, US foreign policy, and what he described as Columbia University’s surrender to federal pressure to punish students.

“My arrest was a direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza, which resumed in full force Monday night,” the statement said. “With January’s ceasefire now broken, parents in Gaza are once again cradling too-small shrouds, and families are forced to weigh starvation and displacement against bombs. It is our moral imperative to persist in the struggle for their complete freedom.”

Khalil described his arrest at his university-owned apartment building in New York in front of his wife, Noor Abdalla, who is eight months pregnant with their first child. The agents who arrested him “refused to provide a warrant” before forcing him into an unmarked car, he said.

“At that moment, my only concern was for Noor’s safety,” he said. “I had no idea if she would be taken too, since the agents had threatened to arrest her for not leaving my side.”

He was then transferred to an Ice facility in New Jersey before being flown 1,400 miles away to the Louisiana detention facility, where he is currently being held. He spent his first night in detention, he said, sleeping on the floor without a blanket.

In his remarks, Khalil said that in Louisiana, he wakes to “cold mornings” and spends “long days bearing witness to the quiet injustices underway against a great many people precluded from the protections of the law”.

“Who has the right to have rights?” Khalil asked. “It is certainly not the humans crowded into the cells here. It isn’t the Senegalese man I met who has been deprived of his liberty for a year, his legal situation in limbo and his family an ocean away. It isn’t the 21-year-old detainee I met, who stepped foot in this country at age nine, only to be deported without so much as a hearing.”

“Justice escapes the contours of this nation’s immigration facilities,” he added.

Khalil drew comparison between his current treatment in the US and the ways in which he said the Israeli government uses detention without trial to lock up Palestinians.

“I was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria to a family which has been displaced from their land since the 1948 Nakba,” he added, referring to the expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians in 1948 after the creation of Israel.

“I spent my youth in proximity to yet distant from my homeland. But being Palestinian is an experience that transcends borders. I see in my circumstances similarities to Israel’s use of administrative detention – imprisonment without trial or charge – to strip Palestinians of their rights,” he said.

“I think of Gaza hospital director and pediatrician Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, who was taken captive by the Israeli military on December 27 and remains in an Israeli torture camp today. For Palestinians, imprisonment without due process is commonplace.”

Khalil’s arrest ignited protests and caused alarm among free expression advocates, who view the deportation attempt as a violation of his free speech rights. Khalil has not been accused of a crime. His lawyers argue that the Trump administration is unlawfully retaliating against him for his activism and constitutionally protected speech. In an amended petition filed last week, they contended that his detention violates his constitutional rights, including the rights to free speech and due process, and goes beyond the government’s legal authority.

His attorneys are currently fighting in a New York court to have him transferred back to New York and to secure his release. A federal judge has blocked Khalil’s deportation while the legal challenge is pending.

Throughout Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and since assuming office, Trump has repeatedly pledged to deport foreign students involved in pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses, frequently framing such demonstrations as expressions of support for Hamas.

Khalil, who has worked for the British embassy in Beirut, served as a lead negotiator for the Gaza solidarity encampment at Columbia University last year, mediating between the pro-Palestine protesters and university administrators.

The Trump administration has accused the former student of leading “activities aligned to Hamas” and was attempting to deport him using a rarely invoked legal provision from the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which gives the US secretary of state the power to remove someone from the US if their presence in the country is deemed to “have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States”.

Federal prosecutors are asking the New York court to order his challenge to his detention moved to Louisiana, where it would likely face more conservative judges.

Diala Shamas, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights and member of Khalil’s legal team, said that what happens to Khalil will reverberate beyond his case. “The Trump administration has clearly signaled that this is their test case, their opening shot, the first of many more to come,” she said.

“And for that test case, they chose an intrepid and deeply principled organizer who is beloved and trusted in his community,” Shamas said.

After Khalil’s arrest, Trump said that it was just “the first of many to come” and vowed on social media to deport other foreign students he accused of engaging in “pro-terrorist, antisemitic, anti-American activity”.

Khalil said in his statement that he has always believed that his duty “is not only to liberate myself from the oppressor, but also to liberate my oppressors from their hatred and fear”.

“My unjust detention is indicative of the anti-Palestinian racism that both the Biden and Trump administrations have demonstrated over the past 16 months as the US has continued to supply Israel with weapons to kill Palestinians and prevented international intervention” he said. “For decades, anti-Palestinian racism has driven efforts to expand US laws and practices that are used to violently repress Palestinians, Arab Americans, and other communities.”

He added: “That is precisely why I am being targeted.”

Khalil also criticized Columbia University, arguing that university leaders “laid the groundwork for the US government to target me by arbitrarily disciplining pro-Palestinian students and allowing viral doxing campaigns – based on racism and disinformation – to go unchecked.”

The university has increasingly taken disciplinary actions against students who participated in pro-Palestinian protests. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is stepping up its attacks on the school under the guise of fighting antisemitism, which it claims run rampant at the university. The administration is using the same argument to threaten dozens of others American universities with potentially crippling funding cuts.

Students, Khalil said, have an important role to play in fighting back. “Students have long been at the forefront of change – leading the charge against the Vietnam War, standing on the frontlines of the civil rights movement, and driving the struggle against apartheid in South Africa,” he said.

“In the weeks ahead, students, advocates, and elected officials must unite to defend the right to protest for Palestine. At stake are not just our voices, but the fundamental civil liberties of all.”

He concluded: “Knowing fully that this moment transcends my individual circumstances, I hope nonetheless to be free to witness the birth of my first-born child.”

• Read Khalil’s full statement here.

In his first public remarks since being detained by federal immigration authorities, Palestinian activist and recent Columbia graduate, Mahmoud Khalil, spoke out against the conditions facing immigrants in US detention and said he was being targeted by the Trump administration for his political beliefs.

“I am a political prisoner,” he said in a statement provided exclusively to the Guardian. “I am writing to you from a detention facility in Louisiana where I wake to cold mornings and spend long days bearing witness to the quiet injustices underway against a great many people precluded from the protections of the law.”

Khalil, a permanent US resident who helped lead Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian protests last spring, was arrested and detained in New York on 8 March by federal immigration authorities who reportedly said that they were acting on a state department order to revoke his green card.

The Trump administration, he said, “is targeting me as part of a broader strategy to suppress dissent”, warning that “visa-holders, green-card carriers and citizens alike will all be targeted for their political beliefs.”

The statement, which Khalil dictated to his friends and family over the phone from an Ice detention facility in Jena, Louisiana, railed against the US’s treatment of immigrants in its custody, Israel’s renewed bombardment of the Gaza Strip, US foreign policy, and what he described as Columbia University’s surrender to federal pressure to punish students.

“My arrest was a direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza, which resumed in full force Monday night,” the statement said. “With January’s ceasefire now broken, parents in Gaza are once again cradling too-small shrouds, and families are forced to weigh starvation and displacement against bombs. It is our moral imperative to persist in the struggle for their complete freedom.”

Khalil described his arrest at his university-owned apartment building in New York in front of his wife, Noor Abdalla, who is eight months pregnant with their first child. The agents who arrested him “refused to provide a warrant” before forcing him into an unmarked car, he said.

“At that moment, my only concern was for Noor’s safety,” he said. “I had no idea if she would be taken too, since the agents had threatened to arrest her for not leaving my side.”

He was then transferred to an Ice facility in New Jersey before being flown 1,400 miles away to the Louisiana detention facility, where he is currently being held. He spent his first night in detention, he said, sleeping on the floor without a blanket.

In his remarks, Khalil said that in Louisiana, he wakes to “cold mornings” and spends “long days bearing witness to the quiet injustices underway against a great many people precluded from the protections of the law”.

“Who has the right to have rights?” Khalil asked. “It is certainly not the humans crowded into the cells here. It isn’t the Senegalese man I met who has been deprived of his liberty for a year, his legal situation in limbo and his family an ocean away. It isn’t the 21-year-old detainee I met, who stepped foot in this country at age nine, only to be deported without so much as a hearing.”

“Justice escapes the contours of this nation’s immigration facilities,” he added.

Khalil drew comparison between his current treatment in the US and the ways in which he said the Israeli government uses detention without trial to lock up Palestinians.

“I was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria to a family which has been displaced from their land since the 1948 Nakba,” he added, referring to the expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians in 1948 after the creation of Israel.

“I spent my youth in proximity to yet distant from my homeland. But being Palestinian is an experience that transcends borders. I see in my circumstances similarities to Israel’s use of administrative detention – imprisonment without trial or charge – to strip Palestinians of their rights,” he said.

“I think of Gaza hospital director and pediatrician Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, who was taken captive by the Israeli military on December 27 and remains in an Israeli torture camp today. For Palestinians, imprisonment without due process is commonplace.”

Khalil’s arrest ignited protests and caused alarm among free expression advocates, who view the deportation attempt as a violation of his free speech rights. Khalil has not been accused of a crime. His lawyers argue that the Trump administration is unlawfully retaliating against him for his activism and constitutionally protected speech. In an amended petition filed last week, they contended that his detention violates his constitutional rights, including the rights to free speech and due process, and goes beyond the government’s legal authority.

His attorneys are currently fighting in a New York court to have him transferred back to New York and to secure his release. A federal judge has blocked Khalil’s deportation while the legal challenge is pending.

Throughout Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and since assuming office, Trump has repeatedly pledged to deport foreign students involved in pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses, frequently framing such demonstrations as expressions of support for Hamas.

Khalil, who has worked for the British embassy in Beirut, served as a lead negotiator for the Gaza solidarity encampment at Columbia University last year, mediating between the pro-Palestine protesters and university administrators.

The Trump administration has accused the former student of leading “activities aligned to Hamas” and was attempting to deport him using a rarely invoked legal provision from the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which gives the US secretary of state the power to remove someone from the US if their presence in the country is deemed to “have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States”.

Federal prosecutors are asking the New York court to order his challenge to his detention moved to Louisiana, where it would likely face more conservative judges.

Diala Shamas, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights and member of Khalil’s legal team, said that what happens to Khalil will reverberate beyond his case. “The Trump administration has clearly signaled that this is their test case, their opening shot, the first of many more to come,” she said.

“And for that test case, they chose an intrepid and deeply principled organizer who is beloved and trusted in his community,” Shamas said.

After Khalil’s arrest, Trump said that it was just “the first of many to come” and vowed on social media to deport other foreign students he accused of engaging in “pro-terrorist, antisemitic, anti-American activity”.

Khalil said in his statement that he has always believed that his duty “is not only to liberate myself from the oppressor, but also to liberate my oppressors from their hatred and fear”.

“My unjust detention is indicative of the anti-Palestinian racism that both the Biden and Trump administrations have demonstrated over the past 16 months as the US has continued to supply Israel with weapons to kill Palestinians and prevented international intervention” he said. “For decades, anti-Palestinian racism has driven efforts to expand US laws and practices that are used to violently repress Palestinians, Arab Americans, and other communities.”

He added: “That is precisely why I am being targeted.”

Khalil also criticized Columbia University, arguing that university leaders “laid the groundwork for the US government to target me by arbitrarily disciplining pro-Palestinian students and allowing viral doxing campaigns – based on racism and disinformation – to go unchecked.”

The university has increasingly taken disciplinary actions against students who participated in pro-Palestinian protests. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is stepping up its attacks on the school under the guise of fighting antisemitism, which it claims run rampant at the university. The administration is using the same argument to threaten dozens of others American universities with potentially crippling funding cuts.

Students, Khalil said, have an important role to play in fighting back. “Students have long been at the forefront of change – leading the charge against the Vietnam War, standing on the frontlines of the civil rights movement, and driving the struggle against apartheid in South Africa,” he said.

“In the weeks ahead, students, advocates, and elected officials must unite to defend the right to protest for Palestine. At stake are not just our voices, but the fundamental civil liberties of all.”

He concluded: “Knowing fully that this moment transcends my individual circumstances, I hope nonetheless to be free to witness the birth of my first-born child.”

• Read Khalil’s full statement here.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) plans to eliminate its scientific research office and could fire more than 1,000 scientists and other employees who help provide the scientific foundation for rules safeguarding human health and ecosystems from environmental pollutants.

As many as 1,155 chemists, biologists, toxicologists and other scientists – 75% of the research programme’s staff – could be laid off, according to documents reviewed by Democratic staff on the house committee on science, space and technology.

The planned layoffs, cast by the Trump administration as part of a broader push to shrink the size of the federal government and make it more efficient, were assailed by critics as a massive dismantling of the EPA’s longstanding mission to protect public health and the environment.

The plans were first reported by the New York Times.

EPA administrator Lee Zeldin has said he wants to eliminate 65% of the agency’s budget, a huge spending cut that would require major staffing reductions for jobs such as monitoring air and water quality, responding to natural disasters and lead abatement, among many other agency functions. The EPA has also issued guidance directing that spending items greater than $50,000 require approval from Elon Musk’s so-called ‘“department of government efficiency”.

The Office of Research and Development – EPA’s main science arm – currently has 1,540 positions, excluding special government employees and public health officers, according to one memo. A majority of staff – ranging from 50% to 75% – “will not be retained”, the memo says.

The research office has 10 facilities across the country, stretching from Florida and North Carolina to Oregon.

The plan calls for dissolving the research office and reassigning remaining staff to other parts of the agency “to provide increased oversight and align with administration priorities,” the memo says. EPA officials have presented the plan to the White House for review.

Molly Vaseliou, an EPA spokesperson, said the agency “is taking exciting steps as we enter the next phase of organizational improvements,” but said changes had not been finalized.

“We are committed to enhancing our ability to deliver clean air, water and land for all Americans,” she said, adding, “While no decisions have been made yet, we are actively listening to employees at all levels to gather ideas on how to increase efficiency and ensure the EPA is as up to date and effective as ever.”

California congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, the top Democrat on the science committee, said in a statement that the agency’s research office was created by Congress and “eliminating it is illegal.”

Every decision the EPA makes “must be in furtherance of protecting human health and the environment, and that just can’t happen if you gut EPA science,” Lofgren said.

“EPA cannot meet its legal obligation to use the best available science without (the Office of Research and Development) and that’s the point,” she added. President Donald Trump and his billionaire adviser, Musk, “are putting their polluter buddies’ bottom lines over the health and safety of Americans,” Lofgren said.

In his first term, “Trump and his cronies politicised and distorted science,” she said. “Now, this is their attempt to kill it for good.”

Ticora Jones, chief science officer at the environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council, said Trump’s EPA “yet again is putting polluters over people.”

She called on Congress to “stand up and demand that EPA keep its scientists on the beat so that we all can get the clean air and clean water we need and deserve.”

The arrest of Rodrigo Duterte is a welcome sign that the rules-based order continues to hold, the Nobel laureate Maria Ressa has said, even as the global order has been marred by the US “descending into hell” at the hands of the same forces that consumed the Philippines.

Ressa’s remarks came after Duterte, the former president of the Philippines, made his first appearance before the international criminal court (ICC) in The Hague, accused of committing crimes against humanity during his brutal “war on drugs”.

His arrest and the trial suggest that the thousands of victims and their families – rights groups estimate that as many as 30,000 people were killed during the years-long crackdown – may finally see justice, said Ressa. “There’s a sense that impunity ends and that the idea of an international, rules-based order can perhaps still exist.”

The American-Filipina journalist, however, found it impossible to untangle the news from the bigger picture. In 2016 Duterte had become the “first president elected with social media”, she said, seizing on the ubiquity of Facebook in the Philippines to, as her reporting has documented, mobilise online mobs and spread disinformation. Now, she said, the same tactics were being used to undermine democracy around the world, particularly in the US.

“I joke all the time that the Philippines went from hell to purgatory … My only worry is that the west and America is at the stage we were at in 2016, when you’re descending to hell,” she said. “To watch this deja vu twice, it’s like a bad punishment for me.”

As a cofounder of the Rappler news site, Ressa was at the forefront of exposing the propaganda spread by online trolls during Duterte’s time in power, alongside his government’s alleged abuses of power and growing authoritarianism.

Ressa, who in 2021 was awarded the Nobel peace prize in recognition of her determination to uphold freedom of expression, spoke to the Guardian from Berlin, where she was participating in a “people’s court” that has this week put social media on trial, examining how it interacts with polarisation, radicalisation and misinformation.

The week-long Social Media Tribunal, which has no legal powers, will hear testimonies from sources that range from a Facebook whistleblower to a Rohingya campaigner and victims of cyberstalking and sextortion before handing down its “judgment” on Friday.

Backed by the rights group Cinema for Peace and Ukraine’s Center for Civil Liberties, and created under the patronage of Benjamin Ferencz, who until his death in 2023 was the last surviving prosecutor from the Nuremberg trials, the initiative aims to ramp up pressure for international accountability. In 2023, the same campaigners were behind a similar “people’s court” that put the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, on trial for the crime of aggression after his invasion of Ukraine.

The tribunal in Berlin was opened on Monday by Ressa, who cited a whistleblower on how, more than a decade ago, the Philippines was alleged to have been used as a “petri dish” to test out the interplay between social media and tactics of mass manipulation. “If it worked in our country, they went to the west, specifically targeting America,” said Ressa.

As falsehoods, many of them laced with fear, hate and outrage, began hurtling across social media in the Philippines, Ressa travelled to Silicon Valley to sound the alarm. “I felt like Cassandra and Sisyphus combined,” she said. “And I think people just kind of thought, ‘oh that’s interesting, that’s never going to happen here.’”

Years later, the world watched as the 2024 US presidential elections played out against a similar backdrop, giving rise to an ecosystem that continues to prop up the Trump administration. Ressa, who last year described “tech bros” such as Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk as “the largest dictators” said the US was now staring down “the greatest challenge democracy will face”.

She said: “Because when you give the broligarchy state power – ie the most powerful country in the world at this moment in time – who knows what will happen?”

What she did know was that time was of the essence. “What we learned in the Philippines is that you are at your greatest power when the attacks begin. If you are silent, you give consent. If you are silent, you give up your rights,” she said. “This is that moment where you have to ask yourself, what are you willing to sacrifice for the truth? Because if you don’t, if you bury your head in the sand like an ostrich, you will lose your rights.”

She pointed to the Philippines to highlight what was at stake. As Rappler refused to back down from publishing stories about Duterte’s administration, Ressa fended off a barrage of hate – at one point the messages soared to 98 an hour, she said – and faced 10 criminal charges. Two years after Duterte left office, she has won most of the cases but two charges remain, forcing her to request court permission each time she wants to leave the country.

Duterte’s arrest last week laid bare a nation still divided: while supporters took to the streets in his strongholds, others continue to grapple with the painful fallout of a years-long anti-drug campaign that saw thousands of people – many of them men in poorer, urban areas – gunned down in the streets.

“In 2016, when the drug war began, I was like ‘Oh my god, this is going to affect a generation of Filipinos’. And it has,” she said. “So yes, he’s arrested but there’s so much damage that now needs to get rebuilt.”

She cast it as a sort of cautionary tale for the US and west, one that pointed to how the free rein of technology could pave the way for populism to be tipped into authoritarianism. “If you do not protect your rights today, what’s destroyed takes a hell of a long time to rebuild.”

Most treatments for back pain do not work and even the few that do bring little relief, a global review of the evidence on one of the world’s commonest health problems has found.

Six in 10 adults in the UK live with lower back pain at some point. Symptoms can include excruciating pain, restricted movement, inability to work and reluctance to mix socially. Some people feel better within weeks but others can find their life dominated by chronic pain for years.

The wide range of treatment available includes painkillers, acupuncture, stretching, massage, anti-inflammatory drugs, laser and light therapy, and manipulation of the spine.

However, the bad news for the many who endure back pain is that only 10% of these non-surgical treatments usually deployed actually have any effect – and the rest provide little or no benefit.

Only six out of the 56 treatments analysed are effective and even those yield only “small” relief. The other 50 treatments either do not work, only modestly reduce pain or may even worsen it.

That is the conclusion of the most comprehensive review yet of the worldwide evidence surrounding what non-surgical treatments have analgesic – pain-killing – effects on back pain.

Australian researchers led by Dr Aidan Cashin at the pain impact centre at Neuroscience Research Australia examined 301 previously published randomised controlled trials that investigated the 56 treatments or combinations of treatments, such as anti-inflammatories and muscle relaxants. The trials were carried out in 44 countries worldwide, including in Europe, North America and Asia.

“The current evidence shows that one in 10 non-surgical and non-interventional treatments for low-back pain are efficacious, providing only small analgesic effects beyond placebo,” conclude the authors, whose findings are published in the medical journal BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine.

“The efficacy for the majority of treatments is uncertain. Our review did not find reliable evidence of large effects for any of the included treatments.”

The one treatment that does help those with acute low-back pain is non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), they found. In addition, five treatments also bring some relief for chronic low-back pain: exercise, spinal manipulative therapy, taping, antidepressants and what are known as transient receptor potential vanilloid 1 (TPRV1) drugs.

But three treatments for acute back pain do not work – exercise, glucocortisoid injections and taking paracetamol. And two for chronic back pain are also ineffective – antibiotics and anaesthetics.

However, the evidence for the other 45 treatments is “inconclusive”. The researchers assessed and offered a judgement on the extent to which they all relieved pain. Despite some of them being very popular, most “may provide modest reductions in pain”, they said.

Interventions that “probably provide little to no difference in pain” include exercise, paracetamol, glucocortisoid injections, anaesthetics and antibiotics or antimicrobial drugs.

However, having a massage, taking painkillers and wearing foot orthotics “may provide” large reductions in pain.

Heat, acupuncture, spinal manipulation and transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) may produce a “moderate” reduction in pain. Osteopathic treatment and using muscle relaxants and NSAIDs together may produce a small lessening of pain.

However, two treatments may increase someone’s pain, including extracorporeal shockwaves and the anti-inflammatory drug colchicine.

Prof Kamila Hawthorne, the chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners, said that family doctors often refer patients with back pain for physiotherapy as a first-line treatment, to be assessed and given exercises to perform, or to link workers, who suggest non-medical interventions.

“Many patients do report feeling some relief from the interventions – medical or not – that we suggest,” Hawthorne said.

Tim Button, the president of the British Chiropractic Association, welcomed the study’s endorsement of spinal manipulation and taping as effective treatments.

“Our members are increasingly seeing patients come to them with back pain, worried that they can’t work and stuck on NHS waiting lists,” he said.

“While this may not always be a ‘miracle cure’ to chronic musculoskeletal conditions, it is as effective as other non-invasive treatments and makes a real difference to how quickly people can get back to work and normal life.”

A Chartered Society of Physiotherapy spokesperson said: “Physiotherapists carry out an in-depth assessment to identify the root causes of back pain, which will be different for everyone and can range widely from stress, fear of movement and poor sleep to smoking, obesity, job-related strain, and insufficient physical activity.

“Exercise has been shown to be the most helpful treatment for back pain. Hands-on treatments have been shown to have a small benefit to back pain, but only when used as part of a whole treatment programme, which includes exercise.

“Similarly, injections may be beneficial as part of a treatment programme, but not on their own.”

Pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian protesters disrupted the Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony for Israeli actor Gal Gadot on Tuesday, delaying the event and inciting police response.

Several dozen protesters gathered ahead of the ceremony for the Wonder Woman star, who is an outspoken supporter of the Israeli military. According to Variety, pro-Palestinian protesters held signs that read “Heroes Fight Like Palestinians,” “Viva Viva Palestina” and “No Other Land Won Oscar,” referring to the documentary on Israeli incursions onto Palestinian land in the West Bank that won the award for best documentary this month.

A video posted to X by Variety reporter Katcy Stephan shows protesters chanting “shame on Gal Gadot”. Another showed multiple protesters handcuffed by police. The crowd also shouted: “Up up with liberation, down down with occupation” and “not another nickel, not another dime, no more money for Israel’s crime.” Variety reported that nearly two dozen protesters gathered for each side.

The demonstrations delayed the ceremony by about 15 minutes. Protesters could still be heard as the proceedings got underway, and police were called after a pro-Palestinian protester stole an Israeli flag.

Gadot, who stars as the Evil Queen in Disney’s live-action Snow White, served in the Israeli military and has vocally supported Israel since the 7 October terrorist attacks and subsequent invasion of Gaza, both on social media and in an impassioned speech before the Anti-Defamation League’s annual summit on 4 March. “Never did I imagine that on the streets of the United States, and different cities around the world, we would see people not condemning Hamas, but celebrating, justifying and cheering on a massacre of Jews,” she said in her speech.

Speaking to Variety ahead of Tuesday’s ceremony, Gadot described how she became more direct with her politics after the Hamas-led attack on Israeli citizens on 7 October 2023. “When people were abducted from their homes, from their beds, men, women, children, elderly, Holocaust survivors, were going through the horrors of what happened that day, I could not be silent,” she said. “I was shocked by the amount of hate, by the amount of how much people think they know when they actually have no idea, and also by how the media is not fair many times. So I had to speak up.”

“I am all about humanity,” she continued, “and I felt like I had to advocate for the hostages.” As for criticism of her stances, she added: “when your compass is clear, your conscience is clean. I know what I’m advocating for, and I know what I wish for the world.”

Gadot steered clear of the issue during her ceremony, instead thanking Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins and Fast and Furious star Vin Diesel, and referring to herself as “just a girl from a town in Israel”.

The demonstrations precede the opening weekend for Snow White, which has faced its own fair share of controversy in the weeks leading up to its release. Speculation of a rift between Gadot and co-star Rachel Zegler, who is vocally pro-Palestine, flared after Disney scaled back last weekend’s world premiere, limiting interviews to in-house, talent-friendly press. Zegler has also received flak for publicly criticizing the original 1937 version of Snow White, and wishing on Instagram that Donald Trump and his voters “know no peace” after the November election. She since apologized.

Gadot is also not the only Disney star to face criticism for their stance on Israel-Palestine. Last month, several dozen pro-Palestinian protesters gathered outside the Hollywood premiere of Captain America: Brave New World, calling for a boycott of the film over the inclusion of Israeli superhero Ruth Bat-Seraph, aka Sabra, played by Israeli actor Shira Haas.

They held signs with such slogans as “Disney supports genocide.” In a joint letter, some Palestinian cultural groups complained: “By reviving this racist character in any form, Marvel is promoting Israel’s brutal oppression of Palestinians.”