Donald Trump said on Friday that plans for possible war with China should not be shared with Elon Musk because of his business interests, a rare admission that the billionaire faces conflicts of interests in his role as a senior adviser to the US president.

Trump rejected reports that Musk would be briefed on how the United States would fight a hypothetical war with China, saying: “Elon has businesses in China. And he would be susceptible, perhaps, to that.”

The reference to Musk’s businesses – which include Tesla, an electric vehicle manufacturer trying to expand sales and production in China – is an unusual acknowledgment of concerns about Musk balancing his corporate and government responsibilities.

Trump had previously brushed off questions about Musk’s potential conflicts of interest, simply saying that he would steer clear when necessary.

The president said that Musk visited the Pentagon on Friday morning to discuss reducing costs, which he has been working on through the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge).

The defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, said Musk was there “to talk about efficiencies, to talk about innovations”.

Musk said while leaving the Pentagon that he was ready to do “anything that could be helpful”. He also refused to answer questions as to whether he received a classified briefing on China as part of the visit.

As a key adviser to Trump and the head of Doge, Musk has exercised broad powers in the two months since Trump returned to the White House, conducting mass layoffs and slashing budgets across the federal government. But while the Pentagon was also in line to be a target for job cuts, Musk has yet to play any role there, including in defense intelligence and military operations.

A senior defense official told reporters on Tuesday that roughly 50,000 to 60,000 civilian jobs would be cut in the defense department.

Musk’s involvement in any US plans or dealings with China would raise not only security concerns but questions over a significant conflict of interest, as he has considerable economic interests in China as the owner of Tesla and SpaceX, which also has contracts with the US air force.

In the early hours of Friday morning, Musk denied the reports that he would be briefed on war with China, calling it “pure propaganda” and threatening to find those who leaked the information.

“I look forward to the prosecutions of those at the Pentagon who are leaking maliciously false information,” he wrote. “They will be found.”

Musk repeated his demand for such prosecutions upon arrival at the Department of Defense on the outskirts of Washington DC on Friday morning. He left the Pentagon about 90 minutes after arriving.

A Pentagon spokesperson, asked by email to explain the true purpose of Musk’s briefing given administration denials that it would involve putative war plans with China, referred the Guardian to a statement posted on social media by Hegseth.

In a Friday meeting at the White House to announce new air force fighter planes, Trump and Hegseth both firmly rejected reports that Musk was shown any Pentagon plans regarding a potential conflict with China during his visit earlier that day.

“They made that up because it’s a good story to make up. They’re very dishonest people,” Trump said about the New York Times reporting. “I called up Pete [Hegseth] and I said: ‘Is there any truth to that?’ Absolutely not, he’s there for Doge, not there for China. And if you ever mentioned China, I think he’d walk out of the room.”

Hegseth echoed Trump’s notion that the visit was focused on discussing government efficiency initiatives and innovation opportunities, adding that there were “no Chinese war plans”.

“We welcomed him today to the Pentagon to talk about [the ‘department of government efficiency’], to talk about efficiencies, to talk about innovations. It was a great informal conversation,” he said.

Hegseth suggested the reporting was deliberately intended to “undermine whatever relationship the Pentagon has with” the Tesla CEO.

However, some military experts have still expressed concern about Musk’s level of access to sensitive information.

Wesley Clark, retired general and former Nato supreme commander, told CNN in an interview on Friday afternoon that the administration has been “cutting a lot of corners in a lot of areas”.

“It’s no problem giving him a general impression, we do this for contractors, but the conflict of interest – I’m more interested in his interests abroad, he talks to Putin, he has business in China, he has other considerations and those can impact things,” Clark said.

“I’m more worried about Elon Musk coming into the Pentagon and saying ‘I’m high tech and I have smart people in Silicon Valley and these generals do not know anything’. You have got to be really careful about jumping on the next shiny object.”

According to a New York Times report, the meeting was set to take place not in Hegseth’s office, where informal meetings about innovation would normally take place, but in a secure conference room known as “the Tank”, which is typically used for higher-level meetings. Musk was to be briefed on a plan that contains 20 to 30 slides and details how the US military would fight a conflict with China.

Officials who spoke anonymously with the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal offered up potential reasons why Musk was receiving the briefing. The Times suggested that Musk, in his Doge capacity, might be looking into trimming the Pentagon’s budget and would need to know what military assets the US would use in a potential conflict with China.

One source told the Journal that Musk was receiving the briefing because he asked for one.

Though Musk has a “top-secret” clearance within the federal government, lawyers at SpaceX advised him in December not to seek higher levels of security clearances, which would probably be denied due to his foreign ties and personal drug use.

The Associated Press contributed reporting

The US has blocked Canadian access to a library straddling the Canada-US border, drawing criticism from a Quebec town where people have long enjoyed easy entry to the space.

The Haskell Free Library and Opera House is located between Stanstead, Quebec, and Derby Line, Vermont. It was built deliberately to straddle the frontier between the two countries – a symbol of cooperation and friendship between Canada and the US.

The library’s entrance is on the Vermont side. Previously, Canadian visitors were able to enter using the sidewalk and entrance on the American side but were encouraged to bring documentation, according to the library’s website.

Inside, a line of electrical tape demarcates the international boundary. About 60% of the building, including the books, is located in Canada. Upstairs, in the opera house, the audience sits in the US while the performers are in Canada.

Under the new rules, Canadians will need to go through a formal border crossing before entering the library.

“This closure not only compromises Canadian visitors’ access to a historic symbol of cooperation and harmony between the two countries but also weakens the spirit of cross-border collaboration that defines this iconic location,” the town of Stanstead said in a press release on Thursday.

US Customs and Border Protection did not immediately respond to queries posed on Friday.

In a statement to Reuters, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said the US was responding to drug trafficking.

“Drug traffickers and smugglers were exploiting the fact that Canadians could use the US entrance without going through customs. We are ending such exploitation by criminals and protecting Americans,” the statement said.

The department provided no evidence of drug trafficking or smuggling and did not immediately respond to a request for additional information.

In 2018 a Quebec man named Alexis Vlachos pleaded guilty in a Vermont court to charges relating to a plot to use the library to smuggle backpacks full of handguns into Canada on at least two occasions. He was later sentenced to 51 months in a US prison.

Relations between the United States and Canada, longtime allies, have deteriorated since Donald Trump threatened to annex Canada as the 51st state and imposed tariffs.

The library is a relic of a time when Americans and Canadians could cross the border with simply a nod and a wave at border agents, residents say. It was the gift of a local family in the early 1900s to serve the nearby Canadian and American communities.

A small group of American and Canadian protesters gathered outside on Friday.

Peter Welch, a Democratic senator from Vermont, called reports of the closure troubling.

“Vermont loves Canada. This shared cultural institution celebrates a partnership between our two nations,” Welch said on X.

The Department of Homeland Security said on Friday that it would revoke the temporary legal status of more than 530,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans welcomed into the US under a Biden-era sponsorship process, according to a notice posted to the Federal Register and signed by the homeland security chief Kristi Noem.

The order cuts short a two-year “parole” program – known as CHNV – under Joe Biden that allowed 532,000 people who had arrived in the US since October 2022 with financial sponsors to obtain two-year work permits to live and work in the US. Noem’s notice said they will lose their legal status on 24 April.

The new policy affects people who are already in the US and who came under the humanitarian parole program. It follows an earlier Trump administration decision to end what it called the “broad abuse” of the humanitarian parole, a long-standing legal tool presidents have used to allow people from countries where there is war or political instability to enter and temporarily live in the US.

During his campaign, Donald Trump promised to deport millions of people who are in the US illegally, and as president he has also been ending legal pathways for immigrants to come to the US and to stay.

Under the new policy, parolees must depart before their parole termination date if they have no lawful basis to stay in the US.

“Parole is inherently temporary, and parole alone is not an underlying basis for obtaining any immigration status,” DHS said.

Trump said on 6 March that he would decide “very soon” whether to strip the parole status from some 240,000 Ukrainians who have fled to the US during the conflict with Russia. Trump’s remarks came in response to a Reuters report that said his administration planned to revoke the status for Ukrainians as soon as April.

Biden launched a parole entry program for Venezuelans in 2022 and expanded it to Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans in 2023 as his administration grappled with high levels of illegal immigration from those nationalities. Diplomatic and political relations between the four countries and the United States have been strained.

The new legal pathways came as Biden tried to clamp down on illegal crossings at the US-Mexico border.

The Trump administration’s decision to strip the legal status from half a million migrants could make many vulnerable to deportation if they choose to remain in the US. It remains unclear how many who entered the US on parole now have another form of protection or legal status.

The order has already been challenged in federal courts. A group of American citizens and immigrants sued the Trump administration for ending humanitarian parole and are seeking to reinstate the programs for people of the four nationalities.

Lawyers and activists raised their voices to denounce the government’s decision.

Friday’s action is “going to cause needless chaos and heartbreak for families and communities across the country”, said Karen Tumlin, founder and director of Justice Action Center, one of the organizations that filed the lawsuit at the end of February. She called it “reckless, cruel and counterproductive”.

Donald Trump’s shuttle diplomacy between Russia and Ukraine has at times resembled a game of broken telephone, and the US president’s disregard for the details suggests the ceasefire he seeks is further off than his bullish statements may suggest.

Consider the events of just the last week. After his call with Vladimir Putin on Tuesday, Trump said that the two men had agreed to a partial ceasefire on “energy and infrastructure” targets, indicating that Russia would not target bridges, hospitals, railways or other civilian structures.

Hours later, a Russian drone slammed into a Ukrainian hospital. Russia’s readout of the call said that it had agreed to a halt on strikes on “energy infrastructure”, suggesting that everything else was fair game.

By Wednesday, the White House press secretary was dodging the question of what was discussed, pointing reporters to the administration’s readout without clarifying if Trump had misunderstood their discussion.

That day, Trump surprised the world by announcing that the US was proposing an American-led privatisation of Ukrainian power plants in order to provide a new security guarantee to the Ukrainians. Trump ordered his national security adviser Mike Waltz and secretary of state Marco Rubio to provide an “accurate” readout of the call (in itself a curious distinction). In it, they said Trump had told Zelenskyy that “American ownership of those plants could be the best protection for that infrastructure.”

Not so fast, said Zelenskyy on Thursday. The power plants are national property and “belong to all Ukrainians”. A takeover bid had never come up.

“If the Americans want to take the station from the Russians and they want to invest there and modernise it, that is a completely different issue,” he said. “In terms of ownership [of the nuclear power plants], we definitely did not discuss this with President Trump.”

The discrepancies are adding up and Ukraine is looking to protect itself from a potentially catastrophic misunderstanding. On Thursday, Zelenskyy also announced that he would send a team of negotiators to Riyadh in order to supply US negotiators with a list of energy infrastructure that it wanted to be included in a partial ceasefire.

“I don’t want there to be a different understanding of what the parties will agree on,” Zelensky said.

Trump has a habit of describing complex and sometimes compromising conversations in exultant, hyperbolic terms. He famously described one 2019 phone call with Zelenskyy as “perfect”. During it, he suggested that Ukraine launch an investigation into Joe Biden’s son Hunter in exchange for future military support.

Trump’s recent phone calls, particularly with Putin, have been held in a similar black box. After they spoke this week, the Kremlin said it had demanded a cessation of foreign military aid with Ukraine as part of any long-term peace. That was never discussed, Trump claimed.

“We didn’t talk about aid, actually, we didn’t talk about aid at all,” Trump said. “We talked about a lot of things, but aid was never discussed.”

The US president has sought to control the information that comes out of his private discussions with foreign leaders. And in his recent discussions, particularly with Putin, the White House has not made clear which advisers were present on the calls.

Only Steve Witkoff, a real-estate mogul and friend of Trump’s, has spoken directly about the call, saying it was “epic, transformational” and he was “proud to be an American sitting there listening to it”.

Next week’s exercise in shuttle diplomacy in Riyadh may prove a moment when Trump can no longer paper over the cracks. “There are going to be proximity discussions meaning one group’s going to be in this room, one group in this room and they’ll sit and talk go back and forth sort of like shuttle diplomacy in a hotel,” said General Keith Kellogg, the Trump envoy to Ukraine. “And that’s how it’s going to work and then we’ll find out where everybody stands.”

There is a degree of gullibility to the US approach as their business-facing dealmakers begin to encounter veteran Russian diplomats. When Sergei Lavrov and Yuri Ushakov met with US negotiators in Riyadh, they brought decades of experience and pointed to draft agreements to help shape the discussions. The US negotiators appeared outflanked.

Witkoff has said he believes that Putin is “acting in good faith” and that after the Trump-Putin phone call to prevent attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure, the Russian military had shot down seven of their own drones. Some members of Russia’s ultrapatriotic right have ridiculed him in subsequent days as gullible.

“The west believed that nonsense and that’s great,” said Mikhail Zvinchuk, a popular Russian military blogger and propagandist, during an online stream. “Mr Witkoff said he was impressed by Russia’s commitment to peace.”

Putin’s negotiating team in Riyadh is to be led by a former FSB general who headed the department gathering intelligence on Ukraine, and Grigory Karasin, a former diplomat who negotiated the Minsk accords between Russia and Ukraine

Those agreements sought to halt the conflict between Ukraine and Russian-backed proxy forces in the country’s south-east. But they were seen as deeply disadvantageous to Ukraine and were plagued by the details of which side had to provide which guarantees and in which order. Ultimately, they collapsed.

One question as Witkoff, Waltz, and Rubio prepare to travel to Riyadh for the high-stakes meetings on Monday is whether they can summon the expertise to wrangle the details of an 11-year-old conflict with some of Russia’s most experienced negotiators sitting across the table.

Boxing Hall of Famer and entrepreneur George Foreman has died at age 76, his family has announced in an Instagram post on his account.

“With profound sorrow, we announce the passing of our beloved George Edward Foreman Sr. who peacefully departed on March 21, 2025 surrounded by loved ones,” the post read.

Foreman, a heavyweight champion boxer, was “a devout preacher, a devoted husband, a loving father, and a proud grand and great grandfather”, the family’s statement said.

“A humanitarian, an Olympian, and two time heavyweight champion of the world. He was deeply respected – a force for good, a man of discipline, conviction, and a protector of his legacy, fighting tirelessly to preserve his good name – for his family.

“We are grateful for the outpouring of love and prayers, and kindly ask for privacy as we honor the extraordinary life of a man we were blessed to call our own.”

An intimidating, thunderous puncher who lost his first title to Muhammad Ali in their famous Rumble in the Jungle in 1974, “Big George” was a more rotund, jovial figure when he knocked out Michael Moorer for his second crown two decades later.

Foreman’s comeback and the fortune he made selling fat-wicking electric cooking grills made him an icon of self-improvement and success.

Soon after his birth in Marshall, Texas, on 10 January 1949, his family moved to Houston where he and his six siblings were raised by a single mother. Growing up poor in the segregated American South, Foreman dropped out of junior high school and used his size and fists in street robberies.

The Job Corps, part of President Lyndon B Johnson’s Great Society reforms, “rescued me from the gutter”, Foreman later wrote. Through the program, 16-year-old Foreman moved out of Texas and was encouraged to channel his rage and growing bulk into boxing.

At age 19 and in his 25th amateur fight, Foreman captured the heavyweight boxing gold medal at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. Turning pro, he won 37 straight matches on his way to face reigning champion Joe Frazier in Kingston, Jamaica, winning by technical knockout in round two.

Foreman defended the belt twice more before meeting Ali in Kinshasa, Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in one of the most celebrated boxing matches in history.

Ali had been stripped of his crown seven years prior for refusing to be drafted into the Vietnam war and came into the match a heavy underdog against the bigger, younger champion. But for seven rounds, Ali lay against the ropes and fended off Foreman’s clubbing blows, tiring and knocking him out in the eighth round.

“I was one strong heavyweight punching fighter,” Foreman told Reuters in 2007. “I was one punching machine, and that was the first time I delivered everything I had and nothing worked.”

The loss devastated Foreman. He took a year off before returning to the ring and then, after a second professional loss, retired in 1977 to become an ordained minister in the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ.

A decade later and considerably heavier at 143kg (315lb), Foreman staged an unlikely return to the ring to raise money for a youth centre he founded in Texas.

He went on to win 24 straight matches, gradually slimming along the way, before losing to Evander Holyfield in a 12-round decision in 1991. Three years later, he knocked out undefeated southpaw Moorer to become the oldest ever heavyweight champion at age 45.

Foreman’s last fight was in 1997, ending his career with a professional record of 76 wins and five losses.

Foreman was married four times in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1985, he married for the fifth time to Mary Joan Martelly, with whom he remained for the rest of his life. He had five sons – all called George – five biological daughters and two adopted daughters.

Throughout the 1990s and after retirement, he was an enthusiastic pitchman for various products, most notably an electric grill from home appliance maker Salton Inc. In 1999, the company paid Foreman and his partners $137.5m to put his name on the grill and other goods.

“What I do is fall in love with every product I sell,” Foreman wrote in his autobiography, By George. “That’s what sells. Just like with preaching.”

The comedian Katherine Ryan has received a second skin cancer diagnosis after raising concerns about a mole on her arm.

Ryan attended a private clinic where a doctor who also works for the NHS dismissed her concerns about melanoma and gave her the all-clear, but she went back and a test revealed the mole was cancerous.

The 41-year-old standup was diagnosed with stage two melanoma in her 20s, after finding an irregular mole on her leg, which was removed.

She said on her podcast, Telling Everybody Everything: “The only reason that they agreed to remove it was because I went to a fancy, private place in South Kensington, and I paid them a grand.

“I don’t believe that on the NHS they ever would have removed this mole, because I don’t know how long ago, I’m looking through my emails to find out how long ago, I think six to eight months ago, I went to another private clinic and gave them £300 for a seven-minute consultation.

“I was in that room for seven minutes, and the doctor was like: ‘I do melanoma on the NHS, it’s all I do, I know all about skin cancer, I’m the man, this is not melanoma, goodbye.’

“He was really nice to me, and he gave me the news that I wanted, I think it’s really easy to take a diagnosis of ‘you’re healthy’ and just walk away. But the mole kept changing, and I know a lot about melanoma. I just felt like this mole wasn’t right.”

Ryan asked the doctor to remove the mole, but he recommended sending a sample off for histology first. He then phoned her to confirm it had come back showing early melanoma.

She said: “He was shocked. He’s like: ‘It doesn’t look like melanoma, but it is melanoma.’”

The Big Fat Quiz of the Year star said the doctor made an appointment to remove the mole completely. She later confirmed the mole’s removal in a post on TikTok, in which she shared pictures of it and urged others to get their moles checked.

Melanoma is a type of skin cancer, which can spread to other areas of the body. A new mole or a change in an existing mole can be a symptom of the condition. They are often an uneven shape with a mix of two or more colours, and moles that are sore, bleeding, itchy or crusty could be cancerous.

The main cause of melanoma is ultraviolet light, which comes from the sun and is used in sunbeds.

Footage of an octopus riding a shark has stunned scientists – and delighted marine animal enthusiasts.

Researchers spotted the orange Maori octopus clinging to the back of a large shortfin mako shark in the Hauraki Gulf off the northern coast of New Zealand in December 2023. The University of Auckland research team was searching the ocean for feeding frenzies at the time.

The marine scientist Rochelle Constantine was confused at first about what exactly she was seeing, thinking the orange patch on the shark’s head might be an injury.

“At first, I was like: ‘Is it a buoy?’” Constantine told the New York Times. “‘Is it entangled in fishing gear or had a big bite?’”

A technician set up a drone for a closer look. As they drew nearer, they saw tentacles – thereby discovering the world’s first “sharktopus”.

The Maori octopus is the largest octopus in the southern hemisphere. “You can see it takes a fair amount of real estate on the shark’s head,” Constantine said.

Octopuses are typically found on the seabed, which shortfin mako sharks rarely visit, making the incident even stranger.

“We moved on after 10 minutes, so I can’t tell you what happened next,” Constantine told Oceanographic. “The octopus may have been in for quite the experience, though, since the world’s fastest shark species can reach 50km per hour.”

She said the unusual encounter is another example of how much of the ocean and marine life is still unknown, including the crucial and diverse role sharks play in the marine ecosystem.

“The ‘sharktopus’ encounter is a reminder of the wonders of the ocean,” Constantine said. “One of the best things about being a marine scientist is that you never know what you might see next in the sea. By supporting conservation initiatives, we can help to ensure that such extraordinary moments keep happening.”

A Norwegian man has filed a complaint against the company behind ChatGPT after the chatbot falsely claimed he had murdered two of his children.

Arve Hjalmar Holmen, a self-described “regular person” with no public profile in Norway, asked ChatGPT for information about himself and received a reply claiming he had killed his own sons.

Responding to the prompt “Who is Arve Hjalmar Holmen?” ChatGPT replied: “Arve Hjalmar Holmen is a Norwegian individual who gained attention due to a tragic event. He was the father of two young boys, aged seven and 10, who were tragically found dead in a pond near their home in Trondheim, Norway, in December 2020.”

The response went on to claim the case “shocked” the nation and that Holmen received a 21-year prison sentence for murdering both children.

Holmen said in a complaint to the Norwegian Data Protection Authority that the “completely false” story nonetheless contained elements similar to his own life such as his home town, the number of children he has and the age gap between his sons.

“The complainant was deeply troubled by these outputs, which could have harmful effect in his private life, if they where reproduced or somehow leaked in his community or in his home town,” said the complaint, which has been filed by Holmen and Noyb, a digital rights campaign group.

It added that Holmen has “never been accused nor convicted of any crime and is a conscientious citizen”.

Holmen’s complaint alleged that ChatGPT’s “defamatory” response violated accuracy provisions within the GDPR European data law. It has asked the Norwegian watchdog to order ChatGPT’s parent, OpenAI, to adjust its model to eliminate inaccurate results relating to Holmen and to impose a fine on the company. Noyb said that since Holmen’s interaction with ChatGPT took place, OpenAI had released a new model incorporating web searches – which has made a repeat of the Holmen error “less likely”.

AI chatbots are prone to producing responses containing false information because they are built on models that predict the next most likely word in a sentence. This can result in factual errors and wild assertions, but the plausible nature of the responses can trick users into thinking that what they are reading is 100% correct.

An OpenAI spokesperson said: “We continue to research new ways to improve the accuracy of our models and reduce hallucinations. While we’re still reviewing this complaint, it relates to a version of ChatGPT which has since been enhanced with online search capabilities that improves accuracy.”

A Norwegian man has filed a complaint against the company behind ChatGPT after the chatbot falsely claimed he had murdered two of his children.

Arve Hjalmar Holmen, a self-described “regular person” with no public profile in Norway, asked ChatGPT for information about himself and received a reply claiming he had killed his own sons.

Responding to the prompt “Who is Arve Hjalmar Holmen?” ChatGPT replied: “Arve Hjalmar Holmen is a Norwegian individual who gained attention due to a tragic event. He was the father of two young boys, aged seven and 10, who were tragically found dead in a pond near their home in Trondheim, Norway, in December 2020.”

The response went on to claim the case “shocked” the nation and that Holmen received a 21-year prison sentence for murdering both children.

Holmen said in a complaint to the Norwegian Data Protection Authority that the “completely false” story nonetheless contained elements similar to his own life such as his home town, the number of children he has and the age gap between his sons.

“The complainant was deeply troubled by these outputs, which could have harmful effect in his private life, if they where reproduced or somehow leaked in his community or in his home town,” said the complaint, which has been filed by Holmen and Noyb, a digital rights campaign group.

It added that Holmen has “never been accused nor convicted of any crime and is a conscientious citizen”.

Holmen’s complaint alleged that ChatGPT’s “defamatory” response violated accuracy provisions within the GDPR European data law. It has asked the Norwegian watchdog to order ChatGPT’s parent, OpenAI, to adjust its model to eliminate inaccurate results relating to Holmen and to impose a fine on the company. Noyb said that since Holmen’s interaction with ChatGPT took place, OpenAI had released a new model incorporating web searches – which has made a repeat of the Holmen error “less likely”.

AI chatbots are prone to producing responses containing false information because they are built on models that predict the next most likely word in a sentence. This can result in factual errors and wild assertions, but the plausible nature of the responses can trick users into thinking that what they are reading is 100% correct.

An OpenAI spokesperson said: “We continue to research new ways to improve the accuracy of our models and reduce hallucinations. While we’re still reviewing this complaint, it relates to a version of ChatGPT which has since been enhanced with online search capabilities that improves accuracy.”

Downing Street has said there are “questions to answer” after a fire at an electrical substation closed down London Heathrow airport, stopping more than 1,350 flights and disrupting the journeys of hundreds of thousands of passengers.

Counter-terrorism police are leading the investigation into the “unprecedented” incident that left Britain’s biggest airport unable to function as engineers tried to restore power, but said there was “no indication of foul play”.

Two people familiar with the investigation said officials did not believe the fire was the result of any criminal activity or a hostile state and was more likely to be accidental. Police confirmed on Friday evening that the fire was not thought to be suspicious.

Heathrow partially reopened on Friday evening and was expected to be fully operational on Saturday, but airlines said the closure would continue to have a “huge impact” on passengers in the coming days.

The airport said passengers should come to Heathrow on Saturday as they normally would.

Ministers acknowledged the “immense distress and disruption” caused to passengers, vowing “we will learn the lessons”.

Asked about an inquiry and whether National Grid had questions to answer, the prime minister’s official spokesperson said: “There are questions to answer on how this has happened and what can be done to prevent the scale of disruption we’ve seen from happening again, once the situation is under control.”

Passengers were warned to stay away from Heathrow all day on Friday after the London fire brigade (LFB) was called to tackle the blaze that started shortly after 11pm on Thursday at a substation in Hayes, north of the airport.

More than 70 firefighters worked in “challenging and hazardous” conditions to bring the fire under control, the LFB said, but it was still burning at 8am on Friday, with 25,000 litres of oil having caught fire at the substation. Officers said that despite the acrid smell, there was no air quality danger to the public.

Power to 67,000 homes was cut off for several hours and more than 100 people were evacuated. Power supplies have now been restored to all customers, including Heathrow, allowing operations to resume at the airport.

More than 1,350 flights carrying at least 200,000 passengers had been scheduled to arrive and depart from the airport on Friday, connecting to around 230 destinations, including those in the US for which the airport acts as the main gateway from Europe.

About 120 long-haul flights to Heathrow were in the air when the closure was announced overnight, with arrivals diverted to other airports around Britain and Europe.

London residents will be disturbed by more aircraft noise at night than normally permitted in the coming days after the Department for Transport lifted restrictions on night flights to ease the backlog.

Heathrow has experienced significant disruption from external events, such as the air traffic control outage in August 2023 and the mass groundings during the Covid crisis, but the last time the airport was fully closed for an extended period was during heavy snowfall and freezing conditions in December 2010, when 4,000 flights were cancelled.

Senior security and aviation figures expressed consternation that the world’s best connected airport could be closed for so long because of a power cut.

The International Air Transport Association (Iata) said it was “yet another case of Heathrow letting down both travellers and airlines”. Willie Walsh, Iata’s director general, added: “How is it that critical infrastructure is totally dependent on a single power source without an alternative? If that is the case then it is a clear planning failure by the airport.”

David Omand, the former head of the Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ), told the BBC’s World at One: “Given the importance of Heathrow I am surprised that the whole airport had to be shut for a day.

“I mean, you could understand disruption whilst you change over to alternate systems and so on, but such a complete failure over the period of a day – and who knows the disruption may last longer – is a national embarrassment. It shouldn’t have happened.”

However, the transport secretary, Heidi Alexander, defended the airport on Friday night, saying the “unprecedented situation” had been “totally outside of Heathrow’s control”.

“They have stood up their resilience plan swiftly, and they’ve collaborated closely with our emergency responders and the airline operators,” she said. “They do have backup energy supplies, they have generators, diesel generators.

“None of that failed on this occasion because that backup supply is designed to protect the critical key systems within the airport and not to provide power to the whole airport.

“I would still advise anyone who has got a flight tomorrow [Saturday] to check in with their airline before travelling to the airport. But given the scale and magnitude of this incident, the response has been swift, although I do appreciate there will have been immense distress and disruption to a very large number of people.”

Heathrow’s chief executive, Thomas Woldbye, apologised to “the many people who have had their travel affected”. But added: “I’d like to stress that this has been an incident of major severity. It’s not a small fire.”

The Metropolitan police said it was working with the LFB to establish the cause of the fire, which remains under investigation. A spokesperson said: “While there is currently no indication of foul play we retain an open mind at this time.”

Detectives were preparing to take away parts of the substation and its equipment to examine them for signs of interference. It is understood initial checks of CCTV covering the perimeter of the substation showed nothing suspicious.

Counter-terrorism detectives were expected to stay on the case until an alternative explanation emerged for the fire.

Alice Delahunty, the president of National Grid’s transmission business, said it had been “a very significant and serious incident, which is extraordinarily rare in our network” and that it was not possible to verify any “rumours and speculation” over the cause of the fire.

She added: “We’re not in a position to rule anything in or out. Our focus has been getting homes and businesses back on supply safely. There will be a time for a full and thorough investigation, but the focus has been on restoring power.”

A Heathrow spokesperson said it would initially work with airlines on repatriating the passengers who were diverted to other airports in Europe.

“Our priority remains the safety of our passengers and those working at the airport. As the busiest airport in Europe, Heathrow uses as much energy as a small city, therefore getting back to a full and safe operation takes time. We apologise for the inconvenience caused by this incident.”

British Airways, which operates around half of all Heathrow flights, resumed long-haul services on Friday evening after power was restored. Flights also began arriving at the airport.

The chief executive, Sean Doyle, said BA had “been forced to effectively ground our flying operation”, cancelling every short-haul and the majority of long-haul flights scheduled for Friday.

“Unfortunately, it will have a huge impact on all of our customers flying with us over the coming days,” he said.

A woman who was told she could not bring her dog aboard her international flight drowned the animal in the bathroom of a Florida airport, according to authorities.

Alison Lawrence, 57, of Kenner, Louisiana, faces a felony charge for what police described as the “cruel and unnecessary death” of her white miniature schnauzer, Tywinn.

Lawrence had gone to Orlando’s international airport with Tywinn to fly to Colombia on 16 December 2024, an arrest affidavit alleges.

Paperwork issues prevented Lawrence from taking the pet along with her on an international flight, Orlando police alleged.

In plain view of surveillance cameras, after speaking to an airline agent for several minutes, Lawrence walked into a bathroom near the ticketing area with the dog. She allegedly exited the bathroom without the schnauzer less than 20 minutes later.

Lawrence soon re-entered the terminal and traveled to Colombia, according to reports. A janitor had allegedly spotted the woman in the bathroom cleaning up water and dog food from the stall’s floor.

The employee subsequently found the dog’s carcass in a trash container and reported the grim discovery to a supervisor.

The dog had a companion vest, collar, rabies tag, a dog travel bag and a bone-shaped dog tag with Lawrence’s name and contact information.

An implanted microchip provided Tywinn’s identity to investigators. A necropsy determined that the schnauzer had been drowned.

US Customs and Border Protection confirmed that Tywinn’s owner had boarded a flight to Bogota, Colombia, before then flying to Ecuador, according to the Associated Press.

Police ultimately concluded that Lawrence had “taken extreme and tragic action by killing the dog”, according to ABC7. They arrested her in Lake county, Florida, on Wednesday on a count of aggravated animal abuse, a third-degree felony. She was reportedly released from custody pending the outcome of the case on $5,000 bail.

Dogs traveling from the US to Colombia must be accompanied by a health certificate issued by a veterinarian and a rabies vaccination certificate, according to guidelines from the US Department of Agriculture.

The Associated Press contributed reporting

The owner of Facebook and Instagram is considering charging UK users for an advert-free version of its platforms after agreeing a settlement in a landmark privacy case.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta agreed to stop targeting a user with adverts based on their personal data after a legal agreement that avoided a trial in the high court in London.

Tanya O’Carroll, a human rights campaigner, launched a lawsuit against the $1.5tn (£1.2tn) company in 2022, alleging it had breached UK data laws by failing to respect her right to demand Facebook stop collecting and processing her data in order to target her with adverts.

On Friday both sides settled the lawsuit, with O’Carroll claiming a “victory” after Meta committed to stop using her personal data to target her with bespoke adverts. O’Carroll’s stance was supported by the UK’s data watchdog, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), which said “people have the right to object to their personal information being used for direct marketing”.

O’Carroll said the ICO’s stance, which the regulator made clear in a submission to the high court, could pave the way for more lawsuits on a similar basis.

“This settlement represents not just a victory for me, but for everyone who values their fundamental right to privacy,” said O’Carroll. “None of us signed up to be trapped into decades of surveillance advertising, held hostage by the threat of losing the ability to connect with our loved ones online.”

Meta said it “fundamentally” disagreed with O’Carroll’s claims and took its obligations under the UK’s privacy law, GDPR, seriously. It added that it was weighing the option of introducing a subscription service in the UK, whereby users would pay a fee for an ad-free service. Advertising accounts for approximately 98% of Meta’s revenue.

“We are exploring the option of offering people based in the UK a subscription and will share further information in due course,” said Meta.

Last year the ICO said it was looking at how UK data protection law would apply to an ad-free subscription service.

Meta already offers a no-ads service in the EU costing €7.99 a month after a 2023 ruling by the European court of justice, the highest in the EU.

Israel’s defence minister said he had instructed the military to “seize more ground” in Gaza and threatened to annex part of the territory unless Hamas released 59 Israeli hostages still held in the devastated territory.

Israel Katz’s warning on Friday came as the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) intensified the new offensive launched on Tuesday, when a wave of airstrikes shattered the truce that had brought a fragile and relative calm since mid-January.

Further “non-stop” attacks took place overnight across much of Gaza. “It’s all day and all night. Drones, planes, artillery, tanks … all the time. It’s as bad as it’s ever been,” said one aid worker now based in Gaza City.

After retaking part of the strategic Netzarim corridor that divides Gaza’s north from south, Israeli troops have advanced towards the northern town of Beit Lahiya and into the southern border city of Rafah.

Israeli officials have escalated their threats in recent days, calling on Palestinians in Gaza to overthrow Hamas or face the consequences.

“I ordered [the army] to seize more territory in Gaza,” Katz said in a statement. “The more Hamas refuses to free the hostages, the more territory it will lose, which will be annexed by Israel.”

Katz also threatened “to expand buffer zones around Gaza to protect Israeli civilian population areas and soldiers by implementing a permanent Israeli occupation of the area”, should Hamas not comply.

The permanent establishment of wide buffer zones in Gaza, particularly along its northern perimeter, has long been thought by observers to be an objective of many in the Israeli security establishment and government.

The Trump administration reiterated this week its support for Israel, with the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, saying: “The president made it very clear to Hamas that if they did not release all of the hostages there would be all hell to pay.”

Gaza’s civil defence agency said on Thursday that 504 people had been killed since the bombardment resumed, one of the highest tolls since the war began more than 17 months ago with Hamas’s attack on Israel. More than 100 have been killed since then and many more injured, Palestinian medical officials said.

Amjad Shawaa, the head of the Palestinian NGO Network in Gaza, said: “This time it is very, very bad. It is very intensive and very scary. We don’t know when we could be hit. We worry always about our loved ones. Everything is very uncertain and then there are these threats that Israel will expand its operations. This is a suffocation, a psychological condition that is very hard.”

The IDF said the new strikes were against “terrorist” targets, including a “Hamas military site in northern Gaza where preparations were being made to fire projectiles” and “several vessels in the coastal area of the Gaza Strip … intended for use in terrorist operations by Hamas and the Islamic Jihad [armed group]”.

It gave new evacuation orders for northern coastal areas, displacing thousands more people. The UN estimates that 124,000 people have been displaced in Gaza since Tuesday, about one in 20 of the population.

Preliminary investigations have found that an explosion that killed a UN staffer in Gaza and seriously injured four others earlier this week was caused by a tank shell, aid officials told the Guardian. The IDF has denied all responsibility for the explosion at a UN guesthouse in the central town of Deir al-Balah.

A three-phase ceasefire was agreed in January but Israel refused to begin talks on the implementation of a second phase, which was supposed to lead to a return of all hostages, the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza and a permanent end to hostilities.

Instead, Israel proposed a new plan, reportedly put forward by the US envoy Steve Witkoff, involving a 30- to 60-day truce and the release of all remaining hostages. Israel made no mention of releasing more Palestinian prisoners – a key component of the first phase.

Hamas said on Friday it was still debating Witkoff’s proposal and other proposals made by intermediaries, including Egypt. On Thursday, the group fired rockets at Tel Aviv, the coastal Israeli city and commercial hub, in its first military response to Israel’s offensive. One was intercepted by air defence systems, while two hit an uninhabited area, Israel’s military said.

The new violence in Gaza comes against a backdrop of internal turmoil in Israel, where thousands of protesters have rallied in recent days, accusing the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, of seeking to undermine Israel’s democratic system and resuming military operations without regard for the safety of the hostages in order to bolster his political position.

On Friday, Israel’s supreme court ordered a temporary halt to the government’s dismissal of Ronen Bar, the head of the Shin Bet internal security service, until an appeal could be heard before 8 April. Netanyahu previously cited “mistrust” to justify his sacking of Bar but Israel’s attorney general has ruled that a dismissal by the cabinet has no legal basis.

A recent Shin Bet report on the 7 October Hamas attack acknowledged the service’s failures but also accused Netanyahu’s government of pursuing policies that established some of the conditions for the attack.

Before the IDF’s offensive, Israel had already cut off the supply of food, fuel and humanitarian aid to Gaza. The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, one of the largest providers of food aid in the strip, said on Friday it had only enough flour to distribute for the next six days.

About 1,200 people, mostly Israeli civilians, died in the surprise attack by Hamas in October 2023. The ensuing Israeli offensive into Gaza has killed more than 49,000 people, mostly civilians.

Nasa has dropped its longstanding public commitment to land the first woman and person of color on the moon, in response to Donald Trump’s directives to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) practices at federal agencies.

The promise was a central plank of the space agency’s Artemis program, which is scheduled to return humans to the lunar surface in 2027 for the first time since the final Apollo mission in December 1972.

The Artemis landing page of Nasa’s website previously included the words: “Nasa will land the first woman, first person of color, and first international partner astronaut on the Moon using innovative technologies to explore more of the lunar surface than ever before.”

The version of the page live on the website on Friday, however, appears with the phrase removed.

The development was reported by the Orlando Sentinel.

Nasa spokesperson Allard Beutel said in a statement emailed to the Guardian: “In keeping with the president’s executive order, we’re updating our language regarding plans to send crew to the lunar surface as part of Nasa’s Artemis campaign. We look forward to learning more from [and] about the Trump administration’s plans for our agency and expanding exploration at the moon and Mars for the benefit of all.”

Nasa’s action is in keeping with compliance by numerous other federal agencies that followed orders to remove mentions of DEI programs and initiatives following Trump’s second-term inauguration on 20 January.

Agencies including the Internal Revenue Service and National Institutes of Health took swift action to eliminate policies and funding associated with DEI, while the US military followed a presidential order to implement a ban on transgender people from service, a measure temporarily blocked by a federal judge on Wednesday.

The move by Nasa is particularly notable because the creation of the Artemis program, and decision to land the first woman and person of color on the moon, were made in 2019 during the first Trump administration, according to the science journal Ars Technica.

The agency has made strides in recent years to embrace diversity and move away from its reputation as being staffed by old, white men. All 12 people who walked on the moon during six Apollo missions between 1969 and 1972 were white men aged between 36 and 47.

The first spaceflight by a US woman did not take place until 1983, when Sally Ride flew on the space shuttle Challenger. Nasa’s first Black astronaut in space was Guion Bluford, who flew a mission on Challenger later the same year.

Artemis III is scheduled to land on the lunar surface in mid-2027, with its crew yet to be announced. A paragraph on the Artemis website that preceded the removed section about a woman and person of color continues to state that: “We are exploring the moon for scientific discovery, technology advancement, and to learn how to live and work on another world as we prepare for human missions to Mars.

“We will collaborate with commercial and international partners and establish the first long-term presence on the Moon.”

A first, un-crewed test mission, Artemis I, flew around the moon in November 2022.

Artemis II, which will take humans to the moon and back without landing, is scheduled for April 2026. Its crew of four, three of whom have flown into space before, includes one female astronaut, Christina Koch, and an African American, Victor Glover.

The other crew members are US astronaut Reid Wiseman, the mission commander, and Canadian Jeremy Hansen on his first spaceflight.