Donald Trump will announce his latest round of tariffs at the White House on Wednesday, threatening to unleash a global trade war on what he has dubbed “liberation day”.

Trump has rattled global stock markets, alarmed corporate executives and economists, and triggered heated rows with the US’s largest trading partners by announcing and delaying plans to impose tariffs on foreign imports several times since taking office.

No details of Wednesday’s plans have been made available ahead of the announcement. The president is set to speak at 4pm ET. White House officials said that the implementation of the most sweeping rewrite of US trade policy would be immediate.

Trump has made clear a few goals he wants to accomplish through his tariffs: bring manufacturing back to the US, respond to unfair trade policies from other countries, increase tax revenue, and incentivize crackdowns on migration and drug trafficking.

The implementation of his tariffs has so far been haphazard, with multiple rollbacks and delays and vague promises that have yet to come to fruition. The threats have soured US relations with its largest trading partners. Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, has called them “unjustified” and pledged to retaliate. The European Union has said it has a “strong plan” to retaliate.

Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s press secretary, said that Trump was spending Tuesday “perfecting” the trade plan. “He is with his trade and tariff team right now, perfecting it to make sure this is a perfect deal for the American people and the American worker,” Leavitt said.

Ahead of the announcement, Trump repeated the idea of imposing so-called reciprocal tariffs, with the US taxing imports at the same rates that a country uses for US exports. Trump has specifically mentioned countries like South Korea, Brazil and India, along with the EU, as being possible targets for reciprocal tariffs.

“The world has been ripping off the United States for the last 40 years and more,” Trump told NBC over the weekend. “All we’re doing is being fair.”

Also still on the table are 25% tariffs on all imports from Mexico and Canada, two of the US’s biggest trading partners, which Trump wants to utilize to force the countries to quell migration and drug trafficking into the US. In early March, Trump delayed the start of the tariffs for the second time after negotiating with leaders of the two countries.

Reports have also said that Trump’s advisers are also pitching him a 20% across-the-board tariff on all imports, something closer to what Trump promised on the campaign trail.

Any tariffs announced would be on top of the tariffs that Trump has already implemented: an additional 20% tariff on all Chinese imports and a 25% tariff on all steel and aluminum imports. There is also a 10% tariff on energy imports from Canada.

Trump also announced in March a 25% tariff on all imported vehicles and, eventually, imported auto parts, which will start going into effect on Thursday.

The tariff plans have led to stock market sell-offs and are proving unpopular with Americans, according to polls. Multiple reports suggest internal conflicts within the White House over how far and wide the tariffs should go have exacerbated the uncertainty over what the tariffs will be.

Recent reporting from Politico suggests that some within the White House see the commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, as the most aggressive about tariffs, pushing across-the-board measures. Meanwhile, the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, and trade adviser Peter Navarro are both more averse to dramatic tariffs.

But all conflict within the White House has been largely internal, while Trump and his cabinet have spent the last few weeks trying to pitch the tariffs as good for the US economy, even as the US stock market has been sliding downward and consumer and business sentiments have plummeted.

On Monday, the end of the first quarter of 2025, two of the three major stock exchanges saw their worst quarter in over two years as Wall Street has been reeling from the chaos of Trump’s trade wars. In March, consumer confidence plunged to its lowest level in over four years.

Economists at Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and other banks lowered their forecasts for growth in the US economy in recent days and have noted an increased chance of a recession.

Neel Kashkari, president of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve, told Bloomberg News that it is “the most dramatic shift in confidence that I can recall, except for when Covid hit”, he said. “It’s conceivable that the hit to confidence could have a bigger effect than the tariffs themselves.”

The Trump administration has tried to argue that the drop in confidence has to do with the uncertainty over trade policy, not the impacts of the tariffs themselves. Yet economists say the impacts of tariffs will be another uncertainty in itself, likely leading to higher prices as American businesses, which will have to pay the tariffs on imports, ultimately shifting the cost down to consumers.

“CEOs are consistently saying they want to hike prices,” Alex Jacquez, CEO of the Groundwork Collaborative, a progressive thinktank and advocacy group, told reporters on Tuesday. “What the major retailers and companies who may be affected by tariffs are already planning to do … is pass these costs along to consumers as much as they possibly can.”

Donald Trump has said “tariffs” is the most beautiful word in the dictionary.

The US president is expected to announce his latest round of these border taxes on Wednesday at 4pm ET (9pm BST). In what he is calling “liberation day”, Trump has argued the step is needed to raise money and to encourage domestic manufacturing. But it is also rattling the global economy.

Israel’s defence minister has said the country intends to “seize large areas” of the Gaza Strip amid a major expansion of aerial and ground operations in the besieged Palestinian territory.

Israel Katz said in a statement on Wednesday that “troops will move to clear areas of terrorists and infrastructure, and seize extensive territory that will be added to the state of Israel’s security areas”.

He also said he was calling on Palestinian civilians to flee areas where fighting had returned following the collapse of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas last month and to “act now to overthrow Hamas and return all the hostages”.

The announcement followed a night of intensive airstrikes on Khan Younis and Rafah in southern Gaza, which hospital officials said had killed at least 21 people. The bodies of five women, one of them pregnant, and two children were brought to Nasser hospital on Wednesday morning, medics said, as well as three men from the same family.

There were also reports early on Wednesday of at least two airstrikes on Gaza City and Israeli troop movement in the Rafah area. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it had deployed an extra division to southern Gaza earlier in the day.

The Israeli military issued sweeping evacuation orders last week for people in Rafah and a swath of land stretching northwards towards Khan Younis to move to al-Mawasi, an area on the shore that Israel has designated as a humanitarian zone but repeatedly bombed.

Katz did not elaborate on how much land Israel intends to capture, but according to the Israeli human rights group Gisha, the IDF has seized buffer zones around Gaza’s edges totalling 62 sq km, or 17% of the strip, since the war began in October 2023.

Israel renewed intensive bombing across Gaza on 18 March, followed by the redeployment of ground troops, bringing to an abrupt end an almost two-month-old ceasefire and exchanges of Israeli hostages held by Palestinian militant groups and Palestinians in Israeli jails.

According to the terms of the truce, the sides were supposed to negotiate implementing further phases of the deal during the first 42-day-long stage, but the Israeli government repeatedly postponed the talks.

The latest UN estimate, from 23 March, suggested more than 140,000 people had been displaced since the end of the ceasefire. More than 90% of the strip’s population of 2.3 million have been forced to flee their homes during the conflict, many of them multiple times.

Hundreds of people have been killed in IDF airstrikes and Israel has also cut off humanitarian aid, food and fuel to the strip in an effort to pressure Hamas.

Efforts led by Qatari and Egyptian mediators to get talks aimed at ending the war back on track have not yet led to a breakthrough. The resumption of fighting in Gaza has fuelled protests in Israel against the government from supporters of the remaining hostages and their families.

The 7 October 2023 Hamas attack on southern Israel, in which Israel says 1,200 people, the majority of them civilians, were killed and a further 250 taken captive, was the trigger for the conflict in the Gaza Strip, the worst war between Israel and the Palestinians in more than 70 years of fighting.

Israel’s retaliatory military campaign in Gaza has killed at least 50,357 people, the majority of them civilians, according to the territory’s health ministry.

Some of the bodies of 15 Palestinian paramedics and rescue workers, killed by Israeli forces and buried in a mass grave nine days ago in Gaza, were found with their hands or legs tied and had gunshot wounds to the head and chest, according to two witnesses.

The witness accounts add to an accumulating body of evidence pointing to a potentially serious war crime on 23 March, when Palestinian Red Crescent ambulance crews and civil defence rescue workers were sent to the scene of an airstrike in the early hours of the morning in the al-Hashashin district of Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city.

International humanitarian teams were only allowed access to the site this weekend. One body was recovered on Saturday. Fourteen more were found in a sandy grave at the site on Sunday and were brought back for autopsies in the nearby city of Khan Younis.

Dr Ahmed al-Farra, a senior doctor at the Nasser medical complex in Khan Younis, witnessed the arrival of some of the remains.

“I was able to see three bodies when they were transferred to the Nasser hospital. They had bullets in their chest and head. They were executed. They had their hands tied,’’ Farra said. “They tied them so they were unable to move and then they killed them.”

He provided photographs he said he had taken of one of the dead on arrival at the hospital. The pictures show a hand at the end of a long-sleeved black shirt with a black cord knotted around the wrist.

Another person, an eyewitness who took part in the recovery of remains from Rafah on Sunday, also said they saw evidence of one of the dead having been shot after being detained.

“I saw the bodies with my own eyes when we found them in the mass grave,” the witness, who did not want his name used for his own safety, told the Guardian in a telephone interview. “They had signs of multiple shots in the chest. One of them had legs tied. One was shot in the head. They were executed.”

The accounts add to allegations made by a senior Palestinian Red Crescent official, the Palestinian Civil Defence and the Gaza health ministry that some of the victims had been shot after they were detained and put in restraints by Israeli troops.

The incident came after the Israeli government ended a two-month-old ceasefire and resumed its military campaign against Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza on 17 March, with heavy aerial bombing and ground operations. The people of Rafah were ordered to leave the town on Monday, before Israeli ground operations there.

The international criminal court issued arrest warrants for war crimes in November against the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant, and the ICC prosecutor has said he is still investigating Israeli forces and Hamas for suspected atrocities.

The victims are believed to have been killed on 23 March, two of them in the early hours when their ambulance came under Israeli fire while on the way to collect injured people from an earlier airstrike. The remaining 13 of the dead were in a convoy of ambulances and civil defence vehicles dispatched to retrieve the bodies of their two colleagues. One of the dead was a UN employee. A Red Crescent paramedic, named as Assad al-Nassasra, is still missing.

The UN said the ambulances and other vehicles were buried in sand by bulldozers alongside the bodies of the dead, in what appears to have been an attempt to cover up the killings. UN video footage taken by the recovery team showed a crushed UN vehicle, ambulances and a fire truck that had been flattened and buried in the sand by the Israeli military.

“This is a huge blow to us … These people were shot,” Jens Laerke, a spokesperson for the UN aid coordination office, said on Tuesday. “Normally we are not at a loss for words and we are spokespeople, but sometimes we have difficulty finding them. This is one of those cases.”

Israel’s military has said its “initial assessment” of the incident had found that its troops had opened fire on several vehicles “advancing suspiciously toward IDF troops without headlights or emergency signals”, and has claimed, so far without evidence, that Hamas fighters and other militants had been using the ambulances for cover.

The Israel Defense Forces have so far not responded to questions, first posed on Monday, about the reports that the bodies and their vehicles had been buried or to the allegations that some had been shot after being detained.

Dr Bashar Murad, the Red Crescent’s director of health programmes in Gaza, said at least one of the recovered bodies of the paramedics had had his hands tied, and that one of the paramedics had been on a call to the ambulance dispatcher when the attack took place.

On that call, Murad said, gunshots fired at close range could be heard as well as the voices of Israeli soldiers on the scene speaking in Hebrew, ordering the detention of at least some of the paramedics.

“The gunshots were fired from a close distance. They could be heard on the call between signal officer and of the medical crews that survived and phoned the ambulance centre for help. The soldiers’ voices were clearly audible in Hebrew and very close, as well as the sound of the gunfire.”

“Gather them at the wall and bring some restraints to tie them,” was one of the lines that Murad said could be heard by the dispatcher. He said the call had not been recorded.

Mahmoud Basal, a spokesperson for the Palestinian Civil Defence in Gaza, said the bodies had been found with at least about 20 gunshots in each of them and confirmed that “at least one of them had their legs bound”.

In a statement released on Monday, Gaza’s health ministry said: “They were executed, some of them handcuffed and had sustained head and chest injuries. They were buried in a deep hole to prevent their identities from being identified.”

On Monday the IDF issued evacuation orders covering most of Rafah, indicating it could soon launch another major ground operation, eight days after the paramedics and rescue workers were killed.

According to the Red Crescent, an ambulance was dispatched to pick up the casualties from the airstrike in the early hours of 23 March and called for a support ambulance. The first ambulance arrived at hospital safely but contact was lost with the support ambulance at 3.30am. An initial report from the scene said it had been shot at and the two paramedics inside killed.

The Palestinian Red Crescent president, Dr Younis al-Khatib, said the IDF had impeded the collection of the bodies for several days. The IDF said it had facilitated the evacuation of bodies as soon as “operational circumstances” allowed.

“The bodies were recovered with difficulty as they were buried in the sand, with some showing signs of decomposition,” the Red Crescent said.

Their burial had been put off pending autopsies at the Nasser hospital in Khan Younis. The autopsies have now been carried out, according to hospital sources, and a full report is due to be delivered to the Gaza health ministry within 10 days.

Democrats were tasting unfamiliar triumphalism on Wednesday after the election for a vacant Wisconsin supreme court seat turned into an emphatic repudiation of Elon Musk, Donald Trump’s richest supporter and key ally.

Musk endured a wave of gloating on X, his own the social media platform, after Brad Schimel, a Trump-endorsed judge that he spent $25m supporting lost by 10 percentage points to Susan Crawford, whose victory sustained a four-three liberal majority on the court.

On a day that Trump has earmarked as “liberation day” to mark his long-awaited roll out of trade tariffs, Democrats seized on the result as a referendum on Musk – who has spearheaded the president’s slashing of federal government workers and spending programmes – while casting it as a platform for a recovery in next year’s congressional midterm elections.

In a display of schadenfreude, the Democrats official account posted a picture of Musk donning a cheese head and accompanied with the single word “Loser”.

Crawford, a former attorney for Planned Parenthood, presented her success as a triumph over Musk. “As a little girl, I never could have imagined that I’d be taking on the richest man in the world for justice in Wisconsin. And we won,” she told cheering supporters Tuesday night.

The result is politically significant because the court is due to issue abortion rulings while also deciding on electoral redistricting questions which now have the potential to help Democrats in future elections in a state where contests are traditionally close.

Democrats have sought to exploit Musk’s growing unpopularity to tar Trump and the Republican generally. Recent polls show a majority of voters have a negative view of Musk, who was once popular with the US public.

Hakeem Jeffries, the Democrat leader in the House of Representatives, said it was now on Republicans to separate themselves from Musk.

“Time for them to walk away from this unelected, unpopular, unhinged and un-American billionaire puppet master,” he told MSNBC. “He tried to spend his unlimited resources to buy a state Supreme Court seat in Wisconsin, and it failed spectacularly.”

Chuck Schumer, the party’s leader in the Senate, said the result “sent a decisive message to Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and Doge… our democracy is not for sale.”

Other party figures were blunter. Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota and Kamala Harris’s running mate for the Democrats in the 2024 presidential election, was succinct on Musk’s social media platform X, formerly Twitter.

“Wisconsin beat the billionaire,” he posted.

Jasmine Crockett, a Democrat House member from Texas, posted: “Well well well, I guess Wisconsin agreed on the message for old Elon: “F’ off!,” she wrote.

Eric Swalwell, a California representative, called the result an “ass-kicking” for Republicans, adding: “Where else does Elon want to try and buy an election.”

JD Pritzker, the Democrat governor of Illinois and himself a billionaire, wrote: “Elon Musk is not good at this.”

Suspicions that Musk’s profile and conspicuous wealth have become an electoral turnoff also appeared to infect Republicans.

Pam Van Handel, a Republican party chair in Wisconsin’s Outagamie county, told Politico: “I thought [Musk] was gonna be an asset for this race. People love Trump, but maybe they don’t love everybody he supports.”

The site quoted Rohn Bishop, the Republican mayor of the Wisconsin city of Waupun, as saying: “I thought maybe Elon coming could turn these people to go out and vote, [but] I think… he may have turned out more voters against [Schimel].”

Charlie Kirk, a pro-Trump social media influencer and activist, implied – without mentioning Musk by name – that his wealth and profile might have played a role.

“We did a lot in Wisconsin but we fell short,” he wrote. “We must realize and appreciate that we are the LOW PROP party now. We are the party of welders, waiters and plumbers. We are the party of people who work with their hands, who shower before and after work.”

Neither Musk nor Trump mentioned the supreme court result in its immediate aftermath, trumpeting instead another Wisconsin ballot result that amended the state constitution to require photo ID as a condition for voting.

Republicans also won victories in two special House elections in Florida caused by the resignations of Matt Gaetz, Trump’s original attorney general designee but who later withdrew amid sexual misconduct allegations, and Mike Waltz, now the national security adviser.

But the elections were won by margins of around half of what Trump achieved last November. Jimmy Patronis beat Democrat challenger Gay Valimont to win Gaetz’s former seat, while Randy Fine defeated Josh Weil in Florida’s sixth district, once held by Waltz.

The results bolstered the GOP’s wafer thin House majority to 220-213.

Trump hailed the outcomes, which he attributed to his personal endorsement. “THE TRUMP ENDORSEMENT, AS ALWAYS, PROVED FAR GREATER THAN THE DEMOCRATS FORCES OF EVIL. CONGRATULATIONS TO AMERICA!,” he posted on his Truth Social platform.

But Jeffries claimed the reduced victory margins augured well for the Democrats in next year’s midterms.

“One point that should have my Republican colleagues quaking in their boots,” he said. “In the Florida sixth race, which was a Trump +30 district, the margin was cut in half. There are 60 Republicans in the House who currently represent districts where Trump did worse than 15 or 16 points.”

Tesla reported a 13% drop in vehicle sales in the first three months of the year, making it the electric vehicle maker’s worst quarter since 2022. It’s another sign that Elon Musk’s once high-flying electric car company is struggling to attract buyers.

The drop is likely due to a combination of factors, including its ageing lineup, competition from rivals and a backlash from Musk’s embrace of rightwing politics. It also is a warning that the company’s first-quarter earnings report later this month could disappoint investors.

Tesla reported deliveries of 336,681 vehicles globally in the January-March quarter. Analysts polled by FactSet expected much higher deliveries of 408,000. The figure was down from sales of 387,000 in the same period a year ago. The decline came despite deep discounts, zero financing and other incentives.

Tesla’s stock has plunged by roughly half since hitting a mid-December record as expectations of a lighter regulatory touch and big profits with Donald Trump as president were replaced by fear that the boycott of Musk’s cars and other problems could hit the company hard. Teslas around the country were vandalized in protest of Musk after he dismantled entire federal agencies in his role as the head of the so-called “department of government efficiency”. Musk also made a gesture at a rally that his estranged daughter called “definitely a nazi salute”.

Despite Donald Trump’s attempts to shore up company sales with a Tesla presentation in front of the White House and Musk’s assurances to employees that the company has a “bright and exciting” future, the drop in sales was striking.

Matt Britzman, a senior equity analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown, said: “The scale is worse than many had expected.

“There’s no way to sugarcoat it, Tesla’s first-quarter delivery numbers are a disappointment, though many investors were already preparing for a soft number,” Britzman said.

Analysts are still not sure exactly how much the fall in sales is due to the protests or other factors. Electric car sales have been sluggish in general, and Tesla in particular is suffering as car buyers hold off from buying its bestselling Model Y because of plans for an updated version later this year. Even before Musk took up his role in government alongside Trump, Tesla had struggled with meeting its delivery targets. Earnings calls and delivery reports failed to match analysts’ expectations throughout 2024.

“Headlines will point to branding issues, and it’d be naive to assume that’s not a factor here, but it misses the key point,” Britzman said. “Deliveries have been significantly impacted by downtime at factories as Tesla launched the long-awaited refreshed version of the Model Y, its bestselling car.”

The Austin, Texas, electric vehicle maker has also lost market share to rivals in recent months as their offerings improve, including those of BYD. The Chinese EV giant unveiled in March a technology that allows its cars to charge in just a few minutes.

Despite what analysts describe as strong demand for the Model Y, they expect to see continue volatility for the company for a while. Tesla’s most recent release, the futuristic Cybertruck, has failed to find widespread adoption.

The “brand is under pressure”, Britzman said. “It’s rare to see sentiment toward a company so closely tied to a polarising White House, and until Musk pulls his focus back to Tesla, shares will remain volatile.”

Italy’s interior ministry has written to police forces across the country to increase security at Tesla dealerships after 17 of the electric cars made by Elon Musk’s company were destroyed in a fire in Rome.

Italy’s state police anti-terrorism unit, Digos, is investigating whether the fire at the Tesla dealership in Torre Angela, a suburb in the east of the capital, was started by anarchists.

Firefighters worked for hours to put out the blaze in the early hours of Monday. Drone images showed a row of the burnt-out remains of the vehicles in a parking area of the dealership. Using his social media platform, X, Musk referred to it as “terrorism”.

There are 13 Tesla dealerships in Italy, all managed by the parent company, the majority of them in Rome, but also in other cities including Florence and Milan.

An interior ministry source said the circular was aimed at “raising awareness” of possible anti-Tesla protesters amid a global wave of vandalism in response to Musk’s political activities in the US. If needed, surveillance of dealerships would be increased, it said.

Since the inauguration of Donald Trump as US president in January, Musk has been slashing the federal workforce as chief of the administration’s so-called “department of government efficiency”, prompting the emergence of “Tesla Takedown”, a boycott movement that started in the US before spreading to Europe.

Although most protests have so far been peaceful, Tesla dealerships and cars have increasingly been targets of vandalism. Seven vehicles were set alight at a dealership in Ottersberg, Germany, on Saturday, and two Tesla stores in Sweden, one in the capital, Stockholm, and the other in the coastal city of Malmö, were vandalised with orange paint on Monday.

Musk has nurtured close relations with European far-right party leaders including the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, who in an interview in early January described him as “a brilliant man”.

Matteo Salvini, who leads the far-right League, a member of Meloni’s ruling coalition, expressed solidarity with Musk after the Rome incident.

“Too much unjustified hatred against the Tesla car company,” Salvini wrote on X. “The season of hate and conflict must come to an end as soon as possible. My solidarity goes out to Elon Musk and to all the workers who have been threatened and attacked.”

Researchers who tracked cases of dementia in Welsh adults have uncovered the strongest evidence yet that the shingles vaccination reduces the risk of developing the devastating brain disease.

Health records of more than 280,000 older adults revealed that those who received a largely discontinued shingles vaccine called Zostavax were 20% less likely to be diagnosed with dementia over the next seven years than those who went without.

Pascal Geldsetzer, at Stanford University, said: “For the first time we are able to say much more confidently that the shingles vaccine causes a reduction in dementia risk. If this truly is a causal effect, we have a finding that’s of tremendous importance.”

The researchers took advantage of a vaccination rollout that took place in Wales more than a decade ago. Public health policy dictated that from 1 September 2013, people born on or after 2 September 1933 became eligible for the Zostavax shot, while those who were older missed out.

The policy created a natural experiment where the older population was sharply divided into two groups depending on their access to the vaccine. This allowed the researchers to compare dementia rates in older people born weeks apart but on either side of the vaccine eligibility divide.

After accounting for the fact that not all those eligible for the vaccine received it, the researchers found vaccination led to a 20% reduction in dementia risk, with the strongest effect in women. Anupam Jena, a professor of healthcare policy at Harvard Medical School, said the implications were profound.

Dementia affects more than 55 million people globally and is the leading cause of death in the UK. One in three will develop the condition in their lifetime, and while drugs that slow the disease have recently been approved, there is no cure.

When people contract chickenpox the virus remains dormant in their nerve cells for life. But the virus can reactivate and cause shingles in older people whose immune systems are waning, or in individuals with weakened immunity.

The latest work, published in Nature, is not the first hint that shingles vaccines might shield against dementia. When Zostavax was rolled out in the US in 2006, several studies found lower rates of dementia in people who received the shots. Last year, Oxford researchers reported an even stronger protective effect in people who received Shingrix, a newer vaccine. Geldsetzer is now looking for philanthropic and private foundations to fund a randomised clinical trial to confirm any benefits.

It is unclear how shingles vaccines might protect against dementia, but one theory is that they reduce inflammation in the nervous system by preventing reactivation of the virus. Another theory is that the vaccines induce broader changes in the immune system that are protective. These wider effects are seen more often in women, potentially explaining the sex differences in the study.

In an accompanying article, Jena wrote: “Although it is still unclear precisely how herpes zoster vaccination lowers the risk of dementia, the implications of the study are profound. The vaccine could represent a cost-effective intervention that has public-health benefits strongly exceeding its intended purpose.”

Julia Dudley, the head of research at Alzheimer’s Research UK, said the study strengthened the emerging link between shingles vaccination and reduced dementia risk. “While previous studies suggested an association, this research offers stronger evidence of a direct link, with greater benefit observed in women.

“It’s unclear exactly how the shingles vaccine might influence dementia risk. It may reduce inflammation, support the immune system in ways that protect the brain or involve other mechanisms. It’s important to note that this study looked at the Zostavax vaccine rather than Shingrix, which is now more commonly used.

“Understanding this link better, including the reason for any differences between men and women, could open new avenues for dementia prevention and treatment,” she said.

Maxime Taquet, whose Oxford study found a reduced dementia risk after Shingrix vaccination, said adjuvants in that vaccine, which make the immune response more potent, may play a role. Both studies “provide strong support for the hypothesis that shingles vaccination reduces dementia risk, with the newer recombinant vaccine offering superior protection,” he said. “A key question is whether this enhanced protection is due to improved shingles prevention or the adjuvant’s immunological effects.”

A rightwing US group backing an anti-abortion campaigner whose case has become a new source of UK tensions with the Trump administration is significantly expanding activities and spending in Britain.

The UK branch of Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), which is funding the case of Livia Tossici-Bolt, who is being prosecuted for an alleged breach of a “buffer zone” outside a Bournemouth abortion clinic, increased spending on campaigning and other activities in the UK to more than £1m last year.

ADF UK’s income was more than £1.3m in the year up to June last year, according to records filed to Companies House on Friday. It included “ADF support” of £1,119,975.

The organisation held discussions with a delegation from the US state department, which visited the UK last month before the release of a statement in which the US voiced concern about “freedom of expression in the UK”.

ADF UK, which describes itself as an advocate for “the right of Christians and others to freely associate and share their faith in public”, has been heavily involved in lobbying against the introduction of buffer zones around reproductive health clinics.

Its cases have included that of Adam Smith-Connor, who was cited by the US vice-president, JD Vance, as an example of free speech being under threat in Europe, after Smith-Connor was prosecuted for breaching a public space protection order.

Tossici-Bolt, ADF UK’s latest high-profile case, was mentioned in the US state department statement on Sunday.

A verdict is expected on Friday. She denies the charges.

ADF, which is designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Centre in the US, has close links with Trump’s White House after endorsing his election campaign and has spoken of working with his administration on areas including the reversal of trans rights.

The current speaker of the US House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, is a former ADF lawyer.

Filings show that the organisation’s British wing has a staff of nine, one earning a salary of £100,000 a year and two others paid between £90,000 and £100,000.

The same records give an overview of ADF UK activities in Britain, which range from briefing MPs to supporting campaigns against the assisted dying bill, and “free speech” cases.

The organisation is planning a big event in September in Britain as part of a plan to train law and public policy students.

ADF UK has five directors. Two, including the lawyers Robert Clarke and Paul Coleman, are based in the organisation’s international branch headquarters in Austria.

UK reproductive healthcare providers have voiced concern about ADF’s role and cited the reversal of abortion rights in the US and pressure exerted by rightwing campaigners.

Louise McCudden, the UK head of external affairs at MSI Reproductive Choices, said: “Before safe access zones were implemented last year, the behaviour we saw outside our clinics included spitting, calling women ‘murderers’ and physically blocking people from entering our clinics.

“In the US, abortion clinics have been bombed and burned down, and anti-abortion campaigners have been known to gather outside clinics with guns. Doctors have been assassinated.”

Heidi Stewart, the chief executive of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, said: “It is deeply concerning that US anti-abortion extremists are using their significant financial resources to attempt to influence women’s access to safe, legal reproductive healthcare here in the UK.

“Following the overturning of Roe v Wade and the re-election of Trump as president, the anti-choice movement in this country have become emboldened in their continued attempt to strip women of their rights, dignity, and future.”

An ADF spokesperson said it was a registered human rights charity in the UK and was grateful to the US for bringing attention to what it described as the “free speech crisis” in Britain.

“We advance the right to live and speak the truth for all people and are proud to support Livia’s case and the cases of our other clients who have been victims of ‘buffer zone’ censorship,” they said.

ADF was named in a Facebook post by the US Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL), an office in the US state department, as being among organisations its delegation met while in the UK. It also met officials from the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office and Ofcom, using its talks with Britain’s communications regulator to challenge it on the impact of new online safety laws on freedom of expression.

The freedom of expression statement was issued after the delegation met Tossici-Bolt and ADF UK.

Among the group was Samuel D Samson, who previously worked for US conservative organisations and was pictured wearing a Make America Great Again cap. He was appointed as a senior adviser at the DRL in January. On the day of Trump’s US election, he tweeted: “Today we choose God over pagan idols.”

The DRL’s interest in Britain marks a pivot by an agency set up in the 1970s to advance democracy around the world against the backdrop of the cold war.

A man has been pulled alive from the rubble of a hotel in Myanmar, five days after the country’s worst earthquake in a century flattened entire neighbourhoods and tore through temples, bridges and highways.

A joint team of rescuers from Myanmar and Turkey found the 26-year-old in the ruins of the building in the capital, Naypyidaw, after midnight, the fire service and the country’s ruling junta said.

The disaster has killed more than 2,700 people, and the death toll is expected to surpass 3,000 on Wednesday, according to Myanmar’s military ruler, Min Aung Hlaing. Humanitarian agencies urged other countries to increase aid before the monsoon rains.

Close to the epicentre, in the devastated cities of Mandalay and Sagaing, traumatised survivors slept in the street, with the stench of corpses trapped under the rubble permeating the disaster zone. Water, food and medicine are in short supply, and the monsoon could hit in May.

“The devastating impact of Friday’s earthquake is becoming clearer by the hour – this is a crisis on top of a crisis for Myanmar, where the humanitarian situation is already dire,” said Arif Noor, the Myanmar country director for the humanitarian agency Care.

“Rescue teams are still recovering those trapped under the rubble, and hospitals are overwhelmed. The physical and mental scars of this catastrophe will last for decades.”

Friday’s powerful quake is the latest in a succession of blows for the impoverished country of 53 million, which has been plagued by a civil war since the military seized power in a 2021 coup.

The junta said on Wednesday that it was declaring a temporary ceasefire until 22 April to facilitate relief efforts, a day after armed resistance groups opposed to military rule declared unilateral temporary ceasefires.

In its nightly news bulletin on Tuesday, the state-controlled MRTV quoted Min Aung Hlaing as saying the military had halted its offensives but that unspecified minority ethnic armies were planning to exploit the disaster. “The military is aware they are gathering, training and preparing to attack,” it said, quoting the general as saying at an event to raise funds for quake victims: “We consider it as attacking us and will respond accordingly.”

The UN spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric said: “We must act swiftly to provide relief before the upcoming monsoon season, which, of course, will even worsen this horrendous crisis.”

In addition to those killed, more than 4,500 people were injured and 441 remained missing, according to Min Aung Hlaing. “Among the missing, most are assumed to be dead. There is a narrow chance for them to remain alive,” he said in a speech.

Some agencies say the unofficial death toll could be as high as 10,000.

UN agencies said hospitals were overwhelmed and rescue efforts hindered by infrastructure damage and the civil war.

Julie Bishop, the UN special envoy for Myanmar, urged all sides to immediately cease fire, permit humanitarian access and ensure aid workers are safe. “Continuing military operations in disaster-affected areas risks further loss of life,” she said in a statement.

Residents and representatives of Myanmar’s exiled opposition National Unity Government (NUG) have accused the junta of continuing to drop bombs in the wake of the disaster, and of blocking emergency aid to areas that are beyond the military government’s control.

“[On Monday], five bombs were dropped around Nwe Khwe village. Although there were no casualties from that, the public is already traumatised by the earthquake,” said Ye Lay, 21, from Chaung-U, a town in the region of Sagaing.

“Because of the earthquake damage people are staying outside their homes, and when bombs are dropped, they have to take shelter in trenches,” she said. “If an earthquake strikes, we can’t run away, so people are experiencing a profound sense of insecurity.”

Amnesty International said it had received testimony corroborating reports of airstrikes near areas where quake recovery efforts were focused. “You cannot ask for aid with one hand and bomb with the other,” said Amnesty’s Myanmar researcher Joe Freeman.

The junta has declared a week of national mourning, with flags to fly at half mast on official buildings until 6 April “in sympathy for the loss of life and damages”.

Turtle doves will be allowed to be shot for sport again across Europe, as the EU lifts a ban on hunting that was credited with the species’ tentative recovery.

The EU will allow hunters to shoot 132,000 birds across Spain, France and Italy after the threatened bird enjoyed a population boom in western Europe because of a hunting ban that came into effect in 2021.

The gentle pigeon species, which mate for life with their partners, is on the brink of extinction in the UK, where it is the fastest declining bird species. Globally the bird is classed as vulnerable to extinction because of hunting and habitat loss.

Every year it flies from sub-Saharan Africa across the continent of Europe to breed in the UK and other northern European countries in summer, and in some countries, such as Spain and Italy, people shoot them for sport during their migration.

But after a temporary ban three years ago on the annual shoot of the migratory birds as they pass through France, Spain and Portugal, there has been a remarkable 25% increase in the bird’s western European population, which includes the 2,000 individuals in England.

According to the BirdLife International charity, the data shows that bans on hunting are successful in boosting populations. In the western flyway of Spain, France, Portugal, and north-west Italy, the dove has started to recover. But in the central-eastern flyway of Austria, Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, Malta, Romania and Cyprus, where hunting bans have not been properly enforced, no recovery has been observed.

Barbara Herrero, the senior nature conservation policy officer at BirdLife Europe, said: “The turtle dove did its part. Left alone, it started to recover. But governments failed to uphold their end of the deal. Instead of fixing weak enforcement and protecting habitats, they’re rushing to lift the ban. This is reckless and shortsighted. We know where this path leads – straight back to the brink. The European Commission should have stood firm and kept the moratorium.”

European hunters say efforts to bolster turtle dove numbers have paid off, and argue they have a strong cultural and economic attachment to hunting them.

Massimo Buconi, the president of the Italian Hunting Federation, said turtle doves have traditionally been used to open the Veneto hunting season, describing the celebrations as “an important day that is celebrated like the first day of the football season”.

“Of course, we eat the doves,” he added. “Hunting in Italy has always been closely linked to the kitchen.”

In Spain, where the “maximal harvest” of turtle doves under the new recommendations exceeds 100,000, the bird is classified as game because it can be hunted sustainably and serves a social, traditional, economic, culinary or cultural purpose, said Alejandro Martínez from the Royal Spanish Hunting Federation.

“Hunting in Spain generates €6.5bn and 200,000 jobs,” he said. “This serves as a driving force for development in rural areas that subsist and prosper thanks to the use of species like the turtle dove.”

Minutes from the meeting held by the commission in which officials decided to allow hunting to take place show that EU leaders believe the conditions have been met to allow sustainable shooting of the doves.

They say the conditions to reopen hunting are a population increase of at least two years, an increase in survival, and the existence of credible regulatory, control and enforcement systems. They believe these conditions have been met and will therefore allow 1.5% of the turtle dove population to be killed.

The minutes read: “There was consensus (with the exception of Estonia and BirdLife) to reopen hunting with the 1.5% quota in the western flyway. Meanwhile, the reaction of the birds’ population to the hunting take will need to be closely monitored in the next years.”

In a new book, Joe Biden’s former White House chief of staff paints a devastating picture of the then US president’s mental and physical state before the debate with Donald Trump that sent his 2024 campaign into a tailspin, resulting in his relinquishing the Democratic nomination to Kamala Harris.

Ron Klain served Biden from 2021 to 2023, then returned to his side last June to run debate preparation as he had for numerous Democratic presidents before.

According to Klain, it turned out that Biden “didn’t know what Trump had been saying and couldn’t grasp what the back and forth was”; left preparation and fell asleep by the pool; obsessed about foreign leaders, saying “these guys say I’m doing a great job as president so I must be a great president”; “didn’t really understand what his argument was on inflation”; and “had nothing to say about a second term other than finish the job”.

As described by Klain to the reporter Chris Whipple, at one point Biden had an idea.

“If he looked perplexed when Trump talked, voters would understand that Trump was an idiot. Klain replied: ‘Sir, when you look perplexed, people just think you’re perplexed. And this is our problem in this race.”

Whipple’s book, Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History, will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.

Biden is reportedly planning his own book but Whipple’s blockbuster is not even the first such volume to hit the shelves. This week saw the publication of Fight, by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, which also contains extensive reporting on Biden’s decline and Harris’s struggle to win over party elites.

Like Parnes and Allen, Whipple reports both sides of a campaign Trump won despite a criminal conviction, civil penalties including one related to an allegation of rape, and indictments over election subversion and retention of classified information.

But Whipple focuses another harsh spotlight on Biden, an octogenarian president long beset by questions about his fitness for office.

Last week, Whipple told Politico: “I have fresh reporting on an hour-by-hour, day-by-day basis of Biden’s final days, and obviously his decline is a major part of the story.

“I happen to think that to call it a ‘cover-up’ is simplistic. I think it was stranger and way more troubling than that. Biden’s inner circle, his closest advisers, many of them were in a fog of delusion and denial. They believed what they wanted to believe.”

In early 2024, as the campaign warmed up, Klain was among those who said he believed Biden was the right candidate to beat Trump a second time, telling the New York Times: “If I thought he wasn’t the right candidate to beat Donald Trump, I wouldn’t be for him running. But I think he is the right candidate.”

Even after the disastrous debate, by his own telling to Whipple, Klain believed Biden should have stayed in the race – a statement that jars with Klain’s account of debate prep at Camp David.

“At his first meeting with Biden in Aspen Lodge, the president’s cabin,” Whipple writes, Klain “was startled. He’d never seen him so exhausted and out of it. Biden was unaware of what was happening in his own campaign. Halfway through the session, the president excused himself and went off to sit by the pool.

“That evening Biden met again with Klain and his team, [Biden aides] Mike Donilon, Steve Richetti, and Bruce Reed. ‘We sat around the table,’ said Klain. ‘[Biden] had answers on cards, and he was just extremely exhausted. And I was struck by how out of touch with American politics he was. He was just very, very focused on his interactions with Nato leaders.’”

Klain, Whipple writes, “wondered half-seriously if Biden thought he was president of Nato instead of the US. ‘He just became very enraptured with being the head of Nato,’ he said. That wouldn’t help him on Capitol Hill because, as Klain noted, ‘domestic political leaders don’t really care what [Emmanuel] Macron and [Olaf] Scholz think.’”

Klain, fellow aides and visitors including the film mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg tried to get Biden into shape. Two mock debates were organized, focusing on domestic policy.

“The first was scheduled to last 90 minutes but Klain called it off after 45. The president’s voice was shot and so was his grasp of the subject. All he really could talk about was his infrastructure plan and how he was rebuilding America and 16 million jobs. He had nothing to say about his agenda for a second term.”

Klain says Biden grew irritable, saying he would not make promises as he would be criticized for failing to deliver. Klain says he tried to persuade Biden to run on unfinished business, including his attempt to “subsidize state and local efforts to do childcare and bring down the cost to $20 a day. And you ought to try to fight for it again.”

“Biden seemed befuddled,” Whipple writes. “‘Well, that just seems like a big spending program,’ he said.

Klain said: “No, sir. It brings down costs for people. It’s responsive to inflation. It will bring more people into the workforce. It’s good economics. And you know this is something you’re for.”

But “Biden didn’t want to talk about it” and “25 minutes into the second mock debate, the president was done for the day. ‘I’m just too tired to continue and I’m afraid of losing my voice here and I feel bad,’ he said. ‘I just need some sleep. I’ll be fine tomorrow.’ He went off to bed.”

“The president was fatigued, befuddled, and disengaged,” Whipple writes. “Klain feared the debate with Trump would be a nationally televised disaster.”

It was. On 27 June, Biden arrived at the Atlanta venue with minutes to spare – because, Klain said, “He was the president of the United States. They weren’t going to start without him.” Onstage, for two hours and six minutes, Biden stumbled, stared and mumbled.

As described by Whipple, Jill Biden praised her husband’s performance but all others around the president could see “something was terribly wrong”. Whipple quotes an unnamed close friend of Biden who took a call from Valerie Biden Owens. The president’s sister and longtime adviser was “so angry, she was practically incoherent”. The same friend reports a later call from Biden, laughing at his predicament and sounding like the senator and vice-president of old.

“Where did that voice go?” the friend wondered … “Where did that guy with that voice go? What the fuck happened to this guy?”

To Whipple, that was a question “on which the political fate of the nation would turn”.

Eventually, Biden bowed to reality. On 21 July, Klain took a call from Jeff Zients, his successor as chief of staff. Biden was out. Despite the debate disaster, the news was a “gut punch” to Klain.

“Jeff, that’s too bad,” he said. “I think that’s a mistake. I think this was an avoidable tragedy.”

Harris faced opposition from Democratic grandees including Obama and Nancy Pelosi, but wrapped up the nomination by August. In early September, Klain gave Whipple his interview. With the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, as her running mate, Harris mounted an energetic campaign. In November, she lost to Trump.