Senior officials within Donald Trump’s administration officials gave conflicting messages on Sunday about the US president’s global tariffs that have caused a meltdown in stock markets, prompted warnings of a world recession and provoked rare expressions of dissent from within his Republican party.

Cabinet members fanned out across Sunday’s political talk shows armed with talking points on Trump’s 10% across-the-board tariff on almost all US imports, with higher rates targeted at about 60 countries. If the intention was to calm nerves with a clear statement of intent, then it backfired as top officials gave starkly contrasting signals.

Howard Lutnick, the billionaire commerce secretary, struck an aggressive note on CBS News’s Face the Nation in which he portrayed the tariffs as here to stay. Asked whether there was a chance that tariffs would be postponed to allow countries to negotiate a deal with Washington, he replied: “There is no postponing – they are definitely going to stay in place for days and weeks, that is sort of obvious.”

Lutnick added that Trump intended to “reset global trade”.

“The president has made it crystal, crystal clear,” he said.

However, two other cabinet members gave the opposite take, suggesting that negotiations with individual countries were very much on the cards. Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, told Meet the Press on NBC News that Trump had “created maximum leverage for himself, and more than 50 countries have approached the administration about lowering their non-tariff trade barriers, lowering their tariffs, stopping currency manipulation”.

The agriculture secretary, Brooke Rollins, echoed Bessent by flagging up possible talks. “We’ve got 50 countries that are burning the phone lines into the White House,” she told CNN’s State of the Union.

The scale of Trump’s tariffs have sent shockwaves around the world, catching US investors as well as top Republican politicians by surprise. In just two days last week, more than $6tn was wiped off Wall Street’s market value.

Trump told US consumers in a post on his Truth Social network to “hang tough, it won’t be easy, but the end result will be historic”. Yet as he spent the weekend golfing at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, his unprecedented tax increase goaded senior Republicans to speak out, in a vanishingly rare display of criticism of their leader.

Trump’s former vice-president, Mike Pence, denounced the tariffs as the “largest peacetime tax hike in US history”. Thom Tillis, the Republican senator from North Carolina, said: “Anyone who says there may be a little bit of pain before we get things right needs to talk to farmers who are one crop away from bankruptcy.”

Ted Cruz, a senator from Texas, warned of a “bloodbath” for Republicans in the 2026 midterm elections should the tariffs force the US into recession.

Democrats are detecting opportunity in such unusual challenges to Trump from within his own party. Adam Schiff, the Democratic senator from California, floated on Meet the Press what sounded like a draft campaign strategy for the midterms.

“If we head into a recession, it will be the Trump recession,” he said. Of Trump, Schiff also said: “He’s wrecking our economy.”

Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota who ran as the Democrats’ vice-presidential candidate in last November’s defeat to Trump, called the tariffs “really, really terrifying” on State of the Union. He warned that if you punish dependable trading partners like Mexico and Canada, “they don’t come back overnight.”

As the tariffs kick in, analysts are increasingly pointing to the chances of a recession, which is normally assessed as being two consecutive quarters of falling GDP. The head of economic research at JP Morgan, Bruce Kasman, has raised the probability of global recession to 60%, a figure that he included in a memo titled There Will Be Blood.

Larry Summers, the US treasury secretary during Bill Clinton’s presidency, called the tariffs the “biggest self-inflicted wound we’ve put on our economy in history”. Speaking on ABC News’s This Week, he gave his own estimate of the total loss to US consumers at $30tn – equivalent to doubling petrol prices at the pump.

Trump’s cabinet members attempted to use rhetorical devices as a way of assuaging rattled investors and consumers. Rollins said the markets weren’t crashing – they were “adjusting”.

Asked what he would say to Americans close to retirement who had just watched their lifetime savings drop significantly in recent days, Bessent called that a “false narrative”.

“Americans who want to retire right now, they don’t look at the day-to-day fluctuations of what’s happening,” Bessent said.

Bessent’s answer was coloured, perhaps, by his own net worth, which has been put at more than $521m.

There were moments of the surreal in the exchanges between Trump’s top officials and the political show hosts. Asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper why 10% tariffs had been placed on Heard Island and McDonald Islands, which are populated by penguins near Antarctica but no humans, Rollins said: “I mean, come on, whatever. Listen, the people that are leading this are serious, intentional, patriotic – the smartest people I’ve ever worked with.”

Tapper then pushed back on the agriculture secretary’s justification for the 20% “reciprocal” tariffs that have been imposed on EU goods sold to the US. Rollins said that Honduras bought more pork from the US than the entire European Union.

Tapper pointed out that the EU had tight restrictions on hormone use in livestock production. The EU banned use of synthetic hormones in 1981, and blocked imports of animals that had been treated in that way.

Rollins then accused the EU of using “fake science” to prohibit US products. “That’s just absolute bull,” she said. “We produce the safest, the most secure, the best food in the world.”

Markets are braced for another rollercoaster week as the most punitive of Donald Trump’s tariffs kick in and world leaders weigh up retaliatory action, adding to fears of a global recession.

Stock indices plunged by nearly $5tn (£3.9tn) last week, with markets in the UK and US experiencing losses not seen since the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, as investors took cover from the opening salvoes of Trump’s trade war.

With no sign of the Trump administration rowing back on its so-called “liberation day” tariffs, analysts warned of persistent market turbulence and an increased risk of all-out recession in the US, UK and EU.

Roman Ziruk, a senior market analyst at the global financial services firm Ebury, said: “Volatility will likely stay elevated as we move into [the] week.”

He said some investors were still holding out hope that tariffs against China and the EU, due to kick in from Wednesday, would be delayed or remodelled.

“The danger of escalation of trade tensions cannot, however, be overlooked, particularly as China’s response to the latest round of US tariffs has been more aggressive than before,” Ziruk said.

However, leading figures in the Trump administration warned on Sunday against expectations for a U-turn. Speaking in television interviews, Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, said the US president intended to “reset global trade”.

EU leaders are still considering their response, while Keir Starmer, the UK prime minister, has vowed to “shelter” British businesses from the impact of tariffs, indicating he will announce what steps he plans to take this coming week.

Starmer is expected to pursue an economic reset, which could ultimately include a rethink of Labour’s promise not to raises taxes, in anticipation of a global trade slowdown.

On Sunday, the Treasury minister Darren Jones told the BBC that the era of globalisation has “come to an end”, although he said the UK was still hopeful of striking a trade deal with the White House.

The 10% rate imposed on the UK is at the lowest end of the range of Trump’s tariffs, with the exceptions of Russia, North Korea, Belarus and Cuba, which were left out of the worldwide trade dispute altogether.

But Trump had already imposed a 25% tariff on UK steel and cars, a measure that prompted Jaguar Land Rover to say over the weekend that it was pausing shipments to the US, which buys about a quarter of the 400,000 vehicles the company sells annually.

Economic forecasters said the unexpectedly widespread and punitive nature of the tariffs could still tip the UK economy into decline.

Analysts at Barclays said the UK and EU were at risk of falling into recession in the second half of this year and they revised down their growth forecasts for both economies, as well as for the US.

Erik F Nielsen, the chief economics adviser at UniCredit Bank, said: “It’s too early to estimate the impact of these economic weapons of mass destruction.

“But it’ll be bad – very bad – for US growth, and for growth across the rest of the world. A recession in the US, maybe even a global recession, have become distinct possibilities.”

On Saturday, the world’s richest person, Elon Musk, who has emerged as Trump’s most powerful ally in global business world, told a meeting of Italy’s rightwing League party that he hoped a “free-trade zone” between the EU and US could be created, with no tariffs at all.

But duties of 20% on European imports to the US technically take effect at one minute past midnight on Wednesday, as does the 34% rate for China, the world’s biggest export nation, and others deemed by the White House to be among the “worst offenders”, which includes Japan and Vietnam.

Leaders of European countries have condemned the tariffs, while the French president, Emmanuel Macron, appeared to call on the country’s businesses to halt investment in the US.

The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, has called for negotiation with the US. However, the EU is expected to announce retaliatory tariffs on US consumer and industrial goods – which are likely to include emblematic products such as orange juice, denim and Harley-Davidson motorbikes – in mid-April as a response to steel and aluminium tariffs previously announced by Trump.

While Beijing has already responded with retaliatory tariffs, George Magnus, an expert on China’s economy, said a deal in the longer term was still possible.

“Neither Trump nor [the Chinese president] Xi Jinping want a full-blown trade war right now,” said Magnus, who is the former chief economist at the Swiss bank UBS and a research associate at Oxford University’s China Centre and Soas University of London.

“Trump needs to show voters that the use of tariffs for revenues and leverage is working without putting the American economy through a damaging slowdown or recession,” he said.

“Xi has his own deep-seated economic problems […] without having to manage a harmful external trade war. A big hit to exports would have profound consequences for growth and employment.”

However, he warned of the long-term implications of Trump trying to loosen China’s hold on global supply chains, while Beijing continues trying to boost exports.

“The world must either pay Trump now via tariffs, or pay Xi Jinping later through lost manufacturing and jobs,” he said.

Since Donald Trump returned to the White House, Americans have grown used to high drama and rapid-fire headlines, as executive orders from the Oval Office have reshaped the US, from stripping back LGBTQ+ rights to gutting environmental regulations amid a sense that the US is slipping into authoritarianism.

But even against that backdrop, last week stood out, as Trump launched a fierce global trade war, imposed tariffs on its trading partners and triggered a global market meltdown, including on Trump’s own cherished Wall Street, where hundreds of billions of dollars of stock values evaporated.

Now, with all eyes nervously on Monday’s markets amid fears that the calamitous drops will continue, recession fears are mounting in America. JP Morgan analysts last week boosted their odds on a global recession to 60% and Americans are bracing for a return of inflation – the thing that above all else likely doomed Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden.

But Trump remained unmoved by market drops and the global political condemnation – and even rare criticism from his own Republican party – saying now is a “great time to get rich” and that “China played it wrong – they panicked”.

On the streets of New York too, there was panic among some. In Washington Square Park, two sisters from Detroit were sitting on a park bench nearby the magnolia trees now in bloom. Kathleen, a primary school teacher, said she worried about whether there was a plan in place before changes are made.

“I want to be optimistic, but I live under an umbrella of worry with this administration,” Kathleen said. “I worry about the leadership, worry about a lack of continuity within the leadership, and so many changes at once without a plan.”

Her sister, Elizabeth, said she’d grown so anxious she’d stepped back from the news. “Our mum definitely had a huge jump in anxiety over this past week over her investments. She worked hard for those and she lives on them – a retired schoolteacher, and the drop in stocks very much impacts her day-to-day feeling of security.”

But Leo Ezekiel, 39, had a different perspective. As a financier, he wasn’t so worried about the stock markets. “It’s mostly that big corporations are deciding to sell off, and that will affect people, but in the long run, if stocks go down, it gives room for them to move up. It’s part of the game – and it’s always been like that in the United States.”

Trump made his move because he dreams of a return of American manufacturing might, convinced that tariffs will force factories home to the US, even though almost all economists think that is highly unlikely.

Yet, for such a momentous decision which has rattled the entire world economy, Trump reportedly only made up his mind at the last minute. According to the Washington Post, Trump didn’t arrive on an exact plan until just three hours before the Rose Garden announcement.

The “liberation day” announcement from the White House was a choreographed event, and his speech drew cheers from audience, largely made up cabinet members and blue-collar workers from manufacturing sectors that have for decades been economically pummeled by foreign competition. He offered up a vision that tariffs would bring back an older American economy, reopening factories and returning prosperity to ordinary workers.

“Taxpayers have been ripped off for more than 50 years,” Trump complained. “But it is not going to happen any more.”

Vice-President JD Vance said: “We’ve seen closing factories, we’ve seen rising inflation. We’ve seen the cost of housing so high that most Americans can’t afford to buy a home right now,” Vance said. “President Trump is taking this economy in a different direction.”

America’s largest trading partners, Mexico, Canada, China, Germany and Japan, were less enthusiastic, to say the least. China has announced retaliatory duties of 34%; the Canadian prime minister Mark Carney announced a limited set of counter-measures and called the US moves a “tragedy” for 80 years of “free and open exchange of goods and services”, led by the US.

The British PM Keir Starmer said nothing would be “off the table” when it came to the UK’s response to the tariffs – the UK imports $76.2bn in US services – but that “just as with defence and security” the world was “entering a new era” in economy and trade.

It is one where answers to even the most basic questions remain unknown. Will Trump’s tariffs on US trade partners go down as an act of economic self-sabotage? Or are tariffs merely a negotiating ploy to influence other nations – war by other means? Or is Trump finally getting to express his long-held economic view that the US has been making bad deals for decades?

The next few months may provide some clues. But, in an effort to get ahead of the US tariffs coming into effect next week, some effects were already being felt. The cost of flying goods into the US from China are reported to have risen 40% in four weeks. One car factory in Canada has already shuttered.

On Friday, Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, warned that Trump risked stoking even higher inflation and slower growth. “It is now becoming clear that the tariff increases will be significantly larger than expected,” he said. “The same is likely to be true of the economic effects, which will include higher inflation and slower growth.”

As the financial markets continued to convulse on Friday, the Washington Post reported that Trump is unbowed by negative headlines, criticism from foreign leaders, and was determined to listen to a single voice to secure what he views as his political legacy. That voice was of course his own.

“He’s at the peak of just not giving a fuck any more,” a White House official with knowledge of Trump’s thinking told the newspaper. “Bad news stories? Doesn’t give a fuck. He’s going to do what he’s going to do. He’s going to do what he promised to do on the campaign trail.”

But even some former Trump economic officials privately expressed doubts that returning the US to an era of manufacturing self-sufficiency was likely impossible.

The author Michael Wolff, who has published four books about Trump in power, says the US president will now be keenly gauging how his interruption into global trade norms is going down, with updates and live-action replays provided by aides. Trump, Wolff says, is likely caught between two opposing instincts.

“It’s great for him – he’s dominating the news once again. Nobody is talking about anything else except tariffs. Suddenly, tariffs, an arcane piece of trade policy, are the most dramatic thing in the world that he’s imbued with reality-show stuff. He’ll be really pleased with that.”

But on the other hand, Wolff predicts, Trump will be watching the financial markets. “He’ll have the business guys calling up saying: what the fuck are you doing? I’m sure he hasn’t come to any conclusion. So on the one hand it’s great – he’s the world’s leading guy again. On the other, it might collapse in on him.”

And that, he adds, is the essence of Trump. “He’s fundamentally self-destructive, but that self-destructive impulse is exactly what keeps him at the forefront of the news.”

Keir Starmer is preparing to rethink key elements of the government’s economic policy in an emergency response to Donald Trump’s tariff blitz, amid growing concern in Downing Street that the US president’s trade war could do lasting damage to the UK.

The prime minister believes, say allies, that “old assumptions should be discarded” in the UK’s response, suggesting he and the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, may be preparing to raise taxes again – despite having promised not to do so – or even possibly change their “iron clad” fiscal rules to allow more borrowing and fire up economic growth at home in the event of recession.

Almost $5tn (£4tn) was wiped off the value of global stock markets after Trump launched his tariff offensive last Wednesday on the rest of the world, including a 10% base tariff on imports into the US from the UK.

On Friday, the FTSE 100 closed more than 7% lower than last Monday, after what was its worst week since the height of panic over the Covid pandemic in March 2020.

Underlining the potential impact on UK businesses of a global trade war, Britain’s luxury carmaker Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) said on Saturday that it would “pause” shipments to the US in April as it considered how to respond. “As we work to address the new trading terms with our business partners, we are taking some short-term actions, including a shipment pause in April, as we develop our mid- to longer-term plans,” said JLR.

This week, Starmer, who has refused to criticise Trump or his tariffs directly, will focus on how to frame an economic response to a global economic shock that protects working people, and their incomes and jobs – as well as the UK’s public services.

He believes that the last few days have ushered in a “new era”, that the “world has changed” and that a global trade war risks “undermining a proud, hard-working nation”.

The kind of language now emanating from Starmer’s circles will be seen by economists – and politicians at Westminster – as preparing the ground for big potential shifts in economic policy on the basis that emergency times may require emergency measures.

Speaking to the Observer, Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said: “To the extent that this does change the economic situation in ways that could not have been predicted, that does give permission to do things that were not politically doable otherwise.”

He added “And if this is an economic crisis, it changes what is the appropriate policy response.”

On Friday, China, the world’s second-largest economy, hit back at Trump by announcing a punitive 34% of additional tariffs on imports into China of US goods, mirroring the levy imposed on Beijing by Washington on Wednesday.

The EU has yet to announce its response, while the UK said it is keeping all options available.

Starmer spoke with the French president, Emmanuel Macron, on Saturday to “share their concerns about the global economic and security impact”, said a Downing Street spokesperson. “They agreed that a trade war was in nobody’s interests, but nothing should be off the table.”

In an interview with the Observer, former World Trade Organization head Pascal Lamy, who is also an ex-EU trade commissioner in Brussels, said the EU “can use its big trade firepower to threaten the US with strong and well-targeted countermeasures, and hit the US if they do not move back”.

Lamy said there was a danger that European countries could be flooded with cheap goods from nations such as China that could no longer sell them into the US. But he added: “We have both a trade defence arsenal with anti-dumping, anti-subsidy and safeguard systems in case of import surges.”

Referring to Trump’s tactics, Lamy said it was best to respond robustly in a way the US president understood: “I think Mr Trump learned to do business in the New York mafia-influenced real estate market and that his tactics are based on extortion – you hit and keep hitting for as long as you do not get a good price for stopping. Showing your muscle, it seems to me, is the way to transact with him and his people.”

In a sign of growing concern in the US about the direction of the country after Trump’s election, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of Washington and other big cities on Saturday in a show of defiance against the president’s “authoritarian overreach and billionaire-backed agenda”.

The “Hands Off” protests – of which more than 1,000 events are planned across the country – were expected to be the largest single day of action since Trump was sworn into office for a second term.

Donald Trump’s national security adviser Mike Waltz included a journalist in the Signal group chat about plans for US strikes in Yemen after he mistakenly saved his number months before under the contact of someone else he intended to add, according to three people briefed on the matter.

The mistake was one of several missteps that came to light in the White House’s internal investigation, which showed a series of compounding slips that started during the 2024 campaign and went unnoticed until Waltz created the group chat last month.

Trump briefly considered firing Waltz over the episode, more angered by the fact that Waltz had the number of Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of the Atlantic – a magazine he despises – than the fact that the military operation discussion took place on an unclassified system such as Signal.

But Trump decided against firing him in large part because he did not want the Atlantic and the news media more broadly to have the satisfaction of forcing the ouster of a top cabinet official weeks into his second term. Trump was also mollified by the findings of the internal investigation.

The disclosures nonetheless triggered a “forensic review” by the White House information technology office, which found that Waltz’s phone had saved Goldberg’s number as part of an unlikely series of events that started when Goldberg emailed the Trump campaign last October.

According to three people briefed on the internal investigation, Goldberg had emailed the campaign about a story that criticized Trump for his attitude towards wounded service members. To push back against the story, the campaign enlisted the help of Waltz, their national security surrogate.

Goldberg’s email was forwarded to then Trump spokesperson Brian Hughes, who then copied and pasted the content of the email – including the signature block with Goldberg’s phone number – into a text message that he sent to Waltz, so that he could be briefed on the forthcoming story.

Waltz did not ultimately call Goldberg, the people said, but in an extraordinary twist, inadvertently ended up saving Goldberg’s number in his iPhone – under the contact card for Hughes, now the spokesperson for the national security council.

A day after that Goldberg story was published, on 22 October, Waltz appeared on CNN to defend Trump. “Don’t take it from me, take it from the 13 Abbey Gate Gold Star families, some of whom stood on a stage in front of a 30,000 person crowd and said how he helped them heal,” Waltz said.

According to the White House, the number was erroneously saved during a “contact suggestion update” by Waltz’s iPhone, which one person described as the function where an iPhone algorithm adds a previously unknown number to an existing contact that it detects may be related.

The mistake went unnoticed until last month when Waltz sought to add Hughes to the Signal group chat – but ended up adding Goldberg’s number to the 13 March message chain named “Houthi PC small group”, where several top US officials discussed plans for strikes against the Houthis.

Waltz said in the immediate aftermath of the incident that he had never met or communicated with Goldberg. He also suggested on Fox News that Goldberg’s number had been “sucked” into his phone, seemingly in reference to how his iPhone had saved Goldberg’s number.

The White House did not comment on this story, and the investigation did not resolve the extent of Waltz’s relationship with Goldberg, if any. Reached by phone on Saturday, Goldberg said: “I’m not going to comment on my relationship with Mike Waltz beyond saying I do know him and have spoken to him.”

Trump was briefed on the findings of the forensic review last week around the time he decided to keep Waltz, a person familiar with the matter said. Trump accepted Waltz’s mea culpa and has publicly defended him in recent weeks since the group chat situation became public.

When Trump left the White House on Thursday, he was joined aboard Marine One by his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, his personnel chief, Sergio Gor, and Waltz, which aides took as a show of support for the embattled national security adviser.

Waltz also appears to have also engendered some sympathy from inside Trump’s orbit over the group chat because the White House had authorized the use of Signal, largely because there is no alternative platform to text in real time across different agencies, two people familiar with the matter said.

Previous administrations, including the Biden White House, did not develop an alternative platform to Signal, one of the people said. As a temporary solution, the Trump White House told officials to use Signal as they had done during the transition instead of regular text-message chains.

Israel’s military has backtracked on its account of the killing of 15 Palestinian medics in Gaza last month after footage contradicted its claims that their vehicles did not have emergency signals on when Israeli troops opened fire.

The military said initially it opened fire because the vehicles were “advancing suspiciously” on nearby troops without headlights or emergency signals. An Israeli military official, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with regulations late on Saturday, said that account was “mistaken”.

The almost seven-minute video, which the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) said on Saturday was recovered from the phone of Rifat Radwan, one of the men killed, appears to have been filmed from inside a moving vehicle. It shows a red fire engine and clearly marked ambulances driving at night, using headlights and flashing emergency lights.

The vehicle stops beside another that has driven off the road. Two men get out to examine the stopped vehicle, then gunfire erupts before the screen goes black.

Fifteen Palestinian paramedics and rescue workers, including at least one UN employee, were killed in the incident in Rafah on 23 March, in which the UN said Israeli forces shot the men “one by one” and then buried them in a mass grave.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said the incident was still under investigation. It added: “All claims, including the documentation circulated about the incident, will be thoroughly and deeply examined to understand the sequence of events and the handling of the situation.”

The official said the initial report received from the field did not describe lights but that investigators were looking at “operational information” and were trying to understand whether this was due to an error by the person making the initial report.

“What we understand currently is the person who gives the initial account is mistaken. We’re trying to understand why,” the official added.

According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (Ocha), the PRCS and civil defence workers were on a mission to rescue colleagues who had been shot at earlier in the day, when their clearly marked vehicles came under heavy Israeli fire in the Tel al-Sultan area of Rafah. A Red Crescent official in Gaza said there was evidence of at least one person being detained and killed, as the body of one of the dead had been found with his hands tied.

The shootings happened one day into the renewed Israeli offensive in the area close to the Egyptian border after the breakdown of a two-month ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.

Israeli strikes on Gaza on Sunday killed at least 44 people, rescuers said. “The death toll as a result of Israeli air strikes since dawn today is at least 44, including 21 in Khan Younis,” civil defence agency spokesperson Mahmud Bassal told AFP.

One such strike killed six people on Al-Nakheel Street in the Al-Tuffah neighbourhood of Gaza City, where a group had gathered near a bakery, Bassal said. Among the dead were three children, he confirmed.

On Sunday evening, Hamas said it had fired a barrage of rockets at cities in Israel’s south on Sunday in response to Israeli “massacres” of civilians in Gaza.

The IDF said about 10 projectiles were fired, but most were successfully intercepted. Israel’s Channel 12 reported a direct hit in the southern city of Ashkelon.

Israeli emergency services said they were treating one person for shrapnel injuries and teams were en route to locations of fallen rockets. Smashed car windows and debris lay strewn on a city street, videos disseminated by Israeli emergency services showed.

The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, had ordered a strong response to the rocket attack, his office said.

Another Red Crescent worker on the mission last month, Assad al-Nassasra, is still reported missing and the organisation has asked the Israeli military for information on his whereabouts.

A survivor of the incident, the Palestinian Red Crescent paramedic Munther Abed, has said he saw Nassasra being led away blindfolded by Israeli troops.

The 27-year-old volunteer was in the back of the first ambulance to arrive on the scene of an airstrike in the Hashashin area of Rafah before dawn on 23 March when the vehicle came under intense Israeli fire.

His two Red Crescent colleagues sitting in the front were killed but he survived by throwing himself to the floor of the vehicle. “The door opened, and there they were – Israeli special forces in military uniforms, armed with rifles, green lasers and night-vision goggles,” Abed told the Guardian. “They dragged me out of the ambulance, keeping me face down to avoid seeing what had happened to my colleagues.”

Adeb was detained for several hours before being released.

The UN and Palestinian Red Crescent have demanded an independent inquiry into the killing of the paramedics.

Israeli media briefed by the military have reported that troops had identified at least six of the 15 dead as members of militant groups and killed a Hamas figure named Mohammed Amin Shobaki.

None of the 15 killed has that name and no other bodies are known to have been found at the site. The official declined to provide any evidence or detail of how the identifications were made, saying he did not want to share classified information.

“According to our information, there were terrorists there but this investigation is not over,” he told reporters.

Abed – a volunteer for 10 years – was adamant there were no militants travelling with the ambulances.

Jonathan Whittall, the interim head of Ocha in the occupied Palestinian territory, dismissed allegations that the people who died were Hamas militants, saying staff had worked with the same medics previously in evacuating patients from hospitals and other tasks.

“These are paramedic crews that I personally have met before,” he said. “They were buried in their uniforms with their gloves on. They were ready to save lives.”

The Israeli military official said the troops had informed the UN of the incident on the same day and initially covered the bodies with camouflage netting until they could be recovered, later burying them when the UN did not immediately collect the bodies.

The UN confirmed last week it had been informed of the location of the bodies but that access to the area was denied by Israel for several days. It said the bodies had been buried alongside their crushed vehicles – clearly marked ambulances, a fire truck and a UN car.

A Palestinian teenager with US citizenship was killed after being shot by an Israeli settler in the West Bank town of Turmus Ayya, Palestinian officials said on Sunday, as tensions continue to escalate amid a surge in settler violence and near-daily confrontations between Israeli settlers and Palestinians across the occupied territory.

Omar Mohammad Rabea, 14, was shot along with two other teenagers by an Israeli settler at the entrance to Turmus Ayya, the town’s mayor, Adeeb Lafi, told Reuters.

“Two of them were transported by ambulance to a nearby medical center and then to the hospital. The army arrived at the scene and detained the third injured boy, who is 14 years old and holds US citizenship,” Lafi said.

The army later pronounced Rabea dead and is still holding his body, Lafi added. The Palestinian health ministry confirmed his death, saying he was killed by “occupation forces”.

There was no immediate comment from the Israeli army.

Settler violence in the West Bank, including incursions into occupied territory and raids on Bedouin villages and encampments, has intensified since the war in Gaza began in October 2023.

European countries and the previous US administration under Joe Biden imposed sanctions on violent Israeli settlers, though the White House under Donald Trump removed these sanctions.

Benjamin Netanyahu has announced a last-minute visit to Washington to meet with Donald Trump, where the Israeli leader is expected to discuss Iran, the war in Gaza, and tariffs with the US president.

The Washington visit, Netanyahu’s second since Trump was inaugurated in January, comes after the resumption of hostilities in the Gaza Strip, and underlines the strong relationship between the two men.

Trump has pressed Tehran for a new deal on its nuclear programme, although little progress has been made. There is widespread speculation that Israel, possibly with US help, might launch a military strike on Iranian facilities if no agreement is reached.

Al Hadath, a Saudi television channel, reported on Saturday that the US transferred a second THAAD battery and two Patriot batteries to Israel amid rising tensions. Flight tracking websites showed that a C-5M Super Galaxy, a large US air force transport plane, landed at an airbase in southern Israel on Saturday for about eight hours, the Times of Israel reported.

The Biden administration sent one THAAD battery, an advanced anti-missile system, to Israel in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas attack in October 2023. It has been used since to intercept missile attacks from Iran and the Tehran-allied Houthi group in Yemen.

The US president said on Thursday that he expected a visit soon from Netanyahu – “maybe even next week” – though the Axios website said the timing caught Israeli officials and even some in the Trump administration by surprise.

Monday’s meeting will make Netanyahu the first foreign leader to travel to Washington in an attempt to negotiate a better deal with Trump after his administration’s decision last week to impose sweeping global tariffs that have shaken stock markets, wiping out $5tn (£3.87tn) in value from S&P 500 index companies by Friday’s close in a record two-day decline.

Israel had attempted to duck the shock 17% tariff on Israeli imports by moving preemptively on Tuesday – a day before the tariffs were announced – to drop all remaining duties on the 1% of American goods still affected by them. But Trump moved ahead with the tariffs, saying the US had a significant trade deficit with its Middle East ally and leading beneficiary of military aid.

The US is Israel’s closest ally and largest single trading partner. The two countries signed a free trade agreement 40 years ago and about 98% of goods from the US are tax-free.

An Israeli finance ministry official said on Thursday that Trump’s latest tariff announcement could affect Israel’s exports of machinery and medical equipment.

Netanyahu will travel to the US on Sunday from Hungary, after a four-day official visit in which the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, had made clear he would defy the ICC arrest warrant for the Israeli leader. During the trip, Orbán announced that Hungary would withdraw from the court, which he said had become too “political”.

Other thorny issues in the meeting on Monday include Israel-Turkey relations and “the fight against the international criminal court”, which has accused the Israeli leader of war crimes, Netanyahu’s office said in a statement on Saturday night.

Trump and Netanyahu had spoken by phone on Thursday about Hungary’s decision to withdraw from the ICC, of which the US is not a member. The possibility of the Washington visit apparently arose at that time.

Agencies contributed to this report

The French far-right leader Marine Le Pen has told supporters in Paris she would fight “a political, not a judicial ruling” that could bar her from the next presidential election, as a rival rally denounced an “existential threat” to the rule of law after her conviction for embezzling public funds.

“This decision has trampled on everything I hold most dear: my people, my country and my honour,” the figurehead of National Rally (RN) told a crowd of flag-waving supporters as the country’s three main political movements staged events in the Paris.

Speaking from a temporary stage in front of the Hôtel des Invalides with the party’s 120 members of parliament behind her, Le Pen said she would “not give up” and was the victim of a “witch-hunt”, adding: “It is we who are the most ardent defenders of the rule of law.”

But speaking at a leftwing rally a few kilometres away on the Place de la République, the Green party leader, Marine Tondelier, said Le Pen’s defence amounted to “a total conspiracy theory” and a full-blown attack on judicial independence.

“This is about more than Marine Le Pen,” Tondelier said. “It’s about defending the rule of law from people who think justice is optional. For everyone else, she wants tough justice, tolerance zero, jail for the first offence. For her, it’s too tough.”

Manuel Bompard of the radical left France Unbowed (LFI) told the rally the RN’s mask had slipped after years of trying to clean up its image and pose as a future party of government. “It’s dangerous for democracy, dangerous for the rule of law,” he said.

Police said 7,000 people were at the RN rally and 5,000 at the leftwing rival.

The three-time presidential candidate and frontrunner to succeed Emmanuel Macron was found guilty on Monday of embezzling more than €4m (£3.4m) of European parliament funds to pay RN party workers in France through a vast fake jobs scam.

Le Pen was sentenced to four years in prison, of which two were suspended and two may be served with an electronic bracelet, fined €100,000 and – under a law she had backed – barred from running for public office for five years with immediate effect.

The Paris appeals court has said it will deliver a verdict on her case by next summer, potentially allowing her to contest the 2027 presidential race if her conviction is overturned, which is seen as unlikely, or the ban on running for public office lifted.

The ruling, which followed a 10-year investigation and a nine-week trial, has dramatically shaken up the political landscape and been fiercely attacked by far-right politicians in France and beyond as politically motivated and anti-democratic.

Jordan Bardella, the RN’s 29-year-old president and Le Pen’s likely replacement if she remains ineligible, told cheering RN voters that it was “not just Marine Le Pen who has been unjustly condemned, but French democracy that has been put to death”.

The court decision would go down as “a dark day in our nation’s history”, he said, a “direct attack on our democracy, a wound for millions of patriots” and an attempt to “deprive us of free choice, to wipe from the scene an entire part of France”.

Speaking before her rally, Le Pen – whose vote share in the presidential first round was put at 36% by one poll on Sunday, far ahead of all rivals – said the RN would “follow the example of Martin Luther King’s struggle, who defended civil rights”.

Wearing a “Marine présidente” T-shirt and a “Save democracy” sticker, Patrick, 57, who had come from Normandy, said Le Pen’s sentence was “an outrage. Do they really think they can just get rid of an election favourite like that? It’s a banana republic.”

Valérie, 36, a legal assistant, said the court’s decision was flawed because “the texts it was based on, defining how European parliament money should be used”, were “unclear and imprecise. No one’s been defrauded. It’s all a complete fiction to stop Marine.”

On the Place de la République, several thousand protesters waved placards reading “No Trumpism in France” and “Nobody is above the law”. Vincent Lemaitre, 44, a primary school teacher, said the court’s ruling showed French democracy worked.

The judges, he said, “simply applied the law, which was passed by parliament, including many deputies who represent the RN. Le Pen and her colleagues broke that law. Popularity should not give politicians immunity. Quite the opposite, in fact.”

Anaïs Desmets, 31, said the argument that politicians should only be judged at the ballot box was “absurd. If someone harms children, they are kept away from kids. If someone steals public money, they shouldn’t be allowed to manage it.”

In the working-class northern Paris suburb of Saint-Denis, Macron’s Renaissance party and its allies warned of “an existential threat” to the rule of law. “If you steal, you pay,” the former prime minister Gabriel Attal said. “Especially if you are a politician.”

Attal, addressing an audience that included the present prime minister, François Bayrou, also denounced “unprecedented interference” in France’s affairs including from Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Hungary’s Viktor Orbàn and Italy’s Matteo Salvini.

He said every effort should be made not to politicise the court’s decision. “It’s not up to us, or to anyone else, to say whether the court’s judgement was good or bad,” Attal said. “It is our responsibility to always stick to the facts.”

The French far-right leader Marine Le Pen has told supporters in Paris she would fight “a political, not a judicial ruling” that could bar her from the next presidential election, as a rival rally denounced an “existential threat” to the rule of law after her conviction for embezzling public funds.

“This decision has trampled on everything I hold most dear: my people, my country and my honour,” the figurehead of National Rally (RN) told a crowd of flag-waving supporters as the country’s three main political movements staged events in the Paris.

Speaking from a temporary stage in front of the Hôtel des Invalides with the party’s 120 members of parliament behind her, Le Pen said she would “not give up” and was the victim of a “witch-hunt”, adding: “It is we who are the most ardent defenders of the rule of law.”

But speaking at a leftwing rally a few kilometres away on the Place de la République, the Green party leader, Marine Tondelier, said Le Pen’s defence amounted to “a total conspiracy theory” and a full-blown attack on judicial independence.

“This is about more than Marine Le Pen,” Tondelier said. “It’s about defending the rule of law from people who think justice is optional. For everyone else, she wants tough justice, tolerance zero, jail for the first offence. For her, it’s too tough.”

Manuel Bompard of the radical left France Unbowed (LFI) told the rally the RN’s mask had slipped after years of trying to clean up its image and pose as a future party of government. “It’s dangerous for democracy, dangerous for the rule of law,” he said.

Police said 7,000 people were at the RN rally and 5,000 at the leftwing rival.

The three-time presidential candidate and frontrunner to succeed Emmanuel Macron was found guilty on Monday of embezzling more than €4m (£3.4m) of European parliament funds to pay RN party workers in France through a vast fake jobs scam.

Le Pen was sentenced to four years in prison, of which two were suspended and two may be served with an electronic bracelet, fined €100,000 and – under a law she had backed – barred from running for public office for five years with immediate effect.

The Paris appeals court has said it will deliver a verdict on her case by next summer, potentially allowing her to contest the 2027 presidential race if her conviction is overturned, which is seen as unlikely, or the ban on running for public office lifted.

The ruling, which followed a 10-year investigation and a nine-week trial, has dramatically shaken up the political landscape and been fiercely attacked by far-right politicians in France and beyond as politically motivated and anti-democratic.

Jordan Bardella, the RN’s 29-year-old president and Le Pen’s likely replacement if she remains ineligible, told cheering RN voters that it was “not just Marine Le Pen who has been unjustly condemned, but French democracy that has been put to death”.

The court decision would go down as “a dark day in our nation’s history”, he said, a “direct attack on our democracy, a wound for millions of patriots” and an attempt to “deprive us of free choice, to wipe from the scene an entire part of France”.

Speaking before her rally, Le Pen – whose vote share in the presidential first round was put at 36% by one poll on Sunday, far ahead of all rivals – said the RN would “follow the example of Martin Luther King’s struggle, who defended civil rights”.

Wearing a “Marine présidente” T-shirt and a “Save democracy” sticker, Patrick, 57, who had come from Normandy, said Le Pen’s sentence was “an outrage. Do they really think they can just get rid of an election favourite like that? It’s a banana republic.”

Valérie, 36, a legal assistant, said the court’s decision was flawed because “the texts it was based on, defining how European parliament money should be used”, were “unclear and imprecise. No one’s been defrauded. It’s all a complete fiction to stop Marine.”

On the Place de la République, several thousand protesters waved placards reading “No Trumpism in France” and “Nobody is above the law”. Vincent Lemaitre, 44, a primary school teacher, said the court’s ruling showed French democracy worked.

The judges, he said, “simply applied the law, which was passed by parliament, including many deputies who represent the RN. Le Pen and her colleagues broke that law. Popularity should not give politicians immunity. Quite the opposite, in fact.”

Anaïs Desmets, 31, said the argument that politicians should only be judged at the ballot box was “absurd. If someone harms children, they are kept away from kids. If someone steals public money, they shouldn’t be allowed to manage it.”

In the working-class northern Paris suburb of Saint-Denis, Macron’s Renaissance party and its allies warned of “an existential threat” to the rule of law. “If you steal, you pay,” the former prime minister Gabriel Attal said. “Especially if you are a politician.”

Attal, addressing an audience that included the present prime minister, François Bayrou, also denounced “unprecedented interference” in France’s affairs including from Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Hungary’s Viktor Orbàn and Italy’s Matteo Salvini.

He said every effort should be made not to politicise the court’s decision. “It’s not up to us, or to anyone else, to say whether the court’s judgement was good or bad,” Attal said. “It is our responsibility to always stick to the facts.”

It would be unsafe for Russia to restart the occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant and would take Ukraine up to two years in peacetime if it regained control, the chief executive of the company that runs the vast six-reactor site has said.

Petro Kotin, chief executive of Energoatom, said in an interview there were “major problems” to overcome – including insufficient cooling water, personnel and incoming electricity supply – before it could start generating power again safely.

The future of the Zaporizhzhia plant, Europe’s largest nuclear reactor, is a significant aspect of any negotiations to end the war in Ukraine. Seized by Russia in spring 2022 and shut down for safety reasons a few months later, it remains on the frontline of the conflict, close to the Dnipro River.

Russia has said it intends to retain the site and switch it back on, without being specific as to when. Alexey Likhachev, head of Russian nuclear operator Rosatom, said in February it would be restarted when “military and political conditions allow”.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump has expressed an interest in taking control of it, though this possibility is considered very remote.

Kotin said Energoatom was prepared to restart the plant but it would require Russian forces to be removed and the site to be de-mined and demilitarised.

He said such a restart by Ukraine would take anywhere “from two months to two years” in an environment “without any threats from militaries”, while a Russian restart during wartime “would be impossible, even for one unit [reactor]”.

Kotin said the six reactors could only be brought online after the completion of 27 safety programmes agreed with Ukraine’s nuclear regulator, including testing the nuclear fuel in the reactor cores because it had exceeded a six-year “design term”.

That raises questions about whether Russia could restart the plant after a ceasefire without incurring significant risk. The plant was already unsafe, Kotin said, given that it was being used as “a military base with military vehicles present” and there were “probably some weapons and blasting materials” present as well.

Russia has acknowledged that it has placed mines between the inner and outer perimeters of the plant “to deter potential Ukrainian saboteurs” while inspectors from the IAEA nuclear watchdog have reported that armed troops and military personnel are present at the site.

Last month, the US Department of Energy said the Zaporizhzhia plant was being operated by an “inadequate and insufficently trained cadre of workers”, with staffing levels at less than a third of prewar levels.

The US briefing said Ukrainian reactors, though originally of the Soviet VVER design, had “evolved differently” from their Russian counterparts and “particularly the safety systems”. Russian-trained specialists acting as replacements for Ukrainian staff were “inexperienced” in operating the Ukrainian variants, it said.

Kotin said an attempt to restart the plant by Russia would almost certainly not be accepted or supported by Ukraine. It would require the reconnection of three additional 750kV high-voltage lines to come into the plant, he said.

A nuclear reactor requires a significant amount of power for day-to-day operation, and three of the four high-voltage lines came from territories now under Russian occupation. “They themselves destroyed the lines,” Kotin said, only for Russia to discover engineers could not rebuild them as the war continued, he added.

Only two lines remain to maintain the site in cold shutdown, a 750kV line coming from Ukraine, and a further 330kV line – though on eight separate occasions shelling disrupted their supply of energy, forcing the plant to rely on backup generators.

Experts say a pumping station has to be constructed at the site, because there is insufficient cooling water available. The June 2023 destruction by Russian soldiers of the Nova Kakhova dam downstream eliminated the easy supply of necessary water from the Dnipro river.

Two civilians were reportedly killed by Russian missile attacks on Sunday, including one in a ballistic missile strike in an eastern district of Kyiv; while Russia said it captured a border village near Sumy in north-east Ukraine.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia had launched more than 1,460 guided aerial bombs, nearly 670 attack drones, and more than 30 missiles over the past week. The Ukrainian president said: “The number of air attacks is increasing.”

US-brokered ceasefire talks have only achieved limited results thus far. Both sides agreed to stop attacking energy targets, though each accuses the other of violations; while a maritime ceasefire agreed to by Ukraine has not been accepted by Russia.

A Russian official involved in the negotiations said on Sunday that diplomatic contacts between Russia and the US could come again as early as next week.

More than 100 relatives of people who have died after contact with the police in the UK since 1971 have joined plans for a class action lawsuit in pursuit of compensation and justice.

The plan for group legal action was announced at the People’s Tribunal on Police Killings, a two-day event in which bereaved families presented evidence to a panel of international experts on how their relatives died and the long-term impact this has had on them.

The findings and conclusions of the event will form the basis of a first-of-its-kind legal action directed at police officers, police chiefs and government departments involved in the deaths.

Activist and film-maker Ken Fero, who is helping to lead the action, said: “I think it’s quite revolutionary what we’re trying to do. There has never been a class action of this kind done in the UK before, there hasn’t been a call-up like this one before.

“There are many, many families all over the UK, and there have been for five decades, who suffer in silence. We have to do something radical that involves everybody, that doesn’t cherrypick certain cases. And that’s the idea of a class action.”

He said event organisers had recorded 3,000 deaths involving the police in the UK over the past 50 years, during which time four police officers have been convicted over a killing.

Those involved in the tribunal and legal action included Sieta Lambrias, the sister of Mikey Powell who died from positional asphyxia after police restraint in 2003, and Shirley Sylvester, the cousin of Roger Sylvester, who died after being restrained by eight police officers in 1999.

Samantha Patterson, whose brother Jason McPherson died in 2007 after being stopped and searched by police, said: “We’ve explored all avenues. We’ve done campaigns. We’ve written letters. We’ve met with prime ministers, Home Office secretaries, everybody that you would think. Something needs to change.

“Jason died nearly 20 years ago, and I’m still hearing about cases that are similar to what happened to Jason that night.”

McPherson died after collapsing at a police station where he was taken to be searched, and an inquest into his death criticised the police for not following procedure properly.

Patterson said her brother’s death, and their campaign for justice, had taken a huge toll on her family, including her mother who died shortly after McPherson’s inquest. “In my head, my mum died because she put all her faith into that inquest and she got nothing out of it,” she said.

“She didn’t get any justice for her son. And my other brother, he still has the effects of Jason’s death on him every single day.”

Fero said the number of people involved in the class action is quickly rising into the hundreds. A legal team of barristers is working to establish what shape the class action will take.

“It is about seeking prosecutions, it is about seeking compensation, but it’s also about recognition that the state has failed to protect its own citizens,” said Fero.

“It’s an absolute scandal. And it’s a purposeful deflection that the government has employed to put something there which appears to be judicial, but essentially it has no power.

“The focus has been on improving the system and there’s an acceptance of the deaths that have happened before – we’re not going to accept them.”

The tribunal was organised by a collective of campaign groups, including United Families and Friends Campaign, Migrant Media and 4WardEverUK, with the aim of “exposing the extent of the injustice” and placing it on the international stage.

It also aimed to highlight the disproportionate impact of police killings on black people, and key themes explored included torture, terror, state cover-ups and black resistance.

Organisers said they rejected the terminology “deaths in custody” as it was “inaccurately narrow and misleading”, and does not cover killings of people who have not been arrested or sectioned.

Pope Francis has made a surprise appearance in St Peter’s Square during a special jubilee mass for the sick and health workers, marking his first public appearance at the Vatican since his discharge from hospital two weeks ago.

The pontiff waved at the crowd that stood and applauded as he was appeared unannounced, assisted in a wheelchair to the front of the altar in the square.

“Good Sunday to everyone,’’ Francis said, speaking into a microphone, which he tapped to make sure it was working on a second attempt. “Thank you very much.”

The pontiff’s voice sounded stronger than when he addressed wellwishers outside Gemelli hospital on the day of his release on 23 March, after being diagnosed with life-threatening pneumonia during a five-week hospital stay. He has just completed two weeks of at least two months of doctor-ordered rest as he continues physical, respiratory and speech therapy, as well as treatment for a lingering lung infection.

The pope referred to his experience with illness in both the traditional Sunday blessing and the homily read by Archbishop Rino Fisichella, the organiser of the Holy Year, which is expected to attract 30 million pilgrims to Rome.

Addressing the sick among the crowd, the pope said in the homily read by Fisichella: “In this moment of my life I share a lot: the experience of infirmity, feeling weak, depending on the others for many things, needing support.

“It is not easy, but it is a school in which we learn every day to love and to let ourselves be loved, without demanding and without rejecting, without regretting, without despairing, grateful to God and to our brothers for the good that we receive, trusting for what is still to come.”

He also urged the faithful not to push the fragile from their lives “as unfortunately a certain mentality” did today. “Let’s not ostracise pain from our surroundings. Let’s instead make it an opportunity to grow together, to cultivate hope,” he added.

In the traditional Sunday blessing, pope offered prayers for doctors, nurses and health care workers who were “not always helped to work in inadequate conditions, at times the victims of aggression. Their mission is not easy and must be supported and respected.”

Pope Francis has made a surprise appearance in St Peter’s Square during a special jubilee mass for the sick and health workers, marking his first public appearance at the Vatican since his discharge from hospital two weeks ago.

The pontiff waved at the crowd that stood and applauded as he was appeared unannounced, assisted in a wheelchair to the front of the altar in the square.

“Good Sunday to everyone,’’ Francis said, speaking into a microphone, which he tapped to make sure it was working on a second attempt. “Thank you very much.”

The pontiff’s voice sounded stronger than when he addressed wellwishers outside Gemelli hospital on the day of his release on 23 March, after being diagnosed with life-threatening pneumonia during a five-week hospital stay. He has just completed two weeks of at least two months of doctor-ordered rest as he continues physical, respiratory and speech therapy, as well as treatment for a lingering lung infection.

The pope referred to his experience with illness in both the traditional Sunday blessing and the homily read by Archbishop Rino Fisichella, the organiser of the Holy Year, which is expected to attract 30 million pilgrims to Rome.

Addressing the sick among the crowd, the pope said in the homily read by Fisichella: “In this moment of my life I share a lot: the experience of infirmity, feeling weak, depending on the others for many things, needing support.

“It is not easy, but it is a school in which we learn every day to love and to let ourselves be loved, without demanding and without rejecting, without regretting, without despairing, grateful to God and to our brothers for the good that we receive, trusting for what is still to come.”

He also urged the faithful not to push the fragile from their lives “as unfortunately a certain mentality” did today. “Let’s not ostracise pain from our surroundings. Let’s instead make it an opportunity to grow together, to cultivate hope,” he added.

In the traditional Sunday blessing, pope offered prayers for doctors, nurses and health care workers who were “not always helped to work in inadequate conditions, at times the victims of aggression. Their mission is not easy and must be supported and respected.”

Emergency services are continuing to battle a wildfire that started in Galloway, south of Scotland, and has spread north into East Ayrshire, forcing the evacuation of walkers and wild campers.

The blaze started in the Newton Stewart area on Friday, then spread northwards over the weekend after a change in wind direction to reach Loch Doon. Residents living nearby were advised to keep windows and doors closed and police told people to avoid the area.

Stewart Gibson, the team leader at Galloway Mountain Rescue, told BBC Scotland fire crews had employed four helicopters to drop water on the flames from above, with the fire front several miles wide at one stage.

Rising temperatures across the UK earlier this week led to wildfire warnings being put in place, with the Scottish fire and rescue service saying there was a “very high to extreme risk” of fires spreading because of warm, dry conditions.

The service has warned the public to avoid outdoor fires and barbecues, and to dispose of cigarettes and glass safely.

Further north in the Highlands, crews were tackling another wildfire north of Ullapool on Sunday with roads closed and heavy smoke hampering visibility.

Six crews were in attendance, with personnel travelling almost 70 miles to offer assistance and firefighters at the scene reporting a firewall stretching more than 3 miles and large plumes of smoke descending over the area.

Meanwhile, in Northern Ireland, fire brigades were called to the scene of a blaze in County Antrim on Sunday afternoon. Six fire engines attended the incident near Conogher Road, Dervock, while 40 firefighters were involved in tackling the flames.

Danny Ard, the group commander for the Northern Ireland fire and rescue service, said the firefighters had utilised “jets” and “specialist wildfire equipment to contain the fire”. It was extinguished at 8pm on Sunday.

A significant wildfire that broke out on Saturday and triggered a major incident in Northern Ireland’s Mourne mountains district was extinguished on Sunday morning. One man was arrested by police.

More than 100 firefighters and 15 fire appliances were deployed on Saturday to Sandbank Road, Hilltown, to tackle the blaze, which was believed to have been caused deliberately, fire chiefs said.

Northern Ireland fire and rescue service said the fire had a front of approximately 2 miles “including a large area of forestry close to property”.

Demonstrators estimated to be in the tens of thousands gathered in Washington DC on Saturday in a display of mass dissent against Donald Trump’s policies that organizers hoped would snowball into a rolling cycle of protests that could eventually stymie the US president in next year’s congressional elections.

Anger with Trump and his billionaire lieutenant, the SpaceX and Tesla entrepreneur Elon Musk, was expressed in a sea of placards and banners on the Washington mall, in the shadow of the Washington monument. Multiple messages denounced the two men for shuttering government agencies, cutting jobs and services and – in often graphic terms – for threatening the survival of US democracy.

“Resist like it’s 1938 Nazi Germany” and “Fascism is alive and well and living in the White House”, read two slogans at the Hands Off gathering, organized by the civil society group Indivisible and featuring speeches from a host of other organizations as well as Democratic members of Congress.

The rally, which coincided with roughly 1,000 other similarly themed events across the country, was punctuated by a fusillade of barbs aimed at Trump as well as Musk, whose infiltration into government agencies through the unofficial “department of government efficiency”, or Doge, without congressional approval, and cash-fueled interventions in election races have been seen as anti-democratic affronts.

“They believe democracy is doomed and they believe regime change is upon us if only they can seize our payments system,” said Jamie Raskin, a Democratic representative from Maryland who is the party’s top figure on the House judiciary committee.

He added: “If they think they are going to overthrow the foundations of democracy, they don’t know who they are dealing with.”

Saturday’s events followed weeks of anxiety among anti-Trump forces that the president had railroaded through his agenda in the absence of adequate resistance from congressional Democrats and minus the displays of popular mass opposition that appeared early in his first presidency.

But they also came days after the Democrats drew encouragement from victory in a race for a vacant supreme court seat in Wisconsin into which Musk had unsuccessfully ploughed $25m of his own money to support the Trump-endorsed Republican candidate.

It also followed the roll-out of Trump’s flagship policy of import tariffs, which triggered massive plunges in international stock markets and fueled fears of an economic downturn.

Multiple speakers and attendees said they hoped the rallies would embolden other American disillusioned by Trump’s policies to join future rallies, giving a fledgling protest movement much-needed momentum.

“We want to send a signal to all people and institutions that have been showing anticipatory obedience to Trump and showing they are willing to bend the knee that there is, in fact, a mass public movement that’s willing to rise up and stop this,” said Leah Greenberg, Indivisible’s executive director.

“If our political leaders stand up, we will have their backs. We want them to stand up and protect the norms of democracy and want them to see that there are people out there who are willing to do that. The goal of this is building a message.”

Robert Weissman, the co-president of Public Citizen, a consumer-rights advocacy group, told the crowd: “There’s only one thing that can face down the authoritarian moment we are facing, and that’s the movement we see here today.”

Asked by the Guardian whether the mass demonstrations were sufficient to stop Trump, he said: “It’s not a one-time thing. It’s got to be a sustaining phenomenon. There’s been a lot of criticism of the Democrats for not standing up in Congress, so an event like this will stiffen their spine.

“It’s about making the Democrats better and giving them courage – and it will. That’s also true for ordinary people, because Trump’s authoritarian playbook is designed to make people think it’s useless to resist. This demonstrates power and it will bring in more people.”

Several congressional Democrats predicted the rally would inspire more protests, ultimately fueling an electoral triumph in next year’s congressional midterms, when control of the House of Representatives and the Senate will be up for grabs.

“This is what freedom fighting against fascism looks like,” said Eric Swalwell, a representative for California. “This is not the last day of the fight, it’s the first day. When it all comes to [be] written about, you will see that April 5 is when it all came alive. Energy and activism beget energy and activism.”

Several members acknowledged that protests were rarely enough to supplant authoritarian governments, as demonstrated in countries such as Turkey and Hungary, whose strongman leaders, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Viktor Orbán respectively, have survived in office despite repeated episodes of street protests.

“We invited some historians in to discuss that question,” said Raskin. “They said, in some countries there was just a legislative parliamentary strategy, and that only succeeded about one-third of the time.

“In other countries, there was just a popular-resistance strategy, and that succeeded a little bit more than a third of the time. But when you have a popular-resistance strategy and an effective legislative strategy, it wins more than two-thirds of the time. It’s not a guarantee, but you need to have national mass popular action at the same time that you’ve got an effective legislative strategy, too.”

Representative Don Beyer, whose northern Virginia district – home to 75,000 federal workers – has been disproportionately affected by Musk’s assault on government agencies, compared the effect of Trump’s actions to the upheaval wrought by Mao Zedong in the Chinese cultural revolution.

But, he said, Trump would be derailed by next year’s election, which he said he was “somewhat confident” would be ‘“free and fair”.

“They’re not perfect [but] the people do have a chance to speak,” Beyer said. “Elections are very much decentralized and organized precinct by precinct. There are lots of chances to push back. We just saw that in Wisconsin.”

The US is revoking the visas of all South Sudanese passport-holders and will stop any more of its citizens entering the country.

The Department of State said South Sudan was “taking advantage of the United States” by failing to comply with US efforts to return people to the east African country, adding that the measures would come into effect immediately.

“Every country must accept the return of its citizens in a timely manner when another country, including the United States, seeks to remove them,” it said.

Christopher Landau, the deputy secretary of state, said the dispute related to one alleged South Sudanese national and claimed efforts to engage diplomatically with the South Sudanese government had been rebuffed.

“All visa appointments are cancelled, no new visas will be issued, no existing visas will be effective, and hence NO ONE from South Sudan will be entering the United States on a visa until this matter is resolved,” he said in a social media post.

Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, said Washington would “be prepared to “review these actions when South Sudan is in full cooperation”.

Donald Trump, who campaigned during the US election on an anti-immigration platform, has pursued various methods to remove foreign nationals from the US since returning to the White House, but the move against US-based South Sudanese is the first time he has targeted a group by citizenship with such a blanket measure.

South Sudan nationals in the US were granted “temporary protected status” by the Obama administration in 2011 on the grounds that the country was unsafe because of fighting that started after it declared independence from Sudan. A TPS designation means individuals cannot be removed from the US and are granted the right to work and the ability to travel.

The designation was extended by the Biden administration last September but is set to expire next month. The Department of Homeland Security said 133 people from South Sudan were on the TPS programme last year.

Trump has been pushing to end TPS designations for a handful of countries including Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, potentially affecting half a million people. A judge last month paused plans to end the legal protections for Venezuelans.

What was a simmering conflict in South Sudan has threatened to intensify, with forces loyal to President Salva Kiir facing off with backers of his rival, vice-president Riek Machar.

Conflict between Kiir and Machar, who come from the country’s largest ethnic groups, the Dinka and Nuer, cost 400,000 lives during a five-year civil war which begun in 2013. Uganda and Sudan mediated a ceasefire in 2018 with cabinet and state positions distributed between their factions.

“South Sudan has been in a state of civil conflict since its creation and the only difference is whether the conflict has been open or smouldering beneath the surface,” said Mukesh Kapila, an academic who was the UN head in Sudan in 2004. He added that the underlying issues between the two leaders were never properly resolved.

The agreement faced a major stress test when the civil war in Sudan halted South Sudan’s oil exports, which account for about 70% of its budget. More than 600,000 people from Sudan have also sought refuge in South Sudan further straining the country’s limited resources.

The country’s financial challenges, which meant many in the public sector were not paid for close to a year, have been compounded by renewed hostilities between the supporters of Kiir and Machar.

Machar was placed under house arrest last month along with his wife, Angelina Teny, who is the interior minister. Officials from his party said this effectively ended the 2018 peace agreement. In the weeks leading up to Machar’s arrest several of his associates were removed from office.

Kapila warned it was a dangerous situation but “with the other problems in the world, I’m not sure anyone is currently bothered to stop the momentum toward conflict”.

The British artist called “truly the worst” by the US president, Donald Trump, after he derided a portrait she created of him, has said the criticism called her “integrity into question” and is threatening her career.

Sarah A Boardman painted Trump’s official portrait for the Colorado state capitol building in Denver, where it hung for six years from 2019.

In March, Trump said in a post on his Truth Social platform that the portrait had been “purposefully distorted”. Trump said Boardman’s portrait of the former US president Barack Obama was “wonderful”, but “the one on me is truly the worst”.

In her first comment since the incident, Boardman said Trump’s comments meant that her “intentions, integrity and abilities were, in my opinion, called into question”.

Boardman rebuked the president’s claims in a statement, saying she had “completed the portrait accurately, without ‘purposeful distortion’, political bias, or any attempt to caricature the subject, actual or implied”.

The artist said that while she acknowledged Trump’s right to comment, the “additional allegations that I ‘purposefully distorted’ the portrait, and that I ‘must have lost my talent as I got older’ are now directly and negatively impacting my business of over 41 years, which now is in danger of not recovering”.

Discussing her work with the Colorado Times Recorder in 2019, she acknowledged that there would “always be anger at a president from one side or the other. It is human nature.”

In response to Trump’s criticism, officials said the portrait would be removed, and it has been since. Boardman says that for the first six years after she painted the portrait, she “received overwhelmingly positive reviews and feedback”, but that since Trump’s comments “that has changed for the worse”.

Boardman was born in Britain, and her website says she spent years travelling around Australia, Papua New Guinea, New Zealand, Malaysia, the Middle East, Europe and the US while “conducting a successful career in airline travel and business”.

In 1985, she began studying techniques of the old masters in Germany and built a successful career as an artist, eventually winning a nationwide “call for artists” by Colorado’s state capital of Denver, to paint the official portraits of presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump.

Trump guards his image closely. In January 2025, before his inauguration, he released a portrait that was variously described by critics as serious or ominous, and seemed to reference his 2023 mugshot.

That image was taken after he was charged with attempting to overturn his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden in the state of Georgia – a charge Trump denied.

After Trump’s criticism of Boardman, his envoy Steve Witkoff confirmed the White House had been sent a new work from Moscow, which was a gift from Vladimir Putin. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov described it as a “personal gift”.

Witkoff described the picture as a “beautiful portrait” by a “leading Russian artist”.