Stock markets across Europe slumped on Monday after Donald Trump said foreign governments would have to pay “a lot of money” to lift sweeping tariffs that he characterised as “medicine”.

Speaking to reporters onboard Air Force One late on Sunday, the US president indicated he was not concerned about market losses that have already wiped out nearly $6tn (£5tn) in value from US stocks. “I don’t want anything to go down. But sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something,” he said.

Trump’s comments triggered a mass sell-off on Asian stock markets overnight and prompted the billionaire investor Bill Ackman, one of the US president’s backers in the 2024 race for the White House, to call for a moratorium, saying that sweeping tariffs “on our friends and our enemies alike” had caused an “economic nuclear war”.

In Europe, stock markets plunged in early trading on Monday. The FTSE 100 fell as much as 6%, before recovering slightly to a fall of 3.5%, while Germany’s Dax, France’s CAC 40 and Italy’s FTSE MIB fell about 6%.

On the FTSE 100, the industrial groups Babcock, Rolls-Royce and Melrose were among the biggest fallers, as well as investment companies and Barclays Bank, which has large operations in the US, as concerns over a tariff-induced global recession continued to rip through markets.

Overnight, Japan’s benchmark Nikkei 225 index tumbled 8%, and Hong Kong and Chinese stocks also dived, with Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index down 12%. Shares in the Chinese tech companies Alibaba and Tencent fell more than 8%. In South Korea, trading on the Kospi index was halted for five minutes at 9.12am as stocks plummeted.

In Taiwan, the market fell almost 10%, the largest one-day point and percentage loss on record. Falls were driven by the tech companies TSMC and Foxconn, triggering circuit breakers.

More than $160bn was wiped off the Australian stock markets.

Oil prices sank, continuing a trend over the last week. Brent crude fell by more than $10 to $63.84, sending shares in oil majors sliding down. BP, which has lost two-fifths of its value over the past year, tumbled another 5% and Shell lost almost 6%.

After falling over the last week, gold rose slightly to $2,362. Gold has proved to be a safe haven asset during the coronavirus pandemic and the war in Ukraine, doubling its value since 2020.

Investors also reacted to the prospect of deeper interest rate cuts on Monday. Traders increased their predictions for UK rate cuts, pricing in three quarter-point drops in the UK, from 4.5% to 3.75% with a 90% expectation of a cut in May, while the Bank of Japan, which has been increasing interest rates, was expected to pause.

Trump said he had spoken over the weekend to leaders from Europe and Asia, who hope to convince him to lower tariffs that are as high as 50% and due to take effect this week. “They are coming to the table. They want to talk but there’s no talk unless they pay us a lot of money on a yearly basis,” Trump said.

Trump’s tariff announcement last week jolted economies around the world, triggering retaliatory levies from China and sparking fears of a global trade war and recession. On Sunday morning talkshows, Trump’s top economic advisers sought to portray the tariffs as a savvy repositioning of the US in the global trade order. They also tried to minimise the economic shocks from last week’s tumultuous rollout.

The US Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said more than 50 nations had started negotiations with the US since last Wednesday’s announcement.

Bessent said there was “no reason” to anticipate a recession, citing stronger-than-anticipated US jobs growth last month, before the tariffs were announced.

The US president spent the weekend in Florida, playing golf and posting a video of his swing to social media on Sunday.

US customs agents began collecting Trump’s unilateral 10% tariff on all imports from many countries on Saturday. Higher “reciprocal” tariff rates of 11% to 50% on individual countries are due to take effect on Wednesday at 12.01am eastern daily time.

Some governments have already signalled a willingness to engage with the US to avoid the duties.

In his first significant intervention since the US ushered in a new economic era last week, the UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, said the government would step in to support key British industries.

He is to announce plans to give carmakers more flexibility over how they meet a target to stop sales of new petrol and diesel cars by 2030. Other sectors to be hit by Trump’s tariffs are expected to receive support later in the week, with life sciences likely to be among them.

Paul Donovan, the chief economist at UBS Global Wealth Management, said uncertainty was another factor dragging down markets after US administration officials gave contradictory statements “causing investors to question the existence of a master plan”.

He said: “Investors had assumed Trump’s trade taxes were a bargaining tool, as during the first term. That depends on competent policymaking to balance the benefits of trade negotiations against the damage of tariffs.

“If the competence of policymaking is questioned, markets will worry that economic damage will be lasting”

A search for safe havens benefited European and other industrialised nations, and the value of their bonds rallyied and the cost of borrowing fell.

The two-year gilt yield, which is a proxy for the interest rate, fell to its lowest since September 2024 at 3.814%, down 12 basis points (bps) on the day, while 10-year yields sank to their lowest since December at 4.379%, down 6 bps, before recovering to be 3 bps lower.

“With Europe facing both recession and disinflation from global trade disruption, we suspect ECB/BoE terminal rate pricing can shift lower still,” market strategists at the US bank Citi wrote in a note to clients.

Goldman Sachs increased its predictions for a US recession over the next 12 months, from a 35% chance to 45%.

Tariff-stunned markets face another week of potential turmoil after the worst week for US stocks since the onset of the Covid-19 crisis five years ago.

The White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett denied the tariffs were part of a Trump strategy to crash financial markets to pressure the US Federal Reserve to cut interest rates. He said there would be no “political coercion” of the central bank.

Israel’s military razed huge swathes of land inside the perimeter of Gaza and ordered troops to turn the area into a “kill zone” where anybody who entered was a target, according to testimony by soldiers who carried out the plan.

Israeli combatants said they were ordered to destroy homes, factories and farmland roughly 1km (0.6 miles) inside the perimeter of Gaza to make a “buffer zone”, with one describing the area as looking like Hiroshima.

The testimonies are some of the first accounts by Israeli soldiers to be published since the latest war started in October 2023 after Hamas’s attack on Israel. They were collected by Breaking the Silence, a group founded in 2004 by Israeli veterans who aim to expose the reality of the military’s grip over Palestinians. The Guardian interviewed four of the soldiers who corroborated the accounts.

Titled “The Perimeter” and published on Monday, the report said the stated purpose of the plan was to create a thick strip of land that provided a clear line of sight for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to identify and kill militants. “This space was to have no crops, structures, or people. Almost every object, infrastructure installation, and structure within the perimeter was demolished,” it said.

Soldiers were “given orders to deliberately, methodically, and systematically annihilate whatever was within the designated perimeter, including entire residential neighbourhoods, public buildings, educational institutions, mosques, and cemeteries, with very few exceptions”, the report added.

The ultimate result, however, was the creation of “a death zone of enormous proportions”, the report said. “Places where people had lived, farmed, and established industry were transformed into a vast wasteland, a strip of land eradicated in its entirety.”

It stretches along the frontier with Israel, from the Mediterranean coast in the north to the strip’s south-east corner next to Egypt.

A sergeant in the combat engineers corps said that once an area in the perimeter “was pretty much empty of any Gazans, we essentially started getting missions that were about basically blowing up houses or what was left of the houses”.

This was the routine, they said: “Get up in the morning, each platoon gets five, six, or seven locations, seven houses that they’re supposed to work on. We didn’t know a lot about the places that we were destroying or why we were doing it. I guess those things today, from my perspective now, are not legitimate. What I saw there, as far as I can judge, was beyond what I can justify that was needed.”

Some soldiers testified that commanders viewed the destruction as a way of exacting revenge for the 7 October attacks by Hamas, which sparked the current war when Palestinian militants killed hundreds and kidnapped Israeli and foreign citizens.

While Israel says the war is targeted at Hamas, Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, is fighting allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity at the international criminal court, including starvation of civilians and “extermination”.

The IDF did not respond to a request for comment on the report and combatants’ accounts.

One of the soldiers who provided testimony to Breaking the Silence on condition of anonymity said their unit was told to shoot anyone in the perimeter area on sight. The mentality in their unit, they said, was that there was no such thing as a “civilian” and everyone who walked into the perimeter would be considered a “terrorist”.

Rules on who can be killed on sight appeared to vary for different units, according to the accounts.

A sergeant in the armoured corps said that in 2024 he was given “shoot to kill” orders for any male adult who entered the perimeter. “For women and children, [the order was] ‘shoot to drive away’, and if they come close to the fence, you stop [them]. You don’t kill women, children, or the elderly. ‘Shoot to drive away’ means a tank fire,” he said.

But a captain in an armoured corps unit who operated in Gaza earlier in the war, in November 2023, described the border area as a “kill zone”, saying: “The borderline is a kill zone. Anyone who crosses a certain line, that we have defined, is considered a threat and is sentenced to death.”

Another captain said there were “no clear rules of engagement at any point” and described a “generally massive use of firepower, especially, like with tanks”. They added: “There was a lot of instigating fire for the sake of instigating fire, somewhere between [wanting to produce] a psychological effect and just for no reason.

“[We] set out on this war out of insult, out of pain, out of anger, out of the sense that we had to succeed. This distinction [between civilians and terrorist infrastructure], it didn’t matter. Nobody cared. We decided on a line … past which everyone is a suspect.”

How Palestinians would know they were crossing an invisible line was not made clear to them, the soldiers said. “How they know is a really good question. Enough people died or got injured crossing that line, so they don’t go near it.”

Before the latest war, Israel had previously established a buffer zone inside Gaza that extended to 300 metres, but the new one was intended to range from 800 to 1,500 metres, according to the testimonies.

Satellite imagery has previously revealed the IDF destroyed hundreds of buildings that stood within 1km to 1.2km of the perimeter fence, in a systematic demolishing act that rights groups say may constitute collective punishment and should be investigated as a war crime. Last week, Israel’s defence minister said the military would seize “large areas” in Gaza in a fresh offensive.

The perimeter accounts for just over 15% of the Gaza Strip, which is entirely off-limits to Palestinian residents. It represents 35% of the strip’s entire agricultural land, according to the report.

Despite shoot-to-kill orders, a warrant officer stationed in northern Gaza said Palestinians kept going back to the area “again and again after we fired at them”.

The officer said the Palestinians appeared to want to pick edible plants growing in the area. “There was hubeiza [mallow] there because no one went near there. People are hungry, so they come with bags to pick hubeiza, I think.”

Some got away with their food and their lives, the officer said. “The thing is that, at that point, the IDF really is fulfilling the public’s wishes, which state: ‘There are no innocents in Gaza’.”

In an interview with the Guardian, the same officer said the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023 made many Israelis feel the “need to pick up a gun”.

“A lot of us went there, I went there, because they killed us and now we’re going to kill them,” they said. “And I found out that we’re not only killing them – we’re killing them, we’re killing their wives, their children, their cats, their dogs. We’re destroying their houses and pissing on their graves.”

A war crimes complaint against 10 Britons who served with the Israeli military in Gaza is to be submitted to the Met police by one of the UK’s leading human rights lawyers.

Michael Mansfield KC is one of a group of lawyers who will on Monday hand in a 240-page dossier to Scotland Yard’s war crimes unit alleging targeted killing of civilians and aid workers, including by sniper fire, and indiscriminate attacks on civilian areas, including hospitals.

The report, which has been prepared by a team of UK lawyers and researchers in The Hague, also accuses suspects of coordinated attacks on protected sites including historic monuments and religious sites, and forced transfer and displacement of civilians.

For legal reasons, neither the names of suspects, who include officer-level individuals, nor the full report are being made public.

Israel has persistently denied that its political leaders or military have committed war crimes during its assault on Gaza, in which it has killed more than 50,000 people, most of them civilians. The military campaign was in response to Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack on southern Israel, in which more than 1,200 people, also mostly civilian, were killed and a further 250 taken hostage.

Mansfield, who is known for his work on landmark cases such as the Grenfell Tower fire, Stephen Lawrence and the Birmingham Six, said: “​If one of our nationals is committing ​an offence, we ought to be doing something about it​. Even if we can’t stop the government of foreign countries behaving badly, we can at least stop our nationals from behaving badly.

“British nationals are under a legal obligation not to collude with crimes committed in Palestine. No one is above the law.”

The report, which has been submitted on behalf of the Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) and the British-based Public Interest Law Centre (PILC), covers alleged offences committed in the territory from October 2023 to May 2024 and took six months to compile.

Each of the crimes attributed to the 10 suspects, some of whom are dual nationals, amounts to a war crime or crime against humanity, according to the report.

One witness, who was at a medical facility, saw corpses “scattered on the ground, especially in the middle of the hospital courtyard, where many dead bodies were buried in a mass grave”. A bulldozer “ran over a dead body in a horrific and heart-wrenching scene desecrating the dead”, the witness said. They also said a bulldozer demolished part of the hospital.

Sean Summerfield, a barrister at Doughty Street Chambers, who helped compile the dossier, said it was based on open-source evidence and witness testimony, which together presented a “compelling” case.

“The public will be shocked, I would have thought, to hear that there’s credible evidence that Brits have been directly involved in committing some of those atrocities,” he said, adding that the team wanted to see individuals “appearing at the Old Bailey to answer for atrocity crimes”.

The report says Britain has a responsibility under international treaties to investigate and prosecute those who have committed “core international crimes”.

Section 51 of the International Criminal Court Act 2001 states that it “is an offence against the law of England and Wales for a person to commit genocide, a crime against humanity, or a war crime”, even if it takes place in another country.

Raji Sourani, the director of the PCHR, said: “​This is illegal, this is inhuman and​ enough is enough. The government cannot say we didn’t know; we are providing them with all ​the evidence.”

Paul Heron, the legal director of the PILC, said: “We’re filing our report to make clear these war crimes are not in our name.”

Scores of legal and human rights experts have signed a letter of support urging the war crimes team to investigate the complaints.

Fearing legal repercussions, online harassment and professional consequences, student journalists are retracting their names from published articles amid intensifying repression by the Trump administration targeting students perceived to be associated with the pro-Palestinian movement.

Editors at university newspapers say that anxiety among writers has risen since the arrest of Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk, who is currently in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention fighting efforts to deport her. While the government has not pointed to evidence supporting its decision to revoke her visa, she wrote an op-ed last year in a student newspaper critical of Israel, spurring fears that simply expressing views in writing is now viewed as sufficient grounds for deportation.

Ozturk is one of nearly a dozen students or scholars who have been seized by immigration officials since 8 March, when Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia graduate student and green card holder, was arrested and placed in deportation proceedings over his role in pro-Palestinian protests. Student editors report particularly acute anxieties among international students who have contributed to their newspapers, but say that requests to take down stories over fears of retaliation are coming from US citizens, too.

At Columbia University, Adam Kinder, the editor of the Columbia Political Review, said his publication has been asked to take down nearly a dozen articles and halt the publication process of over a dozen more in response to mounting pressure in recent weeks. His team has complied with those requests. “For students who disagree with the Trump administration’s stance, they fear real retaliation,” Kinder said.

At Stanford University, the Stanford Daily has also seen a surge in takedown requests in recent weeks, according to its editor, Greta Reich. “One came in, then two, then five, then 10 – it just really started piling up very quickly,” she said. The requests, she said, ranged from sources seeking anonymity to opinion writers wanting their names removed, and even demands to blur out identifying images. One former staff editor, an international student, quit entirely, according to Reich. “They didn’t want to be associated with any publication or article that could get them in trouble,” she said.

Kinder, too, has had three staff writers resign out and four more go on hiatus of fear that their association with certain articles could jeopardize their safety or future career prospects.

The growing risk has prompted a coalition of national student journalism organizations to issue an alert on Friday calling on student papers to reconsider longstanding editorial norms around unpublishing stories and anonymization.

“What we are suggesting today stands in opposition to how many of us as journalism educators have taught and advised our students over the years,” the alert reads. “These are not easy editorial decisions, but these are not normal times.”

An ethical dilemma

Takedown requests present ethical dilemmas familiar to any newsroom, and student papers are no exception, with young editors needing to balance high-stakes safety concerns with the journalistic value of transparency. Some are exploring alternatives to full removals, such as de-indexing controversial articles – removing them from search results while keeping them live on their websites.

One editor at an Ivy League university, who requested anonymity given the sensitivities of the issue, said their publication is currently weighing this approach. “It became clear that no solution was going to be perfect. If you delete an article or leave it full of holes, it’s obvious something happened. That could just draw more attention,” they said. They also pointed out that removing articles entirely could backfire, as content often remains accessible through web archives including the Wayback Machine.

At the University of Virginia, the Cavalier Daily has historically refused takedown requests, but its editor, Naima Sawaya, acknowledged that the current climate is different. “One of our staffers, an immigrant, had to resign from our editorial board after we published pieces about Trump’s policies on universities, specifically regarding immigrants and pro-Palestine activism,” she said. The student, she said, was advised by the university’s international studies office that being publicly linked to these articles could pose risks to their visa status.

Sawaya has always viewed the paper as an archive. “We try to emphasize to our staffers when we’re onboarding them that the things they write are becoming part of the historical record,” she said. Recent concerns around student safety have started to challenge her view. “If a staffer today asked for a past article to be removed for their safety, I would remove it,” she admitted.

At New York University’s Washington Square News, editor Yezen Saadah said that while his publication does not publish anonymous bylines, staff are finding ways to respond to contributors who are at risk. “Some staff members have stepped back from reporting roles due to safety concerns, but they still contribute in [other] editorial capacities,” he said.

An editor at a public university in California, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity, said their newsroom had seen a dramatic increase in anonymization requests since Ice began arresting international students – from opinion writers seeking to remove their names from articles critical of Israel or Trump, to sources seeking to anonymize their quotes. They said international students are now only willing to speak to reporters under condition of anonymity.

“Most requests come from international students, though domestic students have also expressed concerns,” they said.

In February, the Purdue Exponent, a student paper at Purdue University in Indiana, removed the names and images of student protesters advocating for Palestinian human rights from its website, citing safety concerns and the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics, which prioritizes minimizing harm. “Pro-Palestinian students are under attack, so we’re removing their names,” the paper announced in an editorial. The paper immediately found itself at the center of a rousing conversation about journalistic ethics, and its editor reportedly received over 7,000 emails, including death threats.

Mike Hiestand, a lawyer at the Student Press Law Center, said that while student media traditionally resisted takedown requests, the current climate has forced a re-evaluation. “The reluctance to comply with takedown requests was based on a world that existed before January 2025,” Hiestand said.

Lindsie Rank, the campus advocacy director at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, also reiterated how much the risk environment has changed. “If one of these cases had called our hotline six months ago, our response would have been: ‘This isn’t really a legal issue. This is more of an ethical question.’ But that has changed,” she said.

Sawaya, from the Cavalier Daily, hasn’t yet taken down any pieces. But like other editors, she is grappling with how the new political reality is affecting the field she hopes to enter professionally when she graduates.

“One of the hardest things right now is getting people to talk to us – even people whose job it is to talk to us, like university communications officials,” she said. “It feels like there’s real fear.”

Bill Murray has said he feels he was “barbecued” by a sexual misconduct allegation on the set of a 2022 comedy, which led to the film being cancelled and his reaching a financial settlement with the woman who accused him of straddling her and kissing her.

“It wasn’t like I touched her,” said Murray to the New York Times in a new interview. “I gave her a kiss through a mask. And she wasn’t a stranger.”

Murray defended his actions to the paper, saying that the complainant was “someone that I worked with, that I had had lunch with on various days of the week”. The actor put his actions down to trying to be amusing in a strained and claustrophobic setting.

“We were all stranded in this one room listening to this crazy scene,” he said. “I dunno what prompted me to do it.” The action was one he had previously performed on someone else, he said.

“I thought it was funny, and every time it happened, it was funny,” continued Murray.

He continued: “It was a great disappointment, because I thought I knew someone, and I did not. I certainly thought it was light. I thought it was funny. To me it’s still funny, the idea that you could give someone a kiss with a mask on. It’s still stupid. It’s all it was.”

Production was suspended on Being Mortal, directed by Aziz Ansari, after the crew member filed a complaint against Murray, and was eventually shut down completely.

The film was backed by Searchlight Films, the production company now owned by Disney, which Murray said he feels handled the incident inappropriately.

“It still bothers me because that movie was stopped by the human rights or ‘H&R’ of the Disney corporation,” he said. “It turned out there were pre-existing conditions and all this kind of stuff. I’m like, what? How was anyone supposed to know anything like that? There was no conversation, there was nothing. There was no peacemaking, nothing.”

Once production was suspended, Murray said they “went to this lunatic arbitration”, while recommending that “if anyone ever suggests you go to arbitration: Don’t do it. Never ever do it. Because you think it’s justice, and it isn’t.”

Shortly after the complaint, Murray had said that he hoped the incident could be resolved swiftly. “We’re talking and we’re trying to make peace with each other,” he said, something he appeared to refer to speaking to the New York Times.

“I tried to make peace,” he said. “I thought I was trying to make peace. I ended up being, to my mind, barbecued.

“I don’t go too many days or weeks without thinking of what happened in Being Mortal.”

Murray, 74, remains one of the US’s most iconic comedians for his roles on Ghostbusters, Saturday Night Live and many of the films of Wes Anderson.

A number of directors and co-stars such as Geena Davis, Lucy Liu, Richard Dreyfuss and Harold Ramis have said they have not found Murray easy to work with, yet he remains a much-loved star, with sightings of him in the wild often going viral.

In 2014, Harvey Weinstein, then producing one of Murray’s movies, compared the phenomenon to faith. “It’s a religion,” he told Variety, “where you can act as badly as you want to people, and they still love you. I used to feel guilty about behaving badly, and I met Bill, and it feels so much better.”

Murray told Saturday’s New York Times it had taken him many years to reconcile himself to his status as of many people’s most prized celebrity sightings.

“I’ve walked down the street with a hat down over my head, glasses on my eyes. I loved Covid,” he said, going on to say that he put “so much energy” into navigating requests for photographs from strangers.

“What a screw head,” he said. “So now what I do for a living is, I take cellphone photographs. I’m not an actor. I am a donkey that is photographed with people who don’t know how to operate their own cellphone camera. … I don’t regret it. I don’t resent it.”

More women risk dying in pregnancy and childbirth because of aid cuts by wealthy countries, which could have “pandemic-like effects”, UN agencies have warned.

Pregnant women in conflict zones are the most vulnerable, and face an “alarmingly high” risk that is already five times greater than elsewhere, according to a new UN report on trends in maternal mortality.

Deaths due to complications in pregnancy and childbirth declined 40% globally between 2000 and 2023, but progress is “fragile” and has slowed since 2016, the authors said. An estimated 260,000 women died in 2023 from pregnancy-related causes.

There is a “threat of major backsliding” amid “increasing headwinds”, the authors said. US funding cuts this year have meant clinics closing and health workers losing their jobs, and disrupted the supply chains that deliver life-saving medicines to treat leading causes of maternal death such as haemorrhage, pre-eclampsia and malaria, World Health Organization experts warned.

The report – itself part-funded by the US – revealed that maternal deaths rose by 40,000 in 2021 due to the Covid pandemic, probably driven by complications from the virus itself and by the disruptions to healthcare.

Dr Bruce Aylward, an assistant director general at the WHO, said that rise could offer insights into the possible impact of current aid cuts.

“With Covid, we saw an acute shock to the system, and what’s happening with financing is an acute shock,” he said.

“Countries have not had time to put in place and plan for what other financing they’re going to use, what other workers they’re going to use, [and] what are the trade-offs they’re going to make in their systems to try to make sure the most essential services can continue.”

The shock to services, he said, would lead to “pandemic-like effects”, adding that funding cuts risked not only progress, “but you could have a shift backwards”.

Deaths around the world would need to fall 10 times faster than at present – by 15% rather than 1.5% a year – to achieve the sustainable development goal target of less than 70 per 100,000 live births before 2030.

The report highlighted significant inequalities. In poor countries in 2023, there were 346 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births – nearly 35 times the 10 per 100,000 in rich countries. While in high- and upper middle-income countries, 99% of births are attended by a health professional, this falls to 73% in poor countries.

Countries where there are conflicts, or which are characterised as “fragile”, accounted for 61% of global maternal deaths, but only 25% of global live births.

A 15-year-old girl in a poor country has a one in 66 chance of dying from a pregnancy or childbirth-related cause. In a rich country, the figure is one in 7,933 – and in a country at war the figure is one in 51.

Catherine Russell, Unicef’s director, said: “Global funding cuts to health services are putting more pregnant women at risk, especially in the most fragile settings, by limiting their access to essential care during pregnancy and the support they need when giving birth.

“The world must urgently invest in midwives, nurses and community health workers to ensure every mother and baby has a chance to survive and thrive.”

Maternal mortality rates have “stagnated” in many parts of the world since 2015, the report found, including northern Africa and much of Asia, Europe, North and Latin America, and the Caribbean.

The authors called for further efforts to ensure critical services were maintained and to improve access to family-planning services and education.

Pascale Allotey, director of the WHO’s reproductive health department, said: “It is an indictment on our humanity and a real travesty of justice that women die in childbirth today.

“It really is something that we all have a collective responsibility for,” she said. “We have to step up.”

More women risk dying in pregnancy and childbirth because of aid cuts by wealthy countries, which could have “pandemic-like effects”, UN agencies have warned.

Pregnant women in conflict zones are the most vulnerable, and face an “alarmingly high” risk that is already five times greater than elsewhere, according to a new UN report on trends in maternal mortality.

Deaths due to complications in pregnancy and childbirth declined 40% globally between 2000 and 2023, but progress is “fragile” and has slowed since 2016, the authors said. An estimated 260,000 women died in 2023 from pregnancy-related causes.

There is a “threat of major backsliding” amid “increasing headwinds”, the authors said. US funding cuts this year have meant clinics closing and health workers losing their jobs, and disrupted the supply chains that deliver life-saving medicines to treat leading causes of maternal death such as haemorrhage, pre-eclampsia and malaria, World Health Organization experts warned.

The report – itself part-funded by the US – revealed that maternal deaths rose by 40,000 in 2021 due to the Covid pandemic, probably driven by complications from the virus itself and by the disruptions to healthcare.

Dr Bruce Aylward, an assistant director general at the WHO, said that rise could offer insights into the possible impact of current aid cuts.

“With Covid, we saw an acute shock to the system, and what’s happening with financing is an acute shock,” he said.

“Countries have not had time to put in place and plan for what other financing they’re going to use, what other workers they’re going to use, [and] what are the trade-offs they’re going to make in their systems to try to make sure the most essential services can continue.”

The shock to services, he said, would lead to “pandemic-like effects”, adding that funding cuts risked not only progress, “but you could have a shift backwards”.

Deaths around the world would need to fall 10 times faster than at present – by 15% rather than 1.5% a year – to achieve the sustainable development goal target of less than 70 per 100,000 live births before 2030.

The report highlighted significant inequalities. In poor countries in 2023, there were 346 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births – nearly 35 times the 10 per 100,000 in rich countries. While in high- and upper middle-income countries, 99% of births are attended by a health professional, this falls to 73% in poor countries.

Countries where there are conflicts, or which are characterised as “fragile”, accounted for 61% of global maternal deaths, but only 25% of global live births.

A 15-year-old girl in a poor country has a one in 66 chance of dying from a pregnancy or childbirth-related cause. In a rich country, the figure is one in 7,933 – and in a country at war the figure is one in 51.

Catherine Russell, Unicef’s director, said: “Global funding cuts to health services are putting more pregnant women at risk, especially in the most fragile settings, by limiting their access to essential care during pregnancy and the support they need when giving birth.

“The world must urgently invest in midwives, nurses and community health workers to ensure every mother and baby has a chance to survive and thrive.”

Maternal mortality rates have “stagnated” in many parts of the world since 2015, the report found, including northern Africa and much of Asia, Europe, North and Latin America, and the Caribbean.

The authors called for further efforts to ensure critical services were maintained and to improve access to family-planning services and education.

Pascale Allotey, director of the WHO’s reproductive health department, said: “It is an indictment on our humanity and a real travesty of justice that women die in childbirth today.

“It really is something that we all have a collective responsibility for,” she said. “We have to step up.”

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.

Law firms that cut deals with Donald Trump’s administration after the president issued executive orders targeting attorneys who challenge his priorities are demonstrating “absolute cowardice”, the independent US senator Bernie Sanders has said.

“They’re zillion-dollar law firms, and money, money, money” is all that motivates them, the popular Vermont lawmaker who caucuses with Democrats said in a feature interview on the latest CBS News Sunday Morning. “So they’re going to sell out their souls to be able to make money here in Washington.”

Sanders’ remarks provided a notable condemnation of law firms who had represented political rivals of Trump then chose the path of least resistance after he aimed orders that threatened to cripple them. The orders sought to revoke security clearances, ban attorneys from accessing federal buildings, and – if they do business with the government – to force the targeted firm’s clients to disclose existing relationships with them.

Some of the US’s most prominent legal practices subsequently capitulated. Willkie, Farr and Gallagher; Milbank LLP; and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom all reached deals with the White House meant to avoid Trump’s orders.

In exchange, the firms would perform pro bono work for causes that are dear to them and Trump while also declining to engage in race-based hiring.

Some firms, on the other hand, have sought to stand up to Trump. Perkins Coie got a court injunction blocking much of an executive order from Trump that targeted the firm. Hundreds of law firms and former judges have signed on to court briefs supporting Perkins Coie in its opposition to Trump.

Meanwhile, after suing over Trump orders directed at them, Jenner & Block as well as WilmerHale were able to secure court mandates impeding most of his measures against them.

Alums of the law firms which have yielded to Trump have voiced some of the strongest criticism for choosing that course of action.

On Sunday, CBS asked Sanders what the cost was to the US when some of its most well-heeled institutions folded in that manner amid a standoff with Trump.

“It is indescribable,” Sanders said.

Sanders on Sunday also contended that many of Trump’s maneuvers nearly three months into his second presidency had rendered the US into a “pseudo-democracy”. He singled out how Trump tasked Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, with slashing the size as well as funding of various federal government agencies and services.

The multibillionaire owner of Tesla, SpaceX and X landed the role after spending more than $270m supporting Trump’s successful run for the White House in November.

“Look, you get one vote, and Elon Musk can spend $270m to help elect Trump,” Sanders told CBS. “Does that sound like a democracy to you?”

Northern Ireland’s public services, including hospitals, schools and police, are being “crippled” by lack of funding, impinging on the quality of life for many people, a report by a government committee has concluded.

The Northern Ireland select committee found patients waiting more than 12 hours to be seen in accident and emergency departments and mental health needs 40% greater than anywhere else in the UK. Hospital waiting lists are among the worst in the country.

Its investigation was also told that Northern Ireland “recently held the world record for prescribing the most anti-depressants per head of population”. It also found that children with special needs were waiting more than a year for support.

The budget for the Northern Ireland Police Service has been static since 2010, despite the special challenges it faces including cross-community recruitment and efforts to stamp out paramilitarism, one of the last vestiges of the Troubles.

One witness, the Law Society of Northern Ireland, said public services were “at risk of collapse”.

The former MP Stephen Farry, a co-director of Ulster University’s strategic policy unit, told the committee it was vital that the political classes in London understood just how bad public services were in NI compared with Great Britain.

He said: “The sheer scale of the crisis is that much greater.”

The committee chair, Tonia Antoniazzi, said: “The crisis afflicting public services in Northern Ireland has gone on for far too long with the crippling effects of underfunding impinging on the day to day lives of people across communities. The current hand to mouth approach when it comes to funding has often been too little, too late.”

The committee is calling on the government to ensure funding for the next fiscal year 2026 to 2027 is “according to NI’s level of need”.

Northern Ireland has the highest public spending per person in the UK, but raises the least revenue per person, the report found. It relies predominantly on what is known as a “block grant” allocated to the devolved administrations of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

According to the so-called Barnett formula used to calculate funding, each nation receives the same pound for pound rise in funding per capita as the national funding. So, for example, if education in England is £100 a head, devolved governments must also get that level of finance.

In recognition of the dire state of Northern Ireland’s public services, the previous government raised funding to give NI’s public sector £124 a head.

The committee noted that research was being conducted to see if that needed to be raised again.

“During our predecessor committee’s inquiry in 2023–24, it heard that the funding and delivery of public services in Northern Ireland were under enormous pressure. One year on, little appears to have changed,” it said.

When power-sharing resumed in 2024 after a 24-month hiatus, the government provided a £3.3bn package, but as part of the settlement the Stormont government was encouraged to raise more revenue itself for public services.

The committee’s investigation found that this has proved to be “politically difficult” with few options open to the devolved government.

As Donald Trump and Elon Musk widen their radical attacks on US judges who have stalled some of Trump’s executive orders and Musk’s slashing of federal agencies, they’re gaining backing from top House Republicans and other politicians, including some to whom the tech billionaire made big campaign donations.

House speaker Mike Johnson and judiciary panel chairman Jim Jordan have echoed some of Trump’s attacks on judges, and a judiciary subcommittee hearing on April 1 explored “judicial overreach” and ways to curb judges who have stymied some Trump orders or Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge) and its draconian cuts to the federal government.

Veteran Republican consultants say the hefty campaign-spending muscle of Musk, the world’s richest man, who spent about $300m helping Trump win last year, is likely to boost many Republican candidates in 2026 races, increasing pressures on members from Trump and Musk to accelerate efforts to rein in dissident judges.

“Republicans on Capitol Hill expect Musk to make a lot of donations to them in 2026,” said longtime Republican consultant Charlie Black. “But it’s likely that such donations will be coordinated with the president’s preferences.”

The verbal assaults on judges by Trump and his allies have been fueled by multiple rulings adverse to some Trump executive orders, including major court decisions in March that sought to halt deporting Venezuelan immigrants and blocking penalizing law firms that Trump deemed political enemies.

Washington DC judge James Boasberg incurred Trump’s wrath for trying to halt the deportation of hundreds of Venezuelans to an El Salvador prison with a nationwide injunction challenging the tenuous legal basis for the administration action. Boasberg’s ruling spurred Trump to falsely label him a “radical left lunatic”, urge his impeachment, and then call for him to be disbarred.

Musk has repeatedly used X, the social media platform he owns and on which he has over 200 million followers, to urge impeaching judges whose rulings he doesn’t like. “The only way to restore rule of the people in America is to impeach judges,” he said on 25 February.

Legal scholars say Trump and Musk’s radical threats of impeachment or disbarment for judicial rulings that stall or block administration moves undermine the rule of law.

“Trump and Musk are playing with fire,” said retired Massachusetts judge Nancy Gertner, who is now a lecturer at Harvard Law School. “They’re undermining bedrock constitutional principles.”

She added: “You can’t shut down a court just because you disagree. The judges have done nothing wrong or inconsistent with their oaths, and nothing outside their judicial roles.”

Trump’s call for impeaching Boasberg drew a sharp and broad rebuke from supreme court chief justice John Roberts, who last month said that “for more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision”.

Further, contrary to Trump’s baseless charges against Boasberg, the judge’s rulings have hardly been one-sided. One example: Boasberg sided with Trump in 2017 to stop the IRS from sharing his tax returns which a long-shot lawsuit sought.

Besides Boasberg, three other Washington DC judges last month ruled against Trump executive orders targeting law firms he viewed as political foes for retribution, which the judges argued were on dangerous or dubious legal ground.

Among other things, the Trump orders seek to take away security clearances for some of the law firms and sharply curtail their government business.

To ratchet up pressures on judges, after judge Beryl Howell issued a decision in March to temporarily block Trump from penalizing the law firm Perkins Coie, the justice department, in a rare move, tried to have Howell removed from the case, alleging she was biased.

In a blistering response, Howell wrote: “This strategy is designed to impugn the integrity of the federal judicial system and blame any loss on the decision-maker rather than fallacies in the substantive legal arguments presented.”

Two other DC judges in March backed law firms Jenner & Block and WilmerHale, which sued the administration on first amendment grounds to block executive orders aimed at hurting the firms financially for their separate ties to key lawyers who led a special counsel inquiry into how Russia worked to help elect Trump in 2016.

Judge John Bates, an appointee of former president George W Bush who issued a restraining order blocking Trump’s sanctions against Jenner & Block, called Trump’s punitive move “disturbing” and “troubling”, noting the order targets the firm’s and its lawyers’ rights under the first amendment, and due process.

Legal scholars and former judges are raising alarms about the rising dangers to the rule of law and the physical safety of judges sparked by the attacks from Trump and his congressional allies.

“While the threats to impeach federal judges based on their decisions are largely performative, they are also designed to foment disrespect for the judiciary and the rule of law,” said former federal judge John Jones, who is now the president of Dickinson College.

“In addition, many of the calls for impeachment are accompanied by the unconscionable disclosure of personal information about individual judges that jeopardize the personal safety of those judges and their family members.”

Other legal experts worry that Trump’s judicial attacks, which some congressional allies are parroting even though the odds of impeaching judges are long, could spark violence.

“The real risk comes not from Congress, but the fringe elements in Trump’s camp, who might be stirred up to threaten or actually inflict harm on the targeted judges,” said former federal prosecutor and Columbia Law School professor Daniel Richman.

“Judges are rightly worried about their safety, and the measures in place to protect them may prove inadequate if the dangerous and irresponsible rhetoric from the Trump camp continues.”

Despite such fears, many of Trump’s hardcore loyalists in Congress are jumping on board to further fuel Trump’s attacks on judges, while benefiting from Musk’s campaign largesse.

At least seven Republican members, including Andy Ogles of Tennessee and Brandon Gill of Texas, who echoed Trump’s call for impeaching Judge Boasberg, or advocated other “action” against judges who ruled against Trump orders, received checks from Musk for $6,600, the maximum he could donate.

Although Republican leaders have suggested that impeachment of judges won’t happen because they don’t have the votes, their public efforts to bolster Trump’s war on judicial independence has been accelerating, with allies exploring other avenues to curb judges.

Speaker Johnson turned up the heat on judges on 25 March when he vowed that “desperate times call for desperate measures, and Congress is going to act”. One option eyed by Trump’s Republican allies came up at a judiciary subcommittee hearing last week that focused on banning nationwide injunctions by judges. A House bill to ban such injunctions is expected to pass in coming weeks.

Meanwhile, Senator Charles Grassley, who leads his chamber’s judiciary committee and has received a donation from Musk, held a hearing that also explored bans on nationwide injunctions by judges; Grassley in March introduced a bill that would end the “practice of universal injunctions”, but Senate passage is deemed a long shot.

Some former Republican congressmen are highly critical of Trump’s congressional allies for amplifying his attacks on judges, and predict that the House GOP will try to “monetize” Trump’s fury at a growing number of judges.

“The investigation into judges by Chairman Jordan, and calls by Gill and Ogles for the impeachment of judges who have ruled against Trump, are more examples of blind loyalty to Trump by a bunch of sycophants,” said former Michigan member Dave Trott.

“It would not be such a big deal except for the fact that their conduct is helping create a crisis involving the constitution they swore to uphold.”

Trott added: “And just in case these sycophants suddenly decide to stand up to Trump, Elon is using his billions to help Republicans get re-elected. This will ensure the GOP stays in line. The concentration of great wealth and power is a problem that will have serious consequences for our country.”

Other ex-Republican members voice similar concerns.

“I think this is a talking point and a fundraising tool,’ said Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania, adding that members will attack judges for “impeding Trump’s agenda, and they’ll try to monetize it for campaign purposes”.

Some former prosecutors say the judicial attacks by Trump and his GOP allies jibe with Trump’s broader blitz to expand his powers

“Trump has, believe it or not, a strategic plan to disable all opposition,” said former prosecutor Paul Rosenzweig.

Part of that plan “involves eliminating internal oversight, like inspectors general, and cowing external opposition, by threatening law firms. The final piece is to eliminate the last independent check on his authority – judges. To do this he is falsely accusing them of bias and enlisting his sycophantic supporters, like Mike Johnson and Jim Jordan, in the effort.”