Extreme volatility plagued global stock markets on Monday, with Wall Street swinging in and out of the red as Donald Trump defied stark warnings that his global trade assault will wreak widespread economic damage, comparing new US tariffs to medicine.

A renewed sell-off began in Asia, before hitting European equities and reaching the US. It was briefly reversed amid hopes of a reprieve, only for Trump to threaten China with more steep tariffs, intensifying pressure on the market.

On Wall Street, the benchmark S&P 500 dropped by as much as 4.1% – entering bear market territory after falling more than 20% from its most recent peak, in February – before launching an extraordinary reversal to turn positive.

While markets were fleetingly boosted after Kevin Hassett, director of the White House national economic council, signaled that Trump was open to considering a 90-day pause on tariffs for all countries but China, the relief didn’t last long. By late morning, the S&P was trading down 1.4%.

As the turmoil headed into a second week, the Dow Jones industrial average was down 2%.

The FTSE 100 shed 4.6% in London, after the Nikkei 225 slumped 7.8% in Tokyo.

Trump, who has previously used market rallies as a barometer of his success, tried to brush off the sell-off this weekend. “I don’t want anything to go down,” the US president said on Sunday. “But sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something.”

He stood firm on Monday. “The United States has a chance to do something that should have been done DECADES AGO,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. “Don’t be Weak! Don’t be Stupid!”

As China prepares to retaliate, Trump threatened to further increase US tariffs on the country – an additional rate of 50% – if it hits back. All talks with Beijing over potential meetings have been “terminated”, he said.

Major share indices have fallen dramatically since he unveiled his controversial plan to overhaul the US economy last week. The Trump administration imposed a blanket 10% tariff on imported goods this weekend, and is set to follow with higher tariffs on products from specific nations from Wednesday.

While senior figures in corporate America have been reluctant to criticize Trump since his inauguration in January, a handful have started to sound the alarm in recent days.

The JPMorgan Chase boss, Jamie Dimon, one of the most influential executives on Wall Street, warned on Monday that Trump’s tariff plan was “likely” to exacerbate inflation. “Whether or not the menu of tariffs causes a recession remains in question, but it will slow down growth,” he wrote in his annual letter to shareholders.

Dimon added: “The quicker this issue is resolved, the better because some of the negative effects increase cumulatively over time and would be hard to reverse.”

The billionaire fund manager Bill Ackman, who backed Trump’s campaign for the presidency, has also demanded the administration reconsider its plan. “We are heading for a self-induced, economic nuclear winter,” he wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

Peter Navarro, Trump’s top trade adviser, insisted in a television interview on Monday morning that the market would find a bottom. Less than hour later, when New York opened for trading, and the search continued.

The technology-focused Nasdaq Composite started the day down 4.3%, before briefly turning positive. By mid-morning, it was down 1%. The VIX “fear index” of volatility rose as high as 60 for the first time since August.

Oil prices also came under pressure, with Brent and WTI benchmarks stooping to their lowest levels in four years, as growing economic tensions between Washington and Beijing stoked fears that a global downturn would challenge demand.

Sir Richard Branson, co-founder of Virgin Group, argued the “predictable and preventable” market chaos would have “catastrophic” implications for people in the US and around the world, and claimed companies were already going bankrupt as a result of the weaker dollar and higher costs.

“This is the moment to own up to a colossal mistake and change course,” Branson wrote on X. “Otherwise, America will face ruin for years to come.”

With global stock markets reeling from Donald Trump’s announcement of sweeping border taxes, some of the US president’s business allies have been left counting the cost.

The world’s 500 richest people lost a collective $536bn (£417bn) in the first two days of stock market trading after Trump’s “liberation day” announcement last Wednesday. It was the biggest two-day loss of wealth ever recorded by Bloomberg’s billionaires index.

Within that, a coterie of tycoons who have supported Trump or attended his inauguration in January have seen their wealth shrink. Here, we look at the four who have been worst hit by the market turmoil – and one billionaire still riding high this year.

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.”

An Israeli airstrike on a tent camp within a hospital complex in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis has killed 10 people, including a journalist, while seriously injuring dozens more after their encampment caught fire.

Images and video from the courtyard of Nasser hospital in Khan Younis showed people desperately attempting to extinguish the fires as it burned through a row of tents. One video showed people screaming as a bystander attempted to move a burning piece of furniture, while a journalist, later identified as Ahmed Mansour of the news outlet Palestine Today, sat upright engulfed by the blaze.

His colleague Helmi al-Faqawi was killed in the strike, while at least nine other journalists were among the wounded. Mansour received treatment for severe burns while the photographer Hassan Aslih was reportedly in a stable condition after suffering a head injury and cuts to his right hand.

The Palestinian foreign ministry in Ramallah said 10 people had been killed in the airstrike, with many more wounded. The ministry called al-Faqawi’s death an act of “extrajudicial killing,” labelling it part of growing crimes against journalists and an attempt to prevent the media from covering events on the ground.

Dozens of journalists in Gaza joined al-Faqawi’s relatives to bury the slain reporter in the hours after the attack, placing a blue flak jacket on top of the white shroud covering his body on a stretcher. His killing has brought the number of Palestinian journalists killed since October 2023 to 207, according to the Palestinian foreign ministry in the occupied West Bank.

“We will continue to deliver the message and convey the truth to the whole world. This is our humanitarian duty,” the journalist Abd Shaat told Reuters. He said that the noise of the airstrike had woken them, only for them to see that a nearby tent sheltering their colleagues was on fire.

Since the beginning of Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip hundreds of people have sought shelter in encampments in hospital grounds across the besieged territory, hoping that proximity will provide a measure of safety.

The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and the Shin Bet security agency said the airstrike on the hospital grounds was targeting Aslih, whom they accused of being a member of Hamas. In a statement, the IDF accused Aslih of taking part in Hamas’s attack on a string of Israeli towns and kibbutzim on 7 October 2023, when 1,200 people were killed and 250 taken hostage.

He took part in the attack by uploading “footage of looting, arson and murder to social media”, the IDF said. Aslih has documented the impact of Israeli attacks on Gaza by uploading photos and video to his Instagram page, followed by 571,000 people.

His most recent post showed the funeral of the journalist Islam Miqdad, her blue flak jacket also draped across the white shroud over her body, in a burial ritual for journalists. Miqdad was killed in an attack on the building where she was sheltering with her young son in western Khan Younis.

“My daughter is innocent. She had no involvement, she loved journalism and adored it,” Miqdad’s mother Amal Kaskeen told the Associated Press.

Last year was the deadliest on record for journalists, with Israel responsible for 70% of the total deaths of media workers, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Israel’s assault on Gaza claimed the lives of 82 Palestinian journalists in 2024, according to CPJ.

Israel resumed airstrikes on Gaza after a fragile ceasefire collapsed last month. The UN’s agency for Palestinian refugees said another 142,000 people were displaced in just six days in March after the resumption of fighting.

Fifty-nine hostages, including 24 understood to be alive, are still held by militants in Gaza. Israel’s assault on the territory has killed more than 50,000 Palestinians in 18 months of war, a third of them children, according to the health ministry in Ramallah.

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 the 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 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 was 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 was 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 were 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 more than 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.”

Police in the Brazilian state of São Paulo have uncovered that a judge spent 23 years working under a false identity – and a distinctly British one.

Born José Eduardo Franco dos Reis – a name fairly typical in a country once colonised by Portugal – he entered law school and served for over two decades as a judge using the false name Edward Albert Lancelot Dodd Canterbury Caterham Wickfield.

In 1995, having just passed the public examination to become a judge, Wickfield claimed in an interview with a Brazilian newspaper that he was the son of English aristocrats, born in Brazil but raised in the UK until the age of 25.

What police and public prosecutors are now calling a fraud was only recently discovered and came to the public’s attention following a piece by the news outlet G1.

Since then, Brazilians have been left stunned, trying to grasp how a judge could sustain such an elaborate deception for so long, especially with such an unusual name.

In October, identifying himself as Wickfield, he visited a government office in São Paulo to renew his ID card.

All his documents listed his “British” names, but the birth certificate registration number matched that of a Brazilian man named Dos Reis. When police cross-checked the data – and fingerprints – they confirmed it was the same individual.

According to what is known so far, Dos Reis began presenting himself as Wickfield in the early 1980s.

Police say he falsified his birth certificate, entered the University of São Paulo’s law school and began working as a judge in 1995, remaining on the bench until his retirement in 2018.

When police uncovered the alleged fraud, he was summoned for questioning. This time identifying himself as Dos Reis, he claimed that Wickfield was his twin brother, given up for adoption as a child to a noble British couple.

He gave no further explanation for the names, though a piece by the Folha de S Paulo newspaper noted that they appear inspired by literature – such as the Round Table’s Lancelot or Mr Wickfield, the lawyer in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield.

A public prosecutor charged Dos Reis with identity fraud and using false documents. Court officers have been unable to locate him, so he has yet to be formally summoned to respond.

Last Friday, the São Paulo Court decided to suspend his pension payments as a retired judge – in February alone, he received R$166,413.94 (more than $28,000).

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.”

Europe’s first research station for the study of Atlantic temperate rainforest is set to be built beside an ancient wood in Cornwall.

The Thousand Year Trust charity is crowdfunding an initial amount to build the £750,000 facility, which will enable students and academics to study this historically overlooked but biodiverse natural habitat.

The research station, which has planning permission, will be built at Cabilla, a former Cornish hill farm on Bodmin Moor that has become a retreat centre and rainforest restoration project with a swath of ancient woodland at its heart.

“The reason why everyone whether they are eight or 80 knows and loves tropical rainforest and understands that they are the lungs of the planet is because they’ve been so comprehensively researched but there’s a lack of love and knowledge about temperate rainforests,” said Merlin Hanbury-Tenison, the founder of the Thousand Year Trust.

“A lot of that lack of knowledge is because there aren’t scientists spending time dedicated to Atlantic temperate rainforests.”

Atlantic temperate rainforest thrives in the mild, wet, oceanic climate of far western Europe, stretching from Bergen in Norway to Braga in northern Portugal. It is often oak woodland notable for its spectacular epiphytes such as moisture-loving lichens, mosses and ferns.

Swaths of the woodland, which is a valuable carbon sink, once covered western Scotland, Wales and south-west England, as well as Ireland, but it has been reduced to tiny fragments, a fraction of its former size. Globally, temperate rainforest covers less than 1% of the Earth’s land surface, making it one of the rarest ecosystems on the planet.

Awareness of the Atlantic rainforest was raised by Guy Shrubsole’s book The Lost Rainforests of Britain. In 2023, the government published a temperate rainforests strategy for England, including a commitment to invest £750,000 on research into protecting England’s rainforests. Those funds are yet to be allocated.

Shrubsole has called for a target of doubling the area of British rainforest by 2050.

Hanbury-Tenison, who manages Cabilla, hosted 20 MSc students last year, with a further six PhDs being partly based in its Cornish rainforest from six universities that the Thousand Year Trust has partnered with. He hopes to double that number this year but lacks the facilities to host further scientific endeavours – until the research station is built.

It will be constructed from local wood sourced by the Woodland Trust and comprise bunkhouse accommodation for students, senior academics and volunteers, a laboratory/work station, canteen facilities and a modest amphitheatre area where talks and informal meetings can take place.

According to Hanbury-Tenison, Cabilla is the ideal location for Europe’s first temperate rainforest research station because it is situated in the middle of the habitat’s climatic envelope, with Bodmin Moor approximately halfway between Bergen in the north and Braga to the south.

As well as its crowdfunder, the Thousand Year Trust is in discussions with other larger charities, philanthropists and the government about potential funding for the research station.

The charity is also receiving a helping hand from Hanbury-Tenison’s father, Robin, an explorer who founded Survival International. Robin is celebrating his 89th birthday next month by doing a sponsored row 25 miles along the River Tamar, the boundary between “Cornwall and England” – as the Cornish often put it – to raise money for the research station.

“We hope it will serve as a nexus for temperate rainforest research across the whole range,” said Merlin Hanbury-Tenison. “I truly believe that we’ll only be able to make headway in protecting and expanding the Atlantic temperate rainforest when we love it and we’ll only love it when we understand it and that comes from scientific research.

“In 10 years’ time, when my children are beginning their GCSE studies, I’d like for the British public and education system to know that we are a rainforest people living on a rainforest island, just as people in Brazil or Borneo are proud of their rainforests.”

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.

A police officer who was driving a van that followed two teenage boys before they died in an e-bike crash in Cardiff, triggering hours of disorder in the city, will not face charges, prosecutors have said.

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said it had decided not to bring criminal charges against the South Wales police officer following the deaths of Harvey Evans, 15, and Kyrees Sullivan, 16, in Ely, Cardiff, on 22 May 2023.

Kyrees and Harvey died when they crashed on a Sur-Ron bike minutes after CCTV captured them being followed by a police van. The disorder afterwards included violent clashes with police and damage to property.

Malcolm McHaffie, the head of the CPS special crime division, said: “Our thoughts remain with the families and friends of the two teenagers following their tragic deaths in May 2023.

“Following a thorough and detailed review of the evidence in relation to a single allegation of dangerous driving in this case, we have decided that no criminal charges will be brought against a South Wales police officer.

“We have concluded that there is insufficient evidence to provide a realistic prospect of conviction. We fully understand that this will be disappointing news for the families of both boys and will offer a meeting with them to explain our reasoning further.”

The decision is subject to the victims’ right of review (VRR) scheme, which provides a victim or their families in some classes of case with a specifically designed process to exercise the right to review certain CPS decisions not to start a prosecution or to stop a prosecution.

The deaths provoked a night of violent disorder that left 15 police officers wounded. Rioters claimed they had gathered to pay respect to the dead boys before clashes broke out with officers from South Wales police.The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) said it submitted a file of evidence to the CPS to consider an offence of dangerous driving for the driver of a police van.

David Ford, an IOPC director, said: “We know that the boys’ deaths have had a deep impact on the local community and I want to thank everyone again for their patience while we carried out our detailed investigative work.”

He added: “We are finalising our position over any potential disciplinary proceedings in relation to the driver of the police van and will provide a further update once final decisions have been made.”

The watchdog said an additional investigation into family complaints against South Wales police, which covered a number of areas including the families’ treatment at the scene of the incident, was close to concluding.

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.

The actor John Lithgow has described Donald Trump’s second presidency as “a pure disaster” for the arts in the US. Lithgow, speaking after his best actor victory at the Olivier awards in London on Sunday, singled out Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center, Washington DC’s national institution for the performing arts. “Our administration has done some shocking, destructive things,” he said, “but the one that grieves me most is taking over the Kennedy Center.”

The US president is now chair of the prestigious cultural complex (which was founded as a government-funded, bipartisan venue) and has installed new board members and a new interim leader, loyalist Ric Grenell. The board had been in the process of selecting a successor to outgoing leader Deborah Rutter, who in January announced her intention to step down after 11 years.

“Deborah Rutter was fired from her position as president – even though she’d already resigned and had [several] months to go,” said Lithgow. “She’s a very good friend of mine. We co-chaired a commission on the arts [launched by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2018] and spent three years finding out the state of the arts in America [was] in crisis. Well, it’s really in crisis now. First there was coronavirus, now there’s this.”

Lithgow was named best actor at the Oliviers for his performance as Roald Dahl in Mark Rosenblatt’s play Giant, which ran at the Royal Court last year and transfers to the West End later this month. In his acceptance speech, the actor – best known for the TV comedy 3rd Rock from the Sun – said that this moment was “more complicated than usual” for relations between the US and the UK but that he personally felt the special relationship was “intact”.

Lithgow described himself as “a curious kind of hybrid Englishman”, reflecting on the films and TV series he has made in the UK and his stage appearances, which have included Twelfth Night with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2007 and The Magistrate at the National Theatre in 2012.

“I grew up with Shakespeare,” he said. “My father was a producer of Shakespeare festivals in Ohio. He was a regional theatre artistic director. I was in 20 Shakespeare plays by the time I was 20 years old … I came over and went to Lamda [the London drama school] after my college years. When I returned, everyone thought I was English … My sister said to me: ‘I’m not going to talk to you until you stop talking in that pretentious English accent!’”

While assessing the current climate for the arts in the US as “a pure disaster – really disheartening”, Lithgow said that “it gives us all something to fight for and I think the arts are animated by that. Right now, everybody is in shock.” Once that shock has passed, he acknowledged that “bad times create good art”.