Donald Trump insisted his trade war with much of the world was “doing really well” despite mounting fears of recession and as Beijing hit back and again hiked tariffs on US exports to China.

As the US president said his aggressive tariffs strategy was “moving along quickly”, a closely watched economic survey revealed that US consumer expectations for price growth had soared to a four-decade high.

The White House maintains that the US economy is on the verge of a “golden age”, however, and that dozens of countries – now facing a US tariff of 10% after Trump shelved plans to impose higher rates until July – are scrambling to make deals.

“The phones have been ringing off the hook to make deals,” the press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told reporters on Friday.

Beijing raised Chinese tariffs on US products to 125% on Friday – the latest salvo of its escalating trade dispute with Washington – and accused Trump of “unilateral bullying and coercion”.

“Even if the US continues to impose even higher tariffs, it would no longer have any economic significance, and would go down as a joke in the history of world economics,” the Chinese finance ministry said.

Few investors were laughing. US government bonds – typically seen as one of the world’s safest financial assets – continued to be sold off, and were on course for their biggest weekly loss since 2019. The dollar also fell against a basket of currencies, and was down against the euro and the pound.

Leading stock indices paused for breath on Friday after days of torrid trading. The FTSE 100 rose 0.6% in London. The S&P 500 increased 1.8% and the Dow Jones industrial average gained 1.6% in New York.

The S&P 500 finished an extraordinarily volatile week for markets up 5.7%, its biggest weekly gain since November 2023.

“We are doing really well on our TARIFF POLICY,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. “Very exciting for America, and the World!!! It is moving along quickly. DJT”

Some of Wall Street’s most influential figures were unconvinced. “I think we’re very close, if not in, a recession now,” Larry Fink, CEO of the investment giant BlackRock, told CNBC. Far from providing certainty, the 90-day pause on higher US tariffs on much of the world “means longer, more elevated uncertainty”, he added.

Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, the US’s largest bank, said the world’s largest economy was facing “considerable turbulence” as a key measure of consumer confidence tumbled to its lowest level since the Covid-19 pandemic – and the second-lowest level on record.

US consumer sentiment has dropped 11% to 50.8 this month, ahead the pause announced by Trump earlier this week, according to a regularly survey compiled by the University of Michigan.

Expectations for inflation meanwhile surged, with respondents indicating they are bracing for prices to rise by 6.7% over the coming year – the survey’s highest year-ahead inflation expectation reading since 1981.

“There is great optimism in this economy,” Leavitt claimed at the White House briefing when asked about the survey. “Trust in President Trump. He knows what he’s doing. This is a proven economic formula.”

Trump won back the White House last November by pledging to rapidly bring down prices – something he has claimed, in recent weeks, is already happening. US inflation climbed at an annual rate of 2.4% last month, according to official data.

“Consumers have spiralled from anxious to petrified,” observed Samuel Tombs, chief US economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics. He added, however, that a bipartisan divide – with Democrats growing more pessimistic, while Republicans become more upbeat – suggests that people are allowing their political views to cloud their economic confidence.

The US’s top markets watchdog is facing demands from senior Democrats to launch an investigation into alleged insider trading and market manipulation after Trump declared on social media that it was “A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!” hours before announcing Wednesday’s climbdown on tariffs.

Days of erratic policymaking constructed a rollercoaster week for markets, with the S&P 500 dropping 12% in just four sessions, before surging back almost 10% in a single day after the administration pulled back from imposing higher tariffs on most countries, except China, which is facing a 145% tariff on exports to the US.

In a letter to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Senate Democrats including Elizabeth Warren and Chuck Schumer wrote: “It is unconscionable that as American families are concerned about their financial security during this economic crisis entirely manufactured by the President, insiders may have actively profited from the market volatility and potentially perpetrated financial fraud on the American public.”

Tesla meanwhile stopped taking orders in China for two models it previously imported from the US, as companies scramble to adapt to prohibitive tariffs imposed in Trump’s trade war.

The manufacturer, run by Trump’s close ally Elon Musk, removed “order now” buttons on its Chinese website for its Model S saloon and Model X sports utility vehicle.

Tesla did not give any indication of why it had made the changes but it came after the rapid escalation of the trade war between the US and China.

The border taxes make the goods trade between the two countries prohibitively expensive and mean cars imported from the US are now much less attractive in China than those produced locally.

In the UK, economists warned that stronger than expected growth of 0.5% in February is likely to prove short lived as the impact of Trump’s trade war is felt throughout the global economy.

Ministers should focus on rebuilding bridges with the EU, Labour politicians have said, after a senior adviser to Donald Trump downplayed the prospect of a breakthrough with the US.

MPs said the government should “prioritise our trading relationship with the EU” and “get a sugar rush of growth” instead of banking on the prospect of preferential treatment from Washington.

Trump imposed 10% tariffs on all UK exports this month, with several other markets, including the EU, facing steeper rates. After financial markets plummeted, the US president announced a temporary reprieve on Wednesday, reducing tariffs on almost all other countries to his baseline of 10%. Car, steel and aluminium imports continue to face a higher tariff of 25%.

The government is in advanced negotiations with the US over a trade deal to secure more favourable arrangements for the UK. However, Kevin Hassett, an economic adviser to Trump, told CNBC on Thursday that any deal that would persuade the president to go below 10% would need to be “extraordinary”.

Asked if she was losing confidence in the prospect of a US trade deal, Rachel Reeves told reporters on Friday: “We continue to engage with our counterparts in the United States.”

She added: “At the same time, we also want to improve trading relations with other countries around the world. It’s why I hosted the Indian finance minister in London this week as part of our economic and financial dialogue, and to try and secure a free trade and investment treaty with India. It’s also why we are having a summit with the European Union in May to improve our trading relations.”

The Guardian reported this week that the government had told businesses a free trade deal with India was 90% complete. Ministers are also putting stock in building economic ties with China, with the trade minister Douglas Alexander travelling to Beijing this week for talks.

Liam Byrne, the Labour chair of the Commons business and trade committee, called for a “big, ambitious reset” with the EU and said it would “deliver an economic uplift bigger than the hit we are going to take from tariffs”.

He said: “We need to prioritise our trading relationship with the EU because it is big and close … There is a real frustration in Brussels about the UK not being clearer in what it wants in the reset. This is in the EU’s interest, the UK’s interest, and the urgency of the situation demands that we crack on with this.”

Stella Creasy, a Labour MP and chair of the Labour Movement for Europe, said: “Get the deal with Europe. Stop talking about red lines. We have shown we can work with Europe on defence security and our economies are intertwined … we do five times as much trade with Europe as with America.

“At the moment, we have tariff-free trade with Europe but we have a massive drop in trade because of all the paperwork. There are many ways we could negotiate to remove those barriers and get a sugar rush of growth from improving trading with our neighbours.”

Harriet Harman, the former cabinet minister and Labour peer, said ministers needed to address “the elephant in the room, which is that Trump is wrong on this, we don’t agree with him”.

Speaking to Sky News’ Electoral Dysfunction podcast, Harman said that when the US put tariffs on imported steel in 2002, Tony Blair “did say this is unacceptable, this is wrong, it’s unjustified, it is breaching the World Trade Organization rules”.

“He was able to say we do not believe this is how you should be within the world organisation and Bush has got it wrong,” she added. “I think it feels as if there’s a kind of restricted vocabulary amongst ministers at the moment where they are speaking in code.

“I think the story needs to be told to the country that this is a really difficult problem and Trump has caused it and he is wrong to do this, but we will be OK with this government,” Harman said.

Hassett told CNBC this week: “Everybody expects that the 10% baseline tariff is going to be the baseline. It is going to take some kind of extraordinary deal for the president to go below there.”

Starmer admitted on Thursday that he had not spoken to Trump since the tariffs were introduced.

Amid the global fallout from Donald Trump’s “liberation day” tariff announcement, it appears nowhere is safe. Crashing share prices, a sell-off in bonds and currency chaos erasing trillions of dollars of wealth in a matter of days.

On Friday, the dollar fell by more than 1% relative to a basket of other currencies to reach its lowest level in three years, compounding an almost 10% slide since the start of the year. In the space of a week, it has lost about 3 cents against the pound and 4 cents against the euro.

Even after the president’s partial U-turn – freezing tariffs at 10% on all US imports except those from China for 90 days – markets swung from relief rally to fresh rout, as investors questioned the once unthinkable: could the US dollar be losing its unassailable safe haven status?

“The damage has been done,” said George Saravelos, the head of foreign exchange research at Deutsche Bank. “The market is reassessing the structural attractiveness of the dollar as the world’s global reserve currency and is undergoing a process of rapid de-dollarisation.”

Unlike in a typical market sell-off, the Trump crash has included US equities, government bonds, known as treasuries, and the dollar losing value in sync. That is unusual because investors normally plough into dollars and Treasury bonds in periods of uncertainty and financial distress.

For the past 80 years, the dollar has held a status as the world’s primary reserve currency; used as a store of value around the globe, as the grease in the wheels of the financial system and as the medium of exchange in trade.

The belief is that a currency backed by the government sitting atop the world’s pre-eminent economy, with the deepest capital markets, most powerful military and a political system that respects the rule of law is about as good as things get.

However, Trump is changing all that, having slapped punitive tariffs on the US’s traditional allies and enemies alike.

Raghuram Rajan, a former governor of the Reserve Bank of India and an ex-chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, said the currency crisis stemmed from investor worries over the US economy and Trump’s erratic policy changes.

“There is a worry about how volatile and unpredictable US policy has become, as well as increasing fears that if the high level of tariffs are to stay, the US will head into a recession,” he said. “[Though] of course, tariff policy seems to be a moving target.”

The sudden loss of confidence has been stark in the US Treasury market, widely considered to be the most important in the world because investors normally use it as the “risk free” benchmark to determine the price of every other financial asset.

In the sharpest weekly move since 1982, the yield – in effect the interest rate – on 30-year US government bonds rose from about 4.4% to 4.8%. The yield on 10-year bonds has also risen.

Investors say a lot is going on. While a clear confidence crisis is brewing, the turbulence for the US dollar and treasuries also reflects the likely economic damage Trump’s policies will inflict; including a more than 50-50 probability of a US recession and the rising chance of the Federal Reserve cutting interest rates.

Amid the wider market rout – with more than $5tn (£3.8tn) wiped off from US share prices – the sell-off in bonds also reflected hedge funds rushing to sell Treasuries to cut back on risky trades, as well as investors dashing for cash.

“I think Trump’s trade views are folly and madness. He is going to harm the US economy and has created a needless crisis,” said Mark Sobel, a former top US Treasury official who is now the US chair of the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum, a central banking thinktank.

“My basic thesis is that the dollar will remain the dominant global currency for the foreseeable future as there are not viable alternatives. But I think that Trump, by weakening America’s economic and institutional foundations by not being a trusted partner, is undermining the underpinnings of what has given rise to dollar dominance.

“His actions over the last week will decidedly accelerate the erosion in dollar dominance as well as give rise to a lot more market volatility globally.”

Figures compiled by the IMF showed the US dollar being the reserve currency of choice for countries around the world, accounting for almost 60% of global foreign exchange reserves. The euro is a distant second, at about 20%, followed by the Japanese yen at almost 6%. Sterling – the global reserve currency before the US’s rise to dominance after the second world war – accounts for about 5%.

Sobel said there had been a recent uptick in the use of the Canadian and Australian dollar, as well as Swiss francs and the yen. The euro has made little ground, while the Chinese yuan – backed by a communist government, with an economy relatively closed to the wider world – still lacks global favour.

Some within Trump’s administration, however, view the dollar’s status as the international reserve currency with distaste, as another sign of the world freeloading off the US.

The president has long wanted a weaker dollar with the idea it would help make US goods cheaper to overseas buyers, supporting domestic manufacturing and helping to reduce the country’s trade deficits.

Stephen Miran, the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, has suggested a plan with parallels to the 1985 Plaza accord – when the US agreed with Japan, Britain, West Germany and France to depreciate the dollar – in what could be called the “Mar-a-Lago accord” after Trump’s Florida residence.

Typically trade deficits – when imports exceed exports – balance over time, as they create downward pressure on a country’s currency (as the result of demand for foreign currency exceeding that of domestic currency). However, the US’s “exorbitant privilege” atop the global reserve currency – guaranteeing dollar demand – has enabled the country to run a persistent trade deficit since the 1970s.

Many economists see little problem with this; if consumers are benefiting from cheaper imported goods.

There are also fears among investors that the US could pursue a strategy of forcing other countries to pay for the “exorbitant privilege” of using the dollar as the reserve currency. That, however, would come with severe damage for the world economy, while further undermining confidence in the dollar.

“The world should be prepared [for this],” said Karsten Junius, a chief economist at J Safra Sarasin Sustainable Asset Management. “We consider it likely that the US will try to combine preferential tariff treatment, access to its market and financial infrastructure to countries that follow the US in isolating China.

“Countries would need to take sides, which would be particularly difficult for European and east Asian countries that have equally important relationships with both the US and China.”

In response to the dollar’s uncertain future, the EU in particular is looking at contingency plans. José Luis Escrivá, the governor of the Bank of Spain and a member of the European Central Bank’s governing council, told the Financial Times the bloc could emerge as a more attractive alternative.

“We can offer a very large economic area and a solid currency, which benefit from the stability and predictability which result from sound economic policies and the rule of law.”

Pascal Lamy, the former EU trade commissioner and ex-head of the World Trade Organization, also said Trump’s trade war could lead other countries to work more closely together.

“The EU is the obvious candidate to rally a number of others. It won’t work if China does it or even if India does it,” he said.

“It is an American crisis. It’s not a global crisis. The US is 13% of world imports. But there is no reason for the 87% remaining to be contaminated by these voodoo economics.”

Several senior Senate Democrats have written a letter asking the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to investigate whether Donald Trump violated securities laws and engaged in insider trading and market manipulation while switching course on his global tariffs.

“We urge the SEC to investigate whether the tariff announcements, which caused the market crash and subsequent partial recovery, enriched administration insiders and friends at the expense of the American public and whether any insiders, including the president’s family, had prior knowledge of the tariff pause that they abused to make stock trades ahead of the president’s announcement,” said the letter, led by the Massachusetts senator and former presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren.

Early on Wednesday, Trump announced on social media: “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!” The post was written at a time of severely volatile market trends and US indices down.

Hours after his post, the US president abruptly announced a 90-day pause on many tariffs. The move sent the US’s S&P 500 back up several percentage points in just minutes. Wednesday ended up marking the best day for the S&P 500 since the recovery from the 2008 financial crisis.

The letter was also signed by the Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, finance committee ranking member Ron Wyden, the Arizona senators Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego, and California’s Adam Schiff.

The senators accuse Trump of announcing “a series of erratic, reckless tariffs, leading to significant market turmoil”, adding: “As a direct result of this chaos, the US financial markets have experienced dramatic declines over the course of just a few days.”

The letter adds: “It is unclear which officials and affiliates of President Trump had advance knowledge of his plans to delay tariffs – but insiders may have known that he was going to announce a tariff pause and that the market would improve.”

The senators also questioned the Trump administration’s actions to undercut the SEC, asking what effects the recent actions and federal staff cuts had had on the agency’s ability to “investigate and pursue enforcement actions” as well as “monitor and respond to large-scale market events”.

The pilot of a sightseeing helicopter that crashed into New York’s Hudson River on Thursday killing all six people onboard reportedly sent a radio message moments earlier saying he was low on fuel and was heading back to the helipad, its operators said on Friday.

Michael Roth, the chief executive of New York Helicopter Tours, described how the pilot never made it back to the downtown Manhattan heliport it took off from about 16 minutes previously on its sixth flight of the day, the Telegraph reported.

“He called in that he was landing and that he needed fuel, and it should have taken him about three minutes to arrive, but 20 minutes later, he didn’t arrive,” Roth told the UK outlet. However, he does not know exactly why the chopper came down.

As well as the pilot, the crash killed five members of a Spanish family. The victims were identified as Agustín Escobar, an executive of the technology company Siemens, his wife, Mercè Camprubí, who was celebrating her 40th birthday, and their three children, aged 10, eight and four, according to Eric Adams, the New York mayor.

The middle child would have celebrated their ninth birthday on Friday, Adams said.

Steven Fulop, the Jersey City mayor, said a relative was arriving from Spain on Friday to take home the family members’ remains.

The pilot has not yet been officially named, and the firm did not immediately respond to a request from the Guardian for comment.

But a report on Friday afternoon from the Gothamist identified the pilot as Sean Johnson, a 36-year-old veteran of the Navy Seals who had recently moved to New York City to continue his aviation career, according to family members and his Facebook profile.

Johnson’s wife, Kathryn, told the outlet that after his military career he took on a variety of jobs, including on a TV show and as a bodyguard for celebrities – but that through it all, Johnson “always wanted to fly”,

Kathryn said that she was struggling to process news of his death. “ It’s just hard right now,” she said.

Divers returned to the river early on Friday morning to salvage sections of the helicopter. Fulop said “major parts” of the Bell 206 chopper broke apart in midair and plunged into the water.

Videos posted on social media captured large chunks of the helicopter, including rotor blades spinning independently of the fuselage, falling from the sky and splashing into the river on Thursday afternoon, not long after the tourist flight had taken off from a popular heliport at the tip of Manhattan.

Other footage showed the aircraft mostly submerged, upside down in the water, and rescue vehicles crowding the streets in New Jersey as emergency workers raced in.

The Hudson River divides the west side of Manhattan from New Jersey and flows into New York harbor past the Statue of Liberty. The weather on Thursday afternoon featured gray skies, light winds and cold rain.

On Friday, witnesses spoke of the shocking moments shortly after 3pm when the sightseeing helicopter, operated by New York Helicopter Tours, broke into pieces about 16 minutes into flight.

“I heard very loud sounds, I thought it had to be gunshots, it was that level loud,” Dani Horbiak told ABC’s Good Morning America.

“When I looked out my window I saw a helicopter falling into pieces. It all happened in seconds.”

Another witness, Bruce Wall, said he also saw the helicopter breaking up in flight.

“I heard some crackling, looked up, and I just see a plane falling apart,” he said. “The tail broke off and the plane tumbled into the water with the propeller still in the air.”

Sean Duffy, the US transportation secretary, said officials from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) were on site and leading the investigation, and that the aircraft was not being monitored by air traffic controllers on the ground at the time it crashed.

Tributes were paid in Spain to Escobar, 49, chief executive of rail infrastructure at Siemens Mobility, and his family, who were enjoying a sightseeing excursion of New York City.

Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, posted to X on Friday: “We have had devastating news about the helicopter accident in the Hudson River.

“Five Spaniards from the same family, three of them children, lost their lives along with the pilot. It’s an unimaginable tragedy. I share the pain of the victims’ loved ones in this heartbreaking moment.”

Spain’s transport minister, Óscar Puente, said : “Reading with horror that the victims of the awful helicopter accident in the US were Agustín Escobar and his family. I met him over the past year in his capacity at Siemens Spain. He was a charming, hard-working and talented person.”

The German industrial conglomerate Siemens confirmed that Escobar worked for the company as head of rail infrastructure at its mobility division.

“We are deeply saddened by the tragic helicopter crash in which Agustín Escobar and his family lost their lives,” Siemens said in a statement.

Camprubí, Escobar’s wife, was a global manager at an energy technology company.

Fulop said in a post to X on Friday that Escobar was in New York for work, and his family joined him for some leisure time.

“I’m sharing this because life moves quick and we don’t always think about the fact it is unpredictable and extremely fragile,” he wrote.

“The husband was here for a business trip and the family flew out to extend the trip a couple days in NYC. They were celebrating the mom’s 40th birthday with the tourist helicopter flight.”

Jessica Tisch, the New York City police commissioner, said most of the passengers were already dead when they were removed from the water, but two were taken to a nearby hospital, where they died soon after.

Tisch said the helicopter took off from a downtown helicopter pad at about 3pm and flew north over the Hudson. It turned south when it reached the George Washington Bridge and crashed minutes later, hitting the water upside down and sinking near Lower Manhattan about 3.15pm, just off Hoboken, New Jersey.

Justin Green, an aviation lawyer and former Marine Corps helicopter pilot, told the AP: “There’s no indication they had any control over the craft. No pilot could have prevented that accident once they lost the lifts. It’s like a rock falling to the ground.”

Green added that videos of the crash suggest a “catastrophic mechanical failure” and it is possible the helicopter’s main rotors struck the tail boom, breaking it apart and causing the cabin to free fall.

The agency said at least 38 people had died in helicopter accidents in New York City since 1977. A collision between a plane and a tourist helicopter over the Hudson in 2009 killed nine people, and five died in 2018 when a charter helicopter offering “open door” flights went down into the East River.

The crash of a tourist helicopter on New York’s Hudson River on Thursday that killed a pilot and a Spanish family of five was “entirely predictable”, according to advocates who are calling for the closure of the region’s three heliports to non-essential traffic.

“A lot of these helicopters are 30 or even 40 years old, and this one was 21 years old, which is still pretty old,” said Andrew Rosenthal, the chair of the Stop the Chop group that has campaigned for an end to helicopter sightseeing trips over New York City and the New York-New Jersey metropolitan area.

“In New York if you have a yellow cab you have to get a new one every five to eight years, yet here we are letting these things fly in the sky at 30 and 40 years of age. There’s no age limit that I’m aware of, which is crazy.

“This was entirely predictable, and preventable. If we had a rollercoaster that killed people every two years, we would not keep it operating, yet we have the same kind of joy ride in the sky that kills people every couple of years, and we keep changing nothing,” he said.

Investigators are working to establish the cause of Thursday’s crash, in which witnesses reported seeing the helicopter break up in midair and plunge in pieces into the river that runs between the west side of Manhattan and the eastern shore of New Jersey.

According to the Associated Press, at least 38 people have died in helicopter accidents in New York City since 1977.

A collision between a plane and a tourist helicopter over the Hudson in 2009 killed nine people, and five died in 2018 when a charter helicopter offering “open door” flights went down into city’s the East River.

Stop the Chop has documented a succession of other non-fatal incidents involving helicopters in and around New York City in recent years, and Rosenthal said it was beyond time that city officials ended tourism flights from the downtown Manhattan heliport from which the Bell 206 chopper took off on Thursday, and two other public-use helipads on the island of Manhattan.

According to the Aviation Property Network, a specialist real estate company, the facilities generate a combined $2.7m annually for New York in lease payments from companies that operate more than 42,000 sightseeing trips annually.

“The mayor can close down the Manhattan downtown heliport tonight, if he wanted to, one stroke of a pen and no other legislation needed,” said Rosenthal, whose group said more than 30,000 of the flights took off from there.

“This is not the first crash, it’s another one in a long series. It’s predictable. It’s going to happen again, it’s just a matter of numbers. We’re OK with police, military, government, news, those are considered essential in our definition, but these non-essential flights are totally not needed.”

Eric Adams, the New York mayor, was asked about sightseeing flights on Friday on the Good Day New York TV show.

“After any form of malfunction, crash or challenge, sometimes that’s [the] immediate thought … we should ban the helicopters or we should not have this tourism type of attraction in our city,” he said.

“We have 65 million tourists that came into the city last year. This is all part of the attraction of being in New York. People want to see the city from the sky.

“What is crucial is that any airport or any air device, that is done with the proper maintenance and proper safety. And that’s what this investigation is going to determine.”

Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate and Palestinian organizer, is eligible to be deported from the United States, an immigration judge ruled on Friday during a contentious hearing at a remote court in central Louisiana.

The decision sides with the Trump administration’s claim that a short memo written by the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, which stated Khalil’s “current or expected beliefs, statements or associations” were counter to foreign policy interests, is sufficient evidence to remove a lawful permanent resident from the United States. The undated memo, the main piece of evidence submitted by the government, contained no allegations of criminal conduct.

During a tense hearing on Friday afternoon, Khalil’s attorneys made an array of unsuccessful arguments attempting to both delay a ruling on his eligibility for removal and to terminate proceedings entirely. They argued the broad allegations contained in Rubio’s memo gave them a right to directly cross-examine him.

Khalil held prayer beads as three attorneys for the Department of Homeland Security presented arguments for his removal.

Judge Jamee Comans ruled that Rubio’s determination was “presumptive and sufficient evidence” and that she had no power to rule on concerns over free speech.

“There is no indication that Congress contemplated an immigration judge or even the attorney general overruling the secretary of state on matters of foreign policy,” Comans said.

A supporter was in tears sat on the crowded public benches as the ruling was delivered.

Following the ruling, Khalil, who had remained silent throughout proceedings, requested permission to speak before the court.

Addressing the judge directly, he said: “I would like to quote what you said last time, that ‘there’s nothing that’s more important to this court than due process rights and fundamental fairness.’”

He continued: “Clearly what we witnessed today, neither of these principles were present today or in this whole process.

“This is exactly why the Trump administration has sent me to this court, 1,000 miles away from my family. I just hope that the urgency that you deemed fit for me is afforded to the hundreds of others who have been here without hearing for months.”

Khalil, 30, helped lead pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia last year. He was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officers in New York on 8 March and transferred to a detention facility in Jena, Louisiana, where he has been detained for over a month. His case was the first in a string of Ice arrests instigated by the Trump administration targeting pro-Palestinian students and scholars present in the US on visas or green cards.

The ruling means that Khalil’s removal proceedings will continue to move forward in Jena, while a separate case being heard in federal court in New Jersey examines the legality of his detention and questions surrounding the constitutionality of the government’s claims it can deport people for first amendment-protected speech if they are deemed adverse to US foreign policy.

Khalil’s legal team is asking the New Jersey judge to release him on bail so that he can reunite with his wife, who is due to give birth to their first child this month.

His lawyers slammed the decision, which they said appeared to be prewritten. “Today, we saw our worst fears play out: Mahmoud was subject to a charade of due process, a flagrant violation of his right to a fair hearing, and a weaponization of immigration law to suppress dissent. This is not over, and our fight continues,” said Marc van der Hout, Khalil’s immigration lawyer.

“If Mahmoud can be targeted in this way, simply for speaking out for Palestinians and exercising his constitutionally protected right to free speech, this can happen to anyone over any issue the Trump administration dislikes. We will continue working tirelessly until Mahmoud is free and rightfully returned home to his family and community.”

During a short prayer vigil held outside the detention centre on Friday afternoon, a group of interfaith clergy read messages of support. A short statement from Khalil’s wife, Noor Abdalla, who is due to give birth this month, was also delivered in front of reporters.

“Today’s decision feels like a devastating blow to our family. No person should be deemed ‘removable’ from their home for speaking out against the killing of Palestinian families, doctors, and journalists,” the statement read.

It continued: “In less than a month, Mahmoud and I will welcome our first child. Until we are reunited, I will not stop advocating for my husband’s safe return home.”

The New Jersey judge has ordered the government not to remove Khalil as his case plays out in federal court. A hearing in that case is set for later on Friday.

Lawyers for the Trump administration were unable on Friday to tell a federal court exactly where the Maryland resident who was wrongly deported to El Salvador last month is or how he is, as the judge admonished the government at a heated hearing.

The US district judge Paula Xinis said it was “extremely troubling” that the Trump administration failed to comply with a court order to provide details on the whereabouts and status of the Salvadorian citizen Kilmar Abrego García and she wanted daily updates on what the government is doing to bring him home.

“Where is he and under whose authority?” Xinis asked in a Maryland courtroom.

“I’m not asking for state secrets,” she said. “All I know is that he’s not here. The government was prohibited from sending him to El Salvador, and now I’m asking a very simple question: where is he?”

The government side responded that it had no evidence that he is not still in El Salvador. “That is extremely troubling,” Xinis said.

The US supreme court on Thursday upheld the judge’s order to facilitate Abrego García’s return to the US, after a lawsuit filed by the man and his family challenging the legality of his summary deportation on 15 March.

Abrego García has had a US work permit since 2019 but was stopped and detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officers on 12 March and questioned about alleged gang affiliation. He was deported on one of three high-profile deportation flights to El Salvador made up chiefly of Venezuelans whom the government accuses of being gang members and assumed special powers to expel without a hearing.

Xinis on Friday repeatedly pressed a government attorney for answers but the administration defied her order for details on how or when it would retrieve Abrego García and claimed she had not given them enough time to prepare.

“I’m not sure what to take from the fact that the supreme court has spoken quite clearly and yet I can’t get an answer today about what you’ve done, if anything, in the past,” Xinis said.

Drew Ensign, an attorney with the Department of Justice, repeated what the administration had said in court filings, that it would provide the requested information by the end of Tuesday, once it evaluated the supreme court ruling.

“Have they done anything?” Xinis asked. Ensign said he did not have personal knowledge of what had been done, to which the judge responded: “So that means they’ve done nothing.”

The administration said in a court filing earlier on Friday that it was “unreasonable and impracticable” to say what its next steps are before they are properly agreed upon and vetted.

“Foreign affairs cannot operate on judicial timelines, in part because it involves sensitive country-specific considerations wholly inappropriate for judicial review,” the filing said.

Abrego García’s lawyers said in a Friday court filing: “The government continues to delay, obfuscate, and flout court orders, while a man’s life and safety is at risk.”

The case highlights the administration’s tensions with federal courts. Several have blocked Trump policies, and judges have expressed frustration with administration efforts – or lack of them – to comply with court orders.

Abrego García’s wife, US citizen Jennifer Vásquez Sura, has not been able to speak to him since he was flown to his native El Salvador last month and imprisoned. She has been rallying outside court and has urged their supporters to keep fighting for him “and all the Kilmars out there whose stories are still waiting to be heard”.

The family sued to challenge the legality of his deportation and on 4 April Xinis ordered the administration to “facilitate and effectuate” his return. The administration challenged that order at the supreme court, which upheld Xinis’s order but said the term “effectuate” was unclear and might exceed the court’s authority.

The justice department in a supreme court filing on 7 April stated that while Abrego García was deported to El Salvador through “administrative error”, his actual removal from the United States “was not error”. The error, department lawyers wrote, was in removing him specifically to El Salvador despite the deportation protection order.

Asked at the White House media briefing on Friday if Donald Trump wants the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, to bring Abrego García with him when he visits the US on Monday, the press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said the supreme court’s ruling “made it very clear that it’s the administration’s responsibility to ‘facilitate’ the return, not to ‘effectuate’ the return”.

Reuters and the Associated Press contributed reporting

A British man was shocked to discover that a photo of his tattoo was included in a US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) document used to identify alleged members of a notorious Venezuelan criminal gang, Tren de Aragua (TdA).

Earlier this week, 44-year-old Pete Belton, who lives in the English county of Derbyshire, told the BBC that he was stunned to find a photo of his forearm tattoo featured in a DHS document among nine images of tattoos intended to assist in “detecting and identifying” TdA members.

Belton, who says he has no connection to the Venezuelan group, expressed his disbelief, telling the BBC: “I’m just an average middle-aged man from Derbyshire.”

The DHS document notes that open source material “has depicted TdA members with a combination of the below tattoos”.

Among them appears to be Belton’s tattoo, which depicts a clock face with the date and time of his daughter’s birth, as well as other tattoos which include stars, skulls, the Michael Jordan “jump man” basketball logo, crowns and guns.

The BBC reported that it conducted reverse image searches for some of the tattoos depicted, and discovered that several of the images first appeared on tattoo websites with no obvious connections to TdA or any other gangs.

They traced the image of Belton’s tattoo to an Instagram post from nearly a decade ago by a Nottingham-based UK tattoo artist.

Belton said that initially he found it a “bit strange” and a “bit funny” that his tattoo was in the document, but now he is worried about a planned family trip to Miami in August with his wife and daughter, and that it might turn into a “six month all-inclusive holiday to Guantánamo”, he said.

“In my head I’m thinking if I’m working in border force and I saw me walking through I’d think ‘hey-up we’ve got one, he’s the one in the document’,” he told the BBC.

The DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Guardian.

The same image of Belton’s tattoo also seemingly appears in a report by the Texas department of public safety (DPS) about TdA activity.

The DPS also did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Guardian.

Since taking office, the Trump administration has deported hundreds of individuals it alleges to be members of TdA, sending them to a notorious prison in El Salvador without even a court hearing.

But in recent weeks, questions regarding the accuracy of these gang allegations have intensified, with lawyers arguing that some of the deportees were misidentified as a result of their tattoos.

Lawyers representing one man say that he was deported over a crown tattoo, which he says is inspired by the Real Madrid football team logo.

In another case, lawyers representing a makeup artist say he was deported after officials deemed his crown tattoos proof that he was a member of TdA. But his lawyers assert that his tattoos reference only the Three Kings Epiphany celebrations.

The days of fumbling around for your boarding pass or frantically checking in for a flight on the way to the airport could soon be over under imminent plans to overhaul the way we travel.

The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), the UN body responsible for crafting airline policy, plans to dramatically shake up existing rules for airports and airlines through the introduction of a “digital travel credential”.

This would allow passengers to store passport information on their devices to be used for travel. The changes could come into effect within three years, according to the Times.

Currently, those flying must check in, which can be done online or at the airport upon arrival. They are then issued with a boarding pass with a barcode. This is scanned by a passenger at various points throughout the airport, including at the gate before boarding.

The changes would make boarding passes and the need to check in for flights obsolete. Instead, flyers will download a “journey pass” to their phone when they book a flight. The pass will be automatically updated if any changes are made to the booking.

Passengers will also be able to upload their passports to their phone and travel through airports using their face for verification. Instead of manually checking in, which would let airlines know who intends to board their flights, airlines will instead be alerted when passengers arrive at the airport and their face is scanned.

Valérie Viale, the director of product management at Amadeus, a travel technology company, told the Times that the changes were “the biggest in 50 years”. She said: “The last upgrade of great scale was the adoption of e-ticketing in the early 2000s. The industry has now decided it’s time to upgrade to modern systems that are more like what Amazon would use.”

Infrastructure upgrades at airports, including facial recognition technology and the ability to read a passport from a mobile device, would be needed for the plans to be carried out successfully.

“Many airline systems haven’t changed for more than 50 years because everything has to be consistent across the industry and interoperable,” said Viale.

The new technology could spark privacy concerns but Amadeus said it had developed a system where passengers’ details are wiped within 15 seconds of each contact with a “touchpoint” – such as the pre-security gates.

How delays and connecting flights are handled could also change. Under the technology being developed, passengers who miss connecting flights due to delays out of their control could automatically be sent a notification on their phones with details of their new onward flight. Their journey pass would automatically update and they would be allowed to board the new flight.

“At the moment airlines have systems that are very siloed,” Viale said. “There’s the reservation system that, when check-in opens, makes a handshake with a delivery system and says ‘here are my reservations, you can now deliver them’. In the future, it’ll be far more continuous and the journey pass will be dynamic.”

The days of fumbling around for your boarding pass or frantically checking in for a flight on the way to the airport could soon be over under imminent plans to overhaul the way we travel.

The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), the UN body responsible for crafting airline policy, plans to dramatically shake up existing rules for airports and airlines through the introduction of a “digital travel credential”.

This would allow passengers to store passport information on their devices to be used for travel. The changes could come into effect within three years, according to the Times.

Currently, those flying must check in, which can be done online or at the airport upon arrival. They are then issued with a boarding pass with a barcode. This is scanned by a passenger at various points throughout the airport, including at the gate before boarding.

The changes would make boarding passes and the need to check in for flights obsolete. Instead, flyers will download a “journey pass” to their phone when they book a flight. The pass will be automatically updated if any changes are made to the booking.

Passengers will also be able to upload their passports to their phone and travel through airports using their face for verification. Instead of manually checking in, which would let airlines know who intends to board their flights, airlines will instead be alerted when passengers arrive at the airport and their face is scanned.

Valérie Viale, the director of product management at Amadeus, a travel technology company, told the Times that the changes were “the biggest in 50 years”. She said: “The last upgrade of great scale was the adoption of e-ticketing in the early 2000s. The industry has now decided it’s time to upgrade to modern systems that are more like what Amazon would use.”

Infrastructure upgrades at airports, including facial recognition technology and the ability to read a passport from a mobile device, would be needed for the plans to be carried out successfully.

“Many airline systems haven’t changed for more than 50 years because everything has to be consistent across the industry and interoperable,” said Viale.

The new technology could spark privacy concerns but Amadeus said it had developed a system where passengers’ details are wiped within 15 seconds of each contact with a “touchpoint” – such as the pre-security gates.

How delays and connecting flights are handled could also change. Under the technology being developed, passengers who miss connecting flights due to delays out of their control could automatically be sent a notification on their phones with details of their new onward flight. Their journey pass would automatically update and they would be allowed to board the new flight.

“At the moment airlines have systems that are very siloed,” Viale said. “There’s the reservation system that, when check-in opens, makes a handshake with a delivery system and says ‘here are my reservations, you can now deliver them’. In the future, it’ll be far more continuous and the journey pass will be dynamic.”

Bella Thorne has accused fellow US actor Mickey Rourke of bruising her genitals with a metal grinder on the set of a movie that they filmed together during what she described as “one of the all time worst experiences” of her career.

In a story on her Instagram account on Friday, Thorne alleged that the episode was part of a broader campaign to humiliate her while they collaborated on the 2020 thriller Girl. She wrote: “This fucking dude. GROSS” and relayed the account in writing over a copy of a BBC article reporting that Celebrity Big Brother’s producers had reprimanded him for aiming homophobic comments at the singer JoJo Siwa while they competed on the reality show.

A representative of Rourke did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thorne’s allegations.

Thorne’s post recounted how she and the Oscar nominee were sharing a scene in which she was kneeling with her hands zip-tied around her back. “He’s supposed to take a metal grinder to my knee cap and instead he used it on my genitals [through] my jeans,” Thorne wrote. “Hitting them over and over again. I had bruises on my pelvic bone – Working with Mickey was one of the all time worst experiences of my life working as an actress.”

She also shared a screenshot of a post on X in which she alleged that Rourke separately revved an engine and covered her “completely in dirt” for another scene.

“I guess he thought it was funny to humiliate me in front of the entire crew,” Thorne – the 27-year-old former Disney star whose credits also include The Duff and Amityville: The Awakening – said of Rourke, 72.

Thorne then asserted that she had to take it upon herself to “go in his trailer absolutely alone” and talk him into finishing up the movie “as he shouted crazy demands that he wanted” from those helming the project written and directed by Chad Faust.

“He refused to speak to the director or producers – so I had to convince him to show up and complete his job,” Thorne continued. “In fact I had to beg.”

She said it was “uncomfortable”. But she said she endured it because “the movie could not be finished without him [and] everyone’s work would’ve just been lost and completely for nothing”.

Thorne’s comments about her on-set experience with Rourke on Girl capped off a week of unflattering headlines for the actor whose work on 2008’s The Wrestler once won him Golden Globe and Bafta awards.

He earned a formal warning from Celebrity Big Brother UK’s producers after going on the show and boasting to Siwa, who is gay, that he would “make her straight”.

Rourke also invoked a British slang word for cigarette that is also a homophobic slur in the US before directing himself at Siwa and saying: “I’m not talking to you.”

Celebrity Big Brother UK’s producers indicated to Rourke that they would remove him from the show if he kept up with the homophobic language.

The head of the US military base in Greenland has been fired for criticising Washington’s agenda for the Arctic island after JD Vance visited two weeks ago.

Col Susannah Meyers, who had served as commander of the Pituffik space base since July, was removed amid reports she had distanced herself and the base from the US vice-president’s criticism of Denmark and its oversight of the territory.

Greenland has its own government but is also part of the kingdom of Denmark, which previously ruled it as a colony and continues to control its foreign and defence policies. Donald Trump has repeatedly said he wants to acquire the island and has not ruled out military or economic force to do so.

The US Space Force said in a statement on Thursday night that Meyers had been removed from the position of commander on Thursday due to a “loss of confidence” in her ability to lead.

“Commanders are expected to adhere to the highest standards of conduct, especially as it relates to remaining nonpartisan in the performance of their duties,” it added.

The statement did not expand further, but the US website Military.com said Meyers sent an email to all personnel at Pituffik on 31 March “seemingly aimed at generating unity among the airmen and guardians, as well as the Canadians, Danes and Greenlanders who work there, following Vance’s appearance”.

Vance visited the base on 28 March in a trip that was substantially changed at the last minute amid increasingly strained relations between the US, Greenland and Denmark. During the visit he told troops that the US had to gain control of the Arctic island to stop the threat of China and Russia. He also criticised Denmark, which he said had “not done a good job by the people of Greenland”.

Originally, the delegation had been planned to be led by his wife, the second lady, Usha Vance, who had been scheduled to visit the capital, Nuuk, and a dog sled race in Sisimiut. But after outrage over the timing after the election – the new coalition government had yet to be sworn in – the plans were changed.

The vice-president said during a press conference at the base: “Our message to Denmark is very simple: you have not done a good job by the people of Greenland. You have underinvested in the people of Greenland and you have underinvested in the security architecture of this incredible, beautiful land mass.”

In her email Meyers wrote: “I do not presume to understand current politics, but what I do know is the concerns of the US administration discussed by vice-president Vance on Friday are not reflective of Pituffik space base.”

The Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said on X: “Actions to undermine the chain of command or to subvert President Trump’s agenda will not be tolerated at the Department of Defence.”

Trump has said the US needs control of Greenland for national and international security.

The US Space Force said Meyers had been replaced with Col Shawn Lee.

Meyers appears to be the latest in a Trump administration purge of high-ranking military officers and commanders. Others include Air Force Gen Tim Haugh, the director of the National Security Agency, and V Adm Shoshana Chatfield, who served with Nato.

Joe Kasper, the chief of staff at the US department of defence, said: “Civilian control of the military is a bedrock principle of our armed forces. Actions to undermine the chain of command or to subvert President Trump’s agenda will not be tolerated at the defence department.”

The Danish defence department declined to comment. The Pituffik space base has been contacted for comment.

Mexico will make an immediate water delivery to Texas farmers to help make up its shortfall under a treaty that has strained US relations and prompted tariff threats by Donald Trump, said Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, on Friday.

Mexico is looking for alternatives to comply with the 81-year-old water-sharing treaty with the US, Sheinbaum said in her regular news conference. A proposal had already been sent to US officials, she said.

Mexico’s failure to keep up with its water deliveries has sparked a diplomatic spat with its largest trading partner. A day earlier, Trump said he would escalate consequences, including tariffs or sanctions on Mexico. Texas Republicans have also publicly accused Mexico of flagrantly ignoring the treaty, harming farmers who depend on the water deliveries.

“For Texas farmers who are requesting water, there will be an immediate delivery of a certain number of millions of cubic meters that can be provided according to the water availability in the Rio Grande,” Sheinbaum said.

Under the 1944 treaty that outlines water sharing between the two countries through a network of interconnected dams and reservoirs, Mexico must send 1.75m acre-feet of water to the US from the Rio Grande every five years. An acre-foot of water is enough to fill about half an Olympic swimming pool.

The treaty’s current five-year cycle is up in October, but Mexico has sent less than 30% of the required water, according to data from the International Boundary and Water Commission.

Sheinbaum has said Mexico is complying with the treaty based on water availability, pointing to drought conditions that have sapped Mexico’s supply. She expects an agreement in the coming days, she said on Friday, and did not see further conflict. The treaty was “fair”, she added.

Mexican officials were scrambling to come up with a plan to increase the amount of water sent to the United States because of growing concern that Trump could drag the dispute into trade negotiations.

Mexico’s federal government may clash with northern Mexican states that closely guard their water supply if it looks to enforce a controversial amendment inserted into the treaty last year that empowers federal officials to take extra water to comply with obligations, sources told Reuters.

Mexico will make an immediate water delivery to Texas farmers to help make up its shortfall under a treaty that has strained US relations and prompted tariff threats by Donald Trump, said Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, on Friday.

Mexico is looking for alternatives to comply with the 81-year-old water-sharing treaty with the US, Sheinbaum said in her regular news conference. A proposal had already been sent to US officials, she said.

Mexico’s failure to keep up with its water deliveries has sparked a diplomatic spat with its largest trading partner. A day earlier, Trump said he would escalate consequences, including tariffs or sanctions on Mexico. Texas Republicans have also publicly accused Mexico of flagrantly ignoring the treaty, harming farmers who depend on the water deliveries.

“For Texas farmers who are requesting water, there will be an immediate delivery of a certain number of millions of cubic meters that can be provided according to the water availability in the Rio Grande,” Sheinbaum said.

Under the 1944 treaty that outlines water sharing between the two countries through a network of interconnected dams and reservoirs, Mexico must send 1.75m acre-feet of water to the US from the Rio Grande every five years. An acre-foot of water is enough to fill about half an Olympic swimming pool.

The treaty’s current five-year cycle is up in October, but Mexico has sent less than 30% of the required water, according to data from the International Boundary and Water Commission.

Sheinbaum has said Mexico is complying with the treaty based on water availability, pointing to drought conditions that have sapped Mexico’s supply. She expects an agreement in the coming days, she said on Friday, and did not see further conflict. The treaty was “fair”, she added.

Mexican officials were scrambling to come up with a plan to increase the amount of water sent to the United States because of growing concern that Trump could drag the dispute into trade negotiations.

Mexico’s federal government may clash with northern Mexican states that closely guard their water supply if it looks to enforce a controversial amendment inserted into the treaty last year that empowers federal officials to take extra water to comply with obligations, sources told Reuters.

Donald Trump’s executive order imposing sanctions on the international criminal court (ICC) is facing a legal challenge from two US human rights advocates who argue it is “unconstitutional and unlawful”.

In a lawsuit filed in federal court on Friday, the advocates said the order had forced them to stop assisting and engaging with the ICC out of fear the US government would punish them with criminal prosecution and civil fines.

Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which filed the case on the advocates’ behalf, argued that Trump’s order violated the first amendment by prohibiting their constitutionally protected rights to share information with the ICC’s chief prosecutor and his staff.

They said the plaintiffs “wish to continue communicating with the [prosecutor’s office], but are chilled from doing so because of the substantial risk that they will be penalised”.

Under the order signed by Trump in February, the US has imposed economic and travel sanctions against the prosecutor, Karim Khan, prohibiting US citizens, permanent residents and companies from providing him with services and material support.

Khan, a British lawyer, leads a division of the ICC, a permanent court in The Hague, which investigates and prosecutes individuals accused of committing atrocities.

Trump issued the order in response to the court’s decision last year to approve Khan’s requests for arrest warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.

The aggressive order established a framework for imposing additional sanctions on ICC officials and directed the US treasury department to submit to Trump the names of other individuals to be targeted, raising the prospect of a more expansive campaign against the court.

The legal challenge against Trump’s order, filed in the US district court for Maine, has been brought by Matthew Smith, the co-founder of Fortify Rights, a south-east Asia-focused human rights organisation, and Akila Radhakrishnan, an international lawyer.

According to the lawsuit, Smith has provided the ICC prosecutor’s office with “evidence of the genocide and forced deportation of Myanmar’s Rohingya people” and assisted the court’s investigators in analysing and developing sources of evidence relating to atrocity crimes.

In a statement issued by the ACLU, Smith said the order meant he had been “forced to stop helping the ICC investigate horrific crimes committed against the people of Myanmar, including mass murder, torture and human trafficking”.

“This executive order doesn’t just disrupt our work – it actively undermines international justice efforts and obstructs the path to accountability for communities facing unthinkable horrors,” he added.

Radhakrishnan, the second plaintiff, has worked with the ICC as an external advocate and adviser, engaging extensively with the prosecutor’s office on sexual and gender-based crimes in countries such as Afghanistan and Myanmar.

In December, according to the lawsuit, Radhakrishnan accompanied a group of Afghan women to The Hague where they met with the prosecutor’s office and its investigators working on its Afghanistan inquiry.

Radhakrishnan said she was bringing the case “to prevent my own government from punishing me for trying to hold the Taliban accountable for its systematic violence against women and girls from Afghanistan”.

The ICC prosecutor’s office – which has an active criminal investigation into crimes committed in Afghanistan as well as the situation in Myanmar and Bangladesh – frequently collects evidence and information from third parties, such as NGOs, victims’ groups and UN investigators.

In their lawsuit, Smith and Radhakrishnan have asked the US court for a declaration that Trump’s order violates the first amendment and does not comply with emergency powers legislation. They also want the court to prevent the government from “enforcing the speech restrictions” imposed by the order.

In 2021, a federal court in California considered a similar legal challenge after Trump imposed sanctions against Khan’s predecessor. In that case, the judge barred the government from enforcing the order against four law professors who assisted the ICC prosecutor, who she said were “likely to succeed on their first amendment challenge”.

Zimbabwe has started to make compensation payments to white former farm owners, 25 years after Robert Mugabe’s government began confiscating land.

The government paid $3.1m (£2.3m) to a “first batch” of 378 farms, the ministry of finance said in a statement on Wednesday, the first payout under a 2020 agreement to pay $3.5bn in compensation.

The remainder of the $311m due to this group of farmers will be paid in US dollar-denominated treasury bonds with two- to 10-year maturities and interest of 2%. That is much lower than the current yield on a two-year US treasury bond of about 3.8%.

Zimbabwe’s finance minister, Mthuli Ncube, said: “The payments will continue. We are very serious about this.”

Mugabe’s government seized more than 4,000 mostly white-owned farms, often violently, from about the year 2000 to redistribute to black people in what it claimed was restitution for the dispossession of British colonial rule.

However, Mugabe and his cronies took nearly 40% of the 14m hectares (about 35m acres) confiscated for themselves, according to a 2010 investigation by a local news outlet, ZimOnline. Agricultural production, which had accounted for 40% of exports, plunged and the economy collapsed, with hyperinflation reaching a staggering 500bn% in 2008.

Zimbabwe cannot borrow from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund as it has been in arrears since 2000 and 2001, respectively. Government debt was $21bn late last year, about half of which was arrears and penalties.

The compensation payments to the displaced farmers are one of the requirements of international lenders to start a debt restructuring process with Zimbabwe, including a new IMF programme.

Andrew Pascoe, who signed the 2020 compensation deal while head of the Commercial Farmers’ Union, confirmed the first payments had been received on 24 March and thanked Zimbabwe’s government, in comments included in the ministry of finance statement. He said: “We are extremely grateful.”

However, Tony Hawkins, a retired University of Zimbabwe economics professor, called the payments a “publicity stunt”, noting that the US could block an IMF programme. A US law “restricts US support for multilateral financing to Zimbabwe until Zimbabwe makes concrete governance and economic reforms”, according to the US state department.

Of using government bonds to pay farmers, Hawkins said: “We continue to accumulate arrears because we are unable to service our foreign debt, so we can’t really afford to take on new debt commitments … It’s derisory, the more you look at it.”

About 1,000 former farmers had signed up for compensation, said Harry Orphanides, one of Pascoe’s co-negotiators. He said: “Look, it’s not a perfect deal. But there was no other alternative.”

Ukraine’s allies have announced a record €21bn (£18.2bn) in additional military support for Kyiv and accused Vladimir Putin of dragging his feet and delaying US-led negotiations over a ceasefire deal.

Speaking at a meeting of the Ukraine defence contact group in Brussels, the British defence secretary, John Healey, said the Russian president had rejected a 30-day pause in fighting proposed a month ago by Donald Trump.

Healey said: “Putin said he wanted peace, but he rejected a full ceasefire. His forces continue to fire on Ukraine, military and civilian targets alike.”

The UK and Germany jointly convened Friday’s Ramstein meeting, which was attended by more than 40 countries but not the US. Pete Hegseth, Trump’s defence secretary, joined by video instead.

Germany’s defence minister, Boris Pistorius, played down the Trump administration’s absence. He conceded that peace “appears to be out of reach in the immediate future” and said Ukraine was at the “epicentre of a broader conflict”.

“It is between freedom and oppression, between the recognition of global standards and aggressive imperialism, between democracy and authoritarianism,” Pistorius said, adding that military support for Ukraine would continue.

The US’s attempts to bring about a quick end to the war have so far not succeeded. Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, held talks on Friday with Putin’s investment aide Kirill Dmitriev in St Petersburg. This followed a visit last week by Dmitriev to Washington.

Witkoff was also due to meet Putin, as the Kremlin cautioned that no breakthroughs and “nothing momentous” should be expected.

In conversations with the White House, Russia has refused to make concessions. Moscow demands control over four Ukrainian regions, the removal of Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s pro-western government and a ban on Nato membership for Ukraine. It also wants the lifting of sanctions.

Trump issued a rare warning to Putin before the meeting on his social media platform Truth Social. “Russia has to get moving. Too many people ere [sic] DYING, thousands a week, in a terrible and senseless war – A war that should have never happened, and wouldn’t have happened, if I were President!!!” he wrote.

Trump has previously said he is “pissed off” by Putin’s failure to stop fighting but he has not taken any serious measures to put pressure on Russia’s president. In interviews, Witkoff has parroted Kremlin talking points, telling the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson that Russian-occupied Ukrainian regions had voted to join Moscow.

Since Ukraine agreed to a US ceasefire last month, Russia has dramatically escalated its aerial bombing campaign. This week it launched a big military push in the Sumy and Kharkiv regions, seizing several border villages.

There is speculation Russia is trying to grab as much territory as possible by 9 May, the day Russia celebrates its victory during the second world war, and before a possible peace deal.

Estonia’s defence minister, Hanno Pevkur, said: “This is why we need to speed up the deliveries as quickly as we can.”

Addressing the Brussels meeting by video, Zelenskyy urged his allies to provide new Patriot air defence systems. This week a Russian ballistic missile hit a playground in the city of Krivhy Rih , where Zelenskyy grew up, killing nine children and 11 adults.

“Our priority is air defence. Patriots that remained unused in storage with our partners should be protecting lives,” Zelenskyy said, adding that 10 more were urgently needed.

Speaking at a press conference after the Ramstein meeting, Pistorius said Germany had already given four Patriot systems to Kyiv and was waiting for more to be delivered. He said a global search was under way. “We will buy anything we can get,” he said.

Germany will provide four Iris-T air defence systems as well as 15 Leopard 1 tanks, more reconnaissance drones and 100,000 artillery rounds, he added. Other governments announced fresh contributions.

Healey said the UK and Norway would supply radar systems, anti-tank mines and “hundreds of thousands of drones” as part of a $560m defence package, on top of £4.5bn committed by Downing Street this year. The figure includes the repair of military vehicles damaged on the battlefield.

Friday’s meeting did not clarify how many countries were ready to send troops to Ukraine as part of a “coalition of the willing”. Speaking to the BBC, the EU’s foreign affairs chief, Kaja Kallas, said: “Different member states have different opinions”. Discussions were still taking place, she added.

The UK, France and Baltic nations have said they will put boots on the ground in the event of a peace settlement. AFP reported that six nations had signed up.

Healey said planning for a so-called reassurance force was “real, substantial and well-advanced”. It envisages foreign soldiers being deployed away from the 1,000km-long frontline and boosting existing Ukrainian ground forces, he suggested.

Russia has categorically rejected the idea. Sweden’s defence minister, Pål Jonson, said Stockholm needed answers to “a number of questions” before it could make a commitment. “It’s helpful if there’s a clarity of what that mission would entail, and what do we do – if we are peacekeeping, deterrence or reassurance,” he said.

The UK has said the US military “backstop” – meaning comprehensive air cover – is essential for any mission to work. The Trump administration, however, has ruled this out and has indicated that Ukraine’s future security needs are now Europe’s problem.

The Biden administration set up the Ukraine defence contact group after Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion and chaired meetings. In February the US relinquished this leadership role, handing it over to London and Berlin. Hegseth said the Trump administration had priorities elsewhere – in Asia and on America’s own borders.

The Kennedy Center’s interim executive director, Richard Grenell – a staunch ally of Donald Trump – accused a professional musician of “vapidness” after she emailed him over concerns of the now Trump-controlled center’s rollbacks on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.

Earlier this week, Yasmin Williams, an award-winning musician who has performed multiple times at the Washington DC-based performing arts center, emailed Grenell regarding the center’s DEI plans, pointing to the cancellations of a concert by the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington as well as Finn, a children’s musical about a shark who feels different from other sharks.

“These events have caused a major negative reaction in my musical community to playing at the Kennedy Center, with lots of individuals I know ultimately canceling their shows there,” Williams wrote, adding: “Most folks seem to be placing the blame on the president for degra[ding] the formerly prestigious institution.”

Williams went on to ask Grenell whether Trump cared about artists cancelling their shows at the center and what, if anything, had changed about the center’s hiring practices, performance bookings and staffing.

Grenell, a former acting director of national intelligence whom Trump appointed to oversee the center after making himself the chair, responded with a series of messages, accusing Williams of believing “newspapers who exist to hate Republicans”.

“Every single person who cancelled a show did so because they couldn’t be in the presence of Republicans,” Grenell wrote in messages Williams later posted on Instagram. “We didn’t fire a single show. We don’t cancel a single show … Read more. Don’t swallow what the media tells you. Don’t be gullible.”

Grenell also wrote: “Your people also booed and harassed the vice president who simply wanted to enjoy music with his wife for a night. Who is the intolerant one?”

Last month, an audience booed JD Vance and his wife, Usha, as they took their seats at the center’s National Symphony Orchestra concert in response to Vance and his allies’ attacks on alleged “improper ideology” at Washington’s cultural institutions.

In response, Williams repeated her questions and wrote: “Your assumptions on my political leanings are incorrect, by the way. Let’s try to be professional.”

Grenell then went on to accuse Williams of “vapidness”, writing: “I’m too busy to confront your vapidness to believe what you read without doing your own research. But I will say that your assumptions are wrong.”

“The programs are so woke that they haven’t made money,” he continued. Grenell, who in his earlier replies had said “We don’t cancel a single show”, went on to say: “Yes, I cut the DEl bullshit because we can’t afford to pay people for fringe and niche programming that the public won’t support … Yes, we are doing programming for the masses in order to pay our bills. No, the into[l]erants who left help us. They were the most intolerant people you’ve ever met. They couldn’t play a show if Republicans were present. That’s weird.”

Following the email thread, Williams wrote on Instagram: “Make of this info what you will! Clearly the Kennedy Center is in awful hands. As someone who has played there several times and attended several shows there, it’s disturbing that this guy has a job at all, especially one at the KC. Do better Kennedy Center.”

Williams told CNN on Thursday that she was “shocked” by the “bizarre” exchange.

“I was shocked at first if anything because, honestly, I thought it was fake. I thought it was just like, is this ChatGPT? Like, what is this?” she said, adding: “He’s not responding like I assume the executive director, interim or not, of the Kennedy Center would respond to an email. It was just bizarre.”

Yasmin also told the network that current and former employees of the center reached out to her after she posted the ordeal on social media, telling her that it was “really nice and refreshing to see how they talk to us and how they treat us come to light”.

The Guardian has reached out to Williams for comment.

Trump’s takeover of the prestigious institution in February triggered widespread criticism throughout the performing arts industry as well as the public. Issa Rae, creator and star of Insecure, canceled her one-night-only sold-out show scheduled for March while the Scandal and Grey’s Anatomy creator Shonda Rhimes resigned as the center’s treasurer.

The soprano singer Reneé Fleming announced her departure last month as artistic adviser to the center while the singer-songwriter Ben Folds stepped down as artistic adviser to the National Symphony Orchestra.