Updated guidance for public bodies after the UK supreme court’s ruling that a woman is defined in law by biological sex is expected to be issued by the summer, the head of the equalities regulator said on Thursday.

Lady Kishwer Falkner, the chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, described the ruling as “enormously consequential”, telling BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “We are going to have a new statutory code of practice, statutory meaning it will be the law of the land, it will be interpreted by courts as the law of the land. We’re hoping we’re going to have that by the summer.”

She said it would give “clarity” that trans women could not participate in women’s sports or use women-only toilets or changing rooms, and the NHS must update its guidance on single-sex wards based on biological sex.

Asked if the supreme court ruling was “a victory for common sense”, she said: “Only if you recognise that trans people exist, they have rights and their rights must be respected. Then it becomes a victory for common sense.

“It’s not a victory for an increase in unpleasant actions against trans people. We will not tolerate that. We stand here to defend trans people as much as we do anyone else. So I want to make that very clear.”

She emphasised that trans people still had clear protection under legislation. “They are covered through gender reassignment … and they’re also covered by sex discrimination.”

Asked to give an example, she said: “We’ll have to flesh this out in the reasoning, but I think if you were to have an equal pay claim, then depending on which aspect of it that it was, you could use sex discrimination legislation. If a trans person was fired, lost their employment because they happen to be trans, that would be unlawful, still absolutely unlawful, and we stand ready to support those people and those claims.”

On the risk that trans people will no longer be able to use facilities designed for either male or female, she added that trans rights organisations should push for more neutral third spaces. “But I think the law is quite clear that if a service provider says we’re offering a women’s toilet, that trans people should not be using that single-sex facility.”

Falkner added that the EHRC would pursue the NHS to change its existing guidance on the treatment of trans patients, which currently say that trans people should be accommodated in single-sex accommodation according to their gender identity, rather than their assigned sex at birth.

“They [the NHS] have to change it. They now have clarity,” she said. “We will be having conversations with them to update that guidance.”

The “efficacy” of the gender recognition certificate, a UK legal document that recognises an individual’s gender identity, allowing them to legally change their sex, would be re-examined, she believed. The government is considering introducing digital IDs, “and if digital IDs come in, then what documentation will provide the identity of that person? So it’s going to be a space that we’ll have to watch very carefully as we go on.”

For gender-critical campaigners, the supreme court’s ruling on the legal definition of a woman was a “huge reset” that left them feeling “vindicated and relieved”.

For transgender rights campaigners, it was a “damaging attack on their rights”, signalling the start of “real issues” in their fight for legal recognition.

“I think this will be the kicking-off point for a very enhanced push for overt restrictions on the rights of trans people,” said Victoria McCloud, who changed her legal sex more than two decades ago.

The UK’s first trans judge, she applied to intervene in the supreme court appeal but was refused. Last year she quit her job as a judge, saying her position had become “untenable” because her trans identity was viewed as a “lifestyle choice or an ideology”. She now lives in the Republic of Ireland.

McCloud said the supreme court ruling came in the midst of “a scary time” for trans people in the UK and would mark the start of a more intense fight for rights. “The rest has been phoney war. The real issues now start,” she said.

“If I was a trans person in the UK today, I would steer clear of using any loo in a public space unless it was a single-sex or combined-sex loo, because I personally cannot, as of this moment, judge whether I should use the male loo or the female loo,” she said.

“I haven’t got my head around the complexities of the judgment and its repercussions will be ongoing for some time. But I’m happy I live in the Republic of Ireland, where this problem is not an issue. They know where I’m allowed to pee here.”

Outside the supreme court on Wednesday morning, Susan Smith, a co-director of the gender-critical campaign group For Women Scotland, which brought the appeal, was one of a number of women jubilantly celebrating the result.

“It was quite something to walk out into banks of photographers and loads of people cheering and clapping. It was very emotional,” Smith said. “We’ve all given up a lot to fight this and we’ve all had to put up with a lot of abuse, a lot of misrepresentation of our motives and our position and our beliefs.

“We’ve finally got clarity on the law, and we know now that when spaces and services are provided under the Equality Act and they’re single-sex, it means exactly that. That feels like a massive relief.”

Smith said the ruling would help women feel safe if there was a male in a female-only space: “They will know that they are well within their rights to object to that.”

She added: “Gender reassignment is a protected characteristic, and it is still protected. But saying that women were just some amorphous collection of people and it was an identity anyone could have, it was really downplaying the very real and different issues that affect men and women.”

Maya Forstater, who founded the campaign group Sex Matters after she won an employment tribunal that found she had been unfairly discriminated against because of her gender-critical beliefs, said the ruling brought “relief, vindication, happiness and pride”.

“This judgment has been so clear and it’s from the highest court in the land,” she said. “There are dozens and dozens of women who have had to bring employment tribunal cases because they’ve been victimised for just saying what they think the law says. Now we know that we were right.”

She said the court judgment was about “recognising rules and reality”. “If you’re a man, you can call yourself what you like, you can dress how you like, but you cannot work in a rape crisis centre, you cannot go into a woman’s changing room,” she said.

McCloud said she also shared concerns about protecting women’s spaces – “I don’t want men in the women’s loos myself, thank you”. But she said people with extreme views “regard someone like me as dangerous” simply because of her trans identity.

“Gender-critical ideology is on the ascendancy, and this is obviously a success for them,” she said. “But the struggle starts now, both for them and for us, because they are going to want to enhance this success and we are going to want to clarify and protect the rights that we thought we had.”

Ellie Gomersall, a trans woman and Scottish Green party activist, said she was “gutted” when she saw the news and described it as “yet another attack on the rights of trans people to live our lives in peace”.

“This will only impact trans people who have got a gender recognition certificate (GRC), which actually the vast majority of trans people don’t. But I don’t want to underplay how damaging it is,” she said.

“It sets the idea that even if you jump through all of the hoops, you go through that really dehumanising and stigmatising process to get a GRC, you’ll still never be recognised in law for who you truly are.”

She added: “Some individuals and organisations will see this result and use it as justification or vindication to discriminate further against trans people, and that makes me really worried for my community.”

For all the negative stereotypes, many politicians are thoughtful, diligent and caring. But they are also human, and it is their more self-serving instincts that may have caused some to breathe a sigh of relief at the supreme court ruling on gender recognition.

After a challenge by the gender-critical group For Women Scotland – which started out as a dispute over Scottish government legislation about female representation on public boards – judges ruled that the terms “woman” and “sex” in the Equality Act refer to biological women and biological sex.

The verdict will be heavily contested, and could bring serious and perhaps unforeseen repercussions for transgender women. But such an unexpectedly definitive view allows leaders in Scotland and Westminster to (and there is no gentle way of putting this) dodge responsibility over one of the most contentious and toxic debates of our age.

The Scottish government’s response was particularly eloquent. While stressing that no one should see the ruling as cause to triumph, it otherwise talked blandly about “engaging with the UK government to understand the full implication of this ruling”.

There is logic to this. The Equality Act and the Gender Recognition Act, the legislative focus of the deliberations, are both UK-wide and thus not something the Holyrood administration can decide unilaterally.

But beneath this reassuring constitutional hum lurks the sound of quiet footsteps, as the SNP’s first minister, John Swinney, shuffles his party away from an era when Nicola Sturgeon’s government was very proudly at the vanguard of transgender rights.

It was little more than two years ago that Sturgeon’s government was openly seeking a battle with Westminster over a plan to make it easier for transgender people in Scotland to get gender recognition certificates – a move blocked by Rishi Sunak.

We are in a very different political climate now, and not just with the open prejudice of the Donald Trump administration, which is purging transgender people from the military on the stated basis that their very identity makes them unfit to serve.

Scotland’s government has been on the receiving end of pushback from other controversies, for example the decision to send Isla Bryson, a transgender woman convicted of double rape, to a women’s prison. To again frame it in slightly unpalatable political terms, this is no longer seen as a vote-winner for the SNP.

For Keir Starmer and the Westminster administration, there had been an unspoken worry about a fudged or unclear court ruling, one that placed the impetus on politicians to decide.

Instead, as a UK government spokesperson said, it gave “clarity and confidence”, both for women and for those who run single-sex spaces. Clarity and confidence, perhaps. Political cover? Most definitely.

Starmer has spent his five years as Labour leader having TV and radio interviewers intermittently asking him to declare, yes or no, whether a woman can have a penis. Starmer’s standard dual response – under the law, a tiny number of trans people are recognised as women but might not have completed gender reassignment surgery – prompted an inevitable and arguably damaging wave of attacks from political opponents.

Kemi Badenoch has been particularly relentless in this, despite having served as equalities minister in a government that did not amend or clarify the Equality Act to reflect her view that, as she put it in a celebratory tweet on Wednesday, “saying ‘trans women are women’ was never true in fact”.

This was not just a Conservative obsession. Starmer faced criticism from some inside Labour – notably from the now independent MP for Canterbury, Rosie Duffield – for, as they saw it, failing to stand up for women. Others condemned him in the belief he was edging away from trans rights.

From a nakedly political-management perspective, the supreme court decision was ideal, making the decision judicial rather than political. No 10 officials believe there will be no need to tweak the Equality Act, leaving their role as little more than a neutral voice in helping organisations adjust to the new reality.

Starmer’s aides deny he has been on a political journey from a few years ago, when as a Labour leadership candidate he signed up to a pledge from the LGBT Labour group “that trans women are women, that trans men are men” – or 18 months later when he criticised Duffield for saying only women could have a cervix.

This is perhaps disingenuous. But in a debate where niceties and nuance are so often trampled on, the prime minister is very much not the first politician to try to fudge things.

A giant planet 124 light years from Earth has yielded the strongest evidence yet that extraterrestrial life may be thriving beyond our solar system, astronomers claim.

Observations by the James Webb space telescope of a planet called K2-18 b appear to reveal the chemical fingerprints of two compounds that, on Earth, are only known to be produced by life.

Detection of the chemicals, dimethyl sulfide (DMS) and dimethyl disulfide (DMDS) would not amount to proof of alien biological activity, but could bring the answer to the question of whether we are alone in the universe much closer.

“This is the strongest evidence to date for a biological activity beyond the solar system,” said Prof Nikku Madhusudhan, an astrophysicist at the University of Cambridge who led the observations. “We are very cautious. We have to question ourselves both on whether the signal is real and what it means.”

He added: “Decades from now, we may look back at this point in time and recognise it was when the living universe came within reach. This could be the tipping point, where suddenly the fundamental question of whether we’re alone in the universe is one we’re capable of answering.”

Others are more sceptical, with questions remaining about whether the overall conditions on K2-18 b, are favourable to life and whether DMS and DMDS, which are largely produced by marine phytoplankton on Earth, can be reliably regarded as biosignatures.

K2-18 b, which sits in the Leo constellation, is nearly nine times as massive as the Earth and 2.6 times as large and orbits in the habitable zone of its star, a cool red dwarf less than half the size of the sun. When the Hubble space telescope appeared to spot water vapour in its atmosphere in 2019, scientists declared it “the most habitable known world” beyond the solar system.

The supposed water signal was shown to be methane in follow-up observations by Madhusudhan’s team in 2023. But, they argued, K2-18 b’s profile was consistent with a habitable world, covered in a vast, deep ocean – a view that remains contentious. More provocatively, the Cambridge team reported a tentative hint of DMS.

Planets beyond our solar system are too distant to photograph or reach with robotic spacecraft. But scientists can estimate their size, density and temperature and probe their chemical makeup by tracking the exoplanet as it passes across the face of its host star and measuring starlight that has been filtered through its atmosphere. In the latest observations, wavelengths that are absorbed by DMS and DMDS, were seen to suddenly drop off as K2-18 b wandered in front of the red dwarf.

“The signal came through strong and clear,” said Madhusudhan. “If we can detect these molecules on habitable planets, this is the first time we’ve been able to do that as a species … it’s mind-boggling that this is possible.”

The findings, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, suggest concentrations of DMS, DMDS or both (their signatures overlap) thousands of times stronger than the levels on Earth. The results are reported with a “three-sigma” level of statistical significance (a 0.3% probability that they occurred by chance) although this falls short of the gold standard for discoveries in physics.

“There may be processes that we don’t know about that are producing these molecules,” Madhusudhan said. “But I don’t think there is any known process that can explain this without biology.”

A challenge in identifying potential other processes is that the conditions on K2-18 b remain disputed. While the Cambridge team favour an ocean scenario, others say the data is suggestive of a gas planet or one with oceans made of magma, not water.

There is a question of whether DMS could have been brought to the planet by comets – this would require an intensity of bombardment that seems improbable – or produced in hydrothermal vents, volcanoes or lightning storms through exotic chemical processes.

“Life is one of the options, but it’s one among many,” said Dr Nora Hänni, a chemist at the Physics Institute of the University of Berne, whose research revealed that DMS was present on an icy, lifeless comet. “We would have to strictly rule out all the other options before claiming life.”

Others say that measuring planetary atmospheres may never yield a smoking gun for life. “It’s under-appreciated in the field, but technosignatures, such as an intercepted message from an advanced civilisation, could be better smoking guns, despite the unlikelihood of finding such a signal,” said Dr Caroline Morley, an astrophysicist at the University of Texas, Austin, adding that the findings were, nonetheless, an important advance.

Dr Jo Barstow, a planetary scientist at the Open University, also viewed the detection as significant, but said: “My scepticism dial for any claim relating to evidence of life is permanently turned up to 11, not because I don’t think that other life is out there, but because I feel that for such a profound and significant discovery the burden of proof must be very, very high. I don’t think this latest work crosses that threshold.”

At 120 light years away, there is no prospect of resolving the debate through closeup observations, but Madhusudhan notes that this has not been a barrier to the discovery of black holes or other cosmic phenomena.

“In astronomy, the question is never about going there,” he said. “We’re trying to establish if the laws of biology are universal in nature. I don’t see it as: ‘We have to go and swim in the water to catch the fish.’”

UK officials are tightening security when handling sensitive trade documents to prevent them from falling into US hands amid Donald Trump’s tariff war, the Guardian can reveal.

In an indication of the strains on the “special relationship”, British civil servants have changed document-handling guidance, adding higher classifications to some trade negotiation documents in order to better shield them from American eyes, sources told the Guardian.

The White House has upended global financial markets and torn up key relationships, with unpredictable and rapidly changing taxes on trading partners including China, the EU and the UK.

Officials were told that the change in protocols was specifically related to tensions over important issues on trade and foreign policy between Washington and London, sources said.

Keir Starmer has prioritised striking a trade deal with Washington, opting not to retaliate over Trump’s decision to impose 10% tariffs on goods exported to the US, and 25% tariffs on UK car and steel exports, instead offering concessions on areas including digital taxes and agriculture.

JD Vance said on Tuesday he believed a mutually beneficial US-UK trade deal was within reach. The US vice-president said officials were “certainly working very hard with Keir Starmer’s government” on a trade deal, adding that it was an “important relationship”.

“There’s a real cultural affinity,” Vance said. “And, of course, fundamentally, America is an anglo country. I think there’s a good chance that, yes, we’ll come to a great agreement that’s in the best interest of both countries.”

However, behind the scenes concern is growing over the vulnerability of UK industries and companies to Trump’s “America first” agenda.

Before Trump’s inauguration, UK trade documents related to US talks were generally marked “Official – sensitive (UK eyes only)”, according to examples seen by the Guardian, and officials were allowed to share these on internal email chains. This classification stood while British officials attempted to negotiate with Joe Biden’s administration, even after a full-blown trade deal was ruled out by the White House.

Now, a far greater proportion of documents and correspondence detailing the negotiating positions being discussed by officials from No 10, the Foreign Office and the Department for Business and Trade come with additional handling instructions to avoid US interception, with some classified as “secret” and “top secret”, sources said. These classifications also carry different guidance on how documents may be shared digitally, in order to avoid interception.

Companies with commercial interests in the UK have also been told to take additional precautions in how they share information with the trade department and No 10, senior business sources said. These include large pharmaceutical companies with operations in the UK and EU.

A Department for Business and Trade spokesperson said: “The US is an indispensable ally and negotiations on an economic prosperity deal that strengthens our existing trading relationship continue.”

Wider questions have been asked about whether the special relationship between the UK and US can withstand increasingly divergent policies on Russian hostility, as well as deep criticisms of Nato and defence collaboration. On trade, pressures are mounting in sensitive areas such as car manufacturing and pharmaceuticals.

Other reports suggest the European Commission has also changed its perspective on the risks of sensitive or secret information being intercepted by the US. Commission employees have been issued with burner phones if they are visiting the US, the Financial Times has reported.

So close has the UK and US position been on defence and security in recent years that secure government material is sometimes marked “UK/US only”, or given a “Five Eyes” marking, in reference to the intelligence-sharing collective made up of the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. So far, the Guardian has only established a change in document-handling related to trade discussions.

Trump’s plan to reboot domestic industry, including in automotive and pharmaceutical manufacturing, has caused consternation among foreign governments keen to protect domestic industries and jobs while trying to strike trade deals to protect against heavy tariffs.

Trump has sought to defend his decision to put vast tariffs in place, saying there would be a “transition cost” from his policies.

The US president also said he would “love” to make a deal with China and that, in his view, he and the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, would “end up working out something that’s very good for both countries”.

In a move regarded by some observers as an attempt to soothe market reactions, including a rise in US government borrowing costs, Trump said last week that he would delay further tariffs for 90 days. The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, said the EU would also delay its response to US tariffs.

Until July, the EU will face a 10% duty on exports to the US, rather than the 20% “reciprocal tariff” rate that was in force for a matter of hours, until Trump’s reversal last Wednesday. US duties of 25% tariffs on steel, aluminium and cars are still in place, however.

Despite suggestions that Trump may be chastened by the markets’ volatile response to his trade policies, the president’s incremental steps have increased duties on Chinese imports to 145%. China responded on Friday by announcing it would increase tariffs on US goods to 125%. The announcement from the Chinese commerce ministry also suggested that it would not pursue higher tariffs in any further retaliatory steps against the US, adding that “at the current tariff level, there is no market acceptance for US goods exported to China”.

“If the US continues to impose tariffs on Chinese goods exported to the US, China will ignore it,” it said, flagging that there were other countermeasures to come. Xi, meanwhile, urged the EU to resist Trump’s “bullying”.

Two of Donald Trump’s top national security aides will hold talks in Paris on Thursday with European politicians and security advisers, as the US and Europe search for common ground on ending the Ukraine war and averting an Iran conflict.

The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, are expected to hear concerns about Russia amid so-far fruitless US attempts to arrange a ceasefire three years after Russia invaded its neighbour.

Rubio and Witkoff will meet the French president, Emmanuel Macron, as well as British and German figures, including the UK foreign secretary, David Lammy.

Top Ukrainian officials were also in Paris, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s chief-of-staff said. “I have just landed in Paris. We arrived together with foreign minister Andriy Sybiga and defence minister Rustem Umerov,” Andriy Yermak wrote on social media, adding they planned to meet representatives of France, Germany, Britain and the United States, without specifying who.

The US president’s frustration with Russia and Ukraine over the war has been increasing and he has been threatening military action against Iranian nuclear facilities.

European leaders have grown more concerned as Trump has heaped pressure and criticism on Zelenskyy, while instead making diplomatic gestures to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.

The Polish foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski, said on Monday that he hoped Trump and his administration would see that Putin was “mocking their goodwill” after Moscow’s deadly missile strike on the Ukrainian city of Sumy.

No specific proposals for the talks have been made public.

France, Britain and Germany were surprised by Trump opening discussions on improving ties with Russia, but have sought a coordinated European response to protecting Ukraine during the conflict and in any ceasefire.

Britain and France have proposed a mainly European “reassurance” force prepared to go to Ukraine if a ceasefire starts. However, many European leaders say it would need US support.

Besides Macron, the French foreign ministry said Rubio would also meet his French counterpart, Jean-Noël Barrot, to discuss Ukraine, prospects for a new Iran nuclear deal and the Middle East.

Witkoff plans to fly on to Rome for a second round of discussions on Saturday with the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, about Iran’s nuclear programme. They met for 45 minutes in Oman on Saturday. Both sides described those talks as positive while acknowledging any potential deal remained distant.

Trump said on Monday he was willing to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities if a deal was not reached.

On Tuesday, he held a meeting with top national security advisers at the White House focused on Iran’s nuclear programme, according to sources familiar with the encounter.

The US had not told European countries about the nuclear talks in Oman before Trump announced them, even though they hold a key card on the possible reimposition of UN sanctions on Tehran.

Thursday’s talks will be an opportunity for potential coordination between US and Europe.

Trump has restored a “maximum pressure” campaign on Tehran since February after ditching a 2015 nuclear pact between Iran and six world powers during his first term and reimposed crippling sanctions on the Islamic republic.

Trump said on Monday he believed Iran was intentionally delaying a nuclear deal with the US and that it must abandon any drive for a nuclear weapon or face a possible military strike on atomic facilities.

With Reuters

A third of school staff have seen “physical underdevelopment” in students due to poverty, with schools in England stretching their budgets to buy basic household items such as cookers, bedding and clothes for pupils whose families are struggling.

A survey of more than 14,000 school staff, published at the National Education Union’s annual conference in Harrogate, found that this rose to more than half of those teachers working in deprived areas, with warnings that things “can only get worse” after recent benefit cuts.

Teachers attending the conference said the malign impact of poverty went beyond malnutrition, with families needing help to navigate the benefits system and lacking necessities such as beds or tables.

Chris Dutton, the deputy headteacher of a secondary school in the south-west of England and chair of the NEU’s national leadership council, said state schools “up and down the country” were providing vital support for families who had nowhere else to turn.

“School budgets are being spent on things that you wouldn’t necessarily associate with school budgets, providing basic equipment for families, providing things like cookers and microwaves,” Dutton said.

“Some schools are having to make those difficult decisions and decide what’s right to do. And actually, it shouldn’t be coming out of school budgets – but we shouldn’t be having children living in these circumstances.”

Michael Allen, a primary school teacher in Wiltshire, said schools were having to provide clothes for children joining reception classes who were unable or too anxious to use toilets by themselves, as well as trying to support their families, putting additional strains on teachers.

Allen said: “We know some children are cold when they come to school. We know that we can give out some payments for heating. But we have to plan that ahead, so it’s more worries for teachers and school leaders when we want to be focusing on teaching and inspiring pupils.

“We are really sometimes mired in things that we feel that maybe others should have picked up before they get to school.”

Kari Anson, the head of a special needs school in Birmingham, said poor living conditions and cuts to disability benefits created greater difficulties for the families of children with special educational needs (Sen).

“There are some children with additional needs, complex medical needs, who because of poverty are living in housing conditions that are absolutely awful. We’re talking mould on the walls, and that impacts those children who are asthmatic, prone to chest infections. This is putting those children in hospital, which means they’re then not attending school,” Anson said.

She added: “I’m really scared about the potential welfare cuts to Pip [personal independence payments] … that will affect a huge amount of young people within the Sen sector. So that really worries me, because it means that things potentially can only get worse.”

The latest government data, published last month for 2023-24, showed that the number of children in poverty had risen to 4.5 million, and accounted for 31% of all children in the UK.

Daniel Kebede, the NEU’s general secretary, said successive governments had expected schools to “plug the gaps” being left in the lives of children.

“A government calling for ‘high and rising standards’ [in schools] cannot at the same time stand idly by in the face of high and rising rates of child poverty,” Kebede said.

A Department for Education spokesperson said: “No child should be living in poverty, which is why we have already taken wide-ranging action to break the unfair link between background and opportunity, led by our cross-government child poverty taskforce.

“We have also tripled investment in breakfast clubs to over £30m – with delivery of free meals and childcare to begin in up to 750 schools from this month – and increased pupil premium to over £3bn to provide additional support for those children that need it most.”

A third of school staff have seen “physical underdevelopment” in students due to poverty, with schools in England stretching their budgets to buy basic household items such as cookers, bedding and clothes for pupils whose families are struggling.

A survey of more than 14,000 school staff, published at the National Education Union’s annual conference in Harrogate, found that this rose to more than half of those teachers working in deprived areas, with warnings that things “can only get worse” after recent benefit cuts.

Teachers attending the conference said the malign impact of poverty went beyond malnutrition, with families needing help to navigate the benefits system and lacking necessities such as beds or tables.

Chris Dutton, the deputy headteacher of a secondary school in the south-west of England and chair of the NEU’s national leadership council, said state schools “up and down the country” were providing vital support for families who had nowhere else to turn.

“School budgets are being spent on things that you wouldn’t necessarily associate with school budgets, providing basic equipment for families, providing things like cookers and microwaves,” Dutton said.

“Some schools are having to make those difficult decisions and decide what’s right to do. And actually, it shouldn’t be coming out of school budgets – but we shouldn’t be having children living in these circumstances.”

Michael Allen, a primary school teacher in Wiltshire, said schools were having to provide clothes for children joining reception classes who were unable or too anxious to use toilets by themselves, as well as trying to support their families, putting additional strains on teachers.

Allen said: “We know some children are cold when they come to school. We know that we can give out some payments for heating. But we have to plan that ahead, so it’s more worries for teachers and school leaders when we want to be focusing on teaching and inspiring pupils.

“We are really sometimes mired in things that we feel that maybe others should have picked up before they get to school.”

Kari Anson, the head of a special needs school in Birmingham, said poor living conditions and cuts to disability benefits created greater difficulties for the families of children with special educational needs (Sen).

“There are some children with additional needs, complex medical needs, who because of poverty are living in housing conditions that are absolutely awful. We’re talking mould on the walls, and that impacts those children who are asthmatic, prone to chest infections. This is putting those children in hospital, which means they’re then not attending school,” Anson said.

She added: “I’m really scared about the potential welfare cuts to Pip [personal independence payments] … that will affect a huge amount of young people within the Sen sector. So that really worries me, because it means that things potentially can only get worse.”

The latest government data, published last month for 2023-24, showed that the number of children in poverty had risen to 4.5 million, and accounted for 31% of all children in the UK.

Daniel Kebede, the NEU’s general secretary, said successive governments had expected schools to “plug the gaps” being left in the lives of children.

“A government calling for ‘high and rising standards’ [in schools] cannot at the same time stand idly by in the face of high and rising rates of child poverty,” Kebede said.

A Department for Education spokesperson said: “No child should be living in poverty, which is why we have already taken wide-ranging action to break the unfair link between background and opportunity, led by our cross-government child poverty taskforce.

“We have also tripled investment in breakfast clubs to over £30m – with delivery of free meals and childcare to begin in up to 750 schools from this month – and increased pupil premium to over £3bn to provide additional support for those children that need it most.”

The journalist Mishal Husain has said “personality-focused journalism doesn’t have to be bombastic”, after concerns that the BBC Radio 4 Today programme has shifted focus to be more editorialised.

The former BBC broadcaster, 52, has moved to front a new interview series as the editor-at-large of Bloomberg Weekend Edition.

She spoke to British Vogue about the changes at Today and the push towards personality-driven media – but the fashion magazine said she did not want to speak about how the arrival of the presenters Amol Rajan and Emma Barnett had changed the current affairs show.

When asked if she was comfortable with the changes, Husain said: “What was true to me was that I would very rarely use the word ‘I’, actually, on air.

“I would quite often say: ‘We’ve talked to so and so’, because you’re always part of a team. From the booking of guests, the deciding to go down a certain route, the writing of a brief – broadcasting is a team effort.

“So I would always say ‘we’ and very rarely use the word ‘I’. That’s just what came naturally to me.”

Husain, who had been at Today since 2013, added: “The last few months have taught me there’s an aspect I can embrace and that is personality-focused journalism doesn’t have to be bombastic.

“It doesn’t have to be about the presenters centring themselves. Hopefully, if they’re a personality with journalistic integrity, journalistic values, then they can be a conduit to the news for people.”

Rajan and Barnett have been praised for their more informal style and speaking about their personal lives. However, some listeners have criticised the shift in the show’s tone.

Husain also said she did not listen to Today “as much as I used to” because her “relationship with daily news has changed”.

The journalist, who has fronted general election debates, said she did not feel “entitled” to the jobs she lost to her colleagues, including the BBC Sunday morning politics programme that went to Laura Kuenssberg after Andrew Marr left, or the News at Ten slot that went to Clive Myrie.

“I think these things happen for a reason. I don’t look at either of those jobs and think I was entitled to do them, or I should have done them, or I wish I was doing them now,” she said.

Husain said she did not want to “behave” in a way in which she used other job offers to leverage a higher salary with the BBC, unlike some of her other colleagues.

The latest BBC annual report showed she was paid between £340,000 and £344,999 at the corporation during the 2023-24 financial year.

Husain also spoke about news organisations, including the BBC, being “completely hamstrung” in their reporting of the Hamas-Israel war because of the banning of foreign journalists from Gaza.

She also said: “This is a media strategy that has meant that the life of the Palestinian civilian is in no way covered in the same way as an Israeli civilian, and both deserve to have their stories told.”

Husain, who joined the BBC in 1998, has fronted The Andrew Marr Show and interviewed the Duke and Duchess of Sussex after their engagement in 2017.

The doctor who carried out the postmortems of the 15 paramedics and rescue workers who were killed by Israeli troops in Gaza in March has said they were mostly killed by gunshots to the head and torso, as well as injuries caused by explosives.

There was international outcry last month after it emerged that Israeli troops had launched a deadly attack on a group of paramedics from the Palestinian Red Crescent, civil defence and United Nations workers, as they carried out a rescue operation in southern Gaza.

Their bodies, along with the crushed vehicles, were buried in a sandy mass grave in Gaza by Israeli troops. After digging up the bodies days later, the UN claimed they had been executed “one by one”.

Ahmed Dhair, the forensic pathologist in Gaza who carried out autopsies on 14 out of the 15 victims, told the Guardian he had found “lacerations, entry wounds from bullets, and wounds resulting from explosive injuries. These were mostly concentrated in the torso area – the chest, abdomen, back, and head.”

Most had died from gunshot wounds, including what Dhair said was evidence of “explosive bullets”, otherwise known as “butterfly bullets”, which explode in the body upon impact, ripping apart flesh and bone.

“We found remains of explosive bullets,” said Dhair. “In one case, the bullet head had exploded in the chest, and the rest of the bullet fragments were found within the body. There were also remnants or shrapnel from bullets scattered on the back of one of the victims.”

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) did not immediately respond to allegations that these bullets had been used in the attack.

Details of the incident have remained disputed. Video footage that emerged from the beginning of the attack shows the convoy of ambulances coming under fire, but the subsequent events that led to the bodies of 15 workers being buried in a mass grave are still unclear.

Israel’s military admitted carrying out the killings but was forced to change its version of events after evidence emerged that contradicted its account that the vehicles had been “moving suspiciously” without lights.

Israel has claimed, without publicly presenting evidence, that six of the unarmed workers killed were Hamas operatives, which has been denied by Red Crescent.

Dhair said his findings did not suggest the paramedics had been shot at close range, but emphasised he was not a munitions expert. He said the shrapnel found in the bodies also suggested they had been hit with some form of explosive devices. “In some cases, the injuries seemed to be a mix of explosive and regular gunfire wounds,” he said.

Responding to the allegations that some of the bodies had been dug up with their hands tied, suggesting they were captured or held before they were killed, Dhair said he had not seen visible signs of restraint.

“Only in one case, there were discoloration and bruising on the wrists that could possibly be due to restraints,” he said. All the men were clearly in their work uniforms and their bodies had begun to decompose.

The findings are likely to increase pressure on Israel to give a full account of the incident amid accusations of a war crime. Israel has said it is still under investigation.

This week it emerged that one of the two paramedics who survived the incident, Assad al-Nsasrah – whose whereabouts had been unknown since – was being held in Israeli detention.

The medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières said on Wednesday that Gaza was becoming a “mass grave for Palestinians”.

Aid supplies including food, fuel, water and medicine have been blocked by Israel from entering Gaza since 2 March, more than two weeks before the collapse of the ceasefire between Israel and the Palestinian militant group with a return to air and ground attacks on the territory.

Israel has said it will keep blocking humanitarian aid from entering Gaza, as it vowed to force Hamas into releasing the remaining hostages from the 7 October 2023 attacks.

The Israeli defence minister, Israel Katz, said: “Israel’s policy is clear: no humanitarian aid will enter Gaza, and blocking this aid is one of the main pressure levers preventing Hamas from using it as a tool with the population.”

“No one is currently planning to allow any humanitarian aid into Gaza, and there are no preparations to enable such aid,” said Katz, who threatened to escalate the conflict with “tremendous force” if Hamas did not return the hostages.

Amnesty International is among the aid agencies that have described Israel’s blockade on all supplies going into Gaza as a crime against humanity and a violation of international humanitarian law. Israel has denied any violations.

More than 51,000 Palestinians have died in Gaza since the conflict began, including more than 1,600 since Israel resumed airstrikes and ground operations on 18 March. The Gaza health ministry does not distinguish between combatants and civilians but has said more than half of those dead were women and children.

Another 13 people were killed in airstrikes overnight, with a well-known photographer, Fatema Hassouna, among those reported dead in the northern area of the strip.

Doctors and aid groups on the ground said the humanitarian situation in Gaza was becoming graver by the day.

“The situation is the worst it has been in 18 months in terms of being deprived of your basic necessities and the resumption of hostilities and attacks against Palestinians in all of Gaza,” said Mahmoud Shalabi, a director at Medical Aid for Palestinians, a British charity.

Israel has been accused of worsening the humanitarian situation by targeting hospitals and medical personnel working in Gaza, with two hospitals struck and debilitated by airstrikes this week. Israel has claimed Hamas has used medical facilities as a cover for terrorist operations.

The resumption of aid into Gaza has become a highly inflammatory political issue in Israel. There are 58 hostages still in Gaza, who were taken captive after the Hamas attacks on southern Israel in October 2023, with 24 believed to still be alive.

Far-right figures in prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government have said no aid should be restored to the civilians of Gaza until Hamas agrees to the hostages’ release.

“As long as our hostages are languishing in the tunnels, there is no reason for a single gram of food or any aid to enter Gaza,” the national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, said on Wednesday.

Donald Trump has declared that Harvard University should no longer receive federal funds, calling it a “joke” that “teaches hate and stupidity”, while his administration said the pre-eminent US university could lose its ability to enrol foreign students.

Harvard made headlines on Monday by becoming the first university to stand up against a series of onerous demands from the Trump administration, setting the stage for a showdown between the federal government and one of the US’s most prestigious institutions.

The Trump administration swiftly retaliated by announcing it would freeze more than $2bn in multiyear grants and contracts with the university. On Wednesday it was also reported by CNN that the IRS was planning to take away Harvard’s tax-exempt status.

Numerous Democratic politicians and top universities across the country have rallied in support of Harvard, but the Trump administration has doubled down, threatening to strip Harvard of its tax-exempt status and insisting that the university apologize.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said late on Wednesday that Harvard would lose its ability to enrol foreign students if it did not meet demands the Trump administration demands to share information on some visa holders. The department’s secretary, Kristi Noem, also announced the termination of two DHS grants to Harvard totalling more than $2.7m.

Noem said she wrote a letter to the university demanding records on what she called the “illegal and violent activities” of Harvard’s foreign student visa holders by 30 April. “And if Harvard cannot verify it is in full compliance with its reporting requirements, the university will lose the privilege of enrolling foreign students,” she said in a statement.

A spokesperson for Harvard said it was aware of Noem’s letter and that the university stood by its statement earlier in the week to “not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights”, while saying it would comply with the law.

As part of an ongoing government review of various universities over allegations of antisemitism following the student-led campus protests against the war in Gaza last year, the Trump administration sent a letter to Harvard University on Friday outlining a list of demands it must meet in order to “maintain Harvard’s financial relationship with the federal government”.

It demanded Harvard close all diversity, equity and inclusion programs; share various admission details with the government; report foreign students who commit conduct violations to federal authorities; commission an outside party to audit each academic department to make sure the student body, faculty, staff and leadership is “viewpoint diverse”; and more.

On Monday, Harvard’s president, Alan Garber, responded that the university would not yield to the government’s demands, describing them as “an attempt to control the Harvard community”.

“The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” he said. “The administration’s prescription goes beyond the power of the federal government. It violates Harvard’s first amendment rights and exceeds the statutory limits of the government’s authority under Title VI. And it threatens our values as a private institution devoted to the pursuit, production, and dissemination of knowledge.”

He added: “No government – regardless of which party is in power – should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”

Other universities responded quickly. In a statement on Tuesday, the acting president of Columbia University said that it would “reject any agreement in which the government dictates what we teach, research, or who we hire”.

This comes after Columbia agreed to several demands from the administration last month after the White House pulled $400m of research grants and other funding from the school over its handling of the protests against the war in Gaza.

“To put minds at ease,” Columbia’s acting president, Claire Shipman, wrote on Tuesday, “though we seek to continue constructive dialogue with the government, we would reject any agreement that would require us to relinquish our independence and autonomy as an educational institution.”

The president of Stanford University, Jonathan Levin, and the school’s provost, Jenny Martinez, also released a statement in response to Harvard’s decision, praising the university.

“Universities need to address legitimate criticisms with humility and openness,” Levin and Martinez wrote. “But the way to bring about constructive change is not by destroying the nation’s capacity for scientific research, or through the government taking command of a private institution.”

Christopher Eisgruber, the president of Princeton University, also weighed in. “Princeton stands with Harvard,” he wrote. “I encourage everyone to read President Alan Garber’s powerful letter in full.”

So did Barack Obama. “Harvard has set an example for other higher-ed institutions – rejecting an unlawful and ham-handed attempt to stifle academic freedom, while taking concrete steps to make sure all students at Harvard can benefit from an environment of intellectual inquiry, rigorous debate and mutual respect,” the former president wrote. “Let’s hope other institutions follow suit.”

Maura Healey, the governor of Massachusetts, where Harvard is located, also praised the university for “standing against the Trump Administration’s brazen attempt to bully schools and weaponize the US Department of Justice under the false pretext of civil rights”.

In response, Trump threatened Harvard’s tax-exempt status. Most universities in the US are exempt from federal income tax under the US tax code because they are considered to be “operated exclusively” for public educational purposes.

Later on Tuesday, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told reporters that Trump “wants to see Harvard apologize”.

Then on Wednesday morning, Trump took to social media again to attack Harvard on his social media platform, Truth Social.

“Harvard is a JOKE, teaches Hate and Stupidity, and should no longer receive Federal Funds,” Trump wrote in the lengthy post. “Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

Reuters contributed to this report

Venice’s entrance fee will resume from Friday, with the main novelty this year being that last-minute day-trippers will pay double.

Last year, as part of an experiment aimed at dissuading day visitors during busy periods, Venice became the first major tourist city in the world to charge people to enter.

Although the initiative made little impact on visitor numbers, it did rake in €2.4m for the lagoon city’s coffers, much more than expected, and Venice authorities still believe it will eventually contribute to helping the Unesco world heritage city tackle overtourism.

This year’s levy, which is bookable online, remains €5, but will double if bought within three days before arrival in the city. Furthermore, it has been expanded to apply on 54 dates, mostly weekends, between 18 April and 27 July, almost double the number of days compared with last year. The measure applies between 8.30am and 4pm local time.

Visitors are provided with a QR code which they will need to present to stewards hired to patrol the city’s main entrance points, for example Venezia Santa Lucia train station.

Anyone who books an overnight stay in Venice is exempt from paying the fee, as are tourists from the wider Veneto region, which is where most day-trippers come from, as well as children under the age of 14. But even if a visitor has booked a hotel room they are still obliged to register their presence on the website.

Last year set a new record for visitors to Venice and its wider area, with more than 3.9 million staying overnight in the city’s historic centre. However, roughly 30 million people visit each year, the majority coming just for the day.

More than 35,000 day-trippers have already booked a ticket, according to the local news website Venezia Today.

Simone Venturini, Venice’s councillor for tourism, said that while there was “no magic wand” solution to a problem affecting many European tourist cities, the access fee scheme “represents a tangible and innovative tool” in terms of data analysis and managing visitor flows.

“It will be a long journey, but from now on the city will be able to rely on objective data rather than mere estimates to understand the phenomenon of overtourism,” he said. “Our goal is to encourage quality tourism – overnight stays – that respects the city and seeks to engage with it on a deeper level, embracing its unique character and rhythm.”

Another goal was to “strike a better balance between the rights of those who live in Venice and those who wish to visit it”, he added.

While the fee was mostly embraced by tourists last year, it was bitterly contested by Venice’s residents. Many of them believe the only real way to achieve more sustainable tourism would be to target the people who stay overnight by clamping down on short-term holiday lets and improving services for the year-round population, which in 2022 fell below 50,000 for the first time.

Giovanni Andrea Martini, a Venice councillor for the opposition, is among the fee’s most prominent critics.

“It has made absolutely no difference,” he said. “The numbers have actually been increasing. In recent days, we have been overwhelmed.”

Although there have been no new protests against the fee, residents have objected to attempts to encourage tourists to visit lesser-known areas of Venice’s main island.

“It is a measure aimed at reducing tourist pressure but naturally it has provoked anger among people living in these areas as it will disrupt their peace,” said Martini. “It is becoming even more tragic for those who live here.”

Plantains, cassava and fermented banana drink should be added to global healthy eating guidelines alongside the olive oil, tomatoes and red wine of the Mediterranean diet, say researchers who found the traditional diet of people living in Tanzania’s Kilimanjaro region had a positive impact on the body’s immune system.

Traditional foods enjoyed in rural villages also had a positive impact on markers of inflammation, the researchers found in a study published this month in the journal Nature Medicine.

Dr Quirijn de Mast, one of the paper’s authors, said they were now in a race against time to record and study the potential benefits of African heritage diets before they disappear as people move to cities and adopt western-style eating habits.

“Time is ticking because you see that these heritage diets are being replaced more and more by western diets,” he said. “We will lose so much interesting information [from which] we can learn – and not only for Africa.”

In previous research, the team had established that people following the traditional way of life in rural areas had a different immune-system profile to urban dwellers, with more anti-inflammatory proteins. Chronic inflammation is a key driver of many non-communicable diseases (NCDs), including rheumatoid arthritis and Alzheimer’s disease.

The new study set out to establish whether diet played a role. For a fortnight, 77 young men in their 20s and 30s were switched from heritage to western-style diets, or the reverse – with blood samples taken at the start and end, and again four weeks later.

Meals on the heritage diet menu included green plantain mixed with kidney beans, boiled chicken served with green vegetables and brown rice and beans. On the western-style menu, they included pizza, fried chicken and french fries and spaghetti served with beef stew.

Those newly adopting a western-style diet saw inflammatory markers in their blood increase and tests suggested their immune systems did not respond as well to infections. They also gained weight. By contrast, switching from a western diet to a heritage diet had a largely anti-inflammatory effect, and blood markers linked to metabolic problems fell.

In a third arm of the trial, participants following a western-style diet were asked to drink the local fermented banana beverage, known as mbege, for one week. That group also saw improvements in markers of inflammation.

For Dr Godfrey Temba, the first author of the paper and a lecturer at KCMC University in Moshi, Tanzania, the findings were not a surprise. “When we are in most of the villages, talking to elderly people [of] 80 or 90 years, they are very healthy. They don’t have any health complications [and] they tell you about consuming this type of diet and this beverage since they were 25.”

However, the diet and its benefits have not been explored and documented – unlike the traditional diets of the Mediterranean and Nordic countries, which are promoted by the World Health Organization for their beneficial effects.

Temba said: “We think this is the right time … so that [African heritage diets] can be also included in the global guidelines of diets, because they really have a health benefit – but because it’s not studied extensively, it’s not easy to convince [people] that they are healthy, because you don’t have enough data.”

The diet’s components, such as flavonoids and other polyphenols, and its impact on the gut microbiome were likely to play a part in the observed effects, De Mast said.

The study was conducted only in men for logistical reasons, but the researchers said they would expect similar findings in women, and for benefits to be maintained over time if people continued the diets.

Many African countries are facing rising rates of NCDs such as diabetes, obesity and heart disease.

De Mast, who holds positions at KCMC University and Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands, said research priorities in Africa had historically been determined by countries in the global north with a focus on infectious diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis and HIV. “Research on [things like] immunology has been neglected. I hope it will change now, with the rapid rise in NCDs, because that will be a major challenge for health systems across Africa.”

Nutritional guidelines also tended to “translate what we know from the north to Africa”, he said. “I think you should have, really, region-specific recommendations based on scientific data.”

The team is now testing what impact adopting a heritage diet can have on Tanzanians living with obesity, including whether it can boost their response to vaccines, and plan to compare different regional heritage diets.

“There’s so much diversity in dietary patterns across Africa – or [even just] in Tanzania,” said De Mast. “Godfrey is in Kilimanjaro region, but 30km down the road there is the Maasai tribe and their diet is entirely different. It’s mainly animal protein based – still, traditionally, cardiovascular disease was almost absent.

“So I think this is just the beginning of research looking at these heritage diets.”