The US will abandon its efforts “within days” to broker a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine unless there are clear signs a settlement can be reached, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has said, as Kyiv says it has signed a memorandum with the US over a controversial minerals deal.

Speaking in Paris on Friday after meeting European and Ukrainian leaders, Rubio said Donald Trump was still interested in a deal. But he added that the US president had many other priorities around the world and was willing to move on unless there were signs of progress.

Rubio’s comments are the clearest signal yet that the White House is ready to walk away from its diplomatic attempts to negotiate an end to the war. Last month Ukraine agreed unconditionally to a US proposal for a 30-day ceasefire.

The Kremlin, however, has rejected the plan. Instead, it has launched a fresh military push across the 600-mile (1,000km) frontline and stepped up its air attacks on Ukrainian civilians and infrastructure. On Sunday it bombed the city of Sumy, killing 35 people and injuring 117.

Since Trump returned to the White House in January he has piled pressure on Ukraine, stopping most US military assistance and temporarily cutting off intelligence sharing. This week he falsely blamed Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Joe Biden for “starting” the war.

In contrast, Trump has refused to criticise Vladimir Putin or to impose sanctions on or punish Moscow. Senior US officials – including the special envoy Steve Witkoff, who held talks last week with Putin in St Petersburg – have instead parroted Kremlin talking points.

Meanwhile, significant details of the minerals deal remain unclear, including whether Kyiv has agreed to a White House demand that it “pays back” the cost of earlier military assistance.

Zelenskyy was poised in February to sign a framework agreement over a wide-ranging economic partnership. It was derailed after his disastrous encounter with Trump and the US vice-president, JD Vance, in the Oval Office.

Since then negotiations have continued. Overnight, Ukraine’s first deputy prime minister, Yuliia Svyrydenko, said a memorandum had been finalised. It paved the way for the setting up of an investment fund for the reconstruction of Ukraine, she indicated.

“We are happy to announce the signing with our American partners,” she said. Speaking to reporters in the White House, Trump said a deal could be signed next Thursday.

The US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, added: “We’re still working on the details.” He said the latest version ran to 80 pages and was “substantially what we’d agree on previously”. “That’s what we will be signing,” he said.

According to the latest draft, seen by the Guardian, Ukraine acknowledges the “significant material and financial support” Kyiv has received from the US since Russia’s 2022 invasion and the desire from both countries for a “lasting peace”.

It says Ukraine’s prime minister, Denys Shmyhal, will visit Washington next week to hold final “technical talks” with Bessent. They are expected to complete discussions on a “reconstruction investment fund”, the memo adds.

The deal would need to be ratified by Ukraine’s parliament, Ukraine’s deputy minister of economy said on Friday.

Zelenskyy is keen to improve relations with the Trump administration. At the same time, he has so far rejected the White House’s demand that revenue from the new joint fund is used to cover the cost of weapons deliveries provided by the Biden administration.

Trump has previously said Ukraine “owes” the US $300bn (£226bn). Zelenskyy has pointed out this assistance was given as a grant, not as a loan, with Republicans and Democrats approving it in Congress. Any future partnership has to be based on “parity”, and should benefit both countries, he says.

The deal may help US weapons manufacturers who are facing a critical shortfall of key rare-earth minerals imported from China. Beijing has restricted their export in response to Trump’s escalating trade war.

Volodymyr Landa, a senior economist with the Centre for Economic Strategy thinktank in Kyiv, said the deal had gone through “multiple iterations”. He added: “It’s hard to say what’s inside.”

Landa said he did not expect Kyiv to accept that previous “non-refundable military aid” was now “debt”. “That’s not only unfair and unrealistic, but may also negatively affect the full global financial system,” he said.

He continued: “If it suddenly turns out that countries and organisations can demand payments for aid given unconditionally in previous years, it will make recipients more cautious, and could reopen difficult issues from previous decades around the world.”

The latest negotiations came as Russia killed one person and injured at least 74 in a ballistic missile strike on a residential area in the city of Kharkiv, in the north-east of Ukraine. Five of the wounded were children.

Kharkiv’s mayor, Ihor Terekhov, said the Russians used ballistic missiles equipped with cluster munitions. “That is why the affected areas are so extensive,” he said. At least 20 blocks of flats, 30 houses and an educational institution were damaged.

On Palm Sunday Russia dropped two Iskander missiles in the city centre of Sumy. One of them hit a congress centre. The other exploded between two university buildings and next to a crowded bus and cars.

China’s foreign ministry has dismissed as “groundless” the accusation by Volodymyr Zelenskyy that the country had been supplying weapons to Russia.

The comments, made at a regular press briefing in Beijing on Friday, came a day after the Ukrainian president said China was supplying weapons to Russia, including gunpowder and artillery, and that Chinese representatives were involved in weapons production on Russian territory.

In response, the ministry’s spokesperson, Lin Jian, said China had never made lethal weapons available to any party in the Ukraine crisis.

“China’s position on the Ukrainian issue has always been clear,” Lin said. “It has been actively committed to promoting a ceasefire and ending the conflict, as well as encouraging peace talks.”

Zelenskyy made the accusations at a press conference, saying Ukraine had information about China’s alleged assistance, and would be prepared to release more details next week.

“We see the cooperation between these two countries in this area, and we must acknowledge it is happening,” he said.

China says it is a neutral party to the conflict, although its leader, Xi Jinping, and Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, are public allies, with a “no limits” partnership between their countries.

Last week, two Chinese nationals were captured in Ukraine fighting alongside Russian forces. At the time, Zelenskyy accused Moscow of trying to involve China “directly or indirectly” in the conflict.

He said the men were among at least 155 other Chinese members of Russia’s armed forces, and accused Russia of conducting “systemic work” in China to recruit fighters, including through social media. He claimed Beijing was “turning a blind eye” to the recruitment.

Beijing denied the accusations, suggesting the fighters were travelling to Russia independently and saying the government warned its citizens to stay away from all conflict zones.

“I would like to reiterate that China is not the initiator of the Ukrainian crisis, nor is China a participating party,” Lin said last week. “We are a firm supporter and active promoter of a peaceful settlement of the crisis.”

She had been welcomed to the White House with open arms as few other foreign visitors had been since Donald Trump’s return, and Giorgia Meloni wanted to assure her host that – at least when it came to their political worldview – they spoke a common language.

Italy’s prime minister, whose Brothers of Italy party has roots in neo-fascism, was keen to stress that she shared many things with the man who had just hailed her as a “friend” who “everybody loves … and respects”.

Tariffs were a bit of problem. But between friends? Hey, we can work it out.

Even if Italy boasted one of Europe’s biggest trade surpluses with the US, such disagreements could be bridged with recourse to the previously uncoined creed of “western nationalism”, argued Meloni, speaking in confident, lightly accented English, although she admitted she did not know if it was “the right word”.

“I know that when I speak about west mainly, I don’t speak about geographical space. I speak about the civilization, and I want to make that civilization stronger,” she said, in terms that the president and his attendant cabinet members-cum-courtiers surely lapped up.

“So I think even if we have some problems between the two shores of the Atlantic, it is the time that we try to sit down and find solutions.”

After all, Meloni pointed out, they were on the same side when it came to one existential struggle, “the fight against the woke and ADI [sic] ideology that would like to erase our history.”

The acronym was a bit confusing. Did she mean DEI? But no matter, her audience got the general gist.

Meloni, 48, has been labelled “Europe’s Trump whisperer” – deemed capable of awakening the concealed angels of his nature that other Euro-leaders cannot reach. She has spent time at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida home, and was the only European leader invited to his inauguration in January.

Here, in the Oval Office, the whispering was having a soothing effect. The president smiled indulgently, before going off on several “weaves” during which he attacked Joe Biden, the federal reserve chair, Jerome Powell, for not cutting interest rates, Biden again, “activist judges” who were blocking his deportation agenda, then Powell once again.

But it was standard Trump. The man who had publicly browbeaten Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s president, and barely tolerated Emmanuel Macron and Keir Starmer on their White House visits was the very picture of a gracious host.

Even JD Vance – whose boorish interventions blew up the Zelenskyy visit and nearly did the same to Starmer’s – kept his trap shut, proof indeed that all was going swimmingly.

Then disaster threatened.

An Italian journalist insisted on asking the prime minister a question in her native Italian. Mamma mia!

Meloni looked disgusted. Weren’t they all supposed to be western nationalists here, defenders of the same civilization. Why emphasize differences?

She played along reluctantly, her features relaxing slightly as she embarked on an extended discourse, but her body language betraying her as she lifted both feet off the ground, one crossed leg folding behind the other. Trump watched her intently all the while.

When she finished, an American journalist tried to ask another question but Trump interjected: “No, wait, I want to hear what you said.”

It was over to Meloni’s female interpreter, sitting nearby, who revealed: “Prime Minister Meloni was asked … what she thinks about the fact that President Trump holds Zelenskyy responsible for the war in Ukraine.”

It was a discordant, yet key, moment – and the prime minister knew it. As the interpreter tried to continue, Meloni – perhaps sensing this was unsafe territory, not least because she has, for the most part, stuck with the western support for Ukraine that Trump is on the brink of abandoning – took over interpreting her own answer.

She limited her explanation to vowing to raise Italy’s contributions to Nato, currently at below 1.5% – well below the 2% minimum agreed, and far short of the 5% Trump has lately demanded.

Then it was the president’s turn. “I don’t hold Zelenskyy responsible,” he said, a retreat from his previous false accusations that Ukraine started the war. “But I’m not exactly thrilled with the fact that that war started. I’m not happy with anybody involved.”

If anybody was to blame, he went on, it was Biden – the default scapegoat for every wrong – because, after all, everyone knew the war would never have started if Trump had still been president.

No blame was attached to “President Putin”, the man who actually was responsible for starting the war. “Now I’m trying to get him to stop,” said Trump.

For the unfortunate Zelenskyy, widely praised across the west for standing steadfast in defense of his country when it was under attack, there was little charity.

“I’m not blaming him. But what I’m saying is that I don’t think he’s done the greatest job, OK? I’m not a big fan, I’m really not.”

It was a telling moment of just how far the west’s center of gravity had shifted in the few short weeks since Trump’s return to power. And an uncomfortable one, even for Meloni.

Then the conversation moved on to to the common ground of combatting migration – and it was back to the whispering again.

Hamas has formally rejected Israel’s latest ceasefire proposal, saying it will not accept a “partial” deal that does not guarantee an end to the war or a full withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza.

Hamas’s chief negotiator, Khalil al-Hayya, accused Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, of putting forward an offer that “set impossible conditions for a deal that does not lead to the end of the war or full withdrawal”.

There are 58 hostages held in Gaza who were captured by Hamas after the 7 October attack on southern Israel in 2023, with 24 still believed to be alive.

In Israel’s most recent offer to Hamas, they had proposed the initial release of 10 hostages in return for a 45-day ceasefire and the release of Palestinian prisoners, with the promise of further discussion of ending the war and restoring aid to Gaza.

For the first time, Israel had demanded the complete disarmament of Hamas as part of the deal – which the militant group has said is a red line. Hayya said it was their “natural right” to possess weapons.

In a video statement, Hayya said that Hamas was no longer willing to accept “partial agreements as a cover for their political agenda, which is based on continuing the war of extermination and starvation”.

He said that Hamas was ready to agree to a “comprehensive package” that ensured the release of all the hostages, in return for an agreed number of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. A key condition, he added, was that Israel “must completely end the war against our people and fully withdraw from the Gaza Strip”.

This week, Israel’s defence minister, Israel Katz, had made it clear that Israeli troops intended to remain in “security buffer zones” it had established in Gaza since the ceasefire with Hamas collapsed in March.

In recent weeks, Israeli troops have taken control of about 30% of Gaza, including parts of Rafah. More than 1,600 people in Gaza have been killed since the ceasefire collapsed, with 15 people, including 10 people from the same family, killed in airstrikes overnight.

After Hamas’s rejection of the deal, Netanyahu’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, said it was time to “open the gates of hell” on Gaza. Earlier this week, Katz had pledged to escalate the conflict with “tremendous force” if Hamas did not return the hostages.

Attempts by mediators from Egypt, Qatar and the US to restore the ceasefire and bring home the hostages have hit major stumbling blocks, and no progress was made in the latest round of talks in Cairo this week, according to officials.

Aid supplies including food, water and fuel have been blocked from entering Gaza since 2 March. Hamas has accused Israel of using mass starvation as a weapon, which they say is a war crime.

There are also fears for the lives of the remaining living hostages as Israel continues its airstrikes on Gaza. This week, a spokesperson for Hamas’s armed wing said it had lost contact with the group holding the Israeli-American hostage Edan Alexander after a “direct strike” on his location.

The White House criticised Hamas for its rejection of the deal offered by Israel.

“Hamas’s comments demonstrate they are not interested in peace but perpetual violence,” said the US national security council spokesperson James Hewitt. “The terms made by the Trump administration have not changed: release the hostages or face hell.”

As the bells rang out across the courtyard of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the priests began to sing a deep, low prayer. Heads bowed over candles, and escorted by people bearing aloft large gold crosses, they made their way to a platform at the heart of the ancient square.

The ceremony on Holy Thursday, in which the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem washes the feet of 12 monastic priests to commemorate the Last Supper, is one of many Easter rituals that have taken place in the Old City of Jerusalem for hundreds of years. For Christians, there is no holier place to commemorate Easter than here, the site where they believe Jesus Christ was crucified, buried and resurrected.

Yet the crowd that assembled outside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on Thursday morning was small and muted. International pilgrims jostled with dark-robed Greek Orthodox monks, but one group of native worshippers was noticeably absent.

For generations, the tens of thousands of Palestinian Christians living in Israeli-occupied West Bank villages and cities such as Ramallah, Bethlehem and Taybeh would travel to Jerusalem’s Old City at Easter to take part in the prayers, processions and rituals such as the Holy Fire ceremony. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre itself is in East Jerusalem, which was captured by Israel from Jordan in the six-day war of 1967 and unilaterally annexed in 1980.

Yet centuries of tradition have been ruptured by Israel’s increasingly draconian control over Palestinian movement – which means any Palestinian in the West Bank living outside Jerusalem, must obtain a military permit if they want to enter the city. For years, Christians in Palestinian territories were regularly granted permits to visit Jerusalem around Easter but since the war with Hamas broke out on 7 October 2023, they have become almost impossible to obtain.

This Easter, the government announced it had issued 6,000 permits, though there are 50,000 Christians – mostly Catholic or Greek Orthodox – living in the West Bank beyond East Jerusalem. However, in reality, just 4,000 were given, according to Christian leaders, and often only to a few members of each family who applied.

These permits are valid for just one week and do not allow the Palestinian pilgrims to stay in Jerusalem overnight, meaning they have to make the gruelling journey back to the West Bank by bus or taxi – crossing a multitude of army checkpoints – every evening, limiting the festivities they can take part in. A group from the village of Taybeh said the Israeli military still did not allow them to cross over to Jerusalem for Palm Sunday even though they had valid permits.

The few who do make it to the Old City have been met with increased police brutality in recent years. In April 2023, Palestinian Christian worshipers and international pilgrims were beaten by Israeli police and armed forces as they attempted to reach the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

“People are very afraid and many will not risk attending the Easter processions any more,” said Omar Haramy, who runs Sabeel, a Christian organisation based in Jerusalem. He said several staff were beaten last year as they tried to attend Easter festivities in the Old City, and Christians in the Old City regularly faced hostility outside churches or as they went about their daily lives.

One of the greatest sources of distress among the Christian community is the introduction of blockades and aggressive policing that prevented thousands of Christians being able to take part in the Holy Fire festivities that mark the resurrection on Easter Saturday afternoon, as they have done for hundreds of years in the Old City.

While the restrictions have been justified in the name of safety, many Christians view them as another way for the Israeli state to exert dominance over the community.

“I will go to the celebrations on Holy Saturday because my family has been part of this tradition for thousands of years, but I’m not going to bring my kids, it’s too dangerous now, with the police violence,” Haramy said.

The spectre of Gaza also hangs over this year’s Easter festivities. Palestinian Christians are among the 51,000 people killed in Gaza since the war with Israel began and on Palm Sunday, an Israeli missile hit the only Christian-run hospital in the strip. There are about 500 Christians are sheltering in Holy Family church, one of only two left standing. Those contacted by the Guardian said they were too afraid to talk, fearful of anything that might make them a target of Israeli airstrikes.

For all its biblical significance and abundance of churches, convents and monasteries, Jerusalem’s Old City has become increasingly dangerous for all Christians, not just those from Arab backgrounds. Since the rise of Jewish ultranationalism in Israel, and the election of the most far-right government in the country’s history, extremist and settler Jewish movements – who want to claim all of Israel and Palestinian-controlled territories as a state only for Jews – have been emboldened in their actions against both Christians and Muslims.

Historically, the relationship between Christians and Jews has been fraught, because of the Christian church’s historic role in antisemitism and the persecution of Jews. The ongoing presence of proselytising evangelical Christians, many from the US, who travel to Israel with the sole purpose of converting Jews, has also been inflammatory, particularly among the Jewish Orthodox community.

But religious intolerance and antichristian sentiment has been made mainstream by Israeli political leadership – the ultra-hardline national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, described Israelis spitting on Christians as “an old Jewish tradition” – and old suspicions have escalated into brazen, all-out violence. There have also been growing incidences of settler groups attempting to seize Christian land in Jerusalem. In 2023, the Holy Land Roman Catholic patriarch Pierbattista Pizzaballa accused the government of establishing a “cultural and political atmosphere that can justify, or tolerate, actions against Christians”.

A recent report by the Rossing Center for Education and Dialogue documented the steep rise in the scale and severity of attacks on Christians in Jerusalem and across Israel in 2024, ranging from spitting at priests and public hate speech to the desecration of graves, arson attacks and vandalising of churches.

“It’s usually young Israeli Jewish men who are conducting these attacks with impunity. They face very little punishment, if the police get involved at all,” said John Munayer, the director of international engagement at the Rossing Center.

“It’s a clear attempt by hardcore settler Zionists to Judaise the Old City of Jersualem and trying to make it unbearable for Christians who have been there for centuries.”

As he attended the Easter prayer ceremony on Thursday, Father Nikon Golovko, the deputy head of the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Jerusalem, said he had “really seen things change for the worse for Christians in the past nine years”.

He said: “We receive a lot more hostility and even aggression from the Jewish community. They spit on priests, even when we are walking through the Christian quarter. It sends a message that the city belongs not to all communities but only to the Jews. It was not like this before.”

After an incident in which Orthodox Jews were caught on video spitting at Christians, Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said that Israel was “totally committed to safeguard the sacred right of worship and pilgrimage to the holy sites of all faiths”.

Xavier Abu Eid, a Palestinian Christian political analyst and the author of Rooted in Palestine: Palestinian Christians and the Struggle for National Liberation 1917-2004, said that despite the mounting harassment they faced, the diminishing numbers of Christians left in the West Bank and the unrelenting horrors of the war in Gaza, he still viewed Easter as a time of hope and “the timely message that life defeats death”.

“As Palestinian Christians, we know that this generation will either make it or break it,” said Abu Eid.

“So making clear to the Israeli occupation that we are going to stay, that we will celebrate the same religious events that we’ve been celebrating for centuries is both a national mandate and a religious mission that we have. Keeping our Christian traditions alive, praying – they have become an act of resistance.”

The Maryland senator Chris Van Hollen met in El Salvador with Kilmar Ábrego García, a man who was sent there by the Trump administration in March despite an immigration court order preventing his deportation.

Van Hollen posted a photo of the meeting on X, saying he also called Ábrego García’s wife “to pass along his message of love”.

The lawmaker did not provide an update on the status of Ábrego García, whose attorneys are fighting to force the Trump administration to facilitate his return to the US.

It was not clear how the meeting was arranged, where they met or what will happen to Abrego Garcia. El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, posted images of the meeting minutes before Van Hollen shared his post, saying: “Now that he’s been confirmed healthy, he gets the honor of staying in El Salvador’s custody.”

Bukele continued mockingly: “Kilmar Ábrego García, miraculously risen from the ‘death camps’ and ‘torture’, now sipping margaritas with Sen Van Hollen in the tropical paradise of El Salvador!” The tweet ended with emojis of the US and El Salvador flags, with a handshake emoji between them.

The meeting came in the hours after Van Hollen said he was denied entry into an high-security El Salvador prison while he was trying to check on Ábrego García’s wellbeing and attempting to push for his release.

The Democratic senator said at a news conference in San Salvador that his car was stopped by soldiers at a checkpoint about 3km from the Terrorism Confinement Center, or Cecot, even as they let other cars go on.

“They stopped us because they are under orders not to allow us to proceed,” Van Hollen said.

Donald Trump and Bukele said this week that they have no basis to send Ábrego García back, even as the Trump administration has called his deportation a mistake and the US supreme court has called on the administration to facilitate his return.

Trump officials have said that Ábrego García, a Salvadorian citizen who was living in Maryland, has ties to the MS-13 gang, but his attorneys say the government has provided no evidence of that and Ábrego García has never been charged with any crime related to such activity.

Van Hollen’s trip has become a partisan flashpoint in the US as Democrats have seized on Ábrego García’s deportation as what they say is a cruel consequence of Trump’s disregard for the courts. Republicans have criticized Democrats for defending him and argued that his deportation is part of a larger effort to reduce crime.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt held a news conference on Wednesday with the mother of a Maryland woman who was killed by a fugitive from El Salvador in 2023.

Van Hollen told reporters on Wednesday that he met with Vice-President Félix Ulloa, who said his government could not return Ábrego García to the United States.

“So today, I tried again to make contact with Mr Ábrego García by driving to the Cecot prison,” Van Hollen said on Thursday.

Van Hollen said Ábrego García has not had any contact with his family or his lawyers. “There has been no ability to find out anything about his health and wellbeing,” Van Hollen said. He said Ábrego García should be able to have contact with his lawyers under international law.

“We won’t give up until Kilmar has his due process rights respected,” Van Hollen said. He said there would be “many more” lawmakers coming to El Salvador.

New Jersey senator Cory Booker is also considering a trip to El Salvador, as are some House Democrats.

While Van Hollen was denied entry, several House Republicans have visited the notorious gang prison in support of the Trump administration’s efforts. Riley Moore, a West Virginia Republican, posted on Tuesday evening that he’d visited the prison where Ábrego García is being held. He did not mention Ábrego García but said the facility “houses the country’s most brutal criminals”.

“I leave now even more determined to support President Trump’s efforts to secure our homeland,” Moore wrote on social media.

Missouri Republican Jason Smith, the chair of the House ways and means committee, also visited the prison. He posted on X that “thanks to President Trump” the facility “now includes illegal immigrants who broke into our country and committed violent acts against Americans”.

The fight over Ábrego García has also played out in contentious court filings, with repeated refusals from the government to tell a judge what it plans to do, if anything, to repatriate him.

Since March, El Salvador has accepted from the US more than 200 Venezuelan immigrants – whom Trump administration officials have accused of gang activity and violent crimes – and placed them inside the country’s maximum-security gang prison just outside San Salvador. That prison is part of Bukele’s broader effort to crack down on the country’s powerful street gangs, which has put 84,000 people behind bars and made Bukele popular at home.

Human rights groups have accused Bukele’s government of subjecting those jailed to “systematic use of torture and other mistreatment”. Officials there deny wrongdoing.

Joe Seiders, the American drummer with Canadian indie rockers the New Pornographers, has been arrested for possession of child sexual abuse imagery.

A statement made by the sheriff’s office of Riverside county, California, alleged that evidence has implicated Seiders in two incidents. On Monday 7 April, an 11-year-old boy reported that a man attempted to film him in a restroom of a fast food restaurant, and on Wednesday 9 April, police officers received another report from the restaurant, that a man was “entering and exiting the restroom with juvenile males at the business”.

Officers arrested Seiders at the scene, and secured search warrants for his home, vehicle and phone: “Evidence was located implicating him in the two reported incidents, along with additional crimes, including possessing child pornography,” the statement reads. He was also charged with annoying/molesting a child, invasion of privacy, and attempted invasion of privacy.

Seiders is being held in jail with bail set at $1m, and is due in court on 22 April.

The New Pornographers responded with a statement reading: “Everyone in the band is absolutely shocked, horrified, and devastated by the news of the charges against Joe Seiders – and we have immediately severed all ties with him. Our hearts go out to everyone who has been impacted by his actions.”

Fronted by AC Newman and the Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Neko Case, the band are an enduring presence in North American indie, with a catalogue dating back to 2000 debut album Mass Romantic. One of their former members is Dan Bejar, AKA Destroyer. Their biggest chart success came with 2014 album Brill Bruisers, which reached No 13 in the US charts, after which their long-time drummer Kurt Dahle left and was replaced by Seiders.

As well as touring with the band, Seiders performed on their three most recent studio albums. He has also backed Case as well as artists including John Oates, Juliana Hatfield and Gary Jules, and previously played in the group Beat Club.

Opposition parties in Italy have complained to the communications watchdog about a series of AI-generated images published on social media by deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini’s far-right party, calling them “racist, Islamophobic and xenophobic”, the Guardian has learned.

The centre-left Democratic party (PD), with the Greens and Left Alliance, filed a complaint on Thursday with Agcom, the Italian communications regulatory authority, alleging the fake images used by the League contained “almost all categories of hate speech”.

Over the past month, dozens of apparently AI‑generated photos have appeared on the League’s social channels, including on Facebook, Instagram and X. The images frequently depict men of colour, often armed with knives, attacking women or police officers.

Antonio Nicita, a PD senator, said: “In the images published by Salvini’s party and generated by AI there are almost all categories of hate speech, from racism and xenophobia to Islamophobia. They are using AI to target specific categories of people – immigrants, Arabs – who are portrayed as potential criminals, thieves and rapists.

“These images are not only violent but also deceptive: by blurring the faces of the victims it is as if they want to protect the identity of the person attacked, misleading users into believing the photo is real. These are images that incite hatred.”

“This is serious,” said Francesco Emilio Borrelli, an MP for the Greens and Left Alliance. “AI generates content based on our instructions, and in this case it was clearly instructed to generate images of black people robbing an elderly woman or a frightened woman. It is part of their strategy to create fear among citizens.”

A spokesperson for Salvini’s party confirmed that “some of the pictures” featured on their social media channels had been “generated digitally”.

In a statement it said: “The point is not the image. The point is the fact. Each post is based on true reports from Italian newspapers, with names, dates and places. If reality seems too harsh, do not blame those who report it, but those who make it so. If it is about a crime, it is hard to accompany the news with cheerful or reassuring images.”

Salvatore Romano, the head of research at the nonprofit AI Forensics, said the League pictures bore “all the hallmarks of artificial intelligence”. “They are out‑of‑context photos in which the subject is in the foreground and the rest is entirely blurred. What worries me is that these AI‑generated images are becoming ever more realistic.”

The complaint to Agcom cites several examples of images thought to have been digitally generated, saying they have appeared alongside the branding of reputable mainstream media outlets which have reported on the crimes mentioned but not used images of the alleged perpetrators.

In one case, the League’s post says: “A foreigner attacks the train conductor” and pairs the text with an image of a man of colour with his fist raised. The original headline in Il Resto del Carlino reads: “He attacks the [female] train conductor and sparks panic on board.” The article makes no mention of the suspect’s nationality beyond calling him a “foreigner”. There was no photograph of the alleged attack.

Another image featured in the complaint shows a mother and father in Islamic dress appearing to shout angrily at a girl, “thus feeding racial and Islamophobic prejudice”. Il Giorno, the newspaper that is cited, makes no reference in its report to the religion of either the family or the girl allegedly abused by her parents, beyond saying the child had attended Arabic language school. There was no photograph of the family.

The use of AI‑generated images for propaganda by far‑right parties is a growing phenomenon that entered the mainstream around last year’s European elections, when images designed to stoke fears over immigration or demonise leaders such as Emmanuel Macron began circulating on social media.

“Then came the American elections with Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who effectively normalised this trend,” said Romano. “Today we see that far‑right parties have not only continued to generate fake images for propaganda but have also increased their use at a time when AI tools have improved content quality, making the phenomenon all the more worrying.”

Despite social platforms being obliged to take steps to anticipate these risks – for example by adding a label specifying that an image has been generated by AI – Romano says that, in practice, this mechanism is almost always ineffective.

Asked if the League was aware that the images could generate hate speech, a spokesperson for Salvini’s party said: “We are sorry, but our solidarity goes to the victims, not the perpetrators. If denouncing crimes committed by foreigners means ‘xenophobia’, perhaps the problem is not the word but those who use it to censor debate. We will continue to denounce, with strong words and images, what others prefer to ignore.’’

If Agcom deems the flagged content offensive it can, under the EU’s Digital Services Act, order posts to be taken down, accounts to be removed and social media platforms to be fined for failing to police user behaviour. In 2023, Agcom fined Meta €5.85m and ordered the removal of dozens of accounts for breaching the ban on gambling advertising.

Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, was approached for comment. X declined to comment.

Opposition parties in Italy have complained to the communications watchdog about a series of AI-generated images published on social media by deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini’s far-right party, calling them “racist, Islamophobic and xenophobic”, the Guardian has learned.

The centre-left Democratic party (PD), with the Greens and Left Alliance, filed a complaint on Thursday with Agcom, the Italian communications regulatory authority, alleging the fake images used by the League contained “almost all categories of hate speech”.

Over the past month, dozens of apparently AI‑generated photos have appeared on the League’s social channels, including on Facebook, Instagram and X. The images frequently depict men of colour, often armed with knives, attacking women or police officers.

Antonio Nicita, a PD senator, said: “In the images published by Salvini’s party and generated by AI there are almost all categories of hate speech, from racism and xenophobia to Islamophobia. They are using AI to target specific categories of people – immigrants, Arabs – who are portrayed as potential criminals, thieves and rapists.

“These images are not only violent but also deceptive: by blurring the faces of the victims it is as if they want to protect the identity of the person attacked, misleading users into believing the photo is real. These are images that incite hatred.”

“This is serious,” said Francesco Emilio Borrelli, an MP for the Greens and Left Alliance. “AI generates content based on our instructions, and in this case it was clearly instructed to generate images of black people robbing an elderly woman or a frightened woman. It is part of their strategy to create fear among citizens.”

A spokesperson for Salvini’s party confirmed that “some of the pictures” featured on their social media channels had been “generated digitally”.

In a statement it said: “The point is not the image. The point is the fact. Each post is based on true reports from Italian newspapers, with names, dates and places. If reality seems too harsh, do not blame those who report it, but those who make it so. If it is about a crime, it is hard to accompany the news with cheerful or reassuring images.”

Salvatore Romano, the head of research at the nonprofit AI Forensics, said the League pictures bore “all the hallmarks of artificial intelligence”. “They are out‑of‑context photos in which the subject is in the foreground and the rest is entirely blurred. What worries me is that these AI‑generated images are becoming ever more realistic.”

The complaint to Agcom cites several examples of images thought to have been digitally generated, saying they have appeared alongside the branding of reputable mainstream media outlets which have reported on the crimes mentioned but not used images of the alleged perpetrators.

In one case, the League’s post says: “A foreigner attacks the train conductor” and pairs the text with an image of a man of colour with his fist raised. The original headline in Il Resto del Carlino reads: “He attacks the [female] train conductor and sparks panic on board.” The article makes no mention of the suspect’s nationality beyond calling him a “foreigner”. There was no photograph of the alleged attack.

Another image featured in the complaint shows a mother and father in Islamic dress appearing to shout angrily at a girl, “thus feeding racial and Islamophobic prejudice”. Il Giorno, the newspaper that is cited, makes no reference in its report to the religion of either the family or the girl allegedly abused by her parents, beyond saying the child had attended Arabic language school. There was no photograph of the family.

The use of AI‑generated images for propaganda by far‑right parties is a growing phenomenon that entered the mainstream around last year’s European elections, when images designed to stoke fears over immigration or demonise leaders such as Emmanuel Macron began circulating on social media.

“Then came the American elections with Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who effectively normalised this trend,” said Romano. “Today we see that far‑right parties have not only continued to generate fake images for propaganda but have also increased their use at a time when AI tools have improved content quality, making the phenomenon all the more worrying.”

Despite social platforms being obliged to take steps to anticipate these risks – for example by adding a label specifying that an image has been generated by AI – Romano says that, in practice, this mechanism is almost always ineffective.

Asked if the League was aware that the images could generate hate speech, a spokesperson for Salvini’s party said: “We are sorry, but our solidarity goes to the victims, not the perpetrators. If denouncing crimes committed by foreigners means ‘xenophobia’, perhaps the problem is not the word but those who use it to censor debate. We will continue to denounce, with strong words and images, what others prefer to ignore.’’

If Agcom deems the flagged content offensive it can, under the EU’s Digital Services Act, order posts to be taken down, accounts to be removed and social media platforms to be fined for failing to police user behaviour. In 2023, Agcom fined Meta €5.85m and ordered the removal of dozens of accounts for breaching the ban on gambling advertising.

Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, was approached for comment. X declined to comment.

More than a quarter of Canadians have been exposed to fake political content on social media that is “more sophisticated and more politically polarizing” as the country prepares to vote in a federal election, researchers have found, warning that platforms must increase protections amid a “dramatic acceleration” of online disinformation in the final weeks of the campaign.

In a new report released on Friday, Canada’s Media Ecosystem Observatory found a growing number of Facebook ads impersonating legitimate news sources were instead promoting fraudulent investment schemes, often involving cryptocurrency.

Canada’s federal election, on 28 April, is the first national vote in which Canadian news is not permitted to be shared on products owned by Meta, including Facebook and Instagram. The ban, which began in August 2023, is a result of a standoff between the tech giant and Ottawa over the Online News Act that forced intermediaries such as Meta and Google’s parent company Alphabet to compensate journalism outlets for sharing their content. Meta described the legislation, Bill C-18 – passed on 18 June – as “unworkable” and argued that the only way to comply with the law is to “end news availability for people in Canada”.

But media researchers found more than half of Canadians still say they get political news from Facebook, despite the platform’s ban on news articles from reputable outlets.

“People using Facebook aren’t often thinking, ‘Am I reading the news?’ But they leave feeling more informed politically, either from comments from friends or family, about the election. They might see a post from a candidate or follow cultural news aggregating types of accounts,” said Aengus Bridgman, the executive director of the MEO.

“But we know this is not the same quality of information they might have accessed before the ban. The richest, densest and most accurate and factchecked information is not making it through any more. Neither is information that might contradict the views they hold. All of that just has been cut really – like, off at the knees.”

Bridgman says that most of the content the team uncovered – including more than 40 Facebook pages promoting fraudulent ads, with new pages being created and identified every day – were meant to be humorous or ironic, instead of convincing. None of the content the team found is expected to sway the electorate.

But Canada’s Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections (Site) is monitoring the election for disinformation and says it expects increased online political activity following the two closely-watched leaders debates. China, Russia and Iran remain the greatest threats to Canada’s election, according to the taskforce.

Last week, Site officials said they had found an information operation linked to China on Chinese-language social media platform WeChat, the popular news account Youli-Youmian.

“Foreign interference has been top of mind this election, with candidates bludgeoning each other on this issue. We monitor these platforms and our evaluation of that incident in particular doesn’t feel as though it had any material influence or consequence,” said Bridgman.

“We don’t think one WeChat channel posting a couple times about Canadian politics articles consistent with their editorial line amounts to foreign interference.”

Instead, researchers have focused their attention on a series of scams that appear to be a continuation of a trend replicated in other countries, in which ads showing “fake sensational political headlines” impersonate small business and personal accounts.

Bridgman cautioned that the broader risk of deepfakes comes when a population is uninformed. “If you’ve never heard about this person before, you cannot distinguish audio or video of them in compromising situations or making offensive remarks. And in the context of politics, we worry that with more unfamiliar candidates, the risk of convincing deep fakes escalates,” he said.

Among posts examined by the team were seven deep fake videos falsely showing prime minister Mark Carney promoting the fraudulent investment platforms featured directly in the ads. These deepfakes typically mimic broadcasts by the CBC or CTV, two of the top news outlets in Canada.

In one of those, the headline reads “Mark Carney announces controversial retaliatory tariff plan in response to Trump’s devastating tariff hikes this week”. The article shows Carney meeting with a top CBC news anchor and includes a purported transcript of an interview, in which he promises to send money to Canadians if they register for what purports to be a newly formed government programme. The link, however, brings users to a cryptocurrency scam.

In another, a page called Money Mindset, which uses the logo of the CBC/Radio-Canada, bought five French-language Facebook ads that were active from one to four hours between 4 and 9 April. One of the ads, featuring a deep fake video of Carney, cost US$300–$399 (about C$500) and received between five and six thousand impressions. In total, the five ads represent an investment of approximately C$1,000 and have received around 10,000 impressions.

“These imposter ads, fake news articles, and deepfake videos can undermine the credibility of both the targeted party leaders featured in the content and the news brands and journalists whose names, logos, or visual designs are being impersonated,” the report said.

A spokesperson for Meta told the Guardian it was “against our policies to run ads that try to scam or impersonate people or brands” adding the company encouraged people to report fraudulent content.

“This is an ongoing industry-wide challenge – scammers use every platform available to them and constantly adapt to evade enforcement. Our work in this area is never done, and we continue to invest in new technologies and methods to protect people on our platforms from scams.”

But researchers say the response from tech companies “appears to have been inconsistent and insufficient for preventing these ads from spreading” – pointing to the proliferation of ads in recent days. The observatory also found that since many of these ads do not self-disclose as political, they often do not appear in the Meta’s ad library, which hampers the ability to assess the scope of the trend.

“Imagine that on TV there’s an ad using clearly fraudulent content or is a deepfake. In what world would that be allowed? It would never get approved for use because of the advertising standards in this country,” said Bridgeman.

“And yet, Facebook runs these ads that get hundreds of thousands of views across the country and it’s just a pure scam. In the midst of a federal election using an image of Carney and a fake CBC news website on a platform that bans the news – this feels like we’re kind of in like a Black Mirror kind of moment. And what worries me is that it feels like people are just okay with this.”

A British woman was among four people who died when a cable car crashed to the ground near Naples in southern Italy on Thursday.

Prosecutors in Torre Annunziata have opened an investigation into possible manslaughter after the accident at Monte Faito, a peak about 28 miles (45km) south-east of Naples.

Police confirmed two of the other victims were an Israeli woman and the Italian driver of the cable car. They would not confirm reports in the Italian press that the fourth victim was British.

Another man, reported in the Italian press to be Israeli, was hospitalised in Ponticelli with severe injuries. The hospital said the man, who was intubated and had fractures to his lower limbs, remained “stable in the seriousness” of his injuries and would undergo further tests on Friday morning.

The cable car service operated two cabins. The one that crashed had been travelling up the mountain, while 16 people were helped out of the cabin that had been making its way down and stopped in mid-air close to the foot of the peak. They were evacuated one by one, using harnesses, footage on RAI public television and other media showed.

Italian media reported that one of the cables supporting the cabin had snapped. The cable car service, which had opened for the spring and summer season 10 days previously, underwent a maintenance check a week ago, according to reports on Friday.

“The cabin at the top has crashed,” Umberto De Gregorio, the chair of EAV, the public transport company that runs the cable car service, wrote on Facebook, calling it “a tragedy”.

Vincenzo De Luca, the head of the Campania region around Naples, told RAI that rescue operations were hampered by fog and strong winds, which on Thursday had reached 100 km/h.

Residents heard a loud bang before the cable car fell, according to news reports.

“There was a truly severe weather situation, therefore I can imagine what could have happened at 1,500 metres above sea level,” De Luca said. “But, I repeat, technical checks must be done with the utmost rigour.”

The last deadly cable car crash in Italy was in 2021 when 14 people were killed when a cable car linking the resort town of Stresa and the Mottarone mountain in the Piedmont region plummeted into the woods near Lake Maggiore.

Giorgia Meloni, the prime minister, was informed of Thursday’s crash during a summit in Washington with the US president, Donald Trump. She expressed her “deepest condolences’ to the families of those killed and injured.

The Faito cable car service was launched in 1952. In 1960 four people, including a nine-year-old child, died after a pylon broke, Napoli Today reported.

US strikes on a fuel port in Yemen have killed at least 58 people, according to the Houthi-run al-Masirah TV, in what would be one of the deadliest since Washington began its attacks on the Iran-backed militants.

The US has vowed not to halt the large-scale strikes begun last month in its biggest military operation in the Middle East since Donald Trump took office in January unless the Houthis cease targeting Red Sea shipping.

Al-Masirah TV also said 126 people had been wounded in Thursday’s strikes on the western port of Ras Isa, which the US military said was intended to cut off a source of fuel for the Houthi militant group.

Asked for comment on the Houthis’ casualty figure and its own estimate, US Central Command said it had none beyond the initial announcement of the attacks.

“The objective of these strikes was to degrade the economic source of power of the Houthis, who continue to exploit and bring great pain upon their fellow countrymen,” it had said in a social media post.

The Houthis have launched dozens of drone and missile attacks on vessels in the Red Sea since November 2023, saying they were targeting ships linked to Israel in protest over the war in Gaza.

The group halted attacks on shipping lanes during a two-month ceasefire in Gaza. Although they vowed to resume strikes after Israel renewed its assault on Gaza last month, they have not claimed any since.

Two days of US attacks in March killed more than 50 people, Houthi officials said.

The largest ever study investigating medical cannabis as a treatment for cancer, published this week in Frontiers in Oncology, found overwhelming scientific support for cannabis’s potential to treat cancer symptoms and potentially fight the course of the disease itself.

The intention of the analysis was to solidify agreement on cannabis’s potential as a cancer treatment, said Ryan Castle, research director at the Whole Health Oncology Institute and lead author of the study. Castle noted that it has been historically difficult to do so because marijuana is still federally considered an illegal Schedule I narcotic.

“Our goal was to determine the scientific consensus on the topic of medical cannabis, a field that has long been dominated by a war between cherrypicked studies,” Castle said.

The study was funded by Cancer Playbook, which works with the Whole House Oncology Institute to collect, analyze and share data on patient-reported outcomes.

While research restrictions on Schedule I substances severely hamper clinical research on cannabis in humans, there is a large body of observational studies on medical cannabis and cancer – as well as lab research – that looks at cannabis’s effect on tumors in test tubes and in animals. The analysis included as many of those studies as possible.

“In order to move beyond bias – conscious or not – it was essential to use a large-scale, radically inclusive methodology based on mathematical reasoning,” Castle said, adding: “We wanted to analyze not just a handful, but nearly every major medical cannabis study to find the actual points of scientific agreement.”

Castle’s study looked at more than 10,000 studies on cannabis and cancer, which he said is “10 times the sample size of the next largest study, which we believe helps make it a more conclusive review of the scientific consensus”.

To analyze the massive quantity of studies, Castle and his team used AI – specifically, the natural language processing technique known as “sentiment analysis”. This technique allowed the researchers to see how many studies had positive, neutral or negative views on cannabis’s ability to treat cancer and its symptoms by, for example, increasing appetite, decreasing inflammation or accelerating “apoptosis”, or the death of cancer cells.

Castle says his team hoped to find “a moderate consensus” about cannabis’s potential as a cancer treatment, and expected the “best case scenario” to be something like 55% of studies showing that medical cannabis improved cancer outcomes.

“It wasn’t 55-45, it was 75-25,” he said.

The study overwhelmingly supported cannabis as a treatment for cancer-related inflammation, appetite loss and nausea. Perhaps more surprisingly, it also showed that cannabis has the potential to fight cancer cells themselves, by killing them and stopping their spread.

“That’s a shocking degree of consensus in public health research, and certainly more than we were anticipating for a topic as controversial as medical cannabis,” Castle said.

Medical cannabis is controversial when it comes to cancer. A 2024 meta-analysis published last year in Jama found that adults with cannabis-use disorder – defined by criteria including an inability to stop or cut down – were 3.5-5 times more likely to develop head and neck cancer. Donald Abrams, an oncologist and professor emeritus of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, says that study was “flawed” in his opinion, “as those patients are so often using tobacco and alcohol, known risk factors for those cancers”.

For his part, Abrams has found cannabis to be useful for cancer patients managing symptoms like appetite loss, nausea, pain and anxiety. But he is skeptical of claims that cannabis can actually fight cancer.

“I have been an oncologist in San Francisco for 42 years now where many if not most of my patients have had access to cannabis. If cannabis cures cancer, I have not been able to appreciate that,” he said.

Still, Abrams admits that “there is elegant pre-clinical evidence from test tubes and animal models that cannabis can affect cancer cells or transplanted tumors” but “as yet those findings have not translated into clinical benefit in people”.

Castle, however, believes that the combination of pre-clinical evidence and patient reported outcomes show that cannabis does have cancer-fighting potential.

A small pilot trial in which 21 patients received either a placebo or a cannabis-based medication in addition to traditional chemotherapy found that those who received the cannabis-based medication survived for longer. Another study of 119 cancer patients found that synthetic CBD helped reduce tumor size and tumor cell circulation.

But to truly prove the efficacy of cannabis and find the best treatment formulation, there would need to be much larger clinical trials in humans.

Castle hopes that his meta-analysis will encourage the US Drug Enforcement Administration to complete the long-stalled process of reclassifying cannabis so it is no longer federally illegal, which could help remove restrictions on clinical research.

“We are not arguing that the standards for adopting new cancer treatments should be lower. We are arguing that medical cannabis meets or exceeds those standards,” he said, “often to a greater extent than current pharmaceutical treatments.”

Drake has expanded his lawsuit against Universal Music Group (UMG) over Kendrick Lamar’s diss track Not Like Us, alleging that he was defamed by Lamar’s half–time performance at the 2025 Super Bowl.

With lyrics including “Say Drake, I hear you like ’em young … certified lover boy? Certified paedophile,” Lamar’s track was one of a number of diss tracks issued by the rappers against each other in spring 2024. Not Like Us became the most commercially successful, reaching No 1 in the US and UK, and it also won Lamar five Grammy awards including record and song of the year.

In January Drake sued UMG, the label that he and Lamar share, over the song, alleging UMG “approved, published and launched a campaign to create a viral hit out of a rap track” that was “intended to convey the specific, unmistakable, and false factual allegation that Drake is a criminal paedophile, and to suggest that the public should resort to vigilante justice in response”. UMG argued the case was “utterly without merit” and called for it to be dismissed.

Drake’s legal team have now amended the lawsuit with new allegations, claiming that the Super Bowl performance, which was the most-watched half-time show ever, “further solidified the public’s belief in the truth of the allegations against Drake … Not only did streams of the recording increase significantly following these two mega-cultural events, but threats against Drake and his family did as well.”

Lamar omitted the words “certified paedophile” from the performance, but included the “I hear you like ’em young” line, delivered while staring into the camera in a moment that was widely shared on social media. The omission was made, the lawsuit claims, because “everyone understands that it is defamatory to falsely brand someone a ‘certified paedophile’”. Lamar is not being sued by Drake, only UMG.

UMG responded to the amendments by saying: “Drake, unquestionably one of the world’s most accomplished artists and with whom we’ve enjoyed a 16-year successful relationship, is being misled by his legal representatives into taking one absurd legal step after another.”

Drake secured a small victory in the ongoing case earlier this month, when a judge allowed his team to access certain UMG documents as they built their case, a process known as “discovery” which UMG had attempted to block.

Alongside their statement about the amendments, UMG addressed that decision, saying: “Drake will personally be subject to discovery as well. As the old saying goes, ‘be careful what you wish for’.”

Drake’s team then responded in kind, saying: “Drake knows exactly what he asked for: the truth and accountability.”

Elsewhere at the Super Bowl show, Serena Williams – who reportedly once dated Drake – danced on stage to Not Like Us, an appearance which was perceived by some viewers as mocking Drake. Asked by Time magazine this week whether that was the case, Williams said: “Absolutely not. I would never do that. And that was sad, that anyone would ever think that. I respect how they could … But absolutely not. I have never had negative feelings towards him. We’ve known him for so many years.”

Drake and Lamar are also currently locked in another battle, for the top of the US singles chart. Lamar’s track Luther, featuring SZA, has been at No 1 for eight weeks, but Drake’s track Nokia has returned to the No 2 spot this week.