A draft Trump administration executive order circulating among US diplomats proposes a radical restructuring of the US state department, including drastic reductions to sub-Saharan operations, envoys and bureaus relating to climate, refugees, human rights, democracy and gender equality.

The changes, if enacted, would be one of the biggest reorganizations of the department since its founding in 1789, according to Bloomberg, which had seen a copy of the 16-page draft, which first reported on the draft.

The proposals reportedly also include the elimination of the Bureau of International Organizations, which liaises with the United Nations and a cut in diplomatic operations in Canada. Overall, the draft proposes a significant rejection of the US commitment to a multilateral world order.

Under the changes, the sprawling state department would be reorganized into four regional bureaus covering Indo-Pacific, Latin America, the Middle East and Eurasia. But an unspecified number of “non-essential” embassies and consulates in Sub-Saharan Africa would be closed.

The New York Times said the proposal executive order could be signed by Donald Trump this week and the changes would take effect by 1 October.

The order is designed to impose “a disciplined reorganization” of the state department and “streamline mission delivery” while cutting “waste, fraud and abuse”, the outlet quoted from the document.

The White House and the state department have not commented on the reports, but early on Sunday, the US secretary of state Marco Rubio called the reported overhaul “fake news” in a post on X. “The ⁦nytimes falls victim to another hoax.”

A senior diplomatic official in Africa said information circulating within the state department about foreign service reforms that are set to be announced would be less sweeping than those described in the document.

One poster on a US foreign service-dedicated Reddit page said they doubted that the changes would go as far as the draft order. “I suspect this is being leaked as a red herring designed to make us grateful for a more modest but still unpopular reorganization,” wrote one user. “It will be basically immediately challenged and enjoined, and then ‘implementation’ will be dragged out until Trump is voted out.”

Still, any radical reorganization of the US foreign operations comes after the Trump administration moved to fold the US Agency for International Development (USAID) into the state department, cut operations, and then reinstate some, including programs for emergency food assistance.

The bureau of humanitarian affairs would “assume any mission-critical duties previously carried out by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)”, the order reads.

The draft order leaked on Sunday would eliminate the Bureau of African Affairs, the special envoy for climate, the Bureau of International Organizations, and the Office of Global Women’s Issues.

“Diplomatic relations with Canada shall fall under a significantly reduced team delegated as the North American Affairs Office (NAAO) within the Office of the Secretary,” according to the document. That includes a substantial downsizing of the US embassy in the capital, Ottawa.

The shake-up would also see US diplomatic staff assigned to regions for the duration of their careers rather than be deployed in rotations around the world. State department-awarded Fulbright scholarships would be reformed as “solely for master’s-level study in national security-related disciplines” with emphasis placed in “critical” languages.

Fellowships associated with historically Black Howard University in Washington, would also be cancelled as part of the administration’s effort to end diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.

“All positions and duties must receive explicit written approval from the President of the United States,” according to the order, which also calls for ending the foreign service exam for aspiring diplomats. The new criteria for hiring, it said, includes “alignment with the president’s foreign policy vision”.

But the order is not the only internal document circulating to propose changes to US diplomatic operations. Another proposes a 50% reduction in the state department budget, and a third calls for the cutting 10 embassies and 17 consulates.

The US state department workforce includes 13,000 members of the foreign service, 11,000 civil service employees, and 45,000 locally employed staff at more than 270 diplomatic missions worldwide, according to its website.

For the second year in a row, abortion providers performed more than 1m abortions in the United States in 2024. About 155,000 people crossed state lines for abortions – roughly double the number of patients who did so in 2020, before the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade and paved the way for more than a dozen state-level abortion bans to take effect.

These numbers, released earlier this week by the abortion rights-supporting Guttmacher Institute, have not changed much since 2023, when the US also performed more than 1m abortions and 169,000 people traveled for the procedure.

This lack of change masks a deep geographical divide in the US, as a handful of states have now become major hubs for people seeking abortions.

In 2024, Illinois provided roughly 35,000 abortions to out-of-state patients, while North Carolina provided 16,700. Kansas and New Mexico, which neighbor anti-abortion Texas, provided 16,100 and 12,800 abortions – the vast majority of which were to out-of-state patients.

“Travel is so incredibly costly, both for patients and for the broader support network of funds, practical support organizations and providers,” said Isaac Maddow-Zimet, a Guttmacher data scientist. The sheer magnitude of the travel, he said, is “testament to the great efforts that a lot of people are taking in order to make sure that people could access care that really they should be able to access within their own community – without necessarily expending this enormous financial and logistical cost”.

As the Guttmacher report focuses on abortions provided through the formal healthcare system, it does not count self-managed abortions, which appear to be on the rise post-Roe. (Medical experts widely agree that individuals can safely end their own first-trimester pregnancies using abortion pills.) The report also does not track abortions provided to people living in states with total abortion bans, even though providers living in blue states sometimes mail abortion pills across state lines – a practice that, in recent months, has sparked heated litigation.

This does not mean, researchers warned, that everybody who wants a post-Roe abortion is still able to get one. Caitlin Myers, a Middlebury College economics professor who has researched the impact of abortion bans, estimated that about 20-25% of people who want abortions are blocked from getting them by bans.

The Guttmacher report arrived days after the Trump administration effectively demolished the CDC team responsible for government reports on abortion provision in the United States, which are known as “abortion surveillance” reports. These cuts have alarmed researchers.

“If we can’t measure outcomes, we can’t do science,” Myers said. “My concern is that this work fundamentally relies on the ability to track public health outcomes, and if we aren’t tracking them, we don’t know what’s happening to people. We don’t know what’s happening in their lives. We don’t know the effect of policies and interventions.”

In addition to the CDC and Guttmacher, just one other group – #WeCount, a research project by the Society of Family Planning – regularly collects nationwide data on abortion incidence. The groups use different methods to collect data, so the CDC’s annual report on the topic has long been less comprehensive than the post-Roe reports issued by Guttmacher and #WeCount.

A number of states – including California, a haven for abortion rights – do not provide information to the federal government about the abortions performed within their borders. The CDC report also lags behind the Guttmacher and #WeCount reports; its most recent report, issued in November, counted abortions performed in 2022.

The CDC report does include information about abortion patients’ demographic backgrounds and the gestational age of their pregnancies, which can serve as a critical fact-check in heated debates around abortion. Anti-abortion activists, for example, often condemn abortions that take place later on in pregnancy, but the 2022 CDC report found that only about 1.1% of all abortions take place at or after 21 weeks’ gestation.

“Abortion surveillance can be used to asses changes in clinical practice patterns over time,” a former employee from the CDC’s Division of Reproductive Health said in a text. “Without this report, we are losing the ability to track these changes.”

Notably, the move to ax the researchers behind the CDC report appears to run counter to Project 2025, a famous playbook of conservative policies. Project 2025 urged the federal government to dramatically expand the CDC’s “abortion surveillance” by cutting funds to states that did not provide the CDC with information about “exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method”. It also suggested that the CDC collect statistics on miscarriages, stillbirths and “treatments that incidentally result in the death of a child (such as chemotherapy)”.

These proposals alarmed researchers and raised concerns about patients’ data privacy, especially given the fact that abortion remains a deeply controversial procedure. But given the turbulence of the Trump administration, experts are not sure whether another agency will ultimately take up Project 2025’s recommendations.

Maddow-Zimet said he doesn’t “think that we’re necessarily any less concerned than we were before about the possibility of these kind of data mandates going into effect and/or using the data in appropriate ways to either make providers ask patients questions they wouldn’t have otherwise asked, that are very stigmatizing, or potentially put providers at risk”.

An Indonesian father of an infant with special needs, who was detained by federal agents at his hospital workplace in Minnesota after his student visa was secretly revoked, will remain in custody after an immigration judge ruled Thursday that his case can proceed.

Judge Sarah Mazzie denied a motion to dismiss the case against Aditya Wahyu Harsono on humanitarian grounds, according to his attorney. Harsono, 33, was arrested four days after his visa was revoked without notice. He is scheduled for another hearing on 1 May.

“His wife has been in a state of shock and exhaustion,” Sarah Gad, Harsono’s lawyer, said. “The Department of Homeland Security has weaponized the immigration system to serve just an entirely different purpose, which is to instill fear.”

Harsono, a supply-chain manager at a hospital in Marshall, Minnesota, who is married to a US citizen, was surprised by authorities in his workplace basement on 27 March. Gad said that Harsono was detained without clear explanation and interrogated for hours.

Harsono’s wife, Peyton, called Gad in a panic after she received a call from human resources at the hospital. Two Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents, dressed in plain clothes, had shown up and instructed the staff to stage a fake meeting in the basement so they could apprehend him, according to Gad.

Hospital staff were distraught but felt forced to comply.

“He unsuspectedly walks in, smiling, and then they just pull out their handcuffs and forcibly detain him, pushing against the wall, start frisking him, and stripping all of his belongings,” Gad said.

The Department of Homeland Security and the Department of State did not immediately respond to requests for comment from the Guardian.

Harsono was brought to the Kandiyohi County Jail, where he is still detained, according to the Ice detainee locator.

He told the Ice agents that his F-1 student visa was valid through June 2026, and that he had a pending green-card application based on his marriage to a citizen, but that he had been issued a notice to appear in court stating that he had overstayed his visa.

His attorney said that as of 28 March, the day after his arrest, his F-1 visa was still active. Gad said the government revoked it without any notice to him, and then claimed he had overstayed.

The revocation was backdated to 23 March and allegedly based on his 2022 misdemeanor conviction for graffitiing a semi-truck trailer. Gad said that this is not a deportable offense under the Immigration and Nationality Act. He had traveled internationally and returned multiple times to Indonesia since the conviction without incident.

The day before Harsono’s bond hearing, DHS disclosed their evidence against him. Besides stating that his visa had been revoked for the misdemeanor graffiti conviction, for which he paid $100 in restitution, they also mentioned an arrest from 2021 during a protest over the murder of George Floyd. That charge was dismissed.

Harsono is Muslim and frequently posts on social media in support of humanitarian relief for Gaza. He also runs a small non-profit, which sells art and merchandise, with proceeds going to organizations aiding Gaza.

His wife and eight-month-old daughter, who has special needs, are distraught by his arrest, Gad said. After the judge granted Harsono a $5,000 bond on 10 April, the Minnesota Freedom Fund had been en route to pay it. But DHS immediately filed a notice to appeal the bond decision, which triggered an automatic stay, meaning Harsono had to remain in custody. Gad said this type of move is rare, usually only seen when a judge grants bond to someone charged with violent or serious crimes.

“You never involve stays of an immigration judge’s bond order for a minor conviction when somebody’s on their way to becoming a green-card holder,” she said.

Gad is preparing to file a federal petition and a temporary restraining order against DHS.

In an appeal for help on GoFundMe, Harsono’s wife explained that her husband had been fired from his job while in detention and now the family is “in danger of losing our apartment” and they “no longer have health insurance”.

The Minnesota Nurses Association condemned the hospital worker’s arrest and restated its position that “nurses should not and will not serve any role in immigration enforcement” and its hope that “all hospital employees will also reject a role in assisting Ice”.

Harsono’s case comes amid a wave of reports of student visas being revoked under the Trump administration’s new executive policy. The actions by the federal government to terminate students’ legal status have left hundreds of scholars at risk of detention and deportation.

At least 901 students at 128 colleges and universities have had their visas revoked or their legal statuses terminated since mid-March, according to an Associated Press review of university statements and correspondence with school officials.

In some high-profile cases, including the detention of the former Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, the Trump administration has argued it should be allowed to deport noncitizens over involvement in pro-Palestinian activism it casts as antisemitic. But in the vast majority of visa revocations, colleges say there is no indication that affected students had a role in protests.

A federal judge on Friday ordered that a Turkish Tufts University student detained by immigration authorities in Louisiana be brought to Vermont by 1 May for a hearing over what her lawyers say was apparent retaliation for an op-ed piece she co-wrote in the student newspaper.

The US district judge William Sessions said he would hear Rümeysa Öztürk’s request to be released from detention. Her lawyers had requested that she be released immediately, or at least brought back to Vermont.

The 30-year-old doctoral student was taken by immigration officials as she walked along a street in the Boston suburb of Somerville on 25 March. After being taken to New Hampshire and then Vermont, she was put on a plane the next day and moved to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Basile, Louisiana. An immigration judge denied her request for bond Wednesday.

Öztürk is among several people with ties to American universities whose visas were revoked or who have been stopped from entering the US after they were accused of attending demonstrations or publicly expressing support for Palestinians. A Louisiana immigration judge has ruled that the US can deport Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil based on the federal government’s argument that he poses a national security risk.

Öztürk’s lawyers are challenging the legal authority for Ice’s detention. They asked that she be immediately released from custody, or returned to Vermont while her immigration case continues.

A lawyer for the justice department said her legal challenge should be dismissed, adding the immigration court has jurisdiction.

Öztürk’s lawyers first filed a petition on her behalf in Massachusetts. Initially, they didn’t know where she was. They said they were unable to speak to her until more than 24 hours after she had been detained. Öztürk herself said she unsuccessfully made multiple requests to speak to a lawyer.

Öztürk was one of four students who wrote an op-ed in the campus newspaper, the Tufts Daily, last year criticizing the university’s response to student activists demanding that Tufts “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide”, disclose its investments and divest from companies with ties to Israel.

Öztürk’s lawyers say her detention violates her constitutional rights, including free speech and due process.

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said last month, without providing evidence, that investigations found that Öztürk engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a US-designated terrorist group.

Earlier this week, however, the Washington Post reported that a state department review of the DHS investigation conducted before Öztürk’s arrest had cast doubt on that claim, and noted that there was no evidence that she had engaged in antisemitic activity or made any public statement indicating support for a terrorist organization.

Wrongly deported Salvadorian man Kilmar Ábrego García has been held incommunicado and faced threats in prison that have left him “traumatized”, a Democratic senator said Friday after returning from meeting him in El Salvador.

Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the state Ábrego García had been living in with his US citizen wife and son until he was deported last month in what the Trump administration conceded was an “administrative error”, traveled to the central American country this week to see his constituent. After initially rejecting his request to meet Ábrego García and preventing him from traveling to the prison where he was being held, president Nayib Bukele’s government on Thursday facilitated a meeting at Van Hollen’s hotel.

“His conversation with me was the first communication he’d had with anybody outside of prison since he was abducted. He said he felt very sad about being in a prison because he had not committed any crimes,” Van Hollen said at a press conference at Dulles international airport outside Washington DC.

He recounted speaking to Ábrego García about his wellbeing, and informing him of the controversy caused by his arrest and Donald Trump’s refusal to let him back into the United States, in spite of a supreme court ruling saying the president should “facilitate” his return.

The senator said Ábrego García told him about how he had been arrested by federal agents after a traffic stop while driving with his five-year-old son, who has autism. He was taken to Baltimore, then Texas, where he was shackled and placed with other deportees on an aircraft where they could not see out the windows. The plane flew to El Salvador, where, Ábrego García said, he was taken to the Terrorism Confinement Center (Cecot) and put in a cell with about 25 other people.

“He said he was not afraid of the other prisoners in his immediate cell, but that he was traumatized by being at Cecot and fearful of many of the prisoners in other cell blocks who called out to him, and taunted him in various ways,” Van Hollen said, adding that Ábrego García otherwise appeared to be in sound health.

Just more than a week ago, Ábrego García was moved to another prison in the city of Santa Ana, where conditions are better, but he still has no contact with the outside world, Van Hollen said. He has also not been told whether he is being charged with a crime, or how long he will be detained.

“They haven’t told him anything about why he was sent or how long he would be there,” the senator said.

Van Hollen described himself as motivated to make the trip both out of a desire to relay Ábrego García’s condition to his family, and outrage that the Trump administration had deported him despite a judge granting him protection from removal, over a “well-founded fear of future persecution” from gangs in El Salvador, and was now refusing to bring him back.

“This case is not only about one man, as important as that is. It is about protecting fundamental freedoms and the fundamental principle in the constitution for due process, that protects everybody who resides in America,” Van Hollen said. “This should not be an issue for Republicans or Democrats. This is an issue for every American who cares about our constitution.”

On Thursday, the federal appeals judge James Wilkinson, an appointee of Republican president Ronald Reagan, wrote an opinion blasting the administration’s conduct in the case as litigation over Ábrego García’s deportation continued.

“The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order,” he wrote.

The Trump administration has countered the criticism by claiming that Ábrego García was a member of the MS-13 criminal gang, with the White House posting on social media that he was “NOT coming back”.

Trump administration officials also seized on a claim from Bukele that Van Hollen and Ábrego García drank margaritas during their meeting, which the senator took pains to refute, saying the drinks had been placed on their table by a Salvadorian government employee.

“Let me just be very clear: neither of us touched the drinks that were in front of us,” he said, adding that the glass placed in front of Ábrego García contained less liquid, as if trying to create the impression that he had drunk from it.

“But this is a lesson into the lengths that president Bukele will do to deceive people about what’s going on. And it also shows the lengths that the Trump administration, or the president, will go to, because when he was asked about a reporter about this, he just went along for the ride.”

Van Hollen was joined at the airport by Ábrego García’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, who brushed away tears as the senator described meeting her husband. At the White House earlier in the day, Trump had read from a domestic violence protective order Vasquez filed in 2021, which she has said stemmed from a rough patch in their marriage that they later worked through.

“When I asked him, what was the one thing he would ask for in addition to his freedom, he said he wanted to talk to his wife,” Van Hollen said of his meeting with Ábrego García. “I told him I would work very hard to make that happen.”

When Sarah Palin arrived at a federal court on Monday, her appearance promised little in the way of legal fireworks.

Palin was in downtown Manhattan for a retrial in her defamation lawsuit against the New York Times. She lost her first trial against the newspaper in 2022 and the legal basis of Palin’s civil claim – that an incorrect editorial unlawfully smeared her – remains the same.

The retrial granted to the former Alaska governor and 2008 Republican vice-presidential contender stems from procedural errors rather than factual questions. The US second circuit court of appeals revamped Palin’s case in 2024, having determined that Judge Jed Rakoff wrongly intruded on jurors’ decision-making.

While the jury was originally deliberating, Rakoff decided that if they delivered a verdict in Palin’s favor, he would set aside this decision. Rakoff, who stated that he presumed Palin would appeal what he expected to be an unfavorable verdict, told both sides that an appeals court “would greatly benefit from knowing how the jury would decide it”, according to NBC News.

Some jurors received push notifications on their phones about Rakoff’s decision while they were actually deliberating. The second circuit also found that Rakoff erred by keeping information from jurors potentially showing that James Bennet, then the editorial page editor at the New York Times, knew this piece was incorrect.

While trial proceedings that started last week are largely a replay of Palin’s initial trial, first amendment constitutional advocates contend that they reflect a troubling trend. Politicians and public figures – especially Donald Trump and his allies – are waging campaigns against US media organisations that are critical of them.

Many of these lawsuits are unlikely to pass legal muster: public figures have a high burden in proving defamation. But many outlets lack the resources to fight a costly years-long legal battle against defamation claims in a culture that’s increasingly media-averse, suppressing free expression.

“Every libel case these days feels like it has significant implications because of the fear and concern that the supreme court might ultimately want to change the legal standards for public officials and public figures,” Roy S Gutterman, director of the Newhouse School’s Tully Center for Free Speech at Syracuse University, said.

That said, Palin’s case might not be a referendum on the first amendment outright as “the actual malice standard, which requires the plaintiff to prove that the false information published about them was done either knowingly or with reckless disregard for the truth, is not an easy standard, which is why plenty of libel plaintiffs like Governor Palin do not win defamation lawsuits”, he added.

If Palin loses again, however, this does not equate to an automatic victory for first amendment rights. “She will almost certainly appeal again and keep appealing,” Gutterman said. “Appellate courts set precedent, so we might still be a ways away from seeing how strong the first amendment ultimately is these days.”

And if Palin were to land a shocking win, “it would not be great for the New York Times or the free press altogether. Even if she wins a nominal amount of money, both sides might still keep appealing,” Gutterman said.

Robert Corn-Revere, chief counsel at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (Fire), said the Palin proceedings hinge on procedural issues rather than a referendum on the first amendment. Philadelphia-based Fire is defending Iowa pollster J Ann Selzer from the US president, who is suing her over a poll which concluded that he was trailing Kamala Harris in the state just before his decisive victory in Iowa as well as nationally in the 2024 election.

“The retrial is more of a standard defamation claim,” Corn-Revere said. “The question is whether or not Sarah Palin will meet the very high bar that is required for a public figure deflation case.”

That said, the case is unfolding in a time where there is “contempt for constitutional norms”.

“People who want to bring some kind of action will do so regardless of whether or not they have some kind of valid claim, or whether or not such a claim even exists,” Corn-Revere said.

The 2017 editorial referred to the 2011 mass shooting that gravely injured then Arizona Democratic congresswoman Gabby Giffords and left six people dead. Prior to this attack, Palin’s political action committee (Pac) published an ad, featuring cross-hairs, spanning over several congressional districts led by Democrats.

The editorial article in question erroneously associated the Pac’s political rhetoric with the mass shooting. Asked about Palin’s claims, the Times said: “This case revolves around a passing reference to an event in an editorial that was not about Sarah Palin. That reference contained an unintended error that was corrected within 18 hours.”

Tom Spiggle, founder of the Spiggle Law Firm, said that the retrial presents a “second bite at the apple” for Palin but “it really comes down to a factual issue at this point”.

“Can they show actual malice?” Spiggle said. “That’s going to be a jury question.”

Although the legal question is very specific, the case does speak to broader ongoing public discourse about free speech in the Trump era. “Trump has in the past made statements that he would like to reform defamation law and make it easier for people to win defamation cases,” he said.

But if Palin loses again, this could make an important statement for free speech.

“I think it does send a message that just because you’re angry at the New York Times – or insert your media source here – doesn’t mean you’re going to prevail. The standards are still high,” Spiggle said. “Actual malice is tough to prove, and there’s a reason for that, right? It’s because we want these reporters … not [to] be on pins and needles every time they publish a story.”

Lawyers for Palin did not respond to a request for comment.

The retrial is scheduled to resume on Monday. Jurors are expected to start deliberating midweek.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has dismissed Vladimir Putin’s Easter ceasefire as a fake “PR” exercise and said Russian troops had continued their drone and artillery attacks across many parts of the frontline.

Citing a report from Ukraine’s commander-in-chief, Oleksandr Syrskyi, Zelenskyy said Russia was still using heavy weapons and since 10am on Sunday an increase in Russian shelling had been observed.

The Russian army had doubled its use of kamikaze drones, he added, saying that there were 26 assaults between midnight on Saturday and noon on Sunday. The 30-hour truce – announced by Putin on Friday – is scheduled to end at midnight on Sunday (2100 GMT). He has not issued an order to extend the ceasefire, the Tass news agency quoted the Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, as saying on Sunday afternoon.

Zelenskyy wrote on social media: “We are documenting every Russian violation of its self-declared commitment to a full ceasefire for the Easter period and are prepared to provide the necessary information to our partners.

“In practice, either Putin does not have full control over his army, or the situation proves that in Russia they have no intention of making a genuine move toward ending the war, and are only interested in favourable PR coverage. The Russian army is attempting to create the general impression of a ceasefire, while in some areas still continuing isolated attempts to advance.”

Zelenskyy later said Ukrainian soldiers had been killed in an ambush in Toretsk in Donetsk oblast. Video footage from the battlefield appeared to confirm his claim that the east of the country was under Russian fire. White puffs of smoke could be seen above the village of Uspenivka, in the Pokrovsk area of Donetsk.

The Russians also reportedly attacked an evacuation convoy in the village of Zoria, near the city of Kostiantynivka. At least two civilians and a rescue worker from the Proliksa aid agency were hurt when Russian drones targeted their cars.

“For us, it’s just another day of war – with shelling from various types of weapons and even one attempt to assault our positions,” Denys Bobkov, the spokesperson for Ukraine’s 37th separate marine brigade, told the Guardian, in a message from the front.

Bobkov said that by 2pm on Sunday his brigade had recorded 16 drone attacks and two artillery strikes. It is fighting near the village of Novopavlivka, south-west of Pokrovsk and on the administrative border between Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk oblasts.

The 66th brigade, based in the city of Lyman, also reported infantry attacks and attempts to repair damaged crossings. “The Russians are using the so-called ‘lull’ to improve their tactical position – to regroup in order to deliver another blow,” it said.

In Moscow, Russia’s defence ministry claimed Ukraine had broken the ceasefire more than 1,000 times. It said there had been more than 900 drone strikes, with damage to infrastructure and civilian casualties. It did not give further details.

After a bloody week, during which Russia killed 35 people in a missile attack in the centre of Sumy, Ukrainian cities were relatively clam on Sunday. Worshippers gathered at St Volodymyr’s cathedral in Kyiv, where priests blessed their Easter baskets with Holy water.

“They’ve already broken their promise. Unfortunately, we cannot trust Russia today,” Olga Grachova, 38, who works in marketing, told the news agency Agence France-Presse.

The truce’s apparent failure comes as the US has signalled it is losing patience with both sides. On Friday, Donald Trump said he was ready to walk away from his attempt to broker a peace settlement, declaring: “We want to get it done.”

“Now if for some reason one of the two parties makes it very difficult, we’re just going to say: ‘You’re foolish. You’re fools. You’re horrible people’ – and we’re going to just take a pass,” he said. The US president denied claims that Putin was “playing” him.

The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, met European leaders in Paris last week to discuss how to end the war. Leaks suggest the White House is pushing for a Kremlin-friendly deal that would freeze the conflict along the existing 1000km-long frontline.

Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, has suggested that Crimea and four other Ukrainian provinces could be given to Russia. The US is considering recognising Crimea as Russian and offering Moscow other incentives such as sanctions relief, Bloomberg reported.

The Kremlin insists its original war goals must be achieved. They include the removal of Zelenskyy as Ukraine’s president, as well as the country’s “demilitarisation” and a guarantee of its non-Nato “neutral” status.

Since their disastrous meeting in February in the Oval Office, Zelenskyy has been seeking to improve relations with Washington. Last month, Ukraine accepted a 30-day US ceasefire proposal and is poised to sign an agreement on Thursday giving the US access to its minerals.

There are hints, however, that Zelenskyy is growing frustrated at the White House’s pro-Putin rhetoric. Trump has piled pressure on Ukraine – in effect cutting off military aid and temporarily pausing intelligence sharing – while taking no corresponding measures against Russia.

On Sunday, Zelenskyy appeared to take a swipe at Fox Television Stations after its Live Now network broadcast live coverage of Putin attending an Orthodox Easter service in Moscow together with Russia’s patriarch, while incorrectly labelling Kyiv as part of Russia.

“Instead of broadcasting religious service from Moscow, the focus should be on pressuring Moscow to genuinely commit to a full ceasefire and to maintain it for at least 30 days after Easter – to give diplomacy a real chance,” Zelenskyy wrote on X.

Ukraine’s foreign ministry said it had asked for an explanation. “If this was a mistake rather than a deliberate political statement, there should be an apology and an investigation into who made the mistake,” a ministry spokesperson said.

Several billion years ago, at the dawn of the solar system, a wet, salty world circled our sun. Then it collided, catastrophically, with another object and shattered into pieces.

One of these lumps became the asteroid Bennu whose minerals, recently returned to Earth by the US robot space probe OSIRIS-REx, have now been found to contain rich levels of complex chemicals that are critical for the existence of life.

“There were things in the Bennu samples that completely blew us away,” said Prof Sara Russell, cosmic mineralogist at the Natural History Museum in London, and a lead author of a major study in Nature of the Bennu minerals. “The diversity of the molecules and minerals preserved are unlike any extraterrestrial samples studied before.”

Results from this and other missions will form a central display at a Natural History Museum’s exhibition, Space: Could Life Exist Beyond Earth?, which opens on 16 May. It will be a key chance for the public to learn about recent developments in the hunt for life on other worlds, said Russell.

As the exhibition will reveal, the basic chemical building blocks for life can be found in other objects in the solar system such as meteorites. However, the material from Bennu, which is named after an ancient Egyptian mythological bird, have been found to be particularly rich in these deposits. “Its parent world clearly had underground lakes of brine, and when these evaporated they left behind salts that resemble those found in dry lake beds on Earth,” said Russell.

In addition, phosphates, ammonia and more than a dozen protein-building amino acids that are present in life forms on Earth – as well as the five nucleobase building blocks that make up RNA and DNA – were found in the samples brought back by OSIRIS-REx.

“These strongly suggest that asteroids similar to Bennu crashed on to Earth, bringing crucial ingredients that led to the appearance of life here,” she added.

Scientists do not believe life evolved on Bennu itself but do think other asteroids like it might have supplied other worlds with the basic ingredients for life. On Earth, with its warm, stable environment, this led to the first appearance of reproducing organisms more than 3.7 billion years ago. It remains to be seen if they appeared on other promising worlds such as Mars and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, that include Europa, Ganymede, Titan and Enceladus. These are now the subject of a number of missions that will feature in the exhibition and include two probes now heading for Jupiter’s ice-covered moons Europa and Ganymede, which are known to possess liquid water oceans.

In addition, the UK-built Rosalind Franklin robot rover is scheduled to land on Mars in 2029 and will drill deep into its soil, seeking evidence of life.

In the past, samples of extraterrestrial rocks made available for study have been limited mainly to meteorites, pieces of the moon brought back by astronauts and robot probes, and lumps of Mars that were blasted towards Earth when large objects struck the red planet and blew debris into space – with some eventually falling on to our world as Martian meteorites.

Visitors to the exhibition will be able to touch samples of lunar and Martian material as well as a meteorite that landed on our planet after breaking off from an asteroid. Intriguingly, this rock is older than the Earth itself.

“This is going to be a blockbuster,” said Sinead Marron, the museum’s senior exhibitions manager.

OSIRIS-REx brought back 120gm of Bennu dust to Earth, and the museum has been given around 200mg to study, said Russell. “When we first opened the capsule, we saw this black dust everywhere, with white particles in it. We thought it might be contaminated. But it turned out to be a compound of phosphorus we have not seen in meteorites but which is absolutely crucial to the development of life. I was astonished.”

The prospects that life might exist elsewhere in the universe made headlines last week when it was announced that observations of the exoplanet K2-18b by the James Webb space telescope had revealed the chemical fingerprints of two compounds that, on Earth, are only known to be produced by life.

On their own, the chemicals, dimethyl sulfide (DMS) and dimethyl disulfide (DMDS), do not amount to proof of alien biological activity but they have boosted hopes that we are not alone in the universe.

Conclusively proving that life exists on distant worlds outside our solar system will be extremely hard, scientists acknowledge – short of a signal from an extraterrestrial intelligence announcing its existence.

By contrast, alien lifeforms within our solar system will be easier to collect and study and may prove, one day, that life on other worlds does indeed exist.

“What we would do about such a discovery is a different matter,” Marron said. “One of the things we will be asking exhibition visitors to think about is how we would treat life if we found it on Mars or another world. Would we stay away from it or try to interact with it?

“Or would we try to eat it, like we eat lifeforms with whom we share this planet? Such questions about alien life help us reflect on the ways we engage with other forms of life in our own world.”

Several billion years ago, at the dawn of the solar system, a wet, salty world circled our sun. Then it collided, catastrophically, with another object and shattered into pieces.

One of these lumps became the asteroid Bennu whose minerals, recently returned to Earth by the US robot space probe OSIRIS-REx, have now been found to contain rich levels of complex chemicals that are critical for the existence of life.

“There were things in the Bennu samples that completely blew us away,” said Prof Sara Russell, cosmic mineralogist at the Natural History Museum in London, and a lead author of a major study in Nature of the Bennu minerals. “The diversity of the molecules and minerals preserved are unlike any extraterrestrial samples studied before.”

Results from this and other missions will form a central display at a Natural History Museum’s exhibition, Space: Could Life Exist Beyond Earth?, which opens on 16 May. It will be a key chance for the public to learn about recent developments in the hunt for life on other worlds, said Russell.

As the exhibition will reveal, the basic chemical building blocks for life can be found in other objects in the solar system such as meteorites. However, the material from Bennu, which is named after an ancient Egyptian mythological bird, have been found to be particularly rich in these deposits. “Its parent world clearly had underground lakes of brine, and when these evaporated they left behind salts that resemble those found in dry lake beds on Earth,” said Russell.

In addition, phosphates, ammonia and more than a dozen protein-building amino acids that are present in life forms on Earth – as well as the five nucleobase building blocks that make up RNA and DNA – were found in the samples brought back by OSIRIS-REx.

“These strongly suggest that asteroids similar to Bennu crashed on to Earth, bringing crucial ingredients that led to the appearance of life here,” she added.

Scientists do not believe life evolved on Bennu itself but do think other asteroids like it might have supplied other worlds with the basic ingredients for life. On Earth, with its warm, stable environment, this led to the first appearance of reproducing organisms more than 3.7 billion years ago. It remains to be seen if they appeared on other promising worlds such as Mars and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, that include Europa, Ganymede, Titan and Enceladus. These are now the subject of a number of missions that will feature in the exhibition and include two probes now heading for Jupiter’s ice-covered moons Europa and Ganymede, which are known to possess liquid water oceans.

In addition, the UK-built Rosalind Franklin robot rover is scheduled to land on Mars in 2029 and will drill deep into its soil, seeking evidence of life.

In the past, samples of extraterrestrial rocks made available for study have been limited mainly to meteorites, pieces of the moon brought back by astronauts and robot probes, and lumps of Mars that were blasted towards Earth when large objects struck the red planet and blew debris into space – with some eventually falling on to our world as Martian meteorites.

Visitors to the exhibition will be able to touch samples of lunar and Martian material as well as a meteorite that landed on our planet after breaking off from an asteroid. Intriguingly, this rock is older than the Earth itself.

“This is going to be a blockbuster,” said Sinead Marron, the museum’s senior exhibitions manager.

OSIRIS-REx brought back 120gm of Bennu dust to Earth, and the museum has been given around 200mg to study, said Russell. “When we first opened the capsule, we saw this black dust everywhere, with white particles in it. We thought it might be contaminated. But it turned out to be a compound of phosphorus we have not seen in meteorites but which is absolutely crucial to the development of life. I was astonished.”

The prospects that life might exist elsewhere in the universe made headlines last week when it was announced that observations of the exoplanet K2-18b by the James Webb space telescope had revealed the chemical fingerprints of two compounds that, on Earth, are only known to be produced by life.

On their own, the chemicals, dimethyl sulfide (DMS) and dimethyl disulfide (DMDS), do not amount to proof of alien biological activity but they have boosted hopes that we are not alone in the universe.

Conclusively proving that life exists on distant worlds outside our solar system will be extremely hard, scientists acknowledge – short of a signal from an extraterrestrial intelligence announcing its existence.

By contrast, alien lifeforms within our solar system will be easier to collect and study and may prove, one day, that life on other worlds does indeed exist.

“What we would do about such a discovery is a different matter,” Marron said. “One of the things we will be asking exhibition visitors to think about is how we would treat life if we found it on Mars or another world. Would we stay away from it or try to interact with it?

“Or would we try to eat it, like we eat lifeforms with whom we share this planet? Such questions about alien life help us reflect on the ways we engage with other forms of life in our own world.”

Missouri State safety Todric McGee has died at the age of 21 after what has been described as a possible accidental shooting.

A Springfield Police Department spokesperson said officers had gone to McGee’s home for a wellness check on Friday morning after receiving a call. They found McGee, who they believe had suffered a “possible accidental self-inflicted gunshot wound”. He was taken to a local hospital but died from his injuries.

“Our football family is in shock and in mourning at the loss of Todric,” Missouri State football coach Ryan Beard said in a statement. “We ask everyone to please respect the privacy of his family and our MoState football team at this time as we begin the healing process. Join us in praying for Todric and the people who loved him.”

McGee was an all-state defensive back at his high school in Wichita, Kansas, where he also served as a team captain. He received offers to play football from Army, Air Force and Southeast Missouri but chose Missouri State. His 2024 season was cut short by injury but he was expected to play a central role for the Bears in 2025.

He was majoring in exercise and movement science and had a brother and sister.

Cake, gifts and a low-key family celebration may be how many senior citizens celebrate their 70th birthday.

But Nasa’s oldest serving astronaut, Don Pettit, became a septuagenarian while hurtling towards Earth in a spacecraft to wrap up a seven-month mission onboard the International Space Station (ISS).

A Soyuz capsule carrying the American and two Russian cosmonauts landed in Kazakhstan on Sunday, Pettit’s birthday.

“Today at 0420 Moscow time (0120 GMT), the Soyuz MS-26 landing craft with Alexei Ovchinin, Ivan Vagner and Donald (Don) Pettit aboard landed near the Kazakh town of Zhezkazgan,” Russia’s space agency Roscosmos said.

Spending 220 days in space, Pettit, Ovchinin and Vagner orbited the Earth 3,520 times and completed a journey of 93.3m miles over the course of their mission.

It was the fourth spaceflight for Pettit, who has logged more than 18 months in orbit during his 29-year career.

The trio touched down in a remote area south-east of Zhezkazgan in Kazakhstan at 6.20am (0120 GMT) after undocking from the space station just over three hours earlier.

Nasa images of the landing showed the small capsule parachuting down to Earth with the sunrise as a backdrop. The astronauts gave thumbs-up gestures as rescuers carried them from the spacecraft to an inflatable medical tent.

Nasa said in a statement that Pettit was “doing well and in the range of what is expected for him following return to Earth”.

He was then set to fly to the Kazakh city of Karaganda before boarding a Nasa plane to the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Texas.

The astronauts spent their time on the ISS researching areas such as water sanitisation technology, plant growth under various conditions and fire behaviour in microgravity, Nasa said.

The trio’s seven-month trip was just short of the nine months that the Nasa astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams unexpectedly spent on the orbital lab after the spacecraft they were testing suffered technical issues and was deemed unfit to fly them back to Earth.

Space is one of the final areas of US-Russia cooperation amid an almost complete breakdown in relations between Moscow and Washington over the Ukraine conflict.

Gaza has been pushed to new depths of despair, civilians, medics and humanitarian workers say, by the unprecedented seven-week-long Israeli military blockade that has cut off all aid to the strip.

The siege has left the Palestinian territory facing conditions unmatched in severity since the beginning of the war as residents grapple with sweeping new evacuation orders, the renewed bombing of civilian infrastructure such as hospitals, and the exhaustion of food, fuel for generators and medical supplies.

Israel unilaterally abandoned a two-month ceasefire with Palestinian militant group Hamas on 2 March, cutting off vital supplies. Just over two weeks later, it resumed large-scale bombing and redeployed ground troops withdrawn during the truce.

Since then, political figures and security officials have repeatedly vowed that aid deliveries will not resume until Hamas releases the remaining hostages seized during the 7 October 2023 attacks that ignited the conflict. Israel’s government has framed the new siege as a security measure and has repeatedly denied using starvation as a weapon, which would constitute a war crime.

The blockade is now entering its eighth week, making it the longest continuous total siege the strip has faced to date in the 18-month war.

Firmly supported by the US, its most important ally under Donald Trump, Israel appears confident that it can maintain the siege with little international pushback.

It is also moving ahead with large-scale seizures of Palestinian land for security buffer zones, and plans to shift control of aid delivery to the army and private contractors, exacerbating fears in Gaza that Israel intends to maintain boots on the ground in the territory long-term and permanently displace its residents.

Many people the Observer spoke tosaid they are now more afraid of famine than airstrikes. “Many times, I have had to give up my share of food for my son because of the severe shortages. It is the hunger that will kill me – a slow death,” said Hikmat al-Masri, a 44-year-old university lecturer from Beit Lahia in north Gaza.

Food stockpiled during the two-month-ceasefire has run out, and desperate people across the territory are jostling at charity kitchens with empty pots and bowls. Goods at markets are now selling for 1,400% above ceasefire prices, according to the latest assessment from the World Health Organization.

An estimated 420,000 people are on the move again because of new Israeli evacuation orders, making it difficult to compile hard data on hunger and malnutrition, but Oxfam estimates that most children are now surviving on less than one meal a day.

About 95% of aid organisations have suspended or cut back services because of airstrikes and the blockade, and since February, Israel has tightened restrictions for international staff to enter Gaza. Basic medical supplies – even painkillers – are running out.

“Gaza City is packed with displaced people who have fled Israeli troops moving into the north, and they are living on the street or putting their tents inside damaged buildings that are going to collapse,” said Amande Bazerolle, the Gaza emergency coordinator for Médecins Sans Frontières, speaking from Deir al-Balah.

Bazerolle added: “There are not enough points of care for so many people. At our burns clinic in Gaza City, we are refusing patients by 10am and we have to tell them to come back the next day, as we are triaging to make our drug supplies last as long as possible.”

The siege has been accompanied by a fierce push by Israeli forces on northern Gaza as well as the entirety of Rafah, the strip’s southernmost city, cutting the territory off from Egypt.

According to the UN, approximately 70% of Gaza is now under Israeli evacuation orders or has been subsumed into expanding military buffer zones; the new Rafah security zone totals one-fifth of the entire territory.

The land seizures are pushing the 2.3 million population – and aid and medical efforts – into ever-smaller Israeli-designated “humanitarian zones”, although an Israeli airstrike last week on al-Mawasi, the biggest such zone on the coast of southern Gaza, killed 16 people.

As the space they can operate in shrinks, aid workers said they are worried that that the rules of engagement followed by the Israeli military have changed since the ceasefire collapsed, pointing to the recent bombings of Nasser hospital in Khan Younis and al-Ahli hospital in Gaza City.

Two people were killed in the Nasser attack, which hit a building where members of an international medical team were present. No casualties were reported in the al-Ahli strike, but the intensive care and surgery departments of the hospital were destroyed, medics said. In both cases, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it had targeted Hamas militants.

“People in Gaza like having international staff around because they assume it affords them more protection and the IDF is less likely to attack the building or the area,” said a senior aid official, who asked not to be named so as to speak freely.

“In the beginning of the war, if there was an airstrike two kilometres away from our location, we would evacuate… eventually, that became 300 metres, and now it’s 30 metres, if [the IDF] hits the building next door.

“There are either no warnings, or sometimes 20 minutes, which is not enough time to evacuate sick people. Our exposure to risk is getting higher… We know the Israelis are trying to force us to work under their terms.”

In a statement in response to the aid worker’s allegations, the IDF said: “Hamas has a documented practice of operating within densely populated areas. Strikes on military targets are subject to relevant provisions of international law, including taking feasible precautions.” It referred questions about aid to the political echelon.

Israel has long alleged that Hamas siphons off large amounts of the aid that has reached Gaza, allowing the group to maintain its control by either keeping the aid for itself or selling it at marked-up prices to desperate civilians.

Last week, Israeli media reported that efforts to sidestep international agencies and create an Israeli-controlled mechanism to distribute aid using private contractors are under way but still in the “early stages”, with no timeframe for implementation. In the interim, the humanitarian crisis will only worsen, aid agencies say.

International mediators are attempting to revive ceasefire talks, but there is little sign either side has moved closer on fundamental issues such as the disarmament of Hamas and the withdrawal of Israeli troops.

Masri, the lecturer from Beit Lahia, said: “When the blockade was imposed again and the war resumed, I felt terrified. I constantly think about my little son, and how I can provide him with basic necessities.

“No one can imagine the level of suffering… Death surrounds us from every direction.”

Russia could play a key role in a deal on the future of Iran’s nuclear programme, with Moscow being touted not only as a possible destination for Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium, but also as a possible arbiter of deal breaches.

Donald Trump, who abandoned a 2015 nuclear pact between Tehran and world powers in 2018 during his first term, has threatened to attack Iran unless it reaches a new deal swiftly that would prevent it from developing a nuclear weapon.

Four hours of indirect talks between the US and Iran in Rome on Saturday, under the mediation of Oman, made significant progress, according to US officials. Further technical talks are due in Geneva this week, followed by another high-level diplomatic meeting next weekend in Oman.

Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, who was at the heart of the Rome talks, wants an agreement wrapped up within 60 days, but is likely to face resistance from Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, who believes the levels of distrust and the technical nature of the talks make such a swift agreement unlikely.

The two most daunting issues are the storage or destruction of Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium, and the external guarantees that can be provided to Iran if the US was to breach an agreement to lift economic sanctions in return for Iran putting its civil nuclear programme back under external supervision by the UN inspectorate, the IAEA. Iran wants a guarantee of consequences for the US if it pulls out of or breaches another deal.

Iran wants to keep its uranium stockpiles inside the country, but the US rejects this and wants either the stockpiles’ destruction or a transfer to a third country, such as Russia.

Iran believes it has received assurances that the US objective is not the entire dismantling of its nuclear programme. Before the Rome talks, in an intervention that sowed confusion in Iran and the US, Witkoff had on social media seemed to endorse such an objective, causing consternation in Iran, but in Rome he gave the impression that this was largely domestic political messaging.

Mohamed Amersi, a member of the advisory board at the Wilson Center, a Washington thinktank, said: “From the Iranian perspective there had been some conflicting messages on social media and in interviews about the US wanting the complete elimination of their nuclear programme and that was not at all what Araghchi had agreed, so the first assurance was that there had been no expansion in the US objectives. If he had not got that assurance it’s likely the whole negotiation would have been wrapped up, and ended immediately.”

On guarantees, Iran believes the only secure agreement is a treaty signed by US Congress, but Araghchi was told it would be anyone’s guess whether Trump could get such an agreement through Congress given the strength of pro-Israeli opinion there.

Another option is for the US to agree to cover Tehran’s losses if Washington were to pull out of a deal. The Iranians floated the idea of a financial penalty before, but the enforcement mechanism in the absence of a treaty remains problematic. A third option if the US is in breach is for Russia to be empowered to return the handed-over stockpile of highly enriched uranium to Tehran, so ensuring Iran would not be the party punished for non-compliance.

Such an arrangement potentially gives Russia a pivotal role in the future US-Iran relationship, and might freeze out Germany, France and the UK, the current guarantors of the 2015 agreement. Neither Iran nor the US want to keep a major future role for the UN.

Rome was seen by some as an important site for the talks, since if they went wrong the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, has the best relations with Trump, and so was well placed to mount a rescue operation. A tentative proposal for a meeting between Araghchi and the US vice-president, JD Vance, who was in Rome, was seen as premature.

There is pressure on Witkoff and Trump to deliver on one of the three negotiations in which they are involved – Iran, Hamas-Israel, and Russia-Ukraine. One source said: “Whatever you may think of Iran, they are rational actors, and they are more likely to strike a deal.”

Iran’s negotiating position was strengthened before the talks by the visit of the Saudi defence minister to Tehran to see the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The visit was intended as a message of solidarity that it opposes and would not collaborate in any US-Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear sites.

The Omani foreign ministry said the goal of the talks was to reach “a fair, sustainable and binding agreement … to ensure that Iran is completely free of nuclear weapons and sanctions, while preserving its right to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes”.