Donald Trump’s national security adviser, Mike Waltz, and his deputy, Alex Wong, will be leaving their posts after they lost the confidence of other administration officials and found themselves without allies at the White House, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The exit of Waltz and Wong marked the conclusion of a fraught tenure. In March, Waltz inadvertently added Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of the Atlantic, to a Signal group chat that shared sensitive information about US missile strikes in Yemen before they took place.

Trump announced in a Truth Social post later on Thursday that he would name his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, to also take on the job of the national security adviser on an interim basis, and that he would nominate Waltz to be the US ambassador to the United Nations.

The president briefly considered firing Waltz over the Signal episode, but decided he was unwilling to give the news media the satisfaction of forcing the ouster of a top cabinet official weeks into his second term. Trump was also mollified by an internal review that found Waltz’s error was a mistake.

The furore over the Signal group chat, if anything, was widely seen to have bought Waltz and Wong additional time after they had both been on shaky ground for weeks. That was in large part because of a strained working relationship with Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, and other senior officials.

The interpersonal difficulties extended to Wong, according to a person directly familiar with the ousters. Wong frustrated some officials at other agencies who were involved in national security matters and complained to people in the West Wing that Waltz refused to rein him in, the person said.

In the days after the Signal group chat episode, Waltz sought advice from JD Vance and others in the vice-president’s circle about how to reset relations. Vance counseled Waltz to be more deferential to Wiles, who had pushed for him to get the job, and throw around his weight less.

But Waltz also came under fire from other quarters. Even though he was cleared in the internal review into Signalgate, as it came to be known, Waltz faced pressure for being seen as a war hawk and at odds with Trump’s “America first” agenda.

That included scrutiny at a dinner that Waltz attended with Trump and some of Trump’s allies including Tucker Carlson, who has been skeptical of the adviser. The outside pressure campaign to remove Waltz additionally included an effort led by Steve Bannon, the people said.

And the far-right activist Laura Loomer, who pushed a conspiracy theory that Wong had loyalties to China, weakened Waltz’s power after she went to the White House last month at Trump’s invitation and successfully pushed for Trump to fire a number of Waltz’s staffers.

The gutting of Waltz’s staff was widely seen to have weakened his position inside Trump’s orbit. As Carlson, Bannon and Loomer separately pushed a whisper campaign that Waltz would be out before June, officials in the White House concurred that Waltz’s influence was waning.

This week, it was quietly made clear to Waltz and Wong that their time at the national security council would be coming to an end. Waltz tried to extend his tenure by attending a cabinet meeting on Wednesday but was informed of his removal on Thursday, one of the people said.

The top Senate Democrat, Chuck Schumer, welcomed the firing of Waltz but said that the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, was most deserving of losing his job.

“They should fire him, but they’re firing the wrong guy. They should be firing Hegseth,” the minority leader told reporters at the Capitol.

He accused Republicans of confirming a defense secretary who was unfit for the job, and predicted scandals similar to Signalgate – where Hegseth, Waltz and other national security officials shared details of airstrikes in Yemen in a group chat – would happen in the future.

“They fired the [national security council] guy, but there are going to be many more problems, just like Signalgate that come out of the defense department, as long as Hegseth is in charge. This is not a one-off. This is going to happen over and over and over again.”

Trump’s move to name Rubio the interim national security adviser took officials at the state department by surprise. Tammy Bruce, the spokesperson for the state department, appeared to learn about the decision from a reporter during a news conference in real time.

The appointment means Rubio has taken on a total of four positions in the administration. In addition to being secretary of state and interim national security adviser, he is also currently serving as the acting USAID administrator and the acting national archivist.

Chris Stein contributed reporting

The Trump administration has unveiled a news-style website that publishes exclusively positive coverage of the president on official White House servers.

White House Wire, published at the government domain WH.gov/wire, resembles the rightwing website the Drudge Report, with a list of headlines from right-leaning outlets praising the administration.

It also promotes White House press releases and social media posts by high-level officials.

The administration’s launch of what it describes as a news “wire” comes amid its ongoing efforts to restrict real news wire services from accessing the White House. Journalists with the Associated Press, the non-partisan news agency, remain barred from Oval Office events despite winning a recent court ruling that ordered the administration to re-admit it. Trevor McFadden, a district judge, ruled that the administration’s attempt to punish AP for not using the new term “Gulf of America” instead of the globally accepted “Gulf of Mexico” was a violation of the first amendment.

A White House official told Axios that the new site is “a place for supporters of the president’s agenda to get the real news”, describing it as providing “transparency”.

While previous administrations would often send emails promoting positive news coverage or interviews with senior officials, it appears to be the first time federal resources have been used to build a website that curates partisan news coverage.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

The Trump administration has been attempting to sideline the established press in favor of friendlier media. The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, now follows her regular press briefings with special ones exclusively for pro-Trump “Maga influencers”, who have used these sessions to ask softball questions and to echo administration talking points.

Matt Drudge, a conservative critic of Trump and founder of the Drudge Report site that seems to have inspired the government’s design, teased the launch on his own website and jokingly threatened a “$1tn lawsuit” in comments to Status News.

Health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr and his department have made a series of misleading statements that alarmed vaccine experts and advocates in recent days – including that the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine includes “aborted fetus debris”.

Health department officials released statements saying they could alter vaccine testing and build new “surveillance systems” on Wednesday, both of which have unnerved experts who view new placebo testing as potentially unethical.

“It’s his goal to even further lessen trust in vaccines and make it onerous enough for manufacturers that they will abandon it,” said Dr Paul Offit, an expert on infectious disease and immunology and the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, about the statements and Kennedy. “It’s a fragile market.”

In this same week, Kennedy exhorted parents to “do their own research” in a talkshow interview – the phrase has become pop culture shorthand for a shallow internet search that casts people into the arms of the disinformation ecosystem.

“All new vaccines will undergo safety testing in placebo-controlled trials prior to licensure – a radical departure from past practices,” an HHS spokesperson told the Washington Post in response to questions about general vaccine policy and the measles vaccine. The department did not clarify what it meant by “new vaccine”.

The department spokesperson also described new surveillance systems for vaccines, “that will accurately measure vaccine risks as well as benefits – because real science demands both transparency and accountability”, but did not elaborate on the design of those systems.

Prior to being confirmed to the role of health secretary, Kennedy was arguably the nation’s most prominent anti-vaccine advocate and led a non-profit known for prolific misinformation. He also earned money by referring clients to law firms suing vaccine makers.

Among the claims Kennedy spread was that medications cause “autoimmune injuries and allergic injuries and neurodevelopmental injuries that have long diagnostic horizons or long incubation periods, so you can do the study and you will not see the injury for five years”, he said in an interview in 2021, according to reporting by the Post.

Kennedy also claimed this week that the MMR vaccine includes “aborted fetus debris”. The rubella vaccine, like many vaccines, is produced using decades-old sterile fetal cell lines derived from two elective terminations in the 1960s.

Vaccines against new pathogens, such as Covid-19, are placebo tested. However, experts consider new placebo-controlled trials for long-time vaccines, for instance measles, to be unethical because it would effectively deny a patient a known intervention while potentially exposing them to a dangerous disease.

“No institutional review board at any academic center would ever accept that – so he’s asking what personal injury lawyer invariably asks for, which is the impossible to be done,” said Offit.

Although Kennedy has made false and misleading statements about vaccines generally, the Covid-19 vaccine appears to be especially in the administration’s crosshairs.

In response to recent questions about Covid-19 strategy from the Guardian, the administration responded: “The Covid-19 pandemic is over, and HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago.”

Health officials have reportedly required all research grant applications on messenger RNA technology, which powers most Covid-19 vaccines, be flagged to Kennedy’s office. They have also ended research that tested for the Covid-19 vaccine’s safety and efficacy in special groups, such as pregnant women, as part of an $11bn clawback in grants from states.

Most controversially, the Food and Drug Administration has delayed expected approval of a new Covid-19 vaccine from Novavax, reportedly on the review of a political appointee known to be skeptical of vaccines.

Over the weekend, FDA commissioner Marty Makary addressed the delay by describing annual updates to the vaccine’s strains as a “new” product, creating confusion about whether vaccine makers have to conduct new safety and efficacy trials. Such trials would not be a normal part of routine updates.

On Monday, the company released a statement that said in part the FDA had demanded a clinical trial as part of post-approval surveillance, and that it would continue to work with the FDA.

The Trump administration will approve its first sale of military equipment to Ukraine since Donald Trump took office, in an indication that the minerals deal signed by the two countries this week may open a path to renewed weapons shipments.

The state department has certified a proposed licence to export “$50m or more” (£37.6m) of defence hardware and services to Ukraine, according to a communication sent to the US committee on foreign relations. It would mark the first permission of its kind since Trump paused all Ukraine-related military aid shortly after taking office.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said on Thursday evening that the signing of the long-discussed minerals deal – on much better terms for Ukraine than had previously been expected – was a result of the meeting he held with Trump on the sidelines of the pope’s funeral on Saturday.

“Now we have the first result of the Vatican meeting, which makes it really historic. We are waiting for other results of the meeting,” he said, in his nightly video address.

Zelenskyy hailed the deal as “truly equal”, saying it created “an opportunity for quite significant investment in Ukraine”.

A senior aide said Kyiv hoped that weapons deliveries would resume swiftly. “There is no direct link where it’s written that ‘you will receive these particular weapons’, but it opens the possibility for parallel talks on the purchase of weapons,” said Mykhailo Podolyak, an aide to Zelenskyy, during an interview in Kyiv. “The American side is now open to these discussions,” he added.

Ukraine’s first deputy prime minister, Yulia Svyrydenko, signed the agreement in Washington on Wednesday, along with the US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent. Senior US officials told reporters that they expected Ukraine’s parliament to ratify the deal within a week. The agreement will see a joint fund set up by the two countries, to be financed from new licenses to exploit deposits of critical minerals, oil and gas.

After several weeks when Trump appeared to be soft on Russia and harsh towards Ukraine, authorities in Kyiv hope the dynamic may be changing. Zelenskyy said on Thursday the minerals agreement had “changed significantly during the process” and that it was “now a really equal agreement which allows for investment in Ukraine”.

Most notably, it excludes from its remit money previously sent to Ukraine as military and humanitarian aid, which Trump had repeatedly said he hoped to recoup. It also explicitly states that it should be implemented in a way that does not hamper Ukraine’s integration with the EU and that US companies will not have a monopoly on deals in Ukraine, but merely obtain the right to take part in competitive bids on fair terms.

The final document followed almost three months of back-and-forth negotiation, after the first outline was brought to Kyiv by Bessent and rejected by Zelenskyy as far too punitive to sign. A later signing ceremony was planned at the White House in February, but broke down after Trump and JD Vance turned on Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, prompting an abrupt conclusion of talks and the Ukrainian president being asked to leave.

Asked how Kyiv had been able to improve the terms of the minerals deal, Podolyak claimed that the actual discussions had proceeded in a very different tone to some of Trump’s public statements.

“That’s just the style of this [US] administration, it’s very aggressive with communications. They will allow leaks of the most horrible conditions and so on, but then in reality they negotiate normally and you can achieve a result,” he said. “They just use this aggression to try to improve their starting position,” he added.

Podolyak said that because US weapons supplied would now need to be bought, Kyiv would need to be more selective about what it requested from the US. “I think fairly quickly we will understand which types of weapons, to carefully select the unique weapons the US has. Because if we can produce our own drones, for example, then we will do that here. But there are some critical weapon types which only the US produces and nobody else,” he said.

Zelenskyy has previously expressed interest in spending tens of billions of dollars on buying Patriot air defence systems from the US, suggesting this could be done either through financing from European allies or through the planned minerals fund.

It was not immediately clear what weapons or services the more modest $50m now on the table referred to. The state department is required to notify Congress of significant sales of armaments and military services under the Arms Export Control Act.

Authorisation was sought for a direct commercial sale, which authorises the transfer of “defense articles or defense services made under a Department of State issued license by US industry directly to a foreign buyer”. The intended sale was first reported by the Kyiv Post.

The last aid package to Ukraine came under the Biden administration, when Congress authorised $1bn in spending as the outgoing administration sought to fast-track military aid before Trump took office.

Russia’s reaction to the minerals deal has been muted, with the exception of the hawkish former president Dmitry Medvedev who claimed it was a disaster for Zelenskyy. “Trump has broken the Kyiv regime to the point where they will have to pay for US aid with mineral resources,” he wrote on Telegram. “Now they [Ukrainians] will have to pay for military supplies with the national wealth of a disappearing country.”

There is cautious optimism in Kyiv over the terms of the long-discussed US-Ukraine minerals deal, signed on Wednesday, which appear to be more advantageous for Ukraine than most had expected.

Many details are still to be finalised and will be written into a yet-to-be-signed further technical agreement, suggesting that the long saga over the deal may not be quite over. But Ukrainian analysts have noted that Kyiv has apparently been able to extract some major concessions, despite Donald Trump’s repeated claim that Ukraine “has no cards” to play.

“Ukraine held the line. Despite enormous pressure, every overreaching demand from the other side was dropped. The final deal looks fair,” Tymofiy Mylovanov, president of the Kyiv School of Economics, wrote on X.

Ukraine’s prime minister, Denys Shmyhal, said on Thursday that his country would retain “full control over its subsoil, infrastructure and natural resources”. Notably absent from the final text was the insistence that Ukraine should repay previous military US assistance via the deal, something Trump has previously repeatedly demanded. Volodymyr Zelenskyy had rejected signing something that would obligate “10 generations” of Ukrainians to repay. Future potential military assistance to Ukraine, however, will count as investments.

The signed agreement also makes it clear that its terms will not jeopardise Ukraine’s potential future integration with the EU, and also does not subject Ukraine to US legal jurisdiction. It does not lock Ukraine in to partnering only with the US on projects in future, and guarantees only access to bidding processes for US companies on fair terms.

“There’s no requirement to sell everything to the US, or to channel all investment through the fund. The obligation is to give the fund fair market access to future projects,” wrote Mylovanov.

The original idea of some kind of “rare earths” deal was thought up by Zelenskyy’s team. It was part of a “victory plan” unveiled before the US election last year, with the specific goal of interesting Trump in an economic partnership, amid fears that a potential Trump administration would not be as amenable to a values-based argument to support Ukraine as the Biden administration had been.

However it seemed that the gambit had backfired when, soon after taking office, Trump dispatched the US Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, to Kyiv with the draft of an agreement that “looked like it had been written on the train”, according to one source. The plan appeared to lock Ukraine into all kinds of obligations, while offering Kyiv nothing in return by way of security guarantees, save the rather thin claim that Washington taking a stake in Ukraine’s economy was itself a kind of security guarantee.

Since then, there have been various attempts to revise and revisit the terms of the deal. In late February, Zelenskyy was meant to sign it during a meeting in Washington, but after the vice-president, JD Vance, goaded him into an argument in front of the cameras in the Oval Office, Ukraine’s president was kicked out of the White House without signing.

Earlier this month, it transpired that the Ukrainian justice ministry had hired the US law firm Hogan Lovells to advise on the deal, according to filings with the US Foreign Agents Registration Act registry.

The deal will need to be ratified by Ukraine’s parliament, while discussions will continue over the “technical agreement” that also needs to be finalised and signed. The overall agreement is unlikely to have a huge impact in terms of contracts signed as long as fighting between Ukraine and Russia continues, but the Zelenskyy team hope that getting it signed will increased goodwill towards Kyiv in the Trump administration. The US president in recent days has continued to paint Zelenskyy as a bigger obstacle to a peace deal than Vladimir Putin – although he has gradually inched towards criticism of the Russian leader.

The first rhetorical noises from Washington on the deal were positive. After signing the agreement, Bessent called it the start of a “historic economic partnership” and claimed it showed that the US remained committed to Ukraine as an ally.

“This agreement signals clearly to Russia that the Trump administration is committed to a peace process centred on a free, sovereign, and prosperous Ukraine over the long term,” said Bessent.

Polls have closed across England for local and mayoral elections, as well as a key parliamentary byelection, with the first results due to be announced within hours.

It is the first full-scale electoral test for Keir Starmer since the general election, and could have notable repercussions for Nigel Farage and Kemi Badenoch, as well as to a lesser extent for the Liberal Democrats and Greens.

The elections cover 24 councils across England, as well as six mayoralties and a byelection in the formerly Labour-held seat of Runcorn and Helsby in Cheshire, which is being closely contested by Reform UK.

The first results, expected at about 2am, will be for two of the mayoral races: North Tyneside, which Labour is expected to hold, and West of England, which was previously held by Labour but is seen as being a close race between Labour, the Greens and Lib Dems.

About an hour later will be perhaps the key result of the night, with voters in Runcorn and Helsby deciding who will succeed Mike Amesbury, the former Labour MP who resigned after being given a suspended prison sentence for punching a man. Bookmakers have Reform as the favourites to overturn Labour’s near-15,000 majority. Labour officials in the constituency on Thursday said the contest appeared too tight to predict.

Other overnight results will include the mayoralties in Greater Lincolnshire, where Reform is hopeful of taking the newly created post, and Doncaster, which is Labour-held and where the party believes it can win again.

However, the bulk of the council votes will not be counted before Friday morning, with many results not finalised until well into the afternoon.

Results are seen as particularly hard to predict given the atomised polling figures, with Reform, Labour and the Conservatives each recording national support generally between 20% and 25%, and the Lib Dems and Greens not notably far behind.

One thing that does seem certain is that the Conservatives will lose many hundreds of council seats, in part because they did so well in 2021 when the same seats were last contested, amid the brief fillip of Boris Johnson’s “vaccine bounce”.

A particularly bad night could put new pressure on Badenoch’s leadership of the party, but Conservative MPs say there is minimal chance of any formal challenge to her for now, not least because so many voters expressed distaste at the Tories’ internal divisions in the run-up to last year’s general election.

Starmer can most likely gloss over a modest night in council results, but a Reform win in Runcorn, and in a couple or several of the mayoral races, would set off new jitters in Downing Street.

The Lib Dems and Greens will be hopeful of making gains, but also wary about potential ingress by Reform.

British government lawyers have said Israel is bound by the Geneva conventions to give the International Committee of the Red Cross access to Palestinian prisoners and cannot justify its refusal to do so by pointing to Hamas’s treatment of Israeli hostages.

On the fourth day of proceedings at the international court of justice in The Hague, Sally Langrish said there had been “repeated credible reports of ill treatment of Palestinian detainees held in Israeli custody” since the 7 October 2023 attacks by Hamas on Israel.

She said Hamas’s refusal to give ICRC access to Israeli hostages seized during the attacks could not serve as justification for Israel’s actions. She added that the ICRC played a vital role in protecting and promoting the lives and dignity of the victims of arms conflict.

The UK lawyers also clashed with Israel by insisting that Unrwa, the UN’s Palestinian relief agency, should be regarded as a neutral and impartial body with which the Israeli government had a duty to cooperate to provide aid to the Palestinian people.

Langrish said: “Israel must facilitate full, rapid, safe and unhindered humanitarian provision to the population of Gaza, including food, water and electricity, and must ensure access to medical care in accordance with international humanitarian law.”

Her submission reflected a UK government determination to stand by international law even if it caused severe political difficulties with its close ally Israel. It also exposed clear legal differences with arguments put to the court by the US the day before.

Israel has mounted a total blockade of aid into Gaza since 2 March, leading to mounting reports of desperation among its 2 million people. The ICJ has been asked by the UN general assembly to give an advisory opinion on Israel’s obligations to allow aid into Gaza, and on its duty to cooperate with UN bodies, notably Unrwa.

Israel, along with its chief legal backer, the US, claims ending all cooperation with Unrwa is justified since under the Geneva conventions it is required to facilitate only the provision of aid with neutral bodies, a description it said Unrwa had forfeited because of alleged infiltration by Hamas.

More than 40 countries and bodies, including the UN itself, are giving oral submissions to the UN’s top court.

Dismissing Israeli claims that Unrwa was a Hamas front, Langrish said: “The United Kingdom considers that Unrwa is an impartial humanitarian organisation for the purposes of article 59 of the fourth Geneva convention. Insofar as impartiality is understood as meaning neutrality, Unrwa also satisfies that requirement.”

She said Israel was bound under article 59 as the occupying power “to facilitate the provision of food, stuff, medical supplies and clothing into the occupied Palestinian territories”.

“That obligation continues to apply for so long as part of the population is inadequately supplied. A refusal to negotiate or agree to relief schemes will constitute a violation of article 59,” she said. “This obligation is unconditional. Facilitation requires wholehearted cooperation in the rapid and scrupulous execution of these schemes. This includes the provision of transport, storage and distribution facilities.”

She also pointed out that under article 55, for Israel to meet its obligations to provide relief through a third party such as Unrwa, “the occupying power must ensure the safety and security of that third party as far as possible”.

Israel, she argued, had only a limited right to choose the agency to distribute aid.

British government lawyers have said Israel is bound by the Geneva conventions to give the International Committee of the Red Cross access to Palestinian prisoners and cannot justify its refusal to do so by pointing to Hamas’s treatment of Israeli hostages.

On the fourth day of proceedings at the international court of justice in The Hague, Sally Langrish said there had been “repeated credible reports of ill treatment of Palestinian detainees held in Israeli custody” since the 7 October 2023 attacks by Hamas on Israel.

She said Hamas’s refusal to give ICRC access to Israeli hostages seized during the attacks could not serve as justification for Israel’s actions. She added that the ICRC played a vital role in protecting and promoting the lives and dignity of the victims of arms conflict.

The UK lawyers also clashed with Israel by insisting that Unrwa, the UN’s Palestinian relief agency, should be regarded as a neutral and impartial body with which the Israeli government had a duty to cooperate to provide aid to the Palestinian people.

Langrish said: “Israel must facilitate full, rapid, safe and unhindered humanitarian provision to the population of Gaza, including food, water and electricity, and must ensure access to medical care in accordance with international humanitarian law.”

Her submission reflected a UK government determination to stand by international law even if it caused severe political difficulties with its close ally Israel. It also exposed clear legal differences with arguments put to the court by the US the day before.

Israel has mounted a total blockade of aid into Gaza since 2 March, leading to mounting reports of desperation among its 2 million people. The ICJ has been asked by the UN general assembly to give an advisory opinion on Israel’s obligations to allow aid into Gaza, and on its duty to cooperate with UN bodies, notably Unrwa.

Israel, along with its chief legal backer, the US, claims ending all cooperation with Unrwa is justified since under the Geneva conventions it is required to facilitate only the provision of aid with neutral bodies, a description it said Unrwa had forfeited because of alleged infiltration by Hamas.

More than 40 countries and bodies, including the UN itself, are giving oral submissions to the UN’s top court.

Dismissing Israeli claims that Unrwa was a Hamas front, Langrish said: “The United Kingdom considers that Unrwa is an impartial humanitarian organisation for the purposes of article 59 of the fourth Geneva convention. Insofar as impartiality is understood as meaning neutrality, Unrwa also satisfies that requirement.”

She said Israel was bound under article 59 as the occupying power “to facilitate the provision of food, stuff, medical supplies and clothing into the occupied Palestinian territories”.

“That obligation continues to apply for so long as part of the population is inadequately supplied. A refusal to negotiate or agree to relief schemes will constitute a violation of article 59,” she said. “This obligation is unconditional. Facilitation requires wholehearted cooperation in the rapid and scrupulous execution of these schemes. This includes the provision of transport, storage and distribution facilities.”

She also pointed out that under article 55, for Israel to meet its obligations to provide relief through a third party such as Unrwa, “the occupying power must ensure the safety and security of that third party as far as possible”.

Israel, she argued, had only a limited right to choose the agency to distribute aid.

Harrods has been hit by a cyber-attack, just days after Marks & Spencer and the Co-op were targeted.

The luxury department store is understood to have been forced to shut down some systems, but said its website and all its stores, including the Knightsbridge flagship, H beauty and airport outlets, continued to operate. It is understood the retailer first realised it was being targeted earlier this week.

Harrods said in a statement: “We recently experienced attempts to gain unauthorised access to some of our systems. Our seasoned IT security team immediately took proactive steps to keep systems safe and as a result we have restricted internet access at our sites today.”

The retailer said it was not asking customers to take any action, indicating that it did not suspect data had been accessed. It added: “We will continue to provide updates as necessary.”

The problems at Harrods, first reported by Sky News, emerged as M&S continues to battle problems caused by a cyber incident that has been linked to the hacking collective Scattered Spider.

More than £650m has been wiped off the stock market value of the company as its website has been forced to stop orders for almost a week. There are also gaps on shelves in stores as the company’s automated stock systems are not working and its loyalty scheme and gift card payments have been disrupted.

On Thursday it emerged that M&S has been forced to pause hiring new workers.

The company said it had pulled all online job postings from its website as its recruitment systems were on hold while tech experts deal with the consequences of a hack which has also forced M&S to close its online shop.

A message on M&S’s jobs website said: “Sorry you can’t search or apply for roles right now, we’re working hard to be back online as soon as possible.”

The company, which employs about 65,000 people in its stores and London head office, had no jobs listed anywhere across its UK business on Thursday despite having more than 200 job openings the previous week.

A spokesperson said: “While we proactively manage the cyber incident, we are temporarily pausing some of our normal processes so we can continue to work hard on offering the best M&S for our customers and colleagues. Job adverts will be up again in due course.”

The Co-op has also had to shut down some internal systems and warned staff to keep cameras on during online conferencing after detecting an attempted hack. Stores and online business continue to operate as usual.

Retailers are on high alert as many use the same systems as M&S and the Co-op, SAP, so potential hackers could try to use the same methods in many businesses.

It is unclear whether the cyber-attacks on the three retailers are coordinated or carried out by the same group.

The National Cyber Security Centre said it was working with M&S and the Co-op to understand the nature of both incidents, and is expected to examine any potential links. The Metropolitan police confirmed on Wednesday that detectives from its cybercrime unit, assisted by colleagues from the National Crime Agency, were investigating the attack on M&S.

Richard Horne, chief executive of the NCSC, said the cyber incidents should “act as a wake-up call to all organisations”. He urged businesses “to ensure they have appropriate measures in place to help prevent attacks and respond and recover effectively”.

He added: “The NCSC continues to work closely with organisations that have reported incidents to us to fully understand the nature of these attacks and to provide expert advice to the wider sector based on the threat picture.”

Retailers and their suppliers have faced a series of cyber-attacks in recent years including Morrisons, which was affected by an incident at its tech supplier, Blue Yonder, in the run-up to Christmas last year.

In 2023 WH Smith was hit by an attack in which company data was accessed illegally, including the personal details of current and former employees. That came less than a year after a cyber-attack on WH Smith’s Funky Pigeon website forced it to stop taking orders for about a week.

Amid concerns about his health, Ozzy Osbourne has insisted he will perform in July at what is being billed as his final concert, fronting the original lineup of Black Sabbath.

Speaking along with his bandmates to the Guardian’s Alexis Petridis in an interview to be published on Friday, he said: “I’ll be there, and I’ll do the best I can. So all I can do is turn up.”

The concert, titled Back to the Beginning and held at the band’s beloved Villa Park in Birmingham, features an all-star supporting lineup of metal greats including Metallica, Slayer and Anthrax. But this week, the frontman of another supporting act, Tool, voiced doubt about Osbourne’s ability to perform.

“I’m cautious about saying, ‘Yeah! All in, he’s gonna do it’,” Maynard James Keenan said. “I don’t know what kind of modern miracles we’ll come up with to get him on stage to do the songs, but this is gonna be a challenge for them. So, I’m honoured to be a part of it, but I’m kinda preparing for the worst, but hoping for the best.”

Osbourne has experienced an extraordinary run of back luck with his health in recent years, including a 2019 fall that exacerbated an earlier spinal injury, requiring numerous surgeries. He has also suffered pneumonia and a longstanding infection, and has been diagnosed with a form of Parkinson’s.

Speaking to the Guardian, he acknowledged the psychological toll: “You wake up the next morning and find that something else has gone wrong. You begin to think this is never going to end.” He said the reunion concert was conceived by his wife, Sharon, as “something to give me a reason to get up in the morning”.

Back to the Beginning will reunite Osbourne with his original Black Sabbath bandmates for the first time in 20 years: guitarist Tony Iommi, bassist Geezer Butler and drummer Bill Ward. After forming in 1968 in Birmingham, the almighty weight of their sound, topped with Osbourne’s penetrating holler, ushered in an entire genre of heavy metal and resulted in classic albums such as Paranoid and Master of Reality. Osbourne left in 1979, then returned in 1997. The classic lineup played together until 2005, continuing without Ward for further tours and a final studio album, 2013’s 13.

Osbourne detailed his preparation for the reunion concert to the Guardian. “I do weights, bike riding, I’ve got a guy living at my house who’s working with me. It’s tough – I’ve been laid up for such a long time. I’ve been lying on my back doing nothing and the first thing to go is your strength. It’s like starting all over again. I’ve got a vocal coach coming round four days a week to keep my voice going. I have problems walking. I also get blood pressure issues, from blood clots on my legs. I’m used to doing two hours on stage, jumping and running around. I don’t think I’ll be doing much jumping or running around this time. I may be sitting down.”

He said he won’t be performing a full set. “We’re only playing a couple of songs each. I don’t want people thinking ‘we’re getting ripped off’, because it’s just going to be … what’s the word? … a sample, you’re going to get a few songs each by Ozzy and Sabbath.”

Elsewhere in the Guardian interview, the other band members speak about their own reasons for returning, and Sharon details her and Ozzy’s plans for retirement.

The concert, on 5 July, will raise funds for three charities: Cure Parkinson’s, Birmingham Children’s Hospital and the Birmingham-based Acorns Children’s Hospice.

A man accused of felling the Sycamore Gap tree on Hadrian’s Wall told police he was being “stitched up” and did not have the skills to do it.

A jury at Newcastle crown court heard police interviews with Daniel Graham, 39, in which he also said he had no idea what he was doing on the night the tree was felled, which took place a month earlier.

Graham and Adam Carruthers, 32, have denied charges of criminally damaging the famous tree and the Roman wall it stood on.

Prosecutors have alleged the pair travelled from Carlisle to Northumberland on a “moronic mission” to cut down the tree during Storm Agnes. They are alleged to have driven there in Graham’s black Range Rover on the evening of 27 September 2023.

They have been accused of filming on an iPhone the cutting down of the tree with a chainsaw in the early hours of 28 September.

The prosecution claims the two men took a wedge of the trunk as a trophy and later “revelled” in the headlines nationally and internationally about the loss of the tree .

Graham was first interviewed by police on suspicion of criminal damage on 31 October.

On day three of the trial, DI Calum Meikle of Northumbria police and a prosecuting barrister, Rebecca Brown, read out transcripts of interviews in which Graham denied having anything to do with felling the tree.

He told police he thought he was being “fixed up” and mentioned a “fake profile” and a “pikey down the road” when asked with whom he was in dispute.

Graham, a groundworker, said he was being “stitched up” and he knew who was accusing him. “It’s nowt to do with me and I don’t know who’s done it, but I know who’s put my name forward. I know who’s made the allegation … I know who’s done this to me.”

He said he was being framed for the crime as part of a dispute with someone “stirring the pot”. Graham said he allowed other people to use his Range Rover.

Asked if any of the chainsaws he owned could be linked to cutting down the sycamore, Graham told police: “They wouldn’t be big enough.” He said he did not have the skills to fell such a large tree.

Asked how he would cut down the tree at Sycamore Gap, he replied: “I have never done a large fell, I haven’t been trained for that.”

Graham told police he did not remember sending Carruthers a message saying “here we go” the morning after the tree was felled as the media picked up on the story.

He replied “no comment” when he was asked who had cut the tree down and if there was a reason for it.

Interviews with Carruthers were also read to the jury. He said he could not remember what he was doing on the night the tree was felled but there was a “good chance” he was at home looking after his new baby.

Carruthers told police he had never felled a tree and thought chainsaws were “nasty things”, adding that he would rather “stick with spanners”.

He said: “If someone said ‘there’s a tree and there’s a saw, cut that down’, I’d have a go but I’ve never done it.”

The court heard that police had never recovered the wedge of the tree said to have been taken as a trophy, or the chainsaw used to topple the sycamore.

Graham, of Carlisle, and Carruthers, of Wigton, are jointly charged with causing criminal damage worth £622,191 to the tree. They are also charged with causing £1,144 of damage to Hadrian’s Wall, a Unesco world heritage site. The wall and the tree belong to the National Trust.

The pair deny all the charges against them. The trial continues.

Rod Stewart has offered to pay for the autism diagnosis of a child who has spent three years on a waiting list.

The singer stepped in after reading about the case of four-year-old Iain Gregori, who is non-verbal and is due to start school this summer.

His father, Michael, told the Daily Record, which has been highlighting the lack of medical appointments for children with conditions such as autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, that he feared his son was “lost in the system”.

The case was raised by the Scottish Labour leader, Anas Sarwar, at first minister’s questions on Thursday.

Sarwar told MSPs: “Three years on, Iain is still non-verbal and is still waiting on a diagnosis.”

He revealed that Iain’s father had been a member of the SNP and campaigned for them to be in government: “He told me that they should now hang their heads in shame, as they have let Scotland down.”

Sarwar added: “When speaking of his son, he said: ‘Everyone is saying Iain needs this diagnosis, he is autistic, everyone is sure of it, but at the same time he needs an official diagnosis to get the resources he needs’.

“Rod Stewart heard this heartbreaking story and stepped in to pay for Iain’s diagnosis. Others won’t be as lucky – why, on [first minister] John Swinney’s watch, do young people have to rely on the charity of a rock star to get the treatment they need?”

Responding, Swinney said an official diagnosis was not required to access support.

“It is absolutely critical that I make that point to parliament today,” he said. “Because there are other pathways that are available, other than diagnosis for ADHD or a neurodiversity condition, which enables young people to attract the support that will assist them in meeting the challenges that they face.”

Swinney said he wanted to reassure parents there was “support available to meet the needs of individual young people”.

He added: “The government is taking a range of interventions where we’re expanding mental health support or supporting the development of community interventions and we are working to make sure that young people get that support at the earliest possible opportunity.”

Stewart told the Daily Record his team would find a private specialist in London or in Scotland to provide a diagnosis and he would cover the costs.

He said: “I’ve been very successful in my career and blessed so far with good health. I also have seven children who are all blessed with good health so I can’t imagine what it must be like for the boy’s parents.”

Michael Gregori said he was a lifelong Stewart fan: “I grew up on Rod’s music. My adopted mum used to play his music all the time and it stuck with me. It is incredible he wants to help us.”

Elite athletes have been warned against having one-night stands because of the risk they could be ­contaminated with banned drugs from engaging in casual sex.

The warning came as top lawyers and anti-doping experts debated ­contamination cases in sport before highlighting the hidden dangers for the Tinder generation.

Mark Hovell, a leading sports lawyer and the independent chair in the Jannik Sinner anti-doping case, raised the issue of the French tennis player Richard Gasquet, who was cleared after testing positive for cocaine after showing it came from kissing a woman in a nightclub.

“­Gasquet managed to get her to come and give evidence to say: ‘Yes, I’m a cocaine addict. I use cocaine,” Hovell added. “‘I kissed him in this ­nightclub.’ But with a one-night stand, how are you going to be able to find that person again? That’s the problem.”

Asked by the moderator Jacqui Oatley whether an elite athlete was opening themselves up if they didn’t get a phone number of the person they slept with, Hovell nodded before saying: “They might not have the evidence they need.”

Another panellist, Travis Tygart, the head of the US Anti-Doping Agency, said he agreed with Hovell’s assessment and cited the case of the American boxer Virginia Fuchs in 2020.

Fuchs tested positive for prohibited substances, but was cleared after proving that the metabolites detected in her sample were consistent with recent exposure via sexual transmission with her male partner.

“I think based on the cases we’ve seen, watch who you kiss and watch out who you have an intimate relationship with,” Tygart told the Sports Resolutions conference.

Tygart also called on the World Anti-Doping Agency to raise the minimum reporting level of substances that could be sexually transmitted, such as clostabal and ostarine – so that if anti-doping laboratories found a trace amount in an athletes’ sample they would not risk a sanction.

“I think it’s a pretty ridiculous world we’re expecting our athletes to live in, which is why we’re pushing to try to change these rules to make it more reasonable and fair,” said Tygart.

“The onus is always on the athletes – we as anti-doping organisations, need to take some of that responsibility back. And I worry how many of the intentional cheats are actually getting away because we’re spending so much time and resources on the cases that end up being someone kissing someone at a bar.”

Tygart also reignited his feud with Wada over the case of 23 Chinese swimmers who tested positive for the banned drug TMZ before later being cleared.

It came as Usada said it had worked out that 96 medals at the Tokyo and Paris Olympics could have potentially have been affected by the cases, and that Wada had a responsibility to clean athletes to do more.

“It’s basically been a year since China’s failure to follow the rules that resulted in no consequences,” Tygart said. “And you run the numbers from the 2021 Summer Olympics and the 2024 Summer Olympics in swimming, and potentially 96 medals have been impacted by those swimmers who had, 23 swimmers who had positive tests.

“And arguably, they should have gotten four years. TMZ is in the category of four years unless they prove source and no intent. And unfortunately the system, for whatever reason, is not willing to get to the bottom of it in a real and meaningful way.”