The US Postal Service has suspended incoming parcels from China and Hong Kong until further notice, amid a growing trade conflict between the US and China.

It comes as Donald Trump said he is not in a hurry to speak to his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, despite expectations that they would hold talks after announcing tit-for-tat tariffs.

The postal service did not say why it was suspending incoming parcels, but among Trump’s measures against China are a broad-based tariff on imports, and the elimination of the de minimis duty-free exemption for low-value packages.

The suspension – which took effect immediately – appears likely related to the latter, and is expected to have significant impact on US consumer orders from retailers including Amazon. In 2023, a US government report said 30% of small packages coming into the US were from two Chinese e-commerce companies, Shein and Temu, alone. The USPS declined to answer further questions.

On Tuesday, minutes after Trump’s threatened tariffs on Chinese goods came into effect, Beijing said it was imposing levies on imports of US energy, vehicles and equipment.

Earlier, Trump suspended threatened duties against Mexico and Canada for a month after both countries vowed to step up measures to counter flows of the drug fentanyl and undocumented migrants into the US.

Trump had signalled earlier that the talks with Xi could take place early this week, but addressing reporters at the White House on Tuesday afternoon he said he was in “no rush” to speak with him.

Stock markets wavered as investors braced for volatile market activity in the coming weeks over Trump’s threatened tariffs on his country’s three biggest goods trading partners.

Trump imposed fresh 10% tariffs on Chinese goods, on top of levies that were already in place against Washington’s biggest economic competitor. Mexico and Canada had faced 25% tariffs.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Monday that Trump was due to talk to Xi, but on Tuesday said she had no “updates on when that call will take place.”

“He is not going to allow China to continue to source and distribute deadly fentanyl into our country, that was the reason for this tariff,” Leavitt told reporters outside the West Wing of the White House.

China unveiled 15% levies on imports of coal and liquefied natural gas from the US, while crude oil, agricultural machinery, big-engined vehicles, and pickup trucks face 10% duties.

Beijing says it will also investigate Google and the US fashion group that owns Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein.

China’s government said the measures were in response to the “unilateral tariff hike” by Washington. It said it would also file a complaint to the World Trade Organization over the “malicious” levies.

Additionally, it unveiled fresh export controls on rare metals and chemicals including tungsten, tellurium, bismuth and molybdenum.

China is a major market for US energy exports and according to Beijing customs data, imports of oil, coal and LNG totalled more than $7bn last year.

But that is dwarfed by China’s imports from more friendly powers such as Russia, from which it bought $94bn worth last year.

Trump has made tariffs a key foreign policy tool of his second term, saying that tariff is the “most beautiful” word in the dictionary.

The Mexican president, Claudia Sheinbaum, and the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, both struck last-minute deals with Trump on Monday to tighten border measures, leading to a 30-day pause on his threatened tariffs.

Talks will continue for the next month on broader pacts.

Mexico said on Tuesday it had begun deploying 10,000 border troops as promised to Trump as part of the agreement to halt tariffs.

More than 450,000 people have been murdered in Mexico since it launched a major offensive against drug cartels in 2006.

Trudeau said Canada would appoint a “fentanyl tsar” and list drug cartels as terrorist organisations.

Agence France-Presse contributed reporting

Donald Trump has fired the opening salvo of his trade war, imposing tariffs on China on Tuesday that sparked instant retaliation from Beijing, amid fears for the global economic repercussions.

Moments after US tariffs of 10% came into effect, China swiftly announced an anti-trust investigation into Google. China’s finance ministry also announced 15% tariffs on coal and liquefied natural gas, and 10% on crude oil, farm equipment, large-displacement vehicles and pickup trucks from the US.

China’s commerce ministry and its customs administration said on Tuesday that to “safeguard national security interests” the country was imposing export controls on a raft of critical minerals: tungsten, tellurium, ruthenium, molybdenum and ruthenium-related items.

The commerce ministry also said it was adding the US companies PVH Group and Illumina Inc to its unreliable entity list, opening them to restrictions or penalties, without detailing what the companies were accused of. PVH is a clothing company that owns brands including Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein. Illumina is a biotech company specialising in genomic sequencing that recently partnered with Nvidia on health-related AI tech.

In December, China launched an antitrust investigation into Nvidia, after a tightening of US export controls on hi-tech products popular in China. On Tuesday, the Financial Times reported that Beijing was considering adding US chipmaker Intel to the list of companies being investigated by China’s antitrust regulator. China is Intel’s largest market, and Nvidia’s second-largest after the US.

Most of Google’s services such as search and email are blocked in China. But the company still makes money in China from Chinese companies advertising overseas and from Chinese phone-makers using its Android operating system.

“The unilateral imposition of tariffs by the US seriously violates the rules of the World Trade Organization,” China’s finance ministry said in its statement announcing the retaliatory tariffs. “It is not only unhelpful in solving its own problems, but also damages the normal economic and trade cooperation between China and the US.”

Earlier, the US president pulled back from the brink of an economic conflict with Canada and Mexico, however, delaying threatened duties for another month after 11th-hour talks.

For exports from China, the US has scrapped an exemption through which shipments valued at less than $800 (£644) have not faced tariffs. Popular Chinese retailers such as Shein and Temu have relied on the exemption to sell cheap goods in the US.

After a call with Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, on Monday, Trump agreed to postpone tariffs of 25% on Mexico – the latest of several delays – after she offered to send 10,000 of the country’s troops to its border with the US.

Talks with Justin Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister, also prompted Trump to postpone 25% tariffs on the country. Canada is implementing a $1.3bn border plan, Trudeau said, and will appoint a fentanyl tsar, list cartels as a terrorists and “ensure 24/7 eyes on the border”.

As the US readied higher tariffs on China on Monday, the White House announced that Trump would speak later this week with China’s president, Xi Jinping. Beijing earlier pledged to hit back with “countermeasures” and file a legal case against the US at the World Trade Organization.

Economists have warned Trump’s tariff plans risk raising prices for millions of Americans, only weeks after he pledged, upon taking office, to “rapidly” bring them down.

Addressing reporters in the Oval Office on Monday, Trump maintained that tariffs were a “very powerful” means of strengthening the US economically and “getting everything else you want”.

Every country wanted to agree a way to avoid US tariffs, the president claimed. “In all cases, they all wanna make deals.”

Trump had conceded over the weekend that they could cause “a little pain” in the US. “WILL THERE BE SOME PAIN? YES, MAYBE (AND MAYBE NOT!),” he wrote on social media. “BUT WE WILL MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, AND IT WILL ALL BE WORTH THE PRICE THAT MUST BE PAID.”

The reaction in global financial markets, which had recovered some of their losses on Monday after Trump’s one-month delay, was mixed on Tuesday.

In Hong Kong, the Hang Seng share index jumped by almost 2.8%, while South Korea’s Kospi rose by 1.3%. The FTSE 100 fell 31 points to 8,551 shortly after opening in London.

Sterling dropped by half a cent against the US dollar to $1.24, while the euro was down a similar amount at $1.03.

The Canadian dollar, which slumped to a 20-year low on Monday before rebounding, weakened – to 1.445 to the dollar.

Chinese markets remain closed because of the lunar new year holiday and will reopen on Wednesday.

Additional reporting by Graeme Wearden

Donald Trump has fired the opening salvo of his trade war, imposing tariffs on China on Tuesday that sparked instant retaliation from Beijing, amid fears for the global economic repercussions.

Moments after US tariffs of 10% came into effect, China swiftly announced an anti-trust investigation into Google. China’s finance ministry also announced 15% tariffs on coal and liquefied natural gas, and 10% on crude oil, farm equipment, large-displacement vehicles and pickup trucks from the US.

China’s commerce ministry and its customs administration said on Tuesday that to “safeguard national security interests” the country was imposing export controls on a raft of critical minerals: tungsten, tellurium, ruthenium, molybdenum and ruthenium-related items.

The commerce ministry also said it was adding the US companies PVH Group and Illumina Inc to its unreliable entity list, opening them to restrictions or penalties, without detailing what the companies were accused of. PVH is a clothing company that owns brands including Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein. Illumina is a biotech company specialising in genomic sequencing that recently partnered with Nvidia on health-related AI tech.

In December, China launched an antitrust investigation into Nvidia, after a tightening of US export controls on hi-tech products popular in China. On Tuesday, the Financial Times reported that Beijing was considering adding US chipmaker Intel to the list of companies being investigated by China’s antitrust regulator. China is Intel’s largest market, and Nvidia’s second-largest after the US.

Most of Google’s services such as search and email are blocked in China. But the company still makes money in China from Chinese companies advertising overseas and from Chinese phone-makers using its Android operating system.

“The unilateral imposition of tariffs by the US seriously violates the rules of the World Trade Organization,” China’s finance ministry said in its statement announcing the retaliatory tariffs. “It is not only unhelpful in solving its own problems, but also damages the normal economic and trade cooperation between China and the US.”

Earlier, the US president pulled back from the brink of an economic conflict with Canada and Mexico, however, delaying threatened duties for another month after 11th-hour talks.

For exports from China, the US has scrapped an exemption through which shipments valued at less than $800 (£644) have not faced tariffs. Popular Chinese retailers such as Shein and Temu have relied on the exemption to sell cheap goods in the US.

After a call with Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, on Monday, Trump agreed to postpone tariffs of 25% on Mexico – the latest of several delays – after she offered to send 10,000 of the country’s troops to its border with the US.

Talks with Justin Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister, also prompted Trump to postpone 25% tariffs on the country. Canada is implementing a $1.3bn border plan, Trudeau said, and will appoint a fentanyl tsar, list cartels as a terrorists and “ensure 24/7 eyes on the border”.

As the US readied higher tariffs on China on Monday, the White House announced that Trump would speak later this week with China’s president, Xi Jinping. Beijing earlier pledged to hit back with “countermeasures” and file a legal case against the US at the World Trade Organization.

Economists have warned Trump’s tariff plans risk raising prices for millions of Americans, only weeks after he pledged, upon taking office, to “rapidly” bring them down.

Addressing reporters in the Oval Office on Monday, Trump maintained that tariffs were a “very powerful” means of strengthening the US economically and “getting everything else you want”.

Every country wanted to agree a way to avoid US tariffs, the president claimed. “In all cases, they all wanna make deals.”

Trump had conceded over the weekend that they could cause “a little pain” in the US. “WILL THERE BE SOME PAIN? YES, MAYBE (AND MAYBE NOT!),” he wrote on social media. “BUT WE WILL MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, AND IT WILL ALL BE WORTH THE PRICE THAT MUST BE PAID.”

The reaction in global financial markets, which had recovered some of their losses on Monday after Trump’s one-month delay, was mixed on Tuesday.

In Hong Kong, the Hang Seng share index jumped by almost 2.8%, while South Korea’s Kospi rose by 1.3%. The FTSE 100 fell 31 points to 8,551 shortly after opening in London.

Sterling dropped by half a cent against the US dollar to $1.24, while the euro was down a similar amount at $1.03.

The Canadian dollar, which slumped to a 20-year low on Monday before rebounding, weakened – to 1.445 to the dollar.

Chinese markets remain closed because of the lunar new year holiday and will reopen on Wednesday.

Additional reporting by Graeme Wearden

Police have said 11 people have been killed and six others taken to hospital after a campus shooting in the southern Swedish city of Örebro, in what Sweden’s prime minister has described as the worst mass shooting in the country’s history.

The local police chief, Roberto Eid Forest, said investigating officers were still in the process of identifying victims but that they believed the “primary perpetrator”, not previously known to police, was among the dead.

He said authorities had had “no prior warning signs” of the attack, which happened soon after 12.30pm local time on Tuesday at a campus housing an adult education centre and other learning facilities, and that it was believed the gunman acted alone.

“At the moment we are confident that no more attacks will occur,” Forest said, although police could not rule out other people having been involved. The campus and local schools where students had been in lockdown had been safely evacuated, he said.

All six hospitalised people are adults, local authorities said. Five of them had gunshot wounds, one of whom has minor injuries.

Jonas Claesson, director of health and medical services in the Örebro region, said one of the patients was in a life-threatening condition.

Police said they had opened an investigation into murder, arson and an aggravated weapons offence.

The prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, described the attack in the city, which is about 125 miles (200km) west of Stockholm, as a “terrible act of violence” on a “very painful day for all of Sweden”.

He said the government was in close contact with police and the operation was continuing.

“My thoughts are [also] with all of those whose normal school day was turned into fear. Being locked up in a classroom fearing for your life is a nightmare no one should have to experience.”

Police should be allowed “the peace of mind they need to investigate what happened and how these horrific crimes could have occurred”, Kristersson said.

“This is the worst mass shooting in Swedish history,” he told reporters, as he urged people not to speculate about the motive.

King Carl XVI Gustaf conveyed his condolences. “It is with deep sadness and dismay that my family and I received the news about the terrible atrocity in Örebro,” he said.

Forest gave no further information about the injured. “The reason we cannot be more specific at this time is that the damage outcome is so great,” he said. Police had earlier said four people had had surgery and one was in a serious condition.

Forest told an earlier media conference police had no indication of motive. “When it comes to saying anything more about the perpetrator, it is still very early,” he said. “The operation is ongoing and that will undoubtedly become clearer.”

Campus Risbergska, where the shooting occurred, serves students mainly over the age of 20. It also offers primary and upper secondary school courses as well as classes in Swedish for immigrants, vocational training and programmes for people with disabilities.

One teacher, Lena Warenmark, told the broadcaster SVT she had been confined to her study after hearing “gunshots very close”.

She said she heard “probably 10 shots” in total, with a short pause between two bursts. She said there had been an unusually small number of students on campus as many had gone home after sitting an exam.

Johannes Sjöberg, whose daughter is a student at the campus, told SVT he had been in touch by text message with her throughout after she had arrived at the school about five minutes before the shooting started.

“She saw blood and the teachers were good at helping them, bringing them in and locking the door,” Sjöberg said. He said his daughter was safe and was providing information to the police.

Andreas Sundling, 28, was among those who barricaded themselves inside the campus. “We heard three bangs and loud screams,” he told the Expressen newspaper.

All those who took shelter were evacuated by mid-afternoon, police said.

Maria Pegado, 54, a teacher at the school, said someone had thrown open the door to her classroom just after lunchbreak and shouted to everyone to get out.

“I took all my 15 students out into the hallway and we started running,” she told Reuters. “Then I heard two shots but we made it out. We were close to the school entrance. I saw people dragging injured out, first one, then another. I realised it was very serious.”

School attacks are rare in Sweden but several serious incidents have taken place in recent years. In March 2022, an 18-year-old student stabbed two teachers to death at a high school in the southern city of Malmö.

Two months earlier, a 16-year-old was arrested after wounding another student and a teacher with a knife at a school in the small town of Kristianstad.

In October 2015, three people were killed in a racially motivated attack at a school in the western town of Trollhättan. The sword-wielding assailant was later killed by police.

Hundreds of protesters and a contingent of Democratic lawmakers rallied outside the Department of the Treasury in Washington on Tuesday, denouncing what they called Elon Musk’s “hostile takeover” of federal financial systems, as demonstrations spilled on to, and took over, the street outside the building.

The protests targeted reports of the “department of government efficiency” (Doge) team’s reported access to sensitive government financial data, including information related to social security payments, Medicare reimbursements, and tax refunds – systems that process trillions of dollars in annual transactions.

“He has access to all our information, our social security numbers, the federal payment system,” Representative Maxwell Frost told the crowd. “What’s going to stop him from stealing taxpayer money?”

About a dozen members of Congress, including Maxine Waters, Al Green, Ayanna Pressley, and senators Chuck Schumer, Jeff Merkley and Richard Blumenthal, joined the condemnations. Jasmine Crockett’s voice boomed across the crowd: “We are not going to sit around while you go and desecrate our constitution. We are going to be in your face and on your asses!”

Minutes earlier, a handful of lawmakers, including Crockett, Pressley, Frost and Jamie Raskin, had attempted to get inside the treasury department before being rebuffed.

Near the tail-end of the demonstration, news broke that the treasury said Musk’s team had been granted “read-only” access to “coded data” of the government’s payments system, according to Bloomberg.

In a letter to Senator Ron Wyden, Jonathan Blum, the treasury’s principal deputy assistant secretary for legislative affairs, wrote that the system remains “robust and effective” and that no valid payment requests from government agencies had been rejected.

But that did little to quell protesters’ concerns about Musk’s involvement with systems in the first place, including many who were former federal contractors, such as Alexa Fraser, who worked in public health research.

“What protections did he turn off to get in there? Who has he sold it to?” she told the Guardian. “We have no reason to think his security situation is better now.”

Dave Stoakley, who drove more than two hours from central Virginia to protest, saw the situation as part of a larger pattern. “I think it’s an intentional dismantling of the government,” he said. “They’re throwing out the good with the bad.”

Blumenthal captured the crowd’s fears in stark terms: “Every American’s information is at risk. What does Elon Musk do with everything he touches? He makes money!”

The Trump administration is placing US Agency for International Development direct-hire staffers around the world on leave, except those deemed essential.

A notice posted online on Tuesday gives the workers 30 days to return home, upending the aid agency’s six-decade mission overseas.

Thousands of USAid employees already had been laid off and programs worldwide shut down after Donald Trump imposed a sweeping freeze on foreign assistance.

Elon Musk’s budget-slashing “department of government efficiency” had taken USAid’s website offline over the weekend as it steadily dismantled the agency, which has been a special target of Musk, Trump and Republicans in the first two and a half weeks of Trump’s second term. The website came back online on Tuesday night, with the notice of recall or termination for global staffers its sole post.

The move had been rumored for several days and was the most extreme of several proposals considered for consolidating the agency into the state Ddpartment. Other options had included closures of smaller USAid missions and partial closures of larger ones.

The decision to withdraw direct-hire staff and their families earlier than their planned departures will likely cost the government tens of millions of dollars in travel and relocation costs.

Staff being placed on leave include both foreign and civil service officers who have legal protection against arbitrary dismissal and being placed on leave without reason.

The American Foreign Service Association, the union which represents US diplomats, sent a notice to its members denouncing the decision and saying it was preparing legal action to counter or halt it.

Locally employed USAid staff do not have much recourse and were excluded from the federal government’s voluntary buyout offer.

The notice says those who will exempted from leave include staffers responsible for “mission-critical functions, core leadership and specially designated programs” and would be informed by Thursday afternoon.

“Thank you for your service,” the notice concluded.

Elon Musk has proposed a “wholesale removal of regulations” in an intensification of his crusade to slash US federal government spending.

On a call aired on X, the social media platform he owns, the multibillionaire entrepreneur said regulations should be “gone” amid growing opposition to his mission as Donald Trump’s enforcer and head of a newly created “department of government efficiency” (Doge).

A lot of opposition has come from average Americans, including several hundred people protesting outside the treasury building where Musk’s team last week gained access to the US treasury payment system.

About a dozen members of Congress, including the representatives Maxine Waters, Al Green and Ayanna Pressley and the senators Jeff Merkley, Chuck Schumer and Richard Blumenthal, joined the crowd. The representative Jasmine Crockett’s voice boomed: “We are not going to sit around while you go and desecrate our constitution. We are going to be in your face and on your asses!”

The treasury system is responsible for $1bn payments per year totaling $5tn and includes sensitive information involving bank accounts and social security payments.

“Regulations, basically, should be default gone,” Musk said in call joined by Vivek Ramaswamy, until recently the joint head of Doge, and two Republican senators, Joni Ernst and Mike Lee.

“Not default there, default gone. And if it turns out that we missed the mark on a regulation, we can always add it back in.”

He also said the early days of Trump’s presidency, combined with a Republican-controlled Congress, presented a unique chance of implementing a radical overhaul of US government.

“If it’s not possible now, it’ll never be possible. This is our shot,” he said. “This is the best hand of cards we’re ever going to have. And if we don’t take advantage of this best hand of cards, it’s never going to happen.”

Musk’s incursion into the entrails of the US government has caused shockwaves. He and his team of recruits – some of them tech students and one said to be a 19-year-old high school graduate – have gained access to employment files and tightly controlled financial and data system at the US treasury, accounting for trillions of dollars of government spending.

Musk has boasted of killing off USAid, the government’s conduit of international aid programmes, calling it an “evil” “criminal organisation” and saying he would feed it into “the wood chipper”. Thousands of staff members have been placed on unpaid furlough. Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, cast some confusion on that boast by saying during a trip to Central America that he was now in charge of the agency, increasing the likelihood that USAid could be combined with the US state department.

Musk’s team has also gained access to the office of personnel management, the federal government’s human resources agency, allowing them to view employment records, while Musk claims to have cancelled up to 50% of federal building contracts for underused office space.

The Doge team intends to insert artificial intelligence tools into the government computer systems to assess contracts and identify cuts, the New York Times reported.

With critics complaining that Musk’s multiplicity of government contracts from his various businesses created conflicts of interest, even Trump felt driven to tell reporters that he did not have unlimited power and could only act with his approval.

“Elon can’t do and won’t do anything without our approval. And we’ll give him the approval where appropriate; where not appropriate, we won’t,” he told reporters in the White House. “If there’s a conflict, then we won’t let him get near it.”

Democrats have accused Musk of flagrantly violating the law and “unconstitutional interference”.

“Elon Musk, you may have illegally seized power over the financial payment systems of the United States Department of Treasury, but you don’t control the money of the American people. The United States Congress does that,” Jaime Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the House of Representatives’ judiciary committee, said outside USAid’s headquarters on Monday.

“We don’t have a fourth branch of government called Elon Musk and that’s going to become real clear.”

Progressive groups were due to stage a “nobody elected Elon” rally outside the US treasury headquarters on Tuesday.

Two groups of unnamed FBI agents sued the justice department on Tuesday to block it from collecting information on thousands of agents and other employees who worked on the criminal investigations against Donald Trump and cases against January 6 US Capitol riot defendants.

The lawsuits came after Emil Bove, the acting deputy attorney general, ordered the FBI to compile and turn over a list of every agent who worked on those cases and their roles, which would then be reviewed for personnel decisions.

In the filings, attorneys for the agents asked for the justice department to be blocked from collecting or disseminating the lists. They added that using the information to fire FBI employees would be retaliatory and unlawful and would violate civil service protections.

The filings underscore the uncertainty and trepidation that has gripped the FBI for days. Much of the upheaval has happened in the aftermath of the interim director, Brian Driscoll, saying in an internal memo that he had been ordered to summarily fire eight senior executives at the bureau unless they retired beforehand.

In the same memo, Driscoll disclosed that he had been directed to identify agents who had worked on January 6 cases, sparking fear at the FBI’s Washington headquarters and in other field offices that agents might be fired for having been assigned to a case that angered the president.

The turmoil at the FBI follows tumult at the justice department. The Guardian reported on Tuesday that more than a dozen prosecutors who had worked on the special counsel cases against Trump had been fired last week at the personal direction of the president.

Driscoll has refused to endorse any effort to start mass purges at the FBI, according to people familiar with the matter. But his position itself may be under scrutiny, given that he and his deputy, Robert Kissane, both worked on January 6-related cases.

The first lawsuit, brought by nine FBI agents, was styled as a class action on behalf of as many as 6,000 affected agents who either worked on a January 6 case or in the criminal investigation into Trump’s mishandling of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago in 2022.

“Plaintiffs are employees of the FBI who worked on Jan 6 and/or Mar-a-Lago cases, and who have been informed that they are likely to be terminated in the very near future (the week of Feb 3-9, 2025) for such activity,” the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit also showed, for the first time, the questionnaire that affected agents had been asked to complete. Survey questions asked the rank of the FBI employee and whether they had been part of the senior executive staff, such as as a special agent in charge, an assistant director or a section chief.

The survey also asked about their specific responsibilities in the January 6 cases they had been assigned to. Specifically, it asked whether they had arrested suspects, helped with evidence collection, submitted or reviewed grand jury subpoenas, interviewed witnesses, led a search warrant or testified at trial, among other actions.

The second lawsuit, brought by seven FBI agents and the FBI agents association, asked a federal judge to impose a temporary restraining order to stop the justice department from releasing the names of agents on the list and pushed for it to be prevented from getting the list at all.

It also outlined the questions in the survey, but added a curious detail that some of the agents who had been asked to complete the questionnaire had done little or no work on the January 6 cases, while others who did work on the cases had never been asked.

“On information and belief, the department of justice is currently in a state of transitional disorganization and has been unable to verify the accuracy of this basic informational data of its members,” the lawsuit stated.

The second lawsuit was filed on behalf of a group of anonymous FBI agents and technical staff – a demonstration of how sprawling the internal review has become – by Mark Zaid and Brad Moss, prominent national security lawyers in Washington, and Norm Eisen, the executive chair of the State Democracy Defenders Fund.

• The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has said he would agree to direct talks with Vladimir Putin to end the war. “If that is the only set-up in which we can bring peace to the citizens of Ukraine and not lose people, definitely we will go for this set-up,” adding that he would also require other “participants” to be present. “If people believe we must move to the diplomatic track, and I believe we are ready to move to the diplomatic track, there must be the US, Europe, Ukraine and Russia [at the talks],” Zelenskyy said in an interview with British journalist Piers Morgan.

• In the Morgan interview, Zelenskyy put Ukraine’s war dead at 45,100 people and injured at 390,000. He estimated Russian losses at 350,000 dead and between 600,000 and 700,000 injured, with “many” Russian forces missing in action.

• A Russian strike killed five civilians including a pregnant teenager and wounded 55 on Tuesday in the town of Izium in Ukraine’s north-eastern Kharkiv region, partially destroying the city council building, officials said. A ballistic missile hit the building in the town’s central district, said the governor, Oleh Syniehubov. Three children were among the injured, who also included many local government and social services workers, he said.

• Russian shelling killed two civilians on Tuesday in different parts of southern Ukraine, officials said. Prosecutors in Dnipropetrovsk region in the south-east said one person was killed in a district east of the major city of Dnipro. The governor of Kherson region further to the south, Oleksandr Prokudin, said one person died in the shelling of a town north of his region’s largest city, also called Kherson.

• A drone attack by Ukraine sparked a fire at an oil depot in Russia’s Krasnodar region, Veniamin Kondratyev, the governor of the region, said early on Wednesday.

• International lawyers have “laid the foundations” for a special tribunal to try Russia for the crime of aggression, Jennifer Rankin writes from Brussels. The EU executive on Tuesday declared a breakthrough that it said would mean the Russian political and military leaders “who bear the greatest responsibility” would be held to account. “There is no doubt that Putin has committed the crime of aggression, which is deciding to attack another country,” said Kaja Kallas, the EU’s foreign policy chief.

• Ukraine said there had been a recent surge in queries from Russian families seeking information on missing soldiers, indicating “huge losses” for Moscow on the battlefield. Since it launched a hotline in January 2024, it had received more than 60,000 requests for details of missing Russian troops, and the real number of missing was likely two or three times higher “as not all relatives have yet applied to the Ukrainian project”. Out of all inquiries, 1,790 Russian soldiers were found to be in Ukrainian captivity and 408 of those were exchanged.

• European and US shipowners have sold at least 230 ageing tankers into the “shadow fleet” used by Russia to evade oil sanctions, an international investigation led by the Dutch investigative outlet Follow the Money (FTM) has revealed. The owners made more than $6bn (£4.8bn) selling their vessels into countries that have not sanctioned Moscow such as India, Hong Kong, Vietnam or Seychelles. Many of the sellers were from countries with sanctions in place against Russia. Greek owners sold 127, the most; UK companies sold 22; and German and Norwegian owners 11 and eight. Most tankers would otherwise have been sold for scrap at a fraction of the price, Jon Henley reports.

• New western sanctions, a weaker rouble and a lower harvest were to blame for Russia’s high inflation rate in December 2024 and January 2025, the Russian central bank reported on Tuesday. Inflation, which reached 9.5% in 2024, has emerged as the biggest economic challenge for Russian authorities as the country approaches the fourth year of what it calls “a special military operation” in Ukraine.

• A former Conservative MP has reportedly joined the International Legion in Ukraine in a non-combat role. Jack Lopresti, 55, a former Tory deputy chair and ex-serviceman, said it was a “huge honour and an immense privilege”. While British citizens are warned by the Foreign Office that it may be illegal for them to fight in Ukraine, there are no examples of UK prosecutions, and it is legal in Ukraine itself.

• The family of an American killed when flight MH17 was shot down over Ukraine in 2014 can sue Russia’s largest bank, Sberbank, for allegedly providing money transfers to the Russia-backed separatist group Donetsk People’s Republic, which is blamed for downing the airliner, a US court ruled on Tuesday. Quinn Schansman, 18, was one of 298 people on board the Malaysia Airlines flight, all of whom were killed when it was shot down over DPR-controlled territory in eastern Ukraine by a surface-to-air missile.

• The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has said he would agree to direct talks with Vladimir Putin to end the war. “If that is the only set-up in which we can bring peace to the citizens of Ukraine and not lose people, definitely we will go for this set-up,” adding that he would also require other “participants” to be present. “If people believe we must move to the diplomatic track, and I believe we are ready to move to the diplomatic track, there must be the US, Europe, Ukraine and Russia [at the talks],” Zelenskyy said in an interview with British journalist Piers Morgan.

• In the Morgan interview, Zelenskyy put Ukraine’s war dead at 45,100 people and injured at 390,000. He estimated Russian losses at 350,000 dead and between 600,000 and 700,000 injured, with “many” Russian forces missing in action.

• A Russian strike killed five civilians including a pregnant teenager and wounded 55 on Tuesday in the town of Izium in Ukraine’s north-eastern Kharkiv region, partially destroying the city council building, officials said. A ballistic missile hit the building in the town’s central district, said the governor, Oleh Syniehubov. Three children were among the injured, who also included many local government and social services workers, he said.

• Russian shelling killed two civilians on Tuesday in different parts of southern Ukraine, officials said. Prosecutors in Dnipropetrovsk region in the south-east said one person was killed in a district east of the major city of Dnipro. The governor of Kherson region further to the south, Oleksandr Prokudin, said one person died in the shelling of a town north of his region’s largest city, also called Kherson.

• A drone attack by Ukraine sparked a fire at an oil depot in Russia’s Krasnodar region, Veniamin Kondratyev, the governor of the region, said early on Wednesday.

• International lawyers have “laid the foundations” for a special tribunal to try Russia for the crime of aggression, Jennifer Rankin writes from Brussels. The EU executive on Tuesday declared a breakthrough that it said would mean the Russian political and military leaders “who bear the greatest responsibility” would be held to account. “There is no doubt that Putin has committed the crime of aggression, which is deciding to attack another country,” said Kaja Kallas, the EU’s foreign policy chief.

• Ukraine said there had been a recent surge in queries from Russian families seeking information on missing soldiers, indicating “huge losses” for Moscow on the battlefield. Since it launched a hotline in January 2024, it had received more than 60,000 requests for details of missing Russian troops, and the real number of missing was likely two or three times higher “as not all relatives have yet applied to the Ukrainian project”. Out of all inquiries, 1,790 Russian soldiers were found to be in Ukrainian captivity and 408 of those were exchanged.

• European and US shipowners have sold at least 230 ageing tankers into the “shadow fleet” used by Russia to evade oil sanctions, an international investigation led by the Dutch investigative outlet Follow the Money (FTM) has revealed. The owners made more than $6bn (£4.8bn) selling their vessels into countries that have not sanctioned Moscow such as India, Hong Kong, Vietnam or Seychelles. Many of the sellers were from countries with sanctions in place against Russia. Greek owners sold 127, the most; UK companies sold 22; and German and Norwegian owners 11 and eight. Most tankers would otherwise have been sold for scrap at a fraction of the price, Jon Henley reports.

• New western sanctions, a weaker rouble and a lower harvest were to blame for Russia’s high inflation rate in December 2024 and January 2025, the Russian central bank reported on Tuesday. Inflation, which reached 9.5% in 2024, has emerged as the biggest economic challenge for Russian authorities as the country approaches the fourth year of what it calls “a special military operation” in Ukraine.

• A former Conservative MP has reportedly joined the International Legion in Ukraine in a non-combat role. Jack Lopresti, 55, a former Tory deputy chair and ex-serviceman, said it was a “huge honour and an immense privilege”. While British citizens are warned by the Foreign Office that it may be illegal for them to fight in Ukraine, there are no examples of UK prosecutions, and it is legal in Ukraine itself.

• The family of an American killed when flight MH17 was shot down over Ukraine in 2014 can sue Russia’s largest bank, Sberbank, for allegedly providing money transfers to the Russia-backed separatist group Donetsk People’s Republic, which is blamed for downing the airliner, a US court ruled on Tuesday. Quinn Schansman, 18, was one of 298 people on board the Malaysia Airlines flight, all of whom were killed when it was shot down over DPR-controlled territory in eastern Ukraine by a surface-to-air missile.

International lawyers have “laid the foundations” for a special tribunal to try Russia for the crime of aggression, the EU has said, hailing a significant step towards holding Vladimir Putin and his top officials accountable for the invasion of Ukraine.

In a statement late on Tuesday, the EU executive declared a breakthrough that it said would mean the Russian political and military leaders “who bear the greatest responsibility” would be held to account.

The tribunal’s creation was initially proposed by Ukraine just days after the full-scale invasion, but for nearly three years lawyers have wrangled over finding the right courtroom.

“There is no doubt that Putin has committed the crime of aggression, which is deciding to attack another country,” the EU’s foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas told reporters.

“And without that crime, there wouldn’t be any killings on the ground. There wouldn’t be any attacks on civilian infrastructure, civilians, rapes.”

Setting up a tribunal, she said, was also about “putting pressure” on Putin and the regime “to really stop this war, and also to give a clear signal to other aggressors or would-be aggressors who are or may be contemplating attacking neighbouring countries”.

Talks, which began last June between the EU, Ukraine, pan-European human rights body the Council of Europe (CoE) and 37 other countries, had been held up over whether Putin and other Russian leaders should be granted immunity. As a compromise, it is understood that Putin and senior figures would not be prosecuted while in office.

In a separate development, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he would agree to direct talks with Putin to end the war that will reach a grim three-year milestone later this month.

British journalist Piers Morgan asked Zelenskyy how he would feel if he sat opposite Putin at a negotiating table.

“If that is the only setup in which we can bring peace to the citizens of Ukraine and not lose people, definitely we will go for this setup,” Zelenskyy said, adding that he would also require other “participants” to be present.

In the interview with Morgan, Zelenskyy put the Ukrainian death toll at 45,100, with 390,000 injured since the full-scale invasion in February 2022. He estimated the Russian dead to be 350,000, with between 600,000 and 700,000 injured, and said Russian forces had “many” missing in action.

The international criminal court (ICC) in The Hague has issued an arrest warrant for Putin and other senior Russian officials over the abduction of Ukrainian children. But it does not have the power to try crimes of aggression, as Russia has not ratified the ICC treaty.

Another mooted option is the amendment of the ICC Rome Statute in the UN general assembly, but many experts argue that would be unworkable, as many members of the court have not submitted to its jurisdiction over the crime of aggression.

To break the logjam, the CoE, which has 46 member states and expelled Russia after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, has offered to host the tribunal.

The talks sped up as Donald Trump prepared to return to the White House, throwing uncertainty over US support for Ukraine. Nearly 40 countries have been involved in the talks, after a plea for justice from Zelenskyy, who has cited “burned cities and tortured people” during the atrocities of Bucha and Mariupol, and missile strikes against ordinary civilians.

Iryna Mudra, the deputy head of the office of president Zelenskyy, said Ukraine’s people wanted to hold the invaders accountable “and to show the world that such horrible war crimes will have serious consequences. [Zelenskyy’s] message is clear,” she went on. “Evil must not remain unpunished. Peace must be just. Ukraine cannot and will not compromise on justice.”

A Ukrainian Nobel peace laureate, Oleksandra Matviichuk, has also called for the swift creation of a tribunal to try Putin, arguing that it could deter Russian forces from inflicting atrocities on Ukraine.

The CoE’s secretary general, Alain Berset, said he hoped work on a text to create the tribunal would be finished this year.

Berset, who met Trump in Paris for the reopening of Notre Dame in December, said it was “not so clear” how the tribunal would be affected by any peace talks launched by the US administration: “We try to go as fast as possible in a highly uncertain context.”

Berset, a former president of Switzerland, signalled that US support was needed if the tribunal was to work. “I think it’s also clear for everybody that without the G7 [the tribunal] will never fly.”

In a related effort to make Russia pay for the damage it has inflicted on Ukraine, the CoE also proposed joining possible talks on an “international claims commission” for Ukraine.

The pace of global heating has been significantly underestimated, according to renowned climate scientist Prof James Hansen, who said the international 2C target is “dead”.

A new analysis by Hansen and colleagues concludes that both the impact of recent cuts in sun-blocking shipping pollution, which has raised temperatures, and the sensitivity of the climate to increasing fossil fuels emissions are greater than thought.

The group’s results are at the high end of estimates from mainstream climate science but cannot be ruled out, independent experts said. If correct, they mean even worse extreme weather will come sooner and there is a greater risk of passing global tipping points, such as the collapse of the critical Atlantic ocean currents.

Hansen, at Columbia University in the US, sounded the alarm to the general public about climate breakdown in testimony he gave to a UN congressional committee in 1988.

“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) defined a scenario which gives a 50% chance to keep warming under 2C – that scenario is now impossible,” he said. “The 2C target is dead, because the global energy use is rising, and it will continue to rise.”

The new analysis said global heating is likely to reach 2C by 2045, unless solar geoengineering is deployed.

The world’s nations pledged in Paris in 2015 to keep global temperature rise below 2C above preindustrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5C. The climate crisis has already supercharged extreme weather across the world with just 1.3C of heating on average in recent years destroying lives and livelihoods – 2C would be far worse.

Prof Jeffrey Sachs, also at Columbia University, said: “A shocking rise of warming has been exposed by, ironically, a reduction of pollutants, but we now have a new baseline and trajectory for where we are.”

Climate scientist Dr Zeke Hausfather, who was not part of the study, said it was a useful contribution. “It’s important to emphasise that both of these issues – [pollution cuts] and climate sensitivity – are areas of deep scientific uncertainty,” he said.

“While Hansen et al are on the high end of available estimates, we cannot say with any confidence that they are wrong, rather that they just represent something closer to a worst-case outcome.”

In the new study, published in the journal Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development, Hansen’s team said: “Failure to be realistic in climate assessment and failure to call out the fecklessness of current policies to stem global warming is not helpful to young people.”

They said the IPCC analysis was heavily reliant on computer models and that the complementary approach they took of making more use of observations and climate analogues from the distant past was needed.

The world has seen extraordinary temperatures over the last two years. The primary cause is the relentless rise in CO₂ emissions from the burning of fossil fuels. The peak of the El Niño climate cycle in 2024 added an extra temperature boost.

However, these two factors do not fully explain the extreme temperatures, or their persistence after the El Niño ended in mid-2024. This left puzzled climate scientists asking if there was a worrying new factor not previously accounted for, or if the extra heat was an unusual but temporary natural variation.

A key focus has been on emissions from shipping. For decades, the sulphate particles produced by ships burning fuel have blocked some sunlight from reaching the Earth’s surface, suppressing temperatures.

But in 2020, new anti-pollution regulations came into force, sharply cutting the level of the aerosol particles. This led to more heat from the sun reaching the surface, which scientists measure as watts per square metre (W/m2).

Hansen’s team’s estimate of the impact of this – 0.5W/m2 – is significantly higher than five other recent studies, which ranged from 0.07 to 0.15 W/m2, but would explain the anomalous heat. Hansen’s team used a top-down approach, looking at the change in the reflectivity over key parts of the ocean and ascribing that to the reductions in shipping emissions. The other studies used bottom-up approaches to estimate the increase in heat.

“Both approaches are useful and often complementary,” said Dr Gavin Schmidt, director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. “But I think in this case, Hansen’s approach is too simple and doesn’t factor in changes in Chinese emissions, or internal variability.”

The new study also argues that the planet’s climate sensitivity to rising carbon emissions has been underestimated, partly because of the underestimation of the impact of reduced shipping emissions.

Climate sensitivity is defined by scientists as the temperature rise that would result from a doubling of CO₂ levels in the atmosphere. Again, Hansen’s team have used a different method to most scientists and come up with a higher estimate.

The IPCC, a collaboration of the world’s climate scientists, found that the computer models that best reproduce past temperatures have a climate sensitivity of 2.5C to 4C.

Hansen’s team took a simpler approach, calculating the potential range in temperature rises for a doubling of CO₂ and then using data on how much heat the Earth has trapped to estimate the most likely climate sensitivity. Their estimate is 4.5C. Cloud formation, which is affected by global heating and aerosol pollution, is a key source of the uncertainties.

Anomalously high temperatures have continued in January 2025, which set a new record for the month and confounded expectations that temperatures would drop with the current La Niña, the cooler part of the El Niño cycle. “This unexpected record may presage higher temperatures this year than many of us thought,” said Hausfather.

Hansen’s group also argues that the accelerated global heating they predict will increase ice melting in the Arctic.

“As a result, shutdown of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (Amoc) is likely within the next 20-30 years, unless actions are taken to reduce global warming – in contradiction to conclusions of IPCC.

“If Amoc is allowed to shut down, it will lock in major problems including sea level rise of several metres – thus, we describe Amoc shutdown as the ‘point of no return’.”

The central estimate of another recent study on the timing of an Amoc collapse was 2050.

However, Hansen said the point of no return could be avoided, based on the growing conviction of young people that they should follow the science. He called for a carbon fee and dividend policy, where all fossil fuels are taxed and the revenue returned to the public.

“The basic problem is that the waste products of fossil fuels are still dumped in the air free of charge,” he said. He also backed the rapid development of nuclear power.

Hansen also supported research on cooling the Earth using controversial geoengineering techniques to block sunlight, which he prefers to call “purposeful global cooling”.

He said: “We do not recommend implementing climate interventions, but we suggest that young people not be prohibited from having knowledge of the potential and limitations of purposeful global cooling in their toolbox.”

Political change is needed to achieve all these measures, Hansen said: “Special interests have assumed far too much power in our political systems. In democratic countries the power should be with the voter, not with the people who have the money. That requires fixing some of our democracies, including the US.”

Greenland will hold a general election on 11 March, its prime minister has announced, amid renewed interest from the US president, Donald Trump, in the Arctic territory.

The upcoming election campaign is expected to revolve around Greenland’s independence aspirations, the development of the island’s fragile economy and relations with Denmark and the US.

“We are in the midst of a serious time. A time that we have never experienced in our country. This is not the time for internal division,” the prime minister, Múte Egede, said in a social media post that did not mention Trump.

Greenland’s parliament later unanimously approved his proposal for the 11 March election.

Trump in December renewed his wish to control the strategically important island and did not rule out using military or economic power to achieve this.

A semi-autonomous territory of Denmark, Greenland has said it is open for business but that it does not wish to be part of the US.

It was due to hold parliamentary elections before 6 April.

Denmark has ruled the island for centuries. Greenland was a Danish colony until 1953 and has since gained broad autonomy, including the right to declare independence, although Copenhagen remains responsible for Greenland’s security and foreign policy.

A majority of Greenlanders would vote for independence if such a referendum were held now, a recent survey by pollster Verian, commissioned by the Danish newspaper Berlingske and Greenlandic daily Sermitsiaq, showed.

About 28% said they would vote against independence.

The island holds vast untapped mineral resources but its economy depends on fishing and annual grants from Denmark.

The poll also showed that 45% of people would not want independence if the standard of living was negatively affected, highlighting that the future path towards it remains unclear.

The Aga Khan, who became the spiritual leader of the world’s millions of Ismaili Muslims at the age of 20 as a Harvard undergraduate, and who poured a material empire built on billions of dollars in tithes into building homes, hospitals and schools in developing countries, has died. He was 88.

His Aga Khan Foundation and the Ismaili religious community announced on their websites that His Highness Prince Karim al-Hussaini, the Aga Khan IV and 49th hereditary imam of the Shia Ismaili Muslims, died on Tuesday in Portugal surrounded by his family.

They said an announcement on his successor would come later.

Considered by his followers to be a direct descendant of the prophet Muhammad, the Aga Khan was a student when his grandfather passed over his playboy father as his successor to lead the diaspora of Shia Ismaili Muslims, saying his followers should be led by a young man “who has been brought up in the midst of the new age”.

Over decades, the Aga Khan evolved into a business magnate and philanthropist, moving between the spiritual and the worldly and mixing them with ease.

Treated as a head of state, the Aga Khan was given the title of “His Highness” by Queen Elizabeth in July 1957, two weeks after his grandfather the Aga Khan III unexpectedly made him heir to the family’s 1,300-year dynasty as leader of the Ismaili Muslim sect.

He became the Aga Khan IV on 19 October 1957, in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on the spot where his grandfather once had his weight equalled in diamonds in gifts from his followers.

He had left Harvard to be at his ailing grandfather’s side, and returned to thee US university 18 months later with an entourage and a deep sense of responsibility.

“I was an undergraduate who knew what his work for the rest of his life was going to be,” he said in a 2012 interview with Vanity Fair magazine. “I don’t think anyone in my situation would have been prepared.”

A defender of Islamic culture and values, he was widely regarded as a builder of bridges between Muslim societies and the west despite – or perhaps because of – his reticence to become involved in politics.

The Aga Khan Development Network, his main philanthropic organisation, dealt mainly with issues of healthcare, housing, education and rural economic development.

A network of hospitals bearing his name are scattered in countries where health care had been lacking for the poorest, including Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Tajikistan, where he spent tens of millions of dollars for development of local economies.

His eye for building and design led him to establish an architecture prize and programmes for Islamic architecture at MIT and Harvard. He restored ancient Islamic structures throughout the world.

Accounts differ as to the date and place of his birth. According to Who’s Who in France, he was born on 13 December 1936, in Creux-de-Genthod, near Geneva, Switzerland, the son of Joan Yarde-Buller and Aly Khan.

The extent of the Aga Khan’s financial empire is hard to measure. Some reports estimated his personal wealth to be in the billions.

The Ismailis – a sect originally centred in India but which expanded to large communities in east Africa, central and south Asia and the Middle East – consider it a duty to tithe up to 10% of their income to him as steward.

“We have no notion of the accumulation of wealth being evil,” he told Vanity Fair in 2012.

“The Islamic ethic is that if God has given you the capacity or good fortune to be a privileged individual in society, you have a moral responsibility to society.”

He is survived by three sons and a daughter.

The Aga Khan, who became the spiritual leader of the world’s millions of Ismaili Muslims at the age of 20 as a Harvard undergraduate, and who poured a material empire built on billions of dollars in tithes into building homes, hospitals and schools in developing countries, has died. He was 88.

His Aga Khan Foundation and the Ismaili religious community announced on their websites that His Highness Prince Karim al-Hussaini, the Aga Khan IV and 49th hereditary imam of the Shia Ismaili Muslims, died on Tuesday in Portugal surrounded by his family.

They said an announcement on his successor would come later.

Considered by his followers to be a direct descendant of the prophet Muhammad, the Aga Khan was a student when his grandfather passed over his playboy father as his successor to lead the diaspora of Shia Ismaili Muslims, saying his followers should be led by a young man “who has been brought up in the midst of the new age”.

Over decades, the Aga Khan evolved into a business magnate and philanthropist, moving between the spiritual and the worldly and mixing them with ease.

Treated as a head of state, the Aga Khan was given the title of “His Highness” by Queen Elizabeth in July 1957, two weeks after his grandfather the Aga Khan III unexpectedly made him heir to the family’s 1,300-year dynasty as leader of the Ismaili Muslim sect.

He became the Aga Khan IV on 19 October 1957, in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on the spot where his grandfather once had his weight equalled in diamonds in gifts from his followers.

He had left Harvard to be at his ailing grandfather’s side, and returned to thee US university 18 months later with an entourage and a deep sense of responsibility.

“I was an undergraduate who knew what his work for the rest of his life was going to be,” he said in a 2012 interview with Vanity Fair magazine. “I don’t think anyone in my situation would have been prepared.”

A defender of Islamic culture and values, he was widely regarded as a builder of bridges between Muslim societies and the west despite – or perhaps because of – his reticence to become involved in politics.

The Aga Khan Development Network, his main philanthropic organisation, dealt mainly with issues of healthcare, housing, education and rural economic development.

A network of hospitals bearing his name are scattered in countries where health care had been lacking for the poorest, including Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Tajikistan, where he spent tens of millions of dollars for development of local economies.

His eye for building and design led him to establish an architecture prize and programmes for Islamic architecture at MIT and Harvard. He restored ancient Islamic structures throughout the world.

Accounts differ as to the date and place of his birth. According to Who’s Who in France, he was born on 13 December 1936, in Creux-de-Genthod, near Geneva, Switzerland, the son of Joan Yarde-Buller and Aly Khan.

The extent of the Aga Khan’s financial empire is hard to measure. Some reports estimated his personal wealth to be in the billions.

The Ismailis – a sect originally centred in India but which expanded to large communities in east Africa, central and south Asia and the Middle East – consider it a duty to tithe up to 10% of their income to him as steward.

“We have no notion of the accumulation of wealth being evil,” he told Vanity Fair in 2012.

“The Islamic ethic is that if God has given you the capacity or good fortune to be a privileged individual in society, you have a moral responsibility to society.”

He is survived by three sons and a daughter.

The Trump administration has begun flying undocumented immigrants from the US to a military detention facility at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said on Tuesday.

Leavitt told Fox Business Network that at least two deportation flights were “under way”, but gave no further details.

Her comments, however, appeared to confirm reporting by the Wall Street Journal, citing an anonymous official with knowledge of the operation, that about a dozen immigrants were onboard one flight from Fort Bliss, Texas. The newspaper said an additional flight had departed on Monday.

CNN later reported one of the flights had “about nine or 10” people onboard who were detained in the US without valid immigration documents.

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) referred a request for comment from the Guardian to the homeland security department, which did not immediately respond.

“President Trump is not messing around, and he’s no longer going to allow America to be a dumping ground for illegal criminals from nations all over this world,” Leavitt told Fox.

“Today, the first flights from the United States to Guantánamo Bay with illegal migrants are under way.”

Donald Trump last week signed an executive order to prepare a huge detention camp at the navy base at Guantánamo that he said could house up to 30,000 people deported from the US.

“Some of them are so bad, we don’t even trust the countries [of origin] to hold them because we don’t want them coming back,” he said. “So we’re going to send them out to Guantánamo. This will double our capacity immediately.”

The news of the first flights, containing deportees of unknown nationality, comes a day after El Salvador offered to accept undocumented migrants from any country – and even incarcerated US citizens. The announcement by El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, followed a visit by the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio.

Leavitt told Fox that Trump was determined to complete what he has previously called “the largest deportation effort in American history”, of 15 million to 20 million people, for which he has said he would engage the military to help achieve it.

“El Salvador has not disagreed to the repatriation of [only] their own citizens but also illegal criminals from other nations who will then be sent to their prisons,” she said.

“Venezuela as well has agreed to repatriation flights, and Colombia also agreed to cooperate with the repatriation of illegal Colombian nationals that we have found in the interior of our country.”

Rubio praised El Salvador’s willingness to accept deportees. “No country’s ever made an offer of friendship such as this. [It is] the most unprecedented and extraordinary migratory agreement anywhere in the world,” he said.

Immigration advocates, meanwhile, have expressed concern over the legality of deporting those in the US illegally to countries they are not from.

“Obviously, we’ll have to study it on our end; there are obviously legalities involved. We have a constitution, we have all sorts of things,” Rubio said on Monday.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the US naval base at Guantánamo is equipped to hold about 120 people.

Known to critics as “America’s gulag”, the facility has housed several people accused of plotting the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks in the US, as well as others deemed to be “enemy combatants”. Some have been detained for years without trial.

Trump’s plan to use it to detain civilians deported from the US further demonizes immigrants, advocates have said.

“This is political theater and part of the Trump administration’s broader effort to paint immigrants as threats in the United States … and fan anti-immigrant sentiment,” Eleanor Acer, senior director for refugee protection at Human Rights First, told the Guardian.

Two Panamanian lawyers have lodged a lawsuit with the country’s supreme court in an attempt to cancel a Hong Kong-based company’s concession to operate two ports at either end of the Panama canal.

Their complaint – filed a day after the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, told Panama’s president, José Raúl Mulino, to reduce China’s alleged influence on the canal – argues that the contract for the two ports is unconstitutional.

If the case is admitted by the court – and the argument is accepted – it could lead to the swift revocation of the contracts, and a victory for Donald Trump’s campaign to push back against Beijing’s presence in the Central American country.

A subsidiary of CK Hutchison Holdings – owned by the Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing – has operated two of the canal’s five ports since it won the tender in 1997.

“After a detailed analysis of the contract … we decided that an action for unconstitutionality was the appropriate means” to challenge the concession, Julio Macías, one of the lawyers behind the suit, told AFP.

In 2023, the supreme court made a similar argument to close down a contentiouus copper mine, following major protests.

Panama’s government is anxious to avoid a scenario in which the US takes the canal by force – or obliges them to meaningfully change the fee structures which are applied equally to ships of all countries and based on market conditions.

In December Trump vowed to “take back” the canal, prompting widespread indignation in Panama – but within days of his threat Panama’s comptroller general announced an audit of the ports contract – the results of which are expected in March.

Following Rubio’s visit on Sunday, President Mulino agreed to tougher restrictions on irregular migration through the Darién Gap, that he would not renew Panama’s membership in China’s “Belt and Road” infrastructure initiative, and, according to US sources, to the free transit of US military vessels.

The following day, however, Trump said he was still not happy with the concessions and said he would speak to Mulino on the phone on Friday.

But if the contract is revoked, it would probably open Panama to international arbitration on the basis that the move was a politically motivated expropriation.

Furthermore, if Mulino does agree to free passage for US military vessels, he could face further legal jeopardy, said Alonso Illueca, a lawyer specializing in international law. “That would amount to preferential treatment and be a clear violation of the canal’s commitment to neutrality,” he said.

Lucy Letby is the victim of “one of the major injustices of modern times”, it has been claimed, after an international panel of experts found no evidence she had murdered or harmed any of the babies she was accused of attacking.

The panel concluded that the 17 newborns whom Letby was charged with harming had suffered a catalogue of “bad medical care” or deteriorated as a result of natural causes at the Countess of Chester hospital in north-west England.

Letby’s new barrister, Mark McDonald, said a report by 14 leading experts had demolished the case against her and was “overwhelming evidence that this conviction is unsafe”.

Their findings have been sent to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), the body that investigates potential miscarriages of justice, which said on Tuesday that it was formally examining the case.

One barrister close to the case claimed the report was so “gamechanging” that Letby could be released from prison on bail if the court of appeal believed there was a real possibility of her convictions being quashed.

Such a step, however, would be at least a year away and would be strongly opposed by the Crown Prosecution Service, which stood by its case on Tuesday. The CCRC said it was not able to say how long it would take to decide whether to refer the matter to the appeal court.

The senior Conservative MP David Davis described the case as “one of the major injustices of modern times” as the findings of 14 leading experts, including a former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, were laid bare at a press conference in Westminster.

Dr Shoo Lee, a retired Canadian neonatologist who chaired the panel, said they had found “so many problems with the medical care” of many of the babies and nothing to support the claim they had been attacked.

A 31-page summary report gave alternative causes of death for four of the seven babies Letby was convicted of murdering, alleging that poor care contributed to each death. “In summary, ladies and gentlemen, we did not find any murders,” he said.

Letby, now 35, is serving 15 whole-life prison terms after being convicted of murdering seven babies and attempting to kill another seven, making her the worst child serial killer of modern times in Britain. The court of appeal has twice refused her permission to appeal against her convictions. A public inquiry is under way on the basis that she is guilty.

Letby was convicted of murdering four of the seven babies by injecting air into their bloodstreams and attempting to kill several others by the same method.

She was also convicted of harming two babies by poisoning them with insulin, pumping air into their feeding tube, force-feeding one with milk and causing trauma to the abdomen.

The panel of experts, however, concluded that there was “no medical evidence supporting malfeasance causing death or injury” in any of the babies whose cases they examined.

It said there were numerous problems in the care of the babies, including a failure to properly carry out “basic medical procedures, delays in their treatment and the misdiagnosis of diseases”.

Lee said the Countess of Chester’s neonatal unit was overworked, had plumbing issues and was staffed by “inadequate numbers of appropriately trained” clinicians. “If this had happened at a hospital in Canada, it would be shut down,” he said.

In one example, the panel concluded that Child 1 – a one-day-old twin boy Letby was convicted of murdering by injecting him with air – had died as a result of thrombosis as a result of a failure to begin his infusion until four hours after he was intubated, risking the development of clots.

It concluded that another baby, a 10-week-old girl whom Letby was convicted of murdering on her fourth attempt, had died as a result of complications linked to respiratory distress syndrome and chronic lung disease.

Lee said doctors had failed to respond to routine warnings about her deterioration and did not treat her with appropriate antibiotics. “This was likely a preventable death,” he said.

The panel also cast doubt on the supposed insulin poisonings, which were the foundation of the prosecution case. Jurors in Letby’s original trial were told that the insulin and c-peptide levels of two infants meant they must have been deliberately injected with insulin. Letby’s original legal team did not contest that claim, yet the jury was told that Letby was the only person who could have poisoned both babies.

A report by Prof Geoff Chase of the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, however, concluded that the two babies’ insulin and c-peptide levels were “typical” for babies of their age and that the tests the prosecution used were “not of forensic quality”.

McDonald, who took over last year as Letby’s barrister, said the failure of her original legal team to produce any medical experts to give evidence meant that “all you were left with was the evidence of prosecution experts”.

He said: “This is fresh evidence. This is new evidence. It’s compelling evidence because of the nature of people who are giving that evidence, and it wasn’t heard by the jury.”

One of the UK’s most eminent neonatologists, Prof Neena Modi, a former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, is one of the 14 experts.

She said there were “very, very plausible reasons for these babies’ deaths” and that, across all 17 cases, there was a combination of babies being “in the wrong place, delivered in the wrong place, delayed diagnosis and inappropriate or absent treatment”.

The Crown Prosecution Service, Cheshire constabulary and the Countess of Chester hospital declined to comment on the report’s findings. Dr Dewi Evans, the prosecution’s lead expert who was criticised by Letby’s legal team, was also approached for comment.

Jesse Eisenberg, who received widespread recognition for his role as the Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, has said he no longer wants to be “associated with someone like that”.

Eisenberg received his first Oscar nomination for his performance in the 2010 film, which portrayed the founding of the social networking website and was directed by David Fincher and written by Aaron Sorkin.

“It’s like this guy is … doing things that are problematic, taking away factchecking,” Eisenberg told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Tuesday. “[There are] safety concerns. Making people who are already threatened in the world more threatened.”

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, announced last month it would no longer use independent factcheckers on its social media sites, and would replace them with “community notes”. Similar to the system used on X, these give users the power to challenge the accuracy of posts.

Zuckerberg, now chief executive of Meta, said third-party moderators were “too politically biased” and it was “time to get back to our roots around free expression”.

The move came as Zuckerberg and other technology executives sought to improve relations with US president Donald Trump, who had criticised Meta’s factchecking policy as censorship of rightwing voices.

After the changes were announced, Trump praised Zuckerberg’s decision. Zuckerberg, X chairman Elon Musk, and Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, were all present at the president’s inauguration last month.

Eisenberg said he was “concerned” by the developments. The actor, who is currently promoting the Oscar-nominated A Real Pain, which he wrote, directed and stars in, added: “These people have billions upon billions of dollars, like more money than any human person has ever amassed and what are they doing with it?

“Oh, they’re doing it to curry favour with somebody who’s preaching hate.

“That’s what I think … not as like a person who played in a movie. I think of it as somebody who is married to a woman who teaches disability justice in New York and lives for her students are going to get a little harder this year.”

Last week, Trump signed a legal settlement that will see Meta pay out roughly $25m (£20m) over the suspension of his accounts after the 6 January Capitol riots in 2021.