Keir Starmer accused Vladimir Putin of dragging his feet over agreeing to a ceasefire with Ukraine on Saturday as international pressure grew on the Russian president to enter talks.

The prime minister said there was a limit to the length of time Putin could prevaricate, after he convened a virtual summit with 29 other international leaders who agreed to take plans for a peacekeeping force to an “operational phase”.

Starmer said military chiefs would meet in London on Thursday to “put strong and robust plans in place to swing in behind a peace deal and guarantee Ukraine’s future security”.

Those who took part in the virtual summit included the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Afterwards, Starmer said “new commitments” had been made on both peacekeeping and tightening sanctions on Russia.

“Sooner or later, he is going to have to come to the table and engage in serious discussions,” the prime minister said.

“So this is the moment: let the guns fall silent, let the barbaric attacks on Ukraine once and for all stop, and agree to a ceasefire now.”

As well as the European nations, the leaders of Australia, Canada and New Zealand also joined the call, as did Nato’s secretary general, Mark Rutte.

Saturday’s meeting followed an intense week of diplomacy in which American and Ukrainian officials agreed on a proposal for an unconditional 30-day ceasefire, which was put to Russia.

But the Kremlin has so far resisted the deal, saying it would only agree to a ceasefire if Ukraine also agreed to abandon its aim of joining Nato and gave up some of its territory to Russia.

In Kyiv, Zelenskyy said Russia was playing for time so it could get into a stronger military position before any ceasefire.

“I think the delaying of the process is exactly because of what I said. They want to improve their situation on the battlefield,” Zelenskyy told a group of journalists in a briefing at the presidential administration.

He said Ukraine had shown its willingness to agree to US proposals for a temporary ceasefire during which terms for a more lasting deal could be discussed, as agreed last week at talks in Saudi Arabia.

“Today, Putin is the one who doesn’t agree with what [Donald] Trump has proposed,” he said.

Zelenskyy said Russia’s attempts to impose conditions on a ceasefire should be rejected out of hand.

“This is a ceasefire for 30 days; it’s not for ever, it’s 30 days, during which all sides have the chance to demonstrate their willingness to end the war,” he said.

Although it is clear that any potential agreement would probably require Ukraine to accept de facto Russian control of some Ukrainian land, he ruled out formally ceding any territory to Russia.

“Our position is that we do not recognise the occupied Ukrainian territories as Russian in any case,” he said. Zelenskyy called the territorial issue complex and said it should be “resolved later, at the negotiating table”.

Writing in the Observer, the UK foreign secretary, David Lammy, also taunted Putin, saying he had been put on the spot by Ukraine’s agreement to a ceasefire and the moves, led by the US president, Donald Trump, to end the conflict.

“The proposal for a ceasefire is therefore a test. He can’t simply say he is ready to end this war – he has to prove it.”

Lammy, who attended a meeting of G7 foreign ministers in Canada last week, said the group of nations known as the “coalition of the willing” was determined to create the conditions “that guarantee that Russia does not come back for more”.

Referring to the security guarantee that these nations plan to offer, Lammy added: “To be credible, it needs US support. But Britain and our allies recognise that the bulk of the contribution must come from Europeans.”

Asked about whether he discussed seizing Russian assets with his counterparts, Starmer said it had been on the agenda but added it was “a complicated question”.

Meanwhile, both Russia and Ukraine launched drone attacks overnight, each reporting more than 100 enemy drones entering their respective airspaces.

• The Ukrainian president has accused Vladimir Putin of “lying to everyone” about the situation in the Russian province of Kursk and seeking to prolong the war. In an X post on Saturday, Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia’s president was lying “about the situation on the ground, especially about what’s happening in the Kursk region”. He said Ukrainian troops were still fending off Russian and North Korean forces in the area but face a potential new attack on Sumy in Ukraine’s north-east. He said Kyiv’s troops were not encircled in Kursk, as has been claimed by Russia, but that Moscow was accumulating forces nearby for a separate strike. “The buildup of Russian forces indicates that Moscow intends to keep ignoring diplomacy,” he said. “It is clear that Russia is prolonging the war.”

• Russian troops recaptured the villages of Rubanshchina and Zaoleshenka in the Kursk region, the Moscow’s defence ministry said on Saturday. On Thursday, Russia announced it had regained full control of the town of Sudzha as Ukraine’s forces have been forced to retreat.

• In the X post, Zelenskyy also accused Putin of lying “about how a ceasefire is supposedly too complicated” and warned Russia’s leader will keep “dragging” out the war. “We talked about who would delay peace and slow everything down – and now we see it clearly,” Zelenskyy said. “A ceasefire could have already happened, but Russia is doing everything to prevent it.”

• British prime minister Keir Starmer said military powers will meet next week as plans to secure a peace deal move to an “operational phase”. The UK prime minister held a virtual call with other European leaders and allies, including Zelenskyy, on Saturday, where he said a “coalition of the willing” would help secure Ukraine “on the land, at sea and in the sky” in the event of a peace deal with Russia.

• Zelenskyy said Ukraine had successfully used a new domestically produced long-range missile in combat. The new “long Neptune” missile has a range of 1,000km (621 miles), he said in the X post. “A new Ukrainian missile, precise strike,” he said.

• Zelenskyy said Russia wanted to achieve a “stronger position” militarily before committing to any ceasefire in the war in Ukraine. At a press conference in Kyiv, Zelenskyy said the question of territory in Ukraine’s war with Russia was “complicated” and should be discussed in detail at a later date.

• The French president, Emmanuel Macron, echoed Zelenskyy, saying Putin is “escalating the fighting” and “wants to get everything, then negotiate”. Russia “does not give the impression it sincerely wants peace”, Macron said in the statement provided to AFP on Saturday and urged Europe and the United States to put pressure on Russia to accept a proposed ceasefire.

• The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, spoke on Saturday to discuss the next stage in talks on ending the war. According to the state department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce, the top diplomats “agreed to continue working towards restoring communication between the United States and Russia”. The statement gave no details on when the next round of US-Russia talks, which are being hosted by Saudi Arabia, would begin.

• Mikhail Kasyanov, Vladimir Putin’s first prime minister and now an opponent of the Russian president, said Moscow was interested only in a conditional ceasefire. Kasyanov told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “He rejected this proposal for an unconditional ceasefire, he wants conditional, he wants a ceasefire on his terms.”

• Ukraine said on Saturday it had downed 130 Russian-launched drones across the country at night. Kyiv’s air force said the Iranian-made Shahed drones were downed over 14 regions and that Moscow had also attacked with two ballistic missiles.

• Kyiv also said that the number injured in a Russian strike a day earlier on Zelenskyy’s home town, Kryvyi Rih, rose to 14. On Friday, officials said Russia attacked a residential area of the central Ukrainian city. “Fourteen people were wounded, among them two children,” the head of the Dnipropetrovsk region, Sergiy Lysak, said on Telegram.

• Russia deployed almost 200 firefighters to help put out a fire at an oil depot caused by a Ukraine drone strike in the southern Krasnodar region, authorities said. The governor of the Krasnodar region, Veniamin Kondratyev, said in the early hours of Saturday that a petrol reserve station in the Black Sea city of Tuapse was “attacked by the Kyiv regime”. The government of the Krasnodar region said 188 people were involved in putting out the fire.

• Ukraine’s largest private energy provider said on Saturday that overnight Russian airstrikes had damaged its energy facilities in the Dnipropetrovsk and Odesa regions. In a statement, DTEK said “damages are significant” and that some consumers in both regions were left without power.

• The Ukrainian president has accused Vladimir Putin of “lying to everyone” about the situation in the Russian province of Kursk and seeking to prolong the war. In an X post on Saturday, Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia’s president was lying “about the situation on the ground, especially about what’s happening in the Kursk region”. He said Ukrainian troops were still fending off Russian and North Korean forces in the area but face a potential new attack on Sumy in Ukraine’s north-east. He said Kyiv’s troops were not encircled in Kursk, as has been claimed by Russia, but that Moscow was accumulating forces nearby for a separate strike. “The buildup of Russian forces indicates that Moscow intends to keep ignoring diplomacy,” he said. “It is clear that Russia is prolonging the war.”

• Russian troops recaptured the villages of Rubanshchina and Zaoleshenka in the Kursk region, the Moscow’s defence ministry said on Saturday. On Thursday, Russia announced it had regained full control of the town of Sudzha as Ukraine’s forces have been forced to retreat.

• In the X post, Zelenskyy also accused Putin of lying “about how a ceasefire is supposedly too complicated” and warned Russia’s leader will keep “dragging” out the war. “We talked about who would delay peace and slow everything down – and now we see it clearly,” Zelenskyy said. “A ceasefire could have already happened, but Russia is doing everything to prevent it.”

• British prime minister Keir Starmer said military powers will meet next week as plans to secure a peace deal move to an “operational phase”. The UK prime minister held a virtual call with other European leaders and allies, including Zelenskyy, on Saturday, where he said a “coalition of the willing” would help secure Ukraine “on the land, at sea and in the sky” in the event of a peace deal with Russia.

• Zelenskyy said Ukraine had successfully used a new domestically produced long-range missile in combat. The new “long Neptune” missile has a range of 1,000km (621 miles), he said in the X post. “A new Ukrainian missile, precise strike,” he said.

• Zelenskyy said Russia wanted to achieve a “stronger position” militarily before committing to any ceasefire in the war in Ukraine. At a press conference in Kyiv, Zelenskyy said the question of territory in Ukraine’s war with Russia was “complicated” and should be discussed in detail at a later date.

• The French president, Emmanuel Macron, echoed Zelenskyy, saying Putin is “escalating the fighting” and “wants to get everything, then negotiate”. Russia “does not give the impression it sincerely wants peace”, Macron said in the statement provided to AFP on Saturday and urged Europe and the United States to put pressure on Russia to accept a proposed ceasefire.

• The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, spoke on Saturday to discuss the next stage in talks on ending the war. According to the state department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce, the top diplomats “agreed to continue working towards restoring communication between the United States and Russia”. The statement gave no details on when the next round of US-Russia talks, which are being hosted by Saudi Arabia, would begin.

• Mikhail Kasyanov, Vladimir Putin’s first prime minister and now an opponent of the Russian president, said Moscow was interested only in a conditional ceasefire. Kasyanov told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “He rejected this proposal for an unconditional ceasefire, he wants conditional, he wants a ceasefire on his terms.”

• Ukraine said on Saturday it had downed 130 Russian-launched drones across the country at night. Kyiv’s air force said the Iranian-made Shahed drones were downed over 14 regions and that Moscow had also attacked with two ballistic missiles.

• Kyiv also said that the number injured in a Russian strike a day earlier on Zelenskyy’s home town, Kryvyi Rih, rose to 14. On Friday, officials said Russia attacked a residential area of the central Ukrainian city. “Fourteen people were wounded, among them two children,” the head of the Dnipropetrovsk region, Sergiy Lysak, said on Telegram.

• Russia deployed almost 200 firefighters to help put out a fire at an oil depot caused by a Ukraine drone strike in the southern Krasnodar region, authorities said. The governor of the Krasnodar region, Veniamin Kondratyev, said in the early hours of Saturday that a petrol reserve station in the Black Sea city of Tuapse was “attacked by the Kyiv regime”. The government of the Krasnodar region said 188 people were involved in putting out the fire.

• Ukraine’s largest private energy provider said on Saturday that overnight Russian airstrikes had damaged its energy facilities in the Dnipropetrovsk and Odesa regions. In a statement, DTEK said “damages are significant” and that some consumers in both regions were left without power.

A vast demonstration has been gathering in Belgrade, marking the climax of more than four months of student-led protests and the biggest challenge to President Aleksandar Vučić in the 11 years of his increasingly autocratic rule.

Vučić stoked tensions in the run-up to yesterday’s mass protest, suggesting there would be an attempt to overthrow him by force and calling it an “imported revolution” with the involvement of western intelligence agencies, but he provided no evidence for the claims. The demonstrations against government corruption and incompetence have so far been overwhelmingly peaceful.

Hundreds of government supporters, mostly black-clad young men wearing baseball caps, many with matching black backpacks, gathered in Belgrade’s Pionirski Park, opposite the Serbian parliament, one of the focal points of the demonstration. Local reports suggested there were members of organised football hooligan groups among them, as well as veterans of the Red Berets special forces unit implicated in the 2003 assassination of Serbia’s liberal prime minister Zoran Djindjić.

A thick cordon of police ringed the assembly building and separated the Vučić supporters from the protesters, who also gathered in front of a stage set up in nearby Slavija Square.

In the mid-afternoon, protesters close to the state broadcasting headquarters in central Belgrade were told by police to move as there was a threat of an attack by a pro-government mob.

Intercity trains had been cancelled for the day in what the state railway company said was a security measure for passenger safety but which was widely seen as an attempt by Vučić to limit the size of the protests. Some city transport services were also suspended in the capital. But long convoys of cars converged on Belgrade from across the country, flying national flags and banners in support of the student cause.

In the roads leading into the city, scores of tractors joined the procession, signalling farmers’ support for the protest movement, as well as hundreds of bikers, riding into town in a phalanx.

The European Union and the United Nations both appealed to the government ahead of the rally to respect the right to demonstrate. Western governments have been hesitant in their approach to the protests over the past four months, partly out of a desire to cultivate good relations with Vučić in the hope of luring him away from Moscow’s orbit.

Vučić has cultivated Donald Trump, approving the construction of a Trump hotel in Belgrade, and on Thursday gave an interview to the US president’s son Don Jr, who echoed the Serbian government’s unsubstantiated claims that the protest movement was fuelled by foreign funding.

The younger Trump suggested the protests had been “weaponised … to incite, potentially, a revolution”, airing conspiracy theories about how the protests were organised and paid for.

The near-daily protests were triggered by the collapse of a concrete canopy over the forecourt of a newly renovated railway station in Novi Sad, which killed 15 people on 1 November. Public outrage was fuelled by an apparent attempt by government officials to cover up unsafe construction methods and potential corruption in the Chinese-led refurbishment.

The demonstrations have been led by students who have focused on demands for better governance and for state institutions to provide the services they are supposed to, without the need for bribes or personal connections.

The students, who make collective decisions rather than elect a leadership, have kept their distance from opposition parties, which they blame for being complicit in the atrophy and cynicism of the public sector.

Donald Trump has invoked the wartime Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport five Venezuelan nationals from the US.

The White House issued a presidential proclamation on Saturday targeting Venezuelan members of gang Tren de Aragua, saying: “Tren de Aragua (TdA) is a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization with thousands of members, many of whom have unlawfully infiltrated the United States and are conducting irregular warfare and undertaking hostile actions against the United States.”

Civil liberties organizations have accused Trump of invoking the 1798 act unlawfully during peacetime to accelerate mass deportations and sidestep immigration law.

Hours later, a federal judge temporarily blocked Trump’s administration from using the act to carry out its intended deportations of the Venezuelans.

US district judge James Boasberg of the federal district court in Washington DC agreed on Saturday to issue temporary restraining order that prevents the Venezuelans’ deportation for 14 days.

“Given the exigent circumstances that it [the court] has been made aware of this morning, it has determined that an immediate Order is warranted to maintain the status quo until a hearing can be set,” Boasberg wrote in his order.

Boasberg’s decision comes in response to a lawsuit filed the same day by the American Civil Liberties Union and Democracy Forward. The organizations charge that the Trump administration unlawfully invoked the Alien Enemies Act.

In the lawsuit, ACLU and Democracy Forward argued the act has been invoked only three times in the history of the US: the war of 1812, first world war and second world war.

“It cannot be used here against nationals of a country – Venezuela – with whom the United States is not at war, which is not invading the United States and which has not launched a predatory incursion into the United States,” the lawsuit stated.

“The government’s proclamation would allow agents to immediately put noncitizens on planes without any review of any aspect of the determination that they are alien enemies,” the lawsuit added.

At remote hearing before Boasberg, both ACLU and Democracy Forward asked that the temporary restraining order be broadened to everyone in danger of removal under the act, the civil liberties organizations said.

The president had previously ordered his administration to designate Venezuela’s Tren De Aragua gang as a foreign terrorist organization.

With Trump characterizing the gang as a foreign force that is invading the US, civil liberties organizations such as the ACLU feared Trump would invoke the 1798 act “unlawfully during peacetime to accelerate mass deportations, sidestepping the limits of this wartime authority and the procedures and protections in immigration law.”

The 227-year-old law is designed to primarily be used in wartime, and only Congress has the authority to declare a war. But the president does have the discretion to invoke the law to defend against a “threatened or ongoing invasion or predatory incursion”, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a non-partisan authority on law and policy.

“This law shouldn’t be invoked because migration is not an invasion, and we’re not in a war time,” said Juliana Macedo do Nascimento, the deputy director of federal advocacy for United We Dream, an immigrant rights organization. “It’s extremely horrifying that we, as immigrants, are being labeled as terrorists, as invaders.”

Those subject to the Alien Enemies Act could be deported without a court hearing or asylum interview, and their cases would be governed by wartime authority rather than by immigration law.

The Alien Enemies Act specifically allows the president to detain, relocate, or deport immigrants based on their country of ancestry – and crucially covers not only citizens of hostile nations but also “natives”, which could include people who may have renounced their foreign citizenship and sought legal residency in the US.

The centuries-old law was also used to arrest more than 31,000 people – mostly people of Japanese, German and Italian ancestry – as “alien enemies” during the second world war, and played a role in the mass removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans during the war.

Trump has been building his case for invoking the act for years by characterizing the influx of migrants at the southern border as an “invasion”. He also previewed his invocation in an executive order on his inauguration day, directing the secretaries of state to plan by preparing facilities “necessary to expedite the removal” of those subject to the act.

“By invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, I will direct our government to use the full and immense power of federal and state law enforcement to eliminate the presence of all foreign gangs and criminal networks bringing devastating crime to US soil, including our cities and inner cities,” he said in his inaugural address.

Though anti-immigrant politicians and groups have long advocated for the use of the act in response to unlawful border crossings, Macedo do Nascimento said a number of executive orders and congressional policies have already broadened the federal government’s authorities to detain and deport immigrants.

“There are already laws that allow for mass detention. There are already laws, like the Laiken Riley Act, that would broaden the dragnet of people who can be detained,” Macedo do Nascimento said. “So the idea of him invoking the Alien Enemies Act feels kind of needless. To me, it is really about building the narrative to label immigrants as terrorists.”

A federal judge has temporarily blocked the Trump administration from using an obscure, 227-year-old law designed primarily for use in wartime to deport five Venezuelan nationals from the US.

District judge James Boasberg, responding to a lawsuit brought by two civil liberties organizations, issued an immediate halt and ordered any planes already in the air be turned around, saying the government was already was flying migrants it claimed were newly deportable to be incarcerated in El Salvador and Honduras.

Hour earlier, Donald Trump invoked the wartime Alien Enemies Act of 1798, saying Venezuelan members of gang Tren de Aragua had “unlawfully infiltrated the United States and are conducting irregular warfare and undertaking hostile actions against the United States”.

Here’s more on the key US politics news of the day:

The Trump administration is considering issuing travel restrictions for the citizens of dozens of countries as part of a new ban, according to sources familiar with the matter and an internal memo seen by Reuters.

The memo lists a total of 41 countries divided into three separate groups. The first group of 10 countries, which includes Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, Cuba and North Korea, among others, would be set for a full visa suspension.

In the second group, five countries – Eritrea, Haiti, Laos, Myanmar and South Sudan – would face partial suspensions that would affect tourist and student visas as well as other immigrant visas, with some exceptions.

In the third group, a total of 26 countries including Belarus, Pakistan and Turkmenistan, among others, would be considered for a partial suspension of US visa issuance if their governments “do not make efforts to address deficiencies within 60 days”, the memo said.

The list has yet to be approved by the administration, including the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and could be amended, officials told the outlet.

The memo follows an executive order issued on 20 January that requires intensified security vetting of any foreigners seeking admission to the US to detect national security threats, and directed several cabinet members to submit a list of countries for partial or full suspension because their “vetting and screening information is so deficient”.

During the first Trump administration, in 2017, a partial ban imposed on travelers from predominantly Muslim-population nations was labeled a “Muslim ban” by Trump and his aides.

Fourteen months earlier, after an Islamic State-inspired mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, Trump had called for “a total and complete” shutdown of Muslims entering the US “until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on”.

A new set of restrictions, outlined in the memo, would follow pledges by the president to institute an immigration crackdown. In October 2023, Trump pledged to restrict people from the Gaza Strip, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen and “anywhere else that threatens our security”.

Any move to ban or restrict immigration from the list of 43 countries would come in tandem with Department of Homeland Security efforts to deport undocumented migrants affiliated with newly identified terrorist crime networks, including Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua, El Salvador’s MS-13 and the Mexican-American 18th St.

At the same time, the Trump administration is moving to cancel immigration status and deport several foreign-born university graduates, including Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil, who led campus protests against Israel’s war on Gaza last year.

A second student who took part in protests around the university last year was arrested by federal immigration agents last week. Leqaa Kordia was arrested by officers from the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Newark. Authorities said she had overstayed a terminated visa.

The administration also revoked the visa of Ranjani Srinivasan, an Indian citizen and doctoral student at Columbia. Srinivasan opted to “self-deport” after officials said she was “involved in activities supporting Hamas”.

In a statement on Friday, the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, said it’s a “privilege to be granted a visa to live and study in the United States of America”.

“When you advocate for violence and terrorism that privilege should be revoked, and you should not be in this country,” Noem added.

Donald Trump expanded on his threats to the media on Friday, suggesting actions of the press should be deemed illegal and subject to investigation.

“I believe that CNN and MS-DNC, who literally write 97.6% bad about me, are political arms of the Democrat [sic] party and in my opinion, they’re really corrupt and they’re illegal, what do they do is illegal,” the president said during a contentious speech at the Department of Justice.

“These networks and these newspapers are really no different than a highly paid political operative,” Trump continued, claiming that CNN and MSNBC are corrupt.

“And it has to stop, it has to be illegal, it’s influencing judges and it’s really changing law, and it just cannot be legal. I don’t believe it’s legal, and they do it in total coordination with each other,” he added.

On Saturday, government-employed journalists at Voice of America (VoA) were put on administrative leave, a day after Trump signed an order eliminating the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), VoA’s parent company, along with six other federal agencies.

Reporters at VoA, which broadcasts news, information and cultural programming in nearly 50 languages to a global audience, were placed on “administrative leave with full pay and benefits until otherwise notified”, according to an internal memo obtained by the Hill, adding that it is “not being done for any disciplinary purpose”.

The decision to place VoA employees on administrative leave came a day after its parent moved to terminate contracts with the Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse, and told its journalists on Friday to stop using material from the wire services.

Kari Lake, the former broadcaster turned Republican politician who was selected by Trump to run VoA, estimated the move would save $53m and said: “We should not be paying outside news organizations to tell us what the news is.” Lake is a Trump loyalist and immigration hardliner who endeared herself to him with dogmatic commitment to the falsehood that both she and Trump were the victims of election fraud.

The latest moves come as disputes between media outlets covering the White House and the administration have grown more numerous in recent weeks, with the White House moving to take control of the press pool away from the White House Correspondents’ Association.

The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said last month that members of the White House press pool will now be selected by administration officials.

That came after a highly publicized dispute between the White House and the Associated Press over the wire agency’s decision not to adopt the name Gulf of America instead of Gulf of Mexico into its stylebook.

The White House has since restricted the AP from access to the Oval Office and Air Force One. In a court challenge seeking to overturn the White House ban, an attorney for the AP described the ban as a “constitutional problem”.

“We’re not arguing that the president of the United States has to answer the Associated Press’s questions,” said Charles Tobin. “The issue is that once he lets the press pool in he can’t say, ‘I don’t like you. You’re fake news. Get out.’”

But the White House argues that access to the president in the Oval Office and onboard Air Force One is a privilege, not a legal right. Last month, a federal judge refused to immediately restore the AP’s access, saying the news organization had not demonstrated it had suffered any irreparable harm.

A subsequent hearing on the issue is set for next week, but Trump has said he plans to keep the AP out “until such time as they agree that it’s the Gulf of America. We’re very proud of this country, and we want it to be the Gulf of America.”

The current fragile pause in hostilities in Gaza has come under further threat with Hamas hardening its negotiating positions amid new Israeli airstrikes in the devastated territory.

The first phase of the ceasefire agreement ended two weeks ago but Israel is refusing to implement the scheduled second phase, which is supposed to end with its withdrawal from Gaza, the freedom of all remaining hostages held by Hamas, and a definitive end to the conflict.

Currently, both sides have refrained from returning to war, though Israel has conducted an intensifying series of airstrikes in Gaza that have killed dozens of Palestinians.

Israeli military officials say the victims are legitimate targets who had entered unauthorised areas, engaged in militant activities or otherwise violated the truce.

On Saturday, two airstrikes targeted northern Gaza killing nine people, according to unconfirmed local reports.

Initial reports said a first strike took place as a Palestinian journalist Mahmoud Aslim was using a drone in the ruined town of Beit Lahiya to survey potential sites for tented camps on behalf of a local charitable organisation. A second strike targeted a car as it evacuated those injured by the first attack.

The Palestinian Journalists’ Protection Center, a local watchdog, said the dead included three Palestinian journalists in all.

The Israeli military said it initially struck two people operating a drone that posed a threat to soldiers in the area, then launched another strike at a group of people who came to collect the drone equipment. The army identified all of those targeted as suspected militants, without providing evidence.

Hamas accused Israel of “deliberate killings” that aimed “to undermine the ceasefire agreement and deliberately destroy any chance of completing the agreement and exchanging prisoners, in a blatant challenge to the mediators and the international community”.

The Ministry of Health in Gaza reported that Israeli fire had killed 19 people in the past 48 hours. The death toll in the 15-month Israeli offensive in Gaza now totals more than 48,500, mostly civilians. Hamas still has 59 hostages, of whom 35 are believed to be dead.

In a statement, Hamas clarified an offer to release a living American-Israeli hostage, saying it would only hand over 21-year-old Edan Alexander if Israel implements the ceasefire agreement which came into effect in January.

The US has already rebuffed the offer, made on Friday, and accused the Islamist militant organisation of “stalling” by making “impractical” demands.

Alexander, who grew up in the US and was fighting as a soldier in the Israeli Defense Forces, was abducted from his military base during Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack that killed 1,200, mostly civilians, and triggered the war. He is the last living US citizen held in Gaza.

There was no immediate comment from Israel on the new statement from Hamas. On Friday, the office of the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, accused the group of “psychological warfare”.

The US said it presented on Wednesday a proposal to extend the ceasefire for several weeks to allow the negotiation of a permanent truce. It said Hamas was claiming flexibility in public while privately making “entirely impractical” demands.

The indirect talks, which are being held in Egypt and Qatar, are expected to continue during the coming week.

For two weeks, Israel has barred the delivery of food, fuel and other supplies to Gaza’s roughly 2 million Palestinians, and cut electricity to the territory a week ago, to pressure Hamas to accept the new proposal.

Hamas however said on Saturday that it would only release hostages if Israel lifted its blockade, withdrew from a strategic corridor along Gaza’s border with Egypt and freed more Palestinian prisoners.

The war has destroyed vast areas of Gaza and displaced most of the population.

The ceasefire’s first phase included the release of 25 Israeli hostages and the bodies of eight others in exchange for nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners. Israeli forces pulled back to a buffer zone along Gaza’s border and allowed a surge of humanitarian aid.

The current fragile pause in hostilities in Gaza has come under further threat with Hamas hardening its negotiating positions amid new Israeli airstrikes in the devastated territory.

The first phase of the ceasefire agreement ended two weeks ago but Israel is refusing to implement the scheduled second phase, which is supposed to end with its withdrawal from Gaza, the freedom of all remaining hostages held by Hamas, and a definitive end to the conflict.

Currently, both sides have refrained from returning to war, though Israel has conducted an intensifying series of airstrikes in Gaza that have killed dozens of Palestinians.

Israeli military officials say the victims are legitimate targets who had entered unauthorised areas, engaged in militant activities or otherwise violated the truce.

On Saturday, two airstrikes targeted northern Gaza killing nine people, according to unconfirmed local reports.

Initial reports said a first strike took place as a Palestinian journalist Mahmoud Aslim was using a drone in the ruined town of Beit Lahiya to survey potential sites for tented camps on behalf of a local charitable organisation. A second strike targeted a car as it evacuated those injured by the first attack.

The Palestinian Journalists’ Protection Center, a local watchdog, said the dead included three Palestinian journalists in all.

The Israeli military said it initially struck two people operating a drone that posed a threat to soldiers in the area, then launched another strike at a group of people who came to collect the drone equipment. The army identified all of those targeted as suspected militants, without providing evidence.

Hamas accused Israel of “deliberate killings” that aimed “to undermine the ceasefire agreement and deliberately destroy any chance of completing the agreement and exchanging prisoners, in a blatant challenge to the mediators and the international community”.

The Ministry of Health in Gaza reported that Israeli fire had killed 19 people in the past 48 hours. The death toll in the 15-month Israeli offensive in Gaza now totals more than 48,500, mostly civilians. Hamas still has 59 hostages, of whom 35 are believed to be dead.

In a statement, Hamas clarified an offer to release a living American-Israeli hostage, saying it would only hand over 21-year-old Edan Alexander if Israel implements the ceasefire agreement which came into effect in January.

The US has already rebuffed the offer, made on Friday, and accused the Islamist militant organisation of “stalling” by making “impractical” demands.

Alexander, who grew up in the US and was fighting as a soldier in the Israeli Defense Forces, was abducted from his military base during Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack that killed 1,200, mostly civilians, and triggered the war. He is the last living US citizen held in Gaza.

There was no immediate comment from Israel on the new statement from Hamas. On Friday, the office of the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, accused the group of “psychological warfare”.

The US said it presented on Wednesday a proposal to extend the ceasefire for several weeks to allow the negotiation of a permanent truce. It said Hamas was claiming flexibility in public while privately making “entirely impractical” demands.

The indirect talks, which are being held in Egypt and Qatar, are expected to continue during the coming week.

For two weeks, Israel has barred the delivery of food, fuel and other supplies to Gaza’s roughly 2 million Palestinians, and cut electricity to the territory a week ago, to pressure Hamas to accept the new proposal.

Hamas however said on Saturday that it would only release hostages if Israel lifted its blockade, withdrew from a strategic corridor along Gaza’s border with Egypt and freed more Palestinian prisoners.

The war has destroyed vast areas of Gaza and displaced most of the population.

The ceasefire’s first phase included the release of 25 Israeli hostages and the bodies of eight others in exchange for nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners. Israeli forces pulled back to a buffer zone along Gaza’s border and allowed a surge of humanitarian aid.

The red tape of government bureaucracy spans more than 4,000 years, according to new finds from the cradle of the world’s civilisations, Mesopotamia.

Hundreds of administrative tablets – the earliest physical evidence of the first empire in recorded history – have been discovered by archaeologists from the British Museum and Iraq. These texts detail the minutiae of government and reveal a complex bureaucracy – the red tape of an ancient civilisation.

These were the state archives of the ancient Sumerian site of Girsu, modern-day Tello, while the city was under the control of the Akkad dynasty from 2300 to 2150BC.

“It’s not unlike Whitehall,” said Sébastien Rey, the British Museum’s curator for ancient Mesopotamia and director of the Girsu Project. “These are the spreadsheets of empire, the very first material evidence of the very first empire in the world – the real evidence of the imperial control and how it actually worked.”

Girsu, one of the world’s oldest cities, was revered in the 3rd millennium BC as the sanctuary of the Sumerian heroic god Ningirsu. Covering hundreds of hectares at its peak, it was among independent Sumerian cities conquered around 2300BC by the Mesopotamian king Sargon. He originally came from the city of Akkad, whose location is still unknown but is thought to have been near modern Baghdad.

Rey said: “Sargon developed this new form of governance by conquering all the Sumerian cities of Mesopotamia, creating what most historians call the first empire in the world.” He added that, until these latest excavations, information on that empire was limited to fragmentary and bombastic royal inscriptions or much later copies of Akkadian inscriptions “which are not completely reliable”.

Of the new discovery, he said: “It is extremely important because, for the first time, we have concrete evidence – with artefacts in situ.” He has been astonished by the detail in those records: “They note absolutely everything down. If a sheep dies at the very edge of the empire, it will be noted. They are obsessed with bureaucracy.” The tablets, containing cuneiform symbols, an early writing system, record affairs of state, deliveries and expenditures, on everything from fish to domesticated animals, flour to barley, textiles to precious stones.

Dana Goodburn-Brown, a British-American conservator, is cleaning the tablets so that they can be transcribed. The work is both painstaking and exciting, she said: “People just think things come out of the ground and look like you see them in the museum, but they don’t.”

One tablet lists different commodities: “250 grams of gold / 500 grams of silver/ … fattened cows… / 30 litres of beer.” Even the names and professions of the citizens are recorded, Rey said: “Women, men, children – we have names for everyone.

“Women held important offices within the state. So we have high priestesses, for example, although it was a society very much led by men. But the role of the woman was at least higher than many other societies, and it’s undeniable based on the evidence that we have.”

The jobs listed range from stone-cutters to the sweeper of the temple floor. Rey said: “Being able to sweep the floor where the gods and the high priest were located was very important. The cities of ancient Mesopotamia in theory all belonged to the gods. The society worked for the temple state.”

The tablets were found at the site of a large state archive building, made of mud-brick walls and divided into rooms or offices. Some of the tablets contain architectural plans of buildings, field plans and maps of canals.

The finds were made by archaeologists at the Girsu Project, a collaboration between the British Museum and the Iraqi government’s State Board of Antiquities and Heritage, funded by Meditor Trust, a charitable foundation.

The site was originally excavated in the 19th and early 20th centuries and was targeted by looters after the two Gulf wars: “Tablets of the Akkad period were either looted or carelessly removed from their archaeological setting and thus decontextualised. So it was very difficult to understand how the administration worked.

“The key thing now is that we were able to excavate them properly within their archaeological context. The new finds were preserved in situ, so in their original context, and we can say for sure that we have indeed the very first physical evidence of imperial control in the world. This is completely new.”

The finds have been sent to the Iraq Museum in Baghdad for further study, ahead of a possible loan to the British Museum.

The Akkadian empire lasted for only about 150 years, ending with a rebellion that secured the city’s independence.

Violent tornadoes ripped through parts of the US, wiping out schools and toppling semitractor-trailers in several states, part of a monster storm that killed at least 26 people as more severe weather was expected late Saturday.

In western Kansas, a dust storm was reported to have killed eight people as high winds produced blowing dust over the interstate, causing collisions of more than 55 vehicles on the I-70.

In Mississippi, Governor Tate Reeves announced that six people had died in three counties and three more people were missing. There were 29 injuries across the state, he added in a nighttime post.

Missouri recorded more fatalities than any other state as it withstood scattered twisters overnight that killed at least 12 people, authorities said. The deaths included a man who was killed after a tornado ripped apart his home.

“It was unrecognizable as a home. Just a debris field,” said Coroner Jim Akers of Butler county, describing the scene that confronted rescuers. “The floor was upside down. We were walking on walls.”

In Arkansas, three storm-related deaths have been confirmed in Independence county with an additional 29 people injured in eight counties, according to the Arkansas division of emergency management on Saturday morning.

Three people were killed on Friday in car crashes during a dust storm in Amarillo county in the Texas panhandle, according to Sgt Cindy Barkley of the state’s department of public safety. One pileup involved an estimated 38 cars.

“It’s the worst I’ve ever seen,” Barkley said, calling the near-zero visibility a nightmare. “We couldn’t tell that they were all together until the dust kind of settled.”

In Mississippi, Governor Tate Reeves announced on Saturday morning that at least three people have been injured and were hospitalized in Grenada county, adding that the number is expected to increase.

Six counties have reported damage including Calhoun, Carroll, Grenada, Humphreys, Leflore and Montgomery. Grenada county has been hit the hardest, Reeves said. A shelter has opened up in the Grenada City auditorium for those in search of refuge.

At least 26 tornadoes were reported but not confirmed to have touched down late on Friday night and early on Saturday as a low pressure system drove powerful thunderstorms across parts of Arkansas, Illinois, Mississippi and Missouri, said David Roth, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service’s Weather Prediction Center.

“Today there is a high risk for more tornadoes across Alabama and Mississippi, the chance is 30%,” he said. “That’s pretty significant.”

As the storms regain strength, the highest possible risk of tornadoes and severe thunderstorms was on Saturday night, forecasters said.

The National Weather Service issued multiple tornado and severe thunderstorm warnings early on Saturday morning for areas in Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, Tennessee, Illinois, Indiana and Texas.

The agency has warned residents not to seek refuge in vehicles outside or under overpasses, as well as not to seek shelter under trees. Instead, it urged residents to get off the road and drive to a designated shelter, basement or safe room. The next best option for shelter is a small, windowless room or hallway on the lowest floor of a sturdy building, according to the agency.

Evacuations were ordered in some Oklahoma communities as more than 130 fires were reported across the state. The state patrol said winds were so strong that they toppled several tractor-trailers.

Forecasters said the severe storm threat would continue into the weekend with a high chance of tornadoes and damaging winds on Saturday in Mississippi and Alabama. Heavy rain could bring flash flooding to some parts of the east coast on Sunday.

Experts say it’s not unusual to see such weather extremes in March.

“What’s unique about this one is its large size and intensity,” said Bill Bunting of the National Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma. “And so what that is doing is producing really substantial impacts over a very large area.”

The weather service said at least five tornadoes were reported in Missouri on Friday, including one in the Saint Louis area. Several buildings were damaged.

The Storm Prediction Center said fast-moving storms could spawn twisters and hail as large as baseballs, but the greatest threat would come from straight-line winds near or exceeding hurricane force, with gusts of 100mph (160km/h) possible.

“Potentially violent” tornadoes were expected on Saturday in parts of the central Gulf coast and deep south into the Tennessee valley, according to the National Weather Service.

The Storm Prediction Center said parts of Mississippi including Jackson and Hattiesburg and areas of Alabama including Birmingham and Tuscaloosa would be at a high risk. Severe storms and tornadoes were also possible across eastern Louisiana, western Georgia, central Tennessee and the western Florida panhandle.

Wildfires in the southern plains threatened to spread rapidly amid warm, dry weather and strong winds, and evacuations were ordered on Friday for some communities in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri and New Mexico.

A blaze in Roberts county, Texas, north-east of Amarillo, quickly blew up from less than a square mile (about 2 sq km) to an estimated 32.8 sq miles (85 sq km), the Texas A&M University forest service said on X. Crews stopped its advance by Friday evening.

About 60 miles (90km) to the south, another fire grew to about 4 sq miles (10 sq km) before its advance was halted in the afternoon.

High winds also knocked out power to more than 300,000 homes and businesses in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois and Indiana, according the website poweroutage.us.

The National Weather Service issued blizzard warnings for parts of far western Minnesota and far eastern South Dakota starting early on Saturday. Snow accumulations of 3-6in (7.6-15.2cm) were expected, with up to a foot (30cm) possible.

Winds gusting to 60mph (97km/h) were expected to cause whiteout conditions.

A devoted investor in Elon Musk’s Tesla – and once a close childhood friend of the US president’s eldest son and namesake – says he hopes the world’s richest man’s role in cutting federal spending for Donald Trump’s administration is “short-lived” and that he returns to managing his businesses.

Investment manager Christopher Tsai, whose firm has tens of millions of dollars tied up in Tesla, said the stock market had demonstrated clear signs of displeasure with Musk’s activities at the so-called “department of government efficiency”. And in an interview with the Guardian, Tsai said: “I hope his involvement with [Doge] is short-lived so he can spend even more time on his businesses.”

The chief investment officer and president of Tsai Capital, which reportedly manages a portfolio of about $137m, made it a point to say that his stated hope does not constitute a loss of faith in Musk or his company’s earning potential, despite opinion polls establishing the Tesla boss’s unpopularity with the American public and his net worth evidently tumbling about $23bn in recent days.

Tsai said the stock markets also reacted negatively when Musk bought Twitter, the social media platform now known as X, in 2022 for $44bn. Yet he said Tsai Capital – which holds about 75,000 shares in Tesla as of its most recent quarterly filings – had made more than six times its money since first investing in the company in February 2020, even with the downturn in performance of late.

Tsai recently told his investors in a letter that his firm considers Tesla to be more of a creator of advanced electronics and software that it attaches to cars rather than a traditional automotive manufacturer and he insisted that the EV maker remained “on a path to become one of the most valuable companies on the planet”.

Nonetheless, he said “the market … reacting unfavorably to Elon Musk’s recent involvement in politics” was real. And though he said he thought Musk’s self-professed belief that government reforms are needed was genuine, Tsai expressed a hope that the Tesla boss’s role in Doge ultimately proved to be like other temporary commitments he had previously taken on.

Tsai’s comments on what is his firm’s largest holding come at a time when Musk – who prominently supported Trump’s successful run for a second presidency – has advised the White House on the widespread firings of government employees and the dismantling of various services. Those services include US humanitarian aid and development work, with experts warning that their elimination could have life-threatening consequences.

If a CNN poll conducted by the research firm SSRS is any indication, such measures have not gone over well with the public. The survey showed 53% of Americans disapproved of Musk, and 35% approved – leaving him about 18 points underwater.

Those results were released on Wednesday, two days after Tesla’s stock fell more than 15% amid public protests against the company and vandalism reported at some of the brand’s dealerships.

Tsai’s descent from a lineage of legendary investors sets his voice apart from some of the others who have weighed in on Musk, Doge and Tesla at the two-month mark of the second Trump presidency.

His paternal grandmother was Ruth Tsai, who became the first woman to trade on the floor of the stock exchange in Shanghai, China, in 1939 during the second world war. Her earnings helped her send her son – Tsai’s father, Gerald – to college in the US, where he ultimately settled and made a name for himself as a financier and fund manager.

Gerald Tsai Jr also eventually became the chief executive officer of the financial services giant Primerica, which – along with its subsidiary Commercial Credit Group – helped build Citigroup, as the New York Times has reported.

A notable aspect of Tsai’s trajectory was his father’s acquaintance with Trump when the latter was primarily a real estate mogul in Manhattan. The families were close enough that, in his youth, Tsai considered Donald Trump Jr his best friend, vacationing with him and once going to a baseball game with his siblings, their mother and their father.

Tsai said the younger Trump was one of the first people to whom he came out as a gay man, doing so before he did to Gerald. “That’s cool,” Tsai recalled Trump Jr telling him, while he said Gerald took a longer time to accept it.

A registered Democrat, Tsai said he had not had “a meaningful conversation with any member of” the president’s family since a lunch with Donald Jr in January 2014 – more than two years before Trump Sr clinched the Republican White House nomination and won his first presidency. Tsai said they just “went in different directions” as the Trumps moved into politics, and their family patriarch aligned himself closely with Musk as he clinched the White House a second time in November’s election.

Meanwhile, the elder Tsai, who married and divorced four times and once survived crashing in a helicopter into New York’s Hudson River before his death in 2008, did not pass on much of his larger-than-life personality to Christopher.

The younger Tsai for instance has been married to his spouse – with whom he is raising teenaged twins – since 2005.

But, as Christopher put it, Gerald Tsai Jr did teach him to learn about – and love – trading stocks in his childhood. He began investing at 12 and started his capital firm in 1997 at age 22.

Tsai said some of the principles to which he adheres – whether as a philanthropic donor to artistic as well as environmental causes – were inherited from the first Chinese American to be CEO of a Dow Jones Industrial company.

“My father would say you have to do deep work in order to figure out where value is and to uncover great situations,” Tsai said. “Our job as investors is to figure out what’s real, what’s not real, what that’s worth, what’s priced into the stock and where the company’s valuation is going.”

A devoted investor in Elon Musk’s Tesla – and once a close childhood friend of the US president’s eldest son and namesake – says he hopes the world’s richest man’s role in cutting federal spending for Donald Trump’s administration is “short-lived” and that he returns to managing his businesses.

Investment manager Christopher Tsai, whose firm has tens of millions of dollars tied up in Tesla, said the stock market had demonstrated clear signs of displeasure with Musk’s activities at the so-called “department of government efficiency”. And in an interview with the Guardian, Tsai said: “I hope his involvement with [Doge] is short-lived so he can spend even more time on his businesses.”

The chief investment officer and president of Tsai Capital, which reportedly manages a portfolio of about $137m, made it a point to say that his stated hope does not constitute a loss of faith in Musk or his company’s earning potential, despite opinion polls establishing the Tesla boss’s unpopularity with the American public and his net worth evidently tumbling about $23bn in recent days.

Tsai said the stock markets also reacted negatively when Musk bought Twitter, the social media platform now known as X, in 2022 for $44bn. Yet he said Tsai Capital – which holds about 75,000 shares in Tesla as of its most recent quarterly filings – had made more than six times its money since first investing in the company in February 2020, even with the downturn in performance of late.

Tsai recently told his investors in a letter that his firm considers Tesla to be more of a creator of advanced electronics and software that it attaches to cars rather than a traditional automotive manufacturer and he insisted that the EV maker remained “on a path to become one of the most valuable companies on the planet”.

Nonetheless, he said “the market … reacting unfavorably to Elon Musk’s recent involvement in politics” was real. And though he said he thought Musk’s self-professed belief that government reforms are needed was genuine, Tsai expressed a hope that the Tesla boss’s role in Doge ultimately proved to be like other temporary commitments he had previously taken on.

Tsai’s comments on what is his firm’s largest holding come at a time when Musk – who prominently supported Trump’s successful run for a second presidency – has advised the White House on the widespread firings of government employees and the dismantling of various services. Those services include US humanitarian aid and development work, with experts warning that their elimination could have life-threatening consequences.

If a CNN poll conducted by the research firm SSRS is any indication, such measures have not gone over well with the public. The survey showed 53% of Americans disapproved of Musk, and 35% approved – leaving him about 18 points underwater.

Those results were released on Wednesday, two days after Tesla’s stock fell more than 15% amid public protests against the company and vandalism reported at some of the brand’s dealerships.

Tsai’s descent from a lineage of legendary investors sets his voice apart from some of the others who have weighed in on Musk, Doge and Tesla at the two-month mark of the second Trump presidency.

His paternal grandmother was Ruth Tsai, who became the first woman to trade on the floor of the stock exchange in Shanghai, China, in 1939 during the second world war. Her earnings helped her send her son – Tsai’s father, Gerald – to college in the US, where he ultimately settled and made a name for himself as a financier and fund manager.

Gerald Tsai Jr also eventually became the chief executive officer of the financial services giant Primerica, which – along with its subsidiary Commercial Credit Group – helped build Citigroup, as the New York Times has reported.

A notable aspect of Tsai’s trajectory was his father’s acquaintance with Trump when the latter was primarily a real estate mogul in Manhattan. The families were close enough that, in his youth, Tsai considered Donald Trump Jr his best friend, vacationing with him and once going to a baseball game with his siblings, their mother and their father.

Tsai said the younger Trump was one of the first people to whom he came out as a gay man, doing so before he did to Gerald. “That’s cool,” Tsai recalled Trump Jr telling him, while he said Gerald took a longer time to accept it.

A registered Democrat, Tsai said he had not had “a meaningful conversation with any member of” the president’s family since a lunch with Donald Jr in January 2014 – more than two years before Trump Sr clinched the Republican White House nomination and won his first presidency. Tsai said they just “went in different directions” as the Trumps moved into politics, and their family patriarch aligned himself closely with Musk as he clinched the White House a second time in November’s election.

Meanwhile, the elder Tsai, who married and divorced four times and once survived crashing in a helicopter into New York’s Hudson River before his death in 2008, did not pass on much of his larger-than-life personality to Christopher.

The younger Tsai for instance has been married to his spouse – with whom he is raising teenaged twins – since 2005.

But, as Christopher put it, Gerald Tsai Jr did teach him to learn about – and love – trading stocks in his childhood. He began investing at 12 and started his capital firm in 1997 at age 22.

Tsai said some of the principles to which he adheres – whether as a philanthropic donor to artistic as well as environmental causes – were inherited from the first Chinese American to be CEO of a Dow Jones Industrial company.

“My father would say you have to do deep work in order to figure out where value is and to uncover great situations,” Tsai said. “Our job as investors is to figure out what’s real, what’s not real, what that’s worth, what’s priced into the stock and where the company’s valuation is going.”

Romania’s electoral commission on Saturday excluded a second far-right hopeful, Diana Șoșoacă, from May’s presidential election, amid rising tension in the run-up to the May rerun of the poll.

Earlier in March, the electoral bureau barred Călin Georgescu, an independent who was polling at about 40% before the rerun election.

Georgescu, a fierce EU and Nato critic, shot to prominence last November when he unexpectedly topped a first round of presidential voting.

But the constitutional court annulled the election after claims of Russian interference and a “massive” social media promotion in his favour.

On Saturday, an electoral commission statement said it had also taken the “decision to reject the candidacy of Diana Șoșoacă”.

It noted that the country’s constitutional court had already banned her from standing last November for making declarations “contrary to democratic values”.

The electoral office did, however, validate the candidacy of George Simion, leader of the Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR). Following the exclusion of Georgescu, he is the most prominent figure on the far right still in the running.

Șoșoacă, a 49-year-old Euro MP known for her pro-Russia views posted on Facebook: “I am proof that we do not live in a democracy.” She said she would appeal the ruling.

On Thursday, she donned boxing gloves as she filed her candidacy, declaring herself ready to “fight the system once again” as she bids to “make Europe and Romania great again”, borrowing Trumpian terms.

Șoșoacă has been accused of spreading pro-Kremlin propaganda and antisemitic views.

She opposed anti-Covid measures during the pandemic and, in July 2024, was expelled from the European Parliament in Strasbourg after loudly interrupting debates.

Her small party, SOS. Romania, won 24 seats after securing about 7% of votes in December’s legislative elections.

Simion’s AUR said banning Șoșoacă’s candidacy “represents a further blow to Romanian democracy and a serious violation of fundamental rights and freedoms”.

The eastern European state has been plunged into chaos since Georgescu’s surprise emergence in November on the back of a huge TikTok social media campaign, which was marred by suspicions of Russian interference.

In a shock decision, the November election was cancelled and this week Georgescu was definitively excluded from the election, the first round of which is scheduled for 4 May.

Georgescu’s exclusion led to some violent protests.

On Saturday, several thousand people marched through Bucharest to express their attachment to the EU.

Surgeons are to put implants into the brains of alcoholics and opioid addicts in a trial aimed at testing the use of electrical impulses to combat drink and drug cravings.

The technique is already used to help patients control some of the effects of Parkinson’s disease, depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Now a group of doctors and researchers – from Cambridge and Oxford universities and King’s College London – are preparing to use deep brain stimulation to try to decrease addicts’ yearnings and to boost their self-control.

“Deep brain stimulation acts like a pacemaker,” the project’s chief investigator Prof Valerie Voon, of Cambridge University’s psychiatry department, told the Observer.

“Just as we can use a pacemaker to stabilise abnormal electrical rhythms in a person’s heart, we believe we can use a brain implant to act like a pacemaker and normalise deviant electrical brain rhythms that are linked to addiction. This trial will show if this is a practical idea.”

The use of brain implants has become popular with doctors treating brain disorders in recent years. More than a quarter of a million people are fitted with them to control symptoms of a range of conditions. In the case of Parkinson’s disease, implants deliver impulses to movement centres in patients’ brains and halt symptoms that include tremors and involuntary movements.

Several recent small proof-of-concept studies have suggested the technique could be expanded for use as a treatment for alcohol and opioid addicts. Scientists are now finalising plans for the first full clinical trial of deep brain stimulation to determine if it could be expanded to counter the growing crisis of alcohol and drug addiction in the UK and other countries.

Several hundred thousand people are dependent on alcohol in the UK and about a quarter of those require treatment for anxiety and depression and other associated health problems.

Opioid addiction is also a serious health problem. Almost half of all fatal drug poisonings now involve opiates such as heroin and morphine.

“Most people are highly disabled if they become seriously addicted to alcohol or opioids,” said Voon. “Nor does their craving affect only them. Their families, their parents, their siblings, their spouses and their children also suffer. Addiction is never just an individual disorder.

“Addicts are unable to work and also face the danger of taking overdoses. It has become a very serious issue for modern society.”

A total of six alcoholics and six opioid addicts will be picked for the trial, which is called Brain-Pacer (brain pacemaker addiction control to end relapse). To be selected, these individuals will have to have suffered at least five years of addiction and had at least three relapses. They will also have to have previously received conventional medications or psychotherapy.

Each person in the trial – which will be carried out at Addenbrooke’s hospital in Cambridge and King’s College hospital in London – will have a slender electrode placed in precise locations in the brain.

For addicts, this will involve neural areas that are involved in reward, motivation and decision-making. The electrodes will then be connected to a pulse generator that is implanted in their bodies, most likely in their chests. This device will deliver the electrical impulses that will moderate the neural activity that is triggering their addiction, it is hoped.

“The aim is to decrease a person’s craving and increase their self-control by providing these electrical impulses,” added Voon.

Crucially, the trials will be randomised so that electrical signals will not be turned on at all times while the brain activity of addicts will be recorded. In this way, the team hopes that they will not only develop new treatments for addiction but will generate fresh understanding of the brain mechanisms that drive alcohol and opioid cravings.

Keyoumars Ashkan, professor of neurosurgery at King’s College hospital and the lead surgeon for the study, said deep brain stimulation was clearly a powerful surgical technique that could transform lives.

“It will be a major leap forward if we can show efficacy in this very difficult disease with a huge burden to the patients and society.”

Donald Trump said he ordered a series of airstrikes on Yemen’s capital, Sana’a, on Saturday, promising to use “overwhelming lethal force” until Iranian-backed Houthi rebels cease their attacks on shipping along a vital maritime corridor.

The Houthis reported a series of explosions in their territory on Saturday evening. Images circulating online show plumes of black smoke over the area of the Sana’a airport complex, which includes a sprawling military facility. The extent of the damage was not yet clear.

“Our brave Warfighters are right now carrying out aerial attacks on the terrorists’ bases, leaders, and missile defenses to protect American shipping, air, and naval assets, and to restore Navigational Freedom,” Trump said in a social media post.

“No terrorist force will stop American commercial and naval vessels from freely sailing the Waterways of the World.”

He also warned Iran to stop supporting the rebel group, promising to hold the country “fully accountable” for the actions of its proxy.

The airstrikes come a few days after the Houthis said they would resume attacks on Israeli vessels sailing in waters off Yemen in response to Israel’s blockade on Gaza. There have been no Houthi attacks reported since then.

At least 13 civilians were killed and nine injured in the US strikes on Sana’a, the Houthi-run health ministry said on Saturday evening.

Six other people, including four children and one woman, were killed and 11 were injured in a US strike on the northern province of Sa’ada, Houthi-run al-Masirah TV reported.

The Houthi rebels have targeted more than 100 merchant vessels with missiles and drones, sinking two vessels and killing four sailors during their campaign targeting military and civilian ships after the start of the war between Israel and Hamas in late 2023 until January of this year, when a tenuous ceasefire in Gaza took effect.

The attacks greatly raised the Houthis’ profile as they faced economic problems and launched a crackdown targeting any dissent and aid workers at home amid Yemen’s decade-long stalemated war that has torn apart the Arab world’s poorest nation.

The United States, Israel and Britain have previously hit Houthi-held areas in Yemen. Israel’s military declined to comment.

The Houthi media office said the US strikes hit “a residential neighborhood” in Sana’a’s northern district of Shouab.

The Saturday operation against the Houthis was conducted solely by the US, according to a US official. It was the first strike on the Yemen-based Houthis under the second Trump administration, and it comes after a period of relative quiet in the region.

Such broad-based and pre-planned missile strikes against the Houthis were carried out multiple times by the Biden administration in response to frequent attacks by the Houthis against commercial and military vessels in the region.

The USS Harry S Truman carrier strike group, which includes the carrier, three navy destroyers and one cruiser, is in the Red Sea and was part of the mission. The USS Georgia cruise missile submarine has also been operating in the region.

Trump announced the strikes as he spent the day at his Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida.

“These relentless assaults have cost the US and World Economy many BILLIONS of Dollars while, at the same time, putting innocent lives at risk,” Trump said.

A Eurovision contestant has reworked her song after a word in the lyrics sounded like an English swearword.

Miriana Conte’s song was originally titled Kant, the Maltese word for singing.

The song now includes the voice of the BBC economics editor Faisal Islam after he interviewed Conte on Newsnight about having only days to alter the song following a complaint.

On Friday, Eurovision released her official music video for the updated track, retitled Serving, which has similar lyrics minus the word “kant”.

The video opens in a documentary-style format featuring commentators talking about her and the song, including the voice of Islam from the Newsnight interview, suggesting how she could redo it: “Serving brunch, maybe, I don’t know.”

Conte told Newsnight she was not trying to “offend anyone”; the word meant different things to different people, and to her, it meant: “I’m serving singing.”

She made her disappointment known to the contest organisers, the European Broadcasting Union, at the time of the complaint. “We’ve just been notified that [the EBU] has decided against using the Maltese word “Kant” in our entry in the Eurovision Song Contest,” she wrote on Instagram. “While I’m shocked and disappointed, especially since we have less than a week to submit the song, I promise you this: the show will go on – Diva NOT down.”

Maltese news outlets reported that the BBC was the one to lodge a complaint with the EBU.

Islam reacted to Conte’s use of his voice in her official music video by posting a laughing emoji and “well, well, well,” on X. The video was played during the end credits of Friday’s episode of Newsnight.

The all-female trio Remember Monday will represent the UK at Eurovision 2025 with their song, What the Hell Just Happened?

Before last year’s competition, the EBU faced criticism for allowing a representative from Israel to perform while the Gaza war was ongoing. Eden Golan was asked to redo her song, Rain, which was alleged to reference Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October 2023. Instead, she entered the competition with Hurricane.

Afterwards, Eurovision announced an internal review and a code of conduct to help “protect” the wellbeing of artists in future contests.

The grand final of Eurovision will take place in Basel, Switzerland, on 17 May, with the semi-finals on 13 and 15 May.