Germany’s parliament has voted in favour of unleashing historic levels of spending to boost the military of Europe’s biggest economy and inject its infrastructure with investments worth hundreds of billions of euros.

The conservatives of Friedrich Merz and the Social Democrats (SPD), who are likely to form a new coalition following last month’s election, led the drive for the creation of a €500bn fund and relaxation of its constitutionally protected debt rules. They secured the last-minute backing of the Greens, which was needed to push the plans through the outgoing parliament.

Hailed by some as a necessary measure to give Germany the fiscal heft it needs to ensure national and European security, and by others as a “highly risky bet” that will be a burden for generations to come, the package received the backing on Tuesday of 513 MPs, with 207 voting against, and no abstentions. The minimum required was 489 votes.

Merz told MPs the package was mainly motivated by “Putin’s war of aggression against Europe”, listing a range of suspected Russian sabotage “taking place every day” against Germany. He said these included attacks on critical infrastructure, arson attacks, spying and disinformation campaigns, as well as broader “attempts to divide and marginalise the European Union”.

Acknowledging that his funding plans were viewed with concern by many who feared the burden of debt, Merz said it was time to acknowledge the new era in which Germany found itself, not least having to be independent from the US.

“We understand the worries, we understand the criticism,” he said, but added: “We have, for at least a decade, felt a false sense of security.” Germany had now to face a “paradigm shift”, which Merz said required “us to rebuild our defence capabilities, in part from scratch”.

Markets rose on Tuesday even before the vote had taken place, in anticipation that the plans would boost growth across Germany and the wider eurozone. The euro reached its highest level in more than five months.

Investors have said the fiscal injection could help Europe’s largest economy emerge from two consecutive years of negative growth. However, they have also warned the package needs to be accompanied by widespread reforms.

Having passed the Bundestag, the lower house of parliament, the legislation will on Friday go to the Bundesrat, the upper house, which represents the governments of Germany’s 16 federal states.

The conservatives and SPD believed they needed to act quickly to pass the legislation, with the Greens, in the outgoing parliament. Because it required changes to the constitution, it needed a majority of at least two-thirds of MPs to back it. In the new Bundestag, due to convene on 25 March, it would have been likely to face opposition from the far-right AfD and far-left Die Linke, who together have a “blocking minority”.

At the centre of the reforms is Germany’s so-called “debt brake”, imposed under the government of Angela Merkel after the 2008 global financial crisis to ensure debt was controlled for future generations. The rules have long since been criticised by experts who say they are outdated and too rigid particularly in an era of fast-evolving geopolitical circumstances.

Merz faced fierce criticism before and during the four-hour debate, in particular from the Greens, who accused him of lying to voters. Opponents said he had voiced his strong commitment to the debt brake during his election campaign, only to have had his views changed within days of winning on 23 February. Merz has justified this by citing the “rapidly changing situation”.

Two Nasa astronauts “stranded” onboard the International Space Station (ISS) since June 2024 are finally on their way back to Earth, more than nine months after the failure of Boeing’s pioneering Starliner capsule scuppered their originally scheduled week-long mission.

A SpaceX Dragon capsule containing four astronauts, including Starliner’s test pilots Sunita Williams and Barry “Butch” Wilmore, undocked from the orbiting outpost at 1.05am ET (5.05am GMT). The spacecraft is scheduled for a splashdown somewhere off the Florida coast at about 6pm ET after a 17-hour descent, with mission managers determining the precise location after assessing weather conditions.

Williams and Wilmore arrived at the ISS on 6 June last year, intending to stay long enough to evaluate Starliner’s docking and operational capabilities during its first crewed flight and return home no more than 10 days later.

But a series of technical issues and safety fears led Nasa and Boeing to send the capsule back to Earth empty in September, and extend the pair’s stay by making them crew members onboard the space station in place of two other astronauts still on the ground who were reassigned to other future missions.

“We’ll miss you, but have a great journey home,” Nasa’s Anne McClain called out from the space station as the capsule pulled away 260 miles (418km) above the Pacific.

Also onboard the capsule are the American Nicholas Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov.

“Crew-9 is going home,” said Hague from inside the capsule as it slowly backed up and away from the station for what a Nasa official described on the live webcast of the event as “the trip downhill”.

Hague said it was a privilege to “call the station home” as part of an international effort for the “benefit of humanity”.

The Nasa official said the weather conditions for the splashdown were expected to be “pristine”.

Dressed in re-entry suits, boots and helmets, the astronauts were seen earlier on Nasa’s live footage laughing, hugging and posing for photos with their colleagues from the station shortly before they were shut into the capsule for two hours of final pressure, communications and seal tests.

In the months since Williams and Wilmore’s arrival, their odyssey has become something of a political football, with the SpaceX founder and Donald Trump acolyte Elon Musk insisting without evidence they were “abandoned” by the Biden administration, and Trump attempting to paint last week’s long-scheduled routine crew rotation flight as a special rescue mission ordered by the White House.

The fallout left the astronauts in an awkward position, with Wilmore telling reporters from space earlier this month that Musk’s claim he offered to bring them home last year, but was rebuffed by Joe Biden, was “absolutely factual”, while admitting: “We have no information on … what was offered, what was not offered, who it was offered to, how that process went.”

Yet in February he told CNN: “We don’t feel abandoned, we don’t feel stuck, we don’t feel stranded. I understand why others may think that … if you’ll help us change the rhetoric, help us change the narrative, let’s change it to ‘prepared and committed’, that’s what we prefer.”

Musk, meanwhile, became embroiled in a public dispute with the Danish astronaut and space station veteran Andreas Mogensen, who accused him of lying, and pointed out that Tuesday’s return of Williams and Wilmore, alongside their ISS Crew 9 colleagues was scheduled as long ago as September.

In response, Musk posted to the X platform he owns that Mogensen was “fully retarded”, drawing him deeper into conflict with retired astronauts and ISS veterans and brothers Scott and Mark Kelly, who defended their European colleague.

The bad blood has continued, with Musk calling Mark Kelly, Democratic senator for Arizona, “a traitor” for visiting Ukraine and urging US military and humanitarian support for the country in its war against Russia; and the politician retorting that Musk was “not a serious guy”. Kelly has also ditched his Tesla car, manufactured by another of Musk’s companies, in protest at the billionaire’s role in slashing federal budgets and staffing.

Tuesday’s splashdown is scheduled for 5.57pm ET, but is likely to change depending on an assessment of weather and sea conditions before Dragon’s final de-orbit burn and re-entry to Earth’s atmosphere.

Live coverage of the final stages of the descent, including the splashdown and crew recovery, will be broadcast on Nasa TV and new streaming service Nasa+, followed by a later press conference.

The future of Boeing’s Starliner capsule, developed as part of Nasa’s commercial crew program, remains uncertain. Engineers have examined the spacecraft at its White Sands, New Mexico, base attempting to find the cause of problems that arose during its maiden crewed flight, including thruster issues and a series of small helium leaks.

Aviation Week reported that Starliner was unlikely to fly again in 2025, but that the company retained confidence in its product and was working towards earning a new flight readiness certification.

The Trump administration claimed to a federal judge on Monday that it did not recall deportation flights of hundreds of suspected Venezuelan gang members over the weekend despite his specific instructions because that was not expressly included in the formal written order issued afterwards.

The administration also said that even if James Boasberg, the chief US district judge in Washington, had included that instruction in his formal order, his authority to compel the planes to return disappeared the moment the planes entered international airspace.

The extraordinary arguments suggested the White House took advantage of its own perceived uncertainty with a federal court order to do as it pleased, testing the limits of the judicial system to hold to account an administration set on circumventing adverse rulings.

An incredulous Boasberg at one stage asked the administration: “Isn’t then the better course to return the planes to the United States and figure out what to do, than say: ‘We don’t care; we’ll do what we want’?”

The showdown between the administration and the judge reached a crescendo over the weekend after the US president secretly invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport, without normal due process, Venezuelans over age 14 who the government says belong to the Tren de Aragua gang.

The underlying basis for Trump to invoke the statute is unclear because it historically requires the president to identify a state adversary, and Boasberg on Saturday issued a temporary restraining order blocking deportations of five Venezuelans who had filed suit against the government.

At an emergency hearing on Saturday evening, Boasberg extended his injunction to block the deportation of all Venezuelan migrants using Alien Enemies Act authority, and told the administration that any deportation flights already in the air needed to be recalled.

By the time of the hearing, two flights had already taken off and a third flight left after Boasberg issued his ruling. All three flights landed in El Salvador, where the deportees were taken to a special maximum security prison, after Boasberg issued his written order.

The Trump administration claimed at a hearing on Monday that it believed it had complied with the written order issued by Boasberg, which did not include his verbal instructions for any flights already departed to return to the US.

“Oral statements are not injunctions and the written orders always supersede whatever may have been stated in the record,” Abhishek Kambli, the deputy assistant attorney general for the justice department’s civil division, argued for the administration.

The judge appeared unimpressed by that contention. “You felt that you could disregard it because it wasn’t in the written order. That’s your first argument? The idea that because my written order was pithier so it could be disregarded, that’s one heck of a stretch,” Boasberg said.

The administration also suggested that even if Boasberg had included the directive in his written order, by the time he had granted the temporary restraining order, the deportation flights were outside of the judge’s jurisdiction.

The judge expressed similar skepticism at the second argument, noting that federal judges still have authority over US government officials who make the decisions about the planes, even if the planes themselves were outside of US airspace.

“The problem is the equitable power of United States courts is not so limited,” Boasberg said. “It’s not a question that the plane was or was not in US airspace.” Boasberg added. “My equitable powers are pretty clear that they do not lapse at the airspace’s edge.”

At times, the Trump administration appeared to touch on a separate but related position that the judge’s authority to block the deportations clashed with Trump’s authority to direct US military forces and foreign relations without review by the courts.

Boasberg expressed doubt at the strength of that argument, as well as Kambli’s separate claim that he could not provide more details about when the deportation flights took off and how many flights left the US on Saturday, before and possibly after his order.

Kambli said he was not authorized to provide those details on account of national security concerns, even in private, to the judge himself. Asked whether the information was classified, Kambli demurred. Boasberg ordered the government to provide him with more information by noon on Tuesday.

The statements offered by the administration in federal district court in Washington offered a more legally refined version of public statements from White House officials about the possibility that they had defied a court order.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt insisted on Monday that the administration acted within “the bounds of immigration law in this country” and said the Trump team did not believe a verbal order carried the same legal weight as a written order.

But the White House’s “border czar” Tom Homan offered greater defiance at the court order and told Fox News in an interview that the court order came too late for Boasberg to have jurisdiction over the matter, saying: “I don’t care what the judges think.”

Donald Trump said on Monday he was ending “immediately” the Secret Service protection details assigned to Joe Biden’s adult children, which the former president had extended to July shortly before leaving office in January.

Trump posted his intention on Truth Social after a reporter asked him about Hunter Biden’s Secret Service detail: “Hunter Biden has had Secret Service protection for an extended period of time, all paid for by the United States Taxpayer,” Trump said.

“Please be advised that, effective immediately, Hunter Biden will no longer receive Secret Service protection. Likewise, Ashley Biden who has 13 agents will be taken off the list,” Trump added.

There was no immediate reaction from the former president’s office.

Former presidents and their spouses receive lifelong Secret Service protection under federal law, but the protection afforded to their immediate families over the age of 16 ends when they leave office, though both Trump and Biden extended the details for their children for six months before leaving office.

While touring the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts on Monday afternoon, a reporter asked Trump if he would revoke the protection for the former president’s son.

“Well, we have done that with many. I would say if there are 18 with Hunter Biden, that will be something I’ll look at this afternoon,” Trump said, who added this was the first time he heard about the matter.

“I’m going to take a look at that,” he said.

This would not be the first instance of Trump revoking security details, in January, he revoked the security details for Mike Pompeo, Trump’s former secretary of state; Brian Hook, a former top aide; and John Bolton, his former national security adviser, within 72 hours of Trump’s second term beginning.

Trump’s decision to remove their security details, which were believed to be provided by the state department, comes despite warnings from the Biden administration that both men faced ongoing threats from Iran due to actions they took following Trump’s orders during his first term as president.

Under US protocol, senior officials other than former presidents and their spouses are not automatically guaranteed ongoing protection. But US intelligence agencies deemed Hook, Pompeo and Bolton to be under significant risk, which prompted the Biden administration to grant them protection.

Marina Dunbar contributed reporting

An Italian newspaper has said it is the first in the world to publish an edition entirely produced by artificial intelligence.

The initiative by Il Foglio, a conservative liberal daily, is part of a month-long journalistic experiment aimed at showing the impact AI technology has “on our way of working and our days”, the newspaper’s editor, Claudio Cerasa, said.

The four-page Il Foglio AI has been wrapped into the newspaper’s slim broadsheet edition, and is available on newsstands and online from Tuesday.

“It will be the first daily newspaper in the world on newsstands created entirely using artificial intelligence,” said Cerasa. “For everything. For the writing, the headlines, the quotes, the summaries. And, sometimes, even for the irony.” He added that journalists’ roles would be limited to “asking questions [into an AI tool] and reading the answers”.

The experiment comes as news organisations around the world grapple with how AI should be deployed. Earlier this month, the Guardian reported that BBC News was to use AI to give the public more personalised content.

The front page of the first edition of Il Foglio AI carries a story referring to the US president, Donald Trump, describing the “paradox of Italian Trumpians” and how they rail against “cancel culture” yet either turn a blind eye, or worse, “celebrate” when “their idol in the US behaves like the despot of a banana republic”.

The front page also features a column headlined “Putin, the 10 betrayals”, with the article highlighting “20 years of broken promises, torn-up agreements and words betrayed” by Vladimir Putin, the Russian president.

In a rare upbeat story about the Italian economy, another article points to the latest report from Istat, the national statistics agency, on the redistribution of income, which shows the country “is changing, and not for the worse” with salary increases for about 750,000 workers being among the positive effects of income tax reforms.

On page 2 is a story about “situationships” and how young Europeans are fleeing steady relationships.

The articles were structured, straightforward and clear, with no obvious grammatical errors.

However, none of the articles published in the news pages directly quote any human beings.

The final page runs AI-generated letters from readers to the editor, with one asking whether AI will render humans “useless” in the future. “AI is a great innovation, but it doesn’t yet know how to order a coffee without getting the sugar wrong,” reads the AI-generated response.

Cerasa said Il Foglio AI reflected “a real newspaper” and was the product of “news, debate and provocations”. But it was also a testing ground to show how AI could work “in practice”, he said, while seeing what the impact would be on producing a daily newspaper with the technology and the questions “we are forced to ask ourselves, not only from a journalistic nature”.

“It is just another [Il] Foglio made with intelligence, don’t call it artificial,” Cerasa said.

An Italian newspaper has said it is the first in the world to publish an edition entirely produced by artificial intelligence.

The initiative by Il Foglio, a conservative liberal daily, is part of a month-long journalistic experiment aimed at showing the impact AI technology has “on our way of working and our days”, the newspaper’s editor, Claudio Cerasa, said.

The four-page Il Foglio AI has been wrapped into the newspaper’s slim broadsheet edition, and is available on newsstands and online from Tuesday.

“It will be the first daily newspaper in the world on newsstands created entirely using artificial intelligence,” said Cerasa. “For everything. For the writing, the headlines, the quotes, the summaries. And, sometimes, even for the irony.” He added that journalists’ roles would be limited to “asking questions [into an AI tool] and reading the answers”.

The experiment comes as news organisations around the world grapple with how AI should be deployed. Earlier this month, the Guardian reported that BBC News was to use AI to give the public more personalised content.

The front page of the first edition of Il Foglio AI carries a story referring to the US president, Donald Trump, describing the “paradox of Italian Trumpians” and how they rail against “cancel culture” yet either turn a blind eye, or worse, “celebrate” when “their idol in the US behaves like the despot of a banana republic”.

The front page also features a column headlined “Putin, the 10 betrayals”, with the article highlighting “20 years of broken promises, torn-up agreements and words betrayed” by Vladimir Putin, the Russian president.

In a rare upbeat story about the Italian economy, another article points to the latest report from Istat, the national statistics agency, on the redistribution of income, which shows the country “is changing, and not for the worse” with salary increases for about 750,000 workers being among the positive effects of income tax reforms.

On page 2 is a story about “situationships” and how young Europeans are fleeing steady relationships.

The articles were structured, straightforward and clear, with no obvious grammatical errors.

However, none of the articles published in the news pages directly quote any human beings.

The final page runs AI-generated letters from readers to the editor, with one asking whether AI will render humans “useless” in the future. “AI is a great innovation, but it doesn’t yet know how to order a coffee without getting the sugar wrong,” reads the AI-generated response.

Cerasa said Il Foglio AI reflected “a real newspaper” and was the product of “news, debate and provocations”. But it was also a testing ground to show how AI could work “in practice”, he said, while seeing what the impact would be on producing a daily newspaper with the technology and the questions “we are forced to ask ourselves, not only from a journalistic nature”.

“It is just another [Il] Foglio made with intelligence, don’t call it artificial,” Cerasa said.

A Canadian entrepreneur and actor in the American Pie movie franchise said she was detained for almost two weeks in “inhumane” conditions by US border authorities over an incomplete visa.

Jasmine Mooney, an actor who is also co-founder of the beverage brand Holy! Water, was detained on 3 March in San Diego, California.

The 35-year-old Canadian citizen’s work visa to the US was reportedly revoked back in November while traveling from Vancouver to Los Angeles, and she was attempting to file a new application.

“Every single guard that sees me is like, ‘What are you doing here? I don’t understand. You’re Canadian. How are you here?’” Mooney said in an interview with ABC 10 last week from the Arizona immigration detention center where she was being held.

Her mother, Alexis Eagles, who lives in British Columbia, says Mooney was detained at the San Ysidro border crossing between Mexico and San Diego, the busiest land border crossing in the world, on 3 March with an incomplete application for a work visa. Eagles told the Vancouver Sun that instead of sending her daughter to Canada or advising her to fix her application, US Customs and Border Protection officers arrested her.

Mooney had not been charged with any crime and does not have a prior criminal record.

She spent three nights in the detention centre, then was transferred. “We eventually learned that about 30 people, including Jasmine, were removed from their cells at 3am and transferred to the San Luis detention center in Arizona,” Eagles said.

“They are housed together in a single concrete cell with no natural light, fluorescent lights that are never turned off, no mats, no blankets, and limited bathroom facilities.”

Every time Mooney was transferred, she was handcuffed and in chains, Eagles claimed.

Mooney told ABC 10 that she was appalled by the conditions inside the private detention facility in San Luis where she was being kept.

“I have never in my life seen anything so inhumane,” she said. “I was put in a cell, and I had to sleep on a mat with no blanket, no pillow, with an aluminum foil wrapped over my body like a dead body for two and a half days.”

Mooney was profiled in BC Business magazine in 2019 for her work in the hospitality industry. According to the profile, she moved from the Yukon to Vancouver in 2008 to study at the British Columbia Institute of Technology. From there, she went to acting school, before owning and operating a bar.

She has said she had a three-year US work visa, which her mother said was revoked as she attempted to travel back to Los Angeles, where she was living, after a holiday in Canada. It was unclear why Mooney’s earlier visa was revoked, or why she was at the southern border this month. However, she told ABC she got her first visa at the San Ysidro border crossing on the advice of a Los Angeles attorney, who met her at the border, and therefore may have thought it would work a second time at that location.

The Guardian contacted US Customs and Border Protection for comment.

Mooney was released over the weekend and landed at Vancouver international airport shortly after midnight on Saturday morning.

“I’m still, to be honest, really processing everything,” Mooney told reporters who were waiting for her at the airport’s international arrivals area.

“I haven’t slept in a while and haven’t eaten proper food in a while, so I’m just really going through the motions,” she told CTV News.

“Thank you for all your messages of support. I’m sorry if I haven’t been able to respond to everyone – just got home after what felt like escaping a deeply disturbing psychological experiment,” she added in a post on her Instagram account.

Former bosses at the hospital where Lucy Letby worked have been accused of “opportunistically” calling for the public inquiry into her crimes to be halted to hide their “catastrophic” failures.

The former executives at the Countess of Chester hospital said for the first time on Tuesday they believed there was a “real likelihood” Letby was innocent, as they called for the probe to be paused.

However, families of the jailed nurse’s victims said the senior managers were attempting to evade responsibility for their “many failures”.

“The applications to stop the inquiry are, on Letby’s part, an attempt to control the narrative, and on the part of the executives to avoid criticism,” said Richard Baker KC, representing the parents of 12 of the babies.

Letby, 35, is serving 15 whole-life prison terms after being convicted of murdering seven babies and attempting to kill another seven at the Countess of Chester hospital in north-west England. The former nurse, who has always protested her innocence, has lost two attempts to overturn her convictions at the court of appeal.

The Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), which investigates potential miscarriages of justice, is examining fresh material submitted by a range of experts on behalf of Letby last month.

The inquiry chair, Lady Justice Thirlwall, is due to publish her final report in the autumn after receiving evidence from hundreds of witnesses.

Lawyers for Letby and the former executives have argued it would be wrong for the judge to continue with her report after an international panel of experts found no evidence she had murdered or harmed any of the infants she was accused of attacking.

Kate Blackwell KC, the barrister for the former leaders, said concerns about Letby’s guilt had been “dismissed as noise” by the Thirlwall inquiry but must now be addressed.

She said the judge must “consider carefully before producing a report based upon the bedrock of Lucy Letby’s convictions”, adding: “The increasing concerns expressed by world-class experts are in real danger of dissolving that bedrock into a beach of shifting sands.”

The former bosses – who include the hospital’s ex-chief executive Tony Chambers and former medical director Ian Harvey – are expected to face criticism from Thirlwall over their handling of the case.

In a closing statement published on Tuesday – the penultimate day of hearings – the former executives said there appeared to be a “real likelihood” that there were “alternative explanations” for the deaths and that the judge’s final report should be paused, or significantly reduced, until the outcome of Letby’s appeal.

Baker, for the families, said this was a “naked attempt by the executives to avoid criticism” and should be dismissed.

He said Letby’s new defence team had mounted a “slick media campaign” to promote her claims of innocence. The parents of babies who died, he said, did not want their lives to be a “sideshow within a ghoulish media circus”.

“For all the bells and whistles that might be attached to a press conference, there is nothing remarkable or new about the evidence being presented,” Baker added. “The theories may have altered but this could hardly be said to be new evidence.”

Peter Skelton KC, for the families of seven of the babies, said the executives had “catastrophically” failed to ensure patient safety and were now “attempting opportunistically to suspend the inquiry’s work”.

“What has been presented with great fanfare as new and incontrovertible evidence turns out to be old and full of analytical flaws,” he told the inquiry, describing the new medical hypothesis as based on “fragile towers of speculation”.

Blackwell, for the executives, denied that their attempt to halt the inquiry represented an “evasion of accountability”.

Even if Letby was innocent of harming the babies, she said, that would “not necessarily exonerate” the former bosses. “There were significant issues affecting the Countess of Chester hospital at the relevant time, which led to the deaths of babies on the neonatal unit, which should not have happened,” she said.

“If Lucy Letby’s convictions are ultimately quashed, questions will of course remain for the senior managers. But these questions will then be based on a wholly different factual scenario.”

She said the former executives accepted that they should have contacted police nearly a year earlier, and that “they should have been more open, they should have been more candid” with the families of the babies.

The arrest of Rodrigo Duterte is a welcome sign that the rules-based order continues to hold, the Nobel laureate Maria Ressa has said, even as the global order has been marred by the US “descending into hell” at the hands of the same forces that consumed the Philippines.

Ressa’s remarks came after Duterte, the former president of the Philippines, made his first appearance before the international criminal court (ICC) in The Hague, accused of committing crimes against humanity during his brutal “war on drugs”.

His arrest and the trial suggest that the thousands of victims and their families – rights groups estimate that as many as 30,000 people were killed during the years-long crackdown – may finally see justice, said Ressa. “There’s a sense that impunity ends and that the idea of an international, rules-based order can perhaps still exist.”

The American-Filipina journalist, however, found it impossible to untangle the news from the bigger picture. In 2016 Duterte had become the “first president elected with social media”, she said, seizing on the ubiquity of Facebook in the Philippines to, as her reporting has documented, mobilise online mobs and spread disinformation. Now, she said, the same tactics were being used to undermine democracy around the world, particularly in the US.

“I joke all the time that the Philippines went from hell to purgatory … My only worry is that the west and America is at the stage we were at in 2016, when you’re descending to hell,” she said. “To watch this deja vu twice, it’s like a bad punishment for me.”

As a cofounder of the Rappler news site, Ressa was at the forefront of exposing the propaganda spread by online trolls during Duterte’s time in power, alongside his government’s alleged abuses of power and growing authoritarianism.

Ressa, who in 2021 was awarded the Nobel peace prize in recognition of her determination to uphold freedom of expression, spoke to the Guardian from Berlin, where she was participating in a “people’s court” that has this week put social media on trial, examining how it interacts with polarisation, radicalisation and misinformation.

The week-long Social Media Tribunal, which has no legal powers, will hear testimonies from sources that range from a Facebook whistleblower to a Rohingya campaigner and victims of cyberstalking and sextortion before handing down its “judgment” on Friday.

Backed by the rights group Cinema for Peace and Ukraine’s Center for Civil Liberties, and created under the patronage of Benjamin Ferencz, who until his death in 2023 was the last surviving prosecutor from the Nuremberg trials, the initiative aims to ramp up pressure for international accountability. In 2023, the same campaigners were behind a similar “people’s court” that put the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, on trial for the crime of aggression after his invasion of Ukraine.

The tribunal in Berlin was opened on Monday by Ressa, who cited a whistleblower on how, more than a decade ago, the Philippines was alleged to have been used as a “petri dish” to test out the interplay between social media and tactics of mass manipulation. “If it worked in our country, they went to the west, specifically targeting America,” said Ressa.

As falsehoods, many of them laced with fear, hate and outrage, began hurtling across social media in the Philippines, Ressa travelled to Silicon Valley to sound the alarm. “I felt like Cassandra and Sisyphus combined,” she said. “And I think people just kind of thought, ‘oh that’s interesting, that’s never going to happen here.’”

Years later, the world watched as the 2024 US presidential elections played out against a similar backdrop, giving rise to an ecosystem that continues to prop up the Trump administration. Ressa, who last year described “tech bros” such as Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk as “the largest dictators” said the US was now staring down “the greatest challenge democracy will face”.

She said: “Because when you give the broligarchy state power – ie the most powerful country in the world at this moment in time – who knows what will happen?”

What she did know was that time was of the essence. “What we learned in the Philippines is that you are at your greatest power when the attacks begin. If you are silent, you give consent. If you are silent, you give up your rights,” she said. “This is that moment where you have to ask yourself, what are you willing to sacrifice for the truth? Because if you don’t, if you bury your head in the sand like an ostrich, you will lose your rights.”

She pointed to the Philippines to highlight what was at stake. As Rappler refused to back down from publishing stories about Duterte’s administration, Ressa fended off a barrage of hate – at one point the messages soared to 98 an hour, she said – and faced 10 criminal charges. Two years after Duterte left office, she has won most of the cases but two charges remain, forcing her to request court permission each time she wants to leave the country.

Duterte’s arrest last week laid bare a nation still divided: while supporters took to the streets in his strongholds, others continue to grapple with the painful fallout of a years-long anti-drug campaign that saw thousands of people – many of them men in poorer, urban areas – gunned down in the streets.

“In 2016, when the drug war began, I was like ‘Oh my god, this is going to affect a generation of Filipinos’. And it has,” she said. “So yes, he’s arrested but there’s so much damage that now needs to get rebuilt.”

She cast it as a sort of cautionary tale for the US and west, one that pointed to how the free rein of technology could pave the way for populism to be tipped into authoritarianism. “If you do not protect your rights today, what’s destroyed takes a hell of a long time to rebuild.”

Google’s owner, Alphabet, has agreed to buy the cybersecurity group Wiz for $32bn (£24.7bn), the biggest acquisition it has ever made.

The search giant’s purchase of the Israeli startup comes as Google attempts to catch its competitors Microsoft and Amazon in the competitive cloud services market.

Wiz, which offers a service that scans the data on cloud storage providers such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure for security risks, turned down a $23bn takeover bid from Alphabet last summer.

The talks failed in part because Wiz and some of its investors were concerned about gaining clearance from regulators.

Alphabet has agreed to pay a $3.2bn fee if the deal fails to complete, as the takeover marks a test of the Trump administration’s appetite to follow former president Joe Biden’s lead in taking on Big Tech.

US justice department officials are trying to force Google to sell off its Chrome browser to dismantle its monopoly it has over the search market.

Wiz, which has offices in New York and Israel and opened its European headquarters in London last year, was founded in 2020 by alumni of the Israeli Intelligence Corps’ Unit 8200. It has the backing of investors including the venture capital firms Sequoia, Thrive and Advent International.

Following the acquisition, Wiz will retain its brand and operate independently of Google, mirroring the way Microsoft operates LinkedIn, according to sources familiar with the deal.

Wiz will also continue to work with, and be available across, all major cloud platforms including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud.

Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Google, said: “Together, Google Cloud and Wiz will turbocharge improved cloud security and the ability to use multiple clouds. Today, businesses and governments that run in the cloud are looking for even stronger security solutions, and greater choice in cloud computing providers.”

When Wiz rejected Alphabet’s $23bn offer, Assaf Rappaport, the startup’s chief executive, said he was “flattered” by the offer but wanted to focus on growth with an eye to floating on the stock market instead.

“This is an exciting moment for our company, but an even more important one for customers and partners,” Rappaport said on Tuesday.

Dan Ives, an analyst at the US broker and investment manager Wedbush, said: “Wiz has become a household name for chief information officers as the Israeli cybersecurity player has a strong cloud cybersecurity platform and customer base that is going after a $1trn market opportunity.

“For Google this [will] be a shot across the bow at other big tech stalwarts, especially Microsoft and Amazon, making a major bet on the cybersecurity space to complement its cloud offering.”

Wiz has said its revenues are $750m annually. Wedbush estimated that Google could drive it to a $1bn-plus business over the coming years “given the company’s massive installed base and go-to-market strategy globally”.

Alphabet’s previous biggest deal was its $12.5bn acquisition of Motorola Mobility in 2012, which it sold two years later for $2.9bn.

Three years ago Alphabet paid $5.4bn to acquire the cybersecurity company Mandiant, to bolster its Google Cloud product. Other deals include paying $1.65bn for YouTube in 2006, and buying the UK AI startup DeepMind for about £400m in 2014.

Alphabet is keen to diversify its business away from its dependence on search-related advertising. The company hopes that Wiz will help it to increase its global market share of the cloud market from 12%, a distant third behind Microsoft Azure at 21% and Amazon Web Services, which has almost a third.

Ives said: “While this deal is expected to see further regulatory scrutiny across the board, we view this as a strategic move by Google to further bolster its cloud security offering and value proposition to enterprises as the company doubles down on its cloud and AI initiatives moving forward.”

A man has been found guilty over the theft of a £4.8m gold toilet from the Oxfordshire country house where Winston Churchill was born.

Blenheim Palace’s 18-carat lavatory was stolen in September 2019 while it was featuring in an art exhibition.

The fully functioning toilet, created by the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, was plumbed in at the time of the heist, causing flooding and damage to the 18th-century house in Woodstock.

Michael Jones was convicted of planning the burglary. The jury is still considering verdicts for two other men charged with conspiring to sell the gold.

James Sheen, 39, from Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, previously pleaded guilty to burglary, converting or transferring criminal property and conspiracy to do the same at Oxford crown court.

More details soon …