Extreme volatility plagued global stock markets on Monday, with Wall Street swinging in and out of the red as Donald Trump defied stark warnings that his global trade assault will wreak widespread economic damage, comparing new US tariffs to medicine.

A renewed sell-off began in Asia, before hitting European equities and reaching the US. It was briefly reversed amid hopes of a reprieve, only for Trump to threaten China with more steep tariffs, intensifying pressure on the market.

On Wall Street, the benchmark S&P 500 dropped by as much as 4.1% – entering bear market territory after falling more than 20% from its most recent peak, in February – before launching an extraordinary reversal to turn positive.

While markets were fleetingly boosted after Kevin Hassett, director of the White House national economic council, signaled that Trump was open to considering a 90-day pause on tariffs for all countries but China, the relief did not last long.

After hours of turbulent trading, the S&P closed down 0.2%. The Dow Jones industrial average finished down 0.9%.

“We’re not looking at that,” Trump told reporters, when asked about the prospect of a pause. Pressed on whether the tariffs set the stage for negotiations with countries, or were permanent, he replied: “Well, it can both be true. There can be permanent tariffs, and there can also be negotiations.”

The FTSE 100 closed down 4.38% in London at 7,702.08 – the lowest close in more than a year – after the Nikkei 225 slumped 7.8% in Tokyo. Other major European also ended the day sharply lower, including Germany’s DAX and France’s CAC which both fell more than 4%.

Trump, who has previously used market rallies as a barometer of his success, tried to brush off the sell-off this weekend. “I don’t want anything to go down,” the US president said on Sunday. “But sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something.”

He stood firm on Monday. “The United States has a chance to do something that should have been done DECADES AGO,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. “Don’t be Weak! Don’t be Stupid!”

As China prepares to retaliate, Trump threatened to further increase US tariffs on the country – an additional rate of 50% – if it hits back. All talks with Beijing over potential meetings have been “terminated”, he said.

Major share indices have fallen dramatically since he unveiled his controversial plan to overhaul the US economy last week. The Trump administration imposed a blanket 10% tariff on imported goods this weekend, and is set to follow with higher tariffs on products from specific nations from Wednesday.

While senior figures in corporate America have been reluctant to criticize Trump since his inauguration in January, a handful have started to sound the alarm in recent days.

Larry Fink, CEO of the investment giant BlackRock, expressed concern on Monday over the threat of a downturn. “The economy is weakening as we speak,” he said at the Economic Club of New York, according to Bloomberg. “Most CEOs I talk to would say we are probably in a recession right now.”

The JPMorgan Chase boss, Jamie Dimon, one of the most influential executives on Wall Street, warned that Trump’s tariff plan was “likely” to exacerbate inflation. “Whether or not the menu of tariffs causes a recession remains in question, but it will slow down growth,” he wrote in his annual letter to shareholders.

Dimon added: “The quicker this issue is resolved, the better because some of the negative effects increase cumulatively over time and would be hard to reverse.”

The billionaire fund manager Bill Ackman, who backed Trump’s campaign for the presidency, has also demanded the administration reconsider its plan. “We are heading for a self-induced, economic nuclear winter,” he wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

Even Elon Musk, a close ally of Trump, currently leading the so-called “department of government efficiency” inside the government, appeared to break with the administration on the issue. Peter Navarro, Trump’s top trade adviser, “ain’t built shit”, Musk wrote on X, which he owns, this weekend.

Navarro, for his part, insisted in a television interview on Monday morning that the stock market would find a bottom. Less than hour later, when New York opened for trading, the search continued.

The technology-focused Nasdaq Composite started the day down 4.3%, before switching in and out of the red. It ended the day broadly flat, up by 0.1%. The VIX “fear index” of volatility rose as high as 60 for the first time since August.

Oil prices also came under pressure, with Brent and WTI benchmarks stooping to their lowest levels in four years, as growing economic tensions between Washington and Beijing stoked fears that a global downturn would challenge demand.

Sir Richard Branson, co-founder of Virgin Group, argued the “predictable and preventable” market chaos would have “catastrophic” implications for people in the US and around the world, and claimed companies were already going bankrupt as a result of the weaker dollar and higher costs.

“This is the moment to own up to a colossal mistake and change course,” Branson wrote on X. “Otherwise, America will face ruin for years to come.”

Donald Trump has threatened to impose an additional 50% tariff on imports from China on Wednesday unless the country rescinds its retaliatory tariffs on the United States by Tuesday.

The news comes on the third day of catastrophic market falls around the globe since Trump announced his trade war last Wednesday with tariffs on the US’s trading partners.

As part of that move the White House announced it would impose a 34% tariff on Chinese imports. In response, Beijing announced a 34% tariff on US imports.

In a statement on Truth Social on Monday morning, the US president said that China enacted the retaliatory tariffs despite his “warning that any country that Retaliates against the U.S. by issuing additional Tariffs” would be “immediately met with new and substantially higher Tariffs, over and above those initially set”.

“If China does not withdraw its 34% increase above their already long term trading abuses by tomorrow, April 8th, 2025, the United States will impose ADDITIONAL Tariffs on China of 50%, effective April 9th,” Trump wrote.

“Additionally, all talks with China concerning their requested meetings with us will be terminated!” he added. “Negotiations with other countries, which have also requested meetings, will begin taking place immediately.”

A senior White House official told ABC News that the increased tariffs on China would be on top of the 34% reciprocal tariff Trump announced last week and the 20% already in place.

Trump’s new ultimatum to China marked the latest escalation from the White House and came as US stocks swung in and out of the red on Monday morning as a report circulated that Trump was going to pause the implementation of his sweeping tariffs for 90 days, but then was quickly dismissed by the White House as “fake news”.

Not long after Trump threatened China with additional tariffs on Monday morning, he participated in a White House visit from the Los Angeles Dodgers to celebrate their World Series title.

The EU has said it offered the US a “zero-for-zero” tariff deal on cars and industrial goods weeks before Donald Trump launched his trade war, but that it would “not wait endlessly” to defend itself.

Maros Šefčovič, the EU commissioner for trade, said he had proposed zero tariffs on cars and a range of industrial goods, such as pharmaceutical products, rubber and machinery, during his first meeting with the US commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, on 19 February.

He said the EU remained open for talks, while suggesting nothing would be concluded soon: “Right now we are in the early stages of discussions, because the US view tariffs not as a tactical step, but as a corrective measure.”

“While the EU remains open to and strongly prefers negotiations we will not wait endlessly,” Šefčovič added, listing EU actions including retaliatory countermeasures.

The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, said the EU had offered “zero-for-zero tariffs for industrial goods” and that offer remained on the table.

Trump has repeatedly railed against the US trade deficit in goods with the EU, focusing on cars. “They don’t take our cars, they don’t take our food products, they don’t take anything,” he said again over the weekend.

But Šefčovič rejected suggestions EU countries would abandon VAT, one of Trump’s grievances. He said the EU had spent “some time and energy” to explain to US counterparts how the sales tax works, citing its use in more than 160 countries. “We are ready to discuss, to look at things, but it has to be a mutually advantageous solution.”

The EU trade commissioner was speaking after it emerged that the union was likely to exempt US bourbon whiskey from its retaliation against Donald Trump’s tariffs, in a sign of tensions over how to handle the expanding trade war.

EU member states will vote on Wednesday over a first round of possible retaliation, in response to Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminium announced last month. The bloc vowed to target up to €26bn (£22.3bn) of emblematic US goods, such as Harley-Davidson motorbikes, orange juice and jeans, with tariffs due to come into force from 15 April. Some countries, notably France and Ireland, have been lobbying for bourbon to be dropped from the list, after Trump threatened 200% tariffs on French wine and champagne.

On Monday, a European Commission vice-president, Stéphane Séjourné, told French Inter Radio he had “a hope” that bourbon would be removed from the list in the coming hours, saying “the message has been taken that the economic impact could be major”.

But Germany’s economy minister, Robert Habeck, warned that handing out exemptions would undermine the EU’s retaliation. “The stock markets are already collapsing and the damage could become even greater. It is therefore important … to act clearly and decisively and prudently, which means realising that we are in a strong position. America is in a position of weakness,” Habeck told reporters.

“If every country is counted individually, and we have a problem here with red wine and there with whisky and pistachios, then it will all come to nothing,” he said.

Italy’s deputy prime minister, Antonio Tajani, suggested the EU could postpone enforcing counter-tariffs against the US until 30 April in order to create more time for dialogue, while stressing that Italy had no intention of putting the bloc “in difficulty”.

The Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, arranged to hold a meeting to discuss the tariffs and their impact on Italy with senior ministers later on Monday. According to reports in the Italian press, she is planning to go to Washington, possibly on 16 April, and intends to encourage Trump to halve the 20% tariff imposed on the EU.

Meloni said last week that “alarmism” over the tariffs may be worse than the actual tariffs, and on Sunday added that while her government didn’t agree with the measures it was “ready to deploy all tools” in order to shield Italian businesses.

Šefčovič said there could be no delay to the 15 April start date, citing EU procedures, but said the measures would fall short of the €26bn originally outlined. “We are not in the business of tit for tat, or penny for penny. We will do this because we are forced to and we still hope we will come to the fruitful mutual advantageous trading relationship.”

At a meeting of EU ministers in Luxembourg on Monday, differences also emerged over how to treat US tech companies, as the EU runs into limits on US goods it can target.

In the planned counter-tariffs, the bloc aims to target US products that can be easily replaced, such as soya beans and consumer goods, rather than, for example, liquified natural gas, imported energy that is helping the EU replace Russian gas.

France, which has called for a suspension of investment into the US, has said nothing should be off the table when it comes to retaliation. The French delegate for trade, Laurent Saint-Martin, said on Monday that no option on goods or services could be excluded and that the EU could be “extremely, extremely aggressive also in return”, referring to the bloc’s anti-coercion instrument.

He said: “Our end goal remains the same, to negotiate this escalation and negotiate back to where things were, and if it’s not possible, of course, [the] European Union must react, must react firmly and must react proportionately.”

But Ireland’s foreign minister, Simon Harris, rejected calls to target US tech companies, describing such a measure as “an extraordinary escalation at a time when we must be working for a de-escalation”.

The first face-to-face contact between the EU and the US administration over the tariffs will happen on Tuesday when Ireland’s agriculture minister meets his counterpart in Washington.

The Irish deputy prime minister will then meet the US commerce secretary in the US capital on Wednesday to press home Irish and EU interests in de-escalating the dispute, which affects the Irish dairy and pharma sectors.

The EU’s never-used anti-coercion law would allow the bloc to take wide-ranging measures against a country deemed to be using trade as a weapon, such as suspending intellectual property rights, revoking licences to do business in the EU and banning companies from bidding for public contracts.

Šefčovič, who was briefing ministers on his recent calls with senior US officials, said “a paradigm shift” in global trade was under way.

EU trade and economy ministers began meeting in Luxembourg as Trump’s tariffs continued to roil global stock markets, deepening last week’s two-day sell-off that analysts called one of the worst since the second world war. Trump’s tariffs are affecting €382bn of EU exports to the US.

Habeck, the outgoing German economy minister, also gave a blunt verdict on Trump tariffs, saying the US president’s widely derided models were “ridiculous” and describing recent comments by Elon Musk as “a sign of weakness”.

The billionaire adviser to the US president and owner of Tesla said over the weekend that he hoped to see complete freedom of trade between the US and Europe. Habeck said these comments were “a sign of weakness” and showed Musk was afraid for his own companies: “If [Musk] has something to say he should go to his president and say before we are talking about zero tariffs, let’s stop the nonsense, the mess you have just made in the last week.”

Trumps’s 20% tariff on all EU goods has been difficult to handle for his closest allies in Europe, such as Meloni, but also Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. Hungary’s foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, said he expected the European Commission to negotiate with the US and China and “to put solid suggestions on the table and succeed”.

The former Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi said on Monday that Meloni, who was the only European prime minister to attend Trump’s inauguration in January, should “distance herself” from Trump. “This doesn’t mean declaring war against America, this means defending our businesses,” he said.

A libertarian group backed by Leonard Leo and Charles Koch has mounted a legal challenge against Donald Trump’s tariff regime, in a sign of spreading rightwing opposition to a policy that has sent international markets plummeting.

The New Civil Liberties Alliance filed a suit against Trump’s imposition of import tariffs on exports from China, arguing that doing so under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) – which the president has invoked to justify the duties on nearly all countries – is unlawful.

The group’s actions echo support given by four Republican senators last week for a Democratic amendment calling for the reversal of 25% tariffs imposed on Canada.

Last Wednesday’s amendment passed with the support of Mitch McConnell, the former Republican Senate majority leader, and his fellow GOP members Rand Paul, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, who argued that tariffs on Canada would be economically harmful.

The action from the alliance has the potential to be even more emblematic, given its backing from Koch, a billionaire industrialist, and Leo, a wealthy legal activist who advised Trump on the nomination of three conservative supreme court justices during his first presidency, which has given the court a 6-3 rightwing majority. The group received money from organisations affiliated with Leo and Koch in 2022.

The alliance has tabled its action on behalf of Simplified, a Florida-based home goods company whose business is heavily reliant on imports from China. It argues that the president has exceeded his powers in invoking the IEEPA to justify tariffs.

“This statute authorizes specific emergency actions like imposing sanctions or freezing assets to protect the United States from foreign threats,” the alliance said in a statement. “It does not authorize the president to impose tariffs. In its nearly 50-year history, no other president – including President Trump in his first term – has ever tried to use the IEEPA to impose tariffs.”

The alliance also argues that power to impose tariffs lies not with a sitting president, but with Congress, and warns that those imposed by Trump could run afoul of US supreme court rulings.

“His attempt to use the IEEPA this way not only violates the law as written, but it also invites application of the supreme court’s major questions doctrine, which tells courts not to discern policies of ‘vast economic and political significance’ in a law without explicit congressional authorization,” its statement said.

Mark Chenoweth, the alliance’s president, said the court in Pensacola – where the suit has been filed – would have to observe this legal precedent.

“Reading this law [IEEPA] broadly enough to uphold the China tariff would transfer core legislative power,” he said. “To avoid that non-delegation pitfall, the court must construe the statute consistent with nearly 50 years of unbroken practice and decide it does not permit tariff setting.”

The suit argues that there is no connection between the fentanyl epidemic – which Trump has cited as a reason for invoking the emergency powers – and the tariffs.

“The means of an across-the-board tariff does not fit the end of stopping an influx of opioids, and is in no sense ‘necessary’ to that stated purpose,” the complaint filed on behalf of Simplified argues.

“In fact, President Trump’s own statements reveal the real reason for the China tariff, which is to reduce American trade deficits while raising federal revenue.”

The legal case adds to rumbling disquiet on tariffs among some of Trump’s usually vocal supporters, including the billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman.

Paul, a senator from Kentucky who has been one of the most consistent congressional anti-tariff voices, told the Washington Post that other Capitol Hill Republicans shared his concern.

“They all see the stock market, and they’re all worried about it,” Paul said. “But they are putting on a stiff upper lip to try to act as if nothing’s happening and hoping it goes away.”

Speaking in support of last week’s Democratic amendment, sponsored by the Virginia senator Tim Kaine, Paul said: “I don’t care if the president is a Republican or a Democrat. I don’t want to live under emergency rule. I don’t want to live where my representatives cannot speak for me and have a check and balance on power.”

Trump attacked Paul and the three other Republican senators who backed the amendment and suggested they were driven by “Trump derangement syndrome”.

In another sign of Republican concern, the GOP senator from Iowa Chuck Grassley – along with a Washington Democrat, Maria Cantrell – introduced a bill that would limit Trump’s ability to impose or increase tariffs by requiring Congress to approve them within 60 days. The White House budget office said on Monday that Trump would veto the bill.

A Danish chef couple who attracted international acclaim with a “forest resort” in Sweden have been tracked down to Guatemala after apparently going on the run from tax authorities, leaving behind 158 barrels of human waste.

Flemming Hansen and Mette Helbæk founded their purportedly eco-friendly retreat, Stedsans, in Halland, southern Sweden, after claiming to have “felt the call of the wild” in Copenhagen, where they ran a popular rooftop restaurant.

Stedsans, formed of 16 wooden cottages looking out on to nature, attracted praise from influencers and reviewers, who described it as “magical” and “enchanting luxury”.

But a few months ago it was discovered that the couple had vanished, leaving multiple animals behind and 158 barrels of human waste, an investigation by newspapers Dagens Nyheter and Politiken has found. It also found that wastewater was left to run into the forest.

Staff said multiple animals – including ducks – had died as a result of being left outside through the night by the couple, and others were left abandoned after the owners vanished.

Stedsans was declared bankrupt in March and the couple reportedly registered themselves as living abroad before Christmas.

According to the investigation, they left the Danish capital, where they owed millions of kroner in debt to Danish tax authorities, in 2016 to move to Sweden. There they set up Stedsans, but started accumulating debt to Swedish tax authorities, which reportedly amounted to 6m SEK (£470,000). They have since started a new hotel business in Guatemala.

In a message posted on their website, they said: “We came very far with Stedsans, but we also had to realise on the way that being soul-driven entrepreneurs on a mission in a country where taxes are some of the highest in the world and bureaucracy is relentless, it is an impossible task.”

They added: “When you read this we have probably been declared bankrupt by the Swedish tax authorities. All we ever wanted was to be a part of creating a more beautiful planet.”

Local authorities described their actions as “environmental crime”. Daniel Helsing, head of building and environment for the local county, Hylte, told Dagens Nyheter: “Voilà. Over 150 barrels of human shit.”

Hansen denied any problems with handling animals when approached by the newspaper. He described Swedish tax authorities as a “narcissistic entity” and said he believed he owed them “over 7m” SEK. He also claimed he was now “sentenced to a life in poverty”.

The Guardian contacted the Danish and Swedish tax authorities. The Danish tax agency said: “We have no comments here subject to confidentiality.” The Swedish tax agency did not comment on the case.

The Guardian has contacted Hansen and Helbæk for comment.

Autopsies conducted on 15 Palestinian paramedics and civil emergency responders who were killed by Israeli forces in Gaza show they were shot in the upper body with “intent to kill”, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent, which is demanding an international investigation into the attack.

The killings took place in the southern Gaza Strip on 23 March, days into a renewed Israeli offensive in the Hamas-ruled territory, and sparked international condemnation.

The results of the postmortems join a growing body of evidence that sharply contradicts Israel’s account of the incident, including video footage that shows the vehicles were travelling with headlights and flashing red lights that identified them, with personnel wearing hi-vis vests, at the time they were fired on.

Germany, one of Israel’s closest backers in the EU, called for an urgent investigation into the incident on Monday. “There are very significant questions about the actions of the Israeli army now,” the foreign ministry spokesperson Christian Wagner said after the video footage emerged.

“An investigation and accountability of the perpetrators are urgently needed,” he said, adding that a full investigation of the incident would be “a question that ultimately affects the credibility of the Israeli constitutional state”.

Those killed included eight Red Crescent staff, six members of the Gaza civil defence agency and one employee of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees.

The bodies were later found buried near the site of the shooting in the Tal al-Sultan area of Rafah city, in what the UN office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs described as a mass grave.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) initially said its soldiers “did not randomly attack” any ambulances, insisting they fired on “terrorists” that were approaching in “suspicious vehicles”.

Lt Col Nadav Shoshani said troops had opened fire on vehicles that had no prior clearance from Israeli authorities and had their lights off, a statement contradicted by video recovered from the mobile phone of one of those killed.

The IDF later changed its story and conceded its earlier account had been “mistaken”. It claimed on Sunday that at least six of the medics were linked to Hamas, but has provided no evidence. None of those killed were armed.

It said on Monday that its initial investigation into the killings had shown that the incident occurred “due to a sense of threat”, and claimed six Hamas militants had been in the vicinity.

The Israeli army chief, Lt Gen Eyal Zamir ordered a more in-depth investigation into the attack after completion of the initial one.

The president of the Red Crescent in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Younis al-Khatib, told journalists in Ramallah: “There has been an autopsy of the martyrs from the Red Crescent and civil defence teams. We cannot disclose everything we know, but I will say that all the martyrs were shot in the upper part of their bodies, with the intent to kill.”

He called for an international investigation into the killings, which the IDF has separately announced it was looking into.

“Why did you hide the bodies?” Khatib asked of the Israeli forces involved in the attack. “We call on the world to form an independent and impartial international commission of inquiry into the circumstances of the deliberate killing of the ambulance crews in the Gaza Strip.

“It is no longer sufficient to speak of respecting the international law and Geneva convention. It is now required from the international community and the UN security council to implement the necessary punishment against all who are responsible.”

In the past 18 months of war Israeli forces have conducted attacks that have killed hundreds of medical workers and the staff of NGOs and UN organisations, including foreign nationals working in Gaza. Six members of World Central Kitchen, including the Briton James Kirby, died in a sustained Israeli attack on their clearly marked vehicles.

Human rights organisations have long accused Israel of a culture of impunity with few soldiers ever facing justice.

A Palestinian journalist was killed and several others wounded on Monday, when Israel struck a media tent near Nasser hospital in Khan Younis.

According to the Palestinian Civil Defence, an organisation affiliated with Hamas’s interior ministry, two people – Helmi al-Faqawi and a civilian, Yousef al-Khazandar – were killed when the Palestine Today agency’s tent was struck.

Israel’s military razed huge swathes of land inside the perimeter of Gaza and ordered troops to turn the area into a “kill zone” where anybody who entered was a target, according to testimony by soldiers who carried out the plan.

Israeli combatants said they were ordered to destroy homes, factories and farmland roughly 1km (0.6 miles) inside the perimeter of Gaza to make a “buffer zone”, with one describing the area as looking like Hiroshima.

The testimonies are some of the first accounts by Israeli soldiers to be published since the latest war started in October 2023 after Hamas’s attack on Israel. They were collected by Breaking the Silence, a group founded in 2004 by Israeli veterans who aim to expose the reality of the military’s grip over Palestinians. The Guardian interviewed four of the soldiers who corroborated the accounts.

Titled “The Perimeter” and published on Monday, the report said the stated purpose of the plan was to create a thick strip of land that provided a clear line of sight for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to identify and kill militants. “This space was to have no crops, structures, or people. Almost every object, infrastructure installation, and structure within the perimeter was demolished,” it said.

Soldiers were “given orders to deliberately, methodically, and systematically annihilate whatever was within the designated perimeter, including entire residential neighbourhoods, public buildings, educational institutions, mosques, and cemeteries, with very few exceptions”, the report added.

The ultimate result, however, was the creation of “a death zone of enormous proportions”, the report said. “Places where people had lived, farmed, and established industry were transformed into a vast wasteland, a strip of land eradicated in its entirety.”

It stretches along the frontier with Israel, from the Mediterranean coast in the north to the strip’s south-east corner next to Egypt.

A sergeant in the combat engineers corps said that once an area in the perimeter “was pretty much empty of any Gazans, we essentially started getting missions that were about basically blowing up houses or what was left of the houses”.

This was the routine, they said: “Get up in the morning, each platoon gets five, six, or seven locations, seven houses that they’re supposed to work on. We didn’t know a lot about the places that we were destroying or why we were doing it. I guess those things today, from my perspective now, are not legitimate. What I saw there, as far as I can judge, was beyond what I can justify that was needed.”

Some soldiers testified that commanders viewed the destruction as a way of exacting revenge for the 7 October attacks by Hamas, which sparked the current war when Palestinian militants killed hundreds and kidnapped Israeli and foreign citizens.

While Israel says the war is targeted at Hamas, Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, is fighting allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity at the international criminal court, including starvation of civilians and “extermination”.

The IDF did not respond to a request for comment on the report and combatants’ accounts.

One of the soldiers who provided testimony to Breaking the Silence on condition of anonymity said their unit was told to shoot anyone in the perimeter area on sight. The mentality in their unit, they said, was that there was no such thing as a “civilian” and everyone who walked into the perimeter would be considered a “terrorist”.

Rules on who can be killed on sight appeared to vary for different units, according to the accounts.

A sergeant in the armoured corps said that in 2024 he was given “shoot to kill” orders for any male adult who entered the perimeter. “For women and children, [the order was] ‘shoot to drive away’, and if they come close to the fence, you stop [them]. You don’t kill women, children, or the elderly. ‘Shoot to drive away’ means a tank fire,” he said.

But a captain in an armoured corps unit who operated in Gaza earlier in the war, in November 2023, described the border area as a “kill zone”, saying: “The borderline is a kill zone. Anyone who crosses a certain line, that we have defined, is considered a threat and is sentenced to death.”

Another captain said there were “no clear rules of engagement at any point” and described a “generally massive use of firepower, especially, like with tanks”. They added: “There was a lot of instigating fire for the sake of instigating fire, somewhere between [wanting to produce] a psychological effect and just for no reason.

“[We] set out on this war out of insult, out of pain, out of anger, out of the sense that we had to succeed. This distinction [between civilians and terrorist infrastructure], it didn’t matter. Nobody cared. We decided on a line … past which everyone is a suspect.”

How Palestinians would know they were crossing an invisible line was not made clear to them, the soldiers said. “How they know is a really good question. Enough people died or got injured crossing that line, so they don’t go near it.”

Before the latest war, Israel had previously established a buffer zone inside Gaza that extended to 300 metres, but the new one was intended to range from 800 to 1,500 metres, according to the testimonies.

Satellite imagery has previously revealed the IDF destroyed hundreds of buildings that stood within 1km to 1.2km of the perimeter fence, in a systematic demolishing act that rights groups say may constitute collective punishment and should be investigated as a war crime. Last week, Israel’s defence minister said the military would seize “large areas” in Gaza in a fresh offensive.

The perimeter accounts for just over 15% of the Gaza Strip, which is entirely off-limits to Palestinian residents. It represents 35% of the strip’s entire agricultural land, according to the report.

Despite shoot-to-kill orders, a warrant officer stationed in northern Gaza said Palestinians kept going back to the area “again and again after we fired at them”.

The officer said the Palestinians appeared to want to pick edible plants growing in the area. “There was hubeiza [mallow] there because no one went near there. People are hungry, so they come with bags to pick hubeiza, I think.”

Some got away with their food and their lives, the officer said. “The thing is that, at that point, the IDF really is fulfilling the public’s wishes, which state: ‘There are no innocents in Gaza’.”

In an interview with the Guardian, the same officer said the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023 made many Israelis feel the “need to pick up a gun”.

“A lot of us went there, I went there, because they killed us and now we’re going to kill them,” they said. “And I found out that we’re not only killing them – we’re killing them, we’re killing their wives, their children, their cats, their dogs. We’re destroying their houses and pissing on their graves.”

An Israeli airstrike on a tent camp within a hospital complex in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis has killed 10 people, including a journalist, while seriously injuring dozens more after their encampment caught fire.

Images and video from the courtyard of Nasser hospital in Khan Younis showed people desperately attempting to extinguish the fires as it burned through a row of tents. One video showed people screaming as a bystander attempted to move a burning piece of furniture, while a journalist, later identified as Ahmed Mansour of the news outlet Palestine Today, sat upright engulfed by the blaze.

His colleague Helmi al-Faqawi was killed in the strike, while at least nine other journalists were among the wounded. Mansour received treatment for severe burns while the photographer Hassan Aslih was reportedly in a stable condition after suffering a head injury and cuts to his right hand.

The Palestinian foreign ministry in Ramallah said 10 people had been killed in the airstrike, with many more wounded. The ministry called al-Faqawi’s death an act of “extrajudicial killing,” labelling it part of growing crimes against journalists and an attempt to prevent the media from covering events on the ground.

Dozens of journalists in Gaza joined al-Faqawi’s relatives to bury the slain reporter in the hours after the attack, placing a blue flak jacket on top of the white shroud covering his body on a stretcher. His killing has brought the number of Palestinian journalists killed since October 2023 to 207, according to the Palestinian foreign ministry in the occupied West Bank.

“We will continue to deliver the message and convey the truth to the whole world. This is our humanitarian duty,” the journalist Abd Shaat told Reuters. He said that the noise of the airstrike had woken them, only for them to see that a nearby tent sheltering their colleagues was on fire.

Since the beginning of Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip hundreds of people have sought shelter in encampments in hospital grounds across the besieged territory, hoping that proximity will provide a measure of safety.

The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and the Shin Bet security agency said the airstrike on the hospital grounds was targeting Aslih, whom they accused of being a member of Hamas. In a statement, the IDF accused Aslih of taking part in Hamas’s attack on a string of Israeli towns and kibbutzim on 7 October 2023, when 1,200 people were killed and 250 taken hostage.

He took part in the attack by uploading “footage of looting, arson and murder to social media”, the IDF said. Aslih has documented the impact of Israeli attacks on Gaza by uploading photos and video to his Instagram page, followed by 571,000 people.

His most recent post showed the funeral of the journalist Islam Miqdad, her blue flak jacket also draped across the white shroud over her body, in a burial ritual for journalists. Miqdad was killed in an attack on the building where she was sheltering with her young son in western Khan Younis.

“My daughter is innocent. She had no involvement, she loved journalism and adored it,” Miqdad’s mother Amal Kaskeen told the Associated Press.

Last year was the deadliest on record for journalists, with Israel responsible for 70% of the total deaths of media workers, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Israel’s assault on Gaza claimed the lives of 82 Palestinian journalists in 2024, according to CPJ.

Israel resumed airstrikes on Gaza after a fragile ceasefire collapsed last month. The UN’s agency for Palestinian refugees said another 142,000 people were displaced in just six days in March after the resumption of fighting.

Fifty-nine hostages, including 24 understood to be alive, are still held by militants in Gaza. Israel’s assault on the territory has killed more than 50,000 Palestinians in 18 months of war, a third of them children, according to the health ministry in Ramallah.

Police in the Brazilian state of São Paulo have uncovered that a judge spent 23 years working under a false identity – and a distinctly British one.

Born José Eduardo Franco dos Reis – a name fairly typical in a country once colonised by Portugal – he entered law school and served for over two decades as a judge using the false name Edward Albert Lancelot Dodd Canterbury Caterham Wickfield.

In 1995, having just passed the public examination to become a judge, Wickfield claimed in an interview with a Brazilian newspaper that he was the son of English aristocrats, born in Brazil but raised in the UK until the age of 25.

What police and public prosecutors are now calling a fraud was only recently discovered and came to the public’s attention following a piece by the news outlet G1.

Since then, Brazilians have been left stunned, trying to grasp how a judge could sustain such an elaborate deception for so long, especially with such an unusual name.

In October, identifying himself as Wickfield, he visited a government office in São Paulo to renew his ID card.

All his documents listed his “British” names, but the birth certificate registration number matched that of a Brazilian man named Dos Reis. When police cross-checked the data – and fingerprints – they confirmed it was the same individual.

According to what is known so far, Dos Reis began presenting himself as Wickfield in the early 1980s.

Police say he falsified his birth certificate, entered the University of São Paulo’s law school and began working as a judge in 1995, remaining on the bench until his retirement in 2018.

When police uncovered the alleged fraud, he was summoned for questioning. This time identifying himself as Dos Reis, he claimed that Wickfield was his twin brother, given up for adoption as a child to a noble British couple.

He gave no further explanation for the names, though a piece by the Folha de S Paulo newspaper noted that they appear inspired by literature – such as the Round Table’s Lancelot or Mr Wickfield, the lawyer in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield.

A public prosecutor charged Dos Reis with identity fraud and using false documents. Court officers have been unable to locate him, so he has yet to be formally summoned to respond.

Last Friday, the São Paulo Court decided to suspend his pension payments as a retired judge – in February alone, he received R$166,413.94 (more than $28,000).

Police in the Brazilian state of São Paulo have uncovered that a judge spent 23 years working under a false identity – and a distinctly British one.

Born José Eduardo Franco dos Reis – a name fairly typical in a country once colonised by Portugal – he entered law school and served for over two decades as a judge using the false name Edward Albert Lancelot Dodd Canterbury Caterham Wickfield.

In 1995, having just passed the public examination to become a judge, Wickfield claimed in an interview with a Brazilian newspaper that he was the son of English aristocrats, born in Brazil but raised in the UK until the age of 25.

What police and public prosecutors are now calling a fraud was only recently discovered and came to the public’s attention following a piece by the news outlet G1.

Since then, Brazilians have been left stunned, trying to grasp how a judge could sustain such an elaborate deception for so long, especially with such an unusual name.

In October, identifying himself as Wickfield, he visited a government office in São Paulo to renew his ID card.

All his documents listed his “British” names, but the birth certificate registration number matched that of a Brazilian man named Dos Reis. When police cross-checked the data – and fingerprints – they confirmed it was the same individual.

According to what is known so far, Dos Reis began presenting himself as Wickfield in the early 1980s.

Police say he falsified his birth certificate, entered the University of São Paulo’s law school and began working as a judge in 1995, remaining on the bench until his retirement in 2018.

When police uncovered the alleged fraud, he was summoned for questioning. This time identifying himself as Dos Reis, he claimed that Wickfield was his twin brother, given up for adoption as a child to a noble British couple.

He gave no further explanation for the names, though a piece by the Folha de S Paulo newspaper noted that they appear inspired by literature – such as the Round Table’s Lancelot or Mr Wickfield, the lawyer in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield.

A public prosecutor charged Dos Reis with identity fraud and using false documents. Court officers have been unable to locate him, so he has yet to be formally summoned to respond.

Last Friday, the São Paulo Court decided to suspend his pension payments as a retired judge – in February alone, he received R$166,413.94 (more than $28,000).

Fearing legal repercussions, online harassment and professional consequences, student journalists are retracting their names from published articles amid intensifying repression by the Trump administration targeting students perceived to be associated with the pro-Palestinian movement.

Editors at university newspapers say that anxiety among writers has risen since the arrest of the Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk, who is currently in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention fighting efforts to deport her. While the government has not pointed to evidence supporting its decision to revoke her visa, she wrote an op-ed last year in a student newspaper critical of Israel, spurring fears that simply expressing views in writing is now viewed as sufficient grounds for deportation.

Ozturk is one of nearly a dozen students or scholars who have been seized by immigration officials since 8 March, when Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia graduate student and green card holder, was arrested and placed in deportation proceedings over his role in pro-Palestinian protests. Student editors report particularly acute anxieties among international students who have contributed to their newspapers, but say that requests to take down stories over fears of retaliation are coming from US citizens, too.

At Columbia University, Adam Kinder, the editor of the Columbia Political Review, said his publication has been asked to take down nearly a dozen articles and halt the publication process of over a dozen more in response to mounting pressure in recent weeks. His team has complied with those requests. “For students who disagree with the Trump administration’s stance, they fear real retaliation,” Kinder said.

At Stanford University, the Stanford Daily has also seen a surge in takedown requests in recent weeks, according to its editor, Greta Reich. “One came in, then two, then five, then 10 – it just really started piling up very quickly,” she said. The requests, she said, ranged from sources seeking anonymity to opinion writers wanting their names removed, and even demands to blur out identifying images. One former staff editor, an international student, quit entirely, according to Reich. “They didn’t want to be associated with any publication or article that could get them in trouble,” she said.

Kinder, too, has had three staff writers resign and four more go on hiatus of fear that their association with certain articles could jeopardize their safety or future career prospects.

The growing risk has prompted a coalition of national student journalism organizations to issue an alert on Friday calling on student papers to reconsider longstanding editorial norms around unpublishing stories and anonymization.

“What we are suggesting today stands in opposition to how many of us as journalism educators have taught and advised our students over the years,” the alert reads. “These are not easy editorial decisions, but these are not normal times.”

An ethical dilemma

Takedown requests present ethical dilemmas familiar to any newsroom, and student papers are no exception, with young editors needing to balance high-stakes safety concerns with the journalistic value of transparency. Some are exploring alternatives to full removals, such as de-indexing controversial articles – removing them from search results while keeping them live on their websites.

One editor at an Ivy League university, who requested anonymity given the sensitivities of the issue, said their publication was currently weighing this approach. “It became clear that no solution was going to be perfect. If you delete an article or leave it full of holes, it’s obvious something happened. That could just draw more attention,” they said. They also pointed out that removing articles entirely could backfire, as content often remains accessible through web archives including the Wayback Machine.

At the University of Virginia, the Cavalier Daily has historically refused takedown requests, but its editor, Naima Sawaya, acknowledged that the current climate was different. “One of our staffers, an immigrant, had to resign from our editorial board after we published pieces about Trump’s policies on universities, specifically regarding immigrants and pro-Palestine activism,” she said. The student, she said, was advised by the university’s international studies office that being publicly linked to these articles could pose risks to their visa status.

Sawaya has always viewed the paper as an archive. “We try to emphasize to our staffers when we’re onboarding them that the things they write are becoming part of the historical record,” she said. Recent concerns around student safety have started to challenge her view. “If a staffer today asked for a past article to be removed for their safety, I would remove it,” she admitted.

At New York University’s Washington Square News, editor Yezen Saadah said that while his publication does not publish anonymous bylines, staff are finding ways to respond to contributors who are at risk. “Some staff members have stepped back from reporting roles due to safety concerns, but they still contribute in [other] editorial capacities,” he said.

An editor at a public university in California, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity, said their newsroom had seen a dramatic increase in anonymization requests since Ice began arresting international students – from opinion writers seeking to remove their names from articles critical of Israel or Trump, to sources seeking to anonymize their quotes. They said international students were now only willing to speak to reporters under condition of anonymity.

“Most requests come from international students, though domestic students have also expressed concerns,” they said.

In February, the Purdue Exponent, a student paper at Purdue University in Indiana, removed the names and images of student protesters advocating for Palestinian human rights from its website, citing safety concerns and the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics, which prioritizes minimizing harm. “Pro-Palestinian students are under attack, so we’re removing their names,” the paper announced in an editorial. The paper immediately found itself at the center of a rousing conversation about journalistic ethics, and its editor reportedly received more than 7,000 emails, including death threats.

Mike Hiestand, a lawyer at the Student Press Law Center, said that while student media traditionally resisted takedown requests, the current climate has forced a re-evaluation. “The reluctance to comply with takedown requests was based on a world that existed before January 2025,” Hiestand said.

Lindsie Rank, the campus advocacy director at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, also reiterated how much the risk environment has changed. “If one of these cases had called our hotline six months ago, our response would have been: ‘This isn’t really a legal issue. This is more of an ethical question.’ But that has changed,” she said.

Sawaya, from the Cavalier Daily, hasn’t yet taken down any pieces. But like other editors, she is grappling with how the new political reality is affecting the field she hopes to enter professionally when she graduates.

“One of the hardest things right now is getting people to talk to us – even people whose job it is to talk to us, like university communications officials,” she said. “It feels like there’s real fear.”

More women risk dying in pregnancy and childbirth because of aid cuts by wealthy countries, which could have “pandemic-like effects”, UN agencies have warned.

Pregnant women in conflict zones are the most vulnerable, and face an “alarmingly high” risk that is already five times greater than elsewhere, according to a new UN report on trends in maternal mortality.

Deaths due to complications in pregnancy and childbirth declined 40% globally between 2000 and 2023, but progress is “fragile” and has slowed since 2016, the authors said. An estimated 260,000 women died in 2023 from pregnancy-related causes.

There is a “threat of major backsliding” amid “increasing headwinds”, the authors said. US funding cuts this year have meant clinics closing and health workers losing their jobs, and disrupted the supply chains that deliver life-saving medicines to treat leading causes of maternal death such as haemorrhage, pre-eclampsia and malaria, World Health Organization experts warned.

The report – itself part-funded by the US – revealed that maternal deaths rose by 40,000 in 2021 due to the Covid pandemic, probably driven by complications from the virus itself and by the disruptions to healthcare.

Dr Bruce Aylward, an assistant director general at the WHO, said that rise could offer insights into the possible impact of current aid cuts.

“With Covid, we saw an acute shock to the system, and what’s happening with financing is an acute shock,” he said.

“Countries have not had time to put in place and plan for what other financing they’re going to use, what other workers they’re going to use, [and] what are the trade-offs they’re going to make in their systems to try to make sure the most essential services can continue.”

The shock to services, he said, would lead to “pandemic-like effects”, adding that funding cuts risked not only progress, “but you could have a shift backwards”.

Deaths around the world would need to fall 10 times faster than at present – by 15% rather than 1.5% a year – to achieve the sustainable development goal target of less than 70 per 100,000 live births before 2030.

The report highlighted significant inequalities. In poor countries in 2023, there were 346 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births – nearly 35 times the 10 per 100,000 in rich countries. While in high- and upper middle-income countries, 99% of births are attended by a health professional, this falls to 73% in poor countries.

Countries where there are conflicts, or which are characterised as “fragile”, accounted for 61% of global maternal deaths, but only 25% of global live births.

A 15-year-old girl in a poor country has a one in 66 chance of dying from a pregnancy or childbirth-related cause. In a rich country, the figure is one in 7,933 – and in a country at war the figure is one in 51.

Catherine Russell, Unicef’s director, said: “Global funding cuts to health services are putting more pregnant women at risk, especially in the most fragile settings, by limiting their access to essential care during pregnancy and the support they need when giving birth.

“The world must urgently invest in midwives, nurses and community health workers to ensure every mother and baby has a chance to survive and thrive.”

Maternal mortality rates have “stagnated” in many parts of the world since 2015, the report found, including northern Africa and much of Asia, Europe, North and Latin America, and the Caribbean.

The authors called for further efforts to ensure critical services were maintained and to improve access to family-planning services and education.

Pascale Allotey, director of the WHO’s reproductive health department, said: “It is an indictment on our humanity and a real travesty of justice that women die in childbirth today.

“It really is something that we all have a collective responsibility for,” she said. “We have to step up.”

More women risk dying in pregnancy and childbirth because of aid cuts by wealthy countries, which could have “pandemic-like effects”, UN agencies have warned.

Pregnant women in conflict zones are the most vulnerable, and face an “alarmingly high” risk that is already five times greater than elsewhere, according to a new UN report on trends in maternal mortality.

Deaths due to complications in pregnancy and childbirth declined 40% globally between 2000 and 2023, but progress is “fragile” and has slowed since 2016, the authors said. An estimated 260,000 women died in 2023 from pregnancy-related causes.

There is a “threat of major backsliding” amid “increasing headwinds”, the authors said. US funding cuts this year have meant clinics closing and health workers losing their jobs, and disrupted the supply chains that deliver life-saving medicines to treat leading causes of maternal death such as haemorrhage, pre-eclampsia and malaria, World Health Organization experts warned.

The report – itself part-funded by the US – revealed that maternal deaths rose by 40,000 in 2021 due to the Covid pandemic, probably driven by complications from the virus itself and by the disruptions to healthcare.

Dr Bruce Aylward, an assistant director general at the WHO, said that rise could offer insights into the possible impact of current aid cuts.

“With Covid, we saw an acute shock to the system, and what’s happening with financing is an acute shock,” he said.

“Countries have not had time to put in place and plan for what other financing they’re going to use, what other workers they’re going to use, [and] what are the trade-offs they’re going to make in their systems to try to make sure the most essential services can continue.”

The shock to services, he said, would lead to “pandemic-like effects”, adding that funding cuts risked not only progress, “but you could have a shift backwards”.

Deaths around the world would need to fall 10 times faster than at present – by 15% rather than 1.5% a year – to achieve the sustainable development goal target of less than 70 per 100,000 live births before 2030.

The report highlighted significant inequalities. In poor countries in 2023, there were 346 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births – nearly 35 times the 10 per 100,000 in rich countries. While in high- and upper middle-income countries, 99% of births are attended by a health professional, this falls to 73% in poor countries.

Countries where there are conflicts, or which are characterised as “fragile”, accounted for 61% of global maternal deaths, but only 25% of global live births.

A 15-year-old girl in a poor country has a one in 66 chance of dying from a pregnancy or childbirth-related cause. In a rich country, the figure is one in 7,933 – and in a country at war the figure is one in 51.

Catherine Russell, Unicef’s director, said: “Global funding cuts to health services are putting more pregnant women at risk, especially in the most fragile settings, by limiting their access to essential care during pregnancy and the support they need when giving birth.

“The world must urgently invest in midwives, nurses and community health workers to ensure every mother and baby has a chance to survive and thrive.”

Maternal mortality rates have “stagnated” in many parts of the world since 2015, the report found, including northern Africa and much of Asia, Europe, North and Latin America, and the Caribbean.

The authors called for further efforts to ensure critical services were maintained and to improve access to family-planning services and education.

Pascale Allotey, director of the WHO’s reproductive health department, said: “It is an indictment on our humanity and a real travesty of justice that women die in childbirth today.

“It really is something that we all have a collective responsibility for,” she said. “We have to step up.”

Europe’s first research station for the study of Atlantic temperate rainforest is set to be built beside an ancient wood in Cornwall.

The Thousand Year Trust charity is crowdfunding an initial amount to build the £750,000 facility, which will enable students and academics to study this historically overlooked but biodiverse natural habitat.

The research station, which has planning permission, will be built at Cabilla, a former Cornish hill farm on Bodmin Moor that has become a retreat centre and rainforest restoration project with a swath of ancient woodland at its heart.

“The reason why everyone whether they are eight or 80 knows and loves tropical rainforest and understands that they are the lungs of the planet is because they’ve been so comprehensively researched but there’s a lack of love and knowledge about temperate rainforests,” said Merlin Hanbury-Tenison, the founder of the Thousand Year Trust.

“A lot of that lack of knowledge is because there aren’t scientists spending time dedicated to Atlantic temperate rainforests.”

Atlantic temperate rainforest thrives in the mild, wet, oceanic climate of far western Europe, stretching from Bergen in Norway to Braga in northern Portugal. It is often oak woodland notable for its spectacular epiphytes such as moisture-loving lichens, mosses and ferns.

Swaths of the woodland, which is a valuable carbon sink, once covered western Scotland, Wales and south-west England, as well as Ireland, but it has been reduced to tiny fragments, a fraction of its former size. Globally, temperate rainforest covers less than 1% of the Earth’s land surface, making it one of the rarest ecosystems on the planet.

Awareness of the Atlantic rainforest was raised by Guy Shrubsole’s book The Lost Rainforests of Britain. In 2023, the government published a temperate rainforests strategy for England, including a commitment to invest £750,000 on research into protecting England’s rainforests. Those funds are yet to be allocated.

Shrubsole has called for a target of doubling the area of British rainforest by 2050.

Hanbury-Tenison, who manages Cabilla, hosted 20 MSc students last year, with a further six PhDs being partly based in its Cornish rainforest from six universities that the Thousand Year Trust has partnered with. He hopes to double that number this year but lacks the facilities to host further scientific endeavours – until the research station is built.

It will be constructed from local wood sourced by the Woodland Trust and comprise bunkhouse accommodation for students, senior academics and volunteers, a laboratory/work station, canteen facilities and a modest amphitheatre area where talks and informal meetings can take place.

According to Hanbury-Tenison, Cabilla is the ideal location for Europe’s first temperate rainforest research station because it is situated in the middle of the habitat’s climatic envelope, with Bodmin Moor approximately halfway between Bergen in the north and Braga to the south.

As well as its crowdfunder, the Thousand Year Trust is in discussions with other larger charities, philanthropists and the government about potential funding for the research station.

The charity is also receiving a helping hand from Hanbury-Tenison’s father, Robin, an explorer who founded Survival International. Robin is celebrating his 89th birthday next month by doing a sponsored row 25 miles along the River Tamar, the boundary between “Cornwall and England” – as the Cornish often put it – to raise money for the research station.

“We hope it will serve as a nexus for temperate rainforest research across the whole range,” said Merlin Hanbury-Tenison. “I truly believe that we’ll only be able to make headway in protecting and expanding the Atlantic temperate rainforest when we love it and we’ll only love it when we understand it and that comes from scientific research.

“In 10 years’ time, when my children are beginning their GCSE studies, I’d like for the British public and education system to know that we are a rainforest people living on a rainforest island, just as people in Brazil or Borneo are proud of their rainforests.”

The Republican US senator and Donald Trump loyalist Markwayne Mullin has evidently sought to backtrack from comments suggesting politicians could “handle our differences” with journalists by shooting and killing them, insisting he was trying to make a joke.

The Oklahoma lawmaker, a former mixed martial arts (MMA) fighter, on Saturday posted to X a video of himself at a stairway in the US Capitol building recounting the tale of the newspaper columnist Charles Kincaid.

In 1890, Kincaid shot dead former Kentucky congressman William Taulbee, with whom he had been feuding.

“There’s a lot we could say about reporters and the stories they write, but I bet they would write a lot less false stories – as President Trump says, fake news – if we could still handle our differences that way,” Mullin says at the conclusion of the almost two-minute clip.

On Sunday, after his remarks were picked up and published by the Oklahoman, in a column that noted escalating verbal attacks by politicians and increasing threats of violence against journalists, Mullin downplayed them.

“Don’t forget I also joked about bringing back caning to settle political disputes,” he said in a second tweet, which contained an election map of Oklahoma showing every county red and claimed the newspaper was “out of touch” with the state.

Mullin’s comments came eight months after Robert Telles, a politician in Nevada, was found guilty of murder for fatally stabbing the Las Vegas Review-Journal reporter Jeff German, who wrote articles critical of his conduct in office.

Mullin, who served as a congressman for 10 years before winning a special election for a Senate seat in November 2022, has developed a record of making threats of physical violence during his time in Washington DC.

The former college wrestler turned MMA fighter – who claims to have won five fights during a brief professional career that ended in 2007, despite records indicating only three wins – was in the news in November 2023 for squaring up to the Teamsters union president, Sean O’Brien, during a heated session of the Senate committee on health, education, labor and pensions.

Mullin later insisted his aggressive conduct, which included advancing on O’Brien and yelling “stand your butt up”, was an exhibition of “Oklahoma values”. In return, O’Brien, who clashed with Mullin during another verbal brawl eight months earlier, accused his rival of acting “like a 12-year-old schoolyard bully”.

The episodes gave rise to Mullin’s comments about caning people he perceived as enemies, something he alluded to in his Sunday tweet.

“This isn’t anything new,” he told Fox Business in November 2023, referring to violence, or threats of it, by politicians in the capital.

“Andrew Jackson challenged nine people to a duel when he was president, and he also knocked one guy out at a White House dinner. There’s been canings before in the Senate.

“Maybe we should bring some of that back, keep people from thinking they’re so tough.”

The journalism advocacy group Reporters Without Borders recorded 108 occasions in which Trump had “insulted, attacked, or threatened the media” during an eight-week period in the run-up to the November 2024 election that returned him to the White House for a second presidency.

Since retaking office in January, the Trump administration has continued its attacks on journalists, banning the Associated Press from the Oval Office for refusing to comply with the president’s executive order to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.

Trump’s assaults on press freedom have also included threats to prosecute and jail journalists who write stories that displease him – and stripping broadcast licenses of networks that air programs that are critical of him.

Kash Patel, the new FBI director, confirmed that the targeting of journalists would be a priority for Trump’s second term during a podcast interview with Steve Bannon, a rightwing ally of the president, in December 2023.

“We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” he said, amplifying Trump’s lies that the 2020 election won fairly by Biden was stolen from Trump.

“We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminally or civilly.”

Clem Burke, the drummer whose backbeats powered Blondie to huge chart success across several decades, has died aged 70.

Burke’s bandmates Debbie Harry and Chris Stein said he had died after “a private battle with cancer”, in a tribute posted to Instagram.

They added: “Clem was not just a drummer; he was the heartbeat of Blondie. His talent, energy and passion for music were unmatched, and his contributions to our sound and success are immeasurable … His vibrant spirit, infectious enthusiasm and rock solid work ethic touched everyone who had the privilege of knowing him.”

Burke was one of only three band members, alongside Harry and Stein, to play on every one of Blondie’s 11 studio albums. Together the group defined the American new wave sound of the 1970s and 1980s, scoring six UK No 1 hits and four in the US, including Heart of Glass and The Tide Is High.

Alongside his work with Blondie, Burke played in supergroups such as the International Swingers, Slinky Vagabond and Magic Christian, and guested with artists as varied as Ramones, Eurythmics, Bob Dylan and Nancy Sinatra.

Born and raised in Bayonne, New Jersey, Burke tinkered with local covers groups and a drum corps before moving to New York, auditioning for Blondie in 1975 to replace the band’s original drummer, Billy O’Connor. “My quest was to find my David Bowie, my Jim Morrison or my Mick Jagger to front a band,” he said in 2022. “I was emphatic about that. I needed to work with people that I felt had that sort of charisma and creativity.”

He had previously auditioned for Patti Smith, for the band that would end up recording her debut album Horses. “She asked me who my favourite drummer was … I said John Bonham, and I think that might’ve been the wrong answer,” he remembered.

Blondie released their debut single, X-Offender, in 1976 but success took a little time to arrive, with Stein and Harry later crediting Burke as the motivating force in the band, convincing Harry not to quit. “He really wanted to get out of New Jersey,” she said.

Their first chart success came overseas, in Australia then the UK, with songs such as Denis and Hanging on the Telephone, but the group swept to global fame in 1979, including in their native US, with Heart of Glass. It was powered by a drum machine but Burke was sanguine about this development: “It was threatening, I suppose, at first, but I’ve never really found myself in the situation where a drum machine was going to take over,” he later said.

Like the whole band, Burke drew on the cosmopolitanism of late-70s New York, playing high-tempo punkish rhythms or sensual, swaggering disco with equal charisma. “We all had a common aesthetic, whether it be the New York Dolls, or the Velvet Underground, or the Shangri-Las,” he said. Hits continued with Call Me – introduced by a tumbling yet precise Burke drum fill – as well as Atomic, a masterclass in cymbal impact, and The Tide is High, the band’s foray into reggae. The three singles were back-to-back No 1s in the UK.

The group’s success tailed off with their 1982 album, The Hunter, and they split later that year. Burke took high-profile sessions with the likes of Bob Dylan, Pete Townshend (“a real gentleman … a dream come true”, Burke said) and Joan Jett. He also worked with the former Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones in the supergroup Chequered Past and later joined another Pistols-related supergroup, the International Swingers, with Glen Matlock.

He played live with Ramones – “not a happy place to be” – and formed various other supergroups and rock’n’roll outfits including the Empty Hearts. His connection with Iggy Pop began when Blondie toured with him in the late 1970s – Burke later toured in his backing band, and in recent years Burke performed Pop’s Lust For Life album on tour with Matlock and Katie Puckrik. He even appeared with a Blondie tribute act, Bootleg Blondie, while his career with the band itself continued.

Blondie reformed for gigs in 1997, and triumphantly returned to the studio: the 1999 album No Exit reached No 3 in the UK and contained another No 1 single, Maria. They continued touring and released four more studio albums.

Among those paying tribute to Burke was another of his creative partners, Nancy Sinatra, who wrote: “My heart is shattered. Clem became an icon as a member of Blondie, but he was also a important part of my band, the KAB. I was blessed to call him my friend. If I ever needed him, he was there.”

Gerald Casale of Devo said: “His unmatched style and New York City ‘cool’ set the performance standard for decades.”