Donald Trump insisted his trade war with much of the world was “doing really well” despite mounting fears of recession and as Beijing hit back and again hiked tariffs on US exports to China.

As the US president said his aggressive tariffs strategy was “moving along quickly”, a closely watched economic survey revealed that US consumer expectations for price growth had soared to a four-decade high.

The White House maintains that the US economy is on the verge of a “golden age”, however, and that dozens of countries – now facing a US tariff of 10% after Trump shelved plans to impose higher rates until July – are scrambling to make deals.

“The phones have been ringing off the hook to make deals,” the press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told reporters on Friday.

Beijing raised Chinese tariffs on US products to 125% on Friday – the latest salvo of its escalating trade dispute with Washington – and accused Trump of “unilateral bullying and coercion”.

“Even if the US continues to impose even higher tariffs, it would no longer have any economic significance, and would go down as a joke in the history of world economics,” the Chinese finance ministry said.

Few investors were laughing. US government bonds – typically seen as one of the world’s safest financial assets – continued to be sold off, and were on course for their biggest weekly loss since 2019. The dollar also fell against a basket of currencies, and was down against the euro and the pound.

Leading stock indices paused for breath on Friday after days of torrid trading. The FTSE 100 rose 0.6% in London. The S&P 500 increased 1.8% and the Dow Jones industrial average gained 1.6% in New York.

The S&P 500 finished an extraordinarily volatile week for markets up 5.7%, its biggest weekly gain since November 2023.

“We are doing really well on our TARIFF POLICY,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. “Very exciting for America, and the World!!! It is moving along quickly. DJT”

Some of Wall Street’s most influential figures were unconvinced. “I think we’re very close, if not in, a recession now,” Larry Fink, CEO of the investment giant BlackRock, told CNBC. Far from providing certainty, the 90-day pause on higher US tariffs on much of the world “means longer, more elevated uncertainty”, he added.

Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, the US’s largest bank, said the world’s largest economy was facing “considerable turbulence” as a key measure of consumer confidence tumbled to its lowest level since the Covid-19 pandemic – and the second-lowest level on record.

US consumer sentiment has dropped 11% to 50.8 this month, ahead the pause announced by Trump earlier this week, according to a regularly survey compiled by the University of Michigan.

Expectations for inflation meanwhile surged, with respondents indicating they are bracing for prices to rise by 6.7% over the coming year – the survey’s highest year-ahead inflation expectation reading since 1981.

“There is great optimism in this economy,” Leavitt claimed at the White House briefing when asked about the survey. “Trust in President Trump. He knows what he’s doing. This is a proven economic formula.”

Trump won back the White House last November by pledging to rapidly bring down prices – something he has claimed, in recent weeks, is already happening. US inflation climbed at an annual rate of 2.4% last month, according to official data.

“Consumers have spiralled from anxious to petrified,” observed Samuel Tombs, chief US economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics. He added, however, that a bipartisan divide – with Democrats growing more pessimistic, while Republicans become more upbeat – suggests that people are allowing their political views to cloud their economic confidence.

The US’s top markets watchdog is facing demands from senior Democrats to launch an investigation into alleged insider trading and market manipulation after Trump declared on social media that it was “A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!” hours before announcing Wednesday’s climbdown on tariffs.

Days of erratic policymaking constructed a rollercoaster week for markets, with the S&P 500 dropping 12% in just four sessions, before surging back almost 10% in a single day after the administration pulled back from imposing higher tariffs on most countries, except China, which is facing a 145% tariff on exports to the US.

In a letter to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Senate Democrats including Elizabeth Warren and Chuck Schumer wrote: “It is unconscionable that as American families are concerned about their financial security during this economic crisis entirely manufactured by the President, insiders may have actively profited from the market volatility and potentially perpetrated financial fraud on the American public.”

Tesla meanwhile stopped taking orders in China for two models it previously imported from the US, as companies scramble to adapt to prohibitive tariffs imposed in Trump’s trade war.

The manufacturer, run by Trump’s close ally Elon Musk, removed “order now” buttons on its Chinese website for its Model S saloon and Model X sports utility vehicle.

Tesla did not give any indication of why it had made the changes but it came after the rapid escalation of the trade war between the US and China.

The border taxes make the goods trade between the two countries prohibitively expensive and mean cars imported from the US are now much less attractive in China than those produced locally.

In the UK, economists warned that stronger than expected growth of 0.5% in February is likely to prove short lived as the impact of Trump’s trade war is felt throughout the global economy.

Ministers should focus on rebuilding bridges with the EU, Labour politicians have said, after a senior adviser to Donald Trump downplayed the prospect of a breakthrough with the US.

MPs said the government should “prioritise our trading relationship with the EU” and “get a sugar rush of growth” instead of banking on the prospect of preferential treatment from Washington.

Trump imposed 10% tariffs on all UK exports this month, with several other markets, including the EU, facing steeper rates. After financial markets plummeted, the US president announced a temporary reprieve on Wednesday, reducing tariffs on almost all other countries to his baseline of 10%. Car, steel and aluminium imports continue to face a higher tariff of 25%.

The government is in advanced negotiations with the US over a trade deal to secure more favourable arrangements for the UK. However, Kevin Hassett, an economic adviser to Trump, told CNBC on Thursday that any deal that would persuade the president to go below 10% would need to be “extraordinary”.

Asked if she was losing confidence in the prospect of a US trade deal, Rachel Reeves told reporters on Friday: “We continue to engage with our counterparts in the United States.”

She added: “At the same time, we also want to improve trading relations with other countries around the world. It’s why I hosted the Indian finance minister in London this week as part of our economic and financial dialogue, and to try and secure a free trade and investment treaty with India. It’s also why we are having a summit with the European Union in May to improve our trading relations.”

The Guardian reported this week that the government had told businesses a free trade deal with India was 90% complete. Ministers are also putting stock in building economic ties with China, with the trade minister Douglas Alexander travelling to Beijing this week for talks.

Liam Byrne, the Labour chair of the Commons business and trade committee, called for a “big, ambitious reset” with the EU and said it would “deliver an economic uplift bigger than the hit we are going to take from tariffs”.

He said: “We need to prioritise our trading relationship with the EU because it is big and close … There is a real frustration in Brussels about the UK not being clearer in what it wants in the reset. This is in the EU’s interest, the UK’s interest, and the urgency of the situation demands that we crack on with this.”

Stella Creasy, a Labour MP and chair of the Labour Movement for Europe, said: “Get the deal with Europe. Stop talking about red lines. We have shown we can work with Europe on defence security and our economies are intertwined … we do five times as much trade with Europe as with America.

“At the moment, we have tariff-free trade with Europe but we have a massive drop in trade because of all the paperwork. There are many ways we could negotiate to remove those barriers and get a sugar rush of growth from improving trading with our neighbours.”

Harriet Harman, the former cabinet minister and Labour peer, said ministers needed to address “the elephant in the room, which is that Trump is wrong on this, we don’t agree with him”.

Speaking to Sky News’ Electoral Dysfunction podcast, Harman said that when the US put tariffs on imported steel in 2002, Tony Blair “did say this is unacceptable, this is wrong, it’s unjustified, it is breaching the World Trade Organization rules”.

“He was able to say we do not believe this is how you should be within the world organisation and Bush has got it wrong,” she added. “I think it feels as if there’s a kind of restricted vocabulary amongst ministers at the moment where they are speaking in code.

“I think the story needs to be told to the country that this is a really difficult problem and Trump has caused it and he is wrong to do this, but we will be OK with this government,” Harman said.

Hassett told CNBC this week: “Everybody expects that the 10% baseline tariff is going to be the baseline. It is going to take some kind of extraordinary deal for the president to go below there.”

Starmer admitted on Thursday that he had not spoken to Trump since the tariffs were introduced.

At the end of a tumultuous week, a US immigration judge has sided with Trump administration lawyers, ruling that Columbia University graduate and Palestinian organizer Mahmoud Khalil can be deported from the US for his views.

The decision came on the same day Trump lawyers were criticized by another judge for defying an order to provide details on how they would return a wrongly deported man to the US.

Meanwhile, the US president insisted his tariff war was going “really well” despite mounting fears of recession and Beijing raising its retaliatory tariffs on the US to 125%.

Catch up with the key Trump administration stories of the day:

Catching up? Here’s what happened on 10 April 2025.

At the beginning of this helter-skelter week, Downing Street was declaring globalisation not only dead but a failure. Now, only five trading days later, the autopsy is still under way but the victim may instead be economic populism, strangled by Wall Street, the citadel of globalisation. Donald Trump’s so-called liberation day may in fact have been the anti-globalist’s entombment day.

In an effort to deny even a tactical retreat, Trump’s aides insist the White House goal all along was not to weaken globalism, or even to protect the US economy with tariffs, but instead to get into a negotiation to lower tariffs around the world and to punish China. As cover stories go, it is hardly credible, partly because the tariffs were repeatedly lauded by Trump as a macroeconomic revenue-raising measure, or a means to bolster US manufacturing.

The reality is that when faced by an attempt to remake the world trading system overnight, or what the former UK Treasury minister Jim O’Neill describes as “a full-on Kamikaze mission”, the markets revolted. But the retreat caused by the sell-off of US Treasury bonds has been only partial, with tariffs set at 10% universally, except for parts of trade with Mexico and Canada.

Washington’s all-out trade spat with China, meanwhile, still leaves the average effective tariff rate at 27%, the highest since 1903, according to the Yale Budget Lab.

Amid the chaos, significant long-term damage has been done not only to Trump’s political credibility but also to the resilience of globalisation as a system.

Trust, agreed rules and a degree of political stability are the underpinnings of globalisation. They are the prerequisite for specialised and highly extended trade supply lines across political borders to function. Globalisation, after all, is not just about the trade in goods or free markets, it is a set of interconnected ideas and institutions underpinning wealth creation that has dominated political thinking since the end of the second world war.

The UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, was not alone in arguing that Trump’s liberation day and its aftermath marked the end of an era. In a warning that holds true even after Trump’s retreat, Mark Carney, the Canadian prime minister and a former governor of the Bank of England, said: “The global economy is fundamentally different today than it was yesterday. The system of global trade anchored on the United States that Canada has relied on since the end of second world war, a system that while not perfect helped deliver prosperity for Canada for decades, is over.

“The 80-year period when the US embraced the mantle of global economic leadership, when it forged alliances rooted in trust and mutual respect and championed the free exchange of goods and services, is over. While this is a tragedy, it is also the new reality.”

In short, this is not a phase, however the trade war with China is resolved. The legacy of liberation day will linger for generations.

Paul Krugman, the Nobel prize-winning economist, largely agreed that the US was committing an act of abdication. “The rules governing tariffs and the negotiating process that brought those tariffs down over time grew out of the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, devised by Roosevelt in 1934 … It was, in fact, one of America’s greatest policy achievements. Donald Trump burned it all down,” he wrote.

When the man elected to lead the country that invented globalisation places the rejection of globalism at his ideological core, even if it means alienating the US’s closest allies, a fundamental reordering is under way.

A key difficulty is that Trump, 78, has shown no sign of wanting to learn from this debacle. As far back as September 1987 he spent $95,000 to publish an “open letter to the American people” in three newspapers. “For years, Japan and other wealthy nations have been taking advantage of the US,” he wrote. “It is time to end our vast deficits by making Japan, and others who can afford it, pay.”

While his target may have shifted from Japan to China, Trump’s sense of resentment and betrayal, coupled with an aversion to trade deficits, has never left him. His election in 2016, alongside Brexit, merely confirmed to him how his message resonated.

In fairness to Trump, analysis showed that US voting districts with industries vulnerable to Chinese imports tended to elect representatives with more polarised stances.

The vote gave him a mandate to end what he described as the US carnage of “rusted-out factories, scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation”. Many in the Davos establishment acknowledged that he had seen something they had not – globalism had left too many behind, not just in poor countries but among a previously middle-class group in western economies.

Trump’s first term would probably have seen a version of this week’s debacle if he had chosen different advisers, and if he had not later been knocked off course by Covid.

For the first two years of his first term, in 2017-18, his instincts were largely kept in check by his economic adviser Gary Cohn, a former chief operating officer at Goldman Sachs, who dampened Trump’s determination to use tariffs to end trade deficits.

Cohn engaged in a two-year running argument, compiling a mass of statistics designed to convince a sceptical Trump that the decline of US manufacturing and its replacement by a service economy was largely benign.

He set out how blanket tariffs rebound on American consumers. He explained the link between consumer uncertainty and the stock market. He challenged Trump to explain why he thought tariffs would not be counterproductive. Trump replied that he did not know, but he just did and it was what he had thought for 30 years. At one point, exasperated, Cohn accused Trump of a dangerous nostalgia, saying: “You have a Norman Rockwell view of America” – the artist remembered for his idealised portrait of American workers.

In the end, Cohn found Trump – who once scrawled “trade is bad” as the summation of his thinking for a keynote speech – so immune to evidence, and so determined to impose steel and aluminium tariffs, that he quit, leaving Peter Navarro, a man Cohn regarded as a tariff flat earther, to take the reins.

Vestiges of opposition to Trump’s tactics remained inside the Republican party. Ben Sasse, a Nebraska senator, tweeted a now familiar criticism in 2018: “About those new tariffs: Europe, Canada & Mexico aren’t China. You don’t treat allies the same way you treat opponents. Blanket protectionism is a big part of why we had a Great Depression. ‘Make America Great Again’ shouldn’t mean ‘Make America 1929 Again’.”

But Trump largely ignored the critics inside his own party. Re-elected in 2024, with Navarro and other tariff supporters reappointed to lead his trade team, Trump was convinced that his key mistake in the first term had been taking any notice of those advising him that globalisation had brought the US unparalleled wealth.

The path was clear for Trump’s headlong assault on tariffs, in part because in the four years out of office the anti-globalist tide had appeared to be heading in his direction. Many on the centre left bought the argument that hyperglobalisation did not suit an era of geopolitical conflict.

The Biden administration, for instance, in the name of reindustrialisation and national security, retained many Trump-era tariffs, especially on China, a decision seen as a mistake by a study published this week by Harvard Kennedy School. In the study, Joe Biden’s economic advisers Adam Posen and Jonas Nahm argued that the protectionism was excessive.

Since the 2007-08 financial crisis, there has been a steady increase in trade-restricting measures – such as tariffs, non-tariff measures, export controls and investment restrictions – contributing to growing trade fragmentation. In 2024 alone, more than 3,000 trade restrictions were implemented globally.

Some arose from legitimate concern about unfair competition, but much was being driven by deepening geopolitical competition. Countries of all politics have resorted to ever-expanding definitions of national security to screen foreign investment and trade. New language has entered the vocabulary such as “friend or near-shoring”, a term to encourage companies to align their supply chains with the geopolitical interests of their countries.

The call for resilient supply chains was given a spur by the vulnerabilities exposed by Covid, including the west’s dependence on a small number of vaccine suppliers.

After the invasion of Ukraine, Russia further exposed the west’s supply chain vulnerability by exploiting Europe’s dependence on its gas pipelines. Interconnectors designed to bring countries closer, such as undersea data cables, have become targets – from the Baltic Sea to the Taiwan Strait. The war also blew apart the myth that trade brought peace.

As a result, investment screening measures were introduced by governments all over the west empowering them to block takeovers and investments by foreign firms, mainly Chinese in strategic industries.

Rachel Reeves endorsed the trend in a speech in Washington as the UK’s shadow chancellor in May 2023. “Globalisation as we know it is dead. Supply chains that prioritise only what is cheapest and fastest struggle when a crisis strikes, be that PPE during Covid or energy following the war in Ukraine.”

In a diagnosis similar to Trump’s, Reeves claimed that a globalised system “can be gamed by countries like China who have undercut and ignored the international trading rules and made it impossible for our own to compete”.

Rajan Raghuram, the former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund and ex-governor of India’s central bank, has argued that friend-shoring is “resurgent protectionism, cloaked and augmented by new geopolitical rivalries”. He also criticised the initiative as “concentrating production within the gated community of advanced communities”.

Even so, trade as a proportion of GDP – the best measure of economic openness – has not as yet collapsed. In its 2023 report titled Re-globalisation, the World Trade Organization (WTO) said there had been a slowdown in world trade after the financial crash and Covid, but the change may as much be to do with the growth of services, as opposed to goods, in the world economy. Countervailing trends such as digital trade have kept globalisation alive.

The issue now is what can be preserved from the wreckage of the past week, and whether a new coalition of the willing – this time of free traders – can be assembled, if necessary. There is talk of a G6 – the G7 minus the US – going to China to see if an agreement can be found to reduce its trade imbalances, and distorting subsidies, a subject of complaint to the WTO not just by the west but by emerging markets.

But this will require the UK’s Labour party to stop briefing that globalisation has failed. In the current context there is no room for nuance, and it risks sounding as if Labour shares Trump’s utterly chaotic prescription. This is the time to declare economic populism, and not free trade, dead.

Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate and Palestinian organizer, is eligible to be deported from the United States, an immigration judge ruled on Friday during a contentious hearing at a remote court in central Louisiana.

The decision sides with the Trump administration’s claim that a short memo written by the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, which stated Khalil’s “current or expected beliefs, statements or associations” were counter to foreign policy interests, is sufficient evidence to remove a lawful permanent resident from the United States. The undated memo, the main piece of evidence submitted by the government, contained no allegations of criminal conduct.

During a tense hearing on Friday afternoon, Khalil’s attorneys made an array of unsuccessful arguments attempting to both delay a ruling on his eligibility for removal and to terminate proceedings entirely. They argued the broad allegations contained in Rubio’s memo gave them a right to directly cross-examine him.

Khalil held prayer beads as three attorneys for the Department of Homeland Security presented arguments for his removal.

Judge Jamee Comans ruled that Rubio’s determination was “presumptive and sufficient evidence” and that she had no power to rule on concerns over free speech.

“There is no indication that Congress contemplated an immigration judge or even the attorney general overruling the secretary of state on matters of foreign policy,” Comans said.

A supporter was in tears sat on the crowded public benches as the ruling was delivered.

Following the ruling, Khalil, who had remained silent throughout proceedings, requested permission to speak before the court.

Addressing the judge directly, he said: “I would like to quote what you said last time, that ‘there’s nothing that’s more important to this court than due process rights and fundamental fairness.’”

He continued: “Clearly what we witnessed today, neither of these principles were present today or in this whole process.

“This is exactly why the Trump administration has sent me to this court, 1,000 miles away from my family. I just hope that the urgency that you deemed fit for me is afforded to the hundreds of others who have been here without hearing for months.”

Khalil, 30, helped lead pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia last year. He was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officers in New York on 8 March and transferred to a detention facility in Jena, Louisiana, where he has been detained for over a month. His case was the first in a string of Ice arrests instigated by the Trump administration targeting pro-Palestinian students and scholars present in the US on visas or green cards.

The ruling means that Khalil’s removal proceedings will continue to move forward in Jena, while a separate case being heard in federal court in New Jersey examines the legality of his detention and questions surrounding the constitutionality of the government’s claims it can deport people for first amendment-protected speech if they are deemed adverse to US foreign policy.

Khalil’s legal team is asking the New Jersey judge to release him on bail so that he can reunite with his wife, who is due to give birth to their first child this month.

His lawyers slammed the decision, which they said appeared to be prewritten. “Today, we saw our worst fears play out: Mahmoud was subject to a charade of due process, a flagrant violation of his right to a fair hearing, and a weaponization of immigration law to suppress dissent. This is not over, and our fight continues,” said Marc van der Hout, Khalil’s immigration lawyer.

“If Mahmoud can be targeted in this way, simply for speaking out for Palestinians and exercising his constitutionally protected right to free speech, this can happen to anyone over any issue the Trump administration dislikes. We will continue working tirelessly until Mahmoud is free and rightfully returned home to his family and community.”

Van der Hout told a federal judge that Khalil will file the appeal after the immigration judge who ruled him “removable” issues the final written ruling. Van der Hout added that Khalil’s legal team may also pursue an asylum case.

“So nothing is going to happen quickly in the immigration proceeding even though she’s found him removable on the foreign policy grounds,” he said.

The judge gave lawyers for Khalil until 23 April to seek a waiver.

During a short prayer vigil held outside the detention centre on Friday afternoon, a group of interfaith clergy read messages of support. A short statement from Khalil’s wife, Noor Abdalla, who is due to give birth this month, was also delivered in front of reporters.

“Today’s decision feels like a devastating blow to our family. No person should be deemed ‘removable’ from their home for speaking out against the killing of Palestinian families, doctors, and journalists,” the statement read.

It continued: “In less than a month, Mahmoud and I will welcome our first child. Until we are reunited, I will not stop advocating for my husband’s safe return home.”

The New Jersey judge has ordered the government not to remove Khalil as his case plays out in federal court. A hearing in that case is set for later on Friday.

Donald Trump had his annual medical examination on Friday, a check-up that may give the public its first details in years about the health of a man who, in January, became the oldest in US history to be sworn in as president.

“I have never felt better, but nevertheless, these things must be done!” the 78-year-old posted on his social media site ahead of the examination, which was conducted at Walter Reed national military medical center in Bethesda, Maryland.

How long the exam took wasn’t immediately clear. All told, however, he spent more than five hours at the center before heading to Air Force One and flying to Florida for the weekend.

Despite long questioning predecessor Joe Biden’s physical and mental capacity, Trump has routinely kept basic facts about his own health shrouded in secrecy – shying away from traditional presidential transparency on medical issues.

If history is any indication, his latest physical is likely to produce a flattering report that’s scarce on details. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt promised a “readout from the White House physician” that would be released “as soon as we possibly can” and suggested it would be comprehensive.

“I can confirm the president is in very good shape,” Leavitt said. She noted that the physical didn’t require Trump being placed under anaesthesia.

A White House doctor in 2018, when Trump was serving his first term, said the president was in overall excellent health but needed to shed weight and start a daily exercise routine.

The finished medical report would be the first public information on Trump’s health since an assassination attempt against him in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July.

Rather than release medical records at that time, Texas representative Ronny Jackson – a staunch Trump supporter – wrote a memo describing a gunshot wound to Trump’s right ear.

In a subsequent interview with CBS in August last year, Trump said he’d “very gladly” release his medical records but never did.

Trump is three years younger than Biden. But on Inauguration Day of his second term in January, Trump was five months older than Biden was during his 2021 inauguration, making Trump the nation’s oldest president to be sworn into office.

Presidents have privacy rights protecting their medical records just like ordinary citizens, and that means they have leeway over what details are released. Modern annual physicals, though, have often played key roles in offering the public a sense of the commander-in-chief’s health – despite historic instances of concealing major medical issues, including President Woodrow Wilson’s debilitating stroke in 1919.

Trump has long opted for offering few substantive details about his health. Before Jackson’s memo, Americans hadn’t seen key details since November 2023, when Dr Bruce A Aronwald released a letter to coincide with Biden’s 81st birthday, saying Trump was in “excellent” physical and mental health.

The letter, posted on Trump’s social media platform, lacks the basics – such as the Republican’s weight, blood pressure and cholesterol levels, or the results of any test. Instead, Aronwlad wrote that he’d examined Trump and found his “physical exams were well within the normal range and his cognitive exams were exceptional”, while also noting that Trump had “reduced his weight”.

Arguably, Trump’s most famous past comments about his own health came during a television interview in July 2020, when he listed off “Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV” while attempting to demonstrate his cognitive abilities.

Trump said that a collection of those five nouns, or ones like them, stated in order, demonstrated mental fitness and were part of a cognitive test he had aced.

With Associated Press and Reuters

• Ukraine could be partitioned like Berlin after the second world war, Donald Trump’s envoy to Kyiv has suggested, as Russia continues to hold out on accepting a truce. Gen Keith Kellogg appeared to suggest the country could be split into zones of control, with British and French troops as part of a “reassurance force” in the west and Moscow’s forces in the east. Between them would be Ukrainian forces and a demilitarised zone but the US would not provide any ground forces, he claimed. “You could almost make it look like what happened with Berlin after world war two, when you had a Russian zone, a French zone and a British zone,” he told the Times newspaper. Kyiv is yet to comment on the remarks.

• Donald Trump issued a rare warning to Vladimir Putin ahead of talks between the US president’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and the Russian president, saying on the Truth Social platform: “Russia has to get moving. Too many people ere [sic] DYING, thousands a week, in a terrible and senseless war – A war that should have never happened, and wouldn’t have happened, if I were President!!!” Putin was shown on state TV greeting Witkoff in St Petersburg’s presidential library at the start of the negotiations and state news agencies later said the talks lasted more than four hours. “The theme of the meeting: aspects of a Ukrainian settlement,” the Kremlin said after the meeting. Putin’s investment envoy, Kirill Dmitriev, who was seen in news footage accompanying Witkoff leaving a hotel in the city, called the talks productive, according to Russia’s state news agency Tass.

• Ukraine’s allies promised a record €21bn ($24bn) in additional military support for Kyiv and accused Vladimir Putin of dragging his feet and delaying US-led negotiations over a ceasefire deal, reports Luke Harding. Speaking at a meeting of the Ukraine defence contact group in Brussels, the British defence secretary, John Healey, said: “Putin said he wanted peace but he rejected a full ceasefire. His forces continue to fire on Ukraine, military and civilian targets alike.” The UK and Germany jointly convened Friday’s meeting in Ramstein, which was attended by more than 40 countries but not the US, with Trump’s defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, joining by video instead.

• Volodymyr Zelenskyy urged Ukraine’s military allies to focus on air defence, asking them to provide 10 additional Patriot systems. The Ukrainian president told the Ramstein meeting via video that Russian attacks showed Moscow was not ready to implement any realistic and effective peace proposals. Separately, Zelenskyy said Ukraine was ready to purchase additional air defence systems, adding that he discussed it with Donald Trump. “Ukraine is not just asking – we are ready to buy appropriate additional systems,” he said in his nightly address on Friday. The government would also strengthen air defences with additional funds for electronic warfare, he said.

• US and Ukrainian officials met on Friday on the US proposal to gain access to Ukraine’s mineral wealth but prospects for a breakthrough were scant given the meeting’s “antagonistic” atmosphere, a source with knowledge of the matter said. The Reuters report quoted the source as saying the strains in the Washington talks stemmed from the Trump administration’s “maximalist” latest draft proposal, which is more expansive than the original version. “The negotiating environment is very antagonistic.” A Treasury Department spokesperson confirmed the discussions, calling them “technical in nature”.

• Russia launched 88 drones at Ukraine in overnight attacks, the Ukrainian air force said on Saturday, and damage was reported in the centre, east and south of the country. It said Ukraine’s air defences shot down 56 of the drones, while 24 drones were “lost” as the military used electronic warfare to redirect them. The Russian defence ministry said earlier that its air defences destroyed 13 Ukrainian drones in the space of 30 minutes late on Friday. Between 10pm and 10.30pm nine drones were destroyed in the Rostov region, on Ukraine’s eastern border, and four in the Kursk region, on Ukraine’s north border, it said.

• More than a hundred Chinese citizens fighting for the Russian military against Ukraine are mercenaries who do not appear to have a direct link to China’s government, two US officials familiar with American intelligence and a former western intelligence official said. Chinese military officers had, however, been in the war behind Russia’s lines with Beijing’s approval to draw tactical lessons from the conflict, the former official said in the Reuters report. The US confirmed on Wednesday that Ukrainian forces had captured two men of Chinese origin in eastern Ukraine after Volodymyr Zelenskyy said his country had information about 155 Chinese citizens fighting there on Russia’s behalf.

• Ukrainian legislators are almost certain to extend martial law again before it expires on 9 May, the parliamentary speaker has said, even as the US and Russia pressure Kyiv to hold a new vote. Ruslan Stefanchuk underlined the legal and practical implausibility of holding free and fair elections in a country that is part-occupied and still under constant attack, while stressing Ukraine’s commitment to democratic elections.

Ukraine’s allies have announced a record €21bn (£18.2bn) in additional military support for Kyiv and accused Vladimir Putin of dragging his feet and delaying US-led negotiations over a ceasefire deal.

Speaking at a meeting of the Ukraine defence contact group in Brussels, the British defence secretary, John Healey, said the Russian president had rejected a 30-day pause in fighting proposed a month ago by Donald Trump.

Healey said: “Putin said he wanted peace, but he rejected a full ceasefire. His forces continue to fire on Ukraine, military and civilian targets alike.”

The UK and Germany jointly convened Friday’s Ramstein meeting, which was attended by more than 40 countries but not the US. Pete Hegseth, Trump’s defence secretary, joined by video instead.

Germany’s defence minister, Boris Pistorius, played down the Trump administration’s absence. He conceded that peace “appears to be out of reach in the immediate future” and said Ukraine was at the “epicentre of a broader conflict”.

“It is between freedom and oppression, between the recognition of global standards and aggressive imperialism, between democracy and authoritarianism,” Pistorius said, adding that military support for Ukraine would continue.

The US’s attempts to bring about a quick end to the war have so far not succeeded. Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, held talks on Friday with Putin’s investment aide, Kirill Dmitriev, in St Petersburg. This followed a visit last week by Dmitriev to Washington.

Witkoff was also due to meet Putin, as the Kremlin cautioned that no breakthroughs and “nothing momentous” should be expected.

In conversations with the White House, Russia has refused to make concessions. Moscow demands control over four Ukrainian regions, the removal of Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s pro-western government and a ban on Nato membership for Ukraine. It also wants the lifting of sanctions.

Trump issued a rare warning to Putin before the meeting on his social media platform, Truth Social. “Russia has to get moving. Too many people ere [sic] DYING, thousands a week, in a terrible and senseless war – A war that should have never happened, and wouldn’t have happened, if I were President!!!” he wrote.

Trump has previously said he is “pissed off” by Putin’s failure to stop fighting but he has not taken any serious measures to put pressure on Russia’s president. In interviews, Witkoff has parroted Kremlin talking points, telling the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson that Russian-occupied Ukrainian regions had voted to join Moscow.

The US envoy to Ukraine, Gen Keith Kellogg, appeared to echo such suggestions in an interview with the Times on Friday, in which he said that a demilitarised zone between Ukrainian and Russian forces could be established along the existing frontline.

He also said that British and French troops could adopt zones of control in the west of the country as part of a “reassurance force”.

“You could almost make it look like what happened with Berlin after World War Two, when you had a Russian zone, a French zone, and a British zone, a US zone,” he said.

Since Ukraine agreed to a US ceasefire last month, Russia has dramatically escalated its aerial bombing campaign. This week it launched a big military push in the Sumy and Kharkiv regions, seizing several border villages.

There is speculation Russia is trying to grab as much territory as possible by 9 May, the day Russia celebrates its victory during the second world war, and before a possible peace deal.

Estonia’s defence minister, Hanno Pevkur, said: “This is why we need to speed up the deliveries as quickly as we can.”

Addressing the Brussels meeting by video, Zelenskyy urged his allies to provide new Patriot air defence systems. This week a Russian ballistic missile hit a playground in the city of Kryvyi Rih, where Zelenskyy grew up, killing nine children and 11 adults.

“Our priority is air defence. Patriots that remained unused in storage with our partners should be protecting lives,” Zelenskyy said, adding that 10 more were urgently needed.

Speaking at a press conference after the Ramstein meeting, Pistorius said Germany had already given four Patriot systems to Kyiv and was waiting for more to be delivered. He said a global search was under way. “We will buy anything we can get,” he said.

Germany will provide four Iris-T air defence systems as well as 15 Leopard 1 tanks, more reconnaissance drones and 100,000 artillery rounds, he added. Other governments announced fresh contributions.

Healey said the UK and Norway would supply radar systems, anti-tank mines and “hundreds of thousands of drones” as part of a $560m defence package, on top of £4.5bn committed by Downing Street this year. The figure includes the repair of military vehicles damaged on the battlefield.

Friday’s meeting did not clarify how many countries were ready to send troops to Ukraine as part of a “coalition of the willing”. Speaking to the BBC, the EU’s foreign affairs chief, Kaja Kallas, said: “Different member states have different opinions”. Discussions were still taking place, she added.

The UK, France and Baltic nations have said they will put boots on the ground in the event of a peace settlement. AFP reported that six nations had signed up.

Healey said planning for a so-called reassurance force was “real, substantial and well-advanced”. It envisages foreign soldiers being deployed away from the 1,000km-long frontline and boosting existing Ukrainian ground forces, he suggested.

Russia has categorically rejected the idea. Sweden’s defence minister, Pål Jonson, said Stockholm needed answers to “a number of questions” before it could make a commitment. “It’s helpful if there’s a clarity of what that mission would entail, and what do we do – if we are peacekeeping, deterrence or reassurance,” he said.

The UK has said the US military “backstop” – meaning comprehensive air cover – is essential for any mission to work. The Trump administration, however, has ruled this out and has indicated that Ukraine’s future security needs are now Europe’s problem.

The Biden administration set up the Ukraine defence contact group after Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion and chaired meetings. In February the US relinquished this leadership role, handing it over to London and Berlin. Hegseth said the Trump administration had priorities elsewhere – in Asia and on America’s own borders.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) unit involved in the killings of 15 Palestinian paramedics and rescue workers in the Gaza Strip last month was under the command of a brigade led by a notorious Israeli general previously accused by some of his own troops of having “contempt for human life”.

The IDF has confirmed that troops from Golani, one of the army’s five infantry brigades, opened fire on two convoys of ambulances in Rafah on 23 March and dug a mass grave to cover the bodies of those killed until the corpses could be retrieved by a UN team six days later. It has disputed allegations from two witnesses who exhumed the bodies and newly released postmortem results that found several of those killed had close-range gunshot wounds to the head and chest and were discovered with their hands or legs tied.

Field operatives from Unit 504, a military intelligence unit with a reputation for cruelty and reckless behaviour, including torture, were also present during the attack, a senior military intelligence source with knowledge of recent IDF deployments in southern Gaza told the Guardian. The Israeli military declined to comment on whether 504 was involved.

During the Rafah attack, the Golani troops were under the command of the reservist Armoured 14th Brigade. The 14th Brigade is part of a division led by Brig Gen Yehuda Vach, who former officers say designated an unofficial “kill zone” elsewhere in the strip which resulted in the arbitrary killings of Palestinian civilians. Soldiers also alleged Vach’s “lack of operational discipline” endangered soldiers’ lives.

Vach has also told troops “there are no innocents in Gaza”, according to an investigation by the Israeli daily Haaretz.

In a video of Golani troops being briefed before their redeployment to Gaza earlier this month, aired by Israel’s Channel 14, a battalion commander appeared to endorse an open-fire policy, telling the soldiers: “Anyone you encounter there is an enemy. You identify anyone, you eliminate him.”

Golani soldiers have previously been accused of war crimes in the conflict, including killing civilians, degrading treatment of bodies, needless destruction of civilian infrastructure, and incitement to genocide.

A song written by a member of the brigade’s 51st Battalion in the aftermath of the Hamas 7 October 2023 attack on Israel that ignited the war has become an unofficial anthem for many soldiers. The chorus’s lyrics include: “For what you did to the nation of Israel, Golani is coming with gasoline … Gaza will burn.”

The accompanying music video features footage from Golani operations in Gaza in which the brigade’s yellow and green standard can clearly be seen.

Many of the allegations against Golani troops were compiled from social media photo and video footage posted online by the soldiers themselves and cited in legal filings by the Hind Rajab Foundation, a non-profit that aims to hold Israeli military personnel accountable for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. Israeli officials say the two founders of the Belgium-based organisation have a history of extremist views.

The presence of Unit 504 was also backed up by the account of the sole survivor of the massacre, the Red Crescent volunteer Munther Abed, and official photos and video of recent IDF operations in Rafah.

The unit has conducted thousands of interrogations of captives from Gaza during the war, and differs from other Israeli military intelligence outfits in that the soldiers are combat troops, operating at a battalion level, who speak fluent Arabic.

According to Abed, a 27-year-old ambulance service volunteer, troops he described as looking like “special forces … armed with rifles, green lasers, and night-vision goggles” dragged him out of the emergency vehicle after it was shot at continuously for five minutes, killing the driver and paramedic he was travelling with.

The uniform description could match either Golani commandos or that of Unit 504 field operatives.

Abed said he was then stripped to his underwear, with his hands bound behind his back, and threatened, suffocated and beaten during several hours of interrogation.

Last week, the Israeli military backtracked on its account of the killings of the paramedics after footage emerged which contradicted its claims that the Red Crescent vehicles were not marked as emergency vehicles and were not using headlights or flashing lights when troops opened fire.

The IDF has said that between six and nine of the medics had links to Hamas, without providing evidence. None of those killed – eight Red Crescent staff, six members of the Gaza civil defence agency and one employee of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees – were armed. One Red Crescent employee is still missing.

The Israeli army chief, Lt Gen Eyal Zamir, has since ordered a second, more in-depth investigation into the attack.

Over 18 months of war Israeli forces have killed hundreds of medical workers and the staff of aid agencies and UN organisations in Gaza. In April last year, seven members of the charity World Central Kitchen died in a sustained Israeli attack on their clearly marked vehicles.

Human rights organisations have long accused the Israeli military of a culture of impunity, with few soldiers ever facing justice. In 2023, fewer than 1% of complaints made against Israeli troops’ actions in the occupied Palestinian territories ended in a conviction, according to the latest US state department annual human rights report.

Earlier this week, the Palestinian Red Crescent Society called for an international investigation into the incident, which was the deadliest for members of the International Committee of the Red Cross since six workers were shot and killed in 2017 in an Islamic State ambush in Afghanistan.

Young men and boys fuelled by “strongly misogynistic” online material are hunting for vulnerable women and girls to exploit on websites such as eating disorder and suicide forums, senior officers have said.

The threat from young males wanting to carry out serious harm is so serious that counter-terrorism officers are joining the National Crime Agency (NCA) in the hunt for them, fearing they could go on to attack or kill.

Britain’s head of counter-terrorism, Matt Jukes, told the Guardian that a joint taskforce would be set up between his force and the NCA to tackle those fixated with violence online, in what he called a “decisive moment”.

Jukes, the Metropolitan police force’s assistant commissioner for specialist operations, said the new pairing would look for those consuming online material about killings or sexual abuse. Those who might go on to plot school shootings and other mass attacks, as well as those who encouraged women and girls to harm themselves, would also fall under their remit.

The new taskforce will also tackle so-called com networks (online communities), which counter-terrorism policing (CTP) and the NCA said involved hundreds of boys and young men. They will also hunt for those viewing material inciting sexual abuse.

The decision to pool the efforts of CTP and the NCA is being driven by the fear that it might be impossible to tell whether an obsession with violence and gore could turn into terrorism, a school massacre or other serious attack until it was too late.

Jukes, who is expected to be a candidate for the deputy commissionership of the Met, said: “What we’ve seen over the years is the characteristics of those cases looking increasingly similar.”

Com networks grew sixfold between 2022 and 2024 and are mainly young males joining together online to carry out hacking exercises and hunt for victims to steer into sexual abuse or worse.

James Babbage, the director general of threats for the NCA, said com networks were believed to have hundreds of people in the UK alone.

“We think they’re mostly doing it for kudos, for notoriety … within their peer group online,” he said. “In general, they are looking for victims who are already vulnerable. So they are looking at sort of suicidal ideation sites. They’re looking at eating disorders forums.”

Jukes said: “Young people who might have felt very isolated in some of their ideas and interests might never even have thought of some of the things which they’re now accessing … so people are getting both content and validation.

“We’re going to go after the com networks. We are going to go after those who appear to be administrating and facilitating them.”

The boost to the hunt for potentially violent young males comes after the Guardian revealed that the Southport attacker who murdered three girls at a dance class last July had been referred and rejected three times by the Prevent programme.

Prevent exists to identify those at risk of supporting terrorist violence. The Southport attacker had shown insufficient signs of ideological extremism but did have an interest in violence, including school massacres.

Babbage said: “The violence-fixated individuals that are coming up on the radar for terrorism policing, the tech-enabled violence against women and girls that police are seeing and the com networks that we’re seeing engaged in child sexual abuse and cybercrime – to some degree, this sort of young male community, it’s sort of the same threat.

“People are spinning up and radicalising and getting into more extreme harm, and might spin out and end up presenting as any one of those things.”

The material driving the young males to view horrific material and to potentially offend “has a very significant dose of misogyny in it”, Babbage added.

Jukes said the internet had “turbocharged” material triggering resentment among some young men: “In com networks and in terrorist networks, the idea that the interests of men and boys have been relegated, and the interests of women have been elevated, leads directly to violent misogyny.”

He said there were “technological and engineering” solutions to the crisis, and that big tech could help by stopping the algorithms pushing extreme content to youngpeople who wanted it. They could also aid police in helping to detect young people searching for violent content.

Jukes added: “The scale we’re talking about is beyond human intervention. There are too many users, too much traffic.”

In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org

Young men and boys fuelled by “strongly misogynistic” online material are hunting for vulnerable women and girls to exploit on websites such as eating disorder and suicide forums, senior officers have said.

The threat from young males wanting to carry out serious harm is so serious that counter-terrorism officers are joining the National Crime Agency (NCA) in the hunt for them, fearing they could go on to attack or kill.

Britain’s head of counter-terrorism, Matt Jukes, told the Guardian that a joint taskforce would be set up between his force and the NCA to tackle those fixated with violence online, in what he called a “decisive moment”.

Jukes, the Metropolitan police force’s assistant commissioner for specialist operations, said the new pairing would look for those consuming online material about killings or sexual abuse. Those who might go on to plot school shootings and other mass attacks, as well as those who encouraged women and girls to harm themselves, would also fall under their remit.

The new taskforce will also tackle so-called com networks (online communities), which counter-terrorism policing (CTP) and the NCA said involved hundreds of boys and young men. They will also hunt for those viewing material inciting sexual abuse.

The decision to pool the efforts of CTP and the NCA is being driven by the fear that it might be impossible to tell whether an obsession with violence and gore could turn into terrorism, a school massacre or other serious attack until it was too late.

Jukes, who is expected to be a candidate for the deputy commissionership of the Met, said: “What we’ve seen over the years is the characteristics of those cases looking increasingly similar.”

Com networks grew sixfold between 2022 and 2024 and are mainly young males joining together online to carry out hacking exercises and hunt for victims to steer into sexual abuse or worse.

James Babbage, the director general of threats for the NCA, said com networks were believed to have hundreds of people in the UK alone.

“We think they’re mostly doing it for kudos, for notoriety … within their peer group online,” he said. “In general, they are looking for victims who are already vulnerable. So they are looking at sort of suicidal ideation sites. They’re looking at eating disorders forums.”

Jukes said: “Young people who might have felt very isolated in some of their ideas and interests might never even have thought of some of the things which they’re now accessing … so people are getting both content and validation.

“We’re going to go after the com networks. We are going to go after those who appear to be administrating and facilitating them.”

The boost to the hunt for potentially violent young males comes after the Guardian revealed that the Southport attacker who murdered three girls at a dance class last July had been referred and rejected three times by the Prevent programme.

Prevent exists to identify those at risk of supporting terrorist violence. The Southport attacker had shown insufficient signs of ideological extremism but did have an interest in violence, including school massacres.

Babbage said: “The violence-fixated individuals that are coming up on the radar for terrorism policing, the tech-enabled violence against women and girls that police are seeing and the com networks that we’re seeing engaged in child sexual abuse and cybercrime – to some degree, this sort of young male community, it’s sort of the same threat.

“People are spinning up and radicalising and getting into more extreme harm, and might spin out and end up presenting as any one of those things.”

The material driving the young males to view horrific material and to potentially offend “has a very significant dose of misogyny in it”, Babbage added.

Jukes said the internet had “turbocharged” material triggering resentment among some young men: “In com networks and in terrorist networks, the idea that the interests of men and boys have been relegated, and the interests of women have been elevated, leads directly to violent misogyny.”

He said there were “technological and engineering” solutions to the crisis, and that big tech could help by stopping the algorithms pushing extreme content to youngpeople who wanted it. They could also aid police in helping to detect young people searching for violent content.

Jukes added: “The scale we’re talking about is beyond human intervention. There are too many users, too much traffic.”

In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org

The days of fumbling around for your boarding pass or frantically checking in for a flight on the way to the airport could soon be over under imminent plans to overhaul the way we travel.

The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), the UN body responsible for crafting airline policy, plans to dramatically shake up existing rules for airports and airlines through the introduction of a “digital travel credential”.

This would allow passengers to store passport information on their devices to be used for travel. The changes could come into effect within three years, according to the Times.

Currently, those flying must check in, which can be done online or at the airport upon arrival. They are then issued with a boarding pass with a barcode. This is scanned by a passenger at various points throughout the airport, including at the gate before boarding.

The changes would make boarding passes and the need to check in for flights obsolete. Instead, flyers will download a “journey pass” to their phone when they book a flight. The pass will be automatically updated if any changes are made to the booking.

Passengers will also be able to upload their passports to their phone and travel through airports using their face for verification. Instead of manually checking in, which would let airlines know who intends to board their flights, airlines will instead be alerted when passengers arrive at the airport and their face is scanned.

Valérie Viale, the director of product management at Amadeus, a travel technology company, told the Times that the changes were “the biggest in 50 years”. She said: “The last upgrade of great scale was the adoption of e-ticketing in the early 2000s. The industry has now decided it’s time to upgrade to modern systems that are more like what Amazon would use.”

Infrastructure upgrades at airports, including facial recognition technology and the ability to read a passport from a mobile device, would be needed for the plans to be carried out successfully.

“Many airline systems haven’t changed for more than 50 years because everything has to be consistent across the industry and interoperable,” said Viale.

The new technology could spark privacy concerns but Amadeus said it had developed a system where passengers’ details are wiped within 15 seconds of each contact with a “touchpoint” – such as the pre-security gates.

How delays and connecting flights are handled could also change. Under the technology being developed, passengers who miss connecting flights due to delays out of their control could automatically be sent a notification on their phones with details of their new onward flight. Their journey pass would automatically update and they would be allowed to board the new flight.

“At the moment airlines have systems that are very siloed,” Viale said. “There’s the reservation system that, when check-in opens, makes a handshake with a delivery system and says ‘here are my reservations, you can now deliver them’. In the future, it’ll be far more continuous and the journey pass will be dynamic.”

Bella Thorne has accused fellow US actor Mickey Rourke of bruising her genitals with a metal grinder on the set of a movie that they filmed together during what she described as “one of the all time worst experiences” of her career.

In a story on her Instagram account on Friday, Thorne alleged that the episode was part of a broader campaign to humiliate her while they collaborated on the 2020 thriller Girl. She wrote: “This fucking dude. GROSS” and relayed the account in writing over a copy of a BBC article reporting that Celebrity Big Brother’s producers had reprimanded him for aiming homophobic comments at the singer JoJo Siwa while they competed on the reality show.

A representative of Rourke did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thorne’s allegations.

Thorne’s post recounted how she and the Oscar nominee were sharing a scene in which she was kneeling with her hands zip-tied around her back. “He’s supposed to take a metal grinder to my knee cap and instead he used it on my genitals [through] my jeans,” Thorne wrote. “Hitting them over and over again. I had bruises on my pelvic bone – Working with Mickey was one of the all time worst experiences of my life working as an actress.”

She also shared a screenshot of a post on X in which she alleged that Rourke separately revved an engine and covered her “completely in dirt” for another scene.

“I guess he thought it was funny to humiliate me in front of the entire crew,” Thorne – the 27-year-old former Disney star whose credits also include The Duff and Amityville: The Awakening – said of Rourke, 72.

Thorne then asserted that she had to take it upon herself to “go in his trailer absolutely alone” and talk him into finishing up the movie “as he shouted crazy demands that he wanted” from those helming the project written and directed by Chad Faust.

“He refused to speak to the director or producers – so I had to convince him to show up and complete his job,” Thorne continued. “In fact I had to beg.”

She said it was “uncomfortable”. But she said she endured it because “the movie could not be finished without him [and] everyone’s work would’ve just been lost and completely for nothing”.

Thorne’s comments about her on-set experience with Rourke on Girl capped off a week of unflattering headlines for the actor whose work on 2008’s The Wrestler once won him Golden Globe and Bafta awards.

He earned a formal warning from Celebrity Big Brother UK’s producers after going on the show and boasting to Siwa, who is gay, that he would “make her straight”.

Rourke also invoked a British slang word for cigarette that is also a homophobic slur in the US before directing himself at Siwa and saying: “I’m not talking to you.”

Celebrity Big Brother UK’s producers indicated to Rourke that they would remove him from the show if he kept up with the homophobic language.

The BBC had an unofficial league table of the most loved and despised accents, the war correspondent Kate Adie has revealed. And the most hated? Brummie.

Geordie was liked, she told an audience in Sunderland, but from one end of the country to the other it was Birmingham that was particularly disliked.

Adie was speaking at an event marking the cataloguing of a huge archive of material documenting her life and career. From starting out at BBC Radio Durham to covering the Troubles, numerous wars and the student uprising in Tiananmen Square, Adie was for years one of Britain’s best-known and most trusted television reporters.

Her archive of more than 2,300 objects includes dozens of notebooks as well as tapes, letters, photographs and video clips. It was donated to the University of Sunderland a number of years ago but funding to properly catalogue the items only came last year.

Adie was brought up in Sunderland but has never had a strong accent, she said. Nor did her parents, who adopted her as a baby, “or their parents”.

She said: “It is one of this country’s complex matters. Accents vary hugely and how they are received varies hugely.

“Years and years ago the BBC had an unofficial league table of the most liked and the most hated accents.

“The view was that some of them drove people nuts up and down the country. Geordie did pretty well. It’s liked.”

Adie asked the audience to guess what the most disliked accent was. A chorus of “Birmingham” followed. They were correct, Adie said.

“From one end of the country to another, it’s Birmingham! Michael Buerk, who comes from Birmingham, was once asked why he didn’t use the accent. He said, ‘I didn’t want death threats’.”

She said dissertations could be written on news programme accents, recalling her days at BBC Radio Durham when a locally accented producer would read the bulletin. “We got complaints from everywhere. The whole range of audience. They felt it wasn’t right for news. It is a curious one.”

Her big break came as duty reporter in May 1980, during the Iranian embassy siege. Her coverage was groundbreaking but did not make her an instant star, she said. “I was sent off to a pools winner the next day.”

The archive includes a bullet that grazed Adie when she was reporting from Tiananmen Square but said her worst moment was in Belfast where she thought she had been shot in the face, dropped down and assumed she was going to die.

Then she heard her cameraman shouting: “Get up! Get up! You’ve been hit in the face by a potato!”

The archive shines a light on Adie’s happy childhood – “lots of tennis” – and her time at the National Youth Theatre, which was not quite the Shakespearean study group her teacher had imagined.

It was instead a large group of “randy 17- and 18-year-olds,” she said. “We had fun.”

Adie recalled the theatre having people from all backgrounds. She remembered meeting a memorably quirky girl. “I wonder what happened to Helen Mirren?”

The University of Sunderland said the cataloguing essentially “unlocks” the Adie collection. It includes images from her first BBC job in 1968 at Durham where her annual salary was £934 a year and its first story was a pigeon race.

She went on to BBC jobs in Plymouth, Bristol and the south coast where she was tipped off about a double murder in Brighton. She and her crew captured great footage but her news editor in Southampton was unimpressed – she was meant to be covering an embroidery exhibition in Ditchling.

She was sacked, she said, but by chance a national news editor rang her to see if she was free for a shift and she told him about the murder and she joined the London newsroom.

David Bell, the university’s vice-chancellor and chief executive, said Adie was one of the most talented broadcasters of her, or any, generation and there were plans to digitise key strands of the collection.

“By unlocking the Kate Adie collection this way, the university hopes to educate and inspire audiences, both young and old, with the accomplishments of a Sunderland-raised pioneer in her field.”

Adie admitted she was something of a hoarder. “I’m just one of those people who goes to clear the attic and then never does.”

Adie is 79 but can still be heard presenting From Our Own Correspondent on BBC Radio 4.

Asked about the state of news reporting today, she said she would love to see a small radio station in every UK town providing local information.

“I think every area of this country, except London, is badly reported. I think a lot of places are neglected, seriously. I’ve seen a thing in New Zealand where the local newspaper is on the same building floor as the local TV and the local radio. They all work together and it works. It is wonderful and it is not expensive.”

Strong winds caused havoc in Beijing and parts of northern China on Saturday, forcing hundreds of flights to be cancelled, attractions to close and rail lines to be suspended, state media said.

The powerful winds stemmed mainly from a cold vortex system formed over Mongolia that was moving east and south, sweeping across northern China from Friday and through the weekend, the China Meteorological Administration (CMA) said.

Temperatures in the capital were set to fall by 12 degrees Celsius on Saturday, and meteorologists warned that wind speeds could rival or exceed April records dating back to 1951.

State-run news agency Xinhua reported that gusts of up to 150km/h (93mph) were forecast.

Beijing earlier issued its first orange alert – the second-highest tier – for strong winds in a decade for this weekend.

As of Saturday morning, 413 flights at Beijing’s Capital international airport had been cancelled, state broadcaster CCTV said.

Train services including the airport’s express subway line and some high-speed rail lines had also been suspended, CCTV added.

Tourist attractions including the Summer Palace, Temple of Heaven, Beijing zoo and the Universal Studios theme park were also temporarily closed on Saturday.

Almost 300 trees in the Chinese capital had toppled and 19 vehicles had been damaged, CCTV said, adding that no injuries due to the strong winds had been reported in Beijing yet.

China is the world’s biggest emitter of the greenhouse gases that scientists say are driving climate change and making extreme weather more frequent and intense.

Dozens of people were killed and thousands evacuated during storms that caused severe flooding around the country last year.

In May, a highway in southern China collapsed after days of rain, killing 48 people.

Rick Thorburn, the Queensland man who was serving life in jail for the murder of 12-year-old foster child Tiahleigh Palmer, has been found dead in his cell.

Queensland Corrective Services confirmed he had died in his Woodford Correctional Centre cell on Saturday.

“The 64-year-old man was accommodated in a single cell and was found unresponsive at approximately 10pm,” a spokesperson said.

“Responding officers called [Queensland ambulance service] and attempted to revive the man. However, their efforts were unsuccessful.”

The incident has been reported to police and all deaths in custody in Queensland are referred to the coroner. The spokesperson said responding officers were being supported by management and were thanked for their attempts to revive the man.

Thorburn was convicted and jailed for life in 2018 after admitting to killing the 12-year-old schoolgirl in 2015 after his son Trent confessed to sexually assaulting her and feared she was pregnant.

Tiahleigh was placed into care in January 2010 and the Thorburn family became her full-time carers in January 2015. Trent told his mother he had sexually assaulted Tiahleigh and was concerned she was pregnant. His mother then told Rick Thorburn, who then murdered her on 29 October, the court heard.

Thorburn said his plan was to dispose of the body, which was found six days later on the banks of the Pimpama River near the Gold Coast, decomposing and naked except for underpants.

A Queensland coroner found in 2021 that Tiahleigh had likely died as a result of choking or asphyxiation in a deliberate act by Thorburn, and rejected Thorburn’s claim it was accidental.

Thorburn was a pall bearer at Tiahleigh’s funeral on 14 November, and was charged almost a year later with her murder.

Rick Thorburn was one of four of the Thorburn family to be convicted over Tiahleigh’s murder. His two sons and his wife were also jailed prior to his conviction. However, all sentences have since passed.

Thorburn was eligible for parole in 2038.