The FBI on Friday arrested a judge whom the agency accused of obstruction after it said she helped a man evade US immigration authorities as they were seeking to arrest him at her courthouse.

The county circuit judge, Hannah Dugan, was apprehended in the courthouse where she works in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, at 8.30am local time on Friday on charges of obstruction, a spokesperson for the US Marshals Service confirmed to the Guardian.

Kash Patel, the Trump-appointed FBI director, wrote mid-morning on X: “We believe Judge Dugan intentionally misdirected federal agents away from the subject to be arrested in her courthouse, Eduardo Flores Ruiz, allowing the subject – an illegal alien – to evade arrest.”

He said that agents were still able to arrest the target after he was “chased down” and that he was in custody. Patel added that “the judge’s obstruction created increased danger to the public”. The FBI director deleted the post minutes later for unknown reasons, but the US marshals confirmed to multiple outlets that the arrest had occurred.

Dugan appeared briefly in federal court in Milwaukee later on Friday morning before being released from custody. Her next court appearance is 15 May.

“Judge Dugan wholeheartedly regrets and protests her arrest. It was not made in the interest of public safety,” her attorney, Craig Mastantuono, said during the hearing. He declined to comment to an Associated Press reporter, following her court appearance.

A crowd formed outside the courthouse, chanting: “Free the judge now.”

In a statement shared with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, an attorney for Dugan said: “Hannah C Dugan has committed herself to the rule of law and the principles of due process for her entire career as a lawyer and a judge.”

It continued: “Judge Dugan will defend herself vigorously, and looks forward to being exonerated.”

Trump weighed in on his Truth Social platform by sharing an image of the judge taken from her campaign’s Facebook page in which she was seen on the bench wearing a KN95 face mask and displaying the Ukrainian national symbol of a trident. The image was first posted on X by the rightwing blogger Libs of TikTok.

The Milwaukee city council released a statement following the arrest: “This morning’s news that Judge Hannah Dugan was arrested by federal authorities is shocking and upsetting. Judge Dugan should be afforded the same respect and due process that she has diligently provided others throughout her career.

“Perhaps the most chilling part of Judge Dugan’s arrest is the continued aggression by which the current administration in Washington, DC has weaponized federal law enforcement, such as ICE, against immigrant communities,” the statement reads. “As local elected officials, we are working daily to support our constituents who grow increasingly concerned and worried with each passing incident.”

Senator Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat representing Wisconsin, called the arrest of a sitting judge a “gravely serious and drastic move” that “threatens to breach” the separation of power between the executive and judicial branches.

“Make no mistake, we do not have kings in this country and we are a democracy governed by laws that everyone must abide by,” Baldwin said in an emailed statement after Dugan’s arrest.

The leftwing senator Bernie Sanders said the move was about “unchecked power”.

“Let’s be clear. Trump’s arrest of Judge Dugan in Milwaukee has nothing to do with immigration. It has everything to do with [Trump] moving this country towards authoritarianism,” he said in a statement.

The Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren said in a social media post: “This administration is threatening our country’s judicial system. This rings serious alarm bells.”

The judge’s arrest dramatically escalates tensions between federal authorities and state and local officials amid Donald Trump’s anti-immigration crackdown. It also comes amid a growing battle between the Trump administration and the federal judiciary over the president’s executive actions over deportations and other matters.

In a statement Wisconsin’s governor, Democrat Tony Evers, accused the Trump administration of repeatedly using “dangerous rhetoric to attack and attempt to undermine our judiciary at every level”.

“I have deep respect for the rule of law, our nation’s judiciary, the importance of judges making decisions impartially without fear or favor, and the efforts of law enforcement to hold people accountable if they commit a crime,” Evers said. “I will continue to put my faith in our justice system as this situation plays out in the court of law.”

It was reported on Tuesday that the FBI was investigating whether Dugan “tried to help an undocumented immigrant avoid arrest when that person was scheduled to appear in her courtroom last week”, per an email obtained by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Dugan told the Journal Sentinel: “Nearly every fact regarding the ‘tips’ in your email is inaccurate.”

The arrest of Dugan is the first publicly known instance of the Trump administration charging a local official for allegedly interfering with immigration enforcement.

Emil Bove, the justice department’s principal associate deputy attorney general, issued a memo in January calling on prosecutors to pursue criminal cases against local government officials who obstructed the federal government’s immigration enforcement efforts.

Bove stated in the three-page memo: “Federal law prohibits state and local actors from resisting, obstructing, and otherwise failing to comply with lawful immigration-related commands or requests.”

Dugan has been charged with the federal offenses of obstructing a proceeding and concealing an individual to prevent arrest, according to documents filed with the court.

The administration alleged that in the original encounter, the judge ordered immigration officials to leave the courthouse, saying they did not have a warrant signed by a judge to apprehend the suspect they were seeking, who was in court for other reasons.

Prosecutors said that Dugan became “visibly angry” when she learned that immigration agents were planning an arrest in her courtroom, according to court filings.

Dugan ordered the immigration officials to speak with the chief judge and then escorted Flores Ruiz and his attorney through a door that led to a non-public area of the courthouse, the prosecution complaint said.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, citing sources it did not identify, said Dugan steered Flores Ruiz and his attorney to a private hallway and into a public area but did not hide the pair in a jury deliberation room as some have accused her of doing.

Dugan was first elected as a county judge in 2016 and before that was head of the local branch of Catholic Charities, which provides refugee resettlement programs. She was previously a lawyer at the Legal Aid Society of Milwaukee, which serves low-income people.

The case is similar to one brought during the first Trump administration against a Massachusetts judge, who was accused of helping a man sneak out a backdoor of a courthouse to evade a waiting immigration enforcement agent.

That prosecution sparked outrage from many in the legal community, who slammed the case as politically motivated. Prosecutors under the Biden administration dropped the case against Newton district judge Shelley Joseph in 2022 after she agreed to refer herself to a state agency that investigates allegations of misconduct by members of the bench.

The Associated Press contributed reporting

A group of high-profile Democratic lawmakers has called on the Donald Trump administration to immediately release the Tufts University graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk, praised her “unwavering spirit” and warned that the White House is engaging in “repression”.

In a New York Times essay published on Friday morning, the US senator Ed Markey and representatives Jim McGovern and Ayanna Pressley, who all represent Massachusetts, where Tufts is based, shared more details from their visit to Öztürk this week at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention center in Louisiana, where she has been held since her arrest last month.

“She was inadequately fed, kept in facilities with extremely cold temperatures and denied personal necessities and religious accommodations” and has “suffered asthma attacks for which she lacked her prescribed medication” the lawmakers wrote.

“Despite all this” they added, “we were struck by her unwavering spirit.”

The lawmakers were part of a delegation of congressional Democratic lawmakers who traveled to Louisiana this week to visit both Öztürk and Mahmoud Khalil, the recent Columbia University graduate and Palestinian activist who is also being held in Ice custody at a separate facility in Louisiana.

Öztürk, who co-authored an opinion essay last year in the Tufts student newspaper that was critical of the university’s response to Israel’s attacks on Palestinians, was detained in late March and transferred to Louisiana. Neither she nor Khalil have been charged with any crimes and appear to have been targeted solely for their political views in a Trump administration crackdown that goes far beyond the undocumented immigrant communities that Trump pledged to expel when he was running for a second term.

“This is not immigration enforcement” the lawmakers wrote. “This is repression. This is authoritarianism.”

They warned that Öztürk’s case “is not an isolated one.

“This administration has already overseen a wave of unconstitutional actions: raids without warrants, prolonged detentions without hearings and retaliatory deportations,” they wrote.

The lawmakers cautioned that each case “chips away at the rule of law”, “makes it easier for the next to go unnoticed”, and “brings us closer to the authoritarianism we once believed could never take root on American soil.

“When a government begins to imprison writers for their words, when it abandons legal norms for political convenience, when it cloaks oppression in the language of national security, alarm bells must ring. Loudly,” they wrote.

They called for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to release Öztürk immediately, to drop any proceedings against her and to investigate the conditions at the detention center where she is being held.

They also urged their Republican colleagues “to stand up to President Trump’s evident disregard for the rule of law.

“And we urge every American to understand: This is not someone else’s fight,” they conclude. “The Constitution is only as strong as our willingness to defend it.”

Also, in Khalil’s case, lawyers for DHS disclosed in court documents that they did not have a warrant when they arrested him last month.

The attorneys representing the administration argued on Thursday that “officers had exigent circumstances to conduct the warrantless arrest” and said that agents believed Khalil would “escape before they could obtain a warrant”.

Khalil’s legal team has argued that Khalil’s removal proceedings should be terminated since he was arrested without a warrant. His lawyers also stated that Khalil had no plans to flee or leave the country, and emphasized that he “fully complied with the agents arresting him, despite the fact that after repeated requests by Khalil, his pregnant wife, and his lawyer, they never showed him a warrant”. His wife has since given birth while Khalil was not released for the event.

In his three months locked up at Stewart detention center in Lumpkin, Georgia, Rodney Taylor has missed meals and showers, lived with increasing pain in his hips, developed a swollen thumb on his right hand and blisters on the stumps where his two legs were amputated when he was a toddler.

Taylor’s mother brought him to the US from Liberia on a medical visa as a small child. He went through 16 operations and is a double amputee. He has two fingers on his right hand. Now 46, he has lived in the US nearly his entire life, works as a barber, is active in promoting cancer awareness in his community, and recently got engaged.

Nonetheless, his immigration status is unresolved, and despite having an application for residence – commonly known as a “green card” – pending, on 15 January Ice agents arrived at his Loganville, Georgia home and took him to Stewart.

The reason, according to his attorney, who shared paperwork from his case with the Guardian: a burglary conviction he received as a teenager and which the state of Georgia pardoned him for in 2010.

His case is one of an untold number of people with disabilities and other serious health issues who are being swept up in the current administration’s “mass deportation” efforts. These efforts are carried out in extreme overcrowding at the hundred-plus detention centers like Stewart across the nation.

They also happen without the benefit of two federal offices that formerly provided oversight for healthcare and other issues, and now a situation is unfolding where detainees with disabilities like Taylor are increasingly at risk of life-altering outcomes and even death, experts say.

“It’s the perfect storm for abuses to occur – including negligence,” said Joseph Nwadiuko, a professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania who researches the immigration detention system. “Deaths are much more likely … [and] we haven’t thought about the healthcare implications of what’s developing,” he said.

The immigration detention system was already a precarious, potentially unsafe place for detainees with disabilities, according to experts and a handful of current and former employees with the Department of Homeland Security – Ice’s parent agency.

But when the current administration closed the office for civil rights and civil liberties (CRCL) and the office of the immigration detention ombudsman (Oido) last month, detainees such as Taylor were left with less protection than ever – at a time when nearly 48,000 detainees are locked up nationwide, the highest number since October 2019.

“It’s all happening in the dark,” said Sarah Owings, Taylor’s attorney, speaking of conditions facing her client and others like him.

Taylor spoke to the Guardian from Stewart. When he was detained in front of his house, he was only days away from picking up new prosthetic legs; the ones he was using were too tight. Then the detention center gave him shoes that didn’t fit the legs and trying to walk “felt like walking on concrete on my knees”, he said.

In addition, the prosthetic legs have batteries that require eight hours of charging a day. But after being locked up at Stewart, he didn’t even see a doctor for three days, and in the ensuing months, the facility has never been able to arrange for eight hours of charging, allowing only several hours at a time. The result: the batteries die and the legs don’t bend, creating more pain in Taylor’s hips.

Taylor and Owings sought a medical leave, in order to see the doctor who could at least fit him for the new prosthetic legs – and were denied. A second petition is “under review”, he said.

In the meantime, walking to the cafeteria to eat has proved too painful. Other detainees brought him meals for awhile, but often had to argue with guards for permission. A case manager took over the chore, often arriving at least an hour after meals.

Staff also offered Taylor a wheelchair – but he can’t push it, as his right hand only has two fingers, and his thumb has swollen and become painful since he was detained.

Taylor’s case was one of several featured in a CNN story about people facing possible deportation after decades of living in the US. Afterwards, he said, “the warden came to me and said, ‘Tell me what you need.’” He told him about his legs and thumb. “I haven’t heard a response yet,” Taylor said. “It’s stressful.”

Taylor told the Guardian he was not the only detainee at Stewart with medical issues. He met another detainee who suffered an infection and couldn’t walk; the man had to wait about a month to get crutches.

“Unless you’re dying or bleeding out … they’re not going to come,” he said a guard told him and several others. “They think, ‘Everybody is getting deported soon … and fixing your issue is not our concern – getting you outta here is our concern. Why spend all this extra money?’” said Taylor.

The situation is the same at other Ice detention facilities, several experts told the Guardian. They mentioned Krome, in Miami, Florida, where at least three detainees have died in recent months and others with conditions such as HIV have gone weeks without medicine.

Amy Zeidan, a professor of emergency medicine at Atlanta’s Emory University who has researched healthcare in the immigration detention system, said that increasing overcrowding also worsens a chronic workforce shortage. “They don’t have enough qualified people,” she said. “They don’t have the people they need to provide appropriate care.”

These conditions “are emblematic of the system” under the current administration, said a DHS staffer who preferred anonymity to avoid retaliation.

Michelle Brané was the ombudsman at the Oido until the office of 100-plus employees was shut down, doing away with inspections of immigration detention facilities – both announced and unannounced; responses to complaints; and policy recommendations for improving such aspects of detention as healthcare. Her office “deescalated situations that are now being exacerbated [by] … increasing detentions”, she said.

The DHS sees things differently.

“These offices have obstructed immigration enforcement by adding bureaucratic hurdles and undermining [the department’s] mission,” said a DHS spokesperson, Tricia McLaughlin, in March, regarding shuttering the Oido and the CRCL, which handled more in-depth investigations of healthcare and other issues. Ice did not respond to a query from the Guardian.

This attitude, said Brané, shows a “disdain for meeting basic humane conditions”, adding that her office was “created by statute and funded by Congress”.

The former ombudsman is concerned about the situation facing detainees with disabilities and other serious health issues. “Ultimately, I’m worried people will die, or suffer irreparable harm – and dying shouldn’t be the point at which we start caring,” she said. “We shouldn’t be a country that is willingly mistreating people.”

Xi Jinping has announced a plan to counter China’s continuing economic problems and the impact of the US trade war, as reports swirl that it could drop tariffs on some US products, including semiconductors.

Friday’s meeting of the politburo was convened to discuss China’s economy, which since the pandemic has faced difficulties fuelled by a housing sector crisis, youth unemployment and Donald Trump’s tariffs on all Chinese imports to the US.

A readout of the meeting published by the official state media outlet Xinhua said China’s economy had showed a “positive trend” with increasing social confidence in 2025, but “the impact of external shocks has increased”.

“We must strengthen bottom-line thinking, fully prepare emergency plans and do a solid job in economic work,” it said.

In a reference to Trump’s global tariffs, the readout said Beijing would “work with the international community to actively uphold multilateralism and oppose unilateral bullying practices”.

he US president has again insisted that Xi has called him to discuss the border taxes, despite Beijing denying any contact between the two countries over their bitter trade dispute.

In an interview conducted on Tuesday with Time magazine and published on Friday, Trump repeated the claim but did not say when the call took place or specify what was discussed. “He’s called,” Trump said of Xi. “And I don’t think that’s a sign of weakness on his behalf.”

On Thursday, a spokesperson for China’s foreign affairs ministry, Guo Jiakun, said of the reports of talks: “None of that is true.”

Friday’s politburo readout proposed a series of interventions to bolster the domestic economy and protect people and businesses from the impact of Trump’s tariffs, including increasing unemployment insurance payouts. It promised to increase low and middle incomes, develop the service industry and boost consumption.

“We should take multiple measures to help enterprises in difficulties,” it said. “We should strengthen financing support. We should accelerate the integration of domestic and foreign trade.”

It stressed the need for more proactive macroeconomic policies, faster development of a new real estate model and increased housing stock, and “stepping up” city renewal programmes and urban renovation.

Wen-ti Sung, a non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub, said the politburo’s decisions showed Beijing “clearly views the international macroeconomic environment as hostile” and was willing to take on high domestic inflation to weather the tariffs.

“[This] hints that China will be digging into the trenches and is preparing for a long trade fight with Trump,” he said.

Sung said Beijing was “doubling down on boosting domestic demand” and bolstering fiscal stimulus as the international market showed no signs of significant improvement.

The meeting was held amid reports that Chinese authorities were considering a list of US products to exempt from the 125% tariffs imposed on all US imports. Earlier reports from Bloomberg and Reuters said medical equipment, semiconductors and some industrial chemicals such as ethane were being considered.

On Thursday, a Shenzhen-based supplier posted online that it had been notified by the customs agency that eight semiconductor products would no longer attract the 125% duty.

On Friday, the head of the American Chamber of Commerce in China, Michael Hart, said the Chinese authorities had been asking members what products they imported from the US that they could not find anywhere else.

He welcomed the early signs that both sides were reviewing tariffs and starting to produce lists of excluded items. Stock markets across the Asia Pacific region rose after the reports.

The trade war has hit the US and Chinese economies, and the tariff exemptions are likely to be a sign of the parties trying to ease their way out. The US had already exempted some categories of Chinese-made products from tariffs, including smartphones and laptops. This week, Trump said his tariffs on China would “come down substantially but it won’t be zero”.

But in public the two governments have given different accounts on the status of negotiations on ending the trade war.

On Friday afternoon, China’s foreign ministry reiterated its claim that the US and China were not engaged in any negotiations on tariffs, contradicting Trump’s claims on Thursday.

Speaking to reporters at the White House, Trump said the two sides were talking. “We may reveal it later, but they had meetings this morning, and we’ve been meeting with China,” he said, declining to say who “they” were.

The remarks appeared to be in response to the Chinese commerce ministry’s spokesperson, He Yadong, earlier saying there were “currently no economic and trade negotiations between China and the United States”.

US consumer sentiment plummeted in April after Donald Trump’s trade war threw the global economy into chaos, according to a new report.

The index of consumer sentiment, a score based on a monthly survey asking Americans about their financial outlooks, fell by 32% since January – the largest drop since the 1990 recession, according to the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research.

“Expectations worsened for vast swaths of the population across age, education income and political affiliation,” said Joanne Hsu, director of the surveys of consumers, in a statement. “Consumers perceived risks to multiple aspects of the economy, in large part due to ongoing uncertainty around trade policy and the potential for a resurgence of inflation looming ahead.”

In April, the index of consumer sentiment fell to 52.2, down from 57 in March. The last time the index fell below 55 was in the summer of 2022, when inflation rose to 9%.

Consumer expectation of inflation also soared from 5% in March to 6.5% in April, the highest it has been since 1981.

It is a sign that, despite his insistence that tariffs will “make a lot of money” and have not yet raised prices, Trump still has not convinced many Americans that his tariffs will actually work.

Trump’s trade policies have scared investors, causing sell-offs in stock and bond markets. The president softened his tone earlier this week on his trade war with China after a volatile few weeks. Markets rallied after Trump said that his Chinese tariffs “will come down substantially”, though he also warned that “it won’t be zero.”

But Wall Street tends to be more reactive than consumers, who have shown four straight months of declining sentiment on the economy. Even after Trump paused the highest of his reciprocal tariffs, causing stock markets to rise, consumer inflation expectations still remained much higher compared with March.

Higher inflation expectations have also been paired with consumers anticipating slower income growth for the year ahead, meaning that more of them will be hesitant to spend in the months ahead – which all could ultimately mean a slowdown in the economy.

“Without reliably strong incomes, spending is unlikely to remain strong amid the numerous warning signs perceived by consumers,” Hsu said.

Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff has met Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin for high-stakes peace talks, hours after a senior Russian military official was killed in a car explosion near Moscow.

Trump has played up Witkoff’s visit – his fourth to Russia in recent months – claiming a deal on ending the war in Ukraine was within reach. “The next few days are going to be very important. Meetings are taking place right now,” Trump told reporters on Thursday. “I think we’re going to make a deal … I think we’re getting very close.”

But no apparent breakthrough was reached on Friday. Putin’s senior aide Yuri Ushakov, who was present at the talks, said the discussions were “constructive and quite useful” and noted that the two sides had “narrowed differences”.

In comments to journalists, Ushakov said the possibility of resuming direct negotiations between Russia and Ukraine had also been discussed.

Putin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said Witkoff had left Moscow carrying a message for Trump. There was no immediate comment from Witkoff on the outcome of the meeting.

At the start of the talks, the Kremlin published a short clip showing Putin and Witkoff – who holds no formal diplomatic credentials – shaking hands and exchanging pleasantries in the Kremlin before sitting down on opposite sides of a white oval table to start their meeting behind closed doors.

Putin was flanked in the meeting by Ushakov and his investment envoy Kirill Dmitriev. Three hours later, Witkoff’s car was seen leaving the Kremlin.

Although Trump has repeatedly claimed he was close to ending the war, now in its fourth year, his efforts to broker a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine have so far yielded little results, stalled by Moscow’s hardline demands.

Reuters on Friday published two sets of documents outlining the US and Ukrainian proposals for ending the war, revealing significant differences on issues ranging from territorial concessions to sanctions.

It remains unclear whether Moscow, which has consistently rejected an immediate ceasefire, would agree to the US proposal, despite the major concessions it offers the Kremlin, including allowing it to retain territory it has captured.

Trump admitted on Friday that the talks were “very fragile” and said he had no deadline for achieving peace, having previously claimed he could end the war “in 24 hours”.

In an interview with Time magazine published on Friday, Trump also said that “Crimea will stay with Russia”, the latest example of the US leader putting pressure on Ukraine to make concessions to end the war while it remains under siege.

Ukraine’s leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, later insisted the territory is “the property of the Ukrainian people”.

“Our position is unchanged,” he told reporters in Kyiv. “The constitution of Ukraine says that all the temporarily occupied territories … belong to Ukraine.”

Witkoff’s visit came hours after a senior Russian general was blown up outside his apartment in what appears to have been the latest Ukrainian operation deep inside Russian territory.

The Russian authorities named the officer as Lt Gen Yaroslav Moskalik, the deputy head of the main operations directorate of the general staff of the Russian armed forces. The blast was similar in nature to previous attacks on Russians that were later claimed by Ukraine.

The apparent Ukrainian assassination is unlikely to sit well with the Trump administration, which has been desperate to show tangible progress on peace before Trump’s 100th day in office next week.

Despite Putin’s refusal to agree to a ceasefire and continued missile strikes on Ukraine, the US president has criticised Zelenskyy repeatedly over the stalled peace talks while adopting a more cautious tone toward the Russian leader.

The Russian investigative committee said the explosions were caused by the detonation of an improvised explosive device packed with shrapnel. The committee, which investigates major crimes, said it had opened a criminal case.

Baza, a Telegram channel with sources in Russia’s law enforcement agencies, said a bomb in a parked car in the town of Balashikha, in the Moscow region, was detonated remotely when the officer, who lived locally, walked past.

A video circulating on Russian social media captured the moment the car exploded, while additional images showed the burnt-out vehicle.

The Kremlin blamed Ukraine for the killing, with Peskov saying Kyiv was engaging in “terrorist activities on Russian territory”. Ukraine has not yet commented on the incident.

Since the start of the full-scale invasion, Ukraine has targeted dozens of Russian military officers and Russian-installed officials whom Kyiv has accused of committing war crimes in the country. Little is known, however, about the clandestine Ukrainian resistance cells involved in assassinations and attacks on military infrastructure in Russia and Russian-controlled areas.

Last December, Ukraine’s security services targeted another senior Russian general, Lt Gen Igor Kirillov, who was killed after an explosive device hidden in an electric scooter detonated outside an apartment building in Moscow.

At the time, Keith Kellogg, Trump’s appointed special representative for Ukraine and Russia, criticised the killing, saying it could have violated the rules of warfare.

Apart from military figures, Ukraine has targeted prominent Russian pro-war propagandists including Darya Dugina, the daughter of an ultra-nationalist Russian ideologue, who was killed in 2022 when a bomb blew up the Toyota Land Cruiser she was driving.

Moskalik, 59, was part of several high-profile Russian foreign delegations in recent years, including in at least two rounds of talks with Ukrainian and western officials, in 2015 and 2019, as well as a 2018 visit to the Assad regime in Syria. Insiders close to the defence ministry say his influence within the Russian military was on the rise.

Mikhail Zvinchuk, a popular Russian military blogger with ties to the defence establishment, said: “According to chatter behind the scenes, one scenario for personnel reshuffling at the general staff had Moskalik being considered as a potential head of the national defence management centre, primarily due to his methodical approach and thoughtfulness.”

“Crimea will stay with Russia,” Donald Trump told Time magazine in a largely sympathetic profile on Friday. And with that statement, the US president made clear that he wanted to carve up another country, Ukraine, and so legitimise the forcible seizure of land made by Moscow 11 years ago.

From reading the transcript of the interview, Trump’s thinking is hardly coherent. Crimea, he says, wouldn’t have been seized if he had been president in 2014, but “it was handed to them by Barack Hussein Obama” and now Crimea has “been with them [Russia] for a long time” – so it is time to accept the seizure.

The president does not even pursue the argument that a recognition of Russia’s occupation of Crimea is a necessary price of ending Russian military assault on Ukraine, though perhaps he thinks it – and instead the conversation is moved on by the reporters to discussing Trump’s aspirations for annexing Greenland and Canada. “The only way this thing really works is for Canada to become a state,” he added.

Wars seldom end satisfactorily. The struggle, violence and sacrifice often does not bear the promised fruit. Invaded suddenly by Russia, Ukraine fought off the capture of Kyiv and existential collapse in the spring, summer and autumn of 2022 but has been unable to expel the attackers since, leaving Kyiv facing the reality of Russia occupying about 18% of its territory.

But the proposed US settlement term sheet – now in the public domainand verified by Trump’s comments about Crimea – is redolent of great power thinking at the end of previous wars: the carve-ups of Versailles in 1919, where a country that had only been narrowly defeated was treated as if it were conquered, or Potsdam in 1945, which divided Europe into west and east.

Ukraine’s own peace plan – an older version of which was also leaked on Friday – tries a different tack: a full ceasefire on the current frontlines first, then a discussion about territories later. It is not the conversation that the US or Russia want to have, but Kyiv argues, with European support, that peace should be rooted in international law, not capitulation. Agreements unjustly imposed do not endure.

The difficulty for Kyiv is, first, that it is the US proposing to give “de jure recognition of Russian control of Crimea” – so, a direct agreement with Russia. The second is that if Ukraine were determined to fight on, and hope that Trump would walk away, it risks losing military intelligence again – and the US may not sell Kyiv critical weapons such as Patriot air defence missiles.

Russia, meanwhile, is responding with a series of increasingly aggressive punishment bombings aimed at Ukrainian civilians. Nineteen were killed when a children’s playground in Kryvyi Rih was bombed on 4 April; 35 died in a morning missile attack on Palm Sunday, 13 April, in central Sumy as families promenaded into town. Three more died overnight in Pavlohrad when a drone hit an apartment block.

This suggests a growing confidence that Russia will not be punished for starting a war, while Trump makes simple demands on social media for the war to stop. On Thursday, the US president said “Vladimir, STOP!” after 12 were killed by Russian bombing in Kyiv, and he complained that “5,000 soldiers a week are dying” – an exaggeration and more importantly a false equivalence.

Western officials estimated that 250,000 Russian soldiers have been killed during the three-year invasion, their deaths often caused in crude infantry assaults ordered by Moscow’s commanders against Ukraine’s frontlines. Meanwhile, Kyiv acknowledged the deaths of 46,000 of its own troops in mid-February, so together the total military fatality rate is less than 2,000 a week.

For all the Russian aggression and the casualties it has caused, the proposed US peace terms say that while Ukraine should be compensated somehow, all sanctions on Russia going back to 2014 should be removed and Washington and Moscow should engage in “economic cooperation on energy and other industrial sectors”. So not just a carve-up, but a rapprochement that Ukraine cannot prevent.

Peace discussions do more than end wars. They often set diplomatic standards for the period thereafter. Perhaps there will be last-minute changes, but the warmer tone of the US-Russia discussions compared with Trump’s beratings of Zelenskyy does not engender much hope. Ukraine’s options – fight on and risk losing the US, or accept a formal loss of Crimea – are not attractive, even if the latter may pave the way to a ceasefire.

An American man identified as the son of a deputy director of the CIA was killed in eastern Ukraine in 2024 while fighting under contract for the Russian military, according to an investigation by independent Russian media.

Michael Alexander Gloss, 21, died on 4 April 2024 in “Eastern Europe”, according to an obituary published by his family. He was the son of Juliane Gallina, who was appointed the deputy director for digital innovation at the Central Intelligence Agency in February 2024.

The story of how the son of a top-ranking US spy died fighting for Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is an unlikely tale of how homegrown anger at the United States and online radicalisation led from a middle-class Virginia childhood to the killing fields of eastern Ukraine.

On a VKontakte page attributed to Gloss, a high school football player born to parents who both served in the military, he described himself as “a supporter of the multipolar world. I ran away from home. traveled the world. I hate fascism. I love my homeland.” He also posted the flags of Russia and Palestine.

According to the investigative website iStories, Gloss is one of more than 1,500 foreigners who have signed contracts with the Russian military since February 2022. The database for the enrollment office was later leaked, exposing him as having signed the contract in September 2023. Sources told iStories that Gloss had been deployed with “assault units”, those engaged in harsh frontline fighting, in December 2023. An acquaintance said that he had been deployed to a Russian airborne regiment sent to storm Ukrainian positions near the city of Soledar.

“With his noble heart and warrior spirit Michael was forging his own hero’s journey when he was tragically killed in Eastern Europe on April 4, 2024,” his family wrote in the obituary, which did not mention Russia and Ukraine or discuss the circumstances of his death.

In university, Gloss was active in gender equality and environmental protest circles. He joined Rainbow Family, a leftwing environmental protest group, and in 2023 traveled to Hatay, Turkey, to assist in the recovery following the earthquake that killed more than 56,000 people. He had also become increasingly angry at the US for its support of Israel and the war in Gaza.

While in Turkey, Gloss began expressing a desire to go on to Russia. “He was usually watching videos about Palestine and was so angry at America,” one acquaintance told iStories. “He started thinking about going to Russia. He wanted to war with the USA. But I think he was very influenced by the conspiracy theory videos.”

After receiving a visa to Russia, he traveled around the country before arriving in Moscow, where he joined the military shortly before his documents expired. Photographs and videos obtained by iStories showed he was sent to a Russian training camp, where he mostly trained alongside Nepali contract soldiers. Three months after enlisting, an acquaintance said, he was deployed to Ukraine as a member of an assault battalion.

A number of acquaintances told the outlet that he had not been interested in fighting, but hoped the army would allow him to receive a Russian passport and stay in the country.

The circumstance’s of Gloss’s death are not known. A friend said that his family had been informed by the Russian government of his death but were given little other information. “It was announced that he died within the borders of Ukraine,” the friend wrote. “We do not know whether he participated in the war. They did not provide any other detailed information.”

It was not clear whether the Russians performed a background check on Gloss or knew the identity of his mother. The Guardian has approached the CIA for comment on the reports.

Donald Trump’s version of Pax Americana, the idea that the US can through coercion impose order on the world, is facing its moment of truth in Ukraine, Gaza and Iran.

In the words of the former CIA director William Burns, it is in “one of those plastic moments” in international relations that come along maybe twice a century where the future could take many possible forms.

The US’s aim has been to keep the three era-defining simultaneous sets of negotiations entirely separate, and to – as much as possible – shape their outcome alone. The approach is similar to the trade talks, where the intention is for supplicant countries to come to Washington individually bearing gifts in return for access to US markets.

The administration may have felt it had little choice given the urgency, but whether it was wise to launch three such ambitious peace missions, and a global trade war, at the same time is debatable.

It is true each of the three conflicts are discrete in that they have distinctive causes, contexts and dynamics, but they are becoming more intertwined than seemed apparent at the outset, in part because there is so much resistance building in Europe and elsewhere about the world order Donald Trump envisages, and his chosen methods.

In diplomacy nothing is hermetically sealed – everything is inter-connected, especially since there is a common thread between the three talks in the personality of the property developer Steven Witkoff, Trump’s great friend who is leading the US talks in each case, flitting from Moscow to Muscat.

To solve these three conflicts simultaneously would be a daunting task for anyone, but it is especially for a man entirely new to diplomacy and, judging by some of his remarks, also equally new to history.

Witkoff has strengths, not least that he is trusted by Trump. He also knows the president’s mind – and what should be taken at face value. He is loyal, so much so that he admits he worshipped Trump in New York so profoundly that he wanted to become him. He will not be pursuing any other agenda but the president’s.

But he is also stretched, and there are basic issues of competence. Diplomats are reeling from big cuts to the state department budget and there is still an absence of experienced staffers. Witkoff simply does not have the institutional memory available to his opposite numbers in Iran, Israel and Russia. For instance, most of the Iranian negotiating team, led by the foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, are veterans of the 2013-15 talks that led to the original Iran nuclear deal.

Yuri Ushakov, Vladimir Putin’s chief foreign policy adviser, who attended the first Russian-US talks this year in Saudi Arabia, spent 10 years in the US as Russian ambassador. He was accompanied by Kirill Dmitriev, the head of the Russian sovereign wealth fund who then visited the US on 2 April.

In the follow-up talks in Istanbul on 10 April, Aleksandr Darchiev, who has spent 33 years in the Russian foreign ministry and is Russian ambassador to the US, was pitted against a team led by Sonata Coulter, the new deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, who does not share Trump’s benign view of Russia.

As to the Gaza issue, Benjamin Netanyahu has lived the Palestinian conflict since he became Israel’s ambassador to the UN in 1984.

Richard Nephew, a former US Iran negotiator, says the cuts to state department means the US “is at risk of losing a generation of expertise … It’s beyond tragedy. It’s an absolutely devastating national security blow with the evisceration of these folks. The damage could be permanent, we have to acknowledge this.”

One withering European diplomat says: “It is as if Witkoff is trying to play three dimensional chess with chess grandmasters on three chessboards simultaneously, not having played the game before.”

Bluntly, Witkoff knows he needs to secure a diplomatic win for his impatient boss. But the longer the three conflicts continue, the more entangled they become with one another, the more Trump’s credibility is questioned. Already, according to a Reuters Ipsos poll published this month, 59% of Americans think Trump is costing their country its credibility on the global stage.

The risk for Trump is that the decision to address so much so quickly ends up not being a show of American strength but the opposite – the public erosion of a super power.

In the hurry to seal a deal with Iran inside two months, Trump, unlike in all previous nuclear talks with Tehran, has barred complicating European interests from the negotiation room.

To Iran’s relief, Witkoff has not tabled an agenda that strays beyond stopping Iran acquiring a nuclear bomb. He has not raised Iran’s supply of drones to Russia for use in Ukraine. Nor has he tabled demands that Iran end arms supplies to its proxies fighting Israel.

That has alarmed Israel, and to a lesser extent Europe, which sees Iran’s desire to have sanctions lifted as a rare opportunity to extract concessions from Tehran. Israel’s strategic affairs minister, Ron Dermer, and Mossad’s head, David Barnea, met Witkoff last Friday in Paris to try to persuade him that when he met the Iran negotiating team the next day in Rome, he had to demand the dismantling of Tehran’s civil nuclear programme.

Witkoff refused, and amid many contradictory statements the administration has reverted to insisting that Iran import the necessary enriched uranium for its civil nuclear programme, rather than enrich it domestically.

Russia, in a sign of Trump’s trust, might again become the repository of Iran’s stocks of highly enriched uranium, as it was after the 2015 deal.

Israel is also wary of Trump’s aggrandisement of Russia. The Israeli thinktank INSS published a report this week detailing how Russia, in search of anti-western allies in the global south for its Ukraine war, has shown opportunistic political support not just to Iran but to Hamas. Israel will also be uneasy if Russia maintains its role in Syria.

But if Trump has upset Netanyahu over Iran, he is keeping him sweet by giving him all he asks on Gaza.

Initially, Witkoff received glowing accolades about how tough he had been with Netanyahu in his initial meeting in January. It was claimed that Witkoff ordered the Israeli president to meet him on a Saturday breaking the Sabbath and directed him to agree a ceasefire that he had refused to give to Joe Biden’s team for months.

As a result, as Trump entered the White House on 19 January, he hailed the “EPIC ceasefire agreement could have only happened as a result of our Historic Victory in November, as it signalled to the entire World that my Administration would seek Peace and negotiate deals to ensure the safety of all Americans, and our Allies”.

But Netanyahu, as was widely predicted in the region, found a reason not to open talks on the second phase of the ceasefire deal – the release of the remaining hostages held in Gaza in exchange for a permanent end to the fighting.

Witkoff came up with compromises to extend the ceasefire but Netanyahu rejected them, resuming the assault on Hamas on 19 March. The US envoy merely described Israel’s decision as “unfortunate, in some respects, but also falls into the had-to-be bucket”.

Now Trump’s refusal to put any pressure on Israel to lift its six-week-old ban on aid entering Gaza is informing Europe’s rift with Trump. Marking 50 days of the ban this week, France, Germany and the UK issued a strongly worded statement describing the denial of aid as intolerable.

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, is calling for a coordinated European recognition of the state of Palestine, and Saudi Arabia is insisting the US does not attack Iran’s nuclear sites.

Witkoff, by contrast, has been silent about Gaza’s fate and the collapse of the “EPIC ceasefire”.

But if European diplomats think Witkoff was naive in dealing with Netanyahu, it is nothing to the scorn they hold for his handling of Putin.

The anger is partly because Europeans had thought that, after the Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s public row with Trump in the Oval Office, they had restored Ukraine’s standing in Washington by persuading Kyiv to back the full ceasefire that the US first proposed on 11 March.

The talks in Paris last week between Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, and European leaders also gave Europe a chance to point out it was Putin that was stalling over a ceasefire.

But instead of putting any countervailing pressure on Russia to accept a ceasefire, Witkoff switched strategy. In the words of Bruno Tertrais, a non-resident fellow at the Institut of Montaigne, Witkoff is “is now presenting a final peace plan, very favourable to the aggressor, even before the start of the negotiations, which had been due to take place after a ceasefire”.

No European government has yet criticised Trump’s lopsided plan in public since, with few cards to play, the immediate necessity is to try to prevent Trump acting on his threat to walk away. At the very least, Europe will argue that if Trump wants Ukraine’s resources, he has to back up a European force patrolling a ceasefire, an issue that receives only sketchy reference in the US peace plan.

The Polish foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski, addressing the country’s parliament on Wednesday, pointed to the necessity of these security guarantees. “Any arrangement with the Kremlin will only last so long as the Russian elite dreads the consequences of its breach,” he said.

But in a sense, Trump and Putin, according to Fiona Hill at the Brookings Institution, a Russia specialist in Trump’s first administration, may already have moved beyond the details of their Ukrainian settlement as they focus on their wider plan to restore the Russian-US relationship.

It would be an era of great power collusion, not great power competition in which Gaza, Iran and Ukraine would be sites from which the US and Russia could profit.

Writing on Truth Social about a phone call with Putin in February, Trump reported” “We both reflected on the Great History of our Nations, and the fact that we fought so successfully together in World War II … We each talked about the strengths of our respective Nations, and the great benefit that we will someday have in working together.”

Witkoff has also mused about what form this cooperation might take. “Shared sea lanes, maybe send [liquefied natural] gas into Europe together, maybe collaborate on AI together,” he said, adding: “Who doesn’t want to see a world like that?”

George Santos, the disgraced former representative, was sentenced to more than seven years in prison on Friday, bringing an end to an extraordinary controversy that began with a fraudulent congressional campaign.

He lied extensively about his life story both before and after entering the US Congress, where he was the first openly LGBTQ+ Republican elected to the body. He was ultimately convicted of defrauding donors.

Santos, 36, was sentenced on Friday morning in Long Island, the large suburban area to the east of New York City.

He sobbed in court saying he was “humbled” and “chastised” and realized he had betrayed his constituents’ trust. He pleaded guilty last summer to federal wire fraud and aggravated identity theft and had appealed for mercy.

“I offer my deepest apologies,” he said on Friday, adding: “I cannot rewrite the past, but I can control the road ahead.”

US district court judge Joanna Seybert appeared unconvinced by his display of contrition.

“Where is your remorse? Where do I see it?” she asked as she sentenced him to 87 months behind bars. She said the former politician appeared to feel that “it’s always someone else’s fault”.

He served in Congress barely a year before his House of Representatives colleagues ousted him in 2023. Having flipped his seat to the GOP it then reverted to the Democrats with Tom Suozzi winning the vacant spot in a special election in February last year.

He admitted to deceiving donors and stealing the identities of nearly a dozen people, including his family members, to fund his winning campaign. He also made up strings of fantastical stories about his life, identity and experiences.

During his court case he frequently held press gatherings and mocked the media and his detractors, saying he was being smeared.

Santos was shown to have spent donor money on vacations, luxury goods, Botox treatment and the website OnlyFans.

Shortly before being elected to the US House of Representatives in New York’s third congressional district, Santos was first accused of deceiving voters by the North Shore Leader, a local newspaper in Long Island, which accused Santos of fabricating much of his résumé.

Santos’s sentencing was not without controversy. Before his Friday court appearance, he referred to himself as a “scapegoat” on social media, in reference to prosecutors accusing him of organizing the fraudulent conspiracy.

Santos also alleged that the justice department was a “cabal of pedophiles”, in posts made to X. Prosecutors highlighted Santos’s comments in a filing after Santos’s defense team requested a two-year prison sentence.

The former representative later defended his remarks, saying he was “profoundly sorry” for his crimes but that a seven-year prison sentence was too harsh.

“Every sunrise since that plea has carried the same realization: I did this, me. I am responsible,” Santos wrote. “But saying I’m sorry doesn’t require me to sit quietly while these prosecutors try to drop an anvil on my head.”

Santos pleaded guilty to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft in August.

Prosecutors, at the time, highlighted Santos’s plea as the first time that he had “told the truth about his criminal schemes”.

“For what may seem like the first time since he started his campaign for Congress, Mr Santos told the truth about his criminal schemes. He admitted to lying, stealing and conning people,” said Breon Peace, the US attorney for the eastern district of New York, in a statement.

“By pleading guilty, Mr Santos has acknowledged that he repeatedly defrauded federal and state government institutions as well as his own family, supporters and constituents. His flagrant and disgraceful conduct has been exposed and will be punished. Mr Santos’s conviction demonstrates this office’s enduring commitment to rooting out corruption and grift by public officials.”

At the time, Santos faced 22 years in prison.

As part of the plea agreement, Santos was forced to pay a restitution of $373,749.97 and forfeiture of $205,002.97.

The Associated Press contributed reporting

George Santos, the disgraced former representative, was sentenced to more than seven years in prison on Friday, bringing an end to an extraordinary controversy that began with a fraudulent congressional campaign.

He lied extensively about his life story both before and after entering the US Congress, where he was the first openly LGBTQ+ Republican elected to the body. He was ultimately convicted of defrauding donors.

Santos, 36, was sentenced on Friday morning in Long Island, the large suburban area to the east of New York City.

He sobbed in court saying he was “humbled” and “chastised” and realized he had betrayed his constituents’ trust. He pleaded guilty last summer to federal wire fraud and aggravated identity theft and had appealed for mercy.

“I offer my deepest apologies,” he said on Friday, adding: “I cannot rewrite the past, but I can control the road ahead.”

US district court judge Joanna Seybert appeared unconvinced by his display of contrition.

“Where is your remorse? Where do I see it?” she asked as she sentenced him to 87 months behind bars. She said the former politician appeared to feel that “it’s always someone else’s fault”.

He served in Congress barely a year before his House of Representatives colleagues ousted him in 2023. Having flipped his seat to the GOP it then reverted to the Democrats with Tom Suozzi winning the vacant spot in a special election in February last year.

He admitted to deceiving donors and stealing the identities of nearly a dozen people, including his family members, to fund his winning campaign. He also made up strings of fantastical stories about his life, identity and experiences.

During his court case he frequently held press gatherings and mocked the media and his detractors, saying he was being smeared.

Santos was shown to have spent donor money on vacations, luxury goods, Botox treatment and the website OnlyFans.

Shortly before being elected to the US House of Representatives in New York’s third congressional district, Santos was first accused of deceiving voters by the North Shore Leader, a local newspaper in Long Island, which accused Santos of fabricating much of his résumé.

Santos’s sentencing was not without controversy. Before his Friday court appearance, he referred to himself as a “scapegoat” on social media, in reference to prosecutors accusing him of organizing the fraudulent conspiracy.

Santos also alleged that the justice department was a “cabal of pedophiles”, in posts made to X. Prosecutors highlighted Santos’s comments in a filing after Santos’s defense team requested a two-year prison sentence.

The former representative later defended his remarks, saying he was “profoundly sorry” for his crimes but that a seven-year prison sentence was too harsh.

“Every sunrise since that plea has carried the same realization: I did this, me. I am responsible,” Santos wrote. “But saying I’m sorry doesn’t require me to sit quietly while these prosecutors try to drop an anvil on my head.”

Santos pleaded guilty to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft in August.

Prosecutors, at the time, highlighted Santos’s plea as the first time that he had “told the truth about his criminal schemes”.

“For what may seem like the first time since he started his campaign for Congress, Mr Santos told the truth about his criminal schemes. He admitted to lying, stealing and conning people,” said Breon Peace, the US attorney for the eastern district of New York, in a statement.

“By pleading guilty, Mr Santos has acknowledged that he repeatedly defrauded federal and state government institutions as well as his own family, supporters and constituents. His flagrant and disgraceful conduct has been exposed and will be punished. Mr Santos’s conviction demonstrates this office’s enduring commitment to rooting out corruption and grift by public officials.”

At the time, Santos faced 22 years in prison.

As part of the plea agreement, Santos was forced to pay a restitution of $373,749.97 and forfeiture of $205,002.97.

The Associated Press contributed reporting

Luigi Mangione on Friday pleaded not guilty to Manhattan federal court charges that he stalked and murdered the UnitedHealthcare chief executive, Brian Thompson, late last year.

Mangione, 26, walked into court just before 1pm. He was wearing tan jail garb with a white long-sleeved undershirt. He spoke with his lawyers, who sat alongside him, and at one point appeared to smile; he could be seen flipping through papers on the table.

Judge Margaret M Garnett asked Mangione to stand, and Mangione confirmed to the justice that he had seen a copy of this indictment and had had enough time to discuss it with his lawyers.

Garnett asked Mangione his plea. Mangione said: “Not guilty.”

Mangione could face the death penalty in a case that shocked America for the killing of a top business executive on New York’s streets but also triggered an outpouring of anger against the country’s for-profit healthcare industry.

As with previous proceedings, throngs of supporters of Mangione queued up outside to secure a much-coveted seat in court. Many sported medical masks or sunglasses, or both, and were reticent about speaking to media but did attack the healthcare system.

“I am a chronically ill person. I live in chronic pain,” one woman said in explaining why she was at court. She said that she had never been in “that much medical debt” compared to others, but “when I say not that much I mean like $30,000.”

Even if it were proved that Mangione killed Thompson, she said, she believed his guilt embodies an ethical grey area. The healthcare industry kills thousands and Thompson was one man, she said. “One life [versus] like a thousand lives, that moral dilemma,” she said.

When asked about the announcement prosecutors would seek the death penalty, she said: “It’s state-sanctioned murder.

“He’s a political prisoner – school shooters don’t get that.”

As those waiting in line chatted among themselves, an LCD-screen truck, displaying support of Mangione, repeatedly drove by the courthouse. One image featured a photo of Mangione smiling that read: “END THE DEATH PENALTY NOW.” The intelligence whistleblower Chelsea Manning was also among those in line.

Mangione’s arraignment comes months after his arrest for allegedly gunning down Thompson outside a New York hotel on 4 December. He was apprehended on 9 December at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania, after a restaurant worker purportedly recognized him from law enforcement advisories and tipped off police.

In federal court, Mangione faces stalking, murder through use of a firearm, and firearms offense charges. Mangione is also charged with a host of murder and firearms counts in New York state court.

Pennsylvania state prosecutors are also pursuing a case against him related to alleged weapons possession and false identification. He has also maintained his innocence in the state cases.

While Mangione was already staring down the prospect of life imprisonment following his arrest, Donald Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, raised the stakes several weeks ago by announcing that she was directing prosecutors to seek the death penalty.

Bondi called Thompson’s killing “a premeditated, cold-blooded assassination that shocked America”. She stated that her decision was in keeping with “President Trump’s agenda to stop violent crime and Make America Safe Again”.

In court, Garnett cautioned prosecutors against making inflammatory statements. She urged them to abide by local court rules that bar attorneys from making “public commentary that could impede Mr Mangione’s right to a fair trial” and to pick a fair jury.

“I’m specifically directing the government to convey my directive to Mr Clayton,” Garnett said, referring to acting Manhattan federal prosecutor Jay Clayton. The judge also directed that prosecutors “request that he convey the same to Attorney General Bondi” and her associates.

The last time federal prosecutors in Manhattan pursued the death penalty was in the case of Sayfullo Saipov, an Islamist extremist who murdered eight people in a truck attack.

During the penalty phase of Saipov’s trial, jurors could not unanimously decide on whether to impose a death sentence, resulting in him being automatically sentenced to life in prison without the chance of parole.

Gregory Germain, a professor of law at Syracuse University’s College of Law, previously told the Guardian that nearly all recent federal death penalty cases took place during Trump’s first term.

Germain said he believed that Trump’s justice department would not agree to an deal in which Mangione pleaded guilty in exchange for a life sentence.

“He has political reasons, wanting to seem ‘tough on crime’ by supporting the death penalty,” Germain said.

Karen Friedman Agnifilo, Mangione’s lead defense attorney, raised several constitutional points during the proceeding. She said there was a “handshake deal” forged between Manhattan prosecutors and Biden’s justice department, under which his state case would be tried first.

But now that federal prosecutors are seeking the death penalty, Friedman Agnifilo said they would fight this plan.

“It’s partly scheduling, your honor, but it’s also constitutional issues [that] are going to be impacted if we are forced to try that case first,” she said.

Friedman Agnifilo also alleged in court that authorities had been listening in on Mangione’s privileged communications.

“We were just informed by the state court prosecutors that they were eavesdropping on all of Mr Mangione’s calls,” she said. “They were listening to his attorney calls and all of his other calls going on. They said it was inadvertent that they were listening to a call between Mr Mangione and me.”

Friedman Agnifilo asked the judge to put a directive in place to prevent this from happening again. Garnett asked the prosecutor Dominic Gentile about the alleged recording.

Gentile said this was “the very first we’ve heard of this situation” and that such would not be “normal practice”.

Garnett told Gentile that she wanted prosecutors to file a letter within seven days outlining what they knew about the recording.

DoorDash is offering to buy its UK-based rival Deliveroo for $3.6bn (£2.7bn), Deliveroo said on Friday.

Deliveroo said that its board was in talks with DoorDash over the offer and that a firm offer had not been made, according to statement sent to the Guardian. Should a firm offer of £1.80 ($2.40) a share be made, Deliveroo said, “it would be minded to recommend such an offer to Deliveroo shareholders.

“There can be no certainty that any firm offer for Deliveroo will be made. At this time, shareholders are advised to take no action in respect to the possible offer,” the company said in a statement.

The company gave DoorDash until 23 May to give a firm offer, according to Reuters.

DoorDash is currently the largest food delivery app in the United States, with 42 million monthly active users in 2024 and $10.7bn in revenue in 2024. The San Francisco-based company was founded in 2012 and has a presence in more than 25 countries.

In 2021, DoorDash acquired the Finnish delivery company Wolt for €7bn, or what was $8.1bn at the time, in stock.

Deliveroo, which is based in London, was founded in 2013 and is the second largest food delivery app in the UK. The company said that it averaged 7.1 million active users in 2024 with £2.07bn in revenue.

Both DoorDash and Deliveroo have, in recent years, tried to expand their user base by getting into grocery deliveries and making non-food deliveries.

In an interview with Fortune in February, DoorDash’s CEO, Tony Xu, said that the company’s presence feels like “a speck of dust”.

“We’re really only addressing a couple of problems with first-party delivery and first-party ordering,” Xu said. “If you think about how do you become a digital powerhouse, you’re going to have to do more than that.”

Civil rights activists in Germany have demanded an independent inquiry into alleged police racism after an officer shot a 21-year-old black man from behind, killing him after an altercation outside a nightclub.

The 27-year-old officer was suspended from duty over the shooting early on Sunday morning in the city of Oldenburg in north-west Germany pending a murder investigation, said state prosecutors. Fatal police shootings are relatively rare in Germany and prosecutors were quoted in local media as saying the suspension and investigation were “routine”.

Police have not identified the victim due to data protection laws but media and pressure groups have identified him as Lorenz A.

Police said in a statement that the man, a German citizen, aimed pepper spray at security staff outside the club after they refused him entry, hurting four people, and that he threatened others with a knife while running away.

When a patrol car tracked him down, police said he again used the pepper spray and approached the 27-year-old officer in a threatening manner. The police officer then opened fire.

A coroner’s report found that at least three bullets hit the man from behind: in the back of his head, torso and hip, local prosecutors said. A fourth shot is believed to have grazed his upper thigh. He later died in hospital.

The state interior minister, Daniela Behrens, said the autopsy results raised “serious questions and grave suspicions” that must be “unsparingly addressed and resolved”.

Police representatives warned against any rush to judgment. “There are racism accusations because the deceased was a person of colour,” Kevin Komolka, the state chair of the GdP police union, told the public broadcaster NDR. “There’s a mood developing painting police as trigger-happy hooligans.”

Prosecutors have begun evaluating security camera footage and audio recordings from the scene and said there was no indication that Lorenz A had threatened police with the knife he had with him. The officers’ body cameras were reportedly turned off.

Rights groups, which have organised a rally in Oldenburg on Friday, said the shooting raised serious concerns.

The German chapter of Amnesty International said the killing “impacts an entire community and all those people in Germany affected by racism”. It said any investigation into the incident led by police would be biased. “We finally need independent investigation mechanisms that are not controlled by police or interior affairs authorities,” it said, citing “structural racism”.

The Black People in Germany Initiative (ISD) quoted friends and the family of Lorenz, calling him a keen basketball player and a “fun-loving person who was full of energy”.

“Now he’s dead, killed by an institution that is supposed to protect us,” it said in a statement, joining the call for an independent investigation as well as a national complaints office for allegations of police racism.

The ‪Amadeu Antonio Foundation, which campaigns against extremism and racism in German society, also denounced what it said was not an isolated incident and questioned the police account that the officer had grounds to fear for his life.

The gathering and march in Oldenburg, called by a Justice for Lorenz group with more than 15,000 followers on social media, is expected to draw at least 1,000 people, according to police. Similar vigils have been called in Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt, Stuttgart and Vienna.

The Black Lives Matter movement, which was initiated after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, also led activists to turn a spotlight on German police. In September of that year, 29 officers in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia were temporarily suspended after their unit was found to have shared extreme rightwing content on a WhatsApp group including a collage of a refugee inside a gas chamber and the shooting of a young black person.

A 2024 study found that 30% of German police had heard colleagues make racist comments in the previous year, with a marked rise in reported anti-Muslim sentiment.

An average of 10.5 people a year are shot dead by police in Germany, the news agency dpa said, citing figures collected by the trade journal Civil Rights and Police, with no clear upward or downward trend across the decades. However, last year there were 22 victims, and this year there have already been 11 such cases reported.

In 2023, the last year statistics were available, Germany’s federal criminal police office reported a record number of incidents of violence against firefighters, police and emergency services workers.

Civil rights activists in Germany have demanded an independent inquiry into alleged police racism after an officer shot a 21-year-old black man from behind, killing him after an altercation outside a nightclub.

The 27-year-old officer was suspended from duty over the shooting early on Sunday morning in the city of Oldenburg in north-west Germany pending a murder investigation, said state prosecutors. Fatal police shootings are relatively rare in Germany and prosecutors were quoted in local media as saying the suspension and investigation were “routine”.

Police have not identified the victim due to data protection laws but media and pressure groups have identified him as Lorenz A.

Police said in a statement that the man, a German citizen, aimed pepper spray at security staff outside the club after they refused him entry, hurting four people, and that he threatened others with a knife while running away.

When a patrol car tracked him down, police said he again used the pepper spray and approached the 27-year-old officer in a threatening manner. The police officer then opened fire.

A coroner’s report found that at least three bullets hit the man from behind: in the back of his head, torso and hip, local prosecutors said. A fourth shot is believed to have grazed his upper thigh. He later died in hospital.

The state interior minister, Daniela Behrens, said the autopsy results raised “serious questions and grave suspicions” that must be “unsparingly addressed and resolved”.

Police representatives warned against any rush to judgment. “There are racism accusations because the deceased was a person of colour,” Kevin Komolka, the state chair of the GdP police union, told the public broadcaster NDR. “There’s a mood developing painting police as trigger-happy hooligans.”

Prosecutors have begun evaluating security camera footage and audio recordings from the scene and said there was no indication that Lorenz A had threatened police with the knife he had with him. The officers’ body cameras were reportedly turned off.

Rights groups, which have organised a rally in Oldenburg on Friday, said the shooting raised serious concerns.

The German chapter of Amnesty International said the killing “impacts an entire community and all those people in Germany affected by racism”. It said any investigation into the incident led by police would be biased. “We finally need independent investigation mechanisms that are not controlled by police or interior affairs authorities,” it said, citing “structural racism”.

The Black People in Germany Initiative (ISD) quoted friends and the family of Lorenz, calling him a keen basketball player and a “fun-loving person who was full of energy”.

“Now he’s dead, killed by an institution that is supposed to protect us,” it said in a statement, joining the call for an independent investigation as well as a national complaints office for allegations of police racism.

The ‪Amadeu Antonio Foundation, which campaigns against extremism and racism in German society, also denounced what it said was not an isolated incident and questioned the police account that the officer had grounds to fear for his life.

The gathering and march in Oldenburg, called by a Justice for Lorenz group with more than 15,000 followers on social media, is expected to draw at least 1,000 people, according to police. Similar vigils have been called in Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt, Stuttgart and Vienna.

The Black Lives Matter movement, which was initiated after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, also led activists to turn a spotlight on German police. In September of that year, 29 officers in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia were temporarily suspended after their unit was found to have shared extreme rightwing content on a WhatsApp group including a collage of a refugee inside a gas chamber and the shooting of a young black person.

A 2024 study found that 30% of German police had heard colleagues make racist comments in the previous year, with a marked rise in reported anti-Muslim sentiment.

An average of 10.5 people a year are shot dead by police in Germany, the news agency dpa said, citing figures collected by the trade journal Civil Rights and Police, with no clear upward or downward trend across the decades. However, last year there were 22 victims, and this year there have already been 11 such cases reported.

In 2023, the last year statistics were available, Germany’s federal criminal police office reported a record number of incidents of violence against firefighters, police and emergency services workers.

Brazil’s former president, Fernando Collor, has been arrested early and ordered to begin serving a prison sentence stemming from his 2023 conviction for corruption.

Collor was convicted of receiving 20m reais ($3.5m) to facilitate contracts between BR Distribuidora, a fuel distributor formerly controlled by the state-owned oil company Petrobras, and construction firm UTC Engenharia for the construction of fuel distribution bases. In return, he offered political support for the appointment of executives at BR Distribuidora when it was still state-owned.

Collor, who led the country from 1990 to 1992, was sentenced to eight years and 10 months, to be served initially in prison, rather than under house arrest. He was arrested on Friday in the northeastern state of Alagoas.

Under the Brazilian legal system, cases concerning members of Congress, presidents and ministers go directly to the supreme court. He was not yet in prison because his lawyers were still lodging appeals.

The case stemmed from the Operation Car Wash, a sweeping corruption investigation that has implicated top politicians and businesspeople across Latin America – including the current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who was arrested in 2018 and imprisoned for nearly two years.

Collor, 75, was the first Brazilian president elected by popular vote, in 1989, after a 21-year military dictatorship. He was impeached and removed from office by Congress in 1992 following corruption allegations. In 2007, he was elected as a senator representing his home state of Alagoas in northeastern Brazil.

Supreme court Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered the former president’s arrest Thursday, with the full board set to vote on Friday whether to confirm the decision. De Moraes said in his decision that Collor should begin serving his sentence, noting that the former president’s lawyers have attempted to drag out proceedings through appeals.

The justice also said that the court had previously ruled in similar cases that, once appeals have no merit, the sentence can be served right away.

Collor’s lawyers did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Troops from Pakistan and India exchanged fire overnight across the line of control in disputed Kashmir, officials have said, after the UN urged the nuclear-armed rivals to show “maximum restraint” after Tuesday’s massacre of Indian tourists by Islamic militants.

Relations have plunged to their lowest level in years, with India accusing Pakistan of supporting “cross-border terrorism” after gunmen carried out the worst attack on civilians in contested Muslim-majority Kashmir for a quarter of a century.

The brief exchange of small-arms fire came as police in Kashmir said they had identified three suspected attackers affiliated with the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba they say were involved in Tuesday’s massacre of Indian tourists and released their sketches, announcing a bounty of 2m rupees (about £17,500) on the three.

A manhunt is under way in the densely forested mountains surrounding the attack site in southern Kashmir.

Syed Ashfaq Gilani, a government official in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, told Agence France-Presse on Friday that troops exchanged fire along the line of control that separates the two countries.

“There is post-to-post firing in Leepa valley overnight. There is no firing on the civilian population. Life is normal. Schools are open,” said Gilani, a senior government official in Jhelum valley district.

India’s army confirmed there had been limited firing of small arms that it said had been initiated by Pakistan, adding it had been “effectively responded to”.

Three Indian army officials told Reuters that Pakistani soldiers used small-arms to fire at an Indian position. The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity in keeping with departmental policy, said Indian soldiers retaliated and no casualties were reported.

There was no immediate comment from Pakistan, and the incident could not be independently verified. In the past, each side has accused the other of starting border skirmishes in Kashmir, which both claim in its entirety.

India’s army chief, Gen Upendra Dwivedi, is to lead a high-level security review in Srinagar in Indian-held Kashmir on Friday, days after militants killed 26 civilians in the disputed region in one of the worst such attacks in years.

The brazen assault, carried out in a mountain meadow near Pahalgam, has derailed prime minister Narendra Modi’s claims of restored calm in the restive Himalayan territory and sent tensions soaring between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan.

The Indian army has launched sweeping “search-and-destroy” operations, deployed surveillance drones, and ramped up troop numbers across the Kashmir valley. The manhunt is searching for three suspects – one Indian national and two Pakistanis.

Early on Friday, authorities in Indian Kashmir demolished the houses of two suspected militants, one of whom is an accused in Tuesday’s attack, according to an official.

As tensions rise between the two countries, the UN has urged India and Pakistan to show restraint. The countries have imposed tit-for-tat diplomatic measures over a deadly shooting in Kashmir.

Relations have plunged to their lowest level in years, with India accusing Pakistan of supporting cross-border terrorism, after gunmen carried out the worst attack on civilians in contested Muslim-majority Kashmir in a quarter of a century.

“We very much appeal to both the governments … to exercise maximum restraint, and to ensure that the situation and the developments we’ve seen do not deteriorate any further,” the UN spokesperson, Stéphane Dujarric, told reporters in New York on Thursday.

“Any issues between Pakistan and India, we believe, can be and should be resolved peacefully through meaningful mutual engagement.”

Dwivedi’s visit to the regional capital underscores a sharp increase in military and diplomatic activity. India began large-scale air and naval drills on Thursday, which analysts say could pave the way for military action.

The Indian air force’s Gagan Shakti exercises, showcasing its Rafale jets and elite strike squadrons, have assumed added urgency, while the navy has intensified manoeuvres and test-fired a surface-to-air missile.

“There are many imponderables Modi must deal with, including the significant capabilities of the Pakistan army,” the veteran analyst C Raja Mohan wrote in the Indian Express. “But given the horrific nature of the attack and the outrage that has convulsed the nation – the victims came from 15 states across India – the PM may have no option but to explore some major risks.”

On the diplomatic front, India’s foreign secretary, Vikram Misri, briefed envoys from 25 countries, including key G20 partners, Gulf states and, notably, China. Beijing’s inclusion, despite strained ties, was seen as an attempt to build broader global consensus.

India presented what it called “clear evidence of cross-border complicity”. An obscure group calling itself the Resistance Front has claimed responsibility for the attack. Indian officials say it is a proxy for the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba or a similar outfit. Islamabad denied involvement, accusing India of failing to provide proof.

On Thursday, Modi promised to capture the gunmen responsible for killing 26 civilians, after Indian police identified two of the three fugitive assailants as Pakistani.

“I say to the whole world: India will identify, track and punish every terrorist and their backer,” the prime minister said, in his first speech since Tuesday’s attack in the Himalayan region. “We will pursue them to the ends of the Earth.”

Denying any involvement, Islamabad called attempts to link Pakistan to the Pahalgam attack “frivolous” and vowed to respond to any Indian action.

“Any threat to Pakistan’s sovereignty and to the security of its people will be met with firm reciprocal measures in all domains,” a Pakistani statement said, after the prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, held a rare national security committee meeting with top military chiefs.

Kashmir has been divided between India and Pakistan since its independence in 1947, with both claiming the territory in full but governing separate portions of it.

Rebel groups have waged an insurgency in Indian-controlled Kashmir since 1989, demanding independence or a merger with Pakistan.

A day after the attack, New Delhi suspended a water-sharing treaty, announced the closure of the main land border crossing with Pakistan, downgraded diplomatic ties, and withdrew visas for Pakistanis.

In response, Islamabad ordered the expulsion of Indian diplomats and military advisers on Thursday, cancelling visas for Indian nationals – with the exception of Sikh pilgrims – and closing the main border crossing from its side.

Pakistan also warned any attempt by India to stop the supply of water from the Indus River would be an “act of war”.

Agence France-Presse and Reuters contributed to this report

Archaeologists excavating the site of a former fish market in Barcelona have uncovered the remains of a large medieval boat that was swallowed by the waters off the Catalan capital 500 or 600 years ago.

The area, which is being dug up in order to build a new centre dedicated to biomedicine and biodiversity, has already yielded finds ranging from a Spanish civil war air-raid shelter to traces of the old market and of the city’s 18th-century history.

But earlier this month, archaeologists came across the ruined stern of a big vessel that may have sunk during a storm in the 15th or 16th centuries, when that part of Barcelona was still under the sea.

A large fragment of the boat, 10 metres long and three metres wide and crossed by more than 30 curved wooden ribs, has been uncovered at a depth of 5 metres below sea level.

The structure was held together by a mix of wooden and iron nails. The construction is typical of the medieval boats that were found in the Mediterranean and throughout Europe from the middle of the 15th century.

“We’d thought some archaeological boat remains might turn up on this site, which is near the port and the artificial stone quay that protected the port, and which was a working zone in the 15th and 16th centuries,” said the lead archaeologist, Santi Palacios. “Two years later, we’ve been lucky enough to find a boat.”

The surviving wood of the boat – which has been named the Ciutadella I after the nearby Ciutadella park – is very fragile and has been kept damp and covered with the sand in which it lay for centuries to help prevent further deterioration.

“The wood has to be kept constantly damp so as to keep it in a good state,” said Delia Eguiluz, a restorer. “When we move it, we’ll have to dismantle it piece-by-piece so we can continue our research.”

The team is mapping the site, labelling all the pieces and taking samples from the boat. In the next phase, the wreck will be taken to a special facility where it will be treated with water-soluble wax to reinforce and preserve the structure.

Experts hope its old timbers and nails will help shed light on how boats were built in the medieval period. Its discovery comes 17 years after another 15th-century boat, known as Barceloneta I, was found near a railway station in the city. Unlike the Ciutadella I, that boat was Cantabrian, rather than Mediterranean.

The team believes that analysis of the newly discovered vessel’s wood and resin will help establish where it was made.

“This is a very important discovery,” said Palacios. “It’s not just about finding one boat because we now have two examples of perfectly documented naval construction in the city of Barcelona.”

The actor Pedro Pascal has attacked author JK Rowling on X, calling her a “heinous loser”.

Pascal responded to a comment reporting the words of activist Tariq Ra’ouf in an Instagram video, in which he urged people to boycott Rowling’s work.

“It has become our mission as the general public to make sure that every single thing that’s Harry Potter related fails … because that awful disgusting shit, that has consequences.”

Pascal liked the post and wrote: “Awful disgusting SHIT is exactly right. Heinous LOSER behaviour.”

Responding on Instagram to the interaction, Ra’ouf applauded Pascal and said he also felt the “immense pain” of the silence of other celebrities.

Pascal has been an outspoken advocate for LGBTQ+ rights and is frequently accompanied on the red carpet by his transgender sister, Lux.

Rowling has attracted some backlash to a photograph she posted of herself last week, smoking a cigar on a yacht with the caption: “I love it when a plan comes together.”

This came after the UK supreme court sitting in London ruled that the terms “woman” and “sex” in the Equality Act refer to a biological woman and biological sex. The action to determine this had been brought by For Women Scotland, a campaign group which brought a case against the Scottish government in which they argued that sex-based protections should only apply to those born female.

Rowling wrote on X: “It took three extraordinary, tenacious Scottish women with an army behind them to get this case heard by the supreme court and, in winning, they’ve protected the rights of women and girls across the UK,” adding, “For Women Scotland, I’m so proud to know you.”

In February, Pascal shared the quote: “A world without trans people has never existed and never will,” on Instagram, dividing his followers. After some threatened to unfollow him, he reiterated his stance, writing: “I can’t think of anything more vile and small and pathetic than terrorising the smallest, most vulnerable community of people who want nothing from you, except the right to exist.”

Earlier this week, he wore a T-shirt reading: “Protect the Dolls” to the London premiere of Marvel’s Thunderbolts*, part of a pro-trans campaign by American designer Conner Ives.

Some of the cast of the new HBO Harry Potter series have experienced online abuse in response to their involvement. However, all three of the key actors so far revealed have also played landmark LGBTQ+ roles. John Lithgow, who will play Albus Dumbledore, won much acclaim for his performance as a transgender woman in 1982’s The World According to Garp.

Janet McTeer, who takes over as Professor McGonagall, played a trans man in 2011’s Albert Nobbs, while Paapa Essiedu (cast as Prof Snape) has frequently played queer roles, most notably in I May Destroy You and the short film Femme, in which he played a gay drag performer.

The series begins filming later this year. Casting of the leading children’s roles has yet to be announced.