Donald Trump, wearing a bandage partially covering his right ear, appeared in public for the first time since surviving an assassination attempt over the weekend.

Trump made a dramatic entrance to loud cheers on Monday during the first night of the Republican national convention in Milwaukee, emerging on the floor of the convention hall at about 9pm CT to cheers of “USA!” and “fight!” Lee Greenwood played “Proud to be an American” as Trump entered the convention hall.

Trump worked his way across the convention floor before making his way to a box, where he joined several notable Republicans, including Tucker Carlson, congressman Byron Donalds, and JD Vance, whom he named his running mate earlier in the day.

“He has proven to be one tough SOB,” Sean O’Brien, the president of the Teamsters union said to thunderous applause after Trump appeared.

His appearance came after a slew of speakers including Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far right congresswoman from Georgia, called Trump a “founding father” of the “America First movement.”

The speakers hailed Trump’s survival as a godly act. They also offered dueling visions of America: a country in decline under Joe Biden, beset by soaring grocery and housing prices while politicians were more concerned with undocumented immigrants and transgender issues. They tried to paint an opposite vision of America under Trump, claiming it was a prosperous country where these problems did not exist.

Greene directly referenced the attempted assassination of Trump on Saturday.

“Unfortunately, this is also a somber moment for our nation. Two days ago, evil came for the man we admire and love so much. I thank God that his hand was on President Trump,” she said.

Senator Tim Scott, of South Carolina, also suggested divine intervention had played a role in the event. “If you didn’t believe in miracles before Saturday, you better be believing right now,” he said. “A devil came to Pennsylvania holding a rifle, but a lion got back on his feet and he roared,” he added, to thunderous applause in the Fiserv Forum.

Kristi Noem, the South Dakota governor , also brought up Saturday’s assassination attempt. “Two days ago, the whole world changed. Evil displayed itself in the very worst way through a cowardly act,” she said.

“An innocent American lost his life and we will continue to lift his family up in our prayers every single day,” added the governor, who was considered a potential vice presidential pick until she published a story about killing her dog and goat. “Prior to this week, we already knew the President Donald Trump was a fighter. He is the toughest man that I have ever met. Nobody has endured more than what he has gone through.”

Amid calls for unity during the convention, Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin said that Democrats and their policies represented a “clear and present danger to America, to our institutions, our values and our people”. A Johnson staffer later told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel that the senator did not intend to read the line during the speech and said it was from an old version that was inadvertently loaded into the teleprompter.

Mark Robinson, the lieutenant governor of North Carolina, who has attracted criticism for violent, racist and sexist remarks also spoke on Monday. Speaking at a church last month, Robinson had said: “Some folks need killing.

But much of his speech on focused on his personal story and rising prices – in alignment with the convention’s Monday theme of “Make America wealthy again”.

“Grocery prices have skyrocketed, gas is nearly double, factories, just like the one I worked at closing, leaving North Carolina families feeling hopeless.”

“Democrats have given hundreds of billions of dollars to the illegals and foreign nations while Gen Z has to pinch and it’s just so that they can never own a home, never married and work until they die,” Charlie Kirk, a Republican founder who is the founder of Turning Points USA. “Donald Trump refuses to accept this vacant, pathetic, and mutilated version of the American dream.”

The evening also featured speeches from several handpicked “ordinary Americans” who offered a firsthand account of how Biden’s policies had harmed them.

Several speakers also focused on LGBTQ issues and immigration as decisive issues.

“Let me state this clearly, there are only two genders,” Greene said during her remarks.

The speeches underscored how Republicans are moving into the final stretch of the election with confidence, offering a succinct encapsulation of the way Republicans plan to frame the choice between Biden and Trump.

“We don’t have to imagine a brighter day, we just have to remember,” John James, a Republican congressman from Michigan, said during his speech.

Just two days after a gunman targeted a Trump campaign rally in Pennsylvania, leaving the candidate grazed by a bullet and one of his supporters dead, the Republican national convention kicked off in Milwaukee in a strikingly normal fashion.

Donald Trump, who made his first public appearance but did not yet address the convention, has now been officially nominated as the Republican presidential candidate. Here are key takeaways from the day:

Donald Trump named JD Vance, the Ohio senator who has aligned himself with the populist right, as his running mate at the Republican national convention on Monday.

“After lengthy deliberation and thought, and considering the tremendous talents of many others, I have decided that the person best suited to assume the position of Vice President of the United States is Senator JD Vance of the Great State of Ohio,” wrote Trump on Truth Social.

When Trump first ran for office, Vance’s eventual nomination to run alongside him would have seemed implausible. Vance, a venture capitalist who rocketed into the public eye with his 2016 memoir turned Netflix movie Hillbilly Elegy, was once among Trump’s conservative critics.

“I’m a never-Trump guy, I never liked him,” Vance said during an October 2016 interview with Charlie Rose. Trump was, by Vance’s estimation at the time, a “terrible candidate”.

He even wondered aloud, in texts to a former roommate, whether Trump was more of “a cynical asshole like Nixon”, or worse, “America’s Hitler”.

Since then, Vance has undergone a dramatic transformation into a Maga power figure and close ally of the former president who has supported some of Trump’s more authoritarian impulses, like questioning the results of the 2020 election and, in a 2021 podcast interview, suggesting Trump should purge civil servants from the federal government if re-elected.

Vance’s response to the assassination attempt at a Trump rally on Saturday was also notable. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” Vance wrote on X. “That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”

Vance has already vied for Trump’s blessing once before, while campaigning for a seat representing Ohio in the US Senate. During the primary, Vance pitched himself as a Trump-style rightwing populist. He criticized “elites”, fired off contemptuous tweets about crime in New York City, promoted the racist and antisemitic “great replacement” theory on Tucker Carlson’s show and grew a beard. He faced a storm of negative ads from the conservative, free market-oriented Club for Growth, which pointed to his past identity as a “never Trumper” as proof of his phoneyness.

The tech billionaire Peter Thiel, who had previously backed Vance’s venture capital startup, poured record-breaking sums of money into the race, and Trump endorsed Vance – ushering in his victory in the primary. When he beat the former Democratic congressman Tim Ryan in the November 2022 general election, it cemented his place on the Maga right.

“I think we need more people like him in politics, who are energetic, dynamic, clear-headed about their ideology,” Vivek Ramaswamy, the biotech entrepreneur who ran for president during the Republican party primaries, said of Vance. “The only negative of it – if there is a negative to point out – is he’s probably one of the best we have in the US Senate, and he’s a principled fighter.”

Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr, celebrated the announcement on the convention floor.

“I watched JD go into sort of – let’s call it enemy territory, from a media perspective, doing the most liberal TV shows, and prosecute the case for my father and against the Democrat lunacy that we’ve seen,” he said.

Outside the floor of the convention in Milwaukee, news spread slowly on Monday that Trump had picked Vance.

“I think it’s a great choice. I like that he’s young. I like that he’s from Ohio. There’s a lot of positives about him. Future of the party,” said Nick D’Alessandro, an alternate delegate from New York.

Larry Johnson, a convention attendee from West Virginia, said he thought Vance could bring more attention to Appalachia: “I think for a long time that area has been kind of overlooked.”

Asa Hutchinson, the former Arkansas governor who was one of the most outspoken Trump critics during the Republican party said Vance was a “strategic” choice.

In an early response from the Democratic party, the Democratic National Committee chair, Jaime Harrison, wrote that the “Trump-Vance ticket would undermine our democracy, our freedoms, and our future”.

In office, Vance has consistently aligned with the populist right, calling into question the US’s role in foreign conflicts and backing rightwing domestic legislation. In 2023, for example, he introduced a bill that would make English the official language of the US.

In a fundraising email, Trump speculated that media outlets “will say MAGA-Patriots like YOU won’t vote for me with JD Vance on the ticket. NOW’S THE TIME FOR US TO PROVE THEM WRONG!”

During a high-stakes conversation at the White House with NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt on Monday, Joe Biden addressed his prior comments about putting Donald Trump “in the bullseye”, saying he thinks there needs to be more focus on the former president’s agenda.

Holt asked Biden about the language he had used to describe Trump – as an “existential threat”, and, on a call with Democratic donors, that “it’s time to put Trump in the bullseye” – and the consequences for the election of the attempted assassination of his opponent two days ago in Pennsylvania.

“I didn’t say crosshairs. I was talking about ‘focus on’,” Biden said. “The truth of the matter was, I guess what I was talking about at the time was, there was very little focus on Trump’s agenda.”

“The term was ‘bullseye’,” Holt said.

“It was a mistake to use the word,” Biden replied. “I didn’t mean … I didn’t say crosshairs. I meant bullseye … I meant focus on it. Focus on what he’s doing. Focus on his policies. Focus on the number of lies he told in the debate.”

Biden fumbled somewhat during the answer, leaving it unclear whether he was apologizing for telling donors to put Trump in a bullseye or whether he was correcting himself after using the word “crosshairs” instead of “bullseye”.

Biden said: “Look, I’m not the guy that said, ‘I want to be a dictator on day one.’ I’m not the guy who refused to accept the outcome of the election.”

Holt pressed the president on whether he had done any “soul-searching” about whether his language could “incite people who are not balanced”.

Biden said: “Look. How do you talk about the threat to democracy, which is real, when the president says things like he says?

“Do you just not say anything because you might incite somebody? Look. I have not engaged in that rhetoric. Now, my opponent has engaged in that rhetoric. He talks about there will be a bloodbath if he loses, talking about how he’s going to forgive all the … actually, I guess suspend the sentence of all that were arrested and sentenced to go jail because of what happened at the Capitol.

“I’m not out there making fun of … like, remember the picture of Donald Trump when Nancy Pelosi’s husband was hit with a hammer, talking about it? Joking about it?”

Biden suggested that Trump’s apparent forgiveness of January 6 rioters was also an incitement to violence. “When you say that therre’s nothing wrong with going to the capitol … putting up a noose for the former vice-president, and then you say you’re going to forgive people for that?

Biden said he had had two meetings in the White House situation room about the attempted assassination, and has asked for an independent review of the performance of the Secret Service. “The question is whether they should have anticipated what happened,” Biden said, noting that coordination with local law enforcement complicates the task of protection.

Holt asked what Biden thought of questions about his decision to continue his run from Democrats in Congress.

“We knew it was going to be a close race from the moment he announced,” Biden said. He cited polling data to say “it’s essentially a toss-up race”.

Biden touted his record, likening it to that of Franklin Roosevelt in its success.

“I’m old,” Biden said. “But I’m only three years older than Trump, number one. And number two, my mental acuity has been pretty damn good. I’ve gotten more done than any president has in a long time in three and a half years. I’m willing to be judged on that.”

He added: “The job’s not finished.”

The president became combative during the interview at that point, taking the media to task for ignoring Trump’s conduct.

“Why don’t you ever talk about the 18 to 28 times Trump lied?” Biden said, incredulous at the question. “I had a bad, bad night. I wasn’t feeling well at all. I screwed up … Why doesn’t the press talk about all the lies he’s told?”

Biden’s one-on-one interview – a relative rarity during his time in office – comes amid continuing calls for the president to step away from his re-election run after his weak performance against Trump during a debate on 27 June raised questions about his age and fitness to serve.

Biden’s public appearances have been closely scrutinized since the debate for signs of personal weakness. ABC’s George Stephanopoulos interviewed Biden on 5 July, and asked if he would publish the results of a neurological exam. The president refused. He pointedly displayed a command of foreign policy knowledge at an hour-long press conference at the Nato summit on Friday.

The president has made increasingly forceful rejections of calls to withdraw. But that question had been expected to be at the center of the Holt interview tonight. It slipped in importance behind images of a gunman narrowly missing Trump’s skull at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, nicking Trump’s ear before being killed by Secret Service sniper fire. One spectator was killed and two others critically injured.

The Republican National Committee opened its national nominating convention this week. Biden’s interview with Holt is a bit of political counter-programming in a moment when all eyes might be expected to be on Trump.

Biden addressed the public Sunday night to call for the temperature of political rhetoric to cool, and said as much again to Holt.

Top EU officials will boycott informal meetings hosted by Hungary while the country has the EU’s rotating presidency, after Hungary’s pro-Russian prime minister Viktor Orbán held a series of rogue meetings with foreign leaders about Ukraine that angered European partners.

The highly unusual decision to have the European Commission president and other top officials of the body boycott the meetings was made “in light of recent developments marking the start of the Hungarian (EU) presidency”, commission spokesperson Eric Mamer posted on Monday on X.

Hungary took over the rotating role on 1 July and since then Orban has visited Ukraine, Russia, Azerbaijan, China, and the United States on a world tour he has touted as a “peace mission” aimed at brokering an end to Russia’s war in Ukraine. That angered many leaders in the EU, who said they had not been informed in advance of Orbán’s plans. His government is friendly with Russia and has gone against the policy of most EU countries on support for Ukraine.

Hungary’s Europe minister, János Bóka, lashed out at the commission’s decision saying the body “cannot cherrypick institutions and member states it wants to cooperate with.”

The decision by the European Commission applies to informal meetings hosted by Hungary. Senior civil servants will attend instead of top officials such as the European Commission president, currently Ursula von der Leyen.

Orbán’s government has gone against the policy of most EU countries by refusing to supply Kyiv with weapons to deter Russia’s invasion and by threatening to block financial assistance to the war-ravaged country.

The long-serving prime minister’s visits to Moscow and Beijing, where he held talks with leaders Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, angered his EU counterparts, who said they had not been informed in advance. They rushed to clarify that Orbán – whose country is currently filling the bloc’s six-month rotating presidency – was not acting on behalf of the EU.

In an interview with Hungarian newspaper Magyar Nemzet on Monday, Orbán’s political director said the prime minister had briefed the leaders of other EU countries “in writing about the negotiations, the experiences of the first phase of the peace mission and the Hungarian proposals”.

“If Europe wants peace and wants to have a decisive say in settling the war and ending the bloodshed, it must now work out and implement a change of direction,” said Balázs Orbán, who is not related to the premier. “A realistic assessment of the situation, realistic goals and the right timing – that’s our approach.”

Hungary’s government has long argued for an immediate ceasefire and peace negotiations in the conflict in Ukraine, but has not outlined what such moves might mean for the country’s territorial integrity and future security. It has exhibited an adversarial posture toward Ukraine while maintaining close ties to Moscow, even after its full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Orbán’s critics have accused him of acting against the unity and interests of the EU and Nato, of which Hungary is a member, and of pursuing an “appeasement” strategy concerning Russia’s aggression.

After Orbán’s unannounced trip to Moscow for talks with Putin on 5 July – the first such visit from an EU head of state or government in more than two years – von der Leyen accused him of trying to mollify the Russian leader, writing on X: “Appeasement will not stop Putin. Only unity and determination will pave the path to a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in Ukraine.”

• Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Monday that Russia should be represented at a second peace summit in November, after a first summit convened by the Ukrainian president last month in Switzerland to which Moscow was not invited. Both sides have shunned direct peace talks since negotiations between Russian and Ukraine delegations fell through in the early weeks of Russia’s invasion in February 2022. But during a press conference in Kyiv after his visit to the US for a Nato defence alliance summit, Zelenskiy opened the door to direct talks with officials from Moscow. “I believe that Russian representatives should be at the second summit,” Zelensky said, describing preparations for a follow-up gathering of Ukraine’s allies.

• In the same news conference, Zelenskiy said Ukraine needs 25 Patriot air defence systems to fully defend its airspace, adding that he also wants western partners to send more F-16 warplanes than those already pledged. A six-month delay in military assistance from the US, the biggest single contributor to Ukraine, meant that Kyiv’s forces had “lost the initiative” on the frontline, Zelenskiy said.

• Top EU officials will boycott informal meetings hosted by Hungary while the country has the EU’s rotating presidency, after Hungary’s pro-Russian prime minister Viktor Orbán held a series of rogue meetings with foreign leaders about Ukraine that angered European partners. The highly unusual decision to have the European Commission president and other top officials of the body boycott the meetings was made “in light of recent developments marking the start of the Hungarian [EU] presidency”, commission spokesperson Eric Mamer posted on Monday on X.

• US journalist and author Masha Gessen was convicted in absentia on Monday by a Moscow court on charges of spreading false information about the military and was sentenced to eight years in prison. The Moscow-born Gessen, a staff writer for The New Yorker and a columnist for The New York Times who lives in the US, is a prominent critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin and an award-winning writer.

• A Ukraine drone attack sparked a fire at a factory producing electrical devices and components in Russia’s Kursk region, the interim governor of the region bordering Ukraine said early Tuesday. “None of the workers were injured,” Alexei Smirnov, the governor, said on the Telegram messaging app.

• A Russian military court on Monday granted house arrest to a general and former commander in Moscow’s Ukraine offensive who has been charged with fraud. Major-General Ivan Popov was released from behind bars Monday after being arrested in May on suspicion of large-scale fraud, punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

• Ukraine said Monday that a military serviceman allegedly attempting to flee the country illegally had been shot dead by a border guard after being caught and detained. The State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) said four servicemen were apprehended while approaching the Moldovan border by foot in the southern Ukrainian region of Odesa on Sunday. “While trying to cross the border, border guards noticed them and detained them,” the SBI said. “One of the fugitives attacked the border guard while trying to escape. In response, he used his service weapon and shot the attacker.”

FBI agents went house to house scouring the Bethel Park neighborhood lived in by Thomas Matthew Crooks and his family as mystery continued to surround the motives of the gunman who tried to assassinate Donald Trump while he was addressing a crowd in nearby Butler, Pennsylvania.

The FBI said it had managed to access Crooks’s phone but preliminary analysis of the information at the FBI lab in Quantico, Virginia, had reportedly not advanced the search into Crooks’s reasons for shooting at Trump, injuring the former US president, killing a rally-goer and wounding two more.

Crooks was almost instantly killed by Secret Service agents returning fire, but the shocking incident has plunged America into political turmoil and roiled an already brutal election campaign, marred by fears of political violence and growing unease about the prospect of civil unrest.

The FBI is investigating whether Crooks was a politically motivated homegrown domestic violent extremist. In an updated statement on Monday, the agency said that the search of the suspect’s residence and vehicle were complete, and it had conducted nearly 100 interviews of law enforcement personnel, event attendees and other witnesses who had been at Big Butler Fairgrounds on Saturday.

“The firearm used in the shooting was purchased legally. The shooter was not known to the FBI prior to this incident,” the agency said.

It added: “While the investigation to date indicates the shooter acted alone, the FBI continues to conduct logical investigative activity to determine if there were any co-conspirators associated with this attack. At this time, there are no current public safety concerns.”

On Monday, it was disclosed that Crooks, 20, may have been trained in marksmanship at the local Clairton Sportsmen’s Club where he was registered as a member.

In a statement to the New York Times, the club’s general counsel said the organization “fully admonishes the senseless act of violence that occurred yesterday” but declined to describe what training Crooks may have had, citing the FBI investigation.

At the gun club, a ramshackle collection of huts on a hillside 15 miles south of Pittsburgh, a US and a POW/MIA flag, symbolizing US commitment to prisoners of war and missing in action during the Vietnam war and all conflicts, flew over the range.

The sharp crack of rounds could be heard as two club members fired at rifle targets, some farther away than the estimated 130 yards between Crooks’s rifle and Trump’s podium when the shooter squeezed off as many as eight shots, striking Trump’s ear, killing a member of the audience and injuring two others.

A manager at Clairton refused to discuss what instruction Crooks had received, and ordered reporters to leave the property.

A firearms instructor at a local gun shop, Legion Arms, said Crooks had not been a customer at that store but opined that the distance of the shot was not great for the type of gun, an AR-15-style rifle, to be fired accurately in the right hands.

“That kind of round and gun are good for 700 or 800 yards,” the instructor, who declined to be identified, said. Crooks, he added, had shown inexperience in his aim, which may also have been affected because he had been rushed after being spotted on his perch above a glass research factory.

“He shot at the head and not the body – the body is what you shoot at when you’re shooting long distance,” the instructor said. “Shooting for the head is what people do because they’ve seen it in movies.”

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette newspaper reported that Crooks purchased 50 rounds of ammunition at Allegheny Arms and Gun Works in Bethel Park hours before the Butler rally. Investigators also said Crooks bought 50 rounds the morning of the shooting.

The Allegheny county bomb squad confirmed on Monday that it had joined the investigation after explosives, some appearing to be grenades, were found in Crooks’s car.

Separately, the Butler sheriff, Michael Slupe, confirmed to the news outlet KDKA-TV that an armed municipal officer with the Butler Township had encountered Crooks before he fired shots at the former president from outside the perimeter of the fairground.

“All I know is the officer had both hands on the roof to get up on the roof, never made it because the shooter had turned towards the officer, and rightfully and smartly, the officer let go,” Slupe said.

In Bethel Park, where Crooks lived with his mother, attended Bethel Park high school, and later got a job in the kitchens of a nursing home, residents continued to puzzle over his motives for attempting to assassinate Trump.

Multiple school friends have described an isolated student who excelled at math but fell short socially. Some described him as conservative-leaning in his politics but overall the picture that has emerged so far is unclear. Unusually for many young people, Crooks had little online presence which might have revealed his political leanings or state of mind in the run-up to the attack.

Alex Williams, 23, who graduated a year before Crooks, said the local community was still reeling.

“Nothing really crazy happens in Bethel so I think a lot of people are disturbed, because it’s not normal,” Williams said. “They’re disappointed that the guy came from here and disappointed it happened at all.”

Williams said he did not recall if Crooks had been bullied, as some direct contemporaries have said. Bullying at the school was often limited to “eye-rolling” and social exclusion, he recalled.

One former student at Crooks’s school, Jason Kohler, has said Crooks was bullied often. “He was quiet, but he was bullied. He was bullied so much,” Kohler said.

Williams said he believed his generation had been deeply affected by Covid lockdowns that had “made us really online” and the extreme political environment had made it possible to become “very right-leaning or very left-leaning … they’ll go down like a pipeline whether it’s left or right.”

As the investigation continues, Biden has called on Americans to reject politically motivated violence. Trump has said his speech to the Republican national convention will focus on “unity”.

“It’s 100% possible for someone to go down pretty far and be, like, ‘yeah, I’m gonna kill the president,’” Williams said.

Crooks’s neighbor Steve Riviere told KDKA that the community “is shocked and surprised, maybe not as surprised as we should be, but shocked that this kind of thing happened” and hoped “this will be the end of it and we’ll get to a position where people can have regular polite discourse about their issues rather than pulling out a gun and climbing on a roof”.

Tired of waiting for the authorities to come to their aid, young men in the Mayo-Kebbi Ouest region of south-west Chad are banding into vigilante groups, using bows, arrows and spears to fight gunmen who have turned kidnapping into a professional pastime.

“We guide the gendarmes in the bush, but we are also the first to go after the criminals after a kidnapping,” said Amos Nangyo, head of one of the units in Pala, capital of the region, which borders Cameroon, told Agence France-Presse earlier this month.

In the last decade, the Sahelian tri-border area of Liptako-Gourma – where Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger meet – has become a hotspot for booming jihadist activity.

But another crisis is brewing in a nearby area that some have called “the triangle of death”: the area from Mayo-Kebbi Ouest and Logone Oriental in Chad to Cameroon’s North Region and Lim-Pendé in the Central African Republic.

Official data is hard to come by for this area and many people do not report incidents for fear of further attacks.

But Chadian authorities say ransoms paid in the area amounted to 43 million Central African Francs (CFA) in 2022 and increased to 52.4 million CFA the following year.

In February, a Polish doctor and her Mexican colleague were abducted from the Tandjilé region but was freed a week later, after a combined rescue mission by Chadian and French forces.

Approximately 86 million CFA was paid in ransom in six incidents between February and May 2023 in Cameroon’s Northern Region, according to a recent report by the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime.

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The rise in abductions is happening alongside small arms trafficking, cattle rustling and drug trafficking. Economic interests, rather than ethnic or religious grudges, are driving kidnappings, according to experts.

In west and central Africa, porous borders are the norm, allowing terror groups such as Boko Haram, for example, to move along the diagonal from northern Nigeria to the Cameroon-Chad-CAR corridor to find possible victims as well as criminal allies to finance their jihadist ventures.

Other regional players include ethnic Fulani herders, who experts say can be both perpetrators and victims, given their nomadic lifestyle and the complex nature of criminal activity in the zone.

The Fulani, perceived as having a lot of money by virtue of having herds of cattle, have long been targets of kidnapping. But some herders, grieving the loss of their cattle and other belongings to rustling, or tired of being harassed by security personnel, have turned to kidnapping too.

There are also the zaraguinas, gangs of rampaging bandits and mercenary rebels who are active in the forests of northern CAR, some having migrated in from its neighbours such as Chad. With the presence of foreign counterparts like the Wagner group in CAR, some local mercenaries have moved to Chad.

Targets include traders, civil servants, aid workers and anyone who seems remotely important or likely to have relatives and friends capable of raising ransoms.

Insecurity escalated south of the Sahara in 2011 after the Nato-led ousting of Muammar Gaddafi opened a highway for the southward flow of small arms and light weapon, galvanising rebel activity from Mali to Nigeria.

This made Chad, a country with a history of long-running domestic conflicts and a reputation for breeding warriors in the hinterlands, even more fertile ground for armed non-state actors who export themselves to stoke conflicts or extinguish them elsewhere.

Remadji Hoinathy, a senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies for Central Africa and Lake Chad Basin who is based in N’Djamena, said “the geography and even the demography and anthropology of that zone” was key to its emergence as a recruitment centre for armed groups and a nucleus of the kidnapping crisis.

“A lot of people in Chad [have] grown up with rebellions [and learned] that the only life they have is a link with weapons,” he said. “They are finding ways of living by the gun … either you are a rebel with the army, or you end up as a mercenary, kidnapper, in banditry or Boko Haram.”

The perpetrators have thrived partly because of weak state governance architecture but also because of spaces – and forests – that serve as criminal hideouts. Combined, the three countries in the corridor account for almost a tenth of the area of Africa but only 4% of its population. Their borders with Maghreb states, which have local conflicts waged by actors with transnational communal ties, stretch for thousands of kilometres. Worse still, the armies in the corridor are stretched by conflicts at their other borders.

“Chad is very concerned about security on the border with Sudan in the east, so they’ve moved their capacity to better monitor that border,” said Ulf Laessing, director of the Sahel programme at German thinktank the Konrad Adenauer Foundation. “That might be a reason that they are not able to effectively guard the border with Cameroon as before.”

The kidnappings have had an adverse impact on movements of goods, cattle and humans across the corridor. Farmers are also scared to work, leading to rotting harvests and depleting food volumes.

This in turn could “cause damaging economic ripples across the region”, according to a January 2024 report by Global Initiative. “Following the 2023 coup in Niger, and with instability continuing in Libya, Sudan and the Lake Chad basin, Cameroon has become the main trade artery for Chad and the CAR. The majority of imports and exports into these countries now pass through the tri-border region,” the report said.

Last October, service chiefs from Cameroon and Chad met in Yaoundé to discuss a bilateral cooperation to tackle cross-border crime.

But experts say more action must be taken to dismantle criminal networks, including a structured regional collaboration to increase security and patrol remote forest zones.

Until then, the local vigilantes in the corridor are staying alert to protect their families and communities. “It’s dangerous volunteer work and we ask the state for means to [help] us,” Nangyo told Agence France-Presse.

The leftwing coalition that won most seats in France’s snap general election is facing division after its leading party said it was suspending negotiations with the others over a failure to agree on a prime minister.

Just one week after the election, the fragile unity within the New Popular Front (NFP) fractured on Monday when France Unbowed (LFI) accused the Socialist party (PS) of “unacceptable methods” in vetoing suggestions over who should lead any new administration.

The rift comes at the start of a crucial week in which the government will resign and new MPs will vote on Thursday to appoint a new president of the national assembly, the equivalent of the speaker of the house.

On Monday, LFI said it would not resume talks about forming a government or agreeing a possible prime minister until after the vote for president of the lower house.

In an angry statement, LFI accused the PS of playing into the hands of Macron – whose centrist alliance Ensemble pushed the far-right National Rally (RN) into third place – by putting the leftwing alliance into a “deadlock”.

“Is the PS playing for time to allow the NFP to crumble and abandoning the programme on which it was elected? We will not allow this stalemate to facilitate presidential manoeuvres,” it wrote.

Macron has said he would not work with a government led by LFI. Both LFI and RN have said they would launch a motion of no confidence in any government that included the other.

“The PS has chosen to veto any candidacy [for prime minister] from the NFP, with the sole aim of imposing its own, arguing that it would be the only one acceptable to Emmanuel Macron. It is thus making the president of the republic the decision-maker on our alliance, even though it has been formed against him and his policies,” the LFI statement said.

It added: “These methods are unacceptable. We demand an immediate agreement on a single candidate from the New Popular Front for the presidency of the national assembly … until then we will not participate in any other discussion about the forming of a government.”

The legislative election that Macron called after the RN’s success in the European elections was meant to “clarify” the French political landscape. Instead, the result just over a week ago revealed three similarly sized blocs had emerged – none of which has a majority, or the prospect of forming one.

French union leaders have accused Macron of hijacking democracy, and called for protests and strikes outside the national assembly and government offices across France at noon on Thursday.

The leftwing coalition that won most seats in France’s snap general election is facing division after its leading party said it was suspending negotiations with the others over a failure to agree on a prime minister.

Just one week after the election, the fragile unity within the New Popular Front (NFP) fractured on Monday when France Unbowed (LFI) accused the Socialist party (PS) of “unacceptable methods” in vetoing suggestions over who should lead any new administration.

The rift comes at the start of a crucial week in which the government will resign and new MPs will vote on Thursday to appoint a new president of the national assembly, the equivalent of the speaker of the house.

On Monday, LFI said it would not resume talks about forming a government or agreeing a possible prime minister until after the vote for president of the lower house.

In an angry statement, LFI accused the PS of playing into the hands of Macron – whose centrist alliance Ensemble pushed the far-right National Rally (RN) into third place – by putting the leftwing alliance into a “deadlock”.

“Is the PS playing for time to allow the NFP to crumble and abandoning the programme on which it was elected? We will not allow this stalemate to facilitate presidential manoeuvres,” it wrote.

Macron has said he would not work with a government led by LFI. Both LFI and RN have said they would launch a motion of no confidence in any government that included the other.

“The PS has chosen to veto any candidacy [for prime minister] from the NFP, with the sole aim of imposing its own, arguing that it would be the only one acceptable to Emmanuel Macron. It is thus making the president of the republic the decision-maker on our alliance, even though it has been formed against him and his policies,” the LFI statement said.

It added: “These methods are unacceptable. We demand an immediate agreement on a single candidate from the New Popular Front for the presidency of the national assembly … until then we will not participate in any other discussion about the forming of a government.”

The legislative election that Macron called after the RN’s success in the European elections was meant to “clarify” the French political landscape. Instead, the result just over a week ago revealed three similarly sized blocs had emerged – none of which has a majority, or the prospect of forming one.

French union leaders have accused Macron of hijacking democracy, and called for protests and strikes outside the national assembly and government offices across France at noon on Thursday.

About 3,000 children – including some as young as 12 – have been swept up in El Salvador’s mass detentions since President Nayib Bukele began his crackdown on gangs two years ago, according to a new report from Human Rights Watch (HRW).

The report, which draws on case files and almost 100 interviews with victims, police and officials, documents the arbitrary detention of children and ill-treatment that in some cases amounted to torture.

Since the state of emergency began in March 2022, security forces have raided neighbourhoods where gang control and violence was once a constant, arresting more than 80,000 people.

Two gangs – Barrio 18 and MS13 – had dominated life in El Salvador since the 1990s. By 2015, they counted on 60,000 members in a country of 6 million. Most businesses were extorted and the annual homicide rate was 103 per 100,000.

By locking up more than 1% of the population, Bukele has turned one of Latin America’s most violent countries into one of its safest: according to official data, in 2023 the homicide rate had fallen to 2.4 per 100,000.

But human rights organisations have documented arbitrary arrests, enforced disappearances, torture and massive violations of due process.

HRW’s investigation showed that many of the children arrested in the crackdown have no apparent connection to gangs or criminal activities.

In prison, the children face overcrowding, poor food and healthcare, and have been denied access to lawyers and family members.

In some cases children were held alongside adults during their first days after their arrest, before being moved to overcrowded juvenile facilities which the authors describe as “dangerous and dehumanising environments that fail to prioritise children’s well-being and reintegration”.

More than 1,000 of the arrested children have been convicted with sentences of between two to 12 years in prison, often on broad charges such as unlawful association and using uncorroborated police testimony.

In many cases children were coerced into giving confessions of gang affiliation through a combination of abusive plea deals and mistreatment.

The report calls on the government to begin a review of the cases of those detained during the state of emergency, prioritising children and other vulnerable detainees.

It also calls on foreign governments and international financial institutions to refrain from approving loans that would benefit the agencies directly involved in the abuses, such as the security forces, the prison system and the attorney general’s office.

“The government’s harsh targeting of children risks perpetuating the cycle of violence in El Salvador,” said Juanita Goebertus Estrada, Americas director at Human Rights Watch. “Foreign governments should urge the government to end its human rights violations and protect the lives and futures of children.”

Despite the well-documented human rights abuses committed during the crackdown, improvements in security have helped make Bukele one of the region’s most popular presidents.

Although El Salvador’s constitution bars presidents from a second consecutive term, Bukele appointed new judges to the constitutional court who ruled that he could run again.

Bukele won the election in February by such a margin that the country is now close to being a one-party state.

Elon Musk has said he plans to give $45m a month to a Super Pac focused on electing Donald Trump, starting in July, the Wall Street Journal has reported.

The tech billionaire, who endorsed Trump two days ago, has already donated what was described as “a sizable amount” to the America Pac, though the actual amount of the donation will not be made public in election filings until 15 July, Bloomberg reported.

Both news outlets’ reports on Musk’s donations relied on the accounts of unnamed people familiar with the plans of the tech billionaire, who, with an estimated net worth of $252bn, is one of the richest people in the world.

If Musk follows through with a donation of this scale, it would be “an extraordinary sum,” the Wall Street Journal reported, citing the largest known donation of the 2024 cycle so far as the $50m contributed to a Super Pac supporting Trump “by the great-grandson of banker Thomas Mellon”.

As of 30 June, Musk had not made any donations to the Super Pac, according to a review of records by the New York Times.

The America Pac has already been backed by some of Musk’s friends and allies in the tech world, the New York Times reported, including Joe Lonsdale, who co-founded the software company Palantir with Peter Thiel, a major political donor to Trump’s newly named vice-president, the Ohio senator JD Vance.

The Winklevoss twins, cryptocurrency entrepreneurs who have attacked Joe Biden for waging what they called a war on cryptocurrency through regulation, have also reportedly contributed to the effort, the Wall Street Journal reported. They hailed Trump as “pro-Bitcoin, pro-crypto, pro-business” in June.

America Pac, lauched this summer, is designed to mirror Democratic party turnout efforts by funding robust Republican get-out-the-vote efforts in swing states, the New York Times reported.

Musk said in March he would not be donating to either candidate for US president.

A senior North Korean diplomat based in Cuba defected to South Korea in November, the South Korean spy agency has said, becoming the highest-ranking North Korean diplomat to escape to the South since 2016.

Without giving any further details, the National Intelligence Service confirmed an earlier report by the South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo, which said that a counsellor responsible for political affairs at the North Korean embassy in Cuba had defected.

Among Ri Il-kyu’s jobs at the embassy was to block North Korea’s rival South Korea and old ally Cuba from forging diplomatic ties, the newspaper reported citing an interview with Ri. In February, the two countries established diplomatic relations.

Details on North Koreans defections often take months to come to light, with defectors needing to be cleared by authorities and going through a course of education about South Korean society and systems.

Ri entered North Korea’s foreign ministry in 1999 and received a commendation from North Korean leader Kim Jong-un for successfully negotiating with Panama to lift the detention of a North Korean ship caught carrying arms from Cuba in 2013, Chosun said.

He told the newspaper he had decided to defect over disillusionment with the regime and unfair evaluation of his work.

“Every North Korean thinks at least once about living in South Korea. Disillusionment with the North Korean regime and a bleak future led me to consider defection,” he told the paper.

“In fact, North Koreans yearn for reunification even more than South Koreans. Everyone believes that reunification is the only way for their children to have a better future. Today, the Kim Jong-un regime has brutally extinguished even the slightest hope left among the people.”

He said he flew out of Cuba with his family but he did not elaborate further on how he pulled off the high-risk escape.

“I bought flight tickets and called my wife and kid to tell them about my decision, six hours before the defection. I didn’t say South Korea, but said, let’s live abroad,” he said.

Ri said he made a final decision to run when his request to travel to Mexico for medical treatment was denied last year, adding that his parents and parents-in-law who might face reprisals for his defection had passed away.

North Koreans caught attempting to defect face severe punishment, including death, according to human rights groups and defectors who have been successful.

Fewer North Korean defectors have been arriving in South Korea in recent years due to strict limits on border crossings into China and hefty broker fees, human rights groups and experts say.

In 2023, 196 North Korean defectors came to Seoul, down from as many as 2,700 a decade ago, South Korean government data showed.

Most of those North Korean defectors who recently defected to the South are the ones who had long lived overseas, like the diplomat Ri, human rights activists say.

The last such known high-profile defection to the South was that of Tae Yong-ho, a former North Korean deputy ambassador to the United Kingdom, in 2016.

Other notable defections include that of the acting ambassador to Italy, Jo Song-gil, in 2019 and the acting ambassador to Kuwait, Ryu Hyun-woo, in 2021, who held the ranks of first secretary and counsellor respectively, according to the Chosun Ilbo.

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol on Sunday promised better financial support for North Korean defectors and tax incentives for companies hiring those defectors, as he attended the ceremony for the inaugural North Korean Defectors’ Day.

North Korea last year shut some embassies in an effort to “rearrange its diplomatic capacity efficiently”, closures that South Korea says indicates the North is struggling under the burden of sanctions.

North Korea maintains an embassy in Cuba, though its ambassador returned home in March, according to media reports.

Reuters and Associated Press contributed to this report

Britain is taking its first steps towards forging closer trading links with the EU in meetings between the new business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, and international counterparts in Italy.

In his first overseas visit since Labour’s election landslide, Reynolds will tell a G7 meeting of trade ministers in the Italian city of Reggio Calabria that the new UK government wants to foster a “closer, more mature relationship with our friends in the EU”.

Aiming to reset relations after a volatile period under successive Conservative administrations since the 2016 Brexit vote, he is expected to tell international ministers that Britain is “back on the world stage and ‘open for business’”.

Reynolds will add: “We are seeking a closer, more mature, more level-headed relationship with our friends in the European Union – our nearest and largest trading partner, and we also intend to forge better trading relationships with countries around the world.”

The meetings come as Keir Starmer tries to build closer links with Brussels by hosting EU leaders at Blenheim Palace near Oxford on Thursday, as part of a one-day European Political Community summit.

The prime minister is attempting to walk a tightrope between strengthening EU relations while also telling voters that his government will not take Britain back into the single market or customs union. Starmer is instead relying on more modest reforms and a warmer tone with Brussels.

The prime minister insisted during the election campaign that the UK would not rejoin the EU within his lifetime. Instead, Labour committed in its manifesto to building stronger trade and investment links with the 27-nation bloc, including through a veterinary agreement, support for touring artists, and mutual recognition deals for professional qualifications.

The EU accounted for 41% of UK exports of goods and services and 52% of imports in 2023. Business leaders have urged Starmer to forge closer links with Brussels given the importance of the EU market to UK companies, while also calling for looser migration rules to give them more access to EU workers.

Under the terms of the Brexit deal finalised by Boris Johnson’s government in late December 2020, and in force since January 2021, the UK and the EU are committed to reviewing the implementation of the agreement every five years, with Starmer expected to oversee the first such process in 2026.

Some commentators have suggested the review could pose an opportunity for the deal to be renegotiated. However, EU officials have argued the process may only offer limited scope for change.

Reynolds is expected on Tuesday to hold his first in-person meetings with G7 counterparts since his appointment earlier this month, including with the vice-president of the EU Commission Valdis Dombrovskis and the German vice-chancellor, Robert Habeck.

The new government is hoping a “reset” of international relations will bolster Britain’s status among global businesses and investors, as part of efforts to secure the highest sustained rate of economic growth in the G7.

It also comes amid rising geopolitical tensions and political uncertainty elsewhere. The US president, Joe Biden, appeared last week to back Starmer’s ambitions for closer EU ties, telling the prime minister in talks at the White House that this would also strengthen the transatlantic alliance with Washington.

The climate crisis is causing the length of each day to get longer, analysis shows, as the mass melting of polar ice reshapes the planet.

The phenomenon is a striking demonstration of how humanity’s actions are transforming the Earth, scientists said, rivalling natural processes that have existed for billions of years.

The change in the length of the day is on the scale of milliseconds but this is enough to potentially disrupt internet traffic, financial transactions and GPS navigation, all of which rely on precise timekeeping.

The length of the Earth’s day has been steadily increasing over geological time due to the gravitational drag of the moon on the planet’s oceans and land. However, the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets due to human-caused global heating has been redistributing water stored at high latitudes into the world’s oceans, leading to more water in the seas nearer the equator. This makes the Earth more oblate – or fatter – slowing the rotation of the planet and lengthening the day still further.

The planetary impact of humanity was also demonstrated recently by research that showed the redistribution of water had caused the Earth’s axis of rotation – the north and south poles – to move. Other work has revealed that humanity’s carbon emissions are shrinking the stratosphere.

“We can see our impact as humans on the whole Earth system, not just locally, like the rise in temperature, but really fundamentally, altering how it moves in space and rotates,” said Prof Benedikt Soja of ETH Zurich in Switzerland. “Due to our carbon emissions, we have done this in just 100 or 200 years. Whereas the governing processes previously had been going on for billions of years, and that is striking.”

Human timekeeping is based on atomic clocks, which are extremely precise. However, the exact time of a day – one rotation of the Earth – varies due to lunar tides, climate impacts and some other factors, such as the slow rebound of the Earth’s crust after the retreat of ice sheets formed in the last ice age.

These differences have to be accounted for, said Soja: “All the datacentres that run the internet, communications and financial transactions, they are based on precise timing. We also need a precise knowledge of time for navigation, and particularly for satellites and spacecraft.”

The research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, used observations and computer reconstructions to assess the impact of melting ice on the length of the day. The rate of slowing varied between 0.3 and 1.0 millisecond per century (ms/cy) between 1900 and 2000. But since 2000, as melting accelerated, the rate of change also accelerated to 1.3ms/cy.

“This present-day rate is likely higher than at any time in the past few thousand years,” the researchers said. “It is projected to remain approximately at a level of 1.0 ms/cy for the next few decades, even if greenhouse gas emissions are severely curbed.” If emissions are not cut, the slowing rate will increase to 2.6 ms/cy by 2100, overtaking lunar tides as the single biggest contributor to long-term variations in the length of days, they said.

Dr Santiago Belda of the University of Alicante in Spain, who was not part of the research team, said: “This study is a great advance because it confirms that the worrying loss of ice that Greenland and Antarctica are suffering has a direct impact on day length, causing our days to lengthen. This variation in day length has critical implications not only for how we measure time, but also for GPS and other technologies that govern our modern lives.”