female shooter armed with two "assault-style" rifles and a pistol shot dead three adults and three nine-year-old children at a private school in Nashville, authorities said.
Emergency services were called to The Covenant School in the US city following reports of an "active shooter event" on Monday morning.
The gunwoman, 28, from Nashville, died after being shot by police.
Authorities were working to identify her and whether she had a connection to the church school.
The victims were pronounced dead after arriving at Monroe Carell Jr. Children's Hospital and Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
President Joe Biden called on Congress again to pass his assault weapons ban in the wake of the shooting.
"It's heartbreaking, a family's worst nightmare," he said.
Children from The Covenant School are led to safety
/ AP
The tragedy unfolded over roughly 14 minutes. At 10.13am on police received the initial call about an active shooter at the Presbyterian school, which teachers about 200 students aged three to 11.
Officers began clearing the first story of the school when they heard gunshots coming from the second level, police spokesperson Don Aaron said during a news briefing.
Two officers from a five-member team opened fire in response, fatally shooting the suspect at 10.27 am, Aaron said.
He said there were no police officers present or assigned to the school at the time of the shooting because it is a church-run school.
Other students walked to safety, holding hands as they left their school surrounded by police cars, to a nearby church to be reunited with their parents.
President Joe Biden speaks about the school shooting in Nashville
/ AP
The school, founded as a ministry of Covenant Presbyterian Church in 2001, is located in the Green Hill neighborhood just south of downtown Nashville, situated close to the cities top universities.
Jozen Reodica heard the police sirens blaring from outside her office building nearby. As her building was placed under lockdown, she took out her phone and recorded the chaos.
"I thought I would just see this on TV," she told the Associated Press. "And right now, it's real."
The killings come as communities around the US reel from a spate of school violence, including the massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, last year; a first grader who shot his teacher in Virginia; and a shooting last week in Denver that wounded two administrators.
“In a tragic morning, Nashville joined the dreaded, long list of communities to experience a school shooting,” Mayor John Cooper wrote on Twitter. “My heart goes out to the families of the victims. Our entire city stands with you.”
An uneasy calm is returning to Israel after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced he would delay a key part of controversial plans to overhaul the justice system.
On Monday night he said he would pause the legislation to prevent a "rupture among our people".
However it is unclear what a delay will achieve beyond buying time.
It followed intensified protests after he fired his defence minister, who had spoken against the plans.
In unprecedented events, the country's biggest trade union called a strike, and Israelis watched society close down around them.
From the main airport to shops and banks - even in hospitals - services were stopped. The co-ordinated action was designed to push Mr Netanyahu back from the brink of pushing through the reforms by the end of this week.
Opposition Leader Yair Lapid called it the "biggest crisis in the history of the country".
The government, Israel's most right-wing ever, is seeking to take decisive control over the committee which appoints judges. The reforms would give the parliament authority to override Supreme Court decisions with a basic majority and would make it difficult to declare a prime minister unfit for office and remove them from power.
Mr Netanyahu said the changes would stop courts over-reaching their powers, but critics said they would help him as he faces an ongoing trial for corruption. He has been on trial facing charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust in three cases. The prime minister denies any wrongdoing and claims he is the victim of a "witch hunt".
The proposed changes have provoked an outpouring of anger from nearly all parts of Israeli society, including parts of its powerful military, since they were announced on 4 January.
Reuters
When he finally addressed the nation on Monday night, he was quick to cast blame. He accused an "extremist minority" of trying to divide the nation, and criticised military reservists who had opposed the bill by saying they wouldn't report for duty. His own part in the country's upheaval was not acknowledged.
The solution Mr Netanyahu has proposed will buy him time, but it won't solve the problem - demonstrators were fighting for this bill to be scrapped, not delayed.
Israel's opposition have said they'll enter into fresh dialogue.
Mr Netanyahu's far-right coalition partner, the Jewish Power party, said they had withdrawn a veto on any delay to passing the reforms in return for a guarantee that Mr Netanyahu would pass them during the next session of parliament.
That could happen any time from the end of April, when parliament returns following a recess which begins on Sunday.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, Jewish Power's leader, also said he accepted the delay because, in exchange, Mr Netanyahu had agreed to put his national security ministry in charge of a new "national guard".
In the heart of Jerusalem, around the Knesset, supporters and critics held counter-protests. One thing united them - the blue and white flag waved by both groups. This is one nation, for weeks bitterly divided and Israelis know it is not over yet.
EPA
Protests erupted on Sunday after Netanyahu fired his defence minister Yoav Gallant, who had spoken out against controversial plans to overhaul the justice system.
However a nationwide strike put forward by the Histadrut labour union was called off after Mr Netanyahu said he would delay the reforms.
Israel's president, Isaac Herzog, said the delay was "the right thing to do". He had previously called for an immediate halt to the plans.
Mr Lapid cautiously welcomed the delay to the reform package.
"If the government engages in a real and fair dialogue we can come out of this moment of crisis - stronger and more united - and we can turn this into a defining moment in our ability to live together," he said.
Elsewhere, the White House said US President Joe Biden would address the Israeli prime minister's decision later on Monday.
Spokesperson John Kirby said the United States remained concerned about the situation in Israel but declined to comment specifically on the delay.
Israeli protesters light fire and block highway as Netanyahu sacks minister
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Benjamin Netanyahu will delay the process for discussions on the controversial judicial overhaul to next month, a statement from the far-right and coalition member party Jewish Power has said.
The statement on Monday afternoon said the legislation would be pushed to the next session of the Israeli parliament in order to “pass the reform through dialogue.” Mr Netanyahu is yet to confirm the delay.
Parliament will go on recess next week for the Passover holiday.
Tens of thousands of protestors have taken to the streets across Israel in a rare show of defiance against the prime minister over his controversial plans to overhaul the judiciary.
Mr Netanyahu fired his defence minister on Sunday after the former army general called for a halt to the divisive reforms, drawing concerns internationally, including from the United States.
In response, Israel‘s largest trade union group launched a strike across a broad swathe of sectors, with over 700,000 workers in health, transit and banking, among many other fields walking out.
Israeli PM agrees to delay judicial overhaul until next parliament session
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will delay the process for discussions on the controversial planned judicial overhaul to next month, a statement from the far-right and coalition member party Jewish Power said on Monday.
The statement said the legislation would be pushed to the next session of the Israeli parliament in order to “pass the reform through dialogue,” the statement said.
Parliament will go on recess next week for the Passover holiday.
Right-Wing Israeli lawmaker says halting judicial overhaul plans would be a mistake
Right-Wing Israeli lawmaker Simcha Rothman told the Israeli Channel Seven pro-settler media channel that halting the government’s planned judicial overhaul would be a mistake, after a key coalition member said passing the legislation would be delayed to the Israeli parliament’s next session.
Israel parliament approves 2023-2024 state budget in preliminary vote
Israel’s parliament has given initial approval to the state’s 2023-2024 budget on Monday in a key test of the governing coalition amid a battle over the government’s flagship judicial overhaul plans.
srael’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu walks at the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, in Jerusalem
(Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)
The cabinet last month had approved the budget draft that the Finance Ministry expects will be fully ratified by the end of May. The budget allocates spending of 484.8 billion shekels ($136 billion) this year and 513.7 billion next year.
The budget next heads to parliament’s finance committee, where it typically undergoes changes before final votes in the full plenum.
Judicial overhaul delayed for ‘at least several weeks,’ national security minister says
A powerful partner in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government says the country’s proposed judicial overhaul has been delayed for at least several weeks.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir says he agreed to a delay in the legislation until parliament reconvenes for its summer session on April 30.
There was no immediate confirmation from Netanyahu.
In a statement, Ben-Gvir said the interim period would give time for a compromise agreement to be reached with the political opposition.
But he said if a deal is not reached, the package would be approved in the summer session.
Ben-Gvir has been a leading proponent of the overhaul, and his statement could pave the way for Netanyahu to announce a delay.
Israel’s Netanyahu ‘to delay’ controversial judicial reforms in wake of mass protests
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu will delay controversial reforms to the judicary in the wake of mass protests, according to the far-right Jewish Power party, a member of the ruling coalition goverment.
The party’s leader, the security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, said in a statement that he had agreed to delay the government’s overhaul of the judiciary in exchange for a promise it would be brought after the upcoming parliamentary recess.
“I agreed to remove the veto to reject the legislation in exchange for a commitment by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the legisltaion would be submitted to the Knesset for approval in the next session”.
Israel's Ben-Gvir says agrees to delay judiciary reform package
The head of one of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hard-right coalition partners said on Monday he had agreed to delay the government’s overhaul of the judiciary in exchange for a promise it would be brought after the upcoming parliamentary recess.
“I agreed to remove the veto to reject the legislation in exchange for a commitment by prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the legisltaion would be submitted to the Knesset for approval in the next session,” security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said in a statement.
‘This hour different to any before’, says Israeli army chief of staff
Israel’s army chief of staff called on soldiers on Monday to continue to do their duty and act with responsibility in the face of bitter social divisions over government plans to overhaul the judiciary.
“This hour is different to any that we have known before. We have not known such days of external threats coalescing, while a storm is brewing at home,” Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi said in remarks made public by the military press office.
Tens of thousands of Israelis demonstrate outside parliament
Tens of thousands of Israelis demonstrated outside parliament in an effort to halt Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to overhaul the judiciary.
Demonstrators turned the streets surrounding the building and the Supreme Court into a roiling sea of blue-and-white Israeli flags dotted with rainbow Pride banners.
Large demonstrations in Tel Aviv, Haifa and other Israeli cities drew thousands more.
“This is the last chance to stop this move into a dictatorship,” said Matityahu Sperber, 68, who joined a stream of people headed to the protest outside the Knesset. “I’m here for the fight to the end.”
Israeli police officers remove a protester blocking a main road
Matt Laubhan, chief meteorologist for local TV station WTVA, struggled to contain his emotions as he told the viewers that the town of Amory was going to take the direct hit from the huge twister. Amory has a population of just over 6,000.
Mr Laubhan told viewers that as much as they “trust him”, he wasn’t sure how the tornado would pan out.
"Oh man, north side of Amory, this is coming in," he said late Friday during the broadcast.
"Oh, man. Dear Jesus, please help them. Amen," he said as more detailed updates of the tornado’s movements came in.
One person was killed in Alabama and 25 in Mississippi as overnight tornadoes wove more than a 150-mile path of destruction through the states, touching down in many regions where mobile homes and other residential structures outnumber sturdier houses.
The twister flattened entire blocks, ripped a steeple off a church and toppled a municipal water tower. Even with recovery just starting, the National Weather Service warned of a risk of more severe weather.
Preliminary information based on estimates from storm reports and radar data indicate the Friday night tornado was on the ground for more than an hour and traversed at least 170 miles, according to National Weather Service meteorologist Lance Perrilloux with the NWS office in Jackson, Mississippi.
“That’s rare — very, very rare,” he said, attributing the long path to widespread atmospheric instability.
Tornadoes and severe winds continued to batter parts of the south during the weekend and thousands remained without power as the storm moved east.
Nearly 13,000 people remained without power in Georgia on Sunday morning, according to PowerOutage.us.
Mississippi governor Tate Reeves on Saturday declared a state of emergency after the storm system tore through Rolling Fork and Silver City before smashing into Winona, Amory and Alabama. The massive supercell storm also brought hail the size of golf balls.
Rolling Fork mayor Eldridge Walker said that his “city is gone” after buildings and homes were obliterated.
“How anybody survived is unknown by me,” said Rodney Porter, who lives 20 miles south of Rolling Fork.
When the storm hit Friday night, he immediately drove there to assist in any way he could. Porter arrived to find “total devastation” and said he smelled natural gas and heard people screaming for help in the dark.
“Houses are gone, houses stacked on top of houses with vehicles on top of that,” he told The Associated Press.
President Joe Biden on Sunday approved an emergency declaration for Mississippi. Mr Biden ordered federal aid to supplement state, tribal and local recovery efforts in the affected areas, a White House statement said.
The funding will be available to affected people in the counties of Carroll, Humphreys, Monroe, and Sharkey, it added.
At least 29 migrants have died after at least two boats sank off Tunisia's coast within hours of each other, officials say.
The sub-Saharan migrants were trying to cross the Mediterranean to reach Italy.
It is the latest in a string of migrant boat capsizes off Tunisia's coast in the last few days, with five others sinking in the past four days.
This comes after Tunisia launched a campaign against undocumented African migrants.
Meanwhile, Italian officials on the island of Lampedusa say they are overwhelmed, after a record 2,500 migrants arrived in the last 24 hours.
The Italian far-right Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, has warned Europe risks seeing a huge wave of refugees arriving on its shores.
Tunisia has become a hub for migrants who wish to make it to Europe, with UN figures showing at least 12,000 migrants who landed on Italy's shores this year left from Tunisia. That figure was just 1,300 in the same time period last year.
However, the Tunisia coast guard say they are taking steps to stop the migrant crossings, having halted around 80 vessels headed for Europe in the past four days, according to the Reuters news agency. It also says it has detained more than 3,000 migrants, the same agency reports.
In a controversial speech last month, Tunisia's president accused sub-Saharan African migrants living in the country of causing a crime wave and described them as a demographic threat.
Kais Saied's comments were widely criticised by the African Union and denounced as "racist hate speech" by human rights groups.
These comments have left some sub-Saharan Africans in Tunisia living in fear, with some saying they have seen an increase in racist incidents.
This has led some countries, like Ivory Coast and Guinea, to repatriate their citizens due to an increased climate of intolerance in Tunisia.
Tunisia's economy is in a poor state, and is facing crisis after negotiations with the the International Monetary Fund (IMF) stalled.
The US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has also warned that Tunisia urgently needs to reach a bailout deal with the IMF.
Matt Laubhan, chief meteorologist for local TV station WTVA, struggled to contain his emotions as he told the viewers that the town of Amory was going to take the direct hit from the huge twister. Amory has a population of just over 6,000.
Mr Laubhan told viewers that as much as they “trust him”, he wasn’t sure how the tornado would pan out.
"Oh man, north side of Amory, this is coming in," he said late Friday during the broadcast.
"Oh, man. Dear Jesus, please help them. Amen," he said as more detailed updates of the tornado’s movements came in.
One person was killed in Alabama and 25 in Mississippi as overnight tornadoes wove more than a 150-mile path of destruction through the states, touching down in many regions where mobile homes and other residential structures outnumber sturdier houses.
The twister flattened entire blocks, ripped a steeple off a church and toppled a municipal water tower. Even with recovery just starting, the National Weather Service warned of a risk of more severe weather.
Preliminary information based on estimates from storm reports and radar data indicate the Friday night tornado was on the ground for more than an hour and traversed at least 170 miles, according to National Weather Service meteorologist Lance Perrilloux with the NWS office in Jackson, Mississippi.
“That’s rare — very, very rare,” he said, attributing the long path to widespread atmospheric instability.
Tornadoes and severe winds continued to batter parts of the south during the weekend and thousands remained without power as the storm moved east.
Nearly 13,000 people remained without power in Georgia on Sunday morning, according to PowerOutage.us.
Mississippi governor Tate Reeves on Saturday declared a state of emergency after the storm system tore through Rolling Fork and Silver City before smashing into Winona, Amory and Alabama. The massive supercell storm also brought hail the size of golf balls.
Rolling Fork mayor Eldridge Walker said that his “city is gone” after buildings and homes were obliterated.
“How anybody survived is unknown by me,” said Rodney Porter, who lives 20 miles south of Rolling Fork.
When the storm hit Friday night, he immediately drove there to assist in any way he could. Porter arrived to find “total devastation” and said he smelled natural gas and heard people screaming for help in the dark.
“Houses are gone, houses stacked on top of houses with vehicles on top of that,” he told The Associated Press.
President Joe Biden on Sunday approved an emergency declaration for Mississippi. Mr Biden ordered federal aid to supplement state, tribal and local recovery efforts in the affected areas, a White House statement said.
The funding will be available to affected people in the counties of Carroll, Humphreys, Monroe, and Sharkey, it added.
Kyiv on Sunday said Russia was holding Minsk as a “nuclear hostage” after Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons to ally Belarus, Agence France-Presse reports.
“The Kremlin took Belarus as a nuclear hostage,” the secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council, Oleksiy Danilov, wrote on Twitter, adding that the move was “a step towards the internal destabilisation of the country”.
Here are some images coming to us over the wires.
Here’s some more on football.
Later on Sunday, Ukraine take on England at the UK’s Wembley Stadium in a qualifying match for the men’s Euro 2024 football competition.
UK ministers offered 1,000 free tickets to Ukrainians and their sponsors to attend the match at Wembley.
Denys Dreyzer, 18, from Kherson, fled Ukraine in May 2022 and came to the UK under the Homes for Ukraine scheme.
He and his family have since moved out from their hosts' home.
Dreyzer, who works as caretaker for the Ukrainian Community Centre and is studying at the University of Bolton, will attend the game with his mother and sister, who he lives with in Bradford. His father is in Kyiv.
Discussing the match, he told PA News:
I hope it will be amazing, because it’s like new fresh air to our community to watch our guys fighting to get to the Euros.
We hope this game our guys will show what we can do. And also it will be good present for our military, because they are every day fighting for our freedom.
I hope they will watch this game and this game will will make them happy.
The Azadi Stadium in Tehran can hold up to 78,000 at capacity. As Anton Miranchuk of Lokomotiv Moscow kicked off under a giant portrait of the former supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini on Thursday night, let’s generously say it wasn’t quite full. Still, what crowd there was made a pretty decent noise.
There were even a few hundred travelling fans, who were rewarded when Miranchuk scored for Russia from the penalty spot. Early in the second half the Porto striker Mehdi Taremi equalised for Iran, and although the later stages disintegrated into a procession of substitutions, the visitors were ultimately a little fortunate to escape with a 1-1 draw.
Honours even on the pitch, then, which felt like a diplomatically fitting result. Over the past year, as the west has begun to close ranks, these two pariah states have found themselves locked in a pragmatic but increasingly enthusiastic embrace.
Russian money has been pouring into Iranian mining and infrastructure projects, to the point where it is now Iran’s largest source of foreign investment. Iran has invited Russian businesspeople to Tehran to share advice on circumventing western sanctions. The two countries have linked their banking systems and embarked on joint naval drills. And last month the Russian and Iranian sports ministers signed a “memorandum of mutual understanding”, vowing to strengthen their sporting ties.
On Sunday evening, Ukraine’s footballers will step out at Wembley Stadium to a vivid fanfare: a sea of flags and bold gestures, an outpouring of affection and solidarity that has greeted them pretty much everywhere they have travelled in the last year. At exactly the same time, in St Petersburg’s Krestovsky Stadium, Russia will play Iraq in their first national team game on home soil since the start of last year’s war.
Good luck finding the game on television or tracking down a match report on the Fifa website. But seamlessly, almost imperceptibly, Russia has returned to the international football treadmill, and nobody seems overly perturbed by it.
Even Ukraine, who called for Iran to be thrown out of last year’s World Cup for its role in supplying drones to the Russian war effort, has in this instance opted for apathy over outrage. “Those countries who play Russia, an aggressor, support Russian aggression and what Russia is doing to Ukraine,” said Ukraine’s caretaker manager, Ruslan Rotan, last week. “We don’t have to think about those countries, we don’t have to pay attention to them. They are not worthy. The bottom line is, forget Russia.”
Russia and China are not creating a military alliance, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, said in a televised interview broadcast on Sunday, stating that the two countries’ military cooperation was transparent, news agencies reported.
Putin also said western powers were building a new “axis”, bearing some resemblance to Germany and Japan’s second world war alliance.
Interfax quoted Putin as saying:
We are not creating any military alliance with China.
Yes, we have cooperation in the sphere of military-technical interaction. We are not hiding this.
Everything is transparent, there is nothing secret.
Kyiv on Sunday said Russia was holding Minsk as a “nuclear hostage” after Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons to ally Belarus, Agence France-Presse reports.
“The Kremlin took Belarus as a nuclear hostage,” the secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council, Oleksiy Danilov, wrote on Twitter, adding that the move was “a step towards the internal destabilisation of the country”.
The UK Ministry of Defence says that since the start of March 2023 Russia is likely to have launched at least 71 Iranian-designed Shahed series one-way attack uncrewed aerial vehicle (OWA-UAVS) against targets across Ukraine.
It says Russia is likely launching Shaheds from two axes: from Russia’s Krasnodar Krai in the east and from Bryansk Oblast in the north-east.
Ukraine will no longer resort to “dangerous” monetary financing to fund the war against Russia, its central bank governor, Andriy Pyshnyi, told the Financial Times in an interview published on Sunday.
The head of the National Bank of Ukraine said that it had “created huge risks for macro-financial stability” when the bank was last year forced to print billions of hryvnia to plug a budget shortfall, adding that an “open conflict” with the government over the issue had been resolved.
“It was a quick remedy, but very dangerous,” Pyshnyi told the newspaper.
Reactions continue on Vladimir Putin’s announcement Russia will station tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus.
“It’s a very significant move,” Nikolai Sokol, a senior fellow at the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation, told Reuters.
“Russia had always been very proud that it had no nuclear weapons outside its territory. So, now, yes, they are changing that and it’s a big change.”
Putin did not specify when the weapons would be transferred to Belarus, which has borders with three Nato members – Poland, Lithuania and Latvia. He said Russia would complete the construction of a storage facility there by 1 July.
“This is part of Putin’s game to try to intimidate Nato … because there is no military utility from doing this in Belarus as Russia has so many of these weapons and forces inside Russia,” said Hans Kristensen, director of the nuclear information project at the Federation of American Scientists.
The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons called Putin’s announcement on an extremely dangerous escalation.
“In the context of the war in Ukraine, the likelihood of miscalculation or misinterpretation is extremely high. Sharing nuclear weapons makes the situation much worse and risks catastrophic humanitarian consequences,” it said on Twitter.
Hello and welcome back to our live coverage of the war in Ukraine. This is Christine Kearney to bring you up to speed with the latest developments.
A senior US administration official says there are no signs Moscow plans to use its nuclear weapons.
Putin likened his plans to the US stationing its weapons in Europe and said that Russia would not be transferring control to Belarus. But this could be the first time since the mid-1990s that Russia were to base such weapons outside the country.
Hawkish Russian politicians and commentators have long-speculated about nuclear strikes, saying Russia has the right to defend itself with nuclear weapons if it is pushed beyond its limits.
“Tactical” nuclear weapons refer to those used for specific gains on a battlefield rather than those with the capacity to wipe out cities. It is unclear how many such weapons Russia has, given it is an area still shrouded in cold war secrecy.
Experts say the development is significant, since Russia had until now been proud that unlike the US, it did not deploy nuclear weapons outside its borders.
The senior US administration official noted that Russia and Belarus had been speaking about the transfer of nuclear weapons for some time.
“We have seen reports of Russia’s announcement and will continue to monitor this situation,” the US defence department’s press office said in a written statement.
“We have not seen any reason to adjust our own strategic nuclear posture nor any indications Russia is preparing to use a nuclear weapon. We remain committed to the collective defence of the Nato alliance.”
In other key developments shortly after 9am in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv:
Ukraine’s deputy minister of defence Hanna Maliar went on Facebook to urge Ukrainians to not openly discuss details about the country’s upcoming offensive. “On live broadcasts, don’t ask experts questions [in the vein of] ‘how is the counter-offensive going?’, don’t write blogs or posts on this topic, and don’t discuss military plans of our army publicly at all. We have one strategic plan – to liberate all our territories. And as for the details – that’s simply a military secret,” Maliar wrote.
The head of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency will visit Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant next week to assess the serious security situation there, the IAEA said. Rafael Grossi said in a statement that the nuclear safety and security dangers at the Russian-held plant were “all too obvious”.
Russia fired on a humanitarian aid delivery point in the city of Kherson on Saturday, injuring two civilians, according to the Ukrainian military. Oleksandr Prokudin, head of the Kherson regional military administration, said: “Russian occupiers continue shelling the places where civilians are provided with aid.”
The top commander of Ukraine’s military has said that his forces are pushing back against Russian troops in the long and grinding battle for the town of Bakhmut. Separately, Britain’s defence ministry said the months-long Russian assault on the city had stalled, mainly as a result of heavy troop losses. British military intelligence also said Russia appeared to be moving to a defensive strategy in eastern Ukraine, Associated Press reported.
Russian oil company Gazprom reduced gas exports to the EU through Ukraine by 15%, the Kyiv Independent reports. On 24 March, Gazprom recorded a gas transit flow of 42.5m cubic metres. A day later, the volume decreased to 36.2m cubic metres.
The US president, Joe Biden, and the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, have displayed a united front against authoritarian regimes as Biden visited the Canadian capital days after the leaders of China and Russia held a Moscow summit. Reuters reported that images of Biden and Trudeau standing side by side in Ottawa on Friday announcing agreements including on semiconductors and migration represented a counterpoint to the scene in Moscow days ago.
The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, spoke by phone with Putin and thanked him for his “positive attitude” in extending the Black Sea grain deal, the Turkish presidency said on Saturday. It said the two leaders discussed steps to improve Turkish-Russian relations, and developments regarding the war in Ukraine, and that Erdoğan expressed the importance of ending the conflict through negotiations as soon as possible, Reuters reported.
More than 5,000 former criminals have been pardoned after finishing their contracts to fight in Russia’s Wagner mercenary group against Ukraine, the founder of Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, said on Saturday. The Wagner group, originally staffed by battle-hardened veterans of the Russian armed forces, took on a much more prominent role in the Ukraine war after the Russian army suffered a series of humiliating defeats last year, Reuters reported.
The United Nations has said it is “deeply concerned” by what it said were summary executions of prisoners of war by both Russian and Ukrainian forces on the battlefield. A report from the UN’s office of the high commissioner for human rights said its monitors had documented dozens of the executions by both sides, that the actual number was likely higher and that they “may constitute war crimes”.
Police in Russia have placed a former speechwriter for Vladimir Putin on a wanted list of suspects, the latest step in a sweeping crackdown on dissent. The Associated Press reports that Abbas Gallyamov wrote speeches for Putin during the Russian leader’s 2008-12 stint as prime minister. Gallyamov later became an outspoken political consultant and analyst who was frequently quoted by Russian and foreign media. He has lived abroad in recent years.
Russia’s parliament speaker has proposed banning the activities of the international criminal court (ICC) after the court issued an arrest warrant for the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, accusing him of war crimes. Vyacheslav Volodin, an ally of Putin’s, said on Saturday that Russian legislation should be amended to prohibit any activity of the ICC in Russia and to punish any who gave “assistance and support” to the court.
