The UK has thrown its weight behind Morocco’s autonomy proposal for Western Sahara, marking a shift in Britain’s position on one of Africa’s longest-running territorial disputes.

Speaking during a visit to Rabat on Sunday, the foreign secretary, David Lammy, said Britain considered Morocco’s 2007 autonomy proposal “the most credible, viable and pragmatic basis” for resolving the dispute.

The UK has previously said the status of the disputed territory in north-west Africa remains “undetermined”, while supporting “self-determination” for “the people of Western Sahara”.

The disputed region has a population of about 600,000 people, and is considered a non-self-governing territory by the UN. While Morocco controls most of the territory, the Algerian-backed Polisario Front controls land in the east of the territory and wants full independence from Rabat.

Under Morocco’s autonomy plan, Western Sahara would remain under Rabat’s sovereignty but with a degree of self-rule.

The US recognised Morocco’s claim over Western Sahara in 2020 during Trump’s first administration. France followed suit last year, along with Spain in 2021.

“The UK will continue to act bilaterally, including economically, regionally and internationally in line with this position to support the resolution of the conflict,” Lammy said after talks with his Moroccan counterpart, Nasser Bourita.

The region has been contested since 1975, when Spain withdrew from its former colony, sparking a conflict between Morocco and the pro-independence Polisario Front.

A UN-brokered ceasefire was reached in 1991, with promises of a referendum on the territory’s future that has never materialised.

Talks have since stalled, and in 2020 the Polisario declared the truce over, accusing Morocco of violating its terms.

Algeria, a key regional player, has previously criticised Rabat’s plan and US support for the proposals.

Bourita described the UK’s endorsement as part of “a momentum to speed up the solution of the conflict”. He said British investments in Western Sahara were under discussion. The two countries also signed cooperation deals on healthcare, innovation, ports, water infrastructure and procurement.

Lammy said the partnerships would allow “British businesses to score big on football’s biggest stage”, a reference to Morocco’s preparations to co-host the 2030 World Cup alongside Spain and Portugal.

The UN still officially supports a negotiated solution that would allow the people of Western Sahara to decide whether to become independent or remain part of Morocco.

As Sudan’s Darfur region has been overrun by militias, women are facing the constant threat of sexual violence, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has reported.

The medical charity said in the South Darfur region alone its workers treated 659 sexual violence survivors between January and March this year, more than two-thirds of whom had been raped.

“Women and girls do not feel safe anywhere. They are attacked in their own homes, when fleeing violence, getting food, collecting firewood, working in the fields. They tell us they feel trapped,” said Claire San Filippo, MSF emergency coordinator, who called on the warring parties to hold their fighters to account.

“These attacks are heinous and cruel, often involving multiple perpetrators. This must stop. Sexual violence is not a natural or inevitable consequence of war, it can constitute a war crime, a form of torture, and a crime against humanity.”

Several women who gave testimonies to MSF described raids where fighters killed all the boys and men in a place before raping women and girls.

A 27-year-old nurse said she was raped last year by fighters who accused her of treating Sudanese army soldiers.

“I want protection now; I don’t want to be raped again … I was too afraid to go to the hospital. My family told me, “Don’t tell anybody”. I don’t have any more pain. But I have nightmares about it,” she said.

MSF said that 56% of the sexual violence they documented was perpetrated by non-civilians.

Women and girls having to walk long distances to gather food and water put them in particular danger, the report said. A third of women and girls were attacked while travelling to or working in fields.

Since April 2023, Darfur has witnessed a surge in human rights abuses as it has been taken over by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary and allied militias as they fight for control against the government’s Sudanese armed forces.

The fighting has recently been concentrated around the city of El Fasher, where conditions have deteriorated rapidly for civilians. The RSF’s seizure of the nearby Zamzam displacement camp led to further reports of increased sexual violence.

The Strategic Initiative for Women in the Horn of Africa (Siha), a coalition of women’s rights groups, said it has verified 14 cases of rape but had received reports of many more, during the Zamzam attack and in the weeks since, as well as dozens of reports of women disappearing or being abducted by RSF fighters.

“Sexual violence has become an everyday reality for women and girls in Darfur, along with the rise in sexually transmitted diseases,” said Siha’s head, Hala al-Karib, who said the international community had abandoned women in Darfur.

Karib said the violence had been escalating since before the current conflict because of the withdrawa of a UN and African Union peacekeeping mission in Darfur that had provided some protection to local communities.

“The peacekeeping mission primarily contributed to the safety and security of women by patrolling roads and enabling them to access their farmlands, while also securing displaced camps,” said Karib.

“The level of neglect toward women in Darfur is staggering. This region is experiencing active genocidal acts, horrific war crimes, and famine due to a siege on livelihoods by all actors. There is no dedicated support for women survivors … this crisis is unfolding amid complete silence and utter neglect from international actors.”

More than 100 people have died and several others remain missing after a torrential downpour in the central Nigerian state of Niger, local authorities said on Friday.

Floods submerged the town of Mokwa after the rains began on Wednesday night and continued into Thursday morning. Ibrahim Audu Hussein, a spokesperson for the state emergency management agency, said rescue efforts were still under way on Friday.

“We have so far recovered 115 bodies and more are expected to be recovered because the flood came from far distance and washed people into the River Niger. Downstream, bodies are still being recovered,” Husseini told the AFP news agency. “So, the toll keeps rising.”

More than 3,000 houses were submerged, he added.

Mokwa, about 230 miles (370km) west of Nigeria’s capital, Abuja, is a commercial hub in Niger state, with many traders and heavy-duty vehicles often carrying goods to other regions.

In Nigeria the rainy season usually runs from April to October. On Wednesday the Nigerian Meteorological Agency had issued a forecast of heavy storms for Abuja and 14 of the country’s 36 states including Niger.

Niger, Nigeria’s largest state by landmass, is home to three major dams – Kainji, Jebba and Shiroro – which contribute significantly to the country’s electricity grid. A fourth dam is under construction.

The state has been prone to flooding in recent times. In April, water released from one of the dams destroyed more than 5,000 farms in 30 communities, including in Mokwa. Local news reports suggested it was the sixth flood in the state this year.

In 2022, floods in Nigeria killed more than 600 people, displaced about 1.4 million and destroyed 440,000 hectares of farmland.

Experts have warned of more extreme weather patterns due to global heating.

More than 100 people have died and several others remain missing after a torrential downpour in the central Nigerian state of Niger, local authorities said on Friday.

Floods submerged the town of Mokwa after the rains began on Wednesday night and continued into Thursday morning. Ibrahim Audu Hussein, a spokesperson for the state emergency management agency, said rescue efforts were still under way on Friday.

“We have so far recovered 115 bodies and more are expected to be recovered because the flood came from far distance and washed people into the River Niger. Downstream, bodies are still being recovered,” Husseini told the AFP news agency. “So, the toll keeps rising.”

More than 3,000 houses were submerged, he added.

Mokwa, about 230 miles (370km) west of Nigeria’s capital, Abuja, is a commercial hub in Niger state, with many traders and heavy-duty vehicles often carrying goods to other regions.

In Nigeria the rainy season usually runs from April to October. On Wednesday the Nigerian Meteorological Agency had issued a forecast of heavy storms for Abuja and 14 of the country’s 36 states including Niger.

Niger, Nigeria’s largest state by landmass, is home to three major dams – Kainji, Jebba and Shiroro – which contribute significantly to the country’s electricity grid. A fourth dam is under construction.

The state has been prone to flooding in recent times. In April, water released from one of the dams destroyed more than 5,000 farms in 30 communities, including in Mokwa. Local news reports suggested it was the sixth flood in the state this year.

In 2022, floods in Nigeria killed more than 600 people, displaced about 1.4 million and destroyed 440,000 hectares of farmland.

Experts have warned of more extreme weather patterns due to global heating.

The mother of the imprisoned British-Egyptian human rights activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah has been admitted to hospital after spending more than 240 days on hunger strike.

Laila Soueif’s family said she had been admitted to St Thomas’ hospital in London on Thursday night with dangerously low blood sugar levels, but continues to refuse medical intervention that would provide her with calories.

Soueif has been on hunger strike for 242 days in protest against the imprisonment of her son, who has been in jail in Egypt since September 2019.

Last week, Souief told the Guardian she weighed 49kg and had lost about 42% of her body weight since beginning the protest.

In December 2021, Abd El-Fattah was sentenced to five years in prison for “spreading false news” and should have been released last year. His mother has not eaten any food since 29 September 2024, the date her son’s prison sentence was due to end. She had been surviving on herbal tea, black coffee, rehydration salts and 300-calorie liquid supplements.

She resumed her full hunger strike on 20 May, saying: “Nothing has changed, nothing is happening.”

UN investigators have declared Abd El-Fattah’s imprisonment in breach of international law. Earlier this year, Keir Starmer promised he would “do everything I can” to ensure his release.

In a statement on Friday, Soueif’s family said she had received glucagon treatment, which induces the liver to break down stored fat to obtain glucose, but continued to refuse treatment that would provide her with calories.

She was previously admitted to hospital in February, with doctors saying she was at “high risk of sudden death”. In March, she agreed to move to a partial hunger strike following a call between Starmer and the Egyptian president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.

Abd El-Fattah has been on his own hunger strike for 90 days since his mother’s admission to hospital in February.

Explaining her decision to resume a full hunger strike, last week Soueif said: “I have never seen [the UK government] act as if the situation was urgent, except when I was hospitalised. For me and for my family the situation is urgent. We have used up more days than we ever thought we had. We need Alaa released now. We need Alaa with us now. We need Alaa reunited with his son, Khaled, now.”

The former British ambassador to Egypt, John Casson, has urged the UK to advise its citizens against travelling to Egypt, in response to Cairo’s refusal to release dual British Egyptian national Alaa Abd el-Fattah.

A UN panel found on Wednesday that Fattah had been held arbitrarily in jail since 2019, but Egypt was refusing to give the UK consular access – let alone release him. His mother has been refusing food in protest at his detention.

Casson, ambassador to Egypt from 2014 to 2018, said: “Egypt pretends to be a friend of the UK and is dependent on British visitors to keep its economy afloat. We have to demonstrate that that is not compatible with abusing our citizens and blocking our embassy.”

He added that the Foreign Office had worked its way through “the normal diplomatic playbook” to secure his release, but this “only revealed Egypt fobbing us off and trying to push us around”.

Casson told the BBC: “It is a police state in Egypt. It is violent and vindictive and it is abusing a British citizen in Alaa Abd el-Fattah.

“It has tortured him and kept him in prison on bogus charges and is causing a lot of distress to his family, but it is also abusing the rights of the British government to do its normal business and it is blocking our embassy from its most fundamental function of visiting and supporting British nationals when they get into trouble.”

He said the advice should be to caution against travel to Egypt –and not just due to this specific case.

As a former ambassador to Egypt, he said “if a friend or family came to me today and asked ‘Should we be booking our winter sun in Egypt?’, I would have to say: ‘You are taking a real risk. If you get into any kind of difficulties, if you post the wrong thing on social media even, there is no guarantee your rights will be protected. There is no guarantee of due process and we cannot even be sure the British embassy will be able to visit you in the normal way.’”

He recalled during his period as ambassador “a Cambridge university student was tortured to death over several days in a prison cell. There was a British woman who went on a beach holiday and found herself in a prison cell for a year due to carrying too many pain killers in her luggage.” There had also been a string of abduction cases.

The travel advice, he said, should be as frank as the advice given to British people thinking of travelling to Hong Kong and Iran.

He believed the case required political will, and had to be a defining issue in the UK relationship with Egypt.

Casson was speaking after co-signing a letter with the Labour peers Lord Hain and Lady Kennedy calling for the British government to advise British nationals not to travel to Egypt.

Cash-strapped and heavily indebted, Egypt is deeply reliant on tourism, which contributed approximately $31bn (£23bn) to its GDP in 2023 and is a provider of nearly 9% of the total jobs in the country. In 2024, Egypt welcomed a record-breaking 15.7 million tourists, surpassing the previous year’s record of 14.9 million. More than 500,000 British people visit Egypt annually.

Current Foreign Office travel advice suggests some parts of Egypt such as Sinai are at risk of terrorism, and also says making critical comments about the government can cause difficulties. There are however no warnings in place about the main tourist spots.

Casson has long been critical of the UK’s inability to find the right levers to persuade the Egyptian president, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, to release Fattah, but the UN report is another pressure point.

The British prime minister, Keir Starmer, has twice rung the Egyptian president to ask for Fattah’s release, while the UK national security adviser, Jonathan Powell, and the UK foreign secretary, David Lammy, have both raised the case in meetings with their opposite numbers.

It has also been raised by UK diplomats at the UN human rights council, but so far even a preliminary right to see Fattah in jail has been denied by British diplomats on the basis that Egypt does not recognise his dual citizenship. He was charged with spreading false news about Egypt, and has been a long-term critic of the government repression.

The African Development Bank has chosen the Mauritanian economist Sidi Ould Tah as its president-elect after three rounds of voting on Thursday afternoon.

The election took place in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, at the end of the annual meeting of the continent’s biggest multilateral lender.

Tah, former head of the Arab Bank for Economic Development in Africa (Badea), beat his closest challenger, Samuel Maimbo, of Zambia, a vice-president of the World Bank, to emerge as successor to the incumbent Akinwunmi Adesina, who completes his second five-year term in September.

Of the five candidates running, four men and a woman, Tah secured 76% of the total vote. Of the remaining votes, Maimbo won 20%, with the former Senegalese economy minister Amadou Hott gaining 3.5%.

The president-elect will be the ninth chief of the 60-year-old development finance institution, which boasts a broad ownership structure: 54 African countries are shareholders, as are G7 nations, including the US and Japan. Nigeria is its single biggest shareholder.

The bank is responsible for backing several large-scale infrastructure developments within the continent, in part using resources from the African Development Fund (ADF). International partners replenish the ADF’s resources every three years, with the next round of funding due to begin this November.

However, with the Trump administration committed to cutting US funding to the AfDB by $555m (£411m) to focus on domestic matters, the bank will have to find creative ways of doing more with less or finding new donors. Adesina has said the current capital of the AfDB has grown to $318bn.

Tah has pledged to collaborate more with Gulf states around infrastructure development.

A South African woman and two accomplices were sentenced to life imprisonment on Thursday for trafficking her then six-year-old daughter, in a case that has gained international attention since the child went missing last year.

Kelly Smith, her boyfriend, Jacquen Appollis, and their friend Steveno van Rhyn were convicted of kidnapping and trafficking the girl, Joshlin Smith, after she disappeared from a small township in the Western Cape.

In a trial that shocked the country, a witness said Kelly Smith told her that she had sold her daughter to a sangoma, or traditional healer, for 20,000 rand (£830) and that the girl was desired for her “eyes and skin”.

Joshlin has still not been found despite an extensive police search.

Announcing their sentences on Thursday, the high court judge Nathan Erasmus said the fact Smith, Appollis and Van Rhyn were drug users was no excuse. “There is nothing that I can find that is redeeming and deserving of a lesser sentence than the harshest I can impose,” Erasmus said.

For kidnapping, the three were given 10-year jail terms.

The Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, who was censored, imprisoned and forced into exile by the dictator Daniel arap Moi, a perennial contender for the Nobel prize for literature and one of few writers working in an indigenous African language, has died aged 87.

“It is with a heavy heart that we announce the passing of our dad, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, this Wednesday morning,” wrote his daughter Wanjiku wa Ngũgĩ on Facebook. “He lived a full life, fought a good fight.”

He died in Atlanta, and his daughter said more details would be announced soon.

Ngũgĩ explored the troubled legacy of colonialism through essays, plays and novels including Weep Not, Child (1964), Devil on the Cross (1980) and Wizard of the Crow (2006). Consider a giant of the modern African pantheon, he had been a favourite for the Nobel prize in literature for years. After missing out on the prize in 2010 to Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa, Ngũgĩ said he was less disappointed than the photographers who had gathered outside his home: “I was the one who was consoling them!”

Born in 1938, while Kenya was under British colonial rule, Ngũgĩ was one of 28 children, born to a father with four wives. He lived through the Mau Mau uprising as a teenager, during which the authorities imprisoned, abused and tortured tens or even hundreds of thousands of people. During the conflict, Ngũgĩ’s father – one of the Gikuyu, Kenya’s largest ethnic group – was forced off his land, and two of his brothers were killed.

This struggle formed the backdrop to the novel that made his name: Weep Not, Child. Published in 1964, just a year after Kenya gained independence, it tells the story of the education of Njoroge, the first of his family to go to school, and how his life is thrown into turmoil by the events which surround him.

A series of novels, including short stories and plays followed, as Ngũgĩ became a lecturer in English literature at Nairobi University. There he argued that the English department should be renamed, and shift its focus to literature around the world. “If there is need for a ‘study of the historic continuity of a single culture’, why can’t this be African?” he wrote in a paper. “Why can’t African literature be at the centre so that we can view other cultures in relationship to it?”

In 1977, he published his fourth novel, Petals of Blood, and a play, The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, which dealt with the troubled legacy of the Mau Mau uprising, but it was his co-authoring of a play written in Gikuyu, I Will Marry When I Want, which led to his arrest and imprisonment in Mamiti maximum security prison.

“In prison I began to think in a more systematic way about language,” he told the Guardian in 2006. “Why was I not detained before, when I wrote in English?” He decided from then on to write in Gikuyu, that “the only language I could use was my own”.

Released in 1978, exile followed in 1982, when the author learned of a plot to kill him upon his return from a trip to Britain to promote his novel Caitani Mutharabaini, translated as Devil on the Cross. He later moved from the UK to the US, where he worked as a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, Irvine, and headed its International Centre for Writing and Translation.

Ngũgĩ continued to write in Gikuyu, despite his troubled connection with his homeland; an arrest warrant was issued for the fictional main character of his 1986 novel Matigari, which was also banned in Kenya. Returning to Nairobi with his wife Njeeri for the first time in 2004, two years after the death of Daniel arap Moi, Ngũgĩ was greeted by crowds at the airport. But during the trip, men wielding guns broke into their apartment, raping Njeeri and beating Ngũgĩ when he tried to intervene. “I don’t think we were meant to come out alive,” he told the Guardian two years later.

His novel Wizard of the Crow, translated by the author into English in 2006, returned to the subject of African kleptocracy, being set in the imaginary dictatorship of the Free Republic of Aburiria. He said the “most beautiful sentence in the entire novel” was “a translation from Gikuyu by the author”.

He continued to translate his own works from Gikuyu, and was nominated for the international Booker prize in 2021 for his epic novel-in-verse The Perfect Nine. He was the prize’s first nominee writing in an indigenous African language and the first author to be nominated for their own translation.

Ngũgĩ had been diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1995 and underwent triple heart bypass surgery in 2019.

Ngũgĩ had nine children, four of whom are authors: Tee Ngũgĩ, Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ, Nducu wa Ngũgĩ, and Wanjiku wa Ngũgĩ. He is survived by his wife, Njeeri.

“Resistance is the best way of keeping alive,” he said to the Guardian in 2018. “It can take even the smallest form of saying no to injustice. If you really think you’re right, you stick to your beliefs, and they help you to survive.”

Namibia has observed its first genocide remembrance day, honouring the estimated 75,000 victims who were massacred by soldiers or forced into concentration camps during German colonial rule.

Between 1904 and 1908, an estimated 65,000 Herero people and 10,000 Nama people were killed when the groups rejected colonial rule. It amounted to 80% and 50% of their respective populations at the time.

Some of their skulls were taken to Germany for racist experiments and were stored in German hospitals, museums and universities for decades.

Namibia’s president, Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah, told a memorial event in the parliament’s gardens on Wednesday that the government would continue to push for reparations from Germany.

She said: “We should find a degree of comfort in the fact that the German government has agreed that German troops committed a genocide against the … people of our land.

“We may not agree on the final quantum, but that is part of the complex negotiations we have been engaged in with the German government since 2013 … We must remain committed that as a nation, we shall soldier on until the ultimate conclusion is reached.”

In 2021, Germany officially recognised the atrocities as a genocide and agreed to pay Namibia €1.1bn (then £940m) to fund development for the Herero and Nama. It said this was a gesture of “reconciliation”, but not compensation or reparations. Germany returned the skulls and other human remains to Namibia in 2011 and 2018.

Descendants of genocide victims said this was not enough and called on the German government to negotiate with them directly.

Germany ruled Namibia, then known as South West Africa, from 1884 to 1915, when it was taken over by South Africa during the first world war. It became independent in 1990.

Between 1904 and 1908, German troops shot, tortured or drove tens of thousands of Herero and Nama people into the Kalahari desert to starve, after they rebelled against colonial rule. Their descendants are now politically marginalised.

Germany’s ambassador to Namibia, Thorsten Hutter, said in a speech at the memorial: “It is a stark reminder of the pain and suffering that was inflicted by German imperial troops during the colonial era … We cannot change the past, but as the people who are living today, it is our responsibility to remember those atrocities that were committed.”

He told the local newspaper the Namibian: “I believe we are on a very good path to forge forward, which includes the issues of reconciliation.”

Herero and Nama representatives said more people in Namibia and worldwide should learn about the genocide. Hoze Riruako, a Herero chief, said it was a precursor to the Holocaust, but “people are not aware of what has happened here to the same level”.

Last year, Namibia declared 28 May would be a genocide remembrance day and a public holiday. It was chosen as it was the day in 1907 when Germany decided to close its concentration camps after an international outcry.

Agence France-Presse and Reuters contributed to this story

Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina, the first Arab and African director to win the coveted Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival, has died aged 91, his family said Friday.

The film-maker was awarded the prize in 1975 for Chronicle of the Years of Fire, a historical drama about the Algerian war of independence.

His children said he passed away at his home in Algiers.

Hamina – who was the oldest living recipient of the Palme d’Or – competed four times in the festival. His 1967 film The Winds of the Aurès won the best first work award.

The struggle for Algeria’s independence was at the heart of Chronicle of the Years of Fire, which in six chapters from 1939 to 1954 tells the story of a nation through its people, culminating in the uprising against French colonisation.

Born on 26 February 1934 in M’Sila in the mountainous Aurès region of north-east Algeria, Hamina was the son of modest peasants from the high plains. He attended agricultural school, then studied in the southern French town of Antibes, just along the Mediterranean coast from Cannes, where he met his future wife. The couple had four sons together.

During the Algerian war, his father was kidnapped, tortured and killed by the French army. He was called up to the French army in 1958 but deserted to join the Algerian resistance in Tunis.

He learned film-making through an internship working on Tunisian newsreels before venturing into short films.

It was an ambush crafted straight from a reality-TV playbook. The Oval Office meeting with South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, started with exchanges of pleasantries, before Donald Trump shouted “turn the lights down” and a video was played to support his false claims that white South African farmers are being murdered for their race.

Ramaphosa came prepared with champion white South African golfers Ernie Els and Retief Goosen, whom the golf-mad Trump referred to as “friends”, as well as South Africa’s richest person, Johann Rupert.

Ramaphosa, who led the African National Congress (ANC) party’s delegation in the talks that ended apartheid white-minority rule three decades ago, needed to play his strongest cards.

In February, Trump signed an executive order cutting aid to South Africa, accusing it of “unjust racial discrimination” against the white Afrikaner minority, which ruled the country during apartheid. The order criticised a South African law allowing land expropriation in limited circumstances and set up a program to bring Afrikaners to the US as refugees. The first group arrived earlier this month.

South African media had speculated whether Ramaphosa was walking into a televised trap, like Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, had just a few months before.

The White House video was likely a surprise for the South Africans. It spliced together clips of Julius Malema, the leader of the far-left Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) opposition party, saying “We are going to occupy land” and “We must never be scared to kill”, before singing the controversial Kill the Boer song (“Boer” is another name for Afrikaners and means “farmer” in Afrikaans).

Malema, whose populism is designed to shock – and whose EFF won just 9.5% of the vote in South Africa’s 2024 election – will probably be thrilled with the attention, after being buoyed up by South African courts ruling that Kill the Boer is not meant to be taken literally.

Former South African president Jacob Zuma, now leading his own opposition party, uMkhonto weSizwe (MK), also featured in the video, singing in Zulu: “We are going to shoot them. They are going to run.”

The video ended with a drone shot of white crosses lining a road where vehicles were queued. Trump said they were paying respects to more than 1,000 murdered white farmers. Ramaphosa said he had never seen the video, which South African-born billionaire and Trump adviser Elon Musk reshared after it was posted on X in March.

Trump then whipped out a sheaf of printed-out news articles, intoning, “Death … death … death,” before handing it over to Ramaphosa.

It was not immediately clear where the white crosses were filmed or even if the footage is real. The Whitkruis Monument is a memorial to dead South African farmers, but the crosses are clustered on a hillside on private land.

While there have been farm murders involving horrific violence, killers interviewed in jail told Rudolph Zinn, a University of Limpopo professor, that they targeted victims of all races for cash and valuables. In the last quarter of 2024, South African police recorded 12 murders on farms, including Black-owned smallholder plots, out of almost 7,000 murders across the country.

South Africa’s agriculture minister, John Steenhuisen, the Afrikaner leader of the ANC’s main rival, the Democratic Alliance – which gets the bulk of its support from white South Africans – said most farmers wanted to stay in South Africa. He also defended the DA’s coalition with the ANC to keep out the “rabble” EFF and MK parties.

The two golfers’ words were perhaps less helpful. Els was cryptic: “Two wrongs don’t make a right.” Goosen spoke of his brother’s “constant battle” with people trying to burn down and take away his farm.

However, their presence could snap Trump out of attack mode. “I respect champions,” he said. “I think the country is very lucky. They really wanted to be here, these two, they could have been on a beautiful fairway.”

South Africa’s most potent defender was Rupert, whose luxury goods conglomerate Richemont owns Cartier. Referring to Malema and Zuma, he said: “I’m their No 1 target.”

Rupert pointed out that all South Africans are targets of crime. He said how much his wife loved JD Vance’s autobiography and begged for Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet service at police stations.

It remains to be seen, though, whether a fellow billionaire and a few rounds with South Africa’s finest golfers will be enough to mollify Trump and persuade him to attend the G20 summit in Johannesburg in November.

A federal judge has ruled that the Department of Homeland Security’s attempt to deport migrants to South Sudan was “unquestionably violative” of an injunction he had issued earlier.

Brian E Murphy, the US district judge in Massachusetts, made the remark at an emergency hearing he had ordered in Boston following the Trump administration’s apparent deportation of eight people to South Sudan, despite most of them being from other countries.

On Tuesday, Murphy ruled that the Trump administration could not let a group of migrants being deported to South Sudan leave the custody of US immigration authorities.

In his order, Murphy wrote: “While the court leaves the practicalities of compliance to defendants’ discretion … the court expects that class members will be treated humanely.”

Last month, Murphy had issued an injunction that required any people being deported to a third country to receive due process. After reports of the apparent South Sudan flight, the judge told Elianis Perez, a justice department lawyer: “I have a strong indication that my preliminary injunction order has been violated.”

At the beginning of Wednesday’s hearing, Elianis Perez, a justice department lawyer, declined to say where the plane carrying the migrants landed, citing “very serious operational and safety concerns”.

Perez also disputed Murphy’s finding that the migrants were not afforded the opportunity to challenge their deportations, Reuters reports.

At Wednesday’s hearing, Murphy said that he would leave the discussion of criminal penalties against the homeland security department for another day.

In an earlier briefing on Wednesday, a homeland security spokesperson acknowledged the deportation was occurring, but refused to say whether the final destination was South Sudan, a highly unstable country that has widely been described as on the verge of descending into another episode of civil war.

“We conducted a deportation flight from Texas to remove some of the most barbaric, violent individuals illegally in the United States. These are the monsters that the district judge is trying to protect,” the spokeswoman, Tricia McLaughlin, said.

McLaughlin went on to add: “It is absolutely absurd for a district judge to try to dictate the foreign policy and national security of the United States.”

“Because of safety and operational security, we cannot tell you what the final destination for these individuals will be,” she continued.

Federal immigration officials said the people were originally from Cuba, Laos, Mexico, Myanmar, Vietnam and South Sudan, but that their home countries refused to accept them as deportations. Homeland security officials claimed that they had been convicted of murder, armed robbery and other serious crimes.

On 18 April Murphy issued a preliminary injunction that was designed to ensure that any migrants being deported to a third country were provided due process under the US constitution’s fifth amendment, in addition to a “meaningful opportunity” to raise any safety concerns.

In an email to his lawyer, the spouse of a Vietnamese man believed to have been deported to South Sudan wrote: “Please help! … They cannot be allowed to do this.”

South Sudan’s police spokesperson, Maj Gen James Enoka, told the Associated Press on Wednesday that no migrants had arrived.

Enoka said that if they did, they would be investigated and those found not to be from the country would be “re-deported to their correct country”.

A federal judge has ruled that the Department of Homeland Security’s attempt to deport migrants to South Sudan was “unquestionably violative” of an injunction he had issued earlier.

Brian E Murphy, the US district judge in Massachusetts, made the remark at an emergency hearing he had ordered in Boston following the Trump administration’s apparent deportation of eight people to South Sudan, despite most of them being from other countries.

On Tuesday, Murphy ruled that the Trump administration could not let a group of migrants being deported to South Sudan leave the custody of US immigration authorities.

In his order, Murphy wrote: “While the court leaves the practicalities of compliance to defendants’ discretion … the court expects that class members will be treated humanely.”

Last month, Murphy had issued an injunction that required any people being deported to a third country to receive due process. After reports of the apparent South Sudan flight, the judge told Elianis Perez, a justice department lawyer: “I have a strong indication that my preliminary injunction order has been violated.”

At the beginning of Wednesday’s hearing, Elianis Perez, a justice department lawyer, declined to say where the plane carrying the migrants landed, citing “very serious operational and safety concerns”.

Perez also disputed Murphy’s finding that the migrants were not afforded the opportunity to challenge their deportations, Reuters reports.

At Wednesday’s hearing, Murphy said that he would leave the discussion of criminal penalties against the homeland security department for another day.

In an earlier briefing on Wednesday, a homeland security spokesperson acknowledged the deportation was occurring, but refused to say whether the final destination was South Sudan, a highly unstable country that has widely been described as on the verge of descending into another episode of civil war.

“We conducted a deportation flight from Texas to remove some of the most barbaric, violent individuals illegally in the United States. These are the monsters that the district judge is trying to protect,” the spokeswoman, Tricia McLaughlin, said.

McLaughlin went on to add: “It is absolutely absurd for a district judge to try to dictate the foreign policy and national security of the United States.”

“Because of safety and operational security, we cannot tell you what the final destination for these individuals will be,” she continued.

Federal immigration officials said the people were originally from Cuba, Laos, Mexico, Myanmar, Vietnam and South Sudan, but that their home countries refused to accept them as deportations. Homeland security officials claimed that they had been convicted of murder, armed robbery and other serious crimes.

On 18 April Murphy issued a preliminary injunction that was designed to ensure that any migrants being deported to a third country were provided due process under the US constitution’s fifth amendment, in addition to a “meaningful opportunity” to raise any safety concerns.

In an email to his lawyer, the spouse of a Vietnamese man believed to have been deported to South Sudan wrote: “Please help! … They cannot be allowed to do this.”

South Sudan’s police spokesperson, Maj Gen James Enoka, told the Associated Press on Wednesday that no migrants had arrived.

Enoka said that if they did, they would be investigated and those found not to be from the country would be “re-deported to their correct country”.

An attempt by the US to deport South Asian migrants to South Sudan has cast a spotlight on the world’s youngest country, which is experiencing a renewed outbreak of the political tensions that have plagued it over the years.

On Tuesday, a US federal judge said migrants supposedly flown from the US to South Sudan appeared to have been deported in violation of a court order and ruled that they remain in the custody and control of US officials.

US immigration authorities confirmed on Wednesday that eight migrants from Cuba, Laos, Mexico, Myanmar, Vietnam and South Sudan were on the deportation flight and claimed that they had been convicted of offences including murder, armed robbery and other serious crimes.

South Sudan’s police spokesperson, Maj Gen James Enoka, told the AP on Wednesday that no migrants had arrived and if they did, they’d be investigated and those found not to be from South Sudan “re-deported to their correct country”.

If they do make it to South Sudan, they will find a country in the midst of political uncertainty and renewed fighting between rival factions.

South Sudan became the world’s youngest country when it gained independence from Sudan in 2011 after a referendum.

The country of 11 million people is rich in oil reserves and its economy is heavily reliant on exports of the product. But the sector is marred by mismanagement and corruption and despite its vast resources, the country is underdeveloped, with most places lacking electricity, paved roads and other infrastructure. About two thirds of its population live in extreme poverty.

South Sudan also experiences some of the world’s most punishing climate phenomena, including extreme flooding, which displaced 380,000 people last year.

In March, authorities put Riek Machar, the country’s first vice-president and main opposition leader, under house arrest, accusing him of agitating his supporters to cause a rebellion.

Earlier that month, the White Army, a community militia loyal to Machar, had launched attacks against the country’s military in Nasir county and overran an army base.

The militia said it had acted in self-defence. The government responded by bombarding areas where the group was based and arrested opposition figures.

Machar’s party, SPLM-IO, said his arrest had in effect collapsed the peace deal that ended the 2013-2018 civil war in which an estimated 400,000 people were killed in fighting between Nuer fighters loyal to Machar and Dinka forces backing Salva Kiir, the current president.

This year’s renewed tensions have put the deal to the test and shaken a fragile peace, with the United Nations warning that South Sudan was on the brink of relapsing into widespread conflict.

Machar remains under house arrest and government offensives have continued in many parts of the north-east, where Nasir is located.

On Tuesday, Kiir promoted second vice-president Benjamin Bol Mel as the deputy chairperson of his SPLM party. In his new role, Bol Mel, who is widely viewed as Kiir’s chosen successor, would become acting president if Kiir stepped down.

The news about deportations of South Asians to South Sudan comes weeks after a standoff between South Sudan and the US after the US sent a Congolese man to South Sudan, claiming he was South Sudanese.

Immigrant rights advocates have accused the Trump administration of deporting about a dozen migrants from countries including Myanmar and Vietnam to South Sudan in violation of a court order, and asked a judge to order their return.

Lawyers for the migrants made the request in a court filing on Tuesday directed to US district judge Brian Murphy, who had barred the Trump administration from swiftly deporting migrants to countries other than their own without first hearing any concerns they had that they might be tortured or persecuted if sent there.

They said they learned that nearly a dozen migrants held at a detention facility in Texas were flown to South Sudan on Tuesday morning. Murphy told a lawyer with the US Department of Justice during a hastily arranged virtual hearing that the potential violation might constitute criminal contempt and he was weighing ordering a plane carrying the migrants to the African country to turn around.

Those migrants included an individual from Myanmar, identified by the initials NM in court documents, whose lawyer received an email on Monday from an official with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement informing the attorney of the intent to deport his client to South Sudan.

According to court documents, NM – who has “limited English proficiency” – refused to sign the notice of removal, which was provided to him only in English, in violation of a previous court order.

The migrant’s lawyers said they learned their client had been flown to South Sudan on Tuesday morning.

The spouse of a Vietnamese man who was held at the same detention center in Texas emailed his lawyer, meanwhile, saying he and 10 other individuals were deported as well, according to the motion.

The lawyers asked the judge for an emergency court order to prevent removal without an opportunity to go to court.

“Return is imminently reasonable – and necessary – in such a situation, as the supreme court recognized in recent weeks,” they wrote, in reference to the case of Kilmar Ábrego García, the Maryland man who was wrongly deported to El Salvador.

The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

South Sudan, the world’s youngest country, gained independence from Sudan in 2011, and has since struggled with armed conflict and poverty. Between 2013 and 2018, fighting between factions loyal to the current president, Salva Kiir Mayardit, and his vice-president, Riek Machar, killed nearly 400,000 people.

The US state department recommends against traveling to South Sudan “due to crime, kidnapping, and armed conflict”.

The South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa, is expected to take the golfers Ernie Els and Retief Goosen with him to meet Donald Trump in the Oval Office on Wednesday, as the government attempts to reset relations with the US amid Trump’s accusations that it is fomenting a white “genocide”.

Ramaphosa’s appeal to Trump’s love of golf, with the potential inclusion of Els and Goosen reported by South African local media, is part of his efforts to avoid a public dressing down of the kind Trump gave to the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in February.

The US has cut aid to South Africa and welcomed a plane-load of white South Africans as refugees, claiming they have been victims of racial discrimination. South African officials and businesspeople are also worried that Congress will not renew the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) when it expires in September, ending tariff-free access to the US for goods including citrus fruits, nuts and cars.

“The trade relations are the most important, that’s what brought us here. We want to come out of the United States with a really good trade deal,” Ramaphosa told South African reporters in the US.

“Ernie Els was actually the person who, over the past month talked Trump into agreeing to the meeting,” said the billionaire JohannRupert, the founder of Switzerland-based luxury goods conglomerate Richemont, which owns jewellery brand Cartier, who will also join the trip.

Rupert has known Trump since 1996 and has played golf with the US president and Els. Rupert, thought to be South Africa’s richest man, told South Africa’s News24 that he and Els visited Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate in March 2024, months before Trump’s re-election, to ask him to keep AGOA.

Far from being victims of a genocide, as in the telling of Trump, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, the South African-born billionaire Elon Musk, Rupert, Els and Goosen are examples of successful white Afrikaners, a minority descended from mainly Dutch colonists who ruled South Africa during its decades of apartheid, legally mandated racial segregation and discrimination in favour of white people.

South Africa was set to offer Musk a deal to bring his Starlink internet service to the country, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday. Musk has railed against affirmative action laws that would have required him to give up 30% of equity to non-white investors. Ramaphosa did not comment on any discussions with Musk when asked by South African reporters.

Ramaphosa’s spokesperson, Vincent Magwenya, did not reply to questions about the delegation to meet Trump or Rupert and Els’s role.

Climate breakdown and wildlife loss are deepening the EU’s “chocolate crisis”, a report has argued, with cocoa one of six key commodities to come mostly from countries vulnerable to environmental threats.

More than two-thirds of the cocoa, coffee, soy, rice, wheat and maize brought into the EU in 2023 came from countries that are not well-prepared for climate change, according to the UK consultants Foresight Transitions.

For three of the commodities – cocoa, wheat and maize – two-thirds of imports came from countries whose biodiversity was deemed not to be intact, the analysis found.

The researchers said the damage to food production by climate breakdown was made worse by a decline in biodiversity that has left farms less resilient.

“These aren’t just abstract threats,” said the lead author of the report, Camilla Hyslop. “They are already playing out in ways that negatively affect businesses and jobs, as well as the availability and price of food for consumers, and they are only getting worse.”

The researchers mapped trade data from Eurostat on to two rankings of environmental security to assess the level of exposure for three staple foods and three critical inputs into the EU’s food system.

They used a ranking of climate readiness from the Notre Dame Global Adaptation Index, which combines a country’s vulnerability to climate damages with its access to financial and institutional support, and a ranking of biodiversity intactness from the UK Natural History Museum, which compares the current abundance of wild species to pre-modern levels.

They found the majority of imports came from countries they ranked “low-medium” on the climate scale and “low-medium” or “medium” on the biodiversity scale.

Some food products were particularly exposed. The EU imported 90% of its maize from countries with low-medium climate readiness and 67% from countries with medium or lower biodiversity intactness, the report found.

For cocoa, a key ingredient in the chocolate industry that Europe does not grow itself, the import exposure was 96.5% for climate preparedness and 77% on the biodiversity scale, the report found.

The industry is already struggling with rises in the price of sugar, driven in part by extreme weather events, and supply shortages of cocoa. Most of its cocoa comes from west African countries facing overlapping climate and biodiversity risks.

The report, which was commissioned by the European Climate Foundation, argued that large chocolate manufacturers should invest in climate adaptation and biodiversity protection in cocoa-growing countries.

“This is not an act of altruism or ESG [sustainable finance], but rather a vital derisking exercise for supply chains,” the authors wrote. “Ensuring farmers are in their supply chains paid a fair price for their produce would allow them to invest in the resilience of their own farms.”

Paul Behrens, an environmental researcher at the University of Oxford and author of a textbook on food and sustainability, who was not involved in the research, said the findings painted an “extremely worrying picture” for food resilience.

“Policymakers like to think of the EU as food-secure because it produces quite a lot of its own food,” he said. “But what this report shows is that the EU is vulnerable to climate and biodiversity risks in some vital food supply chains.”

The report found coffee, rice and soy had fewer risks overall but noted hotspots of concern. Uganda, which provided 10% of the EU’s coffee in 2023, had low climate preparedness and low-medium biodiversity intactness, the report found.

Joseph Nkandu, founder of the National Union of Coffee Agribusinesses and Farm Enterprises in Uganda, called for more access to international climate finance to help farmers become more resilient in the face of worsening weather.

“The weather in Uganda is no longer predictable,” he said. “Heatwaves, prolonged dry spells and erratic rains are withering our coffee bushes and damaging production.”

Marco Springmann, a food researcher at the University of Oxford, who was not involved in the research, said a shift to healthier and more sustainable diets would be needed for food systems to withstand climate shocks.

“About a third of grains and basically all imported soy is used to feed animals,” he said. “Aiming to make those supply chains more resilient therefore misses the point that this supports the very products that are to a large degree responsible for what is being tried to protect from.”

The destruction of the world’s forests reached the highest level ever recorded in 2024, driven by a surge in fires caused by global heating, according to “frightening” new data.

From the Brazilian Amazon to the Siberian taiga, Earth’s forests disappeared at a record rate last year, losing an area the size of Italy to agriculture, fires, logging and mining, according to analysis from the University of Maryland hosted on Global Forest Watch.

In tropical regions, home to the most biodiverse and carbon-dense forests on the planet, fire became the leading driver of loss for the first time since global records began. However, fire is not a natural part of tropical ecosystems. Boreal forests in Canada and Siberia continued to burn last year.

Prof Matt Hansen, co-director at the University of Maryland’s Glad Lab, who led the analysis, described the new figures as “frightening”, while Elizabeth Goldman, co-director of Global Forest Watch, said the update was “unlike anything we’ve seen in over 20 years of data”.

In 2024, forest loss in Brazil reached rates far above any level recorded under the far-right president Jair Bolsonaro, fuelled by fire and the worst drought on record in the Amazon. The country accounted for 42% of all primary rainforest loss in the tropics, losing more than 25,000 sq km (10,000 sq miles). The data differs from Brazil’s official statistics, which uses a different definition of deforestation that does not include fire.

In Bolivia, the loss of previously untouched forest continued to rise, ranking second behind Brazil in overall loss for the first time, driven by drought, fire and government policies promoting agricultural expansion for soya, cattle and sugar cane. The loss of Bolivia’s primary forest has increased nearly fivefold since 2020, reaching more than 14,000 sq km (1.4m hectares).

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Congo-Brazzaville, loss of pristine rainforests reached the highest levels recorded. The countries are home to the Congo basin rainforest, the world’s second largest after the Amazon.

At the Cop26 climate conference in Glasgow, more than 140 world leaders pledged to halt deforestation by the end of the decade, but less than four years later countries are way off track: forest loss must fall by 20% a year from 2024 levels to meet the target by 2030.

“The signal in these data is particularly frightening,” said Hansen “Rising global temperatures are making forests hotter and drier, and as a result, more likely to burn. Given human ignition, even remote rainforests can burn uncontrolled.

“We have a lot of work to do to confront such a widespread, destructive and increasing fire dynamic.”

Goldman called the record-breaking losses “a global red alert”.

She said: “[It is] a collective call to action for every country, every business and every person who cares about a livable planet. Our economies, our communities, our health – none of it can survive without forests.”

Of the 20 countries with the largest areas of pristine forest, 17 are now losing trees at a faster rate than when the 2021 Glasgow deal was signed.

But despite the record loss, there were areas of hope. The loss of primary forest in Indonesia and Malaysia remained relatively low, with the latter dropping out of the top 10 for the first time.

Prof Peter Potapov, co-director of Maryland’s Glad Lab, said the world risked entering a dangerous new cycle.

“2024 was the worst year on record for fire-driven forest loss, breaking the record set just last year. If this trend continues, it could permanently transform critical natural areas and unleash large amounts of carbon – intensifying climate change and fuelling even more extreme fires.

“This is a dangerous feedback loop we cannot afford to trigger further,” he said.

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Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, has defended the Trump administration’s controversial decision to admit 59 Afrikaners from South Africa as refugees after Tim Kaine, a Democratic senator from Virginia, claimed they were getting preferential treatment because they were white.

Kaine, Hillary Clinton’s former running mate, challenged Rubio to justify prioritising the Afrikaners while cancelling long-standing refugee programmes for other groups that have been more documented as victims of conflict or persecution.

The clash between the two men was Rubio’s most combative exchange in his first appearance before the Senate foreign relations committee since his unanimous approval by senators in confirmation hearing in January.

It came a day before South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, was due to meet Donald Trump at the White House in an encounter that promises to be highly charged thanks to the backdrop surrounding the incoming Afrikaners.

“Right now, the US refugee program allows a special program for Afrikaner farmers, the first group of whom arrived at Dulles airport in Virginia not long ago, while shutting off the refugee program for everyone else,” said Kaine, who was a candidate for vice-president alongside Clinton in her unsuccessful 2016 presidential election campaign against Donald Trump. “Do you think Afrikaner farmers are the most persecuted group in the world?”

In response, Rubio said: “I think those 49 people that came surely felt they were persecuted, and they’ve passed … every sort of check mark that had to be checked off in terms of meeting their requirements for that. They live in a country where farms are taken, the land is taken, on a racial basis.”

Trump has falsely asserted that white farmers in South Africa are undergoing a “genocide” and deserving of special status. By contrast, he suspended the US’s refugee resettlement programme on his first day in office in January, in effect stranding 100,000 people previously approved for resettlement.

Kaine asked why Afrikaners were more important than the Uyghurs or Rohingyas, who have faced intense persecution in China and Myanmar respectively, and also cited the cases of political dissidents in Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, as well as Afghans under the Taliban.

“The problem we face there is the volume problem,” Rubio said. “If you look at all the persecuted people of the world, it’s millions of people. They can’t all come here.”

Kaine called the claims of persecution against Afrikaner farmers “completely specious” and pointed to the existence of an Afrikaner minister in South Africa’s coalition government.

He also contrasted the refugee designation of Afrikaners to the absence of such a programme for the country’s Black majority during the apartheid era.

“There never has there been a special programme for Africans to come in as refugees to the United States,” Kaine said, pointing out that special designations were allowed for people being persecuted for religions reasons under communist regimes.

Referring to the US statutory standard of recognising a refugee claim as being a “well-justified fear of persecution”, Kaine asked: “Should that be applied in an even-handed way? For example, should we say if you’re persecuted on the grounds of your religion, we’ll let you in if you’re a Christian but not a Muslim?”

Rubio replied that US foreign policy did not require even-handedness, adding: “The United States has a right to allow into this country and prioritise allowance of who they want to allow to come in. We’re going to prioritise people coming into our country on the basis of what’s in the interests of this country. That’s a small number of people that are coming.”

Kaine responded: “So you have a different standard based on the color of somebody’s skin. Would that be acceptable?”

Rubio replied: “You’re the one talking about the colour of their skin, not me.”

More than 30 years after the end of the apartheid system that enshrined white minority rule, white South Africans typically own 20 times more wealth than their black compatriots, according to an article in the Review of Black Economy.

Unemployment among Black South Africans currently runs at 46.1%, compared to 9.2% for white South Africans.

According to the 2022 census, white people account for 7% of South Africa’s population of 63 million, while Black people account for 81%.

The mother of the imprisoned British-Egyptian human rights activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah has announced she has resumed a near-total hunger strike, stopping taking the 300-calorie supplements she had been consuming on her partial hunger strike for the past three months.

Since the start of her hunger strike 233 days ago, Laila Soueif, 69, has lost 36kg, about 42% of her original body weight, and now weighs 49kg. She is taking the life-endangering step in protest at the continued detention of her son in Cairo beyond his five-year sentence.

She has not eaten any food since 29 September 2024, the date her son’s prison sentence was due to end, and has been surviving only on herbal tea, black coffee and rehydration salts.

At the start of March, amid signs that the UK government was doing more behind the scenes to secure her son’s release, she began a less stringent form of hunger strike, taking a daily 300-calorie liquid nutritional supplement, but on Tuesday she said she was stopping having the supplement after discussions with her family.

She had started taking the supplement after being encouraged by a call that the UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, had made on 28 February to the Egyptian president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, in which he had lobbied for her son’s release.

The Egyptian government refuses to recognise Abd el-Fattah’s British citizenship and does not provide the British embassy in Cairo with consular access. There were signs that the UK national security adviser, Jonathan Powell, was speaking with Egyptian intelligence services, seen as closer to the decision-making centre inside the Egyptian government than the Foreign Office.

Soueif said: “It seemed to everyone around me that it was only reasonable to allow a few weeks for a process that might lead to Alaa’s release without me incurring permanent damage to my health, or worse.”

On the 149th day of her hunger strike in February, Soueif was taken to hospital with dangerously low blood sugar, blood pressure and sodium levels. During her week-long admission at St Thomas’ hospital in London she was given a glucose drip after her blood sugar level dropped to 1.5mmol/L.

Soueif, a mathematics professor, has resumed her daily one-hour vigil outside Downing Street to press Starmer to make her son’s release a priority in Britain’s relations with Egypt.

Explaining her decision to resume a full hunger strike, Soueif said: “I have never seen [the UK government] act as if the situation was urgent, except when I was hospitalised. For me and for my family the situation is urgent. We have used up more days than we ever thought we had. We need Alaa released now. We need Alaa with us now. We need Alaa reunited with his son Khaled now.”

Soueif returned to London on Saturday after a visit to Egypt where she was able to visit her son on three occasions in Wadi el-Natrun prison. He is also on hunger strike, reaching his 81st day on Tuesday without consuming any calories.

On her prison visit on the 6 May, Soueif was able to visit her son in an office and hug him for the first time since October. However, despite agreement that this could happen again, on a visit on 14 May the Egyptian authorities only let her see him from behind glass. Her first visit on 4 May was also behind glass.

In April, Abd el-Fattah had fallen ill with vomiting, severe stomach pains and dizziness and received treatment from doctors in prison.

The extremely dry spring weather in north-western Europe has continued this month, with swathes of the UK, northern France, the Low Countries and Germany receiving just 10% of their normal May rainfall.

The summery conditions, caused by semi-permanent high pressure across the region, are expected to change significantly this week, ending the dry spell for many and delivering much-needed rainfall.

The northern hemisphere’s polar jet stream – a narrow corridor of fast-moving wind that blows approximately 6 miles above Earth’s surface – will intensify in the coming days as it leaves the US and heads into the Atlantic.

During the weekend and early next week, winds of more than 124mph (200km/hr) are forecast, driving in areas of low pressure from the Atlantic. As they reach north-western Europe, the winds will break down areas of high pressure and plunge much of the region into more unsettled weather, with frontal rainfall likely into next week – a welcome event at a time of year that is crucial for the development of crops.

In the run-up to these Atlantic lows, warm and unstable air could trigger showers and thunderstorms in southern France and the Alps, followed by drop in temperature that could bring snow to high altitudes on Friday.

It will also become very unsettled across parts of southern and eastern Africa over the next few days, notably South Africa, southern Mozambique and Madagascar.

Deep areas of low pressure passing eastwards off the southern tip of the continent will generate cold southerly winds and a chance of snowfall over the mountains in South Africa.

Daytime temperatures are likely to be 10-12C below the seasonal norm, such as in Bloemfontein, where it will struggle to top 10C on Wednesday, far below the 21C average in late May.

Gale-force winds exceeding 50mph are expected to trigger dangerous sea conditions along the south-eastern coast of South Africa, whipping waves above 7 metres. Strong winds and high waves will also bombard the southern Mozambique channel between Madagascar and the African mainland, posing a threat to mariners.

One of Africa’s largest protected areas has been shaken by a series of attacks by Islamic State-linked extremists, which have left at least 10 people dead.

Conservationists in Niassa reserve, Mozambique, say decades of work to rebuild populations of lions, elephants and other keystone species are being jeopardised, as conservation operations grind to a halt.

On 29 April, militants attacked buildings in Niassa, killing two anti-poaching scouts. Two more scouts are missing and another seriously injured. The attack, which was later claimed by Islamic State-Mozambique, came 10 days after another raid on a nearby safari camp in which two people were beheaded and six soldiers were killed.

A village of 2,000 people has been displaced by the violence and all conservation work has been suspended in Niassa reserve, according to local groups. On Monday, wildlife and community organisations warned that the violence is risking more than 20 years of conservation work in the area.

“The worst thing about these kind of attacks, which is kind of the point, is the fear factor. The attacks are brutal: the two carpenters that were killed at the safari camp were beheaded. There is enormous fear from communities from the brutality of the attack,” said Colleen Begg, managing director of Niassa Carnivore Project, whose headquarters were attacked in the 29 April raid.

Begg said that the suspension of tourism activities could affect the area for several years.

“Niassa reserve is special because of its size. It is the size of Switzerland. There are very few places like this in Africa with no fences, with large populations of lions, elephants and animals that require a lot of range. It’s one of these beautiful wilderness areas. We’ve been trying to figure out how to make it a world heritage site and all of that is now at risk because of insecurity,” she said.

At 4.2m hectares (10m acres), Niassa is regarded as one of Africa’s most important wildlife refuges. It is home to as many as 1,000 lions, 350 critically endangered African wild dogs, and recovering populations of elephants, buffalo and other keystone species.

Islamic State Mozambique, known locally as al-Shabaab although not linked to the group in Somalia, emerged in 2017 and has displaced more than 1 million people in northern Mozambique as its activities have expanded. While there was a crackdown on the group after an attack on the city of Palma that resulted in the suspension of a major gas project by TotalEnergies, the militants remain active in the country’s northernmost province.

Nine conservation and safari camps have been abandoned since the attacks, with one destroyed by the Islamist group. Begg said that urgent support was needed to restore peace in the region and prevent further loss of life. The Mozambican army is in pursuit of the IS-linked group.

“Obviously, the first task is to solve the problems with the insurgents and get them out of Niassa. If we cannot create peace, people can’t walk to collect honey, they can’t go to their fields, they can’t harvest. It’s impossible for conservationists. No tourists will come. It is devastating,” Begg said.

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Acute food insecurity continues to rise at an alarming rate, with almost 300 million people at risk of death through starvation, new analysis reveals.

Escalating conflict and cuts to humanitarian aid along with climate and economic shocks forced an additional 13.7 million people into chronic food insecurity last year.

It is the sixth consecutive year that the number of people facing “high levels of acute food insecurity” has risen, reaching 295.3 million according to the latest Global Report on Food Crises (GRFC).

The figure represents almost a quarter – 22.6% – of the population of 53 countries analysed by GRFC experts.

“Intensifying conflict, increasing geopolitical tensions, global economic uncertainty and profound funding cuts are deepening acute food insecurity,” the report said.

People facing the most chronic lack of food – as categorised by the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) – more than doubled last year.

More than 95% of them lived in the Gaza Strip or Sudan, although Haiti, Mali and South Sudan had significant populations suffering similar food shortages.

The category – described as “catastrophe” by the IPC – is characterised by starvation, death, destitution and high rates of acute malnutrition.

In Sudan, the worsening civil war led to famine being officially declared with more than 24 million facing acute food insecurity.

Conditions also deteriorated within the Gaza Strip, with experts last year stating that half the population was projected to be suffering the IPC’s “catastrophe” scenario.

“Following the closure of all crossings into the Gaza Strip in early March, and the collapse of the two-month ceasefire, food access has been severely restricted,” the report said.

The warnings were corroborated on Monday when the latest report by the IPC said Gaza’s population of about 2.1 million Palestinians was at “critical risk” of famine as the Israeli blockade on humanitarian aid continued.

The GRFC experts identified worsening food security in 19 countries, largely fuelled by conflicts such as in Myanmar, Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Such insecurity was, they said, aggravated by the climate crisis with worsening drought conditions expected in parts of Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia as well as Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The abrupt termination of funding this year, particularly USAID, has also dismantled nutrition services to more than 14 million children in states such as Sudan, Yemen and Haiti, leaving them vulnerable to severe malnutrition and death.

Even before the funding cuts, nutrition crises were detected in almost half the 53 countries examined in the GRFC report.

The killing of the head of one of Libya’s most powerful militias, which has been accused of abusing asylum seekers and faced allegations of crimes against humanity, has triggered armed clashes in Tripoli, resulting in at least six deaths.

Abdel Ghani al-Kikli, better known as Gheniwa, the commander of Support Force Apparatus SSA, one of Tripoli’s powerful armed groups, based in the densely populated Abu Salim neighbourhood, was killed on Monday night at the headquarters of the 444th Combat Brigade of the Libyan army, a source in one of the country’s security forces told Al Wasat television.

Kikli, one of the capital’s most influential militia leaders, had recently been involved in disputes with rival armed groups, including factions linked to the city of Misrata. His SSA is under the Presidential Council that came to power in 2021 with the government of national unity (GNU) of Abdul Hamid Dbeibah through a UN-backed process.

Armed clashes erupted overnight and gunfire echoed in the city centre and other parts of Tripoli after reports of Kikli’s death.

Libya’s Emergency Medicine and Support Centre said: “Six bodies have been retrieved from the sites of clashes around Abu Salim.

The GNU’s interior ministry called on citizens to stay at home “for their own safety”. After the ministry’s call, drivers started speeding and honking in many Tripoli streets.

One man told Reuters: “I heard heavy gunfire and I saw red lights in the sky.” . Other residents reported gunfire echoing in their neighbourhoods of Abu Salim and Salah Eddin.

The UN mission in Libya urged all parties to “immediately cease fighting and restore calm”, reminding them of their obligation to protect civilians. “Attacks on civilians and civilian objects may amount to war crimes,” it said.

Amnesty International and the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) have described Kikli’s group as one of the main perpetrators of violence inside Libya’s detention centres. According to a UN security council panel of experts report in December 2024, Kikli was a central figure in Libya’s balance of power, playing a key role in militia financing through corrupt practices.

As leader of the SSA, he was accused of extrajudicial killings, torture and serious human rights violations. His name appears in a 189-page complaint filed in 2022 by the ECCHR to the international criminal court, listing him among potential co-perpetrators of crimes against humanity linked to the systematic abuse of migrants and refugees.

Diana Eltahawy, the deputy regional director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International, said in a report published in 2022: “It can come as no surprise that al-Kikli’s militia is yet again involved in horrific crimes – whether against migrants and refugees or Libyans. For over a decade, militias under his command terrorised people in the Tripoli neighbourhood of Abu Salim through enforced disappearances, torture, unlawful killings and other crimes under international law. He should be investigated and, if there is enough admissible evidence, prosecuted in a fair trial.”

In March, a photo shared on X by a Libyan activist showed Kikli in Rome, at the European hospital, visiting a GNU minister, Adel Juma, who was being treated there after surviving an attack in Tripoli on 12 February.

Libya is a major transit point for Europe-bound asylum seekers. For years, human rights organisations have documented how migrants trapped in the country are at the mercy of militias and smugglers. Tens of thousands of people from sub-Saharan Africa are kept indefinitely in overcrowded refugee detention centres where they are subjected to abuses and torture.

The country, a major oil producer in the Mediterranean, has had little stability since a 2011 uprising backed by Nato. Libya split in 2014 between warring eastern and western factions. Major fighting paused with a ceasefire in 2020 but efforts to end the political crisis have failed, with major factions occasionally joining forces in armed clashes and competing for control over Libya’s substantial economic resources.

Reuters contributed to this report

The first group of white South Africans granted refugee status by Donald Trump’s administration has arrived in the US, stirring controversy in South Africa as the US president declared the Afrikaners victims of a “genocide”.

The Afrikaners, a minority descended from mainly Dutch colonists, were met at Dulles international airport outside Washington DC by US deputy secretary of state, Christopher Landau, and deputy secretary of homeland security, Troy Edgar, with many given US flags to wave.

Reuters reported that the group numbered 59 adults and children, citing a state department official, while Associated Press said there were 49.

At Dulles airport, Landau told the assembled white South Africans: “It is such an honour for us to receive you here today … it makes me so happy to see you with our flag in your hands.

He invoked his family’s history, saying: “My own father was born in Europe and had to leave his country when Hitler came in … We respect what you have had to deal with these last few years.”

He added: “We’re sending a clear message that the United States really rejects the egregious persecution of people on the basis of race in South Africa.”

On the same day the group arrived in the US, Trump’s government also ended legal protections that had temporarily protected Afghans from deportation, citing an improved security situation in the country, which is ruled by the Taliban.

One consideration for resettling Afrikaners not Afghans was that “they could be easily assimilated into our country,” Landau told reporters at the airport.

Trump suspended the US refugee settlement programme in January, leaving more than 100,000 people approved for refugee resettlement stranded. Then, in February, he signed an executive order directing officials to grant refugee status to Afrikaners, whose leaders ruled during apartheid while violently repressing the Black majority.

“It’s a genocide that’s taking place,” Trump told reporters at the White House, when asked why white South Africans were being prioritised for resettlement above victims of famine and war elsewhere on the continent, echoing a far-right conspiracy theory that has also been amplified by his South African-born billionaire adviser Elon Musk.

Trump added that the Afrikaners’ race “makes no difference to me”. He said South Africa’s leaders were travelling to meet him next week, but that he would not attend the G20 leaders’ meeting in Johannesburg in November unless the “situation is taken care of”.

South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, said at a conference in Ivory Coast that he had told Trump by phone that he had received false information about white South Africans being discriminated against, from people who disagreed with government efforts to redress the racial inequalities that still persist three decades after white minority rule ended.

“We think that the American government has got the wrong end of the stick here, but we’ll continue talking to them,” he said.

White South Africans typically have 20 times the wealth of Black people, according to an article in the Review of Political Economy. The Black South African unemployment rate is 46.1%, compared with 9.2% for white people.

Laura Thompson Osuri, executive director of Homes Not Borders, a refugee care nonprofit in the Washington area, stood in the airport check-in area with a sign reading: “Refugee. Noun. A person who has been forced to leave his or her country due to persecution, war or violence. Afrikaners are not refugees.”

Osuri said of Trump’s policy: “It’s for showing: ‘Look at us. We do welcome people as long as they look like us.’”

Democrats also condemned the Afrikaners’ resettlement. Maryland senator Chris Van Hollen told a thinktank event: “To watch the Trump administration apply what I call their global apartheid policy … is just an outrageous insult to the whole idea of our country.”

Meanwhile, the Episcopal church said it was ending its decades-long work with the US government supporting refugees, after it was asked to help resettle the white South Africans, citing its “commitment to racial justice and reconciliation”.

The Episcopal church’s migration service is refusing a directive from the federal government to help resettle white South Africans granted refugee status, citing the church’s longstanding “commitment to racial justice and reconciliation”.

Presiding bishop Sean Rowe announced the step on Monday, shortly before 59 South Africans arrived at Dulles international airport outside Washington DC on a private charter plane and were greeted by a government delegation.

Episcopal Migration Ministries instead will halt its decades-long partnership with the government, Rowe said.

Donald Trump opened a fast-tracked refugee status to white South Africans, accusing their government of discrimination, even as his administration abruptly shut down the overall US refugee program. The South Africans jumped ahead of thousands of would-be refugees overseas who had been undergoing years of vetting and processing.

Episcopal Migration Ministries has long resettled refugees under federal grants. Rowe said that about two weeks ago, the government contacted it and said it expected the ministry to resettle some of the South Africans under terms of its grant.

“In light of our church’s steadfast commitment to racial justice and reconciliation and our historic ties with the Anglican Church of Southern Africa, we are not able to take this step,” Rowe said. “Accordingly, we have determined that, by the end of the federal fiscal year, we will conclude our refugee resettlement grant agreements with the US federal government.”

South Africa’s government has vehemently denied allegations of discriminatory treatment of its white minority residents.

“It has been painful to watch one group of refugees, selected in a highly unusual manner, receive preferential treatment over many others who have been waiting in refugee camps or dangerous conditions for years,” Rowe said. “I am saddened and ashamed that many of the refugees who are being denied entrance to the United States are brave people who worked alongside our military in Iraq and Afghanistan and now face danger at home because of their service to our country.”

He also said many refugees, including Christians, are victims of religious persecution and are now denied entry.

He said the church would find other ways to serve immigrants, such as those already in this country and those stranded overseas.

The move marks the end of a ministry-government partnership that, for nearly four decades, has served nearly 110,000 refugees from countries, including Ukraine, Myanmar and Congo, Rowe said.

It’s not the first high-profile friction between the Episcopal church and the Trump administration. Bishop Mariann Budde of Washington DC drew Trump’s anger in January at an inaugural prayer service in which she urged “mercy” on those fearing his actions, including migrants and LGBTQ+ children.

The Anglican church of Southern Africa includes churches in South Africa and neighboring countries. It was a potent force in the campaign against apartheid in the 1980s and 1990s, an effort for which the late archbishop Desmond Tutu received the Nobel peace prize in 1984.

Another faith-based refugee agency, Church World Service, says it is open to serving the South African arrivals.

“We are concerned that the U.S. Government has chosen to fast-track the admission of Afrikaners, while actively fighting court orders to provide life-saving resettlement to other refugee populations who are in desperate need of resettlement,” Rick Santos, CWS president and CEO, said in a statement.

He added that the action proves the government knows how to screen and process refugees quickly.

“Despite the Administration’s actions, CWS remains committed to serving all eligible refugee populations seeking safety in the United States, including Afrikaners who are eligible for services,” he said. “Our faith compels us to serve each person in our care with dignity and compassion.”

The Episcopal ministry and CWS are among 10 national groups, most of them faith-based, that have partnered with the government for refugee resettlement.

The first group of white South Africans granted refugee status by Donald Trump’s administration has arrived in the US, stirring controversy in South Africa as the US president declared the Afrikaners victims of a “genocide”.

The Afrikaners, a minority descended from mainly Dutch colonists, were met at Dulles international airport outside Washington DC by US deputy secretary of state, Christopher Landau, and deputy secretary of homeland security, Troy Edgar, with many given US flags to wave.

Reuters reported that the group numbered 59 adults and children, citing a state department official, while Associated Press said there were 49.

At Dulles airport, Landau told the assembled white South Africans: “It is such an honour for us to receive you here today … it makes me so happy to see you with our flag in your hands.

He invoked his family’s history, saying: “My own father was born in Europe and had to leave his country when Hitler came in … We respect what you have had to deal with these last few years.”

He added: “We’re sending a clear message that the United States really rejects the egregious persecution of people on the basis of race in South Africa.”

On the same day the group arrived in the US, Trump’s government also ended legal protections that had temporarily protected Afghans from deportation, citing an improved security situation in the country, which is ruled by the Taliban.

One consideration for resettling Afrikaners not Afghans was that “they could be easily assimilated into our country,” Landau told reporters at the airport.

Trump suspended the US refugee settlement programme in January, leaving more than 100,000 people approved for refugee resettlement stranded. Then, in February, he signed an executive order directing officials to grant refugee status to Afrikaners, whose leaders ruled during apartheid while violently repressing the Black majority.

“It’s a genocide that’s taking place,” Trump told reporters at the White House, when asked why white South Africans were being prioritised for resettlement above victims of famine and war elsewhere on the continent, echoing a far-right conspiracy theory that has also been amplified by his South African-born billionaire adviser Elon Musk.

Trump added that the Afrikaners’ race “makes no difference to me”. He said South Africa’s leaders were travelling to meet him next week, but that he would not attend the G20 leaders’ meeting in Johannesburg in November unless the “situation is taken care of”.

South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, said at a conference in Ivory Coast that he had told Trump by phone that he had received false information about white South Africans being discriminated against, from people who disagreed with government efforts to redress the racial inequalities that still persist three decades after white minority rule ended.

“We think that the American government has got the wrong end of the stick here, but we’ll continue talking to them,” he said.

White South Africans typically have 20 times the wealth of Black people, according to an article in the Review of Political Economy. The Black South African unemployment rate is 46.1%, compared with 9.2% for white people.

Laura Thompson Osuri, executive director of Homes Not Borders, a refugee care nonprofit in the Washington area, stood in the airport check-in area with a sign reading: “Refugee. Noun. A person who has been forced to leave his or her country due to persecution, war or violence. Afrikaners are not refugees.”

Osuri said of Trump’s policy: “It’s for showing: ‘Look at us. We do welcome people as long as they look like us.’”

Democrats also condemned the Afrikaners’ resettlement. Maryland senator Chris Van Hollen told a thinktank event: “To watch the Trump administration apply what I call their global apartheid policy … is just an outrageous insult to the whole idea of our country.”

Meanwhile, the Episcopal church said it was ending its decades-long work with the US government supporting refugees, after it was asked to help resettle the white South Africans, citing its “commitment to racial justice and reconciliation”.

Koyo Kouoh, the groundbreaking Swiss-Cameroonian curator who was to become the first African woman to head up the Venice Biennale, died suddenly on Saturday, the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa announced.

“It is with profound sorrow that the trustees of Zeitz MOCAA announce the sudden passing of Koyo Kouoh, our beloved executive director and chief curator, on Saturday, 10 May 2025,” said the museum in a statement on Monday.

Kouoh, 57, had been put in charge of the 61st edition of the Biennale Arte, which will take place in Venice from April to November 2026.

Born in 1967 in Doula, Cameroon, but educated through her teens and 20s in Zurich, Kouoh had been executive director of MOCAA in Cape Town, South Africa, since 2019. It holds the continent’s largest collection of contemporary art.

She was previously the founding artistic director of Raw Material Company, an art centre in Dakar, Senegal, which had a big impact on her. “It’s the place I came of age professionally, where I really became a curator and an exhibition-maker,” she recently told the Financial Times. “Dakar made me who I am today.”

As curator of the Biennale she was due to present the exhibition’s title and theme in Venice in a week’s time, on 20 May.

In a statement, the management of the Venice Biennale said they were “deeply saddened and dismayed to learn of the sudden and untimely passing of Koyo Kouoh”.

They said Kouoh had “worked with passion, intellectual rigour and vision on the conception and development of the Biennale Arte 2026”.

The statement added: “Her passing leaves an immense void in the world of contemporary art and in the international community of artists, curators and scholars who had the privilege of knowing and admiring her extraordinary human and intellectual commitment.”

The Biennale confirmed it was “likely to hold the press conference on 20 May”, which would also be livestreamed from its headquarters.

Zeitz MOCAA said it had closed its doors and suspended all programming until further notice.

Kouoh moved to Switzerland at 13 and studied business administration and banking before starting a literary career. In 1994, she co-edited Töchter Afrikas, which was inspired by the groundbreaking Daughters of Africa (1992), an anthology of writing by women of African descent.

She was regarded as a transformational leader at Zeitz MOCAA, where she built “an explicitly Pan-African, world-class programme”, according to the New York Times, which credited her with turning around an institution that had experienced several scandals.

In one of her final interviews, Kouoh discussed her view on mortality. “I do believe in life after death because I come from an ancestral Black education where we believe in parallel lives and realities,” she said. “There is no ‘after death’, ‘before death’ or ‘during life’. It doesn’t matter that much. I believe in energies – living or dead – and in cosmic strength.