Giuffre’s family issued a statement confirming she took her own life at her farm in Western Australia, where she had lived for several years

Virginia Giuffre, one of the most prominent victims of the disgraced US financier Jeffrey Epstein who also alleged she was sexually trafficked to Prince Andrew, has died. She was 41.

Her family issued a statement on Saturday confirming she took her own life at her farm in Western Australia, where she had lived for several years.

Move that opens door for companies to test self-driving technology on trucks over 10,001lb likely to face pushback

California regulators have released a new proposal to allow the testing of self-driving heavy-duty trucks on public roads.

The state’s department of motor vehicles announced proposed regulations on Friday to allow the testing of driverless trucks over 10,001lbs, opening the door for companies to test self-driving technology on vehicles roughly the size of a Ram or Ford super duty pickup truck.

Michael Alexander Gloss, 21, who died on 4 April 2024, was the son of top-ranking US spy Juliane Gallina

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

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

The London-based company, the second largest food deliver app in the UK, said no ‘firm offer’ had been made yet

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

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

To solve three conflicts simultaneously would be a daunting task for anyone, but it is especially so for a man entirely new to diplomacy

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

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

As state is first to order in-person voting at jails, official says ‘one step closer to realizing our democracy’s full potential’

It was a Sunday in late October 2024 when Jesus Rodriguez, then 29, voted for the first time.

He voted in person for the presidential and state races, but his polling place wasn’t at a church, school or community center – it was inside the Jefferson county jail in Colorado.

Harvard is leading the pushback because it can afford to fight. Others are realising that they can’t afford not to

Enfeebling universities or seizing control is an early chapter in the authoritarian playbook, studied eagerly by the likes of Viktor Orbán in Hungary. “Would-be authoritarians and one-party states centrally target universities with the aim of restricting dissent,” Jason Stanley, a scholar of fascism at Yale, wrote in the Guardian in September. Last month, he announced that he was leaving the US for Canada because of the political climate and particularly the battle over higher education.

It is not merely that universities are often bastions of liberal attitudes and hotbeds for protest. They also constitute one of the critical institutions of civil society; they are a bulwark of democracy. The Trump administration is taking on judges, lawyers, NGOs and the media: it would be astonishing if universities were not on the list. They embody the importance of knowledge, rationality and independent thought.

President’s international engagements have set stage for explosive confrontations and Pope Francis’s funeral comes at an especially fraught moment

A spectre is haunting Europe: the spectre of Donald Trump flying to the Vatican this weekend and publicly feuding with international leaders in front of St Peter’s Basilica in the midst of the sombre rituals and rites that will mark the funeral of Pope Francis.

The US leader’s first international trip of his second term comes at one of the most politically fractious and fraught moments in recent memory, as his “America first” project sets fire to US alliances and trade relationships around the world. Between international tariffs, the wars in Ukraine and in Gaza, the Trump team’s open antipathy toward Europe and its hard line on immigration from Central and South America, the papal funeral could prove to be a minefield of international diplomacy.

Shabtai, a Jewish society based at Yale, hosted the extremist far-right politician convicted of supporting terrorism. Why did Yale allow this?

Let me start with a statement that should be obvious: deliberately starving 2 million people – half of whom are children – is indefensible. It is not complicated, it is not a nuanced situation that requires a PhD to parse. It is not an unfortunate and unavoidable part of war. It is quite simply indefensible. I would say that it is also very much prohibited by international human rights law, but that doesn’t seem to exist any more, does it?

As I write this, no food, water or medicine has been allowed into Gaza for almost two months. It is impossible to know just how bad the situation really is because Israel has imposed a media blackout on the region. However, aid organizations have said: “The Gaza Strip is now likely facing the worst humanitarian crisis in the 18 months” since the war began. Thousands of children are malnourished. Childhood malnutrition, I can’t stress enough, has long-term consequences. An entire generation’s future has been violently stolen from them.

Hannah Dugan apprehended in courthouse where she works after agency says she helped man evade authorities

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

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

Alda Curtis, who earned US$1 for the T-shirt she sold on RedBubble, had US$600 removed from her PayPal account without explanation

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Alda Curtis, a 63-year-old counselling student from Sydney, set up a Redbubble store as a hobby, including selling a T-shirt featuring an unhappy cat cartoon.

After years of running the store, a single sale of that T-shirt resulted in a US$100,000 default judgment against her for infringing on the trademark of Grumpy Cat late last year. Then Curtis noticed nearly US$600 had been taken from her PayPal account.

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Russian official calls talks with Steve Witkoff ‘quite useful’ as investigation launched into suspected Ukrainian bombing

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

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

Crews still working to contain one the state’s largest ever wildfires, amid warm temperatures and dry conditions

With crews still working to contain one of New Jersey’s largest wildfires on record, fire danger remains elevated across the state and into eastern Pennsylvania, the National Weather Service warned on Friday.

“There is an increased risk for rapid fire spread this afternoon across portions of New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania,” the NWS said.

Republican former representative who had lied about his credentials sobbed in court saying he was ‘humbled’

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

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

This presidency places authoritarian ambition above all – and now the people of Ukraine are paying the price

To see the true face of Donald Trump, look no further than Ukraine. Laid bare in his handling of that issue are not only his myriad weaknesses, but also the danger he poses to his own country and the wider world – to say nothing of the battered people of Ukraine itself.

Don’t be fooled by the mild, vaguely theatrical rebuke Trump issued to Vladimir Putin on Thursday after Moscow unleashed a deadly wave of drone strikes on Kyiv, killing 12 and injuring dozens: “Vladimir, STOP!” Pay attention instead to the fact that, in the nearly 100 days since Trump took office, the US has essentially switched sides in the battle between Putin’s Russia and democratic Ukraine, backing the invaders against the invaded.

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist and the host of the Politics Weekly America podcast

100 days of Trump’s presidency, with Jonathan Freedland and guests. On 30 April, join Jonathan Freedland, Kim Darroch, Devika Bhat and Leslie Vinjamuri as they discuss Trump’s presidency on his 100th day in office, live at Conway Hall London and livestreamed globally. Book tickets here or at guardian.live

In a statement, the 86-year-old director of the critical and box-office flop said the book confirms his feeling that ‘art can never be constrained’

Megalopolis, Francis Ford Coppola’s $120m passion project, was neither a box office nor a critical success on release last year. Largely funded by the sale of Coppola’s own vineyards, the sci-fi epic starring Adam Driver took around $14m at the global box office amid unconvinced reviews and rumours of abnormal on-set behaviour by its director.

A marketing campaign attempted to leverage bad critical notices by flagging that previous works by Coppola now acclaimed as masterpieces – including Apocalypse Now and The Godfather – had been dismissed by critics at the time. But this backfired after it emerged all of the sniffy historical reviews had been fabricated.

Few policymakers mention US president by name, but his tariffs dominate IMF-World Bank meeting

Kristalina Georgieva’s favourite film, the International Monetary Fund boss told the audience at a packed panel event in Washington on Thursday, is Tom Hanks’s cold war romp Bridge of Spies.

In one of the stranger digressions in a frequently strange week, Georgieva recalled the moment when Hanks’s character, a US lawyer, tells the Soviet spy he has been appointed to defend that he will probably be executed. “You don’t seem alarmed,” Hanks says to him; to which the spy – played by Mark Rylance – replies, “Would it help?”

Exit comes after Joe Kasper was implicated as orchestrator of power grab that led to dismissal of three Pentagon officials

Joe Kasper, the controversial chief of staff to the US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, who was central to a dramatic power struggle at the Pentagon, has left his post, in an unexpected departure.

Despite Hegseth’s assurances just days ago in a TV appearance on the Fox & Friends show that Kasper would merely transition to “a slightly different role” within the department, Kasper confirmed to Politico in a Thursday interview he will instead return to government relations and consulting, maintaining only limited Pentagon ties as a special government employee.

At the scene of the deadliest attack on our capital this year, I see the war on Ukraine is still very real – and Putin shows no signs of ending it

War teaches you to believe only in what happens, rather than what is merely said or promised. A day after the “peace talks” in London, which the US secretary of state Marco Rubio didn’t even turn up for, Ukrainians were not anxiously waiting for the results of a possible deal, which looked unfeasible anyway. Instead, they were counting their dead.

According to Ukraine’s air force, in the early hours of Thursday morning Russia launched 11 Iskander ballistic missiles, 37 KH-101 cruise missiles, six Iskander-K cruise missiles, 12 Kalibr cruise missiles, 4 KH-59/KH-69 missiles and 145 drones. For Kyiv and Kharkiv residents that night, this was not just a case of reading numbers on a news feed, but hearing and feeling explosions rock their cities. It turned out to be the deadliest night for the Ukrainian capital this year.

Nataliya Gumenyuk is a Ukrainian journalist and CEO of the Public Interest Journalism Lab

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I’m scared about the health secretary’s vow to find the cause behind the so-called ‘autism epidemic’

I always knew my parents operated on a different wavelength than most.

For one, they are both exceptionally smart. My mother is a former mathematician, who studied the various levels of infinity as part of her master’s thesis. My father is a computer programmer who, at 17 years old, was one of the youngest people to ever be able to communicate with ships in morse code. They met at a party for members of Mensa, a club for the highly intelligent.

Hurricane Katrina: Mississippi Remembers captures the grief and resilience of survivors in the Magnolia state

Twenty years ago this August, the United States Gulf coast was irrevocably changed when Hurricane Katrina, one of the deadliest and costliest storms to ever hit the country, made landfall. Making landfall as a strong category 3, the storm, which was so vast it stretched the length of the Mississippi Gulf coast all the way into Alabama, hit the Mississippi-Louisiana coastal border before continuing northward.

Since then, superstorms fueled by the climate crisis have become relatively commonplace in the country, but the impact of Katrina endures to this day. Immediately following the storm, the country and world were enthralled by tragic stories out of New Orleans, where the levees failed to a catastrophic effect and the local, state and federal responses were disastrous. But Mississippi, which received the maximum impact from the storm surge, was largely left out of the national narrative around Katrina.

Faustin Nsabumukunzi, 65, is charged with hiding his past when applying for a green card and citizenship

A New York beekeeper who has been in the US for decades has been accused of concealing a leadership role in the genocide in Rwanda in the mid-1990s, prosecutors have said in documents.

The man told federal agents: “I know I’m finished” when he was arrested on Thursday on charges that he hid his past when he applied for for a green card and US citizenship, according to the prosecution in the case.

The president has a chance to make good on his reputation as a dealmaker as Iran moves closer to a nuclear weapon

In May 2018, Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew the US from the Iran nuclear deal and reimposed American sanctions that crippled the Iranian economy. Trump tore up the 2015 agreement, which had taken years for Iran to negotiate with six world powers, under which Tehran limited its nuclear program in exchange for relief from international sanctions. Trump insisted he would be able to negotiate a better pact than the one reached by Barack Obama’s administration.

Today, in his second term as president, Trump is eager to fix the Iran deal he broke nearly seven years ago.

Mohamad Bazzi is the director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern studies and a journalism professor at New York University.

Suspect, charged separately in state court, could face death penalty if convicted over Brian Thompson death

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

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

Rodney Taylor, whose legs were amputated as a toddler, just one of many people with disabilities at risk from detention

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

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