Read the daily news to learn English

Trump China visit live: Rubio hoping for ‘positive response’ to appeal for release of Hong Kong activist Jimmy Lai

US trade representative Jamieson Greer has told Bloomberg TV that an agreement for double-digit billions of dollars in agriculture sales to China is expected after Donald Trump’s visit to Beijing. He also said it was important to China to have the strait of Hormuz open, and that the US believed Beijing was very pragmatic in respect to its involvement with Iran. More on Greer’s comments soon.

Ukraine war briefing: Putin escalating war, not seeking an end – Merz

Russia’s heavy bombardment of Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, showed Moscow was “banking on escalation rather than negotiation”, Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, said on Thursday. Peter Beaumont writes that Kyiv bore the brunt of the day’s almost continuous heavy attacks on Ukraine. Emergency services said at least 16 people, including two children, were killed in the capital. The mayor, Vitali Klitschko, declared Friday a day of mourning. Russia had launched 1,567 drones since the start of Wednesday, said the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. At least 22 civilians were killed over Wednesday and Thursday, officials said. It comes after Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, said on Saturday that the war was “coming to an end”. Zelenskyy said on Thursday: “These are definitely not the actions of those who believe the war is coming to an end.” “Kyiv and its partners are ready for negotiations aimed at a just peace,” said Merz, the German chancellor. “Russia, for its part, is continuing the war.” While Ukraine and Europe “want to help end this terrible war as quickly as possible”, the Russian attacks “speak a different language” to that of Putin’s suggestions the war could be nearing an end. In what sounded like a very pointed rejection of Vladimir Putin’s suggestion that a former German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, could act as a mediator between Russia and Europe, Merz said: “We Europeans decide for ourselves who speaks for us. No one else.” More than 1,500 rescue workers were deployed across Ukraine to deal with the aftermath, including nearly 600 in Kyiv. Zelenskiy said 180 facilities had been damaged including more than 50 residential buildings. A UN vehicle came under fire from drones during a humanitarian mission in Kherson city. In Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, 28 people, including three children, were wounded and civilian infrastructure was targeted, said Oleh Syniehubov, the regional governor. Ukraine’s energy ministry said electricity supplies in 11 regions had been disrupted. The strikes also targeted port infrastructure in the southern Odesa region and railways, officials said. Latvia’s prime minister has resigned after her government collapsed over the issue of Ukrainian drones straying into Latvian territory from Russia. Jon Henley writes that Evika Siliņa lost her governing coalition majority after forcing out her defence minister, Andris Sprūds, who resigned after Silina said the defence sector had “failed to fulfil its promise of safe skies over our country”. MPs from Sprūds’s party then quit the coalition and collapsed the government. Ukraine says the drones – intended for Russian targets – are driven over the border into Latvia by Russian electronic warfare. The UN nuclear watchdog on Thursday warned of “intensified” military activities near several Ukraine nuclear sites that posed significant safety risks. The IAEA named the Khmelnitsky, Rivne and South Ukraine operational nuclear plants and the Chornobyl disaster site. There had been “a major increase in drone activity with more than 160 UAVs recorded flying in the vicinity of the sites”, the IAEA said, and “director general [Rafael] Grossi expressed deep concern about such military activities”. Grossi urged “all parties to exercise maximum restraint”. Ukrainian drone attacks killed one person and injured three on Thursday in Russia’s Belgorod border region, a frequent target of Ukrainian strikes aimed at military sites. The region’s general headquarters said a drone hit a private house in the town of Graivoron near the border, killing a man. A second man was injured. In a second incident, a drone detonated in a village near the border, injuring two people, authorities said. The governor of Belgorod region was one of two regional officials to leave their posts on Wednesday. Vladimir Putin appointed Alexander Shuvaev, a highly decorated veteran, as acting governor. Ukraine’s anti-corruption court on Thursday ordered the arrest on money-laundering charges of Andriy Yermak, a close ally of Volodymyr Zelenskyy and former head of his administration. The court set bail at 140 million hryvnias (US$3.19m), which would allow Yermak, who has denied the allegations against him, to be released pending a final ruling in his case.

Renowned feminist artist and film-maker Valie Export dies aged 85

Valie Export, the Austrian performance artist and film-maker who inverted the male gaze in ways that were provocative, shocking and often outrageously fun, has died aged 85. The artist’s own foundation announced on Thursday evening that Export died in Vienna earlier the same day, three days before her 86th birthday. She is best known for low-budget performances that scandalised Austria and Germany in the late 1960s, but have since been recognised as milestones in feminist art for exposing the objectification of the female body. Most notorious was 1968’s Tapp und Tastkino (Tap and Touch Cinema), for which Export strapped a model theatre stage to her chest and invited shoppers in Vienna’s city centre to touch her bare breasts through a tiny curtain. Her artist colleague Peter Weibel rallied passersby through a megaphone, and timed each “action” with a stopwatch. The zeal with which she laid bare patriarchal power structures was also on display in the centrepiece of her 1980 show at the Venice Biennale. Entitled Geburtenbett (Birth Bed), it showed an outsized female abdomen with crooked legs on a mattress, red neon strip lights streaming from her vulva, and a TV transmitting a Catholic mass where the head would be. “Valie was one of the most visionary feminist artists to emerge in Europe in the second half of the 20th century,” her gallerist Thaddaeus Ropac said in a statement. “Her passing marks the loss of a singular perspective in contemporary art, one that influenced artists across generations. Her pioneering work continues to be of such great urgency.” Born Waltraud Lehner in 1940 in Linz, Export boarded at a convent school as a child but left at 14 to study at the city’s School of Arts and Crafts. She married and had a child before she turned 20, but soon after decided to divorce and place her daughter into temporary care with an older sister in order to study in Vienna. “I thought: this is not my life, being married and a mother,” she told the Guardian in 2019. Custody rights for her daughter were temporarily withdrawn by a judge when she was sentenced on pornography charges in 1970, over her co-editorship of a book on Viennese Actionist art. Export came up with her alias in 1967 – the first name taken from her childhood nickname and the surname inspired by a brand of cigarettes called Smart Export – because she neither wanted to be known by the names of her father or ex-husband. In 1968, she co-founded the Austrian Filmmakers Cooperative, and went on to participate in numerous international exhibitions, including at Kassel’s documenta in 1977 and 2007, and the 1980 Biennale, where she and Maria Lassnig became the first female artists to fill the Austrian pavilion. Her feature film The Practice of Love, about a reporter who gets drawn into a crime case while investigating peep shows in Hamburg’s red light district, was nominated for the Golden Bear at the 1985 Berlin film festival. She was professor of multimedia and performance at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne from 1995 to 2005, and in 2015, Linz opened a Valie Export centre for media and performance art in a former tobacco factory. Her work was introduced to a new generation in 2005, when Marina Abramović re-enacted Genital Panic as one of the seven key performances of the 20th century for her show Seven Easy Pieces, at New York City’s Guggenheim museum.

Israel says it will sue New York Times over article on sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and foreign minister, Gideon Sa’ar, have threatened to sue the New York Times for defamation over the publication of an essay by Nicholas Kristof detailing allegations that Palestinian women, men and children have been raped and sexually abused in Israeli military detention. “Following the publication by Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times of one of the most hideous and distorted lies ever published against the State of Israel in the modern press, which also received the backing of the newspaper, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar have instructed the initiation of a defamation lawsuit against The New York Times,” Israel’s ministry of foreign affairs wrote in a social media post on Thursday. “They defamed the soldiers of Israel and perpetuated a blood libel about rape, trying to create a false symmetry between the genocidal terrorists of Hamas and Israel’s valiant soldiers,” Netanyahu added in a statement to Reuters. “We will fight these lies in the court of public opinion and in the court of law. Truth will prevail.” “This threat, similar to one made last year, is part of a well-worn political playbook that aims to undermine independent reporting and stifle journalism that does not fit a specific narrative,” Danielle Rhoades Ha, a New York Times spokesperson, said in a Thursday statement. “Any such legal claim would be without merit. “Nick has covered sexual violence for decades, and is widely regarded as one of the world’s best on-the-ground journalists in documenting and bearing witness to sexual abuse experienced by women and men in war and conflict zones,” the statement continued. The paper has repeatedly defended Kristof’s reporting over the last few days. Kristof’s interviews with 14 men and women “were corroborated with other witnesses, whenever possible, and with people the victims confided in – that includes family members and lawyers”, said Charlie Stadtlander, a spokesperson for the Times, in a statement posted on Wednesday. “Details were extensively fact-checked, with accounts further cross-referenced with news reporting, independent research from human-rights groups, surveys and in one case, with U.N. testimony. Independent experts were consulted on the assertions in the piece throughout reporting and fact-checking.” It is not clear in which jurisdiction Israeli officials would bring the lawsuit or whether defamation claims could even be filed by a government. “There is no chance a US court would countenance such a case,” said David A Logan, a professor emeritus at the Roger Williams School of Law and media law expert. There is a legal consensus, he added, that the first amendment bars lawsuits or prosecutions of critics of government brought by the government. Mark Stephens, an expert in international media law, called the idea of Israel suing the Times “ludicrous”. “Libel is about hurt feelings, being shunned and avoided and isolated as a human (sentient) being,” he said in an email. “This is as much about politics as it is about law – and courts are alert to the difference.” Kristof’s piece, which was published in the Times’ opinion section on Monday, details allegations of sexual abuse, including rape, at the hands of Israeli prison guards, soldiers, settlers and interrogators, and sometimes involving dogs. In the piece, Kristof wrote that he found the victims he interviewed by asking around among lawyers, human rights groups, aid workers and “ordinary Palestinians”. He noted that while he was able to corroborate many of their stories, in some cases “it was not possible, perhaps because shame left people reluctant to acknowledge abuse even to loved ones”. He notes that “there is no evidence that Israeli leaders order rapes” and extensively quotes Israeli officials’ rejection of the story’s allegations. The Guardian has also published accounts of sexual abuse of Palestinians in Israeli custody, and recently reported that Israeli soldiers and settlers were using sexual assault as a tool to force Palestinians out of their homes in the occupied West Bank. Allegations of sexual assault of detainees in Israeli detention have also been documented by Israeli and international human rights groups such as B’Tselem and Save the Children, among others. But Kristof’s story prompted furious backlash against the Times from Israel supporters. “Have they – the NY Times – no sense of decency and journalistic responsibility?” wrote Deborah Lipstadt, a former envoy to combat antisemitism under the Biden administration. Earlier this week, Israel’s foreign ministry accused the Times of purposely having published Kristof’s piece the night before the publication of an official Israeli report alleging systematic sexual violence by Hamas on and following 7 October 2023. The statement prompted the Times to issue a public response rejecting the allegations. The paper also publicly rejected allegations of internal discussions at the Times about “source credibility and lack of evidence”. “There is no truth to this at all,” Stadtlander said then. It is not the first time Israeli officials have threatened to sue the Times. Last year, Netanyahu said in an interview with Fox News that the Times “should be sued” over its coverage of starvation in Gaza. “I’m actually looking at whether a country can sue the New York Times,” Netanyahu said at the time. “And I’m looking into it right now, because I think it’s such a – it’s such clear defamation. I mean, you put a picture of a child that’s supposed to then represent all these supposedly starving children, yet they put in this picture of a child who has cerebral palsy.” Israel did not follow through on that threat. A spokesperson for the Times said at the time that “attempts to threaten independent media providing vital information and accountability to the public are unfortunately an increasingly common playbook, but journalists continue to report from Gaza for the Times, bravely, sensitively and at personal risk, so that readers can see firsthand the consequences of the war.”

Tape shows Bolsonaro son asking jailed banker for $26.8m to fund film on father

Flávio Bolsonaro, Brazil’s leading rightwing presidential hopeful, has been caught on tape asking a banker accused of corruption for $26.8m (£20m) to fund a film about his father, the former president Jair Bolsonaro. The leaked voice memos and text messages were published on Wednesday by the Intercept Brasil, and later acknowledged by Flávio Bolsonaro, a far-right senator who is tied in polls with President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva ahead of October’s election. The incident was already being seen as the most serious blow since the senator announced his candidacy as his father’s representative, since the former president is under house arrest after being convicted over an attempted coup. In the recordings, Flávio Bolsonaro can be heard asking for R$134m ($26.8m) towards a “heroic” biopic in which Jair Bolsonaro is played by Jim Caviezel, who portrayed Jesus in Mel Gibson’s 2004 Passion of the Christ. The requests were made to the banker Daniel Vorcaro, who is currently in prison and at the centre of what many consider the country’s largest banking fraud and one of the biggest corruption scandals in recent history, with total losses estimated at R$60bn. In the messages, which were sent before his arrest – but when many of the accusations against him were already widely known – Flávio refers to the banker as “brother” and presses him for payment to ensure Caviezel and director Cyrus Nowrasteh were paid. “We’re at a very decisive moment for the film and, as there are a lot of outstanding payments, everyone is tense … Imagine us defaulting on someone like Jim Caviezel, or Cyrus … It would be very bad,” the younger Bolsonaro can be heard saying. The revelations triggered a significant backlash, even among the far right. Romeu Zema, the governor of Minas Gerais who is a presidential hopeful but has largely avoided criticising the Bolsonaros, called the recordings “a slap in the face to decent Brazilians”, while a conservative congressman suggested it might be better to replace Flávio on the ticket with Bolsonaro’s wife, Michelle. “The blow to Flávio’s campaign is brutal – by far the worst news for his campaign so far,” said the sociologist Celso Rocha de Barros. “Flávio’s anti-establishment credentials, which helped him draw level with Lula, could quickly erode,” added Barros. Vorcaro was the majority shareholder in the small private Master Bank, and is accused of defrauding many of its 800,000 clients out of hundreds of millions of pounds by offering returns far above market rates. To cover losses and keep expanding, he allegedly paid millions in bribes to public officials and politicians. Vorcaro denies all the allegations and is awaiting trial in prison. The scandal has rattled Brazilian society from football, religion, politics and the judiciary – and first touched the Bolsonaro family last week, when police accused senator Ciro Nogueira, a former senior member of the ex-president’s cabinet, of having received monthly bribes of up to R$500,000 to act in the banker’s interests. Nogueira denies the allegations. When Flávio’s messages to Vorcaro were revealed on Wednesday, he initially denied the story, but later admitted it, saying it was “a son seeking private sponsorship for a private film about his father’s story”. In the messages, he invites Vorcaro to a private dinner with Caviezel and Nowrasteh in São Paulo, and the banker responds by suggesting it be held at his home. Caviezel and Nowrasteh are not accused of wrongdoing; neither man responded to a request for comment. Bolsonaro did not respond to requests for comment and, in his social media post, did not say whether he ultimately received the money. However, an advertising executive reportedly hired to broker the deal told the newspaper O Globo that at least ($12m) had been paid, and documents submitted to tax authorities and mentioned by the newspaper reportedly show that part of the funds was indeed transferred to an intermediary company. The sum is far above the budgets of two internationally successful Brazilian films: I’m Still Here, which won the Oscar for best international feature in 2025 with a budget of $8.9m, and The Secret Agent, nominated for best picture in 2026 with $5.6m. Some have drawn comparisons between the unusually high budget for Brazilian standards and the $40m plus $35m spent on marketing by Amazon for a documentary about the US first lady, Melania Trump. In Bolsonaro’s case, the film’s production company and its executive producer and screenwriter – a former Bolsonaro minister – denied that the project received any funds from Vorcaro or his bank. Barros said: “The budget is completely out of step with a national production, and the foreign participants are not top-tier. The way this money was raised still needs to be investigated … The producers say the money never reached them. So where did it go?”

Israeli nationalists chant ‘death to Arabs’ in violent Jerusalem Day march

Israeli nationalists chanted “death to the Arabs”, “may your villages burn” and “Gaza is a graveyard” in a state-sponsored march through Jerusalem to mark the anniversary of the city’s capture and annexation. The annual assertion of Jewish control over Palestinian East Jerusalem has grown more extreme in recent years, and Thursday’s event culminated with the national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, unfurling an Israeli flag in front of the al-Aqsa mosque, the holiest Islamic site in the city. Most Palestinians in the Muslim quarter of the Old City had shuttered their shops and gone home before the march began, but members of far-right radical Jewish groups who had entered scuffled with Palestinian residents still there, with both sides throwing chairs at each other, until separated by police who entered the city that afternoon in force. “I’ve come to show all the world that this is our city. This is the Holy Land. God gave us this country and this city,” a 19-year-old marcher, Ariel Amichai, said. Asked what the intended message of the march was to Palestinians in Jerusalem, he replied: “That they must leave. This is our country. And they can’t just be here and try to stab us or kill us.” Amichai, who is from Modi’in, 43km from Jerusalem, said he believed that Jerusalem Day, marking the capture of the east side of the city in 1967, was the only day when Jews could enter the Muslim quarter through the Damascus Gate, though Israeli Jews and Palestinians use the gate on a daily basis. Marchers were bused in from around Israel and from settlements in the occupied West Bank in a vast operation funded by the Jerusalem municipality and government ministries. The finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, also took part in Thursday’s march. Once Palestinians had left the Old City, much of the tension was between government-backed marchers and members of a Jewish group, Standing Together, which had come to protect Palestinian residents from political violence. Suf Patishi, a Standing Together organiser, said a record 400 volunteers had turned up in hi-vis vests in the organisation’s trademark purple, on a day fraught with risks. “We wanted to really cover each and every corner of the city to make sure that we prevent attacks against Palestinians,” Patishi said. “Yes, it is dangerous to us, but nothing like the danger to the Palestinians that are living here.” There were a few religious Jews among the protective cordon of counter-protesters. An ultra-orthodox man with a long grey beard and gold coat said he had come from northern Israel and gave his name only as David. “I’ve become appalled by the violent behaviour of people in my community,” David said. “I’m a man of faith, religious, and they’re doing this in our name, and I felt I should do something to contrast that. This is a desecration of God’s name, so the only way to remedy that is to do the opposite, a Kiddush Hashem, a sanctification of God’s name.” On the al-Aqsa compound, known to Jews as the Temple Mount, Ben-Gvir danced with supporters singing “the Temple Mount is in our hands”, as he unfurled an Israeli flag. The national security minister has led a campaign to erode the 59-year status quo, dating back to the Israeli capture of East Jerusalem and the West Bank, under which non-Muslims are forbidden from praying in the sacred area. On Thursday evening, Ben-Gvir wrote on his Telegram social media account: “59 years after the liberation of Jerusalem, I raised the Israeli flag on the Temple Mount and we can proudly say: We have returned governance to the Temple Mount.”

Photo of US-China delegation criticized over absence of women: ‘masculine, militarized and exclusionary’

By the time Donald Trump and Xi Jinping met at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People on Thursday, the bilateral had featured all the expected pomp and pageantry: a meticulously choreographed display of Chinese soldiers, children waving American and Chinese flags, and rows of senior officials and the US’s top business executives. Conspicuously absent at the table, however, were women from either delegation – a stark visual that quickly drew criticism from observers who saw it as an unmistakable display of patriarchal power. In a tweet that has attracted over 22,000 likes overnight, Gita Gopinath, an economics professor at Harvard University, wrote: “A painting of the end of meritocracy: A meeting of the two largest economies and not one woman at the table.” Speaking to the Guardian, Gopinath elaborated on her comments, saying: “We have somehow gravitated back to this idea that what matters is your network and not your capabilities – and that matters [in terms of] whether or not you get a seat at the table.” She added: “It’s just inexplicable how you end up with a single-gender table, given the many talented women around the world. Halima Kazem, associate director for Stanford University’s program in feminist, gender and sexuality studies, echoed similar sentiments. Comparing Thursday’s images to bilateral meetings during Barack Obama’s presidency, Kazem said: “We’ve gone backward. Obama-era US-China summits included women at the table. Now neither superpower thinks women belong in the room where great power politics happens. This isn’t just American failure – it’s a bilateral signal that women’s voices don’t matter in shaping the global order.” Women seated at previous US-China bilateral meetings during Obama’s presidency included Liu Yandong, China’s then vice-premier, as well as Susan Rice, US national security adviser, and Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state. Kazem pointed to the type of power being ostensibly signaled by both sides, saying: “This wasn’t about lack of qualified women – both countries have plenty in their diplomatic and security establishments. This was a choice about what kind of authority to project: masculine, militarized, and exclusionary. “When both superpowers perform power this way, they’re jointly defining what ‘serious’ diplomacy looks like and who gets excluded from it,” she added. Despite the absence of women at Thursday’s bilateral meeting in the Great Hall of the People, a small handful of women did accompany Trump on his two-day visit to Beijing, including Lara Trump, his daughter-in-law, as well as Jane Fraser, the Citigroup CEO, and Dina Powell McCormick, the Meta president.