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Abrupt change of plans comes after president on Truth Social warns residents of Tehran to evacuate immediately

Donald Trump will return early to Washington on Monday from the G7 summit because of events in the Middle East, US officials said, confronted by an escalating Iran-Israel conflict and the possibility of US involvement hanging in the balance.

The White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that Trump would participate in theG7family photo and would dine with leaders at the summit in Alberta, Canada, before travelling back a day ahead of schedule.

Trump’s abrupt change in plans comes after a series of developments in the Israel-Iran conflict and a Truth Social post by the president warning residents in Iran’s capital of Tehran to immediately evacuate.

The ominous warning from Trump followed an evacuation order issued earlier in the day by Israeli forces tellingresidents in large parts of Tehran to evacuateahead of imminent bombing of “military infrastructure”.

Trump’s early departure is a blow to G7 organizers who had sought to discuss the conflict in the Middle East and were hoping for the US to be a signatory to a statement calling on both sides to de-escalate.

A draft of the statement saidIrancan never possess a nuclear weapon, Israel has a right to defend itself and Iran’s nuclear weapons program is subject to a negotiated deal, according to a person familiar with the matter.

“AMERICA FIRST means many GREAT things, including the fact that, IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!” Trumpsaid in a postafter his schedule change was announced.

Trump also suggested he was coming under more pressure to mediate in the conflict.

“They want to make a deal and as soon as I leave here, we’re going to be doing something. But I have to leave here,” Trump said, adding: “It’s always better to talk in person.”

The rapid succession of events raised concerns in Washington about the possibility of the US being dragged into the conflict or its potential to trigger a broader war in the region.

Israel’s bombing runs started with attacks on air defenses, nuclear sites and the military chain of command. But four days into the campaign, it appears to have drifted into war of attrition.

And in another ominous escalation on Monday, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, also said that killing Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei, would “end the conflict”.

After the surprise Israeli attack on Friday, Iran has carried out retaliatory missile strikes on Israeli cities, focusing on the most populated areas between Tel Aviv and the port of Haifa, and threatened to leave the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

The US has not been directly involved in the conflict, but on Monday, the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier strike group was rerouted from the South China Sea to the Middle East, a move that put two US carriers in the region.

The Nimitz is likely to reach the Middle East later this week and join the USS Carl Vinson carrier strike group, a person familiar with the matter said.

Two destroyers in the Mediterranean have also been moved closer to Israel in recent days to help protect US assets in the region. Dozens of air force refuelling aircraft were also deployed from the US to Europe over the weekend to support operations in the Middle East.

It has been five days since Israel attacked Iran and the civilian death toll is rising, but its goal is unclear. Julian Borger reports

It’s been five days sinceIsraellaunched attacks on Iran and the war seems to be escalating. Hundreds of people have been killed and Israeli forces have issued an evacuation order for part of Tehran. Iran has managed to evade Israel’s defences with missiles.

The Guardian’s senior international correspondent,Julian Borger, explains toMichael Safithat Israel’s war aims seems to have changed. The first few days were marked by strikes on nuclear facilities and the killing of military officials and nuclear scientists, as Israel said it aimed to preventIranfrom developing nuclear weapons. Now, however, it seems to have expanded into a war of attrition, with regime change a possible goal.

In the meantime, the world is holding its breath to see what Donald Trump will do. Israel launched its attacks while talks were being held by Iran and the US over Tehran’s nuclear programme. Will the US president join forces with Israel or strike a deal with Iran to end the war?

Cold drop, upper-air trough and heat dome combine to create severe weather and 85mm hailstone

Severe thunderstorms swept acrossFrancelast Friday, killing one person and injuring another. Two systems were involved, prompting orange weather warnings: the first came from the west via Brittany and hit the north of the country, and the second arrived via Spain and affected south-west France.

More than 30,000 lightning strikes were recorded between midnight on Friday and early Saturday. Eure, north of Paris, was worst hit with 4,326 strikes. Strong winds lashed Normandy – Rouen recorded a 76mph (123km)/h) gust that broke the 64mph record set in 2019. Hail affected several areas, leading to infrastructure and crop damage.

There were further storms over central and north-west France on Saturday night, many with very large hailstones. The largest, found in Orly, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, measured 85mm.

Several factors led to the severe weather. A key component was a phenomenon known asgoutte froide, in which an isolated, upper-air cold pool detached from the overall circulation, creating significant atmospheric instability.

Athalweg d’altitude(upper-air trough) provided the lift necessary by favouring air ascent. Warm, moist air flowed into the trough and was forced upwards. As the air rose, it started to cool and water vapour began to condense, forming clouds. As this clouds swelled, they created severe thunderstorms.

As air flowed into the trough from every direction, it enabled supercells to develop by introducing the element of spin. Supercells are large-scale, highly organised storms with a rotating updraft that can sustain themselves for several hours and travel hundreds of miles – one of which swept through northern France on Friday.

A recent heat dome over the country helped intensify the storms by providing a greater gradient between the surface and the upper air, and by bringing a greater source of moisture. A heat dome occurs when high pressure persists over a region, trapping warm air and allowing temperatures to rise several degrees above the seasonal average.

Excavation crews begin sealing off site in Tuam, Co Galway, before full-scale dig starts on 14 July

Preliminary work aimed at identifying the remains of nearly 800 infants is starting on thesite in Tuam, Co Galway, as Ireland continues to wrestle with the traumatic legacy of its mother and baby homes scandal.

Catherine Corless, a local historian who first sounded the alarm about the dark past of the institution run by nuns from the Bon Secours order, uncovered the names of 796 infants who are believed to have been buried there between 1925 and 1961, some in a disused subterranean septic tank. There were no burial records.

On Monday, excavation crews began sealing off the site before the search for remains next month. “There are so many babies, children just discarded here,” Corless told Agence France-Presse.

It was Corless’s work that led to an Irish commission of investigation into the so-called mother and baby homes, to which young women and girls were sent for decades to give birth in, rather than in hospital or at home. Doubling as orphanages and adoption agencies for much of the 20th century, the institutions were run by religious orders with sanction by the state, which overlooked deprivation, misogyny, stigma and high infant mortality rates.

The government made a formalstate apologyin 2021 after thecommissionreport.

In Tuam, hoarding has been placed around the excavation site, now in the middle of a housing estate. The preliminary work is expected to last four weeks before a full-scale excavation begins on 14 July.

The site was once a workhouse and the search for the infants’ remains could be complicated by the fact that victims of the 19th century great famine are also thought to be buried there.

Daniel MacSweeney, who is overseeing the operation, told RTÉ radio: “It’s an incredibly complex challenge because of the size of the site and the fact that we are dealing with infant remains that we know, at least in the case of the memorial gardens (on the site), are co-mingled.”

The existence of mother and baby homes has been described as a dark stain on Irish society. In 2017, the then taoiseach Enda Kenny described what was revealed about Tuam as “a chamber of horrors”.

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Speaking in the Dáil, the Irish parliament, he did not spare his fellow citizens. “No nuns broke into our homes to kidnap our children. We gave them up to what we convinced ourselves was the nuns’ care. We gave them up maybe to spare them the savagery of gossip, the wink and the elbow language of delight in which the holier-than-thous were particularly fluent. We gave them up because of our perverse, in fact, morbid relationship with what is called respectability,” he added.

Alaa Mousa accused of torturing detainees at military hospitals during Syrian civil war under former ruler Bashar al-Assad

A Syrian doctor has been sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity in his home country – including murder and torture – by aGermancourt.

The 40-year-old man, Alaa Mousa, worked as a junior doctor in an army hospital and a military intelligence prison in Homs and Damascus inSyria, in 2011 and 2012, in the early phase of the civil war.

He abused prisoners accused of being members of the opposition and who were considered enemies of the Syrian dictatorBashar al-Assadwho had participated in the uprisings against the regime during the Arab spring. He was convicted by the court in Frankfurt of two deaths and eight cases of severe torture.

The court imposed the highest possible sentence on the man, a supporter of Assad, whose crimes – including war crimes, torture and murder – the judge, Christoph Koller, said had “seriously injured nine people, both physically and mentally, and killed two”.

He described the doctor, based on one of several experts’ reports, as having a “sadistic” nature that was given particular expression when he tortured his victims.

“Above all, the accused enjoyed harming people that he considered inferior and of lower value to himself,” Koller said.

Witnesses called to give evidence during the almost three-and-a-half-year trial described, sometimes in considerable detail, the severe abuse they had received at the hands of Mousa, including beatings and kickings, or how he deliberately set broken bones with insufficient levels of anaesthetic. They also told the court how the doctor had poured flammable liquid on their wounds and parts of their body – and in two cases, including that of a 14-year-old boy, on their genitals – and set them on fire. He injected one prisoner with a deadly poison while the man had been trying to defend himself. He died in front of fellow prisoners.

The court also heard how he had beaten and kicked a young man suffering from epileptic seizures, knowing he had the condition, which led to it worsening. He later administered a pill, which caused the man to die in the presence of his brother.

Koller praised the more than 50 witnesses who he said had possessed the courage to share the descriptions of their suffering with the court, sometimes over several days. He said without them the case could not have been brought successfully.

During her summing up, the senior public prosecutor Anna Zabeck emphasised to the court last month the difficult circumstances under which the witnesses had testified. Both they and their relatives living in Syria were repeatedly threatened and intimidated to prevent them from appearing at the trial, she said.

She said the witnesses had been “asked to give almost everything during their testimony”, by discussing the violence that had scarred them “physically and mentally”. The prosecutor Christina Schlepp added that, despite repeated accusations from the defence lawyers that the victims had been part of a conspiracy against the doctor, there were “no signs they had wanted to incriminate” Mousa for the sake of it.

During the often hours-long court sessions, Mousa mainly sat in the dock with his head bowed, and repeatedly had to blow his nose.

Mousa has lived inGermanyfor 10 years. He worked in various clinics over five years as an orthopaedic medic, most recently at a hospital in Bad Wildungen in the state of Hessen, in western Germany, until his arrest in summer 2020. He was recognised and reported to the authorities after some of his victims saw him in a TV documentary about the Syrian city of Homs and was placed in custody. The court case against him at Frankfurt’s higher regional court started in January 2022 and took place over nearly 190 days.

It was possible to try the doctor in a German court even though the crimes were committed in Syria due to the principal of universal jurisdiction in international criminal law. This allows for the prosecution anywhere of a person alleged to have committed war crimes.

The federal prosecutor’s office had asked for the man to receive life imprisonment – which usually runs to a maximum of 15 years in Germany – followed by preventive detention – meaning he would always stay behind bars, because of the potential danger it considered him to pose to wider society should he ever be released.

Lawyers acting for the doctor called for him to be acquitted on the charge of the two killings, arguing that he had not been working in Homs at the time they took place.

The doctor, who entered court wearing a black fur-trimmed hooded coat to cover his face, pleaded not guilty, insisting he had been the victim of a conspiracy.

Four booths hidden from view, prompting fury from Israel’s defence ministry and visiting US Republicans

The four main Israeli company stands at the Paris airshow have been shut down after exhibitors reportedly refused to remove some weapons from display.

The stands at the aerospace industry event were hidden from view after pressure on the organisers from the French government, a source told the Guardian.

The stands were used by Elbit Systems, Rafael, IAI and Uvision. Three smaller Israeli stands, which did not have hardware on display, and an Israeli Ministry of Defence stand, remain open. The airshow is taking place amid an escalatingconflict in the Middle East.

Reuters reported that the instruction came from the French authorities after Israeli companies failed to comply with a direction from a French security agency to remove offensive or kinetic weapons from the stands.

The show, which was first held in 1909 and is organised by the French Aerospace Industries Association, is taking place in Le Bourget, in north-eastParis, from Monday until Sunday.

France, a longtime ally of Israel, has gradually hardened its position on Benjamin Netanyahu’s government over its actions in Gaza and military strikes abroad. The French president,Emmanuel Macron, last Friday reiteratedhis country’s support for Israel’s right to protect itself, but in reference to its strikes on Iran he called on “all parties to exercise maximum restraint and to de-escalate”.

Israel’s defence ministry said it had rejected the order to remove some weapons systems from displays, and that exhibition organisers responded by erecting a black partition that separated the Israeli industry pavilions from others.

The ministry said: “This outrageous and unprecedented decision reeks of policy-driven and commercial considerations. The French are hiding behind supposedly political considerations to exclude Israeli offensive weapons from an international exhibition – weapons that compete with French industries.”

IAI’s president and chief executive, Boaz Levy, said the black partitions were reminiscent of “the dark days of when Jews were segmented from European society”, according to Reuters.

Earlier on Monday, images taken by the AFP agency showed yellow writing on one of the black walls around the stands. Accompanied by a drawing of an Israeli flag, it read: “Behind these walls are the best defense systems used by many countries. These systems are protecting the state of Israel these days. The French government, in the name of discrimination, is trying to hide them from you.”

Later, the section of black wall appeared to have been replaced by a white wall.

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Two US Republican politicians attending the airshow also criticised the move.

Talking to reporters outside the blacked-out Israeli defence stalls, the Republican governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders described the decision as “pretty absurd”, and the Republican senator Katie Britt criticised it as “shortsighted”.

Meshar Sasson, a senior vice-president at Elbit Systems, accusedFranceof trying to stymie competition, pointing to a series of contracts that Elbit has won in Europe. “If you cannot beat them in technology, just hide them, right? That’s what it is because there’s no other explanation,” he said, according to Reuters.

The company Rafael described the move as “unprecedented, unjustified, and politically motivated”.

The airshow’s organiser said it was in talks to try to help “the various parties find a favourable outcome to the situation”.

Palazzo Maffei in Verona contacts police after visitors cause Van Gogh’s Chair to buckle while posing for photos

An Italian museum has contacted the police after two clumsy tourists almost wrecked a work of art while posing for photos.

Video footage released by Palazzo Maffei in Verona showed the hapless pair photographing each other pretending to sit on a crystal-covered chair made by the artist Nicola Bolla – described by the museum as an “extremely fragile” work.

The woman squats and does not seem to touch the work – called Van Gogh’s Chair and covered in Swarovski crystals – but the man is not so careful, sitting and then stumbling backwards as the seat buckles under his weight.

The pair can then be seen fleeing the room in footage that went viral over the weekend.

Palazzo Maffei described it as “every museum’s nightmare” and said on Monday it had made a complaint to the police, without specifying when it was filed.

The museum posted an account on social media on Thursday saying the incident had happened in the past four weeks and the chair had since been repaired.

“It was an idiotic thing to do,” Bolla told Italian magazine Fanpage. But the artist said he could see a “positive side” to the incident. “It’s like a kind of performance. Ordinary people can do it too, not just artists.”

Government programs designed to offer rent below market rate for low-to-moderate income households are failing those who most need it, advocates say

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A two-bedroom apartment in Bondi Junction that is part of an “affordable” housing scheme run by theNew South Walesgovernment has been listed at $1,100 a week to rent, prompting advocates to warn that programs designed to help low-income earners are increasingly out of reach.

Across the country, affordable housing programs are meant to offer rent below market rate for low-to-moderate income households that make too much for social housing but not enough for the private market.

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The two-bedroom two-bathroom apartment in Bondi Junction is listed under the AffordableHousingScheme by HomeGround Real Estate Sydney, with the guidelines set by the NSW government.

To be eligible for the apartment, which has a $4,400 bond attached to it, applicants must not earn more than a combined income of $121,100 for a couple, $161,500 for three adults, $145,300 for a couple with one child and $169,500 for a couple with two children.

If two adults live there, they would be spending more than 47% of their income on rent, if three adults lived there, they would pay 35%, and a couple with a child would pay 39%.

Financial and housing experts consider a home affordable if it costs no more than 30% of a person’s income.

A snapshot of affordable housing properties in NSW conducted by the NSW Tenants’ Union in January found that 13 of the 32 available properties were priced at a rate higher than the NSW Affordable Housing Guidelines.

While the NSW guidelines do allow for greater than 30% to be charged to moderate households, Leo Patterson Ross for Tenants’ Union NSW said the scheme was failing to address “the difficulties people at all levels of income are having in finding a home they can afford and sustain”.

“Excluding people from living in an area because they aren’t rich enough is what the private market has been allowed to do – we shouldn’t be subsidising similar behaviour,” he said.

“We need to make sure affordable housing is delivering genuine affordability. Failing to do so undermines community support for the concept, as well as failing to meet the housing needs of the community.”

The rental asking price of many of the affordable homes currently advertised would also require tenants to part with more than 30% of their income.

A one-bedroom apartment in Homebush in NSW which was listed for $600 a week would cost a prospective tenant $31,285.71 annually. Single applicants can earn no more than $80,700, meaning more than 38% of their income would be spent on rent on the “affordable” property.

In Victoria, a one-bedroom fully furnished apartment in Caulfield marketed at “hospitality and retail staff” is listed at $615 a week, which would be $32,068 annually.

To be eligible, singles can make no more than $73,530, making the rent more than 43% of their income.

The current advertisements follow another string of Bondi apartments recently advertised under the state’s affordability program, with a two-bedroom two-bathroom flat listed for $1,300 a week.

After Guardian Australia enquired about the two-bedroom property listed for $1,100, the rent was dropped to $1,040 a week.

A spokesperson for HomeGroundSydneysaid the property could be rented for as much as $1,400 a week in the normal market.

“We recognise that when market rent is high in locations such as Sydney’s eastern suburbs, even below-market affordable rents can seem high,” the spokesperson said.

But 20% below market price “makes it much more affordable for families to live close to where they work and go to school”, the spokesperson said.

As rents have surged by more than 30% in many parts of the country over the past three years, affordable housing programs are often marketed for essential workers or those making below $90,000 so they can live in their own communities.

The managing director of the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, Michael Fotheringham, said many of them offer affordability in name only, with no standardised definition of the term across jurisdictions in Australia.

“It’s a really loose terminology that different state rules apply across the country, and we have both federal and state government investing in programs to deliver affordable housing,” he said.

“But what ‘affordable housing’ is, is really unclear.”

In NSW, affordable properties should be rented out with a discount of 20% on the market rent, though the guidelines say “flexibility in pricing may be applied to moderate income households”.

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The spokesperson for HomeGround, which is one of the biggest affordable providers, said their policy has a ceiling of 40% of a household’s income “to accommodate people’s different incomes and their personal choices on where they want to live”.

“For context, private market rent [may] be up to 50% of a household’s income in high-demand areas,” they said.

In Victoria, it is often linked to income, capped at 30% of the tenant’s median income and at least 10% below market rent.

In South Australia, affordable rentals are often offered at 75% or less of the market rate, while in the ACT they are offered at between 20% and 25% below the market rate.

And under the national scheme, which will end in 2026, rents are capped at 20% below market rates for eligible tenants. The Housing Australia Future Fund has promised to create 20,000 new affordable homes across Australia over five years from 2024.

“We’ve got this real inconsistency across the country,” Fotheringham said.

One key issue, especially in capital cities, is the huge increase in asking rents over the past three years.

In June 2022, a typical one-bedroom unit across Australia rented for $444 a week. Today, that figure has reached $565 – a jump of more than 27% in just three years, data produced for Guardian Australia by Everybody’s Home shows.

For houses, the story is similar. The average asking rent for a house has climbed from $588 a week to $722, a rise of nearly 23%. That means a renter is now paying more than $7,000 extra each year for the same home compared with 2022.

In capital cities, the picture is even worse. Average unit rents have jumped by 35.7% since 2022, while house rents have increased by 31.3%.

Fotheringham said a project is more likely to get approved if a portion of a development is set at an affordable rent, with councils in some cases allowing more stories.

“Governments incentivise it, because they want there to be more affordable supply, even if the current methods of calculating what’s affordable are imperfect,” he said.

Australia needs a consistent national approach that is locally sensitive, he said, suggesting the government should carefully consider tying it to incomes rather than market rate.

“Affordable housing [with a] capital A is, a name of a product, rather than experience,” he said.

While states struggle with bridging the gap, people are increasingly being forced out of suburbs they may have lived in for generations, said Everybody’s Home’s spokesperson, Maiy Azize.

“Governments keep rolling out ‘affordable’ housing schemes, but there is no substitute for social housing. That means low-cost rentals that people can actually afford,” she said.

Australia currently needs 640,000 more social homes than it has, Azize said.

“Until we clear that backlog, and then open the door to people on middle incomes, we’ll never tame runaway rents,” she said.

“Right now, a person on an average income in Sydney can’t get into social housing, but they can’t afford the private market either. That gap is swallowing whole communities. The only fix is to boost social housing – and make it available to more people.”

Trump’s press secretary announces early departure ‘because of what’s going on in the Middle East’

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Donald Trump is leavingthe G7 summit in Canadaa day early, skipping meetings with leaders including Anthony Albanese as he returns to Washington amid escalating war in the Middle East.

The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said the president would return to the US after an official dinner with theG7leaders on Monday night, local time.

“President Trump had a great day at the G7, even signing a major trade deal with the United Kingdom and Prime Minister Keir Starmer,” she wrote on social media.

“Much was accomplished, but because of what’s going on in the Middle East, President Trump will be leaving tonight after dinner with heads of state.”

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The move came after he declined to join a joint statement from the G7 leaders calling for both sides in the conflict to de-escalate and warned people in Iran’s capital, Tehran, to evacuate.

During an official photo for leaders of the G7 countries, Trump said: “You probably see what I see, and I have to be back as soon as I can.”

US media reports suggested he requested the National Security Council be prepared in the White House situation room for his return.

Trump has called publicly for a diplomatic resolution to the bombings between Israel and Iran and has threatened US military action if the conflict continues to grow.

Trump’s departure is a blow for Albanese, who had expected to hold his first face-to-face talks with the president, including covering trade issues and the US review of the Aukus nuclear submarines agreement.

After the news broke, a government spokeswoman said the departure was “understandable” given the situation in the Middle East.

“As the prime minister said a short time ago, we are very concerned about the events in the Middle East and continue to urge all parties to prioritise dialogue and diplomacy.”

The opposition leader, Sussan Ley, said the decision showed Albanese should have done more to secure an early meeting with Trump, rather than waiting for an international summit.

“Given the deteriorating situation in the Middle East, this decision is understandable but to the detriment of Australia,” she said in a statement.

“The prime minister should have been more proactive in seeking to strengthen this relationship – Australia’s most important – and we encourage him to change his approach to advance our national interest.”

Albanese is still expected to meet leaders including the UK’s Keir Starmer and the new German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, at the Kananaskis summit site, before returning to Australia on Tuesday night.

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The United Nations general assembly in September could provide the next opportunity for a meeting between Albanese and Trump. Albanese is expected to go to New York and could add a visit to the White House to the trip if an invitation is forthcoming

By thenthe 30-day Pentagon Aukus review, which is being led by the under secretary of defence for policy, Elbridge Colby, will be complete.

The Australian delegation had been buoyed by Trump’s comments about Aukus after his own meeting with Starmer earlier on Monday, when the president nodded in agreement that sharing of nuclear technology between the three countries represented an “important deal”.

“We’re very long-time partners and allies and friends, and we’ve become friends in a short period of time,” he said of the British PM.

News of his early departure came minutes after Albanese said he expected a positive meeting with Trump. The pair have previously spoken by phone, including about the Aukus deal.

“There are great advantages that we have,” he said. “The sum of one plus one plus one sometimes equals more than three.”

Trump had been due to hold bilateral talks with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky and Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum before leaving Canada.

He had criticised the move to remove Russia from the G8 group in 2014 and even suggested China should be invited to join the forum of the world’s biggest economies.

It is not the first time Trump has overshadowed a summit hosted in Canada. In 2018 he left a previous G7 meeting in disarray after boycotting a previously agreed leaders’ communique, deriding then prime minister Justin Trudeau as “dishonest and weak”.