There has been widespread condemnation of an attack on a man who was found nailed to a fence in a car park in Bushmills, County Antrim.

The victim, in his 20s, was discovered with nails in both hands and injuries to his nose in the Dundarave Park area. He was taken to hospital for treatment in the early hours of Sunday.

Two vans, one belonging to the injured man, were found on fire nearby and crews from the Northern Ireland fire and rescue service were called to the scene. Graffiti on the wall of public toilets in the vicinity was being linked to the violent attack and arson.

About 20 visitors in campervans and mobile homes were reported to have been in the area at the time of the assault.

Some local people said privately they believed loyalist paramilitaries were responsible.

The Police Service of Northern Ireland said the victim of the “brutal” and “sinister” attack had been left with life-changing but not life-threatening injuries.

The PSNI also said paramilitary involvement was one of the lines of inquiry being investigated.

It called on anyone with information or video footage to contact them as part of the police investigation.

The assistant chief constable Bobby Singleton told the BBC: “This criminal and violent behaviour cannot be tolerated in a peaceful community and has to be condemned.”

Local politicians said people were shocked by what happened.

The Alliance party assembly member (MLA) Sian Mulholland told a local radio station there was no place for vigilantism in Northern Ireland in 2024.

“If people do have concerns, the police and the justice system are the routes we have to follow,” she said, “otherwise we are in the wild west.”

A local Traditional Unionist Voice MLA, Jim Allister, said: “It is for the lawful authorities to deal with law-breaking. Mob rule has no place in our society.”

The last reported incident of a similar attack was more than 20 years ago.

In 2002 a 23-year-old man from west Belfast was found “crucified” and with broken legs in a loyalist area in the south of the city. Harry McCartan had to undergo surgery to remove wooden splinters that remained in his hands after the 6in nails were removed.

There was a time, not so long ago, that Donald Trump did not seem to be very familiar with the Bible.

When he first ran for the nomination of the very Christian Republican party, Trump was unable to name a single Bible verse. Early in his 2016 presidential campaign he referred to the eucharist as a “little cracker”. In a subsequent church visit, as he attempted to prove his religious credentials, he put cash in a plate that was meant to hold the communion.

How times have changed.

“All Americans need a Bible in their home, and I have many. It’s my favorite book,” Trump declared in March, in a video posted on Truth Social. “I’m proud to endorse and encourage you to get this Bible. We must make America pray again.”

In the video, Trump, who has a long history of endorsing and selling things, is clutching the God Bless the USA Bible – a “patriotic” take on the holy text that Trump is now hawking for $59.99.

“I want to have a lot of people have it,” Trump continued. “You have to have it for your heart and for your soul.”

Well, who am I to defy a one-term, twice-impeached, former president who is currently on trial over hush-money payments to a porn star. I bought it.

Buying something from Donald Trump is fraught with danger. Trump is known for not following through on business agreements: in the run-up to the 2016 election, literally hundreds of people, including lawyers, carpenters and painters, came forward to accuse Trump of not paying them for their work.

Happily the Bible, which cost $83.37 after tax and shipping, eventually arrived. I eagerly tore open the packaging, held the bag upside down, and out plopped what is essentially a Christian nationalist’s fantasy: a Bible that is all American flags and bald eagles, with founding documents and lyrics to a patriotic anthem slotted in alongside the holy text.

The front of the Bible has an embossed USA flag. In the back are glossy pages bearing some of America’s most sacred documents: the Declaration of Independence; the Pledge of Allegiance; and the lyrics to Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the USA, a song which is played on repeat at Trump’s political rallies.

These pages are illustrated with the American flag and some of the country’s best-regarded things: the bald eagle, yes, but also the Statue of Liberty, what appears to be a musket, and the Capitol building, which somewhat ironically was attacked by supporters of Trump three years ago.

One of the more intriguing questions in the FAQ section of the Trump bible website asks: “What if my Bible has sticky pages?”

My Bible did indeed have sticky pages. But no bother: the FAQ guidance explains that sticky pages are a common problem with new bibles, and directs the reader to “a YouTube video that does a wonderful job of explaining how to break your new Bible in”.

That video is six minutes long. It shows a man unboxing what is objectively a better-looking Bible than the God Bless the USA version, then flipping through the entire book, page by page. “Separating the pages is a somewhat tedious process,” the man says.

He was right. The Trump Bible, which uses public domain text from the King James version, has 1,350 thin-to-the-point-of-translucent pages, and I wasn’t about to go through the entire thing. But all the good stuff appears to be in here: there’s Noah desperately bundling animals onto a big boat, Job having his life ruined because of what amounts to a wager between god and the devil, and the book of Leviticus – much of which is given over to the correct way to sacrifice animals. (For a bullock, sprinkle its blood round the altar and wash its innards before setting it on fire; if you’re offering up a pigeon, be sure to wring off its head before plucking.)

You don’t have to pay $59.99 for that kind of content. Search “free Bible” online and there are hundreds of places that are literally giving it away. But this Trump-endorsed Bible represents something special to his supporters, said Kristin Du Mez, a professor at Calvin University whose research focuses on the intersection of gender, religion and politics.

“My sense is, most people aren’t buying this Bible to read it,” Du Mez said. “They’re buying the Bible to have it, and to participate in this kind of shared identity. To put $60 down to say: ‘Yes, this is my guy and and I’m committed to this, and this is my faith.’”

The shared identity is one of embracing the “myth of Christian America”, Du Mez said: “The idea that America was founded as a distinctly Christian nation: a proto conservative, white evangelical version of the country, which never really existed. It’s that shared vision of a mythical past, and commitment to restoring some semblance of that kind of mythical order in the present.”

After those early fumbles as he attempted to appeal to Christians, Trump was ultimately embraced by the evangelicals who make up much of the GOP – the same GOP taking a hatchet to church-state separation. In fact, the former president’s relationship with the religious right has now deepened to the extent that Trump is comfortable with comparing himself to their messiah.

Further cementing that bond goes some way towards explaining Trump’s decision to promote the God Bless the USA bible. But there’s also the financial aspect.

Trump owes more than $500m as a result of civil court convictions. He has been charged with more than 90 felony crimes, in five different jurisdictions, and lawyers cost money (unless you don’t pay them).

While the God Bless the USA Bible website says that the Bible is “not owned, managed or controlled by Donald J Trump”, it adds that the venture “uses Donald J Trump’s name, likeness and image under paid license from CIC Ventures LLC”.

Trump, according to a financial disclosure report filed last year, is the manager, president, secretary and treasurer of CIC Ventures LLC.

Happy days for Trump then. Although this Bible wheeze has not gone down well with everyone.

“Blasphemous” and “disgusting”, was the verdict of pastor Loran Livingston, a conservative evangelical who leads the Central church in North Carolina. A pastor in South Carolina said the Bible was a “commandment violation”, while Raphael Warnock, the Democratic Georgia senator and a pastor himself, also wasn’t happy.

“The Bible does not need Donald Trump’s endorsement,” Warnock told CNN.

“And Jesus in the very last week of his life chased the money changers out of the temple, those who would take sacred things and use them as cheap relics to be sold in the marketplace.”

It is unclear how many of these “cheap relics” have been sold. As of early May, God Bless the USA Bibles were still available for sale online – unlike the Trump-licensed sneakers that he was hawking earlier this year.

After the failure of Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, Trump Mortgage, Trump Magazine, various Trump casinos and the Trump board game, perhaps the former president has finally given his name to a winning product. At $59.99 a pop for what is, objectively, quite a poorly printed, rather sticky book, the God Bless the USA Bible looks like a fairly safe bet. Maybe those lawyers will get paid after all.

Breasts have been a focus in the culture wars of the last 50-odd years. Second-wave feminists casting off their bras in the 1970s come to mind, and then ongoing judgment-filled debates around breastfeeding, and the even more fraught, and recent, hostilities around trans healthcare. Recent celebrations of female sensuality manifested in things like #freethenip, hot girl summer, widening conversations around sexual pleasure, and the body positivity movement all take breasts as a key motif, too.

But for all the girlies freeing their nips on Instagram, it’s much rarer to see them free on the street. We keep them under wraps and rarely articulate why they seem to be so contentious. The potency of breasts as symbols of things as disparate but overlapping as gender, eroticism and motherhood makes them the nexus of a wild cocktail of emotions, politics and desires.

A new exhibition at ACP Palazzo Franchetti in Venice, Breasts, sets out to examine the multifaceted ways artists have represented them. It’s a huge idea, but curator Carolina Pasti largely limits the exhibition to postwar modern and contemporary art. She’s sourced minor works from big name artists and installed them in a kitschy pink environment that isn’t even that Instagrammable, hoping to pull in visitors with the gimmick of boobs.

She begins, however, with a tiny Madonna and Child from circa 1395 that is part of the genre known as a Madonna del Latte because it depicts Christ drinking from his mother’s breast. There are hundreds of works like this one – it feels as if every Renaissance painter made one at some point. The iconography of the nursing madonna was a branch of the cult of the Madonna of Humility, because the Virgin Mary was depicted as a humble woman of the people. In medieval and Renaissance Europe (and even into the 20th century), breastfeeding was something only working-class people did: they breastfed their own children and were hired as wetnurses for middle and upper-class families. The idea that Mary would have nursed her own child, the son of God, was revelatory. The Catholic fascination with blood found resonance in another fluid of the body: milk.

But this motif fell out of fashion after the Council of Trent, also known as the Counter-Reformation, in the 1560s, which firmly delineated the boundaries of acceptable iconography in the Catholic church in response to the birth of Protestantism. The intimacy of Mary feeding her child, and the rapture in which these images were held by the masses, had become too crass, too prurient, too embodied for the church.

So begins the saga of the breast in modern western culture: already rife with conflict. Of course, Pasti could have started much earlier: with the so-called Willendorf Venus, for example, made circa 25,000 BCE in Paleolithic Europe and depicting a female figure with voluptuous breasts, belly and hips. Or with one of the many sculptures of the Ephesian Artemis, a version of the Greek goddess Artemis with many breasts, made around the first century CE. These ancient, pre-Christian images of women offer narratives of fertility, abundance and matriarchal power that sit outside the bounds of contemporary representations of femininity but nevertheless have influenced the way breasts are understood today.

In the centuries between Madonna del Latte and the modern and contemporary visions of the breast on show at Palazzo Franchetti, perceptions of breasts shifted dramatically. Think of the history of women’s necklines in Europe as a microcosm of the way breasts were socially coded: the high ruffs in early Elizabethan England compared with the busty, dramatically low necklines of 18th-century France that sometimes even exposed nipples, followed by the prudish late Victorian dresses, when high collars returned. Class is hugely important in reading this history, too: it was generally the breasts of upper-class women that were of interest, either as objects to be hidden or displayed. Images of women in lands that were colonised by European powers were often rendered with bare breasts, signifying their perceived lack of civilisation and their inequality with white women.

In the 20th century, the development of modern art and abstraction led to depictions of the breast that were abstracted from the body. Laura Panno’s work, which Pasti cites as the main inspiration for the show, depicts breasts in isolation, without the body they belong to. The shapes and textures that make a breast become strange and heightened in this context. The repeating concentric circles of Panno’s Origine echo Marcel Duchamp’s Prière de Toucher, which is also featured in the exhibition. The sense of roundness, of being an orb, which is rarely true of actual breasts, is highlighted in works such as Adelaide Cioni’s To Be Naked, Breasts and Masami Teraoko’s Breasts on Hollywood Hills Installation.

Despite the erotic association of breasts, few of these works are particularly sexual. Chloe Wise’s Soccer, showing a chest with a curvy set of breasts leaning down over a black and white soccer ball, has the most sex appeal. The disembodiment of most of these works is too jarring to allow for any sense of human connection.

The artist’s gaze takes on outsize significance here, when power dynamics and physical interaction are implied by the interaction between artist and subject. Pasti told me that inclusivity was a fundamental value for her as curator of this exhibition, in her pursuit of “understanding how women were represented throughout art” by both men and women.

The male artists featured in the exhibition approach the breast from various points of view. Robert Mapplethorpe, the celebrated gay American photographer, took the photo titled Lisa Marie/Breasts in 1987. He positioned himself and his camera below his subject’s chest, taking a photo that looks upward from her belly button towards her breasts, which rise up like mountains in a strange landscape of flesh. His insistence on the shape and line of this monumental embodied landscape, rather than the personhood of his subject, invites the viewer to see breasts from a new perspective. Other male depictions of breasts have an undertone of violence or control, such as Allen Jones’s Cover Story 2/4, a Barbie-esque metal cast of an idealised female body.

While some artists look forward to abstraction or other contemporary visual languages, others look back to historical motifs of representing breasts. Cindy Sherman’s photograph Untitled #205 shows the artist dressed as a sort of baroque, Madonna-esque figure with bare breasts and pregnant belly draped in gauzy fabric, arranged like an Ingres painting. But the breasts and belly are obviously fake, hanging on the artist’s shoulders like those of a drag queen, evoking complicated readings about gender, motherhood, and transhistorical connections. Anna Weyant’s more recent painting, Chest, shows a closeup of a woman’s chest with her arm covering her breasts. The flattened realism and blank setting is characteristic of Weyant’s work, and gives her subject a timelessness that allows us to imagine it depicts a scene that is equally likely to have happened yesterday or 500 years ago.

The decision to examine a single part of the traditional female body, rather than the whole body or the idea of femininity or womanhood itself, makes this exhibition purposefully narrow. It promotes a particularly abstract, formal view of the breast: how has this beautiful, specific thing inspired artists? The curves, the colours, the undulations of skin and flesh are the subject of the works here much more than the cultural ebbs and flows of breasts and the people who have them.

It also opens up space for conversation about who has breasts. Prune Nourry is the only featured artist who is a survivor of breast cancer, and her work, Œil Nourricier #6, is a fragile, round glass sculpture of a breast that raises questions about the fragility of life and health. Many breast cancer survivors no longer have their own breasts, so the mobility of this sculpture reflects the way breasts can be something that is removed from the body.

Breasts can also be added to the body, as in Sherman’s photograph, or in Jacques Sonck’s photograph of a trans woman in Ghent. Sonck’s photo of a bare-chested man is also included, reminding us that literally everyone has breasts of some shape or size – but when we say “breasts”, we almost always mean women’s. These works push at the biological essentialism that still undergirds the way we think and talk about gender and bodies. If breasts can come and go from bodies of different gender identities, how does their cultural meaning evolve?

The exhibition joins a larger trend in the art world of exploring embodiment, which has often been driven by female artists and a feminist gaze. This has led to some wonderfully nuanced and substantive explorations of bodies and gender in art, such as Lauren Elkin’s recent book Art Monsters, but also to a lot of posturing about bodies that is only skin deep. Women’s bodies have been the central motif of western art, and critical engagement with those women is long overdue. Boobs are just boobs without the person they belong to – but what about her? What does she think?

From touchline handbags in London with his manager a week ago to this: an individual performance of verve and efficiency to go with collective success, Mohamed Salah smiling once again. Much has been written and said about the Egyptian forward, of his recent struggles, future and behaviour. But a career as storied as his requires him to put aside the noise and go again, an internal wiring that is present among only the best. Salah was electric against Tottenham, striking the bar with a cross-turned-shot and forcing a strong save from Guglielmo Vicario inside the first 10 minutes. The post was struck not long after, though the offside flag went up too, and then came the goal just 16 minutes in, masterful movement at the far post preceding a clinical header. He was present in the build-up to Liverpool’s other three goals, allowing Jürgen Klopp a gorgeous afternoon of Anfield sunshine and fist pumps as that final goodbye inches closer. Taha Hashim

Torrential rainstorms in Brazil’s southernmost state of Rio Grande do Sul have caused the worst flooding the country has seen in 80 years, many deaths and the displacement of thousands of families. Central parts of the state were hit the hardest after the storms began last Monday, with unofficial weather stations in the area recording 50-100cm (20-40in) of rain over the past week.

Widespread floods and landslides have caused major damage to homes and infrastructure, most alarmingly triggering the partial collapse of a small hydroelectric dam on Thursday, which sent a 2-metre-high wave through the surrounding area. At least 57 deaths have been reported and 24,000 people have been displaced, alongside an estimated 500,000 being without power and clean water.

This part of South America is no stranger to major rainfall; Rio Grande do Sul has experienced flooding three other times in the past year. This is because the polar and tropical regions of the atmosphere meet around this latitude, resulting in a zone of high pressure that delivers long periods of dry weather punctuated with heavy bursts of rain. However, this event has been particularly devastating, with experts attributing the heightened rainfall to the combination of global heating and the recent El Niño phenomenon, during which waters in the eastern Pacific Ocean become warmer.

South of Rio Grande do Sul, Uruguay is braced for similarly heavy rain this week. Intense storms are forecast across the country until Wednesday, with 20-25cm expected in places.

El Niño is also partially responsible for the ongoing catastrophic rainfall in east Africa, which began in March and has caused devastating flooding in Kenya, Tanzania, Somalia, Rwanda and Burundi. Latest figures report more than 400 deaths across the five countries, with almost 250,000 people displaced.

Tanzania was dealt another blow on Friday when it was struck by an unusually powerful tropical storm, a rare event so close to the equator. The system, which was named Hidaya, strengthened to tropical cyclone status as it approached Tanzania, making it the most powerful storm recorded in the region, with winds of up to 80mph fuelling waves 2 metres high. Hidaya weakened to a severe tropical storm before making landfall south of Dar es Salaam, but still brought up to 10cm of rainfall to surrounding areas.

Spiralling rents and sky-high property prices risk becoming a key battleground of European politics as far-right and populist parties start to exploit growing public anger over the continent’s housing crisis, experts have said.

Weeks before European parliament elections in which far-right parties are forecast to finish first in nine EU member states and second or third in another nine, housing has the potential to become as potent a driver of far-right support as immigration.

“Far-right parties prosper when they can exploit the social gaps that emerge out of underinvestment and inadequate government planning … and when they can blame outsiders,” said the UN’s special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing.

“That’s the situation many EU countries are now in,” Balakrishnan Rajagopal told the Guardian. “The housing crisis is no longer affecting just low earners, migrants, single-parent families, but the middle classes. This is the social issue of the 21st century.”

Shortages of affordable housing have sparked protests in Lisbon, Amsterdam, Prague, Milan and – outside the EU – London, with young people in particular raging against rents swallowing half their incomes and mortgages 10 times an average salary.

The issue was a top concern for voters in last year’s Dutch elections, won by the far-right Freedom party (PVV) of the anti-Islam Geert Wilders, and it played into the rise in support for Portugal’s Chega, which almost trebled its vote share in March.

“It’s a theme that ticks a lot of current boxes” for far-right parties, said Catherine Fieschi, of the European University Institute. “It’s easy to frame it as an elites-versus-the-people issue – and to claim migrants are being treated better than nationals.”

Eurostat data shows that across the 27-member bloc, house prices soared by 47% between 2010 and 2022, with rents rising 18% over the same period. In some countries more than a fifth of households spend 40% or more of their net income on housing.

Recent academic research has established a clear link between rising rents and votes for the far right – even without strong anti-immigration messaging.

Tarik Abou-Chadi, an EU politics specialist and co-author of a study that found rising rents were reflected locally in growing support for the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party in Germany, said “fear of status loss” was a key factor.

“This data shows housing is now part of a broader package of economic and social threats and insecurities fuelling anxiety,” he said. “The fear you may have to move home because you can’t afford it leads to a rise in radical-right support.”

The research combined detailed rental data with local responses to Germany’s annual Socio-Economic Panel household opinion survey to show increasing rents were associated with greater support for the far-right AfD, especially among low-income tenants.

Much of the AfD’s support is in more left-behind rural regions, where rents have stayed relatively low, and the effect was even stronger in urban areas, Abou-Chadi said, providing a possible explanation for the party’s rising vote share in cities.

“What’s interesting is that the relationship is there even when people’s rents may not actually have increased,” Abou-Chadi said. “It’s not just about actual hardship but also about the worry – that threat to social and economic status.”

Thus far, the AfD has made little attempt to play a housing card, while in Portugal, Chega focused more on corruption than on a crisis aggravated – in cities such as Lisbon and Porto – by a huge boom in holiday lets and high-earning digital nomads.

“But the scope for housing to become a highly significant factor in the far-right vote is very clearly there, and will only increase in the future,” said Vicente Valentim, a University of Oxford specialist on Europe’s far right.

Mainstream parties are starting to awaken to the threat. In January, big city mayors demanded an urgent focus on more affordable, qualitative and sustainable housing, while MEPs and housing ministers called for housing to be made a top EU priority.

Rajagopal, who recently reported on the Dutch housing crisis, said a first step should be to enshrine affordable, adequate and secure housing as a legal right.

“EU countries have a long and laudable tradition of social protection, of welfarism,” he said. “But when it comes to recognition of housing as a legal human right, Europe is lagging behind international law. EU citizens cannot go to their national courts over housing. European countries recognise this, but are not doing anything about it.”

Beyond that, the housing crisis in Europe – including the UK – was a product of “treating housing like any other commodity, to be bought and sold”, and of abandoning state planning, Rajagopal said.

“Europe drank the 1980s Kool-Aid … markets were good, planning bad,” he said. “But markets only really take care of themselves. If you also abandon state planning, nobody’s supplying housing. And that’s what allows the PVV, for example, to blame migrants for the Dutch crisis when there is no evidence migrants are to blame.

“If we want to stop the rise of the far right, starve it of some oxygen, things like housing have to be seen as fundamental rights.”

Sorcha Edwards, the secretary general of the NGO Housing Europe, agreed. “Obviously, we need to build more,” she said. “But supply isn’t the only answer. It’s what kind of housing we build, and with what kind of financing.”

A market-first approach to housing – relying on private, profit-driven capital, and on charities to mop up the mess – now needed to make way for “patient, public-interest financing”, with “social conditionality and strings attached”, Edwards said.

“There’s going to have to be a real cultural shift. The backbone has to be the limited profit sector. Not just municipal housing, but alternative forms of ownership, like cooperatives. We absolutely have to build with the right kind of money.”

Ukraine’s former Eurovision winner Jamala has said her country “cannot afford” to boycott the song contest because it needs the opportunity to remind Europe of Russia’s invasion.

There have been calls for artists to refuse to participate over Israel’s inclusion in the music competition while the war in Gaza continues.

The opening round begins on Tuesday in Malmö, Sweden, after the singer Loreen won in Liverpool last year.

Jamala, who won the contest for Ukraine in 2016, said a boycott over the Israel-Hamas war was not an option for her country. She said that artists needed to be “loud and creative” to remind the world about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine when the public was “getting tired” of hearing about it.

The question of whether to withdraw over Israel’s involvement has also plagued the UK’s entrant, Olly Alexander. In a BBC documentary that will air on Tuesday, he said reaction to his decision to participate had been “very extreme”, with people branding him complicit in genocide.

Jamala said Ukraine needed to take opportunities to raise awareness after the war had dropped in prominence from the news since the Russian invasion in February 2022.

“Some countries may refuse to participate [in the contest], but we don’t. Especially we cannot afford to give up such a contest in time of war,” she told PA Media. “There are many wars now in the world and, of course, it is not easy to constantly keep attention on yourself so that people do not get tired of our war.

“But that is our task, people who remain in Ukraine, people who are fighting, to be as loud and creative … this is the task of artists to find new ways of how to reveal and show their country.”

Ukraine’s entry this year is the rapper and singer duo Alyona Alyona and Jerry Heil. Jamala, 40, whose real name is Susana Alimivna Jamaladinova, said she hoped they would give many interviews “and talk about the fact that the war in Ukraine continues”.

Before being chosen as the UK’s Eurovision entrant, Alexander had signed an open letter calling for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war and describing Israel’s actions in Gaza as “genocide”.

Queers for Palestine launched a petition calling for him to boycott Eurovision in March over the inclusion of Israel, saying the event was “cultural cover” for an “ongoing genocide”.

Speaking in a BBC documentary about him to be broadcast on Tuesday, the singer said: “A lot of the contestants and myself have been having a lot of comments that are like ‘You are complicit in a genocide by taking part in Eurovision,’ which is quite extreme. It’s very extreme.”

In an interview with the Times, Alexander reportedly began to cry when discussing the fallout from his decision to go ahead. “Obviously, I wish there wasn’t a war or this insane humanitarian crisis. I wish for peace and I have found this experience, at times, extremely … I’ve just felt really sad and distressed,” he said.

“But I still believe it’s a good thing when people come together for entertainment. That’s why I wanted to do Eurovision.”

The Irish entrant, Bambie Thug, had also previously backed “an immediate and lasting ceasefire” but declined to boycott the event. Alongside Alexander and the Danish entrant, Saba, the artists said in a statement: “It is important to us to stand in solidarity with the oppressed and communicate our heartfelt wish for peace, an immediate and lasting ceasefire, and the safe return of all hostages.

“We stand united against all forms of hate, including antisemitism and Islamophobia.”

President Xi Jinping has lauded China’s ties with France as a model for the international community, as he arrived in Paris for a rare visit against a backdrop of mounting trade disputes with the EU.

French President Emmanuel Macron is set to urge Xi to reduce trade imbalances and to use his influence with Russia over the war in Ukraine. Xi is due to meet Macron and European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen on Monday.

Xi, who was welcomed in Paris by prime minister Gabriel Attal, said in a statement released on his arrival that ties between China and France were “a model for the international community of peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation between countries with different social systems”.

In a separate op-ed published in the French daily Le Figaro, the Chinese president said he was coming to France with three messages: that Beijing was committed to opening up “new vistas” in its relationship with France; opening up “ever wider” to the world and to upholding world peace and stability.

“While opening up itself, China also encourages Chinese companies to go global,” Xi wrote. “France is advancing re-industrialisation based on green innovation, whereas China is accelerating the development of new quality productive forces.”

On the war in Ukraine he wrote that China “understands the repercussions of the Ukraine crisis on the people of Europe”. He emphasised that Beijing is not “a party to or a participant in it”, adding that “China has been playing a constructive role in striving for peaceful settlement of the crisis”.

Xi’s visit to Europe is the first since 2019 and will also see him visit Serbia and Hungary.

One of Macron’s key priorities will be to warn Xi of the danger of backing Russia in its invasion of Ukraine, with western officials concerned Moscow is already using Chinese machine tools in arms production.

The west wants China above all not to supply weapons to Russia and risk tipping the balance in the conflict.

“It is in our interest to get China to weigh in on the stability of the international order,” said Macron in an interview with the Economist published on Thursday.

“We must, therefore, work with China to build peace,” he added.

France is also backing a European Union probe into Chinese electric vehicle exports, and in January, Beijing opened an investigation into mostly French-made imports of brandy, a move widely seen as a tit-for-tat retaliation for EU probes.

“We want to obtain reciprocity of exchanges and have the elements of our economic security taken into account,” Macron said in an interview with French newspaper La Tribune ahead of Xi’s two-day visit, his first trip to the region in five years.

Von der Leyen said Monday she will press for “fair” competition with China in talks with Xi.

“We have to act to make sure that competition is fair and not distorted,” she said, adding, “I have made clear that the current imbalances in market access are not sustainable and need to be addressed”.

The European Commission, the European Union’s authority on trade issues, has opened a slew of competition probes targeting China in recent months.

Beijing has reacted furiously to the most recent investigation, into suspected inequitable access to China’s medical devices market, calling it a sign of EU “protectionism”.

The EU’s 27 members – in particular France and Germany – are divided on their attitude towards China.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz will not join Macron and Xi in Paris due to prior commitments, sources said.

“In Europe, we are not unanimous on the subject because certain players still see China as essentially a market of opportunities,” Macron said, without naming any countries.

France will also seek to make progress on opening the Chinese market to its agricultural exports and resolve issues around the French cosmetic industry’s concerns about intellectual property rights, officials said.

China may announce an order for about 50 Airbus aircraft during Xi’s visit, but it remains uncertain whether it will be a new deal, people familiar with the negotiations said.

On Tuesday, Macron will take Xi to the Pyrenees, a mountainous region dear to the French president as the birthplace of his maternal grandmother, before Xi heads to Serbia and Hungary.

Reuters and Agence France-Presse contributed to this report

A woman has been arrested on suspicion of neglect after a five-month-old boy suffered a cardiac arrest at Legoland Windsor Resort.

The baby is in critical condition in hospital after the incident at about 1pm on Thursday, police said.

A 27-year-old woman from Witham, Essex was arrested on Friday on suspicion of neglecting a child to cause unnecessary injury. She has been released on police bail until 26 July.

DC Zoe Eele, of the Thames Valley police’s child abuse investigation unit, said: “We are investigating a distressing incident involving a very young child at Legoland Windsor earlier this week.

“Firstly, our thoughts are with the family of the boy who is in a critical condition in hospital after suffering a cardiac arrest. We are supporting them as best we can at this extremely difficult time.

“We are working closely with the team at Legoland Windsor Resort but would like to speak to anyone who may have information about this incident, specifically anyone who was queuing for the Coastguard HQ boat ride between around 11.30am and 12.45pm.

“Get in touch either by calling 101 or via our website, quoting reference number 4324 0202 786.

“Alternatively, you can provide information anonymously to independent charity Crimestoppers by calling 0800 555 111 or via its website.”

Police have confirmed they are not looking for further suspects in relation to the incident.

The bodies believed to be those of the two Australians and an American who went missing in the Pacific coast state of Baja California showed the three men were killed with gunshots to the head, Mexican authorities said on Sunday.

María Elena Andrade Ramírez, the state’s attorney general, said the families of the missing men had arrived in Tijuana to verbally identify the bodies. Authorities expect to have official confirmation shortly.

The preliminary hypothesis of the investigation is that the missing men were attacked by people who wanted to steal their car.

Dr Ramón Álvarez Martínez said that the bodies displayed injuries that suggested resistance.

Three Mexican nationals have been detained, one of whom has been charged with kidnapping.

The other two are being held for possession of crystal meth, though Andrade Ramírez did not discard the possibility that they were linked to the crime.

“In fact, we are sure that more people took part in the attack,” said Andrade Ramírez, who said officials would soon be able to provide more information about advances made in the investigation.

Perth siblings Callum and Jake Robinson, both in their 30s, were travelling in the region on a surfing holiday, with their friend Jack Carter Rhoad, a US citizen. The trio were reported missing when they failed to check into pre-arranged accommodation near the city of Ensenada last weekend.

Friends and family appealed on social media for any information on their whereabouts, saying it was “out of character” for them not to be in contact.

The missing men’s tents and burned-out truck were found on Thursday, by a remote stretch of coastline.

On Friday, four bodies were found in a covered-up well on isolated ranch land six or seven kilometres from where the missing men’s car was found.

Three of the bodies had been there five to seven days before they were found on Friday. A fourth body was also found in the well, which was estimated to have been there 15 to 30 days.

Andrade Ramírez said that authorities did not believe the attackers knew the victims were tourists, and emphasised that Baja California was still safe for tourists.

In 2023, Mexico saw more than 30,000 homicides for the sixth consecutive year. More than 100,000 people are also missing.

In 2015, Western Australian surfers Adam Coleman and Dean Lucas were murdered, believed to have been shot by gang members in the neighbouring Sinaloa region before their van and bodies were burnt.