Outlining its first preparedness strategy, the European Commission said it wanted to encourage citizens to take “proactive measures to prepare for crises, such as developing household emergency plans and stockpiling essential supplies”. “We are saying to member states: 72 hours of self-sufficiency is what we recommend,” Hadja Lahbib, the European commissioner for preparedness and crisis management, told reporters. Today, the EU launches its new #Preparedness Strategy. “We must prepare for large-scale, cross-sectoral incidents and crises, including the possibility of armed aggression, affecting one or more member states,” the document states. The plans are likely to provoke a mixed response from EU member states, who perceive threats in different ways.

The European defence emergency has made talk of Brexit and its future less taboo on both sides of the Channel. The City lost 40,000 finance jobs soon after Brexit: those high earners who have departed Britain lost the Treasury £1bn a year in tax. Keir Starmer has called for an “ambitious UK-EU defence and security partnership”, but France has blocked British defence companies from accessing a €150bn (£125bn) European defence fund. It has just renegotiated its complex patchwork of EU agreements, partly in the single market, for goods only. However inflexible the EU seems, Switzerland shows painstaking deals of mutual advantage can crisscross the apparently rigid single market rules.

In January, its sales across Europe fell 45%, from 18,161 in 2024 to 9,945. Volkswagen reported a 180% increase in sales of battery electric vehicles to just under 20,000, while BMW and Mini sold a combined 19,000 such models last month. The Chinese-owned BYD recorded a 94% increase in sales in Europe to more than 4,000. Tesla reported annual revenues of $97.7bn last year. BYD also sells about the same number of electric vehicles as Tesla – 1.76m compared with 1.79m respectively in 2024.

The devastating impacts of the climate crisis reached new heights in 2024, with scores of unprecedented heatwaves, floods and storms across the globe, according to the UN’s World Meteorological Organization. The report lists 151 unprecedented extreme weather events in 2024, meaning they were worse than any ever recorded in the region. Storms were also supercharged by global heating in 2024, with an unprecedented six typhoons in under a month hitting the Philippines. Photograph: Luong Thai Linh/EPADr Brenda Ekwurzel, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, condemned the Trump administration’s deletion of online climate information. “Attempts to hide climate science from the public will not stop us from feeling the dire impacts of climate change,” she said.

Some countries could decide to include climate spending in their defence budgets, suggested Ana Toni, Brazil’s chief executive of the Cop30 summit. Unfortunately, climate change is there for a long time. We need to take climate change very seriously, otherwise we will have even more wars in the future. So that trade-off between short-term defence needs now, versus the long-term need to prevent this bigger fight on climate change, is absolutely needed. Toni predicted that the US’s turn away from climate action under Trump would not weaken China’s efforts to cut carbon.

A US journalist has taken the Indian government to court after his Indian overseas citizenship was unilaterally cancelled, after the publication of a story critical of a prominent Indian businessman. OCI status is given to foreign citizens of Indian origin, or those married to Indian nationals, and allows for visa-free travel, residency and employment in India. Satter received his OCI through marriage. According to an investigation by Reporters Without Borders, at least 15 media outlets investigating Appin received legal notices and five have been subjected to legal proceedings. The Indian government now has until the next hearing, on 22 May, to respond to the petition and give legal justification for Satter’s OCI cancellation.

Climate whiplash is already hitting major cities around the world, bringing deadly swings between extreme wet and dry weather as the climate crisis intensifies, a report has revealed. “And given that we’re looking at the world’s largest cities, there are really significant numbers of people involved.”Coping with climate whiplash and flips in cities is extremely hard, said Michaelides. The researchers have worked in Nairobi, Kenya, one of the cities suffering climate whiplash. Other whiplash cities include Baghdad, Bangkok, Melbourne and Nairobi. The cities that had at least five months more of both extreme wet and extreme dry in the second period were classed as having developed climate whiplash.

The families of the two tourists, who were detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), had compared their ordeals to “a horror film”. Both Germans were held at the Otay Mesa Detention Center, a prison in San Diego, California. He had entered the US on a tourist visa and with his girlfriend, Lennon Tyler, had subsequently visited Mexico where they had taken her dog to the vet. “Especially not if you’re on a tourist visa, and especially not over the Mexican border.”US authorities have yet to issue a statement on the German cases. She had been travelling on a tourist visa, but was told she should have applied for a working visa as she planned to stay with a family receiving accommodation in exchange for carrying out domestic chores.

The EU has announced it will impose trade “countermeasures” on up to €26bn worth of US goods in retaliation to Donald Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminium imports, escalating a global trade war. France’s European affairs minister, Benjamin Haddad, said on Wednesday that the EU could “go further” in its response to the US tariffs. In 2019, Switzerland, one of the EU’s closest trading partners, complained when it was affected by EU restrictions on steel imports designed to protect EU industry. The UK steel industry warned that Trump’s tariffs “couldn’t come at a worse time”, and said the move would have “hugely damaging consequences for UK suppliers and their customers in the US”. Gareth Stace, the director general of the trade association UK Steel, called the Trump administration’s move “hugely disappointing”.

The most polluted countries were Chad, Bangladesh, Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and India. Air pollution in India, which is home to six of the 10 dirtiest cities in the world, fell by 7% between 2023 and 2024. The air quality in Beijing is now almost the same as in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. To create the ranking, the researchers averaged real-time data on air pollution, measured at ground level, over the course of the calendar year. Air quality monitoring is worse in parts of Africa and west Asia, where several countries were excluded from the analysis.

“The damage she had done was monumental,” Yunus told the Guardian, describing the state of Bangladesh when he took charge. View image in fullscreen Celebrations at Parliament House after the fall of Sheikh Hasina, in Dhaka in August. Photograph: Syed Mahamudur Rahman/NurPhoto/Rex/ShutterstockYunus’s return to Bangladesh was heralded as the dawn of a new era for the country. Yunus is determined to frame the country’s woes as consequences of Hasina’s rule: “Hasina’s regime wasn’t a government, it was a family of bandits. In a speech, Trump alleged millions of USAid dollars earmarked for strengthening Bangladesh political landscape had been used to elect a “radical left communist” without offering any evidence.

With music, among other things.”View image in fullscreen Swiss farmers in traditional attire yodel before the Alpabfahrt cattle drive in Urnäsch, in the canton of Appenzell Ausserrhoden. While Echo vom Eierstock is the most prominent example of a sea change in the Swiss yodelling scene, it’s not the only one. Echo vom Eierstock’s runaway popularity means they have also had to become selective, capping membership at 50. As soon as she heard of Echo vom Eierstock, she knew she had to try out. In traditional yodelling songs, “women are made out to be sweet, small, helpless, and defenceless when a man comes to call”, says Felber.

After Elon Musk backed Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) – calling the party Germany’s “only hope” – voters are considering an alternative to Tesla. Data released on Thursday showed that registrations of the company’s electric cars in Germany fell 76% to 1,429 last month. Calling them “major brand worries for Tesla”, he added in a note to investors that the direct impact on sales should be relatively small. View image in fullscreen In Australia, Tesla sales were down 72% in February compared with the same month in 2024. UK Tesla sales fell in January, but bounced back by a fifth in February to leave sales up year-on-year for 2025 so far.

Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, has said his government is working on a plan to prepare large-scale military training for every adult male in response to the changing security situation in Europe. “Today we are talking about the need for a half-million army in Poland,” Tusk said. Poland already spends a higher proportion of GDP on defence than any other Nato member, including the US. Last year Poland’s defence spending reached 4.1% of GDP, according to Nato estimates, and it plans to hit 4.7% this year. Trump has suggested the US might abandon its commitments to the alliance if member countries don’t meet defence spending targets.

The Swiss government has been told it must do more to show that its national climate plans are ambitious enough to comply with a landmark legal ruling. It was seen as a historic decision in Europe, where it was the court’s first ruling on climate, with direct ramifications for all 46 Council of Europe member states. However, there was resistance within Switzerland from the start, and by the summer the Swiss federal council had rebuffed the ruling. She called on the Swiss federal council and parliament “to take the dangers of global warming seriously and finally take decisive action against the climate crisis”. Sébastien Duyck, a senior attorney at the Center for International Environmental Law, said European governments had “reaffirmed the rule of law”.