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‘Payment expected within seven days’: New Zealand doctor invoices US embassy for rising petrol costs

A New Zealand doctor has asked the US embassy in Wellington to reimburse his clinic for petrol costs, saying Donald Trump and his administration started an “avoidable war” and should foot the bill for rising fuel prices. Dr Shane Dunphy, of Onslow medical centre in New Zealand’s capital, requested the US embassy pay his centre NZ$2,790.95 (US$1,597) for the cost of petrol vouchers provided to staff to help pay for transport. In a letter sent with the invoice, Dunphy said his staff were struggling to afford petrol because of the energy crisis triggered by the US-Israeli attacks on Iran. The clinic had provided the vouchers to staff so they could afford to come to work and feed their families, he said. “We now ask that the USA reimburse us the cost of these vouchers. The USA is responsible for this and therefore should be held accountable.” New Zealand is particularly exposed to the energy crisis caused by the conflict, as it is highly dependent on global trade and susceptible to disruptions in supply chains and shipping. Petrol prices have increased up to 50 cents a litre, pushing the average price of unleaded fuel to more than $3 per litre. Dunphy’s letter takes aim at Trump and called the attack on Iran “immoral and completely unjustified”. He encouraged other individuals and businesses to send the US embassy their invoices for increased costs, but added: “No amount of money could compensate for the human misery and loss of life Trump and the USA are responsible for.” Dunphy signed off his letter saying: “Payment is expected within seven days”. Speaking to the Guardian, Dunphy said he felt compelled to send the letter and invoice on 27 March as “a matter of principle”. “If you break something, you should fix it,” he said. “I think that the whole world needs to be pointing the finger at the US and saying, sort this out. You voted this man to be president. You sort it out.” Dunphy criticised nations that had not condemned the war, including New Zealand and its prime minister, Christoper Luxon. “Unless they stand on principle, you know, what do we have?” Dunphy said. “One man has led to this global economic crisis. So that sums it up for me, that’s why I’ve done it.” Dunphy said he didn’t anticipate the embassy would pay the account. The US embassy has been contacted for comment.

‘Weak and pathetic’: why is the EU not using its leverage to stop Israel?

The human costs of Israel’s attacks on Lebanon were plain to see when the Irish MEP Barry Andrews visited Beirut last month. He met people who had fled Israeli airstrikes and complied with evacuation orders in southern Lebanon. At makeshift shelters – converted schools – conditions were even worse than during Israel’s last incursion in 2024, he was told. “There are dirty mattresses, dirty blankets, [people] are getting infections, they are getting rashes,” he said recalling a picture of misery compounded by swingeing aid budget cuts. Andrews, who chairs the parliament’s development committee, was in Lebanon two weeks after Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy, fired rockets into Israel, triggering massive retaliatory strikes by Israeli forces. On his return from Lebanon, Andrews was one of the first European lawmakers to call for the EU to revive sanctions against Israel. He believes the EU must respond to Israel’s attacks on Lebanon, but also state-backed settler violence in the West Bank, attacks on health workers in Gaza, and Israel’s potential reinstatement of the death penalty against Palestinians after a vote in the Knesset this week. Yet, one month into the Iran war, the EU – one of Israel’s closest allies and most important economic partners – has not gone beyond words in an attempt to sway Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. Critics say the EU can and should use its economic and diplomatic leverage. Andrews said: “When the European Union takes a principled stand on these issues the Israelis do pay attention.” The EU could exert economic pressure via its association agreement with Israel, a commerce and cooperation accord that underpins a €68bn (£59bn) trading relationship and promotes cooperation in areas, including energy and scientific research. Sven Kühn von Burgsdorff, the EU representative to the Palestinian territories until 2023, believes the EU should suspend this agreement with Israel, halt all military support and cease trade with illegal settlements. He fears that without action to defend international law in Gaza and the West Bank, the EU’s reputation “will be further severely affected”. He said: “The usual words of concern and condemnation are not enough; they are meaningless when not followed by effective measures to hold Israel to account.” Andrews said the EU’s response to the war on Iran and Israel’s attacks on Lebanon had been “weak and pathetic”. “It demonstrates that time and time again, Israel has been given a permission slip for endless war crimes.” For its part, the European Commission condemned the Knesset vote for the death penalty, which would apply to Palestinians but not Jewish extremists, as “very concerning” and “a clear step backwards”. The Council of Europe, the continental human rights body, which has signed 28 treaties with Israel, described the vote as “a legal anachronism incompatible with contemporary human rights standards”. Western leaders have warned Israel against a ground offensive in Lebanon, while condemning Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel. In the past four weeks, more than 1,240 people have been killed in Lebanon, including at least 124 children, while more than 1.1 million people have been forced to flee their homes. Away from the headlines, at least 673 people have been killed in Gaza since the October ceasefire, bringing the death toll in the devastated territory to 72,260. The EU’s reluctance to take measures against Israel is a familiar story. The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, last September proposed unprecedented sanctions against Israel, citing the “manmade famine” in Gaza and “a clear attempt to undermine the two-state solution” with settlement plans in the West Bank. Von der Leyen, a German conservative, had previously been accused of being an uncritical defender of Israel. She was responding to intense public scrutiny of the horrors unfolding in Gaza, where Israel is accused of committing genocide, and the call by a large majority of EU member states to review the bloc’s association agreement. But the sanctions never found majority support in the EU council of ministers and momentum dissipated when Trump announced his Gaza ceasefire plan in October. EU countries remain concerned about the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza and relentless violence in the West Bank, which the Israeli state has been accused of enabling. “There may come a point when we need to increase the pressure on Israel again,” said one senior EU diplomat in mid-March, describing the situation in Gaza and the West Bank as “highly problematic”. The EU’s initial response to the war was cautious in part, diplomats suggested, because Israel and the US targeted Iran, a regime strongly condemned by the EU for massacring its own people and sowing bloody mayhem in the Middle East and Ukraine via drone supplies from Russia. A second EU diplomat, who supported the association agreement review in 2025, emphasised the importance of maintaining contacts with Israeli society, citing an open letter from 600 Israeli security officials calling for an end to the war in Gaza last August – an appeal published as Israel considered intensifying the war on the devastated territory. “These are not peaceniks … these are people from the Israeli security establishment, who are very much concerned about the policies of their own government. The EU has to relate to that in one way or another.” Moreover, the EU has been historically divided on the its stance towards Israel. Ireland, Spain and Slovenia, for instance, have been staunch defenders of the Palestinian cause, while Germany and Austria, for historical reasons, have been deeply reluctant to criticise Israel. Adding to the complexity, the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, is Netanyahu’s ideological soulmate and has played a crucial role in vetoing otherwise uncontentious measures, such as sanctions on extremist settlers in the West Bank. A commission spokesperson emphasised this week that diplomatic engagement with Israel was continuing “and this is what we do with our regular partners when we don’t see developments eye to eye”. Kühn von Burgsdorff, the former EU envoy, argues for a more robust approach. “How can it serve Europe to be seen as a sidekick of an erratic, unreliable and apparently megalomaniac US president, or of a warmongering, annexationist Israeli prime minister. That cannot be in Europe’s interest, because it comes at the expense of relations with other parts of the world.”

Rationale for Iran war questioned after Trump says ‘I don’t care’ about regime’s uranium stockpiles

Donald Trump has said he does not care about Iran’s stock of highly enriched uranium (HEU), arguing it was deep underground and could be monitored by satellite, raising questions about one of the key US justifications for the war. Experts said that if the US-Israeli offensive against Iran concluded with the Tehran government still in control of its 440kg HEU stockpile, it would be significantly closer to the capability of making nuclear warheads than if the US had pursued a potential negotiated settlement that was on the table at the time the US and Israel launched the war on 28 February. Asked about the stockpile by Reuters news agency on Wednesday, Trump said: “That’s so far underground, I don’t care about that.” “We’ll always be watching it by satellite,” he added. In his address to the nation from the White House on Wednesday night, Trump elaborated: “If we see them make a move, even a move for it, we will hit them with missiles very hard again.” Unless they were intended as a ruse to put Tehran off its guard, the president’s remarks appeared to rule out a risky military mission to retrieve the HEU stockpile, which Iran is believed to have hidden down deep underground shafts. The apparent decision to leave the HEU, which is roughly enough for about a dozen warheads, in Iran appeared to conflict with Trump’s assertions that one of the principal war aims was to ensure it could never make a nuclear bomb. He has repeatedly claimed, since starting the war, that Iran had been two to four weeks from making a nuclear weapon and firing it at the US and Israel, a claim rejected as absurd by most experts. Nuclear proliferation experts say that if the HEU stock remains under Iranian control at the end of hostilities, it would leave Tehran significantly closer to the capability of making nuclear bombs than the proposed settlement being negotiated in Geneva on 26 February, two days before the war began. In those US-Iran talks, Iranian officials have said they had proposed diluting the HEU stockpile to low-enriched uranium, and reportedly agreed to keep only a much smaller stock of enriched uranium on its territory. The Iranian proposal would have also included a multiyear pause in any uranium enrichment and paved the way for a restoration of a comprehensive monitoring regime by the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The Omani mediators at the Geneva negotiations thought that significant progress had been made, as did the UK’s national security adviser, Jonathan Powell, who was in Geneva at the time with British nuclear experts. Another, more technical, round of talks was due to take place the following Monday in Vienna but it never happened, because the US and Israel launched their attack. “We are actually less secure now from the nuclear threat than we were before he started the war, because they still have the material and we still have no greater insight into the material and what they might do with it,” said Emma Belcher, a nuclear expert and president of Ploughshares, a foundation promoting non-proliferation efforts. She added: “We’ve also likely increased [Tehran’s] calculus that they will seek nuclear weapons to prevent the very kind of attack we’ve just witnessed.” According to the IAEA, about 200kg of the HEU, enriched to 60% purity, is being kept down deep shafts under a mountain near the city of Isfahan. On the weekend Le Monde published a satellite photograph from June last year of a large truck at a tunnel entrance at the Isfahan site carrying blue containers, which the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists assessed most likely contained HEU. Trump was briefed over the past week on a Pentagon proposal he had requested to secure and extract the HEU stockpile, according to the Washington Post. The operation would have involved taking control of an area in Iran’s mountainous interior, flying in excavation equipment and building a runway for cargo planes to fly the HEU out of the country, the report said. It would have taken hundreds if not thousands of troops several weeks, exposing them to high risks. Trump’s remarks on Wednesday suggested he had judged the risks to be too high. The HEU stockpile itself is the consequence of Trump’s decision, in 2018 during his first term, to withdraw from a multilateral nuclear deal agreed three years earlier. That agreement limited the Iranian uranium stockpile to less than 4% enriched. Iran only began making 60% HEU after the agreement fell apart. “The comment that you can just not worry about the material because you can see it from satellites really fundamentally misunderstands how to manage nuclear risk,” Belcher said. “The issue isn’t just whether we can see the material, it’s whether we can verify, secure and constrain it. And in order to do that, you need diplomacy, inspections and sustained international cooperation.”

New Zealand signs defence pact with Cook Islands after quarrel over China deal

New Zealand and the Cook Islands have signed a defence and security declaration, ending a year-long diplomatic row that erupted after the Cook Islands struck strategic agreements with China. The Cook Islands was a dependent New Zealand colony from 1901-65 but has since operated as a self-governing nation in “free association” with New Zealand. Its roughly 17,000 citizens hold New Zealand citizenship. There are obligations between the two nations to regularly consult on matters of defence and security. In February 2025, New Zealand expressed “significant concern” about a lack of transparency over the Cook Islands’ decision to sign a strategic partnership deal with China covering deep-sea mining, regional cooperation and economic issues. It marked the first time the Cook Islands had struck a major deal with a country outside its traditional partners – New Zealand and Australia – causing concern within those countries over China’s push for influence in the Pacific. New Zealand, the Cook Islands’ biggest funder, responded by halting millions of dollars in aid to the nation, which the Cook Islands’ prime minister, Mark Brown, described as “patronising” and “inconsistent with modern partnership”. On Thursday, relations between the two nations improved, after the signing of declaration that requires both parties to act in good faith and consult on matters of defence and security. New Zealand’s foreign affairs minister, Winston Peters, said it was no secret the two governments had faced a series of “serious disagreements” since late 2024, but the declaration was about “setting a course together for the future” and providing clarity over the relationship. Peters said: “The strategic environment we face is more complex and contested today than at any other point since New Zealand and the Cook Islands formed our free association relationship in 1965. “In that context, it’s vital that New Zealand and the Cook Islands are clear – with one another and third parties – about the nature of our special relationship and our responsibilities to one another in the defence and security domains.” New Zealand would resume roughly NZ$29.8m ($17.1m) in annual funding support, he said. Peters added: “We are pleased to now have a shared certainty about the contours of that relationship, and we are grateful to prime minister Brown and his government for the constructive way they approached the negotiation of this declaration.” Brown said the agreement was about “moving forward”. He said: “This declaration is about security and defence across our region, and I’m confident that the provisions we have in this declaration will address any concerns that may have occurred in the past.” Brown said the defence pact with New Zealand would not affect the Cook Islands’ deal with China, but Peters said that deal was no longer a concern. “This declaration resolves this former ambiguity and provides clarity to both governments so that we can move forward focused on the future, not the past,” Peters said. “If anyone understands the Polynesian society, cousins fall out now and again … our job is getting it back.”

Top Iranian official injured in strike on Tehran – as it happened

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One killed and buildings damaged as magnitude 7.4 earthquake strikes Indonesia

One person has been killed after a 7.4 magnitude earthquake that struck off Indonesia’s Ternate island, damaging buildings and triggering small tsunami waves. The quake, which had a depth of 35km, occurred on Thursday at 6.48am local time, according to the United States Geological Survey. Its epicentre was 127km (79 miles) west-north-west of Ternate, an island in Indonesia’s North Maluku province. The US tsunami warning system initially warned of the risk of hazardous tsunami waves within 1,000km of the epicentre, including along the coasts of Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia, saying waves reaching 0.3 metres to 1 metre (3.2 feet) above the tide level were possible for some of the Indonesian coastline. About two hours after the quake it confirmed the threat of a tsunami had passed. Strong shaking lasting 10 to 20 seconds was felt in Bitung – a coastal city on the north-eastern edge of Sulawesi island – and surrounding areas, as well as in Ternate city, according to Indonesia’s disaster management agency (BNPB). Tsunami waves were recorded in five locations, according to Indonesia’s BMKG meteorology agency, which said the highest – 0.75m (2.46ft) – occurred in North Minahasa in North Sulawesi province. A total of 11 aftershocks were monitored, the largest at a magnitude of 5.5. The authorities have urged the public to remain vigilant. “At this stage, caution is still required, particularly for communities living along the coast,” a spokesperson for BNPB said in a statement, telling residents to refrain from returning to beaches or coastal areas until authorities confirmed it was safe to do so. A 70-year-old woman died in North Sulawesi’s Minahasa district, and another resident was injured after the quake. Images showed a sports complex in North Sumatra that was damaged, with mangled wall panels and metal bars lying across the ground outside. BNPB said initial assessments showed “minor to moderate” damage to buildings in areas of Ternate, which has a population of about 205,000. A church in the Batang Dua Island district was damaged, as were two houses in South Ternates. In Bitung, efforts to assess the damage were ongoing, the agency said. The quake was initially recorded at a magnitude of 7.8, the US Geological Survey said. Japan’s meteorological agency said “slight sea level changes” might occur along Japan’s coast but that no tsunami damage was expected. The Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology and Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology both later confirmed there was no tsunami threat to their territories. An Agence France-Presse journalist in Manado, North Sulawesi province, said the shaking woke him and others in the city, who rushed outdoors. “I immediately woke up and left my house. People [were] immediately scrambling outside,” he said. “There is a school and the pupils rushed outside.” He said the shaking persisted for “quite long” but he did not witness “significant damage”. Indonesia, a vast archipelago of more than 280 million people, is prone to earthquakes because of its location on the so-called “ring of fire”, an arc of volcanoes and faultlines in the Pacific basin. In 2022, a magnitude 5.6 earthquake killed at least 602 people in West Java’s Cianjur city, the deadliest one in Indonesia since a 2018 quake and tsunami in Sulawesi killed more than 4,300 people. In 2004, an extremely powerful Indian Ocean quake set off a tsunami that killed more than 230,000 people in a dozen countries, most of them in Indonesia’s Aceh province. This affected area of the Molucca Sea often experiences moderate to large earthquakes, according to the US Geological Survey. Over the past 50 years, nine other earthquakes with a magnitude higher than seven have occurred within 250km of Thursday’s earthquake, though few have caused major damage because of their location at sea.

Global super-rich may have hidden $3.55tn from tax officials, says Oxfam

The global super-rich may have as much as $3.55tn hidden away from tax authorities, according to estimates by Oxfam. The charity renewed its call for a wealth levy and urged governments to close tax loopholes as it published its latest analysis of the scale of offshore holdings. Building on the work of academics including the French economist Gabriel Zucman and the EU Tax Observatory, Oxfam said total wealth held offshore had increased significantly, to $13.25tn (£10tn) in 2023 – the latest year for which estimates were available. The share of these secretive holdings hidden from tax authorities has fallen sharply since the introduction in 2016 of a new system of automatic information exchange between jurisdictions. But Oxfam estimates that perhaps $3.55tn is still shielded from tax – worth more than 3% of global GDP. Estimates from previous research suggest 80% of this wealth, or more than $2.84tn, is likely to be owned by the richest 0.1% of households. That would mean this tiny group hold untaxed assets equivalent to the total wealth of the poorest half of the global population. The research was released to mark 10 years from the publication of the Panama Papers, an investigation which exposed the inner workings of tax havens. Christian Hallum, Oxfam’s lead on tax, said: “This isn’t just about clever accounting – it’s about power and impunity. When millionaires and billionaires stash trillions of dollars in offshore tax havens, they place themselves above the obligations that bind the rest of society.” Oxfam is part of a global campaign to mobilise calls for a global progressive wealth tax, including through negotiations at the UN on a framework for tax cooperation. It also called for countries in the global south to be included in the Common Reporting Standard – the system that allows for information exchange between jurisdictions. The UK-based charity is calling on Labour to implement a wealth tax. The chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has already increased taxes on wealth, by raising the rate of capital gains tax, levied when assets are sold, and announcing a new council tax surcharge for properties worth more than £2m. She also extended reforms announced by her Conservative predecessor, Jeremy Hunt, and scrapped the “non dom” regime that allowed some foreign-born residents to avoid paying tax in the UK. But Oxfam would like the chancellor to go further – as would the Green leader in England and Wales, Zack Polanski, who has said a wealth tax would be a “day one priority” for his party in government. Polanksi has said such a tax would be levied annually at a rate of 1% on assets worth more than £10m, including property, and 2% above £100m. The Green party claims this policy would raise about £15bn a year. However, the Institute for Fiscal Studies thinktank has argued that it would be better to prioritise reform of existing taxes on wealth, including council tax and capital gains. The House of Commons public accounts committee has criticised HM Revenue and Customs for not even knowing how many billionaires there are in the country.