• Three children and three adults killed in attack
• Police killed attacker, 28, a former student
• Biden repeats his call for meaningful gun control reform

A former student killed three children and three adults at a Christian elementary school in Nashville on Monday, armed with two “assault-style” weapons and a handgun after elaborately planning the massacre by drawing a detailed map and conducting surveillance of the building, police said.

Nashville chief of police John Drake told NBC News the shooter had planned to attack several different places, saying a manifesto belonging to the suspect “indicates that there was going to be shootings at multiple locations, and the school was one of them”.

Kyiv air defence says they have downed 13 drones involved in a nighttime attack on the Ukrainian capital that sparked fires but caused no casualties.

• What we know on day 398 of the invasion

Suspilne, Ukraine’s state broadcaster, reports on its official Telegram channel that this morning the border village of Chernatske in Sumy oblast has been struck. It writes: “Twenty hits were recorded, probably from barrel artillery. The infrastructure of the village was damaged – a cultural centre and a children’s playground, as well as five private houses.”

The UK Ministry of Defence says Russia’s 10th tank regiment has borne the brunt of the assault of Avdiivka and has likely lost a “large portion of its tanks” while attempting to surround the town from the south.

Fears of more violent clashes with police as demonstrations against Macron’s unpopular pensions policy to carry on

Hundreds of thousands of people are expected to take part in street protests and strikes across France on Tuesday amid fears of violent clashes with police, as demonstrations continue over Emmanuel Macron’s use of constitutional executive powers to push through an unpopular raise of the pension age.

The protest movement against raising the age from 62 to 64 is the biggest domestic crisis of Macron’s second term, with the strikes on Tuesday expected to affect refineries, bin collections, rail transport, air travel and schools. Authorities in Paris and several cities are braced for clashes between police and protesters.

Recent auroras have been so intense they have been visible as far north as Auckland

The lure of unusually vibrant views of the southern lights in New Zealand has prompted aurora-hunters to drive for hours through the night to capture the “elusive” sight on camera, with social media groups devoted to swapping tips growing in size.

The aurora australis is always more visible in New Zealand and Australian skies during autumn and winter – beginning in March in the southern hemisphere – but this month, the southern lights have been more visible than usual, analysts say. Auroras – beautiful light shows in the night sky – are seen when sunspots erupt, causing solar storms which send material from the sun towards Earth.

More than 60 signatories write to PM before Tuesday’s debate, warning bill will ‘cost lives’

More than 60 NGOs, MPs and academics have written to Rishi Sunak urging him to withdraw the UK’s illegal migration bill, warning that it will drive modern slavery underground and “cost lives”.

Ahead of the controversial bill’s committee stage debate on Tuesday, signatories, including Anti-Slavery International, After Exploitation and Liberty say it would “rob” people fleeing danger of the right to claim asylum, simply for entering the UK irregularly.

While the ex-president has increased his national lead, the Florida governor is putting up a closer fight in Iowa and New Hampshire

Donald Trump has increased his national lead in the Republican presidential primary but seems set to face a closer tussle with his chief rival, Ron DeSantis, in the crucial first two states to vote, new polls show.

On Monday, a new survey from the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard and the Harris Poll gave Trump a 26-point national lead over DeSantis, by 50% to 24%, a four-point gain since February.

Creed III actor due to face court in May after unnamed female accuser alleges he struck her ‘about the face with an opened hand’ and bruised her neck

Jonathan Majors has been charged with several assault and harassment misdemeanours, after being accused of assaulting a woman during an alleged “domestic dispute”, the Manhattan district attorney’s office has confirmed.

New York City police said Majors, the star of Creed III as well as Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, was arrested on Saturday when police responded to a 911 call inside an apartment in the Chelsea neighbourhood in Manhattan.

Lack of data and fallout from Covid both hamper equal rights, and women suffer worst, says new chair of UN disability rights committee

People with disabilities are most at risk and last to be looked for in disasters like earthquakes and floods, a UN official has said.

A lack of available data means they remain “lost and excluded” from rescue operations, said Gertrude Fefoame, the new chair of the UN committee on the rights of persons with disabilities.

Defence minister says government ‘willing to explore’ participating in ‘pillar two’ of defence deal founded by Australia, UK and US

New Zealand’s government has confirmed it is discussing joining the non-nuclear part of the Aukus alliance founded by Australia, the UK and US.

“We have been offered the opportunity to talk about whether we could or wish to participate in that pillar two [non-nuclear] aspect of it,” said Andrew Little, the New Zealand defence minister. “I’ve indicated we will be willing to explore it.”

Exclusive: Australian company resurrects flesh of lost species to demonstrate potential of meat grown from cells

A mammoth meatball has been created by a cultivated meat company, resurrecting the flesh of the long-extinct animals.

The project aims to demonstrate the potential of meat grown from cells, without the slaughter of animals, and to highlight the link between large-scale livestock production and the destruction of wildlife and the climate crisis.

Assault unit members claim in video that superiors ‘want to execute us’ after ‘huge’ losses in eastern Ukraine

• Russia-Ukraine war – latest news updates

Members of a recently formed Russian assault unit say their commanders deployed troops to stop them from retreating and threatened them with death after they suffered “huge” losses in eastern Ukraine.

In a video addressed to President Vladimir Putin, a group of about two dozen men in military uniform say they are the remnants of Storm, a unit under the defence ministry.

Head of Norwegian manufacturer Nammo says plans to increase production at its largest factory are affected by demands of nearby data centre

• See all our Ukraine coverage

One of Europe’s largest ammunition manufacturers has said efforts to meet surging demand from the war in Ukraine have been stymied by a new TikTok data centre that is monopolising electricity in the region close to its biggest factory.

The chief executive of Nammo, which is co-owned by the Norwegian government, said a planned expansion of its largest factory in central Norway hit a roadblock due to a lack of surplus energy, with the construction of TikTok’s new data centre using up electricity in the local area.

• Xanthaki’s advice to IOC for Paris 2024 sparks outrage
• ‘I don’t think it makes sense to exclude all Russian military’

A United Nations expert advising the International Olympic Committee has provoked outrage by claiming that Russian soldiers who have fought in Ukraine should be allowed to compete at the Paris 2024 Games – as long as they have not committed war crimes.

Alexandra Xanthaki, the UN special rapporteur for cultural rights, angered Ukrainian athletes on an IOC‑hosted call by saying that only Russians implicated directly in crimes against humanity or propaganda for war should be barred from international sport.

Ukraine unable to ensure safety of nuclear plant until Russian forces leave; Kyiv air defence shoots down drones

Photos, emails, playlists: our phones and computers have become hosts for our pasts. What happens when the backups fail?

No matter how much our computers assure us they’re backing everything up to a hard drive in the sky, memory failure remains a hardwired part of our lives. Writers reflect on when a digital loss created an emotional hole – from the college essay that disappeared minutes before the due date to an iPhone update that lost years of photographs.

Elvira and her brothers, Ricard and Ramón, were left at a train station in Barcelona aged two, four and five. As an adult, when Elvira decided to look for her parents, she discovered a family history wilder than anything she had imagined

On 22 April 1984, a sandy-haired, ringleted two-year-old girl named Elvira was driven with her brothers, Ricard and Ramón, aged four and five, to a grand railway terminus in Barcelona. The children, dressed in designer clothes, rode in a white Mercedes-Benz driven by their father’s French friend Denis. He parked near the modernist Estación de Francia and walked them into the hangar-like hall, which had shiny, patterned marble floors and was topped by two glass domes. Once there, he told the children to wait while he bought sweets.

The three siblings waited, but Denis did not return. Eventually, Elvira started crying. A railway worker asked what was wrong and Ramón, who spoke French and Spanish, explained. The police were called, but when they asked the children their parents’ names, they did not know. Nor could the children give their own surnames, or say where they lived – except that, until recently, it had been Paris.

Florence Débarre’s discovery of genetic data online showed for first time that animals susceptible to coronavirus were present at market

• Today in Focus podcast: ‘It’s way beyond just science’: untangling the hunt for Covid’s origins

One of the most compelling clues to the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic was uploaded without announcement to a scientific database, going unnoticed for weeks.

And then, just as suddenly, it vanished from public view.

Dr Peter Attia is an expert on longevity and preventative medicine. He explains how sleep, weight training and other incremental changes can make us much more resilient

Twenty years ago, Peter Attia was working as a trainee surgeon at Johns Hopkins hospital in Baltimore, where he saved countless people facing what he calls “fast death”. “I trained in a very, very violent city,” he tells me. “We were probably averaging 15 or 16 people a day getting shot or stabbed. And, you know, that’s when surgeons can save your life. We’re really good at that.”

What got to him, he says, were the people he treated who were in the midst of dying much more slowly. “All the people with cardiovascular disease, all the people with cancer: we were far less effective at saving those people. We could delay death a little bit, but we weren’t bending the arc of their lives.”

The eyes of the world are no longer on Doha and, although some progress has been made, many workers feel let down

The grass inside Lusail Stadium is lush, richly coloured, moist. One hundred days after the World Cup final, the pitch is still watered daily and cut once a week; a team of around 30 workers are on hand to maintain the site. Empty white seats glare from stands that once housed swaying, jubilant Argentina fans; an unseasonable wind whistles under the roof that once held in their songs. The nearby boulevard, where Lionel Messi and his victorious teammates paraded into the December night, is almost empty save for groups of south Asian workers, cloths covering their heads to protect them from the midday sun, filling in the gaps between paving slabs with fresh cement.

There is still work to be done here even though the circus has moved on. But many of those who remain are patently at risk of exploitation and abuse despite Qatar’s attempts to mask the cracks in its partially successful labour reforms. When Qatar announced those flagship measures in August 2020, a decade after it won the right to host the World Cup, Fifa called them “groundbreaking”. The Qataris claimed they were a “major step forward”. The UN said they marked a “new era”. Even Qatar’s strongest critics gave them a cautious welcome.

Compact wifi hifi with big sound supports hundreds of music services, multiple voice assistants and looks the part

The Era 100 is the first of a brand new line of wifi speakers from multi-room audio specialists Sonos, taking what was good about its popular longstanding One series and adding more bass and stereo sound.

The new compact smart speaker costs £249 ($249/A$399), making it the mid-range option in the company’s speaker line after the firm’s collaboration with Ikea starting at £99.

Dimensions: 18.3 x 12 x 13.1cm

Weigh: 2kg

Speakers: two tweeters, one midwoofer

Connectivity: wifi 6, Bluetooth 5, USB-C, AirPlay 2, Spotify Connect

Women are expected to play an impossible game: show compassion and submission while being assertive and confident

When Devin McNalley, a Michigan native, landed a job in marketing at a large legacy automotive company in her 20s, she couldn’t wait to prove her worth. Her university degree in communications and a self-starter attitude that had transformed a server job into a PR one made her believe she could do good work, get noticed, and even start to meaningfully climb the corporate ladder.

Devin was entering a male-dominated industry, but she didn’t blink at it. Her mother was among the first generation of women to enter white-collar industries en masse in the second half of the 20th century. The figure of a corporate woman was normal to her, and she had good reason to believe her qualifications, combined with her natural intelligence, charm, and assertiveness, would work in her favor as she sought to get ahead.

Since 1946, despite floods, cyclones and remote terrain, the birds have carried vital intelligence round Odisha state. Now the authorities want to clip their wings …

With social media and smartphones offering instant communications, the postcard and the telegram are virtually obsolete. But in India’s eastern state of Odisha, police are working hard to preserve an even older practice – carrier pigeons.

Used to carry messages between stations in remote regions and keep in touch with police units on the move, the police pigeons of Odisha also proved to be the only dependable method of communication during devastating floods in 1982 and a 1999 super-cyclone that caused widespread destruction in the coastal state. Indeed, the handlers say pigeon post helped save many lives.

Democracies should be maturely debating online safety and data, not making kneejerk responses that risk an idea we all cherish

TikTok’s chief executive, Shou Zi Chew, discovered during his five-hour grilling by US Congress what Huawei could have told him all along: being owned by a Chinese company is bad for business.

In fact, the panic over TikTok is a lot like like Huawei and 5G all over again. The security and privacy risks are plausible, but largely without evidence. What this is really about is trust, trade and geopolitics.

Emily Taylor is an associate fellow in the International Security Programme, Chatham House, CEO of Oxford Information Labs and editor of the Journal of Cyber Policy

Paintings and sculptures are easier to transport and hide than yachts and private jets. Don’t let them slip through the net

René Magritte, one of Belgium’s most famous artists, was a leading member of the 1920s movement called surrealism, which sought revolution against the constraints of the rational mind. When describing his paintings, Magritte said they “evoke mystery” and strived to ask beholders: “What does that mean? It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing, it is unknowable.” I sometimes feel as if I am looking at a Magritte painting when examining Russians’ ability to evade western sanctions policies.

Arkady Rotenberg, worth a reported $3.5bn (£2.9bn), is a childhood friend of Vladimir Putin. He used to be the Russian president’s judo sparring partner, before progressing to become a rich businessman. Rotenberg has publicly claimed to own the $1bn so-called “Putin’s Palace”, a huge Italianate complex on the Black Sea coast said to be secretly owned by the Russian president.

The UK’s obsession with jail time is counterproductive and cruel. There are better ways to deal with wrongdoing

Auriol Grey, who has cerebral palsy and lives in specially adapted accommodation, was walking along a footpath in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, and was infuriated to see a bicycle coming towards her. She waved her arm at it, making the 77-year-old rider swerve, lose her balance and fall into the road, where she was hit by a passing car and died. An act of what might be called antisocial behaviour was followed by a terrible accident. Grey is now serving three years in prison for manslaughter.

Britain’s judicial system is obsessed with prison to a degree that is unlike any other country in western Europe. The number of prisoners has roughly doubled since the 1990s. Prison conditions are so bad that a Dutch court refused to extradite a convict to Britain on grounds of its “inhumane” jails.

Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist