A time of opportunity seemed to lie ahead in 1975, but has PNG and its leaders lived up to that promise?

In the early 1970s, Dame Meg Taylor remembers a sense of immense optimism as Papua New Guinea stood on the brink of independence. At that time she joined the staff of Sir Michael Somare, who would later become the country’s first prime minister.

“There was a lot of hope,” said Taylor, diplomat and former secretary general of the Pacific Islands Forum.

President says team will start reaching out to trade partners with new tariff rates as 90-day pause ends this week

Donald Trump said on Sunday that his administration plans to start sending letters on Monday to US trade partners, dictating new tariff rates to be imposed on goods they sell to Americans. “It could be 12, maybe 15,” the president told reporters, “and we’ve made deals also, so we’re going to have a combination of letters and some deals have been made.”

With his previously announced 90-day pause on tariffs set to end on 9 July, the president was asked if the new rates would go into effect this week, or on 1 August, as some officials had suggested.

Married couple die in Russian strike against Kostyantynivka; Ukraine on agenda as Macron makes state visit to UK. What we know on day 1,230

Russia and Ukraine struck each other with hundreds of drones on Sunday, throwing Russian air travel into disarray, as Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced Ukrainian deals with western partners allowing Kyiv to scale up production of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Six Ukrainian drones targeted Moscow, said its mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, while another two were reported outside Russia’s second largest city, St Petersburg. Rosaviatsiya, Russia’s civil aviation authority, reported temporary airport closures in the two cities and other regional centres and said dozens of flights had been delayed.

In Ukraine on Sunday, Russian drones injured three civilians in Kyiv and at least two in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, located in the north-east, officials said. A Russian attack involving Shahed drones also targeted port infrastructure in Mykolaiv in central Ukraine, according to its governor, Vitaliy Kim. He reported warehouses and the port’s power grid were damaged but there were no casualties.

Russia killed four civilians and injured a fifth with a glide bomb and a drone in the frontline town of Kostyantynivka in eastern Ukraine, prosecutors said. The drone struck a car in which a married couple were travelling, killing the 39-year-old woman and 40-year-old man on the spot.

Zelenskyy said Ukraine had struck deals with European allies and a leading US defence company to step up drone production, ensuring Kyiv receives “hundreds of thousands” more UAVs this year. Zelenskyy did not name the US business in his nightly video address to Ukrainians, but said Ukraine and Denmark had also agreed to co-produce drones and other weapons on Danish soil.

Russia said on Sunday it had captured the villages of Piddubne in Donetsk and Sobolivka in Kharkiv. Ukraine did not immediately comment on Russia’s claims which were also not independently confirmed. Piddubne was home to about 500 people before the conflict and lies 7km (four miles) from the border of Ukraine’s central Dnipropetrovsk region. Sobolivka lies 3km (two miles) west of the town of Kupiansk, outside areas Russia claims it is holding, according to battlefield maps by the US-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW).

Emmanuel Macron, the French president, is to begin a state visit to the UK on Tuesday, addressing parliament and co-chairing a meeting on Ukraine. Macron and Starmer will host the 37th Franco-British summit in London on Thursday, where they are set to discuss opportunities to strengthen defence ties in response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The summit will touch upon the deployment of “a reassurance force” to Ukraine after a ceasefire and how to “increase pressure” on Russia to accept an unconditional ceasefire, the Élysée Palace said. The last state visit by a French president to the UK was made by Nicolas Sarkozy in 2008.

Survey comes before supreme court decision on secret commission payments ruled unlawful by court of appeal

More than 23 million people believe they could be due compensation for a mis-sold car loan, according to a poll before this month’s supreme court decision.

Borrowers, banks and the government are anxiously awaiting the ruling, which could trigger one of the biggest redress schemes since the £50bn payment protection insurance (PPI). The PPI saga forced UK banks to compensate people who had bought often worthless insurance cover.

Iceland will be leaving the party early but, after some initial wobbles, the hosts are still going strong. A quarter-final place beckons for Pia Sundhage’s Switzerland after second-half goals from Géraldine Reuteler and Alayah Pilgrim finally settled a nation’s nerves.

Providing Sundhage’s players do not stumble against Finland on Thursday in Geneva they should be on course to finish behind Norway in Group A and on course for a potential last-eight date with Italy or, more probably, Spain.

Residents observe day of prayer after 82 people killed and 10 girls and one camp counselor still unaccounted for

Residents in central Texas were observing a day of prayer on Sunday for at least 82 people killed and dozens missing in Friday’s devastating flash flooding, as a search and rescue operation for survivors began to morph into a grim exercise of recovering bodies.

Relatives continued an anxious wait for news of 10 girls and one camp counselor still unaccounted for from a riverside summer camp that was overwhelmed by flash flooding from the Guadalupe River, which rose 26ft (8 meters) in 45 minutes on Friday morning after torrential pre-dawn rain north of San Antonio.