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At 4pm on a Friday afternoon in June 2019, Macy Smith, then 17 years old, was driving alone in a white hatchback near Pilot Mountain in North Carolina. The road twisted through a thick forest and a torrential summer storm lashed down. Macy lost control on a corner and the car hydroplaned, hurtling through the trees and flipping over three times before settling in a ravine. She was flung into the back seat and the vehicle pinned her left arm to the ground.

Macy was frantic: she stretched for her phone, but couldnt reach it. She listened out for passing cars, but it was a remote spot and they didnt come often. The first went by without stopping, then the next, then a third. It became dark. Macy had lost feeling in the arm that was trapped, and her neck throbbed. By 10.30pm, 28 cars had come and gone. But then the 29th did stop: Macy heard the doors open, and the voices of her stepfather and brother calling her name. They followed the tyre skids down the embankment and her stepfather held her hand through the blown-out sunroof. Macy had kept it together until this point, but now she sobbed.

The family had found Macy using the Find My Friends app, which allows users with Apple iPhones to share their location with others. Her mother, Catrina Cramer Alexander, had checked it when Macy hadnt come home and was not answering calls. They then jumped in their car and followed the pulsing blue dot to the ravine.

Having that location, if we didnt have that, we would have never known where to look, Alexander told a local TV station. Im certain that that is what saved her life.

What happened to Macy is every parents worst nightmare, though mercifully there was a happy-ish ending: Macy had a fractured neck and underwent an operation to repair nerve damage in her arm. But its not hard to imagine a worse outcome. What if her phone had smashed? What if it couldnt get a signal in the forest? Its unreal that I survived that crash, she said afterwards.

Find My Friends was unveiled on 4 October 2011, the day before Steve Jobss death, and has been installed as standard on Apple products since 2015. But the app was not the first or even the market leader: thats Life360, which describes itself as a family safety service and has received funding from Google and Facebook since it was founded in 2008. Standard location-sharing apps, such as Find My Friends on iOS devices and Google Family Link for Android, give a GPS pinpoint for users, which they can either choose to reveal to others or not. Life360 does that too, but for a fee you can activate premium features, such as being notified if someone in your circle has been involved in a car accident, or if they have driven above the speed limit or even gone beyond a set geo-fenced area.

There is a significant market for these features. Life360 is used by 32 million people in more then 140 countries; its currently the seventh most downloaded social-networking app on the App Store and its San Francisco-based company has been valued at more than $1bn. A survey of 4,000 parents and guardians in the UK in 2019 found that 40% of them used real-time GPS location tracking on a daily basis for their children; 15% said that they checked their whereabouts constantly.

That word constantly will send many teenagers into a cold sweat. At best, location-tracking apps can feel like an extension of helicopter parenting; at worst, they might feel like stalking. While all the apps tend to emphasise that they provide security for the child and peace of mind for the parent, some clearly go into deeper, more invasive territory. One, Find My Kids, allows you to activate the microphone on your childs phone remotely, so you can eavesdrop on their interactions. OurPact gives you access to screenshots of your childs online activity, all encrypted for maximum safety. Bark monitors and scans messages sent from a device, looking for issues such as cyberbullying, sexual content, online predators, depression, suicidal ideation, threats of violence, and more. The app claims to cover almost 6 million children, and has detected 478,000 self-harm situations and 2.5m severe bullying situations.

Location tracking has become a battleground in many families, bringing up issues of trust, privacy and personal growth. And while the discussion mostly relates to teens, it can start much earlier. Find My Kids, which launched in Russia in 2016 and is now worldwide, notes on its website: Youd [sic] kid is too young for a smartphone? Use childrens GPS smartwatch! In the US, the GizmoWatch 2 offers real-time location tracking and is aimed at children as young as three. KIDSnav is pitched at five-year-olds and up and offers GPS tracking and a built-in microphone to listen in on whatever is happening around your child.

All parents have to ask themselves what is best for their child. And Macy Smith and her family are in no doubt that location-tracking apps can be invaluable: in fact, after the accident, the family upgraded from Find My Friends to Life360, because of the crash detection and roadside assistance it offers.

I know its hard for teenagers to give up your privacy, Macy told ABC News, but sneaking out and being places you dont want your parents to know about is not worth being trapped under a car for seven hours.

In a sense, location-tracking apps have crept up on us. Most parents would agree that planting a chip in your child that monitored their movements and vital signs as depicted in the Arkangel episode of the dystopian, tech-anxiety series Black Mirror in 2018 would be a little extreme. But smartphones have put similar technology in all of our pockets and, well, when its 12.30am and you want to go to bed and your kids not back from their friends house, its pretty difficult to resist.

If its on your phone, why would you not look? says Sonia Livingstone, a professor of social psychology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, who has written extensively on childrens rights in the digital age. Up till now, parents and children had evolved lots of ways of handling it: Phone when you reach your friends I wont worry as long as youre home by 11. But now with the apps and tracking, you know everything. So its: Why did they go to the shopping centre on the way to their friends? They said they were going to this friend, why are they on that side of town? Once youve got information, it is almost wrong not to look at it.

Not all teenagers find location tracking an invasion of their privacy. Many are happy to share their whereabouts constantly with their friends: Snap Map, a popular, opt-in function of Snapchat, pinpoints the users exact position and those in their circle (with alarming accuracy) whenever the app is turned on. Some dont even mind their parents keeping tabs on their movements. When I think about it, it makes me feel safe, because I know that Mum or Dad knows where I am, says Lola Pethybridge, a 17-year-old student from south London. Or even my brother who is two years younger if it came down to him having to figure out where I was. Its just that safety net where you can say, I need help. Or, Can you come and get me? And the relief of, Oh, someone I trust knows where I am.

Next year, Pethybridge hopes to go to university will she turn off the familys Find My Friends then? Just judging by my habits, she says, I dont think I will.

The subject of location tracking is a more contentious issue with other families. Alicia Hardy, a solicitor from Petersfield in Hampshire, encouraged her two children, Ben and Louise, to use Find My Friends after hearing about it from her sister who lives in the US. Ben, who was 17 at the time, lasted for about a month. At that point in my life, I wasnt necessarily that happy about Mum knowing where I was all the time, says Ben, who is now 23. He smiles, I was sneaking out to smoke, so I didnt want Mum to see that I was leaving school.

Louise, meanwhile, was 14 and went along with her mothers Find My Friends request; now 20, they both still use it. I introduced it not because I wanted to catch my kids out doing stuff wrong, because frankly, I did stuff wrong, but for me it was more an anxious-mother thing, explains Alicia. Children can be on their phones all day to their mates. But they dont answer their phone to their parents or text them back. And thats really, really irritating for parents, because they systematically would not answer for hours. I tend to catastrophise, whereas Marco doesnt even think about it. (Marco Hardy, her ex-partner and Ben and Louises father, agrees: Ive never even looked at an app or even contemplated it, he says.)

By many objective measures, young people face fewer dangers than they did a generation ago, but it probably doesnt feel like that to their parents. Livingstone has found in her research that daughters are especially likely to be tracked, with concerns about sexual assault and, in recent times, reports of drink-spiking. Many of the apps lean into these worst-case scenarios. One of the add-ons that Life360 offers is Disaster Response: Evacuation support in case of natural disasters, active shooter events, and more.

Louise Hardy agrees that, at times, location-tracking apps have made her feel safer, but still has some conflict about them. As a kid youre meant to do stuff that your parents dont know about, she says. Youre meant to make mistakes, youre meant to mess up. So them always having an eye on you takes away from childhood a little bit. But Mum is a worrier, so its just a case of keeping her a bit sane.

The Hardy family are clearly very open with each other, and thats important according to Philippa Perry, a psychotherapist and the Observer Magazines agony aunt. Children sometimes want some things to be private, she says. I never used online monitoring with my child because she was an adult before I knew about the software. I relied on that old-fashioned method of asking her where she was going. Once she answered me, Im not telling you. To which I replied, Darling, even Dad has to tell me where hes going so we know where to start the police search. Which, luckily, she found reasonable.

For Perry, location tracking, like most technology, is neither good nor evil: what matters is the boundaries you set and all parties being comfortable with the negotiation. Its not for an outsider like me to say whether or not to use it, she says. Like all things, if you want your children to be open with you and feel like they can tell you anything, dont react angrily or negatively or dismissively when they confide in you. If you have done this in the past and now you have a mute teenager, try to repair that rupture by telling them where you overreacted in the past without making excuses for yourself and say youll do better next time. And do better next time.

Many teens feel a line has been crossed, especially when their parents make location tracking a condition of paying their phone bill. On the online forum Reddit, on boards such as r/insaneparents and r/raisedbynarcissists, kids share horror stories and screenshots of unhinged interactions with their parents. On TikTok, videos instruct users on how to change their phone settings to fool Life360 into freezing their location (I broke Life360, you are welcome). On Twitter, a 20-year-old called Cedar Rose from Kansas City recently made an appeal for $3,000 so they could leave home and their homophobic anti-vax parents who track their movements constantly on Life360. This is my final resort, they wrote. I have no freedom in this house, absolutely none. And I cant take it any more. To date, Cedar has only raised $510, along with some snide comments that they should just get a job.

Whether the use of these apps keeps children safer and more sensible is disputed, but there is obviously the potential to impact relationships between parents and their offspring: certainly where trust has been eroded, location tracking is unlikely to repair the damage. A small study in the Netherlands found that teenagers who were monitored were more secretive and less likely to confide in their parents. If young people want their privacy, theyll find a way of getting it, predicts Livingstone.

Where there is more widespread agreement, though, is concern about what happens with the data that is collected. Life360, for example, made $16m in 2020 from selling location data (it is how the app keeps its basic model free, the company states). This information might end up with insurance companies, or realistically with anyone who feels there is a value in paying for it. Livingstone says, The idea that children are getting a detailed digital footprint not of their own making that tracks everywhere they go, and thats being used to sell advertising to them now or later, is reprehensible.

Its no spoiler that in the Black Mirror episode Arkangel, the (well-intentioned) use of location tracking ends in disaster: the abject breakdown of trust and understanding between a mother and daughter. In the real world, the experiment that we have only tenuously signed up for is ongoing and we will experience the results as they happen, with the fallout felt by our loved ones. Children have always had times in which they were unobserved and playing outside and generally at risk and coping, says Livingstone. We have a crisis in mental health, so it may all be linked that theyre not developing those everyday habits of resilience. But there are some huge unknowns: we have no idea really what it is to grow up when you are constantly observed. So in that sense, we just have to say, we dont know.

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Honey, lets track the kids: the rise of parental surveillance - The Guardian

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Mother Nature struck after 68 laps in Sundays NASCAR Cup Series race at Dover Motor Speedway, pushing the conclusion to the 400-miler to Monday.

The field ran 10 laps under caution prior to bringing the 36 cars to pit road for the red flag on Lap 78. Kyle Larson is the race leader, with Chase Elliott, Ryan Blaney, Martin Truex Jr. and William Byron rounding out the top five.

Though not even one-quarter of the race is complete, there were still some key takeaways on Sunday.

Editors note: The race will resume Monday at noon ET on FS1 (MRN/SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).

After starting second, it took Hamlin 19 laps to get the lead from Chris Buescher. But once the No. 11 car got out front, he set sail.

Hamlin went on to lead the next 55 laps, which is more than hed led in the first 10 races of the season combined (49). Thus far in 2022, the No. 11 Toyota has just one top-10 finish, coming via his win at Richmond.

RELATED: See the running order

Throughout Hamlins career, hes struggled at Dover, at one point being among his worst tracks on the schedule. In recent years, however, the Virginia native has eight top-10 finishes in the last 11 races at the Monster Mile, including his lone win at Dover in 2020.

When the race restarts on Monday, Hamlin will be listed eighth, having pitted for four tires under the caution for rain.

After winning his first career NASCAR Busch Light Pole Award on Saturday, Bueschers stock rose. That continued into the beginning of the race Sunday, as the No. 17 Ford paced the field for the opening 18 laps. In 233 Cup starts (including Sunday), its the second-most laps the Texan has ever led in a Cup race, trailing only Homestead-Miami from last year (57).

When Buescher lost the lead to Hamlin on Lap 19, he quickly dropped to fourth, behind Larson and Elliott, but stayed in the top five. Like the No. 11 car, the No. 17 team also brought the pole sitter to pit road under the caution for rain.

On Monday, Buescher will restart from 13th position, losing a few spots on pit road from the first pit stall. Bueschers best Dover finish is 14th in 2020, though he won an Xfinity Series race at the Monster Mile in 2015. Keep an eye on him.

Saturdays group practice sessions were eventful, to say the least. Many drivers, including Byron and Tyler Reddick, went for wild rides.

Some of the series big teams continued to struggle in the opening stint of Sundays race. With a competition caution at Lap 40, Stewart-Haas Racing drivers Chase Briscoe and Cole Custer had already lost a lap to the leader. As the yellow flag flew, Austin Dillon was next to go one lap down, with Joey Logano and Byron just ahead of the No. 3 car.

During the competition caution, Logano came over the radio and said his No. 22 Ford was out of control and felt like he was going to wreck. Fortunately for Briscoe, he was the free pass recipient.

Making a strategy call to get track position, Byron will restart fifth on Monday, with Dillon and Logano mired down in 26th and 27th, respectively. Briscoe made his way up to 24th.

Well see if these drivers, and others, can turn it around on Monday.

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Dover so far: What weve learned through 78 laps completed at the Monster Mile - NASCAR

But as televised theater, the formula works. Mr. Carlson reliably draws more than three million viewers. When he defended the idea of demographic replacement on a different Fox show in April, the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish civil rights group, called for his firing, noting that the same concept had helped fuel a string of terrorist attacks, including the 2018 mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue. But when Mr. Carlson ran a clip of his comments on his own prime-time show a few days later, according to Nielsen data, the segment got 14 percent more viewers in the advertiser-sweet demo of 24- to 54-year-olds than Mr. Carlsons average for the year.

Every cable network cares about ratings, but none more so than Fox, whose post-Ailes slogan stresses neither fairness nor balance but sheer audience dominance: Most Watched, Most Trusted. And at Fox, according to former employees, no host scrutinizes his ratings more closely than Mr. Carlson. He learned how to succeed on television, in part, by failing there.

The talk-show host who rails against immigrants and the tech barons of a new Gilded Age is himself the descendant of a German immigrant who became one of the great ranching barons of the old Gilded Age. Henry Miller landed in New York in 1850 and built a successful butcher business in San Francisco; along with a partner, he went on to assemble a land empire spanning three states. They obtained some parcels simply by bribing government officials. Others were wrung from cash-poor Mexican Californians who, following the Mexican-American War, now lived in a newly expanded United States and couldnt afford to defend their old Mexican land grants in court against speculators like Mr. Carlsons ancestor. Through the early 20th century, Mr. Millers land and cattle empire was utterly dependent on immigrant labor, said David Igler, a historian at the University of California, Irvine, and author of a history of the Miller empire.

Over the years, the Miller fortune dispersed, as great fortunes often do, into a fractious array of family branches. Mr. Carlsons mother, Lisa McNear Lombardi, was born to a third-generation Miller heiress, debuted in San Francisco society and met Richard Carlson, a successful local television journalist, in the 1960s. They eloped to Reno, Nev., in 1967; Tucker McNear Carlson was born two years later, followed by his brother, Buckley. The family moved to the Los Angeles area, where Richard Carlson took a job at the local ABC affiliate, but the Carlsons marriage grew rocky and the station fired him a few years later. In early 1976, he moved to San Diego to take a new television job. The boys went with him according to court records, their parents had agreed it would be temporary and commuted to Los Angeles on weekends while he and Lisa tried to work out their differences.

But a few months later, just days after the boys returned from a Hawaii vacation with their mother, Richard began divorce proceedings and sought full custody of the children. In court filings, Lisa Carlson claimed he had blindsided her and left her virtually penniless. The couple separated and began fighting over custody and spousal support. Mr. Carlson alleged that his wife had repeated difficulties with abuse of alcohol, marijuana, cocaine and amphetamines, and that he had grown concerned about both her mental state and her treatment of the boys. On at least one occasion, he asserted, the boys had walked off the plane in San Diego without shoes; the mothers own family members, he said, had urged him not to let her see the children unsupervised. He won custody when Tucker was 8, at a hearing Lisa did not attend: According to court records, she had left the country. She eventually settled in France, never to see her sons again. A few years later, Richard Carlson married Patricia Swanson, an heiress to the frozen-food fortune, who adopted both boys.

For many years, Tucker Carlson was tight-lipped about the rupture. In a New Yorker profile in 2017, not long after his show debuted, he described his mothers departure as a totally bizarre situation which I never talk about, because it was actually not really part of my life at all. But as controversy and criticism engulfed his show, Mr. Carlson began to describe his early life in darker tones, painting the California of his youth as a countercultural dystopia and his mother as abusive and erratic. In 2019, speaking on a podcast with the right-leaning comedian Adam Carolla, Mr. Carlson said his mother had forced drugs on her children. She was like, doing real drugs around us when we were little, and getting us to do it, and just like being a nut case, Mr. Carlson said. By his account, his mother made clear to her two young sons that she had little affection for them. When you realize your own mother doesnt like you, when she says that, its like, oh gosh, he told Mr. Carolla, adding that he felt all kinds of rage about it.

Mr. Carlson was a heavy drinker until his 30s, something he has attributed in part to his early childhood. But by his own account, his mothers abandonment also provided him with a kind of pre-emptive defense against the attacks that have rained down on his Fox show. Criticism from people who hate me doesnt really mean anything to me, Mr. Carlson told Megyn Kelly, the former Fox anchor, on her podcast last fall. He went on to say: Im not giving those people emotional control over me. Ive been through that. I lived through that as a child. One lesson from his youth, Mr. Carlson told one interviewer, was that you should only care about the opinions of people who care about you.

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How Tucker Carlson Stoked White Fear to Conquer Cable - The New York Times

SHANGHAI, May 2 (Reuters) - When Tesla's (TSLA.O) Shanghai plant and other auto factories were shut over the last two months by emergency measures to control Chinas biggest COVID-19 outbreak, the burning question was how quickly they could restart to meet surging demand.

But with the Shanghai lockdown grinding into its fourth week, and similar measures imposed in dozens of smaller cities, the worlds largest boom market for electric cars has gone bust.

Other companies from luxury goods makers to fast-food restaurants have also offered a first read on the lost sales and shaken confidence of recent weeks, even as Beijing rolls out measures to help COVID-hit industries and stimulate demand. read more

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Joey Wat, CEO of Yum China (9987.HK), which owns KFC and Taco Bell, said in a letter to investors that April sales had been significantly impacted by COVID controls. In response, the company simplified its menu, streamlined staffing and promoted bulk orders for locked-down communities, she said.

The pressing question now is: how and when will Chinese consumers start buying everything from Teslas to tacos again?

In China's once-hot EV market, the recent turmoil is a stark example of a one-two economic punch, first to supply and then to demand, from Beijings hard-line implementation of COVID controls across the worlds second-largest economy. read more

Before Shanghai was locked down in early April to contain a COVID-19 outbreak, sales of electric vehicles had been booming. Teslas sales in China had jumped 56% in the first quarter, while sales for EVs from its larger rival in China, BYD (002594.SZ), had quintupled. Then came the lockdowns.

Showrooms, stores and malls in Shanghai were shut and its 25 million residents were unable to shop online for much beyond food and daily necessities due to delivery bottlenecks. Analysts at Nomura estimated in mid-April that 45 cities in China, representing 40% of its GDP, were under full or partial lockdowns, with the economy at a growing risk of recession.

The China Passenger Car Association estimated retail deliveries of passenger cars in China were 39% lower in the first three weeks of April from a year earlier.

COVID control measures cut into shipments, car dealers held back from promoting new models, and sales tumbled in Chinas richest markets of Shanghai and Guangdong, the association said.

One dealer of a premium German car brand in Jiangsu province, which borders Shanghai, told Reuters sales plunged by one-third to half in April, citing lockdowns and trucking bottlenecks that made it difficult to deliver orders.

He was even more worried about the impact on consumer spending power, he said, declining to give his name as he was not permitted to speak to the media.

"It could be worse than the first wave of COVID in 2020, when the economic recovery was quick and strong. Nowadays there are more uncertainties in the economy, and the stock and property markets are not doing well," he said.

Much will depend on how fast these restrictions can be lifted but the coming weeks may be difficult, Helen de Tissot, chief financial officer at French spirits maker Pernod Ricard (PERP.PA), told Reuters on Thursday. read more

Kering (PRTP.PA), which owns luxury brands including Gucci and Saint Laurent, said a significant chunk of its stores had been shuttered in April.

Its very difficult to predict what will happen after the lockdown, said Jean-Marc Duplaix, Kerings chief financial officer. read more

Apple (AAPL.O) also warned at its latest results over COVID-hit demand in China. read more

City authorities from Beijing to Shenzhen are trying to stimulate some demand by giving out millions of dollars worth of shopping vouchers to encourage residents to spend.

On Friday, Guangdong, a manufacturing powerhouse with an economy larger than South Koreas, rolled out its own incentives to try to restart sales of EVs and plug-in hybrids.

These include subsidies of up to 8,000 yuan ($1,200) for a select range of what China classes as new energy vehicles, including from Volkswagen (VOWG_p.DE) and BYD. Tesla, second in EV sales in China, was excluded from the subsidy programme.

The U.S. automaker did not respond to a request for comment.

Chongqing, another major auto manufacturing hub, in March said it would offer cash of up to 2,000 yuan ($300) for shoppers who exchange old cars for new models and set aside another $3 million for other measures to spur sales.

While noting such measures, Credit Suisse analysts still said they believe COVID control measures have put both online and offline consumption on a downward spiral.

"We see the consumer sector as being at major risk if the prolonged pandemic and further tightening continue across China," they said in an April 19 research note.

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Reporting by Zhang Yan and Brenda Goh; Additional reporting by Sophie Yu in Beijing and Silvia Aloisi in Milan; Writing by Kevin Krolicki; Editing by Tom Hogue

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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China COVID hard line eats into everything from Teslas to tacos - Reuters

Around 100 civilians were on Sunday evacuated from the Azovstal steelworks in Mariupol, the last holdout of Ukrainian forces in the city. Around 1,000 civilians and 2,000 Ukrainian fighters are thought to be sheltering in bunkers and tunnels underneath the plant, enduring a weeks-long siege with little food or water.

One of the civilians evacuated spoke to Reuters, telling the news agency, We didnt see the sun for so long:

Cowering in the labyrinth of Soviet-era bunkers far beneath the vast Azovstal steel works, Natalia Usmanova felt her heart would stop she was so terrified as Russian bombs rained down on Mariupol, sprinkling her with concrete dust.

Usmanova, 37, spoke to Reuters on Sunday after being evacuated from the plant, a sprawling complex founded under Josef Stalin and designed with a subterranean network of bunkers and tunnels to withstand attack.

I feared that the bunker would not withstand it I had terrible fear, Usmanova said, describing the time sheltering underground.

When the bunker started to shake, I was hysterical, my husband can vouch for that: I was so worried the bunker would cave in.

We didnt see the sun for so long, she said, speaking in the village of Bezimenne in an area of Donetsk under the control of Russia-backed separatists around 30 km (20 miles) east of Mariupol.

She recalled the lack of oxygen in the shelters and the fear that had gripped the lives of people hunkered down there.

Usmanova was among dozens of civilians evacuated from the plant in Mariupol, a southern port city that has been besieged by Russian forces for weeks and left a wasteland.

Usmanova said she joked with her husband on the bus ride out, in a convoy agreed by the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), that they would no longer have to go to the lavatory with a torch.

You just cant imagine what we have been through - the terror, Usmanova said. I lived there, worked there all my life, but what we saw there was just terrible.

Thank you for following todays coverage of the war in Ukraine.

We will be closing this liveblog but you can catch all the latest developments on our new blog launched below.

US first lady Jill Biden is set to visit Romania and Slovakia on Thursday for five days to meet with US service members and embassy personnel, displaced Ukrainian parents and children, humanitarian aid workers, and teachers, her office has said.

On Sunday, celebrated as Mothers Day in the United States, Biden will meet with Ukrainian mothers and children who have been forced to flee their homes because of Russias war against Ukraine, her office said according to Reuters.

The wife of president Joe Biden will meet with US military service members at Mihail Kogalniceau Airbase in Romania on Friday, before heading to Bucharest to meet with Romanian government officials, US embassy staff, humanitarian aid workers, and teachers working with displaced Ukrainian children.

The trip also includes stops in the Slovakian cities of Bratislava, Kosice and Vysne Nemecke, where Biden will meet with government officials, refugees and aid workers, her office said.

Bidens visit is the latest show of support for Ukraine and neighbouring countries that are helping Ukrainian refugees by top US representatives.

South Korean ambassador Kim Hyung-tae has returned to Kyiv along with some embassy staff, the news agency Yonhap has reported citing the Foreign Ministry in Seoul.

The South Korean embassy was evacuated at the beginning of the Russian invasion and staff had been working at a temporary office in the western Ukrainian city of Chernivtsi since March.

The ministry said Kim would start working from Kyiv on Monday and that it was considering the phased return of remaining staff in accordance with the future security situation there.

[They] plan to carry out tasks on diplomatic affairs and protecting [South Korean] nationals under closer cooperation with the Ukrainian government.

More than 20 embassies, including those of the EU, UK, France, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands, have already reopened in the Ukrainian capital.

US secretary of state Antony Blinken said US diplomats would gradually begin returning to the country during a visit to Kyiv last week.

Associated Press has filed a story saying that the Ghost of Kyiv, an unnamed fighter pilot who was praised for supposedly shooting down several Russian planes, is in fact a myth.

Ukrainian authorities admitted that the legendary pilot was a myth.

The Ghost of Kyiv is a super-hero legend whose character was created by Ukrainians! Ukraines air force said in Ukrainian on Facebook.

The statement came after multiple media outlets published stories wrongly identifying Major Stepan Tarabalka as the man behind the moniker. Tarabalka was a real pilot who died on March 13 during air combat and was posthumously awarded the title Hero of Ukraine, Ukraines air force said last month.

But he was not the Ghost of Kyiv, the force said in Saturdays statement. The information about the death of the The Ghost of #Kyiv is incorrect, Ukraines air force wrote in a separate post Saturday on Twitter. The #GhostOfKyiv is alive, it embodies the collective spirit of the highly qualified pilots of the Tactical Aviation Brigade who are successfully defending #Kyiv and the region.

Adam Schiff, chairman of the US House Intelligence Committee, has told CNN its only a matter of time before US president Joe Biden visits Ukraine.

I have to think that a presidential visit is something under consideration, but only a question of how soon that will be feasible.

On Sunday US House speaker Nancy Pelosi became the highest ranking US official to meet Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy in Kyiv since the start of Russias invasion at the end of February.

The House delegation had discussed Zelenskiys priorities for the next phase of the war, which is concentrated in the east of the country after Russian forces withdrew from around the capital, and Bidens request for a $33bn aid package for Ukraine, Schiff said:

We wanted to discuss with him, within that really vast sum, what is the priority in terms of what weapons that he needs, what other assistance that he needs, Schiff said. We went through a detailed discussion of the next phase of the war. Its moving from a phase in which Ukrainians were ambushing Russian tanks -- it was close-quarters fighting -- to fighting more at a distance using long range artillery, and that changes the nature of what Ukraine needs to defend itself.

Russias top uniformed officer, General Valery Gerasimov, visited dangerous frontline positions in eastern Ukraine last week in a bid to reinvigorate the Russian offensive there, the New York Times has reported citing Ukrainian and US officials.

The Guardian was unable to verify the report.

During the visit, Gerasimov, chief of the Russian general staff, narrowly escaped a deadly Ukrainian attack on a school being used as a military base in the Russian-controlled city of Izium late Saturday, the Times reported.

Around 200 soldiers including at least one general were killed in the strike, a Ukrainian official told the paper, but Gerasimov had already departed for Russia.

The Institute for the Study of War, a US-based think tank, earlier said that Ukrainian forces had likely conducted a rocket artillery strike on a Russian command post in Izyum on April 30 that struck after Russian chief of staff Valery Gerasimov had left but killed other senior Russian officers.

US officials could not confirm the attack and the Russian Defence Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Our working assumption is that he was there because theres a recognition they havent worked out all their problems yet, one of the US officials told the Times. The Russian offensive has been slow, with widespread disarray and poor morale reported among Russian forces.

The Kremlin appears to be focusing its operations around the city of Izium as part of renewed efforts to seize the entirety of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Gerasimov has reportedly been put in command of the push.

Two explosions have taken place in the early hours of Monday in Belgorod, the southern Russian region bordering Ukraine, Vyacheslav Gladkov, the regions governor has written in a social media post.

There were no casualties or damage, Gladkov wrote, according to Reuters.

On Sunday Gladkov had said one person was injured in a fire at a Russian defence ministry facility in Belgorod, while seven homes had been damaged.

Posts on social media said fighter jets and loud explosions had been heard above the city overnight. The Guardian was unable to verify the reports.

Russia last month accused Ukraine of a helicopter attack on a fuel depot in Belgorod, for which Kyiv denied responsibility, as well as shelling villages and firing missiles at an ammunition depot.

Updated at 22.22EDT

A few more images captured by Reuters of the evacuation of civilians from the Azovstal steel works in Mariupol, showing emotional scenes as people were reunited with family members in the village of Bezimenne in the Donetsk region:

Around 100 civilians were on Sunday evacuated from the Azovstal steelworks in Mariupol, the last holdout of Ukrainian forces in the city. Around 1,000 civilians and 2,000 Ukrainian fighters are thought to be sheltering in bunkers and tunnels underneath the plant, enduring a weeks-long siege with little food or water.

One of the civilians evacuated spoke to Reuters, telling the news agency, We didnt see the sun for so long:

Cowering in the labyrinth of Soviet-era bunkers far beneath the vast Azovstal steel works, Natalia Usmanova felt her heart would stop she was so terrified as Russian bombs rained down on Mariupol, sprinkling her with concrete dust.

Usmanova, 37, spoke to Reuters on Sunday after being evacuated from the plant, a sprawling complex founded under Josef Stalin and designed with a subterranean network of bunkers and tunnels to withstand attack.

I feared that the bunker would not withstand it I had terrible fear, Usmanova said, describing the time sheltering underground.

When the bunker started to shake, I was hysterical, my husband can vouch for that: I was so worried the bunker would cave in.

We didnt see the sun for so long, she said, speaking in the village of Bezimenne in an area of Donetsk under the control of Russia-backed separatists around 30 km (20 miles) east of Mariupol.

She recalled the lack of oxygen in the shelters and the fear that had gripped the lives of people hunkered down there.

Usmanova was among dozens of civilians evacuated from the plant in Mariupol, a southern port city that has been besieged by Russian forces for weeks and left a wasteland.

Usmanova said she joked with her husband on the bus ride out, in a convoy agreed by the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), that they would no longer have to go to the lavatory with a torch.

You just cant imagine what we have been through - the terror, Usmanova said. I lived there, worked there all my life, but what we saw there was just terrible.

Hello, this is Helen Livingstone taking over the blog from Maanvi Singh to bring you the latest from the war in Ukraine.

First a bit more from Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrovs interview with Italys Mediaset broadcaster.

He said that Russia was not demanding the surrender of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy as a condition for peace.

We do not demand that he surrender. We demand that he give the order to release all civilians and stop the resistance. Our goal does not include regime change in Ukraine. This is an American speciality. They do it all over the world.

We want to ensure the safety of people in the east of Ukraine, so that they are not threatened by either the militarisation or the nazification of this country, and that there are no threats to the security of the Russian Federation from the territory of Ukraine.

He also denied that Russia would attempt to claim victory in Ukraine by 9 May when Russia marks the end of the second world war with Victory Day saying that the Russian military would not artificially adjust their actions to any date, including Victory Day.

The pace of the operation in Ukraine depends, first of all, on the need to minimise any risks for the civilian population and Russian military personnel.

Asked about recent rumours concerning the health of president Vladimir Putin, he did not answer directly, saying instead:

Ask the foreign leaders who spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin recently, including UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. I think you will understand what is at stake.

Updated at 20.34EDT

Jennifer Rankin, Harry Taylor, Maanvi Singh, Rob Booth

Updated at 20.39EDT

In Kherson, the first major city to fall, Russia is replacing Ukrainian currency with Russian rubles.

Per AFP, Kirill Stremousov, a civilian and military administrator of Kherson said that beginning 1 May, we will move to the ruble zone, according state news agency RIA Novosti.

It is a tactic to legitimize Russias control of the city and surrounding areas through installing a pro-Russian administration, according to an intelligence update released by Britains Defense Ministry. The move is indicative of Russian intent to exert strong political and economic influence in Kherson over the long term, the Defense Ministry said.

Russias foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said that the county is working to prevent nuclear war, Reuters reports.

In an interview with Italian TV, Lavrov said: Western media misrepresent Russian threats. Russia has never interrupted efforts to reach agreements that guarantee that a nuclear war never develops.

Lavrov also doubled down on Russian conspiracy theories and propaganda about Nazism in Ukraine.

This week, Pentagon press secretary John Kirby called Russias justification for the war in Ukraine BS. Its hard to square [Vladimir Putins] BS that this is about Nazism in Ukraine, and its about protecting Russians in Ukraine, and its about defending Russian national interests, when none of them, none of them were threatened by Ukraine, Kirby said. Its brutality of the coldest and the most depraved sort.

Updated at 18.19EDT

Eight have died after Russian attacks on Donetsk and Kharkiv, according to the governors of those regions.

AFP reports:

The deaths came as the Russian army refocuses its efforts on eastern Ukraine, notably the Donbas region, which incorporates Donetsk and Lugansk.

Four were killed in shelling in the town of Lyman in Donetsk, the regional governor said.

On May 1, four civilians were killed in Russian shelling in the Donetsk region, all in Lyman. Eleven other people were injured, governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said on Telegram.

Another person had died of his injuries in a town near Lyman, he added.

Lyman, a former railway hub known as the red town for its redbrick industrial buildings, is expected to be one of the next places to fall to the Russian army after Ukrainian forces withdrew.

Over the past 24 hours, Russian forces appeared to have made notable advances around the town, advancing on their positions by several kilometres, an AFP team in the area said.

Another three people were killed in shelling on residential areas in and around Kharkiv, Ukraines second city, the regional governor Oleg Synegubov said on Telegram.

As a result of these shellings, unfortunately, three people were killed and eight civilians were injured.

The Ukrainian army has also withdrawn from Kharkiv, its troops now in outlying positions, according to AFP journalists who recently visited the city.

Ukrainian president Volodomyr Zelenskiy said that evacuations from Mariupol will continue tomorrow if all the necessary conditions are met. Today, for the first time in all the days of the war, this vital corridor has started working, he said. For the first time there were two days of real ceasefire on this territory.

In his latest address, he said:

We will continue to do everything to evacuate our people from Azovstal, from Mariupol in general. The organization of such humanitarian corridors is one of the elements of the ongoing negotiation process. It is very complex. But no matter how difficult it was, more than 350,000 people were rescued from the areas of hostilities...

Today, Russian troops continued to strike at the territory of our state. The targets they choose prove once again that the war against Ukraine is a war of extermination for the Russian army. They targeted the warehouses of agricultural enterprises. The grain warehouse was destroyed. The warehouse with fertilizers was also shelled. They continued shelling of residential neighborhoods in the Kharkiv region, Donbas, etc.

They are accumulating forces in the south of the country to try to attack our cities and communities in the Dnipropetrovsk region.

What could be Russias strategic success in this war? Honestly, I do not know. The ruined lives of people and the burned or stolen property will give nothing to Russia. It will only increase the toxicity of the Russian state and the number of those in the world who will work to isolate Russia.

Isobel Koshiw and Ed Ram in Kharkiv report:

In Ukraines second city, where the barrage of Russian shelling has been among the most relentless endured, hundreds of people stand in line at a post office, waiting to be given chicken and potatoes. As elsewhere in the country, the mundane institutions of civil society of Kharkiv have had to be hastily repurposed for the goal of keeping its population alive, and about 30 such locations across the city have been turned into food aid distribution points.

The postal workers at this branch of Nova Poshta, who are being paid by their employer to hand out food instead of post, say that an average of 3,000 people come to their repurposed branch every day, seven days a week. They manage the queues using the post offices ticket system.

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Russia-Ukraine war: South Korea set to reopen embassy in Kyiv; Lavrov says Russia working to prevent nuclear war as it happened - The Guardian