Late-night host Jimmy Kimmel has defended a joke in which he called Melania Trump an “expectant widow” just days before a shooting incident at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

The first lady described a Kimmel sketch which aired last Thursday as “hateful and violent”, and the White House urged his network, ABC, to fire the comedian.

Three days later, a gunman opened fire at the White House Correspondents’ dinner in Washington DC, which Donald Trump attended with Melania. Authorities have said the gunman’s attack may have targeted members of the Trump administration.

Kimmel said the original joke was a “light roast” about the 23-year age difference between the president and his wife.

“Our First Lady, Melania, is here. Look at Melania, so beautiful. Mrs Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow,” Kimmel said during the Thursday night sketch.

Delivering his first monologue on Jimmy Kimmel Live! after the shooting, the comedian said the joke was “a very light roast joke about the fact that he’s [President Trump] almost 80 and she’s younger than I am”.

“It was not by any stretch of the definition a call to assassination and they know that, I’ve been very vocal for many years speaking out against gun violence in particular,” he added.

“I agree that hateful and violent rhetoric is something we should reject, I think a great place to start to dial that back is having a conversation with your husband about it.”

On Monday, Melania wrote in a post on X that “people like Kimmel shouldn’t have the opportunity to enter our homes each evening to spread hate”.

“His monologue about my family isn’t comedy – his words are corrosive and deepens the political sickness within America… How many times will ABC’s leadership enable Kimmel’s atrocious behavior at the expense of our community.”

President Trump also said he appreciated that so many people were “incensed by Kimmel’s” remarks, claiming they were a “call to violence”, in a post on Truth Social on Monday afternoon.

“[T]his is something far beyond the pale. Jimmy Kimmel should be immediately fired by Disney and ABC,” he added.

The BBC has contacted ABC for comment.

• Follow our live coverage
• White House to review Trump’s security after shooting
• ‘Are we about to die?’: Performer describes locking eyes with Trump as they ducked for cover
• What we’re learning about suspected Washington press dinner gunman

Kimmel was taken off air last September after he made comments about the shooting of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk.

In a monologue, Kimmel said the “Maga gang” – a reference to Trump’s followers – was trying to “score political points” from the murder of Kirk. His show was reinstated a week later.

After returning to the show, Kimmel said he accepted that some people felt his remarks about Kirk’s death had been “ill-timed or unclear or maybe both”, adding: “I get why you’re upset.”

In the latest incident, a resurfaced clip of Kimmel’s Thursday joke sparked backlash on social media after the shooting, with critics accusing the comedian of encouraging political violence. Several conservative social media users called for Kimmel to be taken off air.

Trump and Melania were evacuated unharmed from the gala dinner on Saturday night after a gunman opened fire near a security checkpoint at the event, held at the Washington Hilton.

Trump told reporters that the dinner was “a rather traumatic experience” for his wife.

The suspect, identified as 31-year-old Cole Tomas Allen, was tackled by agents near a staircase leading down to a ballroom where the dinner was taking place, with hundreds of journalists, officials and public figures attending.

Allen appeared in court on Monday where he was charged with attempting to assassinate the president.

He was also charged with weapon offences relating to the incident. He did not enter a plea.

A California man has been charged with attempting to assassinate US President Donald Trump in an incident that has sparked a White House security review.

Cole Tomas Allen, 31, was also charged with two firearms offences when he appeared in court in Washington DC on Monday. He did not enter a plea.

He was carrying a semi-automatic handgun, a pump-action shotgun and three knives as he charged past a security checkpoint at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner on Saturday, say prosecutors.

A Secret Service agent was shot but not seriously wounded during the attack at a hotel. The accused faces life in prison if found guilty.

Dressed in a blue jumpsuit with a nametag, the suspect appeared calm at Monday’s court appearance in the nation’s capital.

He was softly spoken as he answered almost every question from the judge with either “yes, your honour” or “no, your honour”.

He stated his age and said he had a master’s degree.

Three US marshals stood behind him, and one was at his side, while the federal prosecutor handling the case, US Attorney for Washington Jeanine Pirro, looked on.

During Saturday night’s incident, Trump, Vice-President JD Vance, cabinet members and other White House officials were rushed from the Washington Hilton hotel ballroom after gunfire rang out.

The suspect allegedly rushed through a security checkpoint one floor above the basement venue.

“One Secret Service officer was shot in the chest, but was wearing a ballistic vest that worked,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told a news conference on Monday.

“This heroic officer who was hit fired five times at Allen, who was not shot but fell to the ground and was promptly arrested.”

Blanche said the suspect is believed to have discharged his shotgun at least once.

It is not clear whether the Secret Service agent was shot by the suspect, or was caught in crossfire from other law enforcement. The agent has been released from the hospital.

Attempting to assassinate the president carries a potential life sentence.

The other charges – transportation of a firearm between states to commit a felony and discharging a firearm in a crime of violence – both have maximum sentences of 10 years. The suspect is due to appear in court again on Thursday.

The court heard that the accused crossed multiple state lines in order to try to kill Trump.

The suspect left his home in the city of Torrance in the Los Angeles area on 21 April, travelling by train to Chicago, said officials.

On 24 April, he left Chicago, and arrived in Washington where he checked into the Hilton on the eve of the gala.

The suspect studied at the prestigious California Institute of Technology, and worshipped at the Pasadena United Reformed Church in the Los Angeles area.

Federal campaign finance records show he donated $25 to a Democratic Party political action committee in support of Kamala Harris for president in 2024.

According to an affidavit, the accused sent an email to his family shortly before the attack that said, “Administration officials… are targets, prioritized from highest-ranking to lowest”.

“I would still go through most everyone here to get to the targets if it were absolutely necessary,” he allegedly added.

He was remanded in custody and prosecutors said more charges could be filed.

The accused has not been co-operating with investigators, law enforcement sources told the BBC’s US partner CBS.

As US investigators look into the third alleged assassination attempt against Trump, security officials are reviewing the president’s protection protocols.

Many have questioned whether the security perimeter at the Washington Hilton was strong enough, why attendees were not asked to show ID at the event, and why the president, vice-president and others in the line of succession were all gathered in one place.

In Monday’s news conference, the acting attorney general maintained that “law enforcement did not fail” in its job to protect the event.

He noted that the gunman was one floor away, “with hundreds of federal agents between him and the President of the United States”.

The Washington Hilton, where John Hinckley Jr attempted to assassinate then-President Ronald Reagan 45 years ago, said it had followed security instructions from the Secret Service.

A senior White House official told the BBC that Trump was “standing by” the leadership of the Secret Service.

White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles will convene a meeting this week to “discuss protocol and practices for major events”, the official also said.

Trump has offered assurances that King Charles III will “be very safe” during his four-day state visit to the US, which began on Monday at the White House.

Additional reporting from Bernd Debusmann Jr, at the White House

“We’re like a red rag to the enemy. Because we’re taking the war to their territory so that they feel it too,” the Ukrainian soldier says, as his unit scramble to assemble long-range drones for launch at Russia.

Ukraine has been intensifying its deep strikes like this for several weeks, targeting oil export facilities, in particular, like never before.

Now, in a rare interview, the commander of all Ukraine’s unmanned systems has told the BBC such attacks will escalate and claimed his drone forces are also holding back Russia’s advance along the frontline by killing a record number of soldiers.

“1,500 to 2,000km (930-1,240 miles) inside Russian territory is no longer the ‘peaceful rear’,” Robert Brovdi warns. “The freedom-loving Ukrainian ‘bird’ flies there whenever and wherever it wants.”

At the secret launch site, a drizzly field in eastern Ukraine, the long-range drones are primed and we’re ordered back to a safe distance. The team work quickly before Russian forces can detect them and send ballistic missiles hurtling towards us. There’s a shouted command, loud revs of an engine and a flash of white as the first device tears into the sky towards Russia like a mini jet plane.

President Volodymyr Zelensky calls such deep strikes “very painful” to Moscow, causing “critical” losses running to tens of billions of dollars in its energy sector despite the recent surge in global oil prices.

The increase in such attacks is partly down to technology. Locally produced drones are becoming cheaper and flying further: the model we see launch can now travel more than 1,000km and others already go twice as far.

But it’s also about focus. In addition to military personnel and production, Russia’s energy exports have been identified as a priority target.

“Putin extracts natural resources and converts them into blood dollars that they then direct against us in the form of Shahed drones and ballistic missiles,” says Commander Brovdi, justifying the strikes.

Residents in Tuapse on Russia’s Black Sea coast complain of toxic rain after a second wave of major strikes on the local refinery in several days. But Brovdi is dry-eyed.

“If oil refineries are a tool to make money that’s used for war, then they are a legitimate military target, subject to destruction.”

The commander wages war in the skies from a secret location deep underground. We’re taken to meet him in a van with blacked out windows, then led down stairs and along corridors lined with sleeping pods to emerge into a high-tech cavern covered in screens from floor to ceiling.

The soundtrack is a series of bleeps and pings as fresh data is fed to dozens of men in T-shirts and hoodies hunched over joysticks and keyboards. They’re monitoring images streamed directly from the battlefield from drone pilots with names like KitKat and Antalya.

Brovdi’s Unmanned Systems Forces make up just 2% of Ukraine’s military but these days he says they account for a third of all targets destroyed. Their own casualty rate, he tells me, is no secret: less than 1% per year.

Each strike – of any kind – is filmed for verification and logged, and monitors on one wall display a detailed scorecard, updated in real time.

In the past week, Brovdi has reported hitting a dozen Russian FSB security service officers in occupied territory as well as multiple energy facilities in Russia itself. He argues that his forces are critical to denying Putin any headline victories, especially his aim of seizing the rest of the eastern Donbas region within months.

“What is he smoking?” Brovdi is curt. “That’s not realistic. It’s absurd.”

Four years ago, Robert Brovdi was more comfortable in auction houses like Christie’s than filthy trenches. A well-off grain dealer in those days, with a sideline as an art collector, fragments of his pre-war life survive in the paintings and sculptures by Ukrainian artists dotted around the bunker. They’re displayed beside missile casings and captured drones. He’s an ethnic Hungarian, from Uzhhorod in western Ukraine, and best known by his military call sign, Magyar. Clean-shaven before the war, he now wears a long ginger and grey-speckled beard.

The businessman signed up to fight just before Russia’s full-scale invasion – “we all knew war was inevitable” – initially joining the Territorial Defence, then passing through some of the fiercest battles, including for Bakhmut.

But it was before that, pinned down by Russian fire in Kherson, that he first saw the potential of drones. Brovdi recalled a device he’d bought for his own children and began to introduce similar ones to his unit. Suddenly they could climb above Russian positions and stream live images to a nearby artillery team, enabling them to strike. “The idea first developed as self-preservation,” he explains, but it transformed the battlefield.

Within months the soldiers were building their own drones and attaching munitions, and soon became renowned as 414th Brigade, the Birds of Magyar.

Brovdi’s strategy is not only built on long-range strikes.

He talks, at length, about another priority: reducing Russia’s advantage in terms of manpower.

The issue has become even more acute for Ukraine as it struggles to mobilise men for the front: “Those who wanted to fight are already fighting,” the commander accepts.

So his crews are under direct orders to kill more enemy soldiers each month than Russia can recruit. That’s over 30,000 men a month.

“30% of all drone strikes have to be against military personnel,” Brovdi is clear. “You can call it a kill plan, yes, and right now we are exceeding it.”

He says they’ve met their target for four months in a row.

I can’t confirm that data, but Brovdi tells me his men do exactly that: the death of each soldier has to be proved by video, or it doesn’t count.

Some of those clips play on a grim loop on screens in the command centre and Brovdi also posts them on Telegram, where he styles his drone forces as the “birds” and their Russian prey as “worms” to hunt and destroy.

“The greatest mass killing of an enemy in the history of mankind is taking place in this room,” he says at one point, gesturing at the screens around us.

It is brutal talk, from a softly spoken man, but Brovdi refuses to be “gnawed by pity”.

Russian troops are far beyond their own borders, he says, sent by Putin “who wants to destroy our nation”.

“If we don’t kill them, they kill us. That is clear.”

The commander insists he has no “rose-tinted spectacles”: his goal is containment, not mounting new counter-offensives or taking back huge swathes of land.

“We have an effective weapon: not to conduct an offensive war, but to prevent the enemy advancing effectively on our territory,” he tells me.

He also believes Vladimir Putin cannot afford to end his invasion, because the risks of failure are too great.

So Brovdi has one more target: Russian morale.

He hopes a high casualty rate, combined with giant fires burning at facilities deep beyond the border, can create “a certain ferment” within Russia. He’s aiming for the shock factor.

One recent video widely shared in Ukraine shows a Russian woman in Tuapse in floods of tears. “I just wanted to live by the sea with my child, but everything’s ruined…those drones fly, destroying everything,” she sobs, between expletives.

For Brovdi, it’s a sign that the fallout from Russia’s invasion – and Ukraine’s strong pushback – could be spreading beyond its so-far limited circles.

His aim, with every drone, is to make more Russians question the war their country is fighting and the president who started it.

Additional reporting by Sophie Williams, Moose Campbell, Volodymyr Lozhko and Anastasia Levchenko.

The man arrested after shots were fired inside the hotel where the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was being held on Saturday night has been named by law enforcement officials as Cole Tomas Allen.

The 31-year-old suspect is from Torrance in the Los Angeles region, California.

After he was detained by security agents inside the Washington Hilton hotel he told law enforcement officials he wanted to shoot officials in the Trump administration, two sources told CBS, the BBC’s US news partner.

In Sunday’s interview with NBC’s Meet the Press, acting US Attorney General Todd Blanche said the motive of the suspected shooter was still under investigation, but that “preliminary” findings suggested he was targeting administration officials, “likely” including President Donald Trump.

Blanche said investigators were now looking at reports that the alleged gunman had assembled the weapon in the hotel, stressing that he “didn’t get very far”.

“He barely broke the perimeter,” Blanche said, adding that the suspect likely travelled by train from Los Angeles to Chicago, and then to Washington DC.

Citing its sources, CBS also said that at least five to eight gunshots were fired during the incident. CCTV footage posted by Trump shows a person rushing past security officers, who then turn and chase him.

At an earlier news conference, police said that security officials and the suspect exchanged fire, without saying how many shots were fired.

Washington interim police chief Jeffery Carroll said the suspect was not struck by gunfire but was taken to hospital for evaluation.

The suspect was a guest at the Washington Hilton hotel where the correspondents’ dinner was taking place, Carroll said, adding that he was “armed with a shotgun, a handgun, and multiple knives”.

“At this point, it does appear he is a lone actor, a lone gunman,” the police chief said.

Trump later posted a close-up photo showing a shirtless man on the floor with his hands cuffed behind his back with Secret Service standing around him.

On Sunday, Trump told Fox News that the suspect “had a lot of hatred in his heart for a while”, and said his family knew he had “difficulties”. He added that the suspect had a “manifesto”, and suggested he was “strongly anti-Christian”.

US media are reporting a history of anti-Trump social media posts from 31-year-old Allen, citing law enforcement sources.

The BBC’s partner CBS News has seen a written document believed to be linked to the suspect. Other US media have reported on the same document.

It says the gunman wanted to target members of the Trump administration “from highest-ranking to lowest” and that while guests and hotel staff were not the intended targets, they would be attacked if necessary to get to the officials.

BBC News has not independently verified the alleged writings, which have been described as a manifesto and were reportedly sent to the suspect’s family members before the attempted attack.

Pictures later emerged showing FBI agents and police searching an area at a California address believed to be linked to the alleged gunman.

BBC Verify has been looking into the online presence of the suspect.

Los Angeles County’s voter registration records appear to show he had registered no party preference.

According to a Federal Election Commission record, seen by BBC Verify, in October 2024 Allen donated $25 (£18) to the fundraising platform ActBlue with the money earmarked for Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign.

Allen describes himself as a mechanical engineer, game developer and teacher on LinkedIn.

According to his profile, he studied mechanical engineering at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) a highly competitive university, where he took part in its Christian fellowship.

He graduated with a masters in computer science in 2025 from California State University, Dominguez Hills, marking the milestone by sharing a photo of himself in graduation robes to LinkedIn. He also developed and released a game called “Bohrdom” to the gaming platform Steam.

On Facebook, photos of Allen – which BBC Verify has matched to those of his arrest at the Washington Hilton hotel – show him smiling in family photographs at Christmas and graduation events.

In December 2024, he was named teacher of the month by C2 Education, which offers tutoring and college test preparation to students, according to the organisation’s Facebook post.

He has been a part-time teacher there since 2020, his LinkedIn profile says.

Jeanine Pirro, US attorney for Washington, said the suspect was now facing two charges – using a firearm during a crime of violence and assault on a federal officer using a dangerous weapon.

She added that he would be formally charged on Monday in federal court.

Oil prices have risen after plans for a second round of peace talks between the US and Iran stalled again.

Brent, the global benchmark, rose by nearly 2% to $107.26 (£79.25) a barrel, while US-traded crude was up by 1% at $95.40.

It comes after US President Donald Trump said on Saturday that Washington had cancelled plans to send a team to Pakistan for negotiations with their Iranian counterparts.

Global energy supplies have been under intense pressure since the start of the Iran war as the crucial Strait of Hormuz waterway has been effectively closed by the conflict.

Iranian Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi said on Sunday that “important discussions on bilateral matters and regional developments” were ongoing with Oman, its neighbour along the strait.

He posted on social media: “Our focus included ways to ensure safe transit that is to benefit all dear neighbors and the world. Our neighbors are our priority.”

Araghchi arrived in St Petersburg on Monday “with the aim of meeting and holding talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin”, Iranian state-run news agency Irna reported.

Around a fifth of the world’s crude oil and liquified natural gas (LNG) usually passes through the Strait of Hormuz.

Brent crude has risen by more than 10% since Trump announced last week that he would extend a ceasefire with Tehran to give its leadership a chance to present a “unified proposal”.

Sophie Huynh, a portfolio manager and strategist at BNP Paribas, said the ongoing closure of the strait could affect the price of everything from “bin bags to medicine”.

“I think we’re underestimating the extent of which products could be affected by the oil shortage,” she told the BBC’s Today programme. “We’re not consuming crude, we’re consuming products.”

If the strait remains closed for more than a few weeks, the effects will be “really far reaching in terms of supply chain”, she said.

Oil traders appear to be less reactive to the latest headlines and are waiting for “credible” evidence of the conflict easing, said economics lecturer Goh Jing Rong from the Singapore Management University.

“I think traders want concrete evidence rather than just a fragile and reversible ceasefire agreement,” Goh said.

Trump wrote in a Truth Social post on Saturday that there was “too much time wasted on travelling” and “too much work” in sending US representatives to Islamabad.

The president added that “there is tremendous infighting and confusion” within Tehran’s leadership.

“Nobody knows who is in charge, including them,” he said. “Also, we have all the cards; they have none! If they want to talk, all they have to do is call!!!”

Shares in Asia continued to climb, with some major stock markets hitting record highs despite having fallen sharply at the start of the conflict.

Japan’s Nikkei 225 index rose 1.7% on Monday, adding to a rise of nearly 14% in the past month.

The Kospi in South Korea has jumped by more than 20% in the past month, rising by2.5% on Monday.

Japanese and South Korean stocks were initially hit hard as their economies are heavily reliant on energy supplies from the Gulf.