An Australian woman accused of intentionally cooking a fatal mushroom lunch has told her trial she had wanted the beef Wellington meal to be “special”.

Erin Patterson has pleaded not guilty to murdering three people and attempting to kill another at her home in regional Victoria in July 2023.

The 50-year-old says it was a tragic accident, and that she never intended to hurt family members she loved. But prosecutors argue Ms Patterson put poisonous fungi into their food in a carefully crafted plot to kill them.

On Friday, the court heard it was “unusual” for Ms Patterson to host such an event at her house, and she was quizzed about her relationships with her guests.

Ms Patterson’s in-laws, Don and Gail Patterson, both 70, along with Gail’s sister Heather Wilkinson, 66, all fell ill and died days after the lunch.

Heather’s husband, local pastor Ian Wilkinson, was also hospitalised but recovered after coming out of a weeks-long induced coma. Simon Patterson, the accused’s estranged spouse, had been invited too, but pulled out the day before.

More than 50 prosecution witnesses have given evidence at the trial, which began six weeks ago, but Ms Patterson became the first for the defence when she took to the stand on Monday.

On her second day of cross-examination on Friday, Ms Patterson told the court she accepted that invites to her house were rare, but said she’d arranged the occasion to discuss a health issue and wanted to make a nice meal for her relatives to thank them for their support.

“I wanted it to be special,” Ms Patterson said.

She has previously admitted she misled her guests into believing she may need cancer treatment, telling the jury she did so as a cover for weight-loss surgery she was planning to have but was too embarrassed to disclose.

Prosecutor Nanette Rogers, however, put to her that there was no health issue to discuss, and that she had invited Simon and his relatives over to kill them. She had even prepared a spare toxic meal in case Mr Patterson changed his mind and came over, Dr Rogers suggested.

Over and over this week, Ms Patterson has denied these allegations, often becoming emotional as she told the court she loved the lunch guests like her own family.

She has also repeatedly told the court that she realised, in the days after the lunch, that the beef Wellington may have accidentally included dried mushrooms she had foraged, which were kept in a container with store-bought ones.

Lies to the police and health authorities about the source of the mushrooms and her decision to dispose of a food dehydrator were both because she was scared of being blamed for the guests’ dire illnesses, she said.

“Surely if you had loved them, then you would have immediately notified the medical authorities?” Dr Rogers asked.

Ms Patterson said she didn’t tell doctors about the possibility that wild mushrooms had been unintentionally included because the lunch guests were already getting treatment for death cap mushroom poisoning.

“Even after you were discharged from hospital you did not tell a single person that there may have been foraged mushroom used in the meal,” Dr Rogers said.

“Instead you got up, you drove your children to school… and drove home. And then you got rid of the dehydrator.”

“Correct,” Ms Patterson said.

The court heard there’d been conflict between Ms Patterson and her husband, and Dr Rogers suggested the accused was still angry at her in-laws for taking their son’s side.

“You had two faces,” Dr Rogers said, after making Ms Patterson read aloud messages in which she is critical of both Simon Patterson and his parents.

There was her “public face” of appearing to have a good relationship with Don and Gail, Dr Rogers said, and a “private face” which she showed in the messages.

“How you truly felt about Don and Gail was how you expressed it [there],” she said.

“And that is how you really felt about Simon Patterson… you did not regard him as being a decent human being at his core, correct or incorrect?”

That was “incorrect”, Ms Patterson replied, her head shaking and voice faltering.

Ms Patterson’s use of the iNaturalist website – which listed locations of death cap mushrooms in areas close to her home – was also scrutinised, with the accused repeatedly saying she couldn’t clearly recall ever using the site.

She will resume being cross examined next week. The trial, initially expected to take six weeks, is now expected to run for at least another fortnight, the judge has told the court.

Ahead of their game against Japan at the World Cup in Qatar on Wednesday, players from Team Germany assembled on the pitch and covered their mouths in an act of protest.

The players were upset that soccer governing body FIFA had earlier stopped captains from several European teams from wearing armbands in support of the LGBTQ community.

“We wanted to use our captain’s armband to take a stand for values that we hold in the Germany national team: diversity and mutual respect. Together with other nations, we wanted our voice to be heard,” the team said in a statement posted to their official Twitter account.

“It wasn’t about making a political statement – human rights are non-negotiable. That should be taken for granted, but it still isn’t the case. That’s why this message is so important to us,” the team said. “Denying us the armband is the same as denying us a voice. We stand by our position.”

Harvard University has broadened its existing lawsuit against the administration of President Donald Trump to fight a new action that attempts to stop its international students from entering the United States.

On Thursday, the prestigious Ivy League school filed an amended complaint that alleges Trump’s latest executive order violates the rights of the school and its students.

Just one day earlier, Trump published an executive order claiming that “it is necessary to restrict the entry of foreign nationals who seek to enter the United States solely or principally” to attend Harvard.

He called Harvard’s international students a “class of aliens” whose arrival “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States”. As a result, he said that he had the right under the  Immigration and Nationality Act to deny them entry into the country.

But in Thursday’s court filing, Harvard dismissed that argument as the latest salvo in Trump’s months-long campaign to harm the school.

“The President’s actions thus are not undertaken to protect the ‘interests of the United States,’ but instead to pursue a government vendetta against Harvard,” the amended complaint says.

It further alleged that, by issuing a new executive order to restrict students’ entry, the Trump administration was attempting to circumvent an existing court order that blocked it from preventing Harvard’s registration of foreign students.

The complaint called upon US District Judge Allison Burroughs in Massachusetts to extend her temporary restraining order to include Trump’s latest attack on Harvard’s foreign students.

“Harvard’s more than 7,000 F-1 and J-1 visa holders — and their dependents — have become pawns in the government’s escalating campaign of retaliation,” Harvard wrote.

Trump began his campaign against Harvard and other prominent schools earlier this year, after taking office for a second term as president. He blamed the universities for failing to take sterner action against the Palestinian solidarity protests that cropped up on their campuses in the wake of Israel’s war on Gaza.

The president called the demonstrations anti-Semitic and pledged to remove foreign students from the US who participated. Protest organisers, meanwhile, have argued that their aims were non-violent and that the actions of a few have been used to tar the movement overall.

Critics have also accused Trump of using the protests as leverage to exert greater control over the country’s universities, including private schools like Harvard and its fellow Ivy League school, Columbia University.

In early March, Columbia — whose protest encampments were emulated at campuses across the country — saw $400m in federal funding stripped from its budget.

The school later agreed to a list of demands issued by the Trump administration, including changes to its disciplinary policies and a review of its Middle East studies programme.

Harvard University was also given a list of demands to comply with. But unlike Columbia, it refused, citing concerns that the restrictions would limit its academic freedom.

The Trump administration’s demands included ending Harvard’s diversity programmes and allowing the federal government to audit its hiring and admissions processes to “establish viewpoint diversity”. When those demands were not met, it proceeded to strip Harvard of its federal funding, to the tune of billions of dollars.

Trump also threatened to revoke the school’s tax-exempt status and barred it from receiving future federal research grants.

But the attack on Harvard’s international students has threatened to drive away tuition revenue as well. Nearly a quarter of Harvard’s overall student body is from overseas.

In May, the Department of Homeland Security announced it would revoke Harvard’s access to a system, the Student Exchange Visitor Program, where it is required to log information about its foreign students.

That would have forced currently enrolled Harvard students to transfer to another school, if they were in the country on a student visa. It would have also prevented Harvard from accepting any further international students.

But Harvard sued the Trump administration, calling its actions “retaliatory” and “unlawful”.

On May 23, Judge Burroughs granted Harvard’s emergency petition for a restraining order to stop the restriction from taking effect. But since then, the Trump administration has continued to exert pressure on Harvard and other schools.

Earlier this week, for example, the Trump administration wrote a letter to Columbia University’s accreditor, accusing the New York City school of falling short of federal civil rights laws.