Democrats were caught in an apparent stalemate on Saturday as a dug-in Joe Biden continued to endure high-profile calls to end his re-election campaign after a week of astonishing party moves to unseat the president in favor of a candidate many hope will be more likely to beat Donald Trump.

In the weeks since his disastrous debate performance against Trump, the 81-year-old Biden has attempted to fight off calls for him to step down from the top of the ticket amid concerns that his age and mental acuity are no longer up to the job. But a series of interviews, a press conference and speeches have done little to quell party nerves.

“Everyone’s waiting for Joe,” quoted the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd of one top Democrat. “And he’s sitting at home, stewing and saying, ‘What if? What if? What if?’ We’re doing things the Democratic way. We’re botching it.”

Frustration within the Democratic party establishment at what they see as Biden’s intransigence comes as the outlet also reported on Saturday that the president in private is complaining that former aides to presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton would be lecturing him on election strategy after Democratic 1994 and 2010 midterm election losses that he had avoided in 2022.

Those pressuring Biden – who also has Covid – to abandon his re-election bid, the Times reported, “risk getting his back up and prompting him to remain after all”.

Some advisers are said to believe that Biden is holding out at least until the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, visits Washington on Wednesday. But some donors say that that this is the ideal moment for Biden to step aside now that Republicans have had their convention, and Democrats have a month until their own convention in Chicago to tell a new story about a new candidate.

The vivid picture of a Covid-sick, abandoned and resentful veteran politician, sitting out the pressure in a Delaware beach house, comes as most senior Democrats, including the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, former House speaker Nancy Pelosi and the current minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, are calling for Biden – at a minimum – to reconsider his position.

“We have to cauterize this wound right now and the sooner we can do it the better,” Virginia representative Gerald E Connolly, a Democrat, told the Times. Connolly, who has not publicly called for Biden to step aside, said the ongoing drama “shows the cold calculus of politics”.

The past week has seen waves of Democrat elected officials make public statements of their appreciation of Biden’s record in office but dire warnings that the US will see a second Trump presidency should he remain the party’s candidate for November’s presidential election.

The latest high-profile name to join the chorus was Sherrod Brown, when the embattled Ohio senator broke cover on Friday evening to call for an end to Biden’s re-election campaign.

“I’ve heard from Ohioans on important issues, such as how to continue to grow jobs in our state, give law enforcement the resources to crack down on fentanyl, protect social security and Medicare from cuts, and prevent the ongoing efforts to impose a national abortion ban,” Brown said in a statement.

He added: “At this critical time, our full attention must return to these important issues. I think the president should end his campaign.”

Those public disavowals of support have been mirrored by an equally intense private lobbying campaign from top Democrats, party stalwarts and senior donors that is aimed at persuading Biden that he cannot beat Trump and that his political legacy is at risk unless he is replaced by a more dynamic candidate, most likely his vice-president, Kamala Harris.

That campaign has seemingly inched closer and closer to persuading Biden and his close inner circles of advisers and family members that the situation has become so serious that he needs to consider taking the extraordinary step of declaring himself a one-term president and backing someone else to fight Trump.

Biden’s position has reportedly wavered from one of absolute refusal to move to now being open to the idea of considering his position. Some media reports have even suggested that a decision could come in the next few days, including as early as this weekend.

However, on Friday Biden’s campaign struck a notable note of defiance, saying the president – who is isolating at his Delaware beach home – is anticipating getting back on the campaign trail.

“I look forward to getting back on the campaign trail next week to continue exposing the threat of Donald Trump’s Project 2025 agenda while making the case for my own record and the vision that I have for America: one where we save our democracy, protect our rights and freedoms, and create opportunity for everyone,” Biden said in a statement.

“The stakes are high, and the choice is clear,” Biden added. “Together, we will win.”

Biden does have prominent allies still at the heights of the party. Leftist congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Vermont senator Bernie Sanders have come out in favor of Biden remaining at the top of the ticket in the past days.

“If you 10,000% are super-convinced that the candidate, or president, cannot beat Donald Trump, then do what you think is in your good conscience. But I have not seen an alternative scenario that, I feel, does not set us up for enormous peril,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

In polling over the past week Biden has trailed Trump, especially in the crucial battleground states where the election will be won or lost. Republican campaigners have even boasted that their electoral map is broadening as previously safe Democrat states – such as Virginia or New Hampshire – might come into play.

But Ocasio-Cortez warned of potential intra-party chaos if Biden is pushed off the re-election ticket.

“If you think that is going to be an easy transition, I’m here to tell you that a huge amount of the donor class and these elites who are pushing for the president not to be the nominee also do not want to see the VP [Harris] be the nominee”, Ocasio-Cortez said.

She warned that Democrat “elites” don’t want Harris to run in Biden’s place, but a brokered convention in Chicago in which state delegates currently committed to Biden would be free to pledge support to another candidate
could lead to chaos.

Racial, ethnic and class divisions with the Democratic party had been exposed by the Biden crisis, she indicated, and she said her community “does not have the luxury of accepting loss in July of an election year. My people are the first ones deported. They’re the first ones put in Rikers. They’re the first ones whose families are killed by war.”

A US congressman has said he decided to join calls for Joe Biden to exit the presidential race after he claimed the 81-year-old appeared not to recognise him at a recent event.

Seth Moulton, a Democratic congressman from Massachusetts, was one of the first Democrats to call for Biden to drop out of the race shortly after his disastrous debate performance last month. On Friday, Moulton ramped up his efforts to oust the president from the 2024 ticket in a damning op-ed for the Boston Globe.

Moulton said he met Biden in a small group for the 80th anniversary of D-day in Normandy on 6 June. “For the first time, he didn’t seem to recognise me,” the Democrat wrote. “Of course, that can happen as anyone ages but, as I watched the disastrous debate a few weeks ago, I have to admit that what I saw in Normandy was part of a deeper problem.

“It was a crushing realisation, and not because a person I care about had a rough night but because everything is riding on Biden’s ability to beat Donald Trump in November.

“America needs him to win and, like most Americans, I’m no longer confident that he can. The president should bow out of the race.”

Last week Donald Trump, the former president and Republican nominee for the 2024 race, was the target of a failed assassination attempt. Moulton said the shooting had “shifted the national conversation for now [but] what hasn’t changed are these basic facts: Biden is trailing Trump in critical swing states, and he has yet to show us that he is willing or able to change his strategy”.

Adam Smith, a Democratic congressman from Washington, had harsher words for Biden on Saturday, saying the president’s campaign team was committing an “epic act of political malpractice” by allowing him to run.

Speaking to the BBC’s Today programme, he said: “Democratic party leaders all across this country need to stop being coy, quiet and polite about it and they need to express firmly their opinion that the president should step aside and they need to go to President Biden’s campaign team and they need to tell him, ‘You are committing an epic act of political malpractice.’ Please stop and please put the interests of the party and the country ahead of the selfish interests of Joe Biden.”

Biden, who is recovering from Covid, has been under intense pressure to resign since his widely panned debate performance last month. While the president has tried to allay fears about his age and mental capacity for the job with a number of TV interviews and public appearances, he has continued to make gaffes and calls for him to go have persisted.

Last week, at a make-or-break Nato press conference, Biden mistakenly referred to Kamala Harris as “vice-president Trump” and, earlier in the day, accidentally introduced the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, as “President Putin”.

On Friday, Biden said he was looking forward to “getting back on the campaign trail next week” as the number of Democratic members of Congress calling on him to step aside surpassed 30.

Republican nominee Donald Trump will hold his first public campaign rally since a shocking assassination attempt a week ago by appearing in a crucial rust belt battleground state alongside his new running mate, Ohio senator JD Vance.

The return to the campaign trail by Trump comes after the attempted killing of the former US president at a Pennsylvania rally last Saturday when a 20-year-old gunman opened fire, injuring Trump and others and killing one rally-goer.

The shooting roiled American politics, ratcheting up the tension in a race already fueled by fears over rising political violence and the prospect of civil unrest. It also dominated the past week’s Republican national convention in Milwaukee from which Trump emerged at the head of a remarkably unified and energized campaign.

Tonight’s joint rally with Vance is the first for the pair since they officially became the nominees. Trump kicked off the gathering of Republicans by naming Vance his vice-presidential pick.

Michigan is one of the crucial swing states expected to determine the outcome of the presidential election. Trump narrowly won the state by just more than 10,000 votes in 2016, but Democrat Joe Biden flipped it back in 2020, winning by a margin of 154,000 votes on his way to the presidency.

With Vance by his side, Trump will deliver remarks in Grand Rapids, a historically Republican stronghold that has trended increasingly blue in recent elections.

Trump’s choice of Vance was seen as a move to gain support among so-called rust belt voters in places such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Ohio who helped Trump notch his surprise 2016 victory.

Vance specifically mentioned those places during his acceptance speech at the Republican national convention, stressing his roots growing up poor in small-town Ohio and pledging not to forget working-class people whose “jobs were sent overseas and children were sent to war”.

Democrats have dominated recent elections in Michigan, but Republicans now see an opening in the state as Democrats are increasingly divided about whether Biden should drop out of the race.

Biden has insisted he is not dropping out, and has attempted to turn the focus back towards Trump, saying on Friday that Trump’s acceptance speech at the Republican national convention showcased a “dark vision for the future”.

In polls over the last week, Trump has often extended his narrow lead over Biden, though the race overall remains close. Trump, however, is continuing to perform strongly in the crucial battleground states that are vital for victory. His campaign also insists that the contest is broadening to bring in some states – such as Virginia – that Democrats previously considered safe.

The Associated Press contributed reporting

Police in Bangladesh have been granted “shoot-on-sight” orders and a nationwide curfew has been imposed as student-led protests continue to roil the country, leaving more than 100 people dead.

The curfew, imposed at midnight on Friday, was expected to last until Sunday morning as police tried to bring the swiftly deteriorating security situation under control, with military personnel patrolling the streets of the capital.

The curfew was lifted briefly on Saturday afternoon to allow people to run essential errands, but otherwise people have been ordered to remain at home and all gatherings and demonstrations have been banned. The government has also imposed a communications blackout, with all internet and social media access blocked since Thursday night.

While the government is not releasing official statistics of fatalities and injuries, local media has estimated thousands have been injured and that the death toll has hit 115.

In extreme cases, police officers have been granted powers to open fire on those violating the curfew, confirmed Obaidul Quader, the general secretary of the ruling Awami League party.

The protests that have spread across Bangladesh are some of the worst the country has experienced in more than a decade. They began earlier this month on university campuses as students protested against the reintroduction of civil service job quotas that they say are discriminatory and benefit the Awami League, led by Sheikh Hasina, the prime minister.

This week, the protests have spread far beyond campus grounds and grown into a larger movement against Hasina’s government, which has ruled since 2009. Hasina is accused of overseeing rampant authoritarianism, police brutality and corruption, with her re-election in January boycotted by the opposition and widely documented as rigged. The country’s economy has also suffered a severe economic downturn since the outbreak of Covid, leaving hundreds of millions unemployed and grappling with record inflation.

Shafkat Mahmud, 28, a student protester from Uttara, a neighbourhood of Dhaka, said this was no longer just a student protest, but nationwide civilian unrest akin to “civil war”.

Mahmud alleged that after the government shut down the internet on Thursday night, police had gone from using rubber bullets to live ammunition. He described how he and fellow protesters had been attacked on Friday by pro-government supporters who carried machetes and guns and had seen buses carrying away the dead in the aftermath.

“Since the government’s forces have been violently attacking us, our families have joined us in protests,” he said. “Our fight initially was about quotas but after witnessing the brutality and cruelty with which the police attacked the protesters, it’s now about change. We are marching for this government to step down.”

Pro-government student groups attacked protesters earlier this week and police were accused of instigating violence by firing teargas, rubber bullets and stun grenades at the demonstrators. Protesters then invaded the state-run broadcaster, setting it alight, and also broke into a prison in central Bangladesh on Friday, freeing hundreds of prisoners.

According to those on the ground, Friday was the deadliest day of the protests so far, with police accused of firing live ammunition at demonstrators and at least 40 people likely to have been killed in the violence.

Representatives from both sides met late on Friday in an attempt to reach a resolution, with several student leaders demanding a complete reform of the quota system and for universities to be reopened. The law and justice minister, Anisul Huq, said late on Friday that the government was open to discussing their demands.

Holidaymakers are continuing to face disruption as airlines recover from being hit by one of the biggest global IT crashes in recent history.

Passengers had their travel plans ruined on Friday as thousands of flights were cancelled internationally after a botched software upgrade hit Microsoft’s Windows operating system. The incident caused havoc across a number of services, with hospital appointments cancelled, payroll systems seizing up and TV channels going off air.

Nearly 7,000 flights were cancelled worldwide on Friday, including 408 to and from the UK.

As of 10am on Saturday, there had been 23 departing and 25 inbound flights cancelled in the UK, according to figures from the aviation analytics firm Cirium.

The transport secretary, Louise Haigh, said IT systems at airports were “back up and working normally”.

She said: “We are in constant communication with industry. There continues to be no known safety or security issues arising from the outage.”

But she added: “Some delays and a small number of cancelled flights are expected today.”

Travellers at Heathrow were experiencing long queues on Saturday and reported problems with checking in for British Airways flights.

Long check-in queues could also be seen at Gatwick airport on Saturday.

Doug Bannister, the chief executive of the Port of Dover, said hundreds of displaced air passengers had arrived in the hope of taking a ferry.

He said: “We operate a turn up and go system here. However, we do insist you have to book on busy days, even if people are doing this on the drive down.”

Bannister said the port was expecting more than 10,000 cars on Saturday, up from 8,000 the day before. “So far there is no congestion in the town of Dover. Approach roads are busy but moving. Everything is running well.”

The travel association Abta urged holidaymakers to check with providers if there were “any extra steps” they may need to take.

Train travellers were also affected. On Friday London Euston station was oacjed with hundreds of passengers after trains were delayed or cancelled. The issues persisted into Saturday morning. At London Waterloo, passengers were unable to buy tickets from machines at the station, while at Paddington, QR code scanners stopped working.

Several US airlines and airports across Asia said they were resuming operations, with check-in services restored in Hong Kong, South Korea and Thailand, and mostly back to normal in India, Indonesia and at Singapore’s Changi airport as of Saturday afternoon.

“The check-in systems have come back to normal [at Thailand’s five major airports],” the Airports of Thailand president, Keerati Kitmanawat, told reporters at Don Mueang airport in Bangkok. “There are no long queues at the airports as we experienced yesterday.”

Atlanta airport, the busiest in the world by passenger traffic, said it had not been affected by the outage but was working with “airline partners” who were.

While some airports halted all flights, airline staff in others resorted to manual check-ins for passengers.

The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) initially ordered all flights to be grounded “regardless of destination”, although airlines later said they were re-establishing their services and working through the backlog.

India’s largest airline, IndiGo, said operations had been resolved, in a statement posted on X.

“While the outage has been resolved and our systems are back online, we are diligently working to resume normal operations, and we expect this process to extend into the weekend,” the carrier said on Saturday.

A passenger told Agence France-Presse that the situation was returning to normal at Delhi airport with only slight delays in international flights.

The low-cost carrier AirAsia said it was still trying to get back online, and had been “working around the clock towards recovering its departure control systems”. It recommended passengers arrive early at airports and be ready for “manual check-in” at airline counters.

Chinese state media said Beijing’s airports had not been affected.

In Europe, major airports including Berlin, which had suspended all flights earlier on Friday, said departures and arrivals were resuming.

The software update that caused global havoc came from the US cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, which left many Microsoft Windows users facing a “blue screen of death” as their computers failed to start.

CrowdStrike’s chief executive, George Kurtz, said he was “deeply sorry” and made clear it was “not a security or cyber incident”.

GP practices in the UK said they could not see patient records or book appointments, and pharmacy services were also affected.

On Saturday, Nick Kaye, the chair of the National Pharmacy Association, which represents independent community pharmacies, said patients collecting prescriptions could still face disruption this weekend.

“Systems are by and large back online and medicine deliveries have resumed in many community pharmacies today after the global IT outage,” he said.

“However, yesterday’s outage will have caused backlogs and we expect services to continue to be disrupted this weekend as pharmacies recover.

“We urge people to be patient when visiting their local pharmacy and some may be still prioritising those patients with emergency prescriptions from their GP surgery.”

A global IT failure wreaked havoc on Friday, grounding flights and disrupting everything from hospitals to government agencies. Over all the chaos hung a question: how did a flawed update to Microsoft Windows software bring large swaths of society to a screeching halt?

The problem originated with an Austin-based cybersecurity firm called CrowdStrike, relied upon by most of the global technology industry, including Microsoft, for its Falcon program that blocks the execution of malware and cyber-attacks. Falcon protects devices by securing access to a wide range of internal systems and automatically updating its defenses – a level of integration that means if Falcon falters, the computer is close behind. After CrowdStrike updated Falcon on Thursday night, Microsoft systems and Windows PCs were hit with a “blue screen of death” and rendered unusable as they were trapped in a recovery boot loop.

Microsoft is a juggernaut with significant market power, dominating cloud computing infrastructure across Europe and the United States. So it wasn’t just computers that were affected, but servers and a host of other systems as well. Overwhelming requests from users, devices, services and businesses ushered in a cascading series of failures with Microsoft products – namely Azure Cloud and Microsoft 365. Failures plaguing Azure led to additional but separate disruptions with 365 services. A giant clusterfuck ensued.

That’s how CrowdStrike’s faulty update evolved into the largest IT outage in history, but it tells us nothing about why a global computational infrastructure seems to have one point of failure? At least one CrowdStrike executive had the same question.

“Their IT stack may include just a single provider for operating system, cloud, productivity, email, chat, collaboration, video conferencing, browser, identity, generative AI and increasingly security as well,” a CrowdStrike vice-president, Drew Bagley, said. “This means that the building materials, the supply chain and even the building inspector are all the same.”

This is at the heart of what happened these past two days. It’s not just that so many firms rely on CrowdStrike, but that cloud infrastructure relies on hugely powerful companies such as Microsoft which then subject firms to exclusionary and anticompetitive practices that concentrate services and offerings into an increasingly narrow range of options.

In June 2023, the Federal Trade Commission fielded a call for public comments about cloud computing business practices. Microsoft and Amazon, two companies that dominate this space, replied by insisting that competition was “thriving” and “highly dynamic and competitive”. Google, less of a player than the other two, was less demure and offered an 11-page document accusing Microsoft of stifling competition.

“Microsoft’s complex web of licensing restrictions prevents customers, particularly its existing on-premises enterprise clients, from choosing any other cloud provider at the time of migration into the cloud and ultimately locks those customers into its Azure ecosystem,” Google said in its complaint.

Google was right, though it too is guilty of the same sins. Two-thirds of the global cloud infrastructure services market is controlled by these three firms, which make it near impossible to switch between providers by imposing impenetrable technical barriers that deter vendors from switching – effectively locking them in.

As the blue screen of death appeared at airports the world over, the US Federal Trade Commission chair, Lina Khan, tweeted: “All too often these days, a single glitch results in a system-wide outage, affecting industries from healthcare and airlines to banks and auto-dealers. Millions of people and businesses pay the price. These incidents reveal how concentration can create fragile systems.”

Why does concentration, consolidation, and monopolization leave us at risk? It’s not simply that we homogenize a market, leaving everyone exposed to what should be an isolated service disruption. Concentration yields the power to restructure markets. Monopolists force firms out of a market and redesign the terms of engagement for competitors such that they don’t threaten incumbent juggernauts. A vendor ecosystem’s dependency on Microsoft might be rationalized as cost-cutting, just as the dependency that Microsoft will have on another company like CrowdStrike will be rationalized as cost-cutting.

The real cost is externalized: when these services shut down, who truly suffers? CrowdStrike’s chief executive, George Kurtz, has lost hundreds of millions of his fortune, but it will return. Microsoft and CrowdStrike have lost some clients and some business, but will undoubtedly gain more than it had within a year or two. That’s not just the case in this outage, but in any outage.

Is the same true for those who needed unavailable emergency services, hospitals, airports or government agencies? Is it true for the rest of society that has not only grown dependent on digital mediation and computation without much input because these processes are driven by absolutist economic firms, not democratic political actors?

We’ve had these sort of outages before and nothing has changed, partly because the tech industry has been so adept at shifting blame. If that continues, then the monopolists will do what they please and everyone will suffer what they must.

The British Museum boasts one of the biggest collections of Chinese antiquities in the west, but it has faced repeated calls to return them to China. Now historical documents reveal that many of the antiquities were acquired with the full cooperation of Chinese officials in the last century.

US historian Justin M Jacobs has unearthed evidence that shows the Chinese government “willingly and enthusiastically helped them remove these treasures from their lands” because they wanted closer ties with the west and appreciated new scholarship.

He said: “These things did not have priceless valuations that we project on to them today… I have found new evidence that hasn’t been looked at before that will change our view of objects in the British Museum and other institutions.” There have been calls in recent years for the British Museum to return artefacts including the Parthenon marbles – also known as the Elgin marbles – the Rosetta Stone and the Benin bronzes.

Last year’s revelations of thefts of 1,500 museum items sparked renewed international repatriation requests, among them, by China’s state-run English-language newspaper Global Times.

In an editorial, the paper said: “Most Chinese collections were certainly looted or stolen by Britain … As long as Britain cannot prove which collection was acquired legally and honestly, then the mother country of these collections has the right to seek their repatriation.”

Jacobs, a professor of history at the American University in Washington, said he had unearthed evidence showing that, far from seeing the acquisition of antiquities by outsiders as morally dubious, the Chinese authorities believed that professional and social relationships with well-regarded foreigners were more valuable than what they were removing.

He said: “[I have seen] letters and recollections of Chinese officials, Chinese dealers, Chinese scholars talking about what they think of western archaeologists, who came into the country and removed tens of thousands of objects. It’s usually social and diplomatic capital – ‘If we help him out, then this will sweeten diplomatic negotiations with Great Britain the next time we have some sort of diplomatic issue to work out.’

“Or they see having a friendship and connections with a foreign scholar to be more valuable. The Chinese material should be categorised as a form of diplomatic gift.”

He added: “I conclude that most of today’s moral outrage over western museums and their collections is the result of projecting today’s values backward in time to an era in which our values today were not shared, either by westerners or nonwesterners.”

Jacobs’s research will feature in his book, Plunder? How Museums Got Their Treasures, which will be published next week.

The book, which covers objects ranging from ancient Egyptian antiquities to the Parthenon marbles, challenges the widely accepted assumption that many western museum treasures were acquired by imperialist plunder and theft, arguing for a nuanced understanding of how they reached western shores.

Jacobs believes that other objects such as the Benin bronzes – looted during the British military expedition to Benin City in 1897, – were military plunder and “have a case for restitution”.

But he said: “We should not jump from that to say that everything in a museum was acquired in the exact same immoral way that military loot was acquired. Military plunder actually represents a fairly small amount of the materials that you see in a museum.”

The British-Hungarian archaeologist Aurel Stein acquired thousands of Chinese antiquities that ended up in the British Museum and other collections.

Among artefacts that the Chinese officials knew he was removing at the time – “as they recorded their thoughts in Chinese about that removal”, Jacobs said – is a painted panel, believed by some experts to date from between the 7th and 8th century, depicting the legend of how silk-making technology left China. It is now in the British Museum.

Jacobs found unpublished material among Stein’s vast archive in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. It includes a 1914 letter from a Chinese magistrate who said to Stein: “You practise archaeology with a stunning perseverance and thoroughness that is unheard of.”

Jacobs said: “This is awkward. After all, Stein has become something of a nationalist pinata among Chinese critics of western imperialism today.”

The evidence contradicts that image, he said, as it shows Chinese officials knew what Stein and other archaeologists were taking abroad. Those officials looked forward to hearing about new scholarly discoveries that would result from transporting these antiquities to a site for their preservation and study.

Jacobs said: “Just one century ago, the most highly educated and prosperous Chinese in the entire country saw in Stein’s expedition not a sinister imposition of foreign imperialism, but rather an altruistic and admirable display of the scientific keys to catching up with the leading western powers of the day.”

Scientists have voted to eliminate the names of certain plants that are deemed to be racially offensive. The decision to remove a label that contains such a slur was taken last week after a gruelling six-day session attended by more than 100 researchers, as part of the International Botanical Congress, which officially opens on Sunday in Madrid.

The effect of the vote will be that all plants, fungi and algae names that contain the word caffra, which originates in insults made against Black people, will be replaced by the word affra to denote their African origins. More than 200 species will be affected, including the coast coral tree, which, from 2026, will be known as Erythrina affra instead of Erythrina caffra.

The scientists attending the nomenclature session also agreed to create a special committee which would rule on names given to newly discovered plants, fungi and algae. These are usually named by those who first describe them in the scientific literature. However, the names could now be overruled by the committee if they are deemed to be derogatory to a group or race.

A more general move to rule on other controversial historical labels was not agreed by botanists. Nevertheless, the changes agreed last week are the first rule alterations that taxonomists have officially agreed to the naming of species, and were welcomed by the botanist Sandy Knapp of the Natural History Museum in London, who presided over the six-day nomenclature session.

“This is an absolutely monumental first step in addressing an issue that has become a real problem in botany and also in other biological sciences,” she told the Observer. “It is a very important start.”

The change to remove the word caffra from species names was proposed by the plant taxonomist Prof Gideon Smith of Nelson Mandela University in South Africa, and his colleague Prof Estrela Figueiredo. They have campaigned for years for changes to be made to the international system for giving scientific names to plants and animals in order to permit the deletion and substitution of past names deemed objectionable.

“We are very pleased with the retroactive and permanent eradication of a racial slur from botanical nomenclature,” Smith told the Observer. “It is most encouraging that more than 60% of our international colleagues supported this proposal.”

And the Australian plant taxonomist Kevin Thiele – who had originally pressed for historical past names to be subject to changes as well as future names – told Nature that last week’s moves were “at least a sliver of recognition of the issue”.

Plant names are only a part of the taxonomic controversy, however. Naming animals after racists, fascists and other controversial figures cause just as many headaches as those posed by plants, say scientists. Examples include a brown, eyeless beetle which has been named after Adolf Hitler. Nor is Anophthalmus hitleri alone. Many other species’ names recall individuals that offend, such as the moth Hypopta mussolinii.

The International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN) has so far refused to consider changing its rules to allow the removal of racist or fascist references. Renaming would be disruptive, while replacement names could one day be seen as offensive “as attitudes change in the future”, it announced in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society last year. Nevertheless, many researchers have acknowledged that some changes will have to be made to zoological nomenclature rules in the near future.

Knapp said: “The decision by botanists should make it clear to the scientific community that is involved in naming organisms that they need to open up conversations and to become more aware and respectful of what names should be permitted.

“We have taken a baby step, no more than that. We need to make more changes to the rulebook. However, you never get anywhere until you start taking steps, and we have done that at last.”

Scientists have voted to eliminate the names of certain plants that are deemed to be racially offensive. The decision to remove a label that contains such a slur was taken last week after a gruelling six-day session attended by more than 100 researchers, as part of the International Botanical Congress, which officially opens on Sunday in Madrid.

The effect of the vote will be that all plants, fungi and algae names that contain the word caffra, which originates in insults made against Black people, will be replaced by the word affra to denote their African origins. More than 200 species will be affected, including the coast coral tree, which, from 2026, will be known as Erythrina affra instead of Erythrina caffra.

The scientists attending the nomenclature session also agreed to create a special committee which would rule on names given to newly discovered plants, fungi and algae. These are usually named by those who first describe them in the scientific literature. However, the names could now be overruled by the committee if they are deemed to be derogatory to a group or race.

A more general move to rule on other controversial historical labels was not agreed by botanists. Nevertheless, the changes agreed last week are the first rule alterations that taxonomists have officially agreed to the naming of species, and were welcomed by the botanist Sandy Knapp of the Natural History Museum in London, who presided over the six-day nomenclature session.

“This is an absolutely monumental first step in addressing an issue that has become a real problem in botany and also in other biological sciences,” she told the Observer. “It is a very important start.”

The change to remove the word caffra from species names was proposed by the plant taxonomist Prof Gideon Smith of Nelson Mandela University in South Africa, and his colleague Prof Estrela Figueiredo. They have campaigned for years for changes to be made to the international system for giving scientific names to plants and animals in order to permit the deletion and substitution of past names deemed objectionable.

“We are very pleased with the retroactive and permanent eradication of a racial slur from botanical nomenclature,” Smith told the Observer. “It is most encouraging that more than 60% of our international colleagues supported this proposal.”

And the Australian plant taxonomist Kevin Thiele – who had originally pressed for historical past names to be subject to changes as well as future names – told Nature that last week’s moves were “at least a sliver of recognition of the issue”.

Plant names are only a part of the taxonomic controversy, however. Naming animals after racists, fascists and other controversial figures cause just as many headaches as those posed by plants, say scientists. Examples include a brown, eyeless beetle which has been named after Adolf Hitler. Nor is Anophthalmus hitleri alone. Many other species’ names recall individuals that offend, such as the moth Hypopta mussolinii.

The International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN) has so far refused to consider changing its rules to allow the removal of racist or fascist references. Renaming would be disruptive, while replacement names could one day be seen as offensive “as attitudes change in the future”, it announced in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society last year. Nevertheless, many researchers have acknowledged that some changes will have to be made to zoological nomenclature rules in the near future.

Knapp said: “The decision by botanists should make it clear to the scientific community that is involved in naming organisms that they need to open up conversations and to become more aware and respectful of what names should be permitted.

“We have taken a baby step, no more than that. We need to make more changes to the rulebook. However, you never get anywhere until you start taking steps, and we have done that at last.”

Adidas has pulled images of the model Bella Hadid from adverts promoting a sports shoe first launched to coincide with the 1972 Munich Olympic Games.

The German-based sportswear company said it was “revising” its campaign after criticism from Israel over Hadid’s involvement.

The SL72 trainers, described by Adidas as a timeless classic, were promoted by Hadid, an American whose family has its roots in Palestine.

The model, who previously drew the ire of the Israeli government for allegedly chanting the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, has been accused of antisemitism.

Israel’s official account on X said it objected to Hadid as “the face of [the Adidas] campaign” in a post that noted that “eleven Israelis were murdered by Palestinian terrorists during the Munich Olympics”.

Hadid has repeatedly criticised the Israeli government and supported Palestinians over the years and on 23 October made a statement on Instagram lamenting the loss of innocent lives while calling on followers to pressure their leaders to protect civilians in Gaza.

Adidas said in a statement that the campaign for the SL72 shoe “unites a broad range of partners”. It said: “We are conscious that connections have been made to tragic historical events – though these are completely unintentional – and we apologise for any upset or distress caused.

“As a result, we are revising the remainder of the campaign.”

It did not set out what changes would be made. Other advertising images showing Adidas brand ambassadors including the French footballer Jules Koundé, the US rapper A$AP Nast and the Chinese model Sabrina Lan remain online.

Members of the Palestinian group Black September broke into the Olympic village on 5 September 1972. Eleven members of the Israeli team were taken hostage and killed.

It is not the first time that the sportswear company has cut ties with celebrity ambassadors after accusations of antisemitism.

Adidas ended its partnership with the rapper Kanye West in October 2022, saying it “does not tolerate antisemitism” after the rapper was suspended from Instagram and Twitter over offensive posts.

It said the comments and actions from West had been “unacceptable, hateful and dangerous and violate the company’s values of diversity and inclusion, mutual respect and fairness”.

Mina Smallman, the mother of two women murdered in a London park, has forgiven their killer but not the two Metropolitan police officers who took and shared photos of their bodies, she said.

Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman were reported missing on 6 June 2020, the day before friends discovered their bodies in a park in Wembley, north London, after organising their own search party.

Police officers Deniz Jaffer and Jamie Lewis were ordered to guard the scene. While there they took photos, some showing the bodies, and shared them in two WhatsApp groups, calling the victims “dead birds”. They were each jailed for two years and nine months in 2021.

Smallman told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme she had forgiven her daughter’s killer, Danyal Hussein, but not Jaffer and Lewis.

Hussein, who was 18 when he murdered Henry and Smallman, was given two concurrent 35-year jail sentences in 2021.

“It wasn’t until after the trial, [the BBC journalist] Mishal Husain interviewed me and she said: ‘Do you forgive the killer? Have you forgiven the killer?’ After a quick soul search – I had, there was nothing there,” she said on Saturday.

“My husband is the most peaceful, loving, quiet person you could imagine. He has not forgiven him. He feels total rage.”

Speaking about the officer’s actions, Smallman said: “Obviously what they did wasn’t as bad as murdering.

“But you’re telling me you have violated our girls further by doing this. Them, I haven’t forgiven.”

Smallman said that when the two former officers were released from prison, she tried to kill herself.

“I knew they were coming out but the whole trauma of their journey – the effect of when they appealed, when they applied to go to an open prison – I just thought, oh, you know what, I don’t want to be here. I just had enough. I’ve had enough of everything. And yeah, I attempted suicide,” she said.

She said she no longer felt suicidal. “God will not let me go. This is not the way I’m supposed to go. When it’s time, it’ll be time.”

Smallman, who has become a women’s safety campaigner, said she still had faith in the police despite the actions of Jaffer and Lewis.

“It’s one of those things that people might not understand. The majority of the police are good people. I’m invited all over the country by different constabularies to come and talk to them about my experience,” she said.

“This is what I do, and I realise it is keeping me alive. I feel really honoured to meet the parents and the women’s groups who are supporting victims, survivors of male aggression. The response I get from after speaking, it warms my heart, because then I think, I’m not just doing it for me. I’m doing it for them.”

Smallman is in touch with the families of other women murdered by men, including Sarah Everard’s mother, Susan. “When I talk to these mums, they are so broken, really broken, and they’re grateful to me because they know I’m talking about all of us,” she said.

This month, Carol Hunt, 61, and two of her daughters, Hannah, 28, and Louise, 25, were found injured in their home in Bushey, Hertfordshire, and died shortly afterwards. Kyle Clifford was arrested a day later on suspicion of murder. “The first day that I heard about it, it just takes me back to the day when I was told they [her daughters] were dead, and I grieve all over again. I grieve for us and I grieve for the family.”

• In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counsellor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org.

A Native American teen who was recently crowned as the teenaged boy with the world’s longest hair says he is proud that he can now represent his tribe and family to a global audience.

“Culturally, Lakota people have long hair,” Reuben Looks Twice Jr said on Friday in an interview published by the website of Guinness World Records, which sanctioned his mark on 7 June after his hair measure 161cm (5ft 3.3in). Invoking the Lakota word for “spirit”, the 17-year-old added: “It’s part of our Nagi. It’s who I am.

“I feel proud to represent my family and the Lakota Nation.”

Reuben told the organization, which is famous for curating a database of 40,000 world records, that he last had his hair cut when he was two years old. His parents initially let him begin skipping trims while growing up in Rapid City, South Dakota, because hair clippers frightened him.

But then, as he got older, he stuck with growing his hair out to honor the tradition of the Lakota. The Lakota, as is the case with many other Indigenous American peoples, consider hair to be a sacred cultural symbol representing the connection with one’s soul, family and community.

Reuben has since mainly worn his hair in a lengthy braid. He maintains the style by washing it every morning for 20 minutes with shampoo and conditioner, according to his interview with Guinness. Then, he dries it for an hour before spending another 10 minutes untangling, brushing and braiding it again.

The teen told Guinness he went to a hair salon to unbraid, wash and brush out his hair when he decided to go for the world record. The salon laid his hair out to find the longest strand, measured three times and the average of the measurements ended up being the official record achieved by Reuben.

He seized the title from India’s Sidakdeep Singh Chahal, whose hair in 2023 was measured to be 146cm (4ft 9.5in).

Reuben revealed his hair is so long that he sometimes gets it stuck in car doors or ensnared on shower knobs. Yet he said he plans to never cut it.

It’s not only because he hopes it leaves “my family and tribe proud” – upon turning 18, he also would qualify for the Guinness record recognizing the man with the longest hair in the world, which as of Friday was vacant.

A woman has been arrested after a car was “deliberately set alight” in Leeds while two children were inside.

The incident happened at 10.52pm on Thursday. West Yorkshire police said a woman reported her car had been deliberately set alight while her children were in the vehicle.

She and a neighbour took the children to safety and were checked over by ambulance staff with no concerns found, the force said.

A police spokesperson said: “A 19-year-old woman has been arrested on suspicion of arson in relation to the incident and remains in custody. Inquiries are ongoing.”

The force added that the woman has been released on bail pending further inquiries.

Christmas in July has finally arrived for ski resorts this weekend as the first widespread snowfall of the season blankets parts of Australia’s south-east, bringing more than 50cm falls in popular tourist destinations.

David Clark, destination marketing manager for Mt Buller and Mt Stirling ski lifts, said the snow “just keeps coming”.

“It’s been brilliant, it started snowing on Friday night and hasn’t stopped,” he said. “Now’s the time to come – it’s the best conditions we’ve seen so far.”

The resort town received 22cm of snow on Saturday morning, with an additional 15cm accumulating throughout the day – and more forecast.

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“It was a slow start in June but it’s such a relief to have these big snowfalls and proper cold fronts coming through, setting us up for rest of the season,” Clark said.

“We’re guaranteed to have snow now to October.”

Mount Hotham received 31cm of rainfall in the 24 hours to Saturday morning, with the resort at full capacity and closed to day visitors. Further north, Thredbo was blanketed in 27cm of snow overnight, taking its seven-day snowfall count to 43cm.

“The entire mountain and village have been covered in a thick blanket of fresh white snow, creating magical wintry scenes,” a spokesperson said.

“The snowstorm rolled in yesterday evening, bringing heavy snowfall, blizzard conditions and strong winds.

“Experts forecast that this low-pressure system could bring another 50cm over the next 10 days.”

Nearby, Perisher was hit with 25cm of snow overnight, with a further 80cm forecast on Saturday, with freezing temperatures recorded as low as 800m, according to Weatherzone.

A spokesperson from Vail Resorts said the quickly moving cold front was expected to bring the “most significant snowfall of the year”.

Falls Creek in north-east Victoria received a whopping 45cm of snowfall in just 24 hours, including 33cm of fresh snow on Friday evening. Its seven day total was well over 70cm.

The head of marketing and visitor experience at Falls Creek Alpine Resort, Sarah Watt, said car parking capacity had been increased this season but when a big storm hit, they filled quickly. She urged guests to pre-book before leaving home to avoid disappointment.

The cold front moving through South Australia into Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland had brought rain and record low temperatures along with snow and blizzard conditions, with more expected to come.

Forecasters Mountain Watch anticipated 82cm of snow over the next seven days, while Snowatch predicted 78cm for the next fortnight.

Angus Hines of the Bureau of Meteorology said it was a “very wintry outbreak” of weather across the south-east, attributed to snowfall and wind.

“There’s been another good top up [of snow] … given they had a nice dump three or four days ago,” he said.

Hines said there was about 30cm of snow in widespread higher parts of mountains in Victoria and New South Wales on Friday evening, with an additional 20cm expected on average over the next day, bringing high peaks of half a metre.

He said there hadn’t yet been snow reaching low levels as occurred last week in a number of places across NSW up to the Queensland border, but low lying communities in northern Victoria and southern New South Wales, including the tablelands, could receive some snowfall in coming days.

It came amid widespread damaging wind warnings across Australia, stretching from southern parts of South Australia through exposed parts of Victoria and alpine and eastern NSW.

A severe weather warning was in place for Sydney due to the strengthening winds, bringing blizzard-like conditions to areas with snowfall. At Mt Buller, gusts of up to 100km/h were reported on the upper mountain overnight, with conditions calming into Saturday.

Hines said some areas in Queensland had received record low temperatures overnight, including Winton, which was -0.6 on Saturday morning – a record in 22 years of data – and Longreach, which dropped to 0.7 – the coldest temperature in three years.

The cold front was expected to pass across the next two to three days, however with wind chill temperatures were expected to “feel cooler than it looks like”.

Meanwhile, Clark was spending Saturday watching ecstatic young children in Mt Buller’s “magic forest” learn to ski in “super thick fresh powder snow”.

“It’s a great vibe … they were all doing it with smiles and loving it,” he said.

“We’ve got eight lifts operating and just announced we’re opening another three tomorrow which is great news. I’m just looking forward to seeing ski and snowboarders back on the slopes.”