Powerful airstrikes rocked the Red Sea port city of Hodeidah a day after Israeli officials vowed revenge for a drone that struck Tel Aviv.

Airstrikes hit a refinery and electricity infrastructure, sparking a huge blaze. It was the first direct hit on Yemen since Houthi rebels there began targeting Israel with missiles and drones last year.

All of those attacks had been intercepted, until Friday’s strike on Tel Aviv killed one person and injured at least 10.

The Almasirah television channel, run by Yemen’s Houthi movement, said on Saturday evening that airstrikes had targeted the city.

Images circulating on social media, which could not be immediately verified, showed vast plumes of smoke and fire next to the port. Almasirah said three people were killed and 87 wounded in the strikes on the oil facilities.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said its fighter jets struck military targets in the Hodeidah Port in Yemen “in response to the hundreds of attacks carried out against the state of Israel in recent months”.

The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said later in the evening that the port was targeted as it was used “for military purposes”.

The strike, he added, “makes it clear to our enemies that there is no place that the long arm of the state of Israel will not reach”.

Defence minister Yoav Gallant said “the fire that is currently burning in Hodeidah is seen across the Middle East and the significance is clear … The first time that they harmed an Israeli citizen, we struck them. And we will do this in any place where it may be required”.

The Houthis vowed to “plague” Israel with further attacks in response to the strikes.

Almasirah TV initially said the strikes in Hodeidah were carried out by US and British forces but later withdrew the reference, according to Reuters. British and US forces have carried out repeated strikes on Hodeidah, as recently as last month.

The Saudi Arabian outlet Al Arabiya, citing unnamed sources, said the strikes targeting a fuel depot and oil refineries at the port were carried out in a joint operation by Israel, the US and the UK. It said 12 Israeli aircraft, including F-35 model fighter jets, participated in the strikes.

Four US officials said Israel acted alone on Saturday’s attacks on the Houthis, with no US military involvement, the New York Times reported.

The latest airstrikes in Hodeidah follow a vow by Gallant, to “settle the score” after a Houthi drone struck central Tel Aviv, killing one man and injuring 10 other people. The Houthis immediately took responsibility for the attack, claiming they had used a new type of drone undetectable to radar and air defence systems.

Israeli officials instead blamed “human error” and said the military was investigating what went wrong. Chief military spokesperson Rear Adm Daniel Hagari said the drone had been detected by air defences but an “error” meant it was not intercepted.

Local police described how the drone exploded over an apartment block, causing a blast that shook the port city, killed one and unsettled residents, disturbed by the rare attack.

Gallant pledged to strengthen Israeli air defences after the attack amid an increase in rocket attacks from Hezbollah that struck northern Israel. The IDF said a barrage of 40 rockets targeted the occupied Golan Heights and Galilee in the day after the drone attack, challenging Israeli air defences.

Yemen’s Houthis, an Iran-backed militia that control much of the country’s west including the coastline, have targeted ships in the Gulf of Aden and disrupted maritime activity in the Red Sea for months in response to Israeli attacks in Gaza.

Israel shot down a suspected Houthi drone headed for the Red Sea port of Eilat earlier this month with a fighter jet, while the group’s attacks on shipping have greatly disrupted business at the key Israeli port.

The US and UK have struck the port city of Hodeidah repeatedly in response, despite the group’s pledges to continue their attacks as long as the war in Gaza goes on.

Israeli air, naval and artillery strikes on the enclave have killed more than 38,000 people since October.

Netanyahu is preparing to travel to the US to address Congress on Wednesday while under growing domestic and international pressure to agree a deal for a ceasefire in Gaza and to bring hostages home.

This was deepened by a broad and damning ruling on Friday from the UN’s international court of justice (ICJ) that Israel’s settlement policies and occupation of the West Bank break international law.

The ICJ ordered Israel to end its occupation of the Palestinian territories “as rapidly as possible” and make full reparations. It is non-binding, but will be difficult for Israel’s allies to ignore, not least because the court also ruled that states are under an obligation not to recognise the occupation as lawful nor to aid or assist it.

Britain’s Foreign Office on Friday restated its commitment to a two-state solution, as it “carefully considers” the ruling.

The foreign secretary, David Lammy, also announced the UK would resume funding to Unwra, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees on Friday, marking a rare split with Washington over policy on the Gaza war.

Labour pledged in its election manifesto to recognise a Palestinian state as part of a peace process, to create a “safe and secure Israel alongside a viable and sovereign Palestinian state”, but did not set a date.

Netanyahu responded to the ICJ ruling, which other Israeli politicians attacked as antisemitic, by effectively claiming both the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem.

“The Jewish people are not occupiers in their own land, including in our eternal capital Jerusalem nor in Judea and Samaria,” he said in a statement on Friday, using biblical terms for the occupied West Bank that are common in Israel.

On Wednesday the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, passed a resolution opposing the establishment of a Palestinian state. Supporters included Benny Gantz, Netanyahu’s main political rival.

The US criticised “the breadth” of the ICJ’s ruling. “We have been clear that Israel’s programme of government support for settlements is both inconsistent with international law and obstructs the cause of peace,” a US state department spokesperson said on Saturday.

“However, we are concerned that the breadth of the court’s opinion will complicate efforts to resolve the conflict,” it added.

The state department said the ICJ opinion that Israel must withdraw as soon as possible from the Palestinian territories was “inconsistent with the established framework” for resolving the conflict.

Washington said that framework took into account Israel’s security needs, which it says were highlighted by the 7 October attack.

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 tens 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.

Donald Trump launched a full-throated attack on Democratic rivals Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Saturday as he returned to the campaign trail a week after surviving an assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania.

In his first rally since the shocking shooting, and his first with new running mate Ohio senator JD Vance, Trump appeared on stage with the conspicuous white ear bandage he wore during the Republican national convention replaced by a smaller covering. He referred to the assassination attempt as a “horrific event” and said he stood before supporters “by the grace of God. I shouldn’t be here, but let’s face it, something very special happened.”

Trump said “he owed his life to immigration”, because he’d turned his head to the right toward a chart about border crossings fractionally before the bullet whizzed past his head, grazing his ear. “I hope I never have to go through that again,” Trump added. He said his opponents call him “a threat to democracy” but countered that he “took a bullet for democracy”.

Trump also referred to leadership chaos within the Democratic party, which has been consumed with a debate over whether Joe Biden should step down from his re-election bid amid concerns about his age and mental acuity. “They have no idea who their candidate is, and neither do we,” Trump jibed. He called Biden a “feeble old guy”.

Trump, appearing jocular and in good spirits during a lengthy speech, said he would rather be in Michigan than sitting “on some boring beach watching the waves coming in” – another dig at Biden, who is currently recovering from Covid at his Delaware beach home.

The former US president went on to predict a landslide election, asking the crowd whether they preferred he run against Vice-President Kamala Harris, to loud boos, or Biden, to cheers. But he said he would also also be happy to run against Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer who, he said, has done “a terrible job”.

Trump hit his usual themes, attacking electric vehicles, China and trade and promising a massive effort on deportation. He talked in his usual extreme rhetoric, especially when it came to immigration, where he talked in dire terms of crimes committed by immigrants that echo rightwing conspiracy theories.

But Trump also pushed back on accusations that a second Trump presidency would be influenced by the extremist manifesto Project 2025 from the conservative Heritage Foundation and including scores of people close to Trump and his campaign.

The document, he said, had been produced by the “severe right – very, very conservative and the opposite of the radical left. I don’t know anything about it, and I don’t want to know anything about it.”

Trump was preceded on the stage by Vance, who received a warm reception, despite the sports rivalry between his home state of Ohio and Michigan.

Vance criticized both Republicans and Democrats in his speech for previously failing to protect manufacturing jobs in Michigan and the US. “Both parties were broken in very profound ways until Trump came along,” he said.

Crowds numbering in the thousands waited outside the 12,000-capacity Van Andel Arena in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to greet the former president amid what was expected to be improved security after the Secret Service and local police allowed 20-year-old would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks to get on a roof with sightline of the stage in Butler, Pennsylvania, and fire several shots at the former president.

Grand Rapids law enforcement declined to say whether it had deployed extra officers, referring questions to the presidential security agency. But, unlike the open county fair fairgrounds last week, Trump’s rally on Saturday was in an enclosed arena where security would be easier to secure and without, as in Butler, outer areas that were assigned to local police.

“I think what you’re going to see is just a visual increase of additional agents and certainly some pretty unprecedented level of police officers just because it’s the first event after the previous Saturday,” former Secret Service agent Jason Russell told Michigan Live.

Eric Winstrom, the Grand Rapids police chief, said his department had worked closely with federal partners on planning for the event “with solid operational planning, effective resource deployment, and an unwavering commitment to the safety of the community we serve”.

John Schaut, chair of the Republican party chapter in Kent, Michigan, told Michigan Live the shooting hadn’t deterred Trump fans and predicted “a blowout event”.

Trump’s campaign released an official update on his injuries on Saturday. Texas Representative Ronny Jackson, who served as Trump’s White House physician, said Saturday that the bullet fired from Crooks’ gun came “less than a quarter of an inch from entering his head, and struck the top of his right ear” and produced a “2cm wide wound”.

Jackson said the wound is healing but that the former president is still experiencing some bleeding, requiring an ear dressing. “Given the broad and blunt nature of the wound itself, no sutures were required,” he wrote.

Michigan is one of a handful of must-win states for Trump and Biden. Recent polling averages place Trump with a 4% lead over Biden, at 46% to 42%. That tallies with the pattern in other key battleground states, especially in the wake of the disastrous debate performance by Biden three weeks ago that triggered a wave of panic in the party about this electability. On a national level, Trump has opened a lead against Biden in head-to-head surveys.

According to local news reports, supporters began arriving for the rally as early as Friday afternoon, and by midday Saturday, lines to get in to see Trump stretched six blocks.

“I think it’s amazing. It just shows how strong he is and we’re so very proud of him, not that we would expect anybody, if they weren’t up to it, to be here like this,” supporter Julie Bryant of Marshall, Michigan, told Michigan Live. “We’re just here to support, especially after what he’s just been through.”

Supporter Adam Salton said he’d been in line since 6am: “Screw the right and the left, this is about Trump, this is about us. He could be on a golf course right now, he could be with his family, but he’s out here doing this for us so I’ll stand out here for eight hours for him, because it’s for us.”

“He was spared by the hand of God!” a man wrapped in a flag chanted as he walked past a line of people snaking outside the 12,000-seat Van Andel Arena in downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan.

The display prompted a smattering of loud cries of “USA! USA!” but the general tone of the packed-in crowd who had gathered to see Donald Trump’s first rally since a would-be assassin opened fire on him at a campaign event in Pennsylvania a week ago was more laid-back.

Indeed, despite the roiling impact of the shooting on US politics over the past week, it felt like back to business-as-usual for the Trump campaign road show.

Joe Attard, a worker at a factory that makes sheds, made the drive from Southgate, Michigan, to Grand Rapids hoping to catch a glimpse of Trump, who was appearing in the crucial battleground state after being formally anointed as the Republican presidential candidate and hitting the campaign trail with his new running mate, Ohio senator JD Vance.

“There’s a real feeling of community here, everybody in the same mind,” Attard said. “It’s a great feeling.” Other than a lone man across the barricades holding a “Deport Trump” sign, Attard seemed to be right. There were few people around without some kind of Trump-branded apparel.

Perhaps in keeping with a party that has fully unified around Trump after the shocking attempt on his life, most people seemed excited to be at the rally. A man in an army baseball cap pointed people towards the ADA-accessible line. People waved and cheered for the Secret Service officers and mounted police patrolling the street.

Standing in line, Isaiah White, a 25-year-old from Hudsonville, Michigan, said he was “very excited” for another chance to see Trump. The last time Trump came to Van Andel Arena, White got in line too late and had to watch on the Jumbotron outside the venue.

Betsy Gatchell Goff, who came to Van Andel Arena from her hometown of Benton Harbor, Michigan, said she thought Trump was “a unifying figure for our country”. Gatchell Goff hoped that with Trump back in office, “we’ll have a president who does more than sleep all day”, a disparaging reference to Joe Biden.

But there was also a strain of bitter sentiment among the crowd. “Trump won” and “Unvaxxed and Proud” were two of the most common slogans on T-shirts, hats and flags.

The mood around last Saturday’s assassination attempt was surprisingly nonchalant among attendees. Indeed, as has happened with Trump’s campaign, the imagery and fact of the attack had been exploited for gain. A vendor on the corner sold shirts sporting a bloodstained Trump, fist raised, with the caption: “Missed me, motherfucker.”

Attard was glad to see Trump back on the campaign trail so soon after an attempt on his life. “It shows the world that he’s strong,” Attard said.

Among the elected officials present, the tone was more reverent. As the event opener, a local Michigan representative gave a prayer that thanked God for “graciously sparing President Trump”.

Security, on the other hand, was fully alert. Secret Service and TSA agents, including at least one K-9 unit, motioned people through metal detectors, while legions of staffers in crisp polos emblazoned with “Team Trump” ushered people to their seats.

There was serious political red meat from some speakers. Michigan Republican party chair Pete Hoekstra took the stage to open the event and called governor Gretchen Whitmer the “worst governor in the United States”. Anti-Whitmer sentiment was widespread, with people throughout the event calling her “Witless”, “Witchmer” or “Whitler”.

The state of Michigan politics was a prominent theme. Bill Huizenga, the US representative for Michigan’s fourth district, said Trump was in Grand Rapids to show the world how “the blue wall” of midwestern states was “going to crumble like a cookie”.

The Grand Rapids rally was the first since JD Vance was announced as Trump’s running mate. The Ohio senator seemed to be a bit of an unknown quantity among rally attendees.

“I’ll support him because Trump supports him,” Betsy Gatchell Goff said. Isaiah White admitted: “Honestly, I had to Wikipedia him, but he seems all right.”

The tone shifted once Vance appeared. The new vice-presidential candidate opened with a joke about the Ohio-Michigan football rivalry and followed it up with challenging Vice-President Kamala Harris’s record, saying: “What the hell have you got?,” prompting the loudest cheers of the afternoon.

But much of the tone was the usual politics-as-entertainment fare that is a hallmark of Trump rallies. Even in the wake of an attempted assassination, Trump’s rally struck a celebratory tone in this extraordinary American election.

As the crowd filtered in, Macho Man by the Village People and Born Free by Kid Rock alternated with La Vie enRose by Édith Piaf. A sizzle reel from the Trump campaign lit up the arena, then launched straight into a dramatized victimhood narrative.

“The only crime I’ve committed is to fiercely defend this country,” Trump’s voice boomed in the accompanying voiceover. At the line: “When I’m re-elected, I will obliterate the deep state!,” the crowd erupted into cheers and whistles. In a later promotional video, a union worker said: “Fuck you” to a reporter when asked about Joe Biden’s policies.

At this, people throughout the crowd broke into laughter.

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.

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 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”.

According to the Washington Post on Saturday, the tight-knit Biden family has not called an emergency meeting to discuss the spiraling crisis, but is instead exchanging usual daily phone calls and text messages.

Rising anger within the family, which has enjoyed nearly half a century of Joe Biden’s power in Delaware, both as a senator, vice-president and president, is fueled by the belief that his dismal debate performance could still be overcome by a determined fight back and a display of loyalty. “It’s like they don’t know he’s Irish,” the Post quoted a person close to the family.

The past week has seen waves of Democratic 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.

On Saturday, Representative Mark Takano of California, the top Democrat on the House veterans’ affairs committee, added his name to the list of nearly three dozen Democrats in Congress who say it’s time for Biden to leave the race. The Californian called on Biden to “pass the torch” to Harris.

“It has become clear to me that the demands of a modern campaign are now best met by the vice-president, who can seamlessly transition into the role of our party’s standard bearer,” Takano said.

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 tone of defiance, saying the president 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 representative 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, our 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 Democratic 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 Democratic “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 within 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.”

NHS England has warned of “continued disruption” to GP services into next week after Friday’s global IT outrage, as air passengers continued to face delays and flight cancellations.

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 worldwide across a number of services, with hospital appointments cancelled, payroll systems seizing up and TV channels going off air.

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

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”.

NHS England reported on Saturday afternoon that its systems were “coming back online in most areas” but “still running slightly slower than usual”.

A spokesperson said: “As practices recover from the loss of IT systems on Friday, there may be some continued disruption, particularly to GP services, in some areas into next week as practices work to rebook appointments.

“The advice for Monday remains that patients should attend appointments as normal unless told otherwise.”

Microsoft estimates the CrowdStrike update has affected 8.5m windows devices, or less than 1% of all Windows machines, according to Reuters.

Nick Kaye, the chair of the NPANational Pharmacy Association, which represents independent community pharmacies in the UK, 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.”

Holidaymakers have been warned it could take weeks to recover.

Nearly 7,000 flights were cancelled worldwide on Friday, including 408 to and from the UK. As of 10am on Saturday, 23 departing and 25 inbound flights had been cancelled in the UK, according to figures from the aviation analytics firm Cirium.

Travellers at Heathrow and Gatwick experienced long queues on Saturday.

Charles, 50, from the Midlands, said he was glad he was in a queue to leave the country rather than arriving to the UK. “I’m glad it’s because we’re going out,” he said. “It’d be different if we were going back.”

The transport secretary, Louise Haigh, said on Saturday that 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.”

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

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.”

Train travellers were also affected. On Friday London Euston station was packed 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.

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

NHS England has warned of “continued disruption” to GP services into next week after Friday’s global IT outrage, as air passengers continued to face delays and flight cancellations.

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 worldwide across a number of services, with hospital appointments cancelled, payroll systems seizing up and TV channels going off air.

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

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”.

NHS England reported on Saturday afternoon that its systems were “coming back online in most areas” but “still running slightly slower than usual”.

A spokesperson said: “As practices recover from the loss of IT systems on Friday, there may be some continued disruption, particularly to GP services, in some areas into next week as practices work to rebook appointments.

“The advice for Monday remains that patients should attend appointments as normal unless told otherwise.”

Microsoft estimates the CrowdStrike update has affected 8.5m windows devices, or less than 1% of all Windows machines, according to Reuters.

Nick Kaye, the chair of the NPANational Pharmacy Association, which represents independent community pharmacies in the UK, 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.”

Holidaymakers have been warned it could take weeks to recover.

Nearly 7,000 flights were cancelled worldwide on Friday, including 408 to and from the UK. As of 10am on Saturday, 23 departing and 25 inbound flights had been cancelled in the UK, according to figures from the aviation analytics firm Cirium.

Travellers at Heathrow and Gatwick experienced long queues on Saturday.

Charles, 50, from the Midlands, said he was glad he was in a queue to leave the country rather than arriving to the UK. “I’m glad it’s because we’re going out,” he said. “It’d be different if we were going back.”

The transport secretary, Louise Haigh, said on Saturday that 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.”

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

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.”

Train travellers were also affected. On Friday London Euston station was packed 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.

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

The aftershocks of the Microsoft IT outage continued to ripple across the UK on Saturday as holidaymakers and patients suffered the brunt of the computer systems failure.

Customers experienced flight cancellations, faulty train ticket machines and failures in GPs’ prescription and appointment systems after a flawed security update from CrowdStrike, a US cybersecurity firm, crashed 8.5 million devices across the world running the Windows operating system.

By Saturday afternoon, travel companies and the NHS offered tentative signs that the problems were being fixed. Louise Haigh, the transport secretary, said that UK airports and train operators “have their IT systems back up and working as normal” and there would be “some delays and a small number of cancelled flights”. NHS England said that “the majority” of the computer systems were back online “in most areas” but warned there may be further disruption this week.

The impact of Friday’s chaos was still being felt by many. Nearly 7,000 flights were cancelled worldwide, including 408 in and out of the UK, on what was the first day of the summer holidays for most English schools, and expected to be the busiest travel day since October 2019.

On Saturday morning 48 more flights were cancelled, according to aviation analysts Cirium, and people travelling to Europe flocked to Dover to find an alternative route. The Port of Dover authority said it was seeing “hundreds of displaced airport passengers arriving” and warned that anyone travelling needed a ticket beforehand.

IT failures also affected rail travel on Saturday, with passengers struggling to buy tickets at Waterloo and Paddington stations in London, while South Western Railway said some of its ticket machines were still down.

Pharmacies and GPs were continuing to deal with the impact of the outage on Saturday. Patients found appointments had been cancelled at the last minute on Friday. The Royal Surrey NHS Trust declared a critical incident.

Prescriptions could not be sent through to pharmacies, some chemists said, which caused a delay in patients being able to receive their medications at the expected time. Clinicians used paper records and handwritten prescriptions instead.

Dr Fari Ahmad, a GP in Cheshire, told BBC Breakfast on Saturday that her practice had been unable to give patients test results, which would cause “more issues later on in the week”. The National Pharmacy Association chairman, Nick Kaye, said the outage “will have caused backlogs and we expect services to continue to be disrupted this weekend as pharmacies recover.”

Microsoft’s vice-president for enterprise and operating system security, David Weston, said in a blog post yesterday that the company recognised “the disruption this problem has caused for businesses and in the daily routines of many individuals”.

He said: “We currently estimate that CrowdStrike’s update affected 8.5m Windows devices, or less than 1% of all Windows machines. While the percentage was small, the broad economic and societal impacts reflect the use of CrowdStrike by enterprises that run many critical services.”

Emmalinda MacLean and Eric Rosloff had expected to be at home in Los Angeles on Saturday morning after two weeks in Scotland, but found themselves at Heathrow instead.

Their connecting flight from Glasgow had been delayed on Friday, leaving them little wiggle room when they landed at Heathrow.

“We were running through the airport trying to make our connection but security stopped us and sent us to customer services,” MacLean said. “We waited in line for three hours,” her husband added. “And all the time our flight was still on the tarmac. But they wouldn’t let us on.”

Dozens of other passengers had similar problems, they said. After a night in an airport hotel, they returned on Saturday to try to get home.

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.”

The archbishop of Canterbury has spoken of the work to address the Church of England’s historic links to chattel slavery on a trip to Jamaica, as archive research reveals that the slave trader Edward Colston left a bequest in the 18th century to the church’s missionary arm.

Justin Welby is on a three-day visit to the West Indies to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the diocese of Jamaica and the Cayman Islands. He said a £100m fund set up by the church would be used to benefit communities “which still bear the scars” from slavery.

The Church Commissioners, the body that manages the church’s financial assets, published a report in January last year on its links to chattel slavery, via the Queen Anne’s Bounty, a fund used to supplement the income of the clergy.

The Observer revealed in May that an archbishop of Canterbury in the 18th century, Thomas Secker, approved payments for the purchase of enslaved people on sugar plantations in Barbados owned by the church’s missionary arm, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG).

The Observer has now established that Edward Colston left a bequest of £300 (equivalent to more than £54,000 in today’s money) to Archbishop William Wake and other high Anglican figures within the SPG.

Colston’s will in 1721 stated: “I give to the President and Governors of the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts Three Hundred pounds for the promotion and better carrying on that pious work and design.”

Colston, who was a wealthy merchant, is one of Britain’s most notorious slave traders and his statue was toppled from its plinth in Bristol in June 2020 and pushed into the docks.

The statue went on display at the city’s M Shed museum in March this year among other exhibits about the history of protest.

The work of the SPG included its ownership of the Codrington sugar plantations in Barbados, which had been left to the society by Christopher Codrington, a colonial administrator and plantation owner.

His will stipulated the plantations should be maintained and “continued entire with three hundred negros at least kept always thereon”.

The Codrington plantations’ accounts for 1731, which are held in the society’s archive at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, show that “a new iron collar for a Negro” was manufactured on site at the Codrington estate and sold.

On 1 May 1731, two shillings were paid for this by “Thomas Hayes, a farrier”.

Purchases of enslaved persons were repeatedly approved by the society in the 18th century, with the incumbent archbishop of Canterbury acting as society president.

These include payments approved by Secker in 1758 and 1760.

Purchases of enslaved persons were also made by the society in the 1720s and 1730s when Archbishop Wake was president.

In the 1830s the SPG was paid £8,558 in compensation by the British government for the loss of its human “property” in Barbados when chattel slavery ended in the British empire with the 1833 Abolition Act.

Nothing was paid to people who had been enslaved.

Robert Beckford, professor of social justice at the University of Winchester, said: “The gift demonstrates the entanglement of [the SPG] with the dreadful Colston history.”

During his stay in Jamaica this weekend, Welby is due to receive an honorary doctorate of law from the University of the West Indies.

Beckford said he was concerned that an honorary degree from the university suggested it was a case of “job done” on reparations, rather than “needs to be better”.

Church of England officials said it had been previously acknowledged that Colston had been a benefactor to the Queen Anne’s Bounty and they welcomed new research from the archives.

Officials say they are committed to a programme of work examining the church’s historic links to chattel slavery and will be transparent about its findings.

The singer Jessie J has revealed she has been diagnosed with obsessive compulsive-disorder (OCD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

The Price Tag singer, 36, who welcomed her son, Sky Safir Cornish Colman, last year, said having a baby had “exposed” the conditions “a lot more”.

In an Instagram post, she said: “Hello. I was diagnosed with ADHD and OCD about three months ago.

“In telling people a lot of the reaction I got was, ‘Yeah I mean we knew that’ (which I’m sure some of you are doing right now) and of course I knew to some extent but having a baby has let’s say … exposed it a lot more, which was comforting in a way, as it made it feel less heavy and scary.

“But also in moments has made me feel like I can’t talk about it. F*** that. Here I am talking about it.”

ADHD is a condition that affects people’s behaviour and can make people seem restless or impulsive, according to the NHS website.

The health service says that OCD is a mental health condition where a person has obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviours that can interfere with their life.

Jessie, whose full name is Jessica Cornish, added: “It’s weird when you know you have been a little different and felt things differently your whole life, and finally one day when you least expect it, someone really explains why and you can’t avoid it.”

The Do It Like A Dude singer said ADHD was a “wide spectrum” and added she felt “like it’s a superpower as long as you look at it from the right perspective and have the right people around you that can navigate it with you”.

She said it had made her rethink her whole life.

“The way I’ve been, the way I deal with things. The relationships I have had. How I work and how I love,” she said. “It’s empowered me and, honestly, sometimes has overwhelmed me all at the same time.

“If there is one thing social media has given me, it’s the chance to relate, connect and heal with strangers that have kinds hearts and are going through a similar thing.

“I have always been honest in the journey I’m going through in life.

“And I know there are so many people that are going through this same thing and I’m honestly just reaching out to hold your hand and because I need mine held too.”

She continued: “It has made me love myself even more. I’m hugging 11-year-old me. Who would clean her trainers with a toothbrush when she was stressed and to this day has lived with a 1,000 lists to not feel like life will crumble.

“Here’s to getting to know yourself even more through life. And loving yourself all the way.

“Nothing in life defines us, but it helps us grow and become a more wholesome version of ourselves.”

The singer Jessie J has revealed she has been diagnosed with obsessive compulsive-disorder (OCD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

The Price Tag singer, 36, who welcomed her son, Sky Safir Cornish Colman, last year, said having a baby had “exposed” the conditions “a lot more”.

In an Instagram post, she said: “Hello. I was diagnosed with ADHD and OCD about three months ago.

“In telling people a lot of the reaction I got was, ‘Yeah I mean we knew that’ (which I’m sure some of you are doing right now) and of course I knew to some extent but having a baby has let’s say … exposed it a lot more, which was comforting in a way, as it made it feel less heavy and scary.

“But also in moments has made me feel like I can’t talk about it. F*** that. Here I am talking about it.”

ADHD is a condition that affects people’s behaviour and can make people seem restless or impulsive, according to the NHS website.

The health service says that OCD is a mental health condition where a person has obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviours that can interfere with their life.

Jessie, whose full name is Jessica Cornish, added: “It’s weird when you know you have been a little different and felt things differently your whole life, and finally one day when you least expect it, someone really explains why and you can’t avoid it.”

The Do It Like A Dude singer said ADHD was a “wide spectrum” and added she felt “like it’s a superpower as long as you look at it from the right perspective and have the right people around you that can navigate it with you”.

She said it had made her rethink her whole life.

“The way I’ve been, the way I deal with things. The relationships I have had. How I work and how I love,” she said. “It’s empowered me and, honestly, sometimes has overwhelmed me all at the same time.

“If there is one thing social media has given me, it’s the chance to relate, connect and heal with strangers that have kinds hearts and are going through a similar thing.

“I have always been honest in the journey I’m going through in life.

“And I know there are so many people that are going through this same thing and I’m honestly just reaching out to hold your hand and because I need mine held too.”

She continued: “It has made me love myself even more. I’m hugging 11-year-old me. Who would clean her trainers with a toothbrush when she was stressed and to this day has lived with a 1,000 lists to not feel like life will crumble.

“Here’s to getting to know yourself even more through life. And loving yourself all the way.

“Nothing in life defines us, but it helps us grow and become a more wholesome version of ourselves.”

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.

Thomas Matthew Crooks, the gunman who tried to assassinate Donald Trump a week ago, was able to fly a camera-equipped drone over the fairgrounds near Butler, Pennsylvania, shortly before the former president was set to speak there, according to news reports.

The latest disclosure about security lapses that preceded the shooting comes as a more complete picture of Crooks’ preparations is emerging, though it still lacks any definitive motive for the 20-year-old’s actions that led to Trump being grazed by a bullet, the shooting death of former fire chief Corey Comperatore and the critical wounding of two rally-goers.

The Wall Street Journal, which cited law enforcement officials, said Crooks flew the drone on a programmed flight path earlier on the day of the shootings – 13 July – on a predetermined path over the event site.

Later in the day, the would-be assassin fired at least six rounds from a semi-automatic rifle from the roof of the American Glass Research building roughly 150 yards from where Trump was speaking. Soon after, Crooks was killed by a Secret Service counter-sniper with a single bullet to the head.

But investigators have said that Crooks was identified as a suspicious person more than an hour before the shooting when police officers saw him loitering outside the rally with a range finder and a backpack but had lost track of him.

Investigators now say they believe Crooks began planning the attack days after the Trump campaign announced the rally on 3 July and later scoped out the fairgrounds as many as six times in advance of the rally.

On the day of the rally, police saw “someone engaged in suspicious activity”, said representative Gary Palmer, a Republican from Alabama, who was briefed by law enforcement last week.

Oklahoma senator Markwayne Mullin, who was also briefed, said police “were actively looking for him for 19 minutes before the shots rang out”.

New information about Crooks’ intensive planning for the attack has also been gleaned from 14,000 browser history links in his phone. While he did not leave an ideological manifesto common to many mass-shooting perpetrators, FBI investigators have disclosed that online searches linked in his phone showed that he’d researched school shootings. He reportedly searched Michigan school shooter Ethan Crumbley and had a mugshot of him on his phone.

Crooks also performed internet searches on next month’s Democratic convention and Joe Biden, depressive disorder and explosive materials and chemical compounds. Crooks brought a pair of homemade bombs to the rally designed to be set off with a remote fireworks igniter, as well as a bulletproof vest and three 30-round magazines later found in his Hyundai Sonata.

Officials also disclosed that Crooks had received several packages to his home marked “hazardous materials”.

But little if any partisan ideological context or motive has been ascribed to the gunman. Mullin said Crooks “hated politicians as a whole”. Crooks’ former classmates at Bethel Park high school outside Pittsburgh recalled him being a quiet student with a small friend group, though accounts of his personality and school experience often vary.

Crooks excelled at math and had earned an associate’s degree in engineering science from the Community College of Allegheny County in May and had talked about becoming a mechanical engineer.

Since graduating, he’d worked at a Pittsburgh nursing home serving meals and washing dishes for $16 an hour, and liked to build computers, play video games and practice target shooting at a nearby gun-range, including on the day before the shooting. He told the nursing home he’d be back at work on Sunday.

Xavier Harmon, who taught Crooks computer technology, told the New York Times that he was “struggling” to make sense of his student. Like others in computer class, Harmon said, Crooks “didn’t feel like they were accepted among their peers, so computer technology was their place they called home”.

In an autobiographical statement Crooks wrote for his induction into the National Technical Honor Society in 2021, he said his interests “are highly varied, and include computer technology, engineering, history and economics”.

The need to ascribe political motive to Crooks’ assassination attempt may be misguided, experts in the field of mass shootings have said. “What we might be seeing here is, this was somebody intent on perpetrating mass violence, and they happened to pick a political rally,” James Densley, founder of the Violence Project, told the New York Times on Saturday.

An emerging picture depicts Crooks’ family as insular and anti-social. Both of his parents, Matthew and Mary, worked from home as licensed social workers and the FBI has said their small home was cluttered similarly to a hoarder’s house.

Neighbors said the family rarely initiated conversations. “He didn’t speak to anyone, and no one spoke to him,” recalled Liam Campbell, 17, who rode on the school bus with Crooks, to the Times. “He seemed like the kind of person who didn’t like to start conversations with people he didn’t know. He seemed nervous.”

Crooks’ guidance counsellor Jim Knapp said Crooks was more pre-occupied with the latest technology news or cryptocurrency than anything political. When asked about his weekend, Knapp told the Times, “Tom always had something like: ‘Well, I sat in my bedroom, and I was gaming. I was on my computer. I didn’t do much this weekend, but I still had fun.”

“Other than his drive for academics, Tom was simple,” he added.

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.”

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.