Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas, has been targeted and killed in Tehran, the group said in a statement early on Wednesday morning.

The Hamas statement said the group mourned Haniyeh “who died as a result of a treacherous Zionist raid on his residence in Tehran, after participating in the inauguration ceremony of the new Iranian president”.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard confirmed the assassination, which was reported on Iranian State TV early on Wednesday morning, with analysts also claiming Israel killed Haniyeh, the AP said.

The Israeli military declined to comment. Israel has a history of covert assassinations inside Iran, mostly hitting scientists working on the country’s nuclear programme.

The death of Haniyeh is damaging to Hamas, but he was not involved in the military operations on the ground in Gaza, and the group has survived past assassinations of its leadership.

In 2004, Israel killed both Hamas leader Ahmed Yassin and co-founder Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi in attacks in Gaza.

Haniyeh’s death came just hours after Israel claimed it killed Hezbollah’s top military commander, Fuad Shukur, in an airstrike on a south Beirut suburb launched in retaliation for a rocket attack that killed 12 children at the weekend.

The US had been leading a global diplomatic effort to prevent tensions between Israel and Hezbollah, which is backed by Tehran, from escalating into full blown regional conflict.

The two assassinations now raise the stakes not just for Hamas and Hezbollah, but Iran, which backs both groups.

Lebanon’s foreign minister said the strike in Beirut was a shock, after assurances from Israel’s allies that the country was planning a “limited response” that “would not produce a war”.

“That’s what we’re afraid of, and hopefully this will not produce a war,” Abdallah Bou Habib told the Guardian. “We did not expect to be hit in Beirut. We thought these were red lines that the Israelis would respect.”

This is a breaking news story, check back for updates

Israel has claimed it killed Hezbollah’s top military commander, Fuad Shukur, in an airstrike on a south Beirut suburb launched in retaliation for a rocket attack that killed 12 children at the weekend.

Shukur, also known as Hajj Mohsin, served as right hand man to Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, Israel’s military spokesperson R Adm Daniel Hagari said in a late night briefing.

“The IDF will not tolerate terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians. We have been responding to these attacks with precise strikes on Hezbollah commanders, terror operatives and military infrastructure in Lebanon,” Hagari said.

An adviser for planning and directing wartime operations, Shukur was responsible for most of Hezbollah’s advanced weaponry, including precise-guided missiles, cruise missiles, anti-ship missiles, long-range rockets, and UAVs, Israel said.

He also had a $5m (£3.9m) bounty on his head in America over his role in the 1983 bombing of a US marine barracks in the Lebanese capital.

Lebanon’s foreign minister said the strike in Beirut was a shock, after assurances from Israel’s allies that the country was planning a “limited response” that “would not produce a war”.

“That’s what we’re afraid of, and hopefully this will not produce a war,” Abdallah Bou Habib told the Guardian. “We did not expect to be hit in Beirut. We thought these were red lines that the Israelis would respect.”

Lebanon plans to file a complaint with the UN security council and ask Hezbollah “to have a proportional retaliation”, he added. “We want this cycle of destruction of killing and death to stop.”

In his briefing, Hagari said: “Hezbollah’s ongoing aggression and brutal attacks are dragging the people of Lebanon and the entire Middle East into a wider escalation. While we prefer to resolve hostilities without a wider war, the IDF is fully prepared for any scenario.”

The attack, just after sunset on Tuesday, hit a block of flats in Haret Hreik, a suburb known as a Hezbollah stronghold, causing a blast heard across the city.

Three people, including two children, were killed and 74 people injured in the attack, the Lebanese ministry of health said in a statement. Hezbollah did not comment on the Israeli claims that Shukur had been killed.

The top three floors of the building collapsed, and rescuers on cranes concentrated their efforts on clearing debris into the night. “There might still be people trapped under the rubble,” said Ali Abbas, one of the first responders. Shattered glass injured many people in surrounding buildings, including a nearby hospital, he added.

Lebanon’s cabinet will hold an emergency session tomorrow morning to discuss the attack, which the caretaker prime minister, Najib Mikati, condemned as a “criminal act”.

“The Israeli killing machine has not been satisfied by targeting the south of Lebanon and the Bekaa, it has now reached the heart of the capital Beirut, just meters away from one of the largest hospitals in Lebanon,” he said in a statement.

Beirut had been bracing for Israel’s response to a rocket strike on a children’s football match in the occupied Golan Heights three days earlier. Israel and the US have blamed Hezbollah for the attack. Hezbollah has denied responsibility.

The US had been leading a global diplomatic effort to deter Israel from hitting Beirut or Lebanese infrastructure, in an attempt to prevent escalation into full blown regional conflict.

In a post on X after the strike, the Israeli defence minister, Yoav Gallant, said: “Hezbollah crossed the red line.”

The mayor of the northern city of Haifa, Yona Yahav, sent a message to residents saying the city was “prepared for any scenario and are in close contact with the security forces”, and urging them to look out for announcements from authorities.

The White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre said soon afterwards that the US does not believe war between Hezbollah and Israel is inevitable, echoing earlier comments by the US defence secretary, Lloyd Austin.

In Beirut, people were not so certain. As plumes of smoke billowed into the sky above the partly collapsed block of flats, anxious neighbours scrambled to leave the neighbourhood, fearful of further Israeli strikes.

“This area is not safe any more, I expect there to be more. We might go to the mountains, it will be better for us,” Mira Slim, a 20-year-old university student living near the site of the airstrike, said through tears.

Queues also formed at petrol stations across the city as people filled up their cars, wary of further escalation.

Israel assassinated a top Hamas official, Saleh al-Arouri, with an airstrike on Beirut in January. Before that, Israeli forces had last targeted the city during the 34-day war between Israel and Hezbollah in the summer of 2006, when bombing raids largely flattened the same Harek Hreik neighbourhood that was struck on Tuesday.

Russia swiftly condemned the attack as a violation of international law. Iran, Hezbollah’s main backer, condemned it as “sinful and cowardly aggression”.

The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, had vowed a “harsh” response for the attack in the town of Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights. A military statement described it as a direct response.

“The IDF carried out a targeted strike in Beirut, on the commander responsible for the murder of the children in Majdal Shams and the killing of numerous additional Israeli civilians,” the Israeli military said.

In their choice of target, however, Israel may have aimed to send a broader message to Hezbollah that it could reach the group’s leadership in its strongholds.

Shukur is a member of the Jihad council, the group’s top military body. He is said to be in his early 60s and from Baalbek in eastern Lebanon.

He has been involved in Hezbollah campaigns that spanning the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Hezbollah’s intervention in the Syrian civil war in the 2010s and the tit-for-tat strikes with Israel of the past 10 months.

“This is a serious strike and it does pose a real dilemma for Hezbollah and there’s a real question now about what they do,” said Michael Hanna, the US programme director at Crisis Group.

“And then, of course, you are in the potential escalatory cycle, and headed down a path that ends up being not manageable, despite the broader aversion on both sides to all-out war.”

Earlier on Tuesday, countries including the UK, Germany, France and America had urged citizens to leave Lebanon or avoid travelling there. The British foreign secretary, David Lammy, said on Tuesday morning that events were “fast-moving” and that British nationals were advised “to leave Lebanon and not to travel to the country”.

Many airlines had cancelled flights to Beirut. Greece’s Aegean Airlines and Germany’s Condor were the latest to suspend services, joining others including Royal Jordanian, Air France and Lufthansa.

Additional reporting from Andrew Roth in Washington DC and Michael Safi

Israel’s military has charged a reservist with aggravated abuse of Palestinian prisoners, a spokesperson said on Tuesday, as nine other soldiers appeared in military court for an initial hearing over allegations they had sexually abused a detainee from Gaza.

The new indictment alleges that the unnamed soldier, assigned to escort handcuffed and blindfolded Palestinians, used a baton and his assault rifle to attack prisoners on multiple occasions.

He did this even though their restraints meant they posed no threat, and he made videos of the violence. “The accused used severe violence against the detainees he was entrusted with guarding,” the IDF spokesperson said.

The other soldiers detained on Monday are accused of raping and attacking a Palestinian prisoner at the Sde Teiman detention centre so violently that he was taken to hospital in critical condition, Israeli media reported.

His injuries included a ruptured intestine, severe injury to the anus and lungs, and broken ribs, the Israel daily Haaretz reported. A doctor who treated the man told the paper that when he saw the horrific extent of the injuries, he initially assumed they were caused by other inmates.

“I didn’t believe that an Israeli jailer would do such a thing,” said Yoel Donchin, who is also a professor at the Hadassah university hospital.

Haaretz quoted him saying: “If the state and the members of the Knesset think there is no limit to the abuse of prisoners – let them come and kill them themselves like the Nazis, or close the hospital.”

When nine soldiers were arrested on Monday, it prompted an invasion of two military bases by politicians and demonstrators, mostly representing far right parties, who were furious about the arrests and described the men as heroes.

The group surged past police, and the IDF had to call in extra units from other areas to restore order. An increase in threats against the Military Advocate Gen Brig Gen Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi prompted the military to step up her security.

At the closed hearing on Tuesday, military prosecutors requested an extension of the men’s detention to Sunday. One man was released without further charges, a Haaretz reporter said, but deliberations about the other eight continued into the night.

Protesters outside the court objected to the arrest and chanted against the police. The accused soldiers have been granted anonymity for at least two weeks.

Nati Rom, a lawyer representing three of them, did not elaborate on the nature of the alleged sexual abuse and told the Associated Press the men were innocent. The military says it is investigating “substantial abuse” but gave no further details.

The detentions are the first time Israel has charged soldiers with abuse of Palestinian detainees, but they come after months of reporting by the UN and multiple media organisations into widespread abuse of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.

Many have centred on Sde Teiman, which was set up as a temporary holding centre for detainees to be processed when taken out of Gaza but became an overcrowded prison. Israel has refused to allow the International Committee of the Red Cross access to Palestinian prisoners, and human rights activists have described it as “the Israeli Guantánamo”.

The Association of Civil Rights in Israel has taken the government to court over the treatment of prisoners at Sde Teiman, filing an appeal asking for the centre to be closed over abuse. The Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in June that “all efforts” would be made to transfer prisoners out, but it is still in operation.

Tal Steiner, executive director of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, wrote in the daily Haaretz on Tuesday: “Sde Teiman was a place where the most horrible torture we had ever seen was occurring.”

The New York Times documented an allegation of rape from a senior nurse who said two soldiers lifted him up and pressed his rectum against a metal stick fixed to the ground. A report by the UN’s Palestinian relief agency Unrwa into abuse allegations at Sde Teiman provided a similar account of a detainee forced to “sit on something like a hot metal stick”, who said another detainee died after anal rape with an “electric stick”.

Israel’s military denies “systematic abuse” has taken place at Sde Teiman. Announcing the new charges on Tuesday, a spokesperson said: “The IDF operates and will continue to operate out of a deep commitment to the rule of law, and complies with its obligations according to the rules of Israeli and international law.”

As protests over Venezuela’s disputed presidential election spread across the country, opposition supporters have focused their fury on president Nicolás Maduro’s predecessor and political mentor, Hugo Chávez.

At least seven statues of the former leader have been attacked, some beheaded with sledgehammers, and some completely torn down.

In the seaside city of La Guaira, 30km from the capital Caracas, a group of protesters tore down a 3.5-metre Chávez monument which had been inaugurated in 2017 by Maduro, shouting: “This government is going to fall.”

Once removed, the statue was dragged by motorcycles across the plaza, doused in gasoline, and set on fire, the Associated Press reported.

In Coro, the capital of Falcón state, protesters were filmed attacking a concrete statue of Chávez, the former paratrooper who ruled Venezuela from 1999 until his death in 2013. Cheers erupted as the monument fell, and a protester waved a Venezuelan flag over the crumbled remains.

In the city of Calabozo, in Guárico state, protesters used hammers and a metal pole to push over another effigy of the saluting strongman.

This is not the first time that statues of Chávez have been attacked: several were targeted down during a previous wave of unrest in 2017, which more than 160 people died.

But the sheer number of monuments defaced is something new, said Jesús Castellanos, a consultant for the NGO Transparencia Electoral.

“The destruction of so many statues at once is a product of the level of dissatisfaction and discontent over the national electoral council (CNE) calling a victory for Maduro, which does not reflect the reality of what occurred on Sunday,” said Castellanos.

The government-controlled electoral court officially declared Maduro the winner on Monday after a campaign in which opinion polls indicated a strong lead for the main opposition candidate, Edmundo González.

Since then, the opposition, independent observers and neighbouring countries – including the leftwing governments of Colombia and Brazil – have called on the CNE to release voting tally sheets, which it has refused to do so far.

“This is very serious, especially when there are serious doubts about whether the data is accurate,” said Castellanos.

On Tuesday evening the Atlanta-based Carter Center, an NGO founded by Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter focused on conflict resolution, said it was unable to verify the results, blaming authorities for a “complete lack of transparency” in declaring Nicolas Maduro the winner without providing any individual polling tallies.

The Associated Press called the statement “perhaps the harshest rebuke yet” of Venezuela’s chaotic election process because it came from one of just a handful of outside groups invited by the Maduro government to observe the vote.

“The electoral authority’s failure to announce disaggregated results by polling station constitutes a serious breach of electoral principles,” the Carter Center said. The group, which had a technical mission of 17 experts spread out in four cities across Venezuela, added that the election did not meet international standards and “cannot be considered democratic.”

The opposition leader, the conservative former lawmaker María Corina Machado, claimed on earlier Tuesday to have copies of 84% of the voting tallies from polling stations. “They are irrefutable and irreversible proof that we won,” said Machado, who led González’s campaign.

Meanwhile, protests are facing harsh repression from the authoritarian government.

According to the NGO Foro Penal, at least 11 people have been killed by the security forces, including a 15-year-old boy and a 16-year-old girl.

“Unfortunately, the government does not respond to the protests with dialogue and conversations; instead, political protests are repressed,” the NGO’s president, Alfredo Romero, told the NTN24 TV channel.

Addressing supporters outside the presidential palace on Tuesday afternoon, Maduro said security forces were pursuing those behind the attacks – which he has likened to the images from revolutions in post-Soviet states including Ukraine and Georgia, which he claimed were fomented by the US.

“They have been captured, they are under arrest and they will be punished with the full force of the law,” Maduro vowed, before bellowing: “Respect history! Respect the law!”

Additional reporting by Associated Press

Kamala Harris and Donald Trump released dueling campaign ads on Tuesday, as the reshaped US presidential election began to grind into gear with 98 days to go.

The US vice-president’s ad, Fearless, was her first since she became the de facto Democratic nominee, after Joe Biden halted his re-election campaign and endorsed her.

“Donald Trump wants to take our country backward,” Harris said. “To give tax breaks to billionaires and big corporations and end the Affordable Care Act. But we are not going back.”

The former president’s ad, I Don’t Understand, used a snippet of Harris answering a question about immigration policy to bolster a hardline message about drugs, crime, terrorism and the southern border.

Showing footage of her dancing, Trump’s ad called Harris “failed, weak, dangerously liberal”.

Harris’s campaign hit back against Trump, pointing to the Republican’s role in directing congressional Republicans to reject bipartisan border reform.

“After killing the toughest border deal in decades, Donald Trump is running on his trademark lies because his own record and ‘plans’ are extreme and unpopular,” Ammar Moussa, a Harris campaign spokesperson, told reporters.

Harris has been the presumptive Democratic nominee for little more than a week – but she has made an extremely strong start, reeling in more than $200m and appearing to make up ground in the polls.

She is still considering her own vice-presidential pick. But on Monday, Trump’s Republican running mate, the hardline Ohio senator JD Vance, was revealed to have made a telling admission about the strength of Harris’s start.

In remarks at a fundraiser in Minnesota last weekend, reported by the Washington Post and referring to Biden’s decision to give in to those who said he was too old for a second term, Vance said: “All of us were hit with a little bit of a political sucker punch.

“The bad news is that Kamala Harris does not have the same baggage as Joe Biden, because whatever we might have to say, Kamala is a lot younger. And Kamala Harris is obviously not struggling in the same ways that Joe Biden did.”

Biden is 81, and Harris is 59. Trump is 78, making him the oldest presidential nominee of all time. The language of Harris’s new ad pointed to Democratic determination to target Trump’s age – and to portray him as backward-looking and a thing of the past, now that their own old man is out of the campaign picture.

The Harris campaign is also keen to point to its fundraising efforts, which as the new ad was released saw a “White Dudes for Harris” Zoom call featuring celebrities including the actor Jeff Bridges, who famously played Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski. The campaign said it raised $4m.

Five years before Bridges made The Big Lebowski, he played the lead role in Fearless, a 1993 movie about a man whose behaviour is changed after he survives a plane crash.

In a statement accompanying the Fearless ad, the Harris campaign chairperson, Jen O’Malley Dillon, saluted Democrats’ own dramatic shift in fortunes, from plummeting polls under Biden to soaring hopes under Harris.

“Kamala Harris has always stood up to bullies, criminals and special interests on behalf of the American people – and she’s beaten them,” O’Malley Dillon said, echoing the ad’s citation of Harris’s work as attorney general of California, as well as her time as a US senator and vice-president.

“This $50m paid media campaign, bolstered by our record-setting fundraising haul and a groundswell of grassroots enthusiasm, is one crucial way we will reach and make our case to the voters who will decide this election.”

The Harris campaign plans to air its ad prominently over three weeks, including amid coverage of the Olympic Games in Paris.

The Trump campaign is also reportedly focusing on Arizona, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada, Georgia and Michigan – the key battleground states.

JD Vance reportedly admitted to Republican donors this weekend that Kamala Harris was a threat and a “sucker punch”, the latest in a string of recent and past remarks that have been seen to undermine the campaign and that led Donald Trump to try to soften his vice-presidential pick’s description of Democrats as “childless cat ladies”.

The leaked remarks about Harris were themselves quickly followed on Tuesday by the publication of a previously unseen video of Vance telling an interviewer that not having “kids in your life” makes “people more sociopathic” and makes the US a little bit “less mentally stable”.

“You go on Twitter, and almost always, the people who are most deranged and most psychotic are people who don’t have kids at home,” he added in the video, which was released by the Kamala Harris campaign and is undated.

The recorded audio of Vance telling donors at a fundraiser in Golden Valley, Minnesota, on Saturday that “all of us were hit with a little bit of a political sucker punch” when the president, Joe Biden, withdrew from the 2024 race was leaked to the Washington Post.

“The bad news is that Kamala Harris does not have the same baggage as Joe Biden, because whatever we might have to say, Kamala is a lot younger,” the newspaper reported Vance saying. “And Kamala Harris is obviously not struggling in the same ways that Joe Biden did.”

The comments contradict Trump’s own statements on Harris since Biden withdrew from the race. Earlier this month Trump told Bloomberg that he did not think switching out Biden for Harris “would make much difference”, adding: “I would define her in a very similar [way] that I define him.”

On Monday evening, in an interview with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham, Trump said he thought Harris was a “worse candidate” than Biden. And just over a week ago, the Washington Post reported that Vance himself told reporters that there was in effect no difference in running against Biden versus Harris.

As the audio of Vance was leaked on Monday evening, Trump was on Fox News, defending Vance’s past comments that have recently resurfaced about “childless cat ladies”, saying that Vance was simply trying to show how much he values family life.

Vance’s 2021 comments criticizing Harris and other Democrats as “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives” resurfaced after Trump selected the Ohio senator as his running mate earlier this month.

The comments prompted a backlash and warnings from some political strategists that they could cost the Trump campaign valuable votes in a close election.

“He grew up in a very interesting family situation, and he feels family is good. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong in saying that,” Trump said in an interview on Fox News with Laura Ingraham that aired on Monday.

Trump also said in the interview that he did not place a higher value on people with families.

“You know, you don’t meet the right person, or you don’t meet any person. But you’re just as good, in many cases, a lot better than a person that’s in a family situation,” Trump said.

Harris has two stepchildren with her husband, the lawyer Doug Emhoff, and Vance, who was brought up in Ohio, was largely raised by his grandmother.

Other videos of Vance criticizing Democrats and the Democratic party and those within it have surfaced in recent days.

In one newly surfaced interview with Fox News in 2021, identified by the progressive media watchdog Media Matters for America, Vance said that the “left feels comfortable experimenting on children with the lockdowns, the mask mandates and just their general approach to public policy, because they’re increasingly the party in the movement that doesn’t have kids”.

He later added: “I think basically what we’ve done is that we’ve allowed the Democrats to become dominated by a bunch of sociopaths who don’t care about America’s children. And we just need to call it out.”

Reuters contributed reporting

Donald Trump on Monday repeated his weekend remarks to Christian summit attendees that they would never need to vote again if he returns to the presidency in November.

But, after being asked repeatedly on Fox News to clarify what he meant, the Republican former president denied threatening to permanently stay in office beyond his second – and constitutionally mandated final – four-year term.

During the initial remarks made on Friday, which caused outrage and alarm among his critics, Trump told the crowd to “get out and vote, just this time”, adding that “you won’t have to do it any more. Four more years, you know what? It’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote any more, my beautiful Christians.”

Democrats and other critics called the remarks “terrifying”, authoritarian and anti-democratic. And Monday, in a new interview with the Fox News host Laura Ingraham, the former president attempted to explain what he meant.

“That statement is very simple, I said, ‘Vote for me, you’re not gonna have to do it ever again,’” Trump told Ingraham. “It’s true, because we have to get the vote out. Christians are not known as a big voting group, they don’t vote. And I’m explaining that to them. You never vote. This time, vote. I’ll straighten out the country, you won’t have to vote any more, I won’t need your vote any more, you can go back to not voting.”

Ingraham pointed out that many Democrats had interpreted his comments over the weekend to mean there would never be another election again. Trump responded that he had not heard that and continued to talk about how lots of Christians tend to not vote.

“Christians do not vote well. They vote in very small percentages. Why? I don’t know. Maybe they’re disappointed in things that are happening,” Trump continued. “I say, ‘You don’t vote.’ I’m saying, ‘Go out – you must vote.’

“You have to vote” in the 5 November election, Trump continued, calling it the most important presidential race in US history. “After that you don’t have to worry about voting any more. I don’t care, because we’re going to fix it, the country will be fixed and we won’t even need your vote any more because, frankly, we will have such love.

“And I think everybody understood it.”

Ingraham pressed the former president, asking him, “But you will leave office after four years?”

Trump responded, “Of course.”

He added: “By the way … I did last time.”

Neither Ingraham nor Trump mentioned that – after Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential race – his supporters attacked the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 in an attempt to prevent Congress from certifying his electoral defeat.

A spokesperson for Trump’s campaign had previously told the Washington Post that the former president on Friday was “talking about uniting this country and bringing prosperity to every American, as opposed to the divisive political environment that has sowed so much division” that it led to the 13 July attempt on Trump’s life at a political rally in Pennsylvania.

Trump’s remarks on Friday came about two months after he apparently flirted with the idea of being president for three terms at the annual National Rifle Association convention in Dallas.

He alluded to how Franklin D Roosevelt was in the White House for three full terms – and died at the beginning of a fourth – from 1933 to 1945, during the Great Depression and the second world war.

“You know, FDR 16 years – almost 16 years – he was four terms. I don’t know, are we going to be considered three-term? Or two-term?” Trump said, prompting some in the crowd to yell “three!” Politico reported.

The 22nd amendment to the US constitution, enacted in 1951, now limits presidents to two four-year terms.

A group of pet lovers and self-described “cat ladies” came together for the latest in a series of Zoom calls in support of Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. The Tuesday evening call was hosted by Christine Pelosi, a political consultant and the daughter of Nancy Pelosi, and Nikki Fried, the chair of the Florida Democratic party.

The call was not organized around racial and ethnic identity, but as a rebuff to comments made in 2021 by JD Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate, who told the then Fox News host Tucker Carlson that the US was being run by Democrats, corporate oligarchs and “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too”.

Tuesday’s meeting began with a slideshow of pet pictures that played over Dancing Queen by Abba. Nancy Pelosi, a surprise guest, bopped along to the tune before telling the audience that the purpose of the gathering was to show support for women’s freedom to “love how they wanna love, and live how they wanna live”.

“When JD Vance couched his opinion on our freedom, we decided that the cat ladies are striking back,” Pelosi said. “He didn’t realize what an opportunity he was giving us, and what he would unleash.”

The digital conference was organized by a group called Pet Lovers for Kamala. Originally, the group was focused on cat owners in particular, but Christine Pelosi said they found solidarity among dog owners, so they formed an inclusive group that includes owners of all animals.

That included Donna Brazile, a former chair of the Democratic National Committee, and Jan Schakowsky, an Illinois congresswoman. Both appeared with their dogs.

Christine Pelosi and the call’s other organizers gave tips for how to engage people via social media posts, phone and text banks, and by volunteering on behalf of Harris. Fried, who also served as Florida’s commissioner of agriculture from 2019 to 2023, said Harris winning was the only thing stopping the rest of the US going the way of her home state.

“I had to sit next to Ron DeSantis for four straight years and see up close and personal the strangeness of Ron DeSantis,” Fried said. “We have been living under Project 2025. We have been the lab rats for the Heritage Foundation.”

The Tuesday call also follows several other Zoom rallies put on by affinity groups to raise money for the presumptive Democratic nominee.

Within 24 hours of Joe Biden announcing he was ending his campaign, nearly 100,000 Black people logged on to Zoom calls with the groups Win with Black Women and Win with Black Men in support of Harris’s campaign.

Last week, Shannon Watts, best known for founding the gun violence prevention group Moms Demand Action, corralled more than 160,000 white women, and on Monday, a White Dudes for Harris call attracted more than 190,000 people and raised $4m for the vice-president’s campaign.

A virtual meeting of Latino voters is slated for Wednesday and will be hosted by comedian George Lopez.

China’s attempts to stop foreign parliamentarians from attending a summit in Taiwan were “massively overstepping” acts of bullying, the organiser has said at the end of the gathering that saw the group – designed to counter China – expand.

The Inter-parliamentary Alliance on China (Ipac) held its fourth annual summit in Taipei this week, attended by about 50 parliamentarians from 23 countries.

The coalition is aimed at countering threats from China and shifting domestic China policies in members’ respective countries. This year’s location was always bound to aggravate China’s ruling Communist party (CCP), which considers Taiwan to be its own territory. In the days leading up to the meeting, reports emerged of some delegates being contacted by Chinese diplomats in what they said was a “clear attempt to intimidate and dissuade” them from attending.

Luke de Pulford, executive director of Ipac, said some had received calls or demands for meetings scheduled at the same time as the summit to “express to them why they shouldn’t wade into the Taiwan question”, or were offered trips to China instead, “as if they could be bought off”.

De Pulford said Beijing had only targeted countries “where they thought they could bully them”.

“I mean, it’s just really remarkably bullish stuff that’s seriously assertive, massively overstepping,” he told the Guardian. “They were all Global South countries and I just think it’s a really shocking way to behave.”

Chinese ambassadors have called Ipac members in the past to demand that they remove their signatures from communiques. They have also been sanctioned or targeted by Chinese cyber-attacks.

Miriam Lexmann, a Slovak member of the European parliament, said she was among those targeted by local Chinese diplomatic officials.

“I was born into Communist Czechoslovakia and I remember this kind of behaviour when my relatives were called to Communist party headquarters, for intimidation and questioning because they wanted to travel abroad … or had concerns about the Communist regime,” Lexmann told the summit.

On Tuesday afternoon, Ipac introduced new members representing seven world parliaments, including from Taiwan for the first time, and Solomon Islands which switched diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China in 2019.

Peter Keniloria, an opposition MP and son of Solomon Islands’ first prime minister, said his country’s decision created “complexities and challenges” that should be reversed.

“Historically, the relationship that once was held between the Solomons and Taiwan was strong and deeply rooted in partnership and mutual collaboration,” he said. “Nowadays I’m afraid I cannot say the same. I acknowledge the complexities and challenges that both our nations now face as a result of these actions, and state that it is my personal desire to see this relationship return to the strength that once was held.”

Ipac has been vocal in condemning the CCP’s human rights abuses in Xinjiang, and has lobbied in support of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement, in particular the jailed activist and media mogul, Jimmy Lai. It calls itself a “project for lawmakers by lawmakers”, to promote democracy and address threats to the rules-based and human rights systems posed by the rise of China.

On Tuesday the summit endorsed plans to “curb PRC [People’s Republic of China] distortion of UN resolution 2758”. That resolution was passed in 1971, formally recognising the CCP-led PRC as “the only lawful representatives of China” at the UN, and expelling the Chiang Kai-shek-led government of the Republic of China (ROC).

Chinese officials and media frequently claim the resolution affirms the CCP’s one-China principle (which includes their claim over Taiwan), and use state media to attack analysts and others who dispute it. Taiwan’s government, analysts and others have accused the CCP of mischaracterising the resolution, which does not mention Taiwan or the ROC.

De Pulford said countering China’s mischaracterisation of the resolution was partly to address “thorny” topics that often turned people away from the issue of Taiwan.

“It’s very complicated. And for most people it just becomes like, ‘eh, it’s too complicated a territory to speak’.”

Two MPs from Taiwan also joined for the first time, in what the Guardian understands was a late announcement. One of the pair, Chao-Tzu Chen, was unclear on the details of the organisation but said the event was “in line with my philosophy”.

Bolivian opposition senator and summit co-chair, Cecelia Requena, told the Guardian there were major concerns about China’s influence over the Bolivian government, and commercial involvement in infrastructure building and environmentally destructive projects. She said China and Russia were taking control of resources in Latin America without much resistance, but local politicians were scared to push back.

“The way we relate to China has to be improved in order for our national interests to be respected,” Requena said.

In a statement, China’s foreign ministry told the Associated Press that it opposed any form of official exchanges between its diplomatic partners and Taiwan, and that Ipac had “no credibility”.

Additional reporting by Chi-hui Lin

China’s attempts to stop foreign parliamentarians from attending a summit in Taiwan were “massively overstepping” acts of bullying, the organiser has said at the end of the gathering that saw the group – designed to counter China – expand.

The Inter-parliamentary Alliance on China (Ipac) held its fourth annual summit in Taipei this week, attended by about 50 parliamentarians from 23 countries.

The coalition is aimed at countering threats from China and shifting domestic China policies in members’ respective countries. This year’s location was always bound to aggravate China’s ruling Communist party (CCP), which considers Taiwan to be its own territory. In the days leading up to the meeting, reports emerged of some delegates being contacted by Chinese diplomats in what they said was a “clear attempt to intimidate and dissuade” them from attending.

Luke de Pulford, executive director of Ipac, said some had received calls or demands for meetings scheduled at the same time as the summit to “express to them why they shouldn’t wade into the Taiwan question”, or were offered trips to China instead, “as if they could be bought off”.

De Pulford said Beijing had only targeted countries “where they thought they could bully them”.

“I mean, it’s just really remarkably bullish stuff that’s seriously assertive, massively overstepping,” he told the Guardian. “They were all Global South countries and I just think it’s a really shocking way to behave.”

Chinese ambassadors have called Ipac members in the past to demand that they remove their signatures from communiques. They have also been sanctioned or targeted by Chinese cyber-attacks.

Miriam Lexmann, a Slovak member of the European parliament, said she was among those targeted by local Chinese diplomatic officials.

“I was born into Communist Czechoslovakia and I remember this kind of behaviour when my relatives were called to Communist party headquarters, for intimidation and questioning because they wanted to travel abroad … or had concerns about the Communist regime,” Lexmann told the summit.

On Tuesday afternoon, Ipac introduced new members representing seven world parliaments, including from Taiwan for the first time, and Solomon Islands which switched diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China in 2019.

Peter Keniloria, an opposition MP and son of Solomon Islands’ first prime minister, said his country’s decision created “complexities and challenges” that should be reversed.

“Historically, the relationship that once was held between the Solomons and Taiwan was strong and deeply rooted in partnership and mutual collaboration,” he said. “Nowadays I’m afraid I cannot say the same. I acknowledge the complexities and challenges that both our nations now face as a result of these actions, and state that it is my personal desire to see this relationship return to the strength that once was held.”

Ipac has been vocal in condemning the CCP’s human rights abuses in Xinjiang, and has lobbied in support of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement, in particular the jailed activist and media mogul, Jimmy Lai. It calls itself a “project for lawmakers by lawmakers”, to promote democracy and address threats to the rules-based and human rights systems posed by the rise of China.

On Tuesday the summit endorsed plans to “curb PRC [People’s Republic of China] distortion of UN resolution 2758”. That resolution was passed in 1971, formally recognising the CCP-led PRC as “the only lawful representatives of China” at the UN, and expelling the Chiang Kai-shek-led government of the Republic of China (ROC).

Chinese officials and media frequently claim the resolution affirms the CCP’s one-China principle (which includes their claim over Taiwan), and use state media to attack analysts and others who dispute it. Taiwan’s government, analysts and others have accused the CCP of mischaracterising the resolution, which does not mention Taiwan or the ROC.

De Pulford said countering China’s mischaracterisation of the resolution was partly to address “thorny” topics that often turned people away from the issue of Taiwan.

“It’s very complicated. And for most people it just becomes like, ‘eh, it’s too complicated a territory to speak’.”

Two MPs from Taiwan also joined for the first time, in what the Guardian understands was a late announcement. One of the pair, Chao-Tzu Chen, was unclear on the details of the organisation but said the event was “in line with my philosophy”.

Bolivian opposition senator and summit co-chair, Cecelia Requena, told the Guardian there were major concerns about China’s influence over the Bolivian government, and commercial involvement in infrastructure building and environmentally destructive projects. She said China and Russia were taking control of resources in Latin America without much resistance, but local politicians were scared to push back.

“The way we relate to China has to be improved in order for our national interests to be respected,” Requena said.

In a statement, China’s foreign ministry told the Associated Press that it opposed any form of official exchanges between its diplomatic partners and Taiwan, and that Ipac had “no credibility”.

Additional reporting by Chi-hui Lin

The arrest of a journalist for reporting on drug use in the Somali military is the latest incident in an apparent clampdown on critical reporting in the country, which is having a “chilling” effect on Somalia’s media, rights campaigners said.

AliNur Salaad was detained last week and accused of “immorality, false reporting and insulting the armed forces”, after publishing a now-deleted video suggesting that soldiers were vulnerable to attacks by al-Shabaab militants because of widespread use of the traditional narcotic khat.

Angela Quintal, head of the African programme at the Committee to Protect Journalists, called on Somali authorities to drop the case “and allow journalists to report and comment freely on public affairs”

“Somalia must end its practice of harassing and arbitrarily detaining journalists,” she said.

In the past month, the Somali Journalists Syndicate (SJS), a trade union and press freedom group, has criticised the threats and charges levelled against another journalist, Mohamed Salah, for “false and misleading information” in reporting on the suspension of licences for aid organisations by the Somali state of Puntland.

Said Abdullahi Kulmiye was also arrested in July for reporting on incidents of police and armed men demanding bribes at checkpoints. Abdulkadir Isse, a state media employee, was blocked from reporting after publishing an article exploring corruption and abuse of power involving a government minister.

In May, the journalists Sharma’arke Abdi Mahdi and Abdinur Hayi Hashi said they were shot at by four police officers in the town of Dhobley, where they had reported on the local administration’s lack of support for internally displaced people.

Salaad was given bail on Saturday after five days in detention. The SJS secretary general, Abdalle Ahmed Mumin, said no date had yet been set for his hearing.

Mumin – who himself was imprisoned for two months in 2023 over the SJS’s opposition to legislation it believed would restrict free speech – said detention and drawn-out proceedings inhibited all journalists.

“When you are detained, you end up in endless fear. You are not able to continue what you were doing in the past. Critical reporting, independent reporting – that no longer exists,” he said.

“It seems to send a clear message, a chilling message, to other journalists, so the wider community of journalists are in fear and everybody says, ‘What about me? What if I end up in there? What will happen to me?’”

In April SJS’s bank accounts were frozen at the request of Somalia’s attorney general, after the organisation was accused of defamation and registering with false documentation – though it did not specify who had been defamed.

Mumin said: “That was the attempt by the ministry of information and the Somali government in Mogadishu to threaten us, to send us a message to say: ‘if you report on press freedoms, we will come [for] your funding.’”

Laetitia Bader, of Human Rights Watch, said there was a pattern of using criminal law to intimidate journalists during President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s first term in power, between 2012 and 2017, that should not be repeated in his current tenure.

“We have repeatedly raised concerns about the ongoing criminalisation and prosecutions of journalists in Somalia, including around issues of tarnishing of state institutions,” said Bader.

“The tendency to prevent reporting on issues which could be perceived as being controversial or sensitive has made it very difficult for journalists to report on issues which could be of important public interest,” she said.

The Somali government has not responded to a Guardian request for comment.

Anti-whaling activist Paul Watson could face up to 15 years in prison in Japan, after the founder of US-based group Sea Shepherd was arrested on an international warrant in Greenland earlier this month.

According to the Japan Coast Guard, Watson, who is also a co-founder of Greenpeace, is facing charges including accomplice to assault and ship trespass, after he was arrested on an international warrant in Greenland.

The charges stem from the anti-whaling group Sea Shepherd Conservation Society’s alleged boarding of the Japanese whaling ship Shonan Maru 2 in the Southern Ocean in February 2010.

The statutory penalty for such crimes ranges from up to three years in prison or a fine of up to 100,000 yen (£503.10) for vessel trespassing to up to 15 years in prison or a fine of up to 500,000 yen (£2,515.50) for assault, according to Japan’s Ministry of Justice. A spokesperson for the ministry stressed these punishments are general information and do not refer to any specific case, adding they may apply to both principals and accomplices.

The head of the French branch of Sea Shepherd, Lamya Essemlali, visited Watson in custody in Nuuk, Greenland, on Monday and said in a statement that Watson was “doing well” and had “no regrets”.

Activist Peter Bethune, then a member of Sea Shepherd, allegedly boarded the Shonan Maru from a jetski in a bid to detain its captain after the group’s speedboat was destroyed in a collision with the Shonan Maru.

Bethune was seized by the whalers and eventually arrested in Tokyo on charges of illegal boarding. He was given a two-year sentence, suspended for five years.

A warrant to arrest Watson as an accomplice of Bethune was issued in 2010 and an Interpol warrant was filed in 2012 and remained active, a spokesperson for the Japan Coast Guard said. He declined to give his name, citing Coast Guard policy.

The boarding of the Shonan Maru 2 followed clashes between the protesters and whalers that forced Japan’s whaling fleet to return home with barely half its planned catch of whales.

Despite a 1986 International Whaling Commission (IWC) moratorium on commercial whaling, Japan was allowed to kill nearly 1,000 whales each year for what it called scientific research.

It withdrew from the IWC and resumed commercial whaling in 2019, and launched a new whaling mothership, the 9,300-ton, $47m Kangei Maru, in May on a months-long hunt. The ship’s owner, Kyodo Senpaku, has denied speculation that it will sail to the Southern Ocean for whaling, saying it will target whales around Japan.

Known for confrontational whaling protests, the Canadian-American Watson was arrested in Nuuk en route to intercept the Kangei Maru in the north west Pacific, according to the Captain Paul Watson Foundation.

The foundation said the Interpol red notice had disappeared months ago. The Japan Coast Guard said that was not the case.

Watson will be held in Nuuk until 15 August while Denmark considers his potential extradition to Japan, according to the foundation. He was denied bail on the grounds of being a flight risk.

French President Emmanuel Macron’s office has asked Danish authorities not to extradite Watson, who has lived in France for the past year, according to Agence France-Presse.

A French online petition urging Macron to demand Watson’s release has garnered almost 670,000 signatures in eight days.

Sea Shepherd France said on Tuesday that it had launched a separate online petition addressed to Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, urging her not to extradite Watson.

With Agence France-Presse

Keir Starmer has said those who rioted in Southport on Tuesday night will “feel the full force of the law” after police vehicles were set alight and missiles hurled at officers.

It came after far-right protesters pelted police with glass bottles and bricks and attacked a mosque following a knife attack that killed three children.

The prime minister said they had “hijacked the vigil for the victims with violence and thuggery” and “insulted the community as it grieves”.

Merseyside police said 22 officers had been injured during the night of violence, with eight sustaining “serious injuries” including fractures, lacerations, a suspected broken nose and concussion.

Three police dogs were also injured, with two sustaining leg injuries from having bricks thrown at them and a third suffering burns to her back leg.

As officers from five forces struggled to bring the disorder under control, police introduced a 24-hour section 60 order giving officers enhanced stop and search powers, and a section 34 dispersal order allowing police to seize any item, including vehicles, used to commit anti-social behaviour, as well as being able to tell people to leave the area.

Assistant Chief Constable Alex Goss said: “Sadly, offenders have destroyed garden walls so they could use the bricks to attack our officers and have set cars belonging to the public on fire, and damaged cars parked in the mosque car park.

“This is no way to treat a community, least of all a community that is still reeling from the events of Monday.”

He appealed for “anyone who has information or video footage of those involved in this shocking behaviour to come forward so we can identify and arrest those responsible”.

The protest was due to start at 8pm but the streets began filling before then, with scenes rapidly turning violent.

Protesters barricaded themselves down a side street, dragging bins from a pub and industrial unit to provide more missiles to throw at police.

Others turned on a nearby mosque, throwing bricks through the windows, and later, as darkness fell, one group of men ripped up a driveway to arm themselves with stones to throw at police, while across the road, another group tried to force entry to a corner shop.

As darkness fell, smaller groups dispersed and roamed the streets, setting fires in the road. Residents’ walls and fences were pulled down; the bricks used as missiles, and the wooden panels added to the fire.

Police from four neighbouring forces were called in as officers struggled to bring the situation under control.

Alice Dasilva Aguiar, nine, Bebe King, six, and Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, were all fatally stabbed in the attack on Monday. Eight other children suffered stab wounds and five were left in a critical condition, alongside two adults who were also critically injured.

In the aftermath of the attack, for which a 17-year-old was arrested, several false accusations were spread on social media with incorrect names of the attacker. The only details released about the suspect by police described him as a 17-year-old from the village of Banks in Lancashire who was born in Cardiff.

The online misinformation was earlier condemned by the home secretary, Yvette Cooper. On Tuesday night she said it was “appalling” police officers in Southport were facing attacks from “thugs on the streets who have no respect for a grieving community”, adding: “It’s a total disgrace.”

Hundreds of people had taken part in a peaceful vigil on Tuesday evening outside Southport’s Atkinson arts venue, with many in tears as they laid flowers and cards of remembrance. But the vigil was followed by a far-right protest outside a local mosque, which quickly turned violent.

Demonstrators gathered in the area surrounding Hart Street, where Monday’s killings took place. The crowd of hundreds were heard shouting Islamophobic slogans as well as “no surrender”, “English till I die” and “we want our country back” as a police helicopter circled overhead.

Riot police charged at the demonstrators after a police van was set alight and other police vehicles were damaged . Officers used teargas on the angry crowds of predominantly men covering their faces.

Some officers were injured after plant pots and empty bins were among the missiles hurled at them and the Southport mosque building. A group of people attempted to overturn a riot van. Some men were seen pulling down a crumbling wall to use the bricks as weapons, pelting officers with them. Others ripped open black bin bags looking for objects to throw.

Some spectators watched from front gardens, while passersby looked on, saying: “I can’t believe it, it’s horrible isn’t it?” Another said: “This doesn’t achieve anything.”

Southport’s MP, Patrick Hurley, said he condemned any attack on emergency services, adding: “These are the same services that responded to the tragic attack yesterday.

“I want to thank our community for pulling together and supporting every person who has been affected by Monday’s tragic attack,” he said. “Nowhere was this more evident than the solidarity, remembrance and sympathy heard at today’s vigil.”

The violence was so serious that Merseyside police were forced to call in reinforcements. Officers were rushed in from north Wales, Lancashire, Greater Manchester and Cheshire. In a tweet, Merseyside police said: “Officers who had completed a shift in work today are back on duty supporting colleagues in Southport.”

Keir Starmer has said those who rioted in Southport on Tuesday night will “feel the full force of the law” after police vehicles were set alight and missiles hurled at officers.

It came after far-right protesters pelted police with glass bottles and bricks and attacked a mosque following a knife attack that killed three children.

The prime minister said they had “hijacked the vigil for the victims with violence and thuggery” and “insulted the community as it grieves”.

Merseyside police said 22 officers had been injured during the night of violence, with eight sustaining “serious injuries” including fractures, lacerations, a suspected broken nose and concussion.

Three police dogs were also injured, with two sustaining leg injuries from having bricks thrown at them and a third suffering burns to her back leg.

As officers from five forces struggled to bring the disorder under control, police introduced a 24-hour section 60 order giving officers enhanced stop and search powers, and a section 34 dispersal order allowing police to seize any item, including vehicles, used to commit anti-social behaviour, as well as being able to tell people to leave the area.

Assistant Chief Constable Alex Goss said: “Sadly, offenders have destroyed garden walls so they could use the bricks to attack our officers and have set cars belonging to the public on fire, and damaged cars parked in the mosque car park.

“This is no way to treat a community, least of all a community that is still reeling from the events of Monday.”

He appealed for “anyone who has information or video footage of those involved in this shocking behaviour to come forward so we can identify and arrest those responsible”.

The protest was due to start at 8pm but the streets began filling before then, with scenes rapidly turning violent.

Protesters barricaded themselves down a side street, dragging bins from a pub and industrial unit to provide more missiles to throw at police.

Others turned on a nearby mosque, throwing bricks through the windows, and later, as darkness fell, one group of men ripped up a driveway to arm themselves with stones to throw at police, while across the road, another group tried to force entry to a corner shop.

As darkness fell, smaller groups dispersed and roamed the streets, setting fires in the road. Residents’ walls and fences were pulled down; the bricks used as missiles, and the wooden panels added to the fire.

Police from four neighbouring forces were called in as officers struggled to bring the situation under control.

Alice Dasilva Aguiar, nine, Bebe King, six, and Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, were all fatally stabbed in the attack on Monday. Eight other children suffered stab wounds and five were left in a critical condition, alongside two adults who were also critically injured.

In the aftermath of the attack, for which a 17-year-old was arrested, several false accusations were spread on social media with incorrect names of the attacker. The only details released about the suspect by police described him as a 17-year-old from the village of Banks in Lancashire who was born in Cardiff.

The online misinformation was earlier condemned by the home secretary, Yvette Cooper. On Tuesday night she said it was “appalling” police officers in Southport were facing attacks from “thugs on the streets who have no respect for a grieving community”, adding: “It’s a total disgrace.”

Hundreds of people had taken part in a peaceful vigil on Tuesday evening outside Southport’s Atkinson arts venue, with many in tears as they laid flowers and cards of remembrance. But the vigil was followed by a far-right protest outside a local mosque, which quickly turned violent.

Demonstrators gathered in the area surrounding Hart Street, where Monday’s killings took place. The crowd of hundreds were heard shouting Islamophobic slogans as well as “no surrender”, “English till I die” and “we want our country back” as a police helicopter circled overhead.

Riot police charged at the demonstrators after a police van was set alight and other police vehicles were damaged . Officers used teargas on the angry crowds of predominantly men covering their faces.

Some officers were injured after plant pots and empty bins were among the missiles hurled at them and the Southport mosque building. A group of people attempted to overturn a riot van. Some men were seen pulling down a crumbling wall to use the bricks as weapons, pelting officers with them. Others ripped open black bin bags looking for objects to throw.

Some spectators watched from front gardens, while passersby looked on, saying: “I can’t believe it, it’s horrible isn’t it?” Another said: “This doesn’t achieve anything.”

Southport’s MP, Patrick Hurley, said he condemned any attack on emergency services, adding: “These are the same services that responded to the tragic attack yesterday.

“I want to thank our community for pulling together and supporting every person who has been affected by Monday’s tragic attack,” he said. “Nowhere was this more evident than the solidarity, remembrance and sympathy heard at today’s vigil.”

The violence was so serious that Merseyside police were forced to call in reinforcements. Officers were rushed in from north Wales, Lancashire, Greater Manchester and Cheshire. In a tweet, Merseyside police said: “Officers who had completed a shift in work today are back on duty supporting colleagues in Southport.”

• The US will arm F-16 fighter jets supplied by other allies to Ukraine with advanced American weapons including air-to-ground missiles, extended range guided bomb packs and air-to-air missiles including the AMRAAM and AIM-9X, according to the Wall Street Journal ($). The first of dozens of donated F-16s are due in Ukraine this summer, flown by Ukrainian pilots trained in European countries and the US.

• Russia’s defence ministry said on Tuesday its forces had captured the settlement of Pivdenne in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine. It adjoins Toretsk, a Ukrainian stronghold the Russians are trying to take. Ukrainian military bloggers said areas around Toretsk were gripped by heavy fighting with Russian soldiers trying to infiltrate in small groups. Ukraine’s military general staff made no reference to Pivdenne in a late evening report but said Russian forces tried repeatedly to breach Ukrainian defences near Pokrovsk, another hotspot farther west.

• The Ukrainian military said on Tuesday it had successfully hit a Russian oil depot in the Vozy settlement of the Kursk region. The depot was targeted in a joint operation of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) and other forces, said the military general staff. The Kursk region’s acting governor said there had been a missile attack. On Sunday, Ukraine’s military struck the Polevaya oil depot in the Kursk region with three tanks catching fire.

• Ukraine’s energy situation is improving, officials have said, as it contends with waves of Russian attacks targeting power stations. State-run electricity operator Ukrenergo said 30 July was the first day of the month with no power cuts. “If there is no more shelling, it will be possible to manage with minimal restrictions or no power outages at all in the next three months,” said Yuriy Boyko, an adviser to Shmygal who sits on Ukrenergo’s supervisory board. Ukraine has been importing electricity from the EU to fill the gap in generation. The prime minister, Denys Shmygal, said Ukraine was continuing “to prepare for the autumn and winter period and develop alternative generation sources.”

• The Ukrainian government has invited the Chinese foreign minister, Wang Yi, to visit Ukraine, the latter’s foreign ministry has said. Yi and his Ukrainian counterpart, Dmytro Kuleba, met in China last week.

• Shaun Walker reports that the Belarusian president, Alexander Lukashenko, has pardoned Rico Krieger, a German sentenced to death after being accused of espionage on behalf of Ukraine. Germany’s foreign office confirmed to the AFP news agency that Krieger had been pardoned. It comes amid talk of possible high-profile prisoner exchanges by Belarus’s close ally Russia.

• Russian lawmakers passed a bill on Tuesday allowing businesses to use cryptocurrencies in international trade, as part of efforts to skirt western sanctions.

Microsoft outperformed analyst predictions in its latest quarterly earnings report, revealing on Tuesday that its revenue was up 15% year-over-year. But growth of the company’s closely watched Azure cloud computing services failed to meet expectations and shares in Microsoft fell as much as 7% in after-hours trading.

The company was expected to report steady growth in its fourth quarter earnings report, mostly on the back of its cloud services. Revenue from those services grew 29%, lower than the 30% to 31% that analysts predicted, resulting in a sell-off that exacerbates big tech’s recent market woes.

In Microsoft’s earnings report, Satya Nadella, the CEO, sought to bolster confidence in the company’s performance.

“Our strong performance this fiscal year speaks both to our innovation and to the trust customers continue to place in Microsoft,” said Nadella in the earnings statement. “As a platform company, we are focused on meeting the mission-critical needs of our customers across our at-scale platforms today, while also ensuring we lead the AI era.”

Microsoft has invested billions in artificial intelligence in recent years, as part of a bet that AI-enabled services will dominate the tech industry. And the company threw its weight behind ChatGPT maker OpenAI, further cementing itself as a central player in the commercialization of generative AI.

But as the dust in the AI sector settles, there are growing questions about whether big tech’s pivot to AI will be able to yield the sort of revenue boosts that these companies have touted.

Meanwhile, factors including speculation over a Federal Reserve cut to interest rates has led investors to cool their enthusiasm for big tech after a long period of optimism over AI and surging stock prices. Both Tesla and Alphabet’s share prices fell abruptly following the release of their earnings reports last week, while Microsoft’s share price has fallen from the high point it reached in early July.

Microsoft was also at the center of the global tech outage this month that grounded thousands of flights and caused billions of dollars in turmoil across industries. The cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike sparked the outage by pushing a faulty software update to Windows systems, causing them to crash en masse.

A much smaller and unrelated outage hit Microsoft’s Azure cloud service earlier on Tuesday, causing network connection issues in several countries.

At least 973 Native American children died in the US government’s abusive boarding school system, according to the results of an investigation released Tuesday by officials who called on the government to apologize for the schools.

The investigation commissioned by the US interior secretary, Deb Haaland, found marked and unmarked graves at 65 of the more than 400 US boarding schools that were established to forcibly assimilate Native American children into white society. The findings don’t specify how each child died, but the causes of death included sickness and abuse during a 150-year period that ended in 1969, officials said.

Additional children may have died after becoming sick at school and being sent home, officials said.

The findings follow a series of listening sessions held throughout the US over the past two years in which dozens of former students recounted the harsh and often degrading treatment they endured while separated from their families.

“The federal government took deliberate and strategic action through boarding school policies to isolate children from their families, deny them their identities, and steal from them the languages, cultures and connections that are foundational to Native people,” Haaland, a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe in New Mexico and the country’s first Native American cabinet secretary, said in a Tuesday call with reporters.

“Make no mistake,” she added, “this was a concerted attempt to eradicate the, quote, ‘Indian problem,’ to either assimilate or destroy native peoples all together.”

In an initial report released in 2022, officials estimated that more than 500 children died at the schools. The federal government passed laws and policies in 1819 to support the schools, the last of which were still operating in the 1960s.

The schools gave Native American kids English names, put them through military drills and forced them to perform manual labor, such as farming, brick-making and working on the railroad, officials said.

Former students shared tearful recollections of their experience during listening sessions in Oklahoma, South Dakota, Michigan, Arizona, Alaska and other states. They talked about being punished for speaking their native language, getting locked in basements, and having their hair cut to stamp out their identities. They were sometimes subjected to solitary confinement, beatings and withholding of food. Many left the schools with only basic vocational skills that gave them few job prospects.

Donovan Archambault, 85, the former chairman of the Fort Belknap Indian reservation in Montana, said beginning at age 11 he was sent away to boarding schools where he was mistreated, forced to cut his hair and prevented from speaking his native language. He said the experience led him to drink alcohol heavily before he turned his life around more than two decades later. He never talked about his school days with his children until he wrote a book about the experience several years ago.

“An apology is needed. They should apologize,” Archambault told the Associated Press by phone Tuesday. “But there also needs to be a broader education about what happened to us. To me, it’s part of a forgotten history.”

Haaland said she was personally “sorry beyond words”, but she suggested a formal apology should come from the federal government. She didn’t say if she would push Joe Biden to issue one.

Interior department officials also recommended that the government invest in programs that could help Native American communities heal from the traumas caused by boarding schools. That includes money for education, violence prevention and the revitalization of Indigenous languages. Spending on those efforts should be on a scale proportional to spending on the schools, agency officials said.

The schools, similar institutions and related assimilation programs were funded by $23.3bn in inflation-adjusted federal spending, officials determined. Religious and private institutions that ran many of the institutions received federal money as partners in the campaign to “civilize” Indigenous students, according to the new report.

By 1926, more than 80% of Indigenous school-age children – about 60,000 children – were attending boarding schools that were run either by the federal government or religious organizations, according to the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition.

The Minnesota-based group has tallied more than 100 additional schools not on the government list that were run by churches and with no evidence of federal support.

US Catholic bishops in June apologized for the church’s role in trauma the children experienced. And in 2022, Pope Francis apologized for the Catholic church’s cooperation with boarding schools in Canada. He said the forced assimilation of Native peoples into Christian society destroyed their cultures, severed families and marginalized generations.

Legislation pending before Congress would establish a Truth and Healing Commission to document and acknowledge past injustices related to boarding schools. The measure is sponsored in the Senate by Democrat Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and backed by Republican Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.

Simone Biles has won her fifth Olympic gold medal after anchoring the United States to a commanding win in the women’s gymnastics team final on Tuesday afternoon at the Bercy Arena.

The five-woman squad of Biles, Sunisa Lee, Jordan Chiles, Jade Carey and Hezly Rivera returned the US to the top of the Olympic podium in dominant fashion after posting a combined score of 171.296, nearly six points clear of Italy (165.494), who earned their first artistic gymnastics medal in 96 years. Brazil took bronze (164.497), the first team medal in their country’s history, keeping Great Britain off the podium by a scant 0.234 points.

Three years after the Americans settled for a silver medal as favorites at the Tokyo Olympics when Biles withdrew from the team final after after suffering from “the twisties”, the Americans restored their place atop the sport’s world order with a comprehensive performance that saw them rank first across all four disciplines, bringing home team gold for the third time in the last four Summer Games.

“I think we all had something to prove from Tokyo,” a jubilant Biles said afterward. “And tonight we did just that.”

The oldest team the Americans have ever brought to an Olympics, clad in sequined red, white and blue leotards that shimmered from the back of the jam-packed 10,100-seat arena, celebrated in a cluster when the final results flashed on the scoreboard, even if the result had long been beyond doubt.

Biles’ gold marked her 38th career medal between the Olympics and world championships, extending her record as the most decorated gymnast in history.

The 27-year-old from suburban Houston, the oldest American woman to make an Olympic gymnastics team since the 1950s, showed no sign of the calf injury she’d aggravated during Sunday’s qualifying session. The arguable face of the whole Olympics was the star of the show as the Americans claimed their ninth consecutive medal in the team event and the fourth women’s team gold in Olympic history.

The US got off to a flying start on vault, where Chiles (14.000) and Carey (14.800) landed their attempts before Biles stuck a high-scoring Cheng after deciding against performing Yurchenko double pike, the hardest vault currently being done in competition by a female gymnast. Even playing it safe, Biles’ score of 14.900 helped the Americans to an early 1.434-point lead over second-placed China.

Next was the uneven bars, Biles’ weakest discipline and the lone event final that she failed to qualify for. But the American star put down one of the better routines of her career for a score of 14.366. Chiles (14.400) did her part with a solid set while Lee, the individual all-around champion at the last Olympics after Biles’ withdrawal, topped them both with a score of 14.566, kicking off chants of “U-S-A!” from the upper mezzanine.

By then Biles and Co had opened a yawning 3.102 point lead over Italy, nearly the same margin between second and sixth place. The rout was on.

The Americans headed to the beam next, where Chiles fell on her front pike before closing strong for a 12.733 score. Lee (14.600) and Biles (14.366) did more than enough to pick up for their teammate as the US managed to further stretch their lead to 3.602 points after three rotations.

As in their previous team golds in London and Rio, the US team’s final event was the floor exercise. Both Lee (13.533) and Chiles (13.966) turned in sassy, joyful routines filled with power tumbling and firm landings kept the momentum going and further electrified the crowd.

By the time Biles took the floor to close the show, the lead was insurmountable. Yet it was as much a lean-forward moment as these Olympics have seen. Performing to a soundtrack opening with Taylor Swift’s Ready for It?, Biles twice stepped out of bounds but stuck both her tumbling passes in a routine packed to the gills with difficulty. When it was finished and her score of 14.666 was posted, the crowd erupted in applause.

All five members of the US team beamed from ear to ear as they made it through their mostly flawless routines. That included Rivera, the youngest member of the team, who will also bring home a gold medal despite not being selected for Tuesday’s final.

The US team celebrated their win before an animated, celebrity-flecked crowd that included Nicole Kidman, Natalie Portman, Serena Williams, Michael Phelps and Spike Lee. Biles’ husband, Jonathan Owens, an NFL player with the Chicago Bears, also watched Tuesday’s action from the stands after he was granted leave from his team’s training camp.

The Russian team, who pipped the US for the gold in Tokyo, were not entered in Sunday’s final. It must be said their absence left the competition wanting for drama.

Biles will have a opportunity to add to her medal haul over the next week starting with Thursday’s individual all-around final, when she will attempt to become the third woman to win the sport’s greatest prize for a second time after Larisa Latynina of the USSR (1956 and 1960) and Věra Čáslavská of Czechoslovakia (1964 and 1968). She also qualified first on vault and floor exercise, and was second on balance beam, meaning a Paris haul of five medals to match her Rio takehome remains in play.

At last month’s US Olympic trials, Biles had said: “This is definitely our redemption tour. I feel like we all have more to give.”

On a memorable Tuesday afternoon in the 12th arrondissement, their atonement was complete.