Thailand’s conservative establishment is seeking to exterminate politicians who promised reform, according to the former leader of a popular party that was banned by the courts last week.

Pita Limjaroenrat, whose Move Forward party won the most votes and most seats in last year’s election, said Thailand was trapped in a “double lock democracy” where the legal system and military coups were repeatedly being used to undermine election results.

His former party was dissolved on Wednesday over its promise to reform the country’s strict lese majesty law, under which criticism of the monarchy can lead to up to 15 years in prison.

UN Human Rights Chief, Volker Turk, the European Union and the US state department all expressed concern over the Constitutional Court judgment, warning it set back the country’s democratic progress.

The party’s remaining MPs have since regrouped under a new party, the People’s Party, but Pita and the executive committee of Move Forward are banned from politics for 10 years. He has warned legal threats against the new party could escalate.

“They’re coming after us. They’re exterminating us,” said Pita, who spoke to the Guardian from his home in Bangkok. “They’re not going to compromise. They’re not here to find consensus.”

Move Forward had promised to shake up Thailand by stopping the military from intervening in politics, breaking up monopolies that dominate the economy and reforming the lese majesty law.

Their pledges resonated with a wide cross-section of Thai voters, but also attracted fierce opposition from members of the powerful military royalist establishment, which blocked it from taking power, accusing it of trying to overthrow the monarchy.

Pita said his opponents were using the monarchy as a pretext to protect their own interests.

“I believe the king is revered above politics as we are a constitutional monarchy,” he said, adding that he hoped, “the people in power, whether it’s military or monopolies, stop dragging down the monarch as an excuse to protect their concentration of wealth and power.”

The party’s pledge to reform the law was aimed at de-escalating conflict that has existed between younger generations and the monarchy, he said.

“My attempted amendment of the criminal code [article] 112 [the lese majesty law], was hoping to use the parliament as a middle path, a common ground, with transparency.”

In 2020, mass youth-led protests called for reform of the monarchy, criticising an institution that had long been considered untouchable. In the run up to last year’s election there was unprecedented discussion of lese majesty, with political parties forced to announce their stance on the law. Move Forward was the only party to promise reform.

There is now a shrinking space for such debates, Pita said, adding that the conditions for free speech were worse today than even before the mass protests began. Since 2020 at least 272 people have since been charged with lese majesty.

Pita said that there was “a thirst for justice” among the public after the dissolution of Move Forward. “I spend my time trying to shape the trajectory of anger and thirst [towards] the ballot box, rather than the battles on the street,” he said, adding that street protests brought the risk of “bullets in people’s heads” and of a military coup.

The Thai authorities have a history of using excessive violence against protesters, including in 2010, when at least 90 people were killed in a military crackdown.

The threat of a coup was always a possibility in Thailand, he added. “I speak that not because of my feeling but because of facts … From 1932… there have been 13 military coups and 20 attempted [coups] … the last one being just a decade ago,” he said. Judicial harassment was the other way in which the establishment maintained control, he added.

Move Forward was the 34th political party to be dissolved since 2006, according to Pita.

Further legal threats loom against former Move Forward MPs, including those who have moved to its successor, People’s Party. The National Anti-Corruption Commission is investigating the ethical conduct of 44 politicians who belonged to Move Forward who supported the bill to reform lese majesty. They could face a lifetime ban from politics.

The new party would aspire to win by an even greater margin than in last’s year’s election, “to the extent that we’re the undisputed leader in a democratic Thailand”.

The old structures that exist in Thailand also risked a “collapse from within”, he added, as newer generations enter politics, the legal system or the military.

The People’s party has said its ideology remains unchanged, though its strategies may differ. “You can pick up a few flowers, but you cannot stop spring,” Pita said.

Ukrainian sources have indicated that thousands of troops have been committed to its incursion into Russia’s Kursk province, as Moscow and Kyiv traded accusations about a fire at the occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant 250 miles to the south.

A Ukrainian security official told the Agence France-Presse that the aim of the incursion was to destabilise Russia and string out Russian forces with light, fast-moving attacks. It remains unclear how sustainable the operation will be in the medium term amid Kremlin threats that it will be snuffed out using Russian reserves.

Russia had suggested that several hundred Ukrainian troops had launched a surprise attack on Tuesday, but the Ukrainian official said the numbers were larger. Asked whether more than 1,000 Ukrainian soldiers were involved, the official said: “It is a lot more … Thousands.”

Several Ukrainian brigades are said to be involved in the operation, according to a range of sources. Kyiv caught Russia off guard by striking at a lightly defended sector of the front that had seen no significant fighting since the spring of 2022 – and broke through limited border defences.

“We are on the offensive. The aim is to stretch the positions of the enemy, to inflict maximum losses and to destabilise the situation in Russia as they are unable to protect their own border,” the security official said on condition of anonymity.

Later on Sunday, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said that Russia had launched nearly 2,000 cross-border strikes on Ukraine’s Sumy region from the region of Kursk this summer and that such strikes deserved a Ukrainian response. “Artillery, mortars, drones. We also record missile strikes, and each such strike deserves a fair response,” the Ukrainian leader said in his nightly address.

Russian military bloggers say fighting is taking place as deep as 20 km (12 miles) inside the Kursk region, prompting some of them to question why Ukraine was able to pierce the area so easily.

A few dozen Russian soldiers, including fighters from Chechnya who were allegedly captured in Kursk, were shown in a video posted by “I want to live,” a project which is linked to Ukraine’s military spy agency, Reuters reported – although it could not verify the video.

In a separate social media post, Zelenskiy said that Russian forces appeared to have started a fire in one of the cooling towers of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant that it has occupied since the early days of the war.

“Radiation levels are within norm,” Zelenskiy said before accusing Russia of using its control of the site, whose six reactors are in shutdown mode, “to blackmail Ukraine, all of Europe, and the world”.

A Ukrainian official in Nikopol, the nearest town across the river Dnipro from the nuclear plant, added that according to “unofficial information”, the fire was caused by setting fire to “a large number of automobile tyres” in a cooling tower.

Evgeny Balitsky, a Russian-installed official in the occupied south of Ukraine, accused Kyiv’s forces of causing the fire by shelling the nearby city of Enerhodar which, like the plant, was captured by Russia soon after its February 2022 invasion.

The IAEA said there had been no reported impact on nuclear safety at the site.

Video and pictures showed smoke dramatically billowing from one of the towers, although experts said they are not in use while the reactor is in shutdown mode, prompting some to question whether it was a way of trying raise the stakes over Ukraine’s incursion into Russia.

Late on Sunday night, the state-run Tass news agency cited Russia’s state nuclear energy company, Rosatom, as saying that the main fire had been extinguished, while Russian and Ukrainian authorities said one of the cooling towers appeared to have been damaged.

There has been speculation that Ukraine may try to capture a Russian nuclear power plant at Kurchatov near Kursk, but it is more than 30 miles from the current fighting and it is thought that it would be a stretch for Kyiv’s forces to reach that far.

Ukraine’s leaders and its military have said little about the purpose of the incursion. It is generally believed to be intended to ease pressure on the eastern Donbas front where Russian forces have been grinding out advances. It is also seen as demonstrating to Russia and Ukraine’s western backers that Kyiv is still capable of attacking successfully.

Russia’s defence ministry said it had thwarted attacks by Ukrainian “mobile groups” in three villages north and east of Korenevo – Tolpino, Zhuravli, Obshchiy Kolodez – all 15 to 18 miles from the border, the farthest points at which Moscow has acknowledged the incursion to have reached.

A pro-Ukrainian Telegram channel released a video of soldiers raising a flag over a building in the Russian village of Guevo, a couple of miles inside the border and seven miles south of Sudzha, one of the first towns reached during the incursion.

On Saturday, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, had finally directly acknowledged the incursion into Kursk oblast – the first time Kyiv’s regular forces have attacked inside Russia since the Kremlin launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022.

“Today, I received several reports from Commander-in-chief [Oleskandr] Syrskyi regarding the frontlines and our actions to push the war on to the aggressor’s territory,” he said late on Saturday. “Ukraine is proving that it can indeed restore justice and is ensuring the exact kind of pressure that is needed – pressure on the aggressor.”

Maria Zakharova, Russia’s foreign ministry spokesperson, accused Kyiv of being engaged in “terrorist activity” aimed at striking fear in ordinary Russians. “It understands perfectly well that these barbaric acts make no sense from a military point of view, but it continues to work off the loans issued by its masters,” she added.

Fifteen people were injured in Kursk, the acting regional governor, Alexei Smirnov, said, after debris from a missile hit an apartment building. Zakharova said Ukrainian forces had launched a “massive missile strike” on the city and that one had got through, causing casualties.

Russia’s military appears to be relying on defending Kursk with a mixture of conscript border guards, elements from other regional forces and those “redeployed from lower-priority frontline areas in Ukraine”, according to an overnight analysis from the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) thinktank, which added that it was likely to exacerbate “the disorganisation of Russia’s chosen response”.

The ISW said the leadership of the effort to end the Ukrainian incursion had probably passed to Russia’s FSB internal security agency after the Kremlin announced on Friday that the response was a “counter-terrorism operation”. Russian federal law subordinates the military to the head of the counter-terrorism operation, the thinktank said.

Meanwhile, an overnight missile attack near Kyiv killed a man and his four-year-old son, emergency services said. Explosions rang out on Saturday night in the centre and east of Kyiv after Ukraine’s air force said two Russian missiles were heading towards the city.

It was a dreamlike, science fiction-inspired light-show spectacular that closed with Tom Cruise flying through the air from the stadium roof and whisking the Olympic flag off to Los Angeles.

Paris closed its record-breakingly successful Olympic Games on Sunday night with a stunt-filled final ceremony that began with a mysterious, golden intergalactic traveller wandering through a gloomy, barren futuristic landscape, tasked with resurrecting the Olympic spirit.

Ghostly dancers and acrobats – some of whom were fire-service gymnasts – descended from the Stade de France stadium roof and leaped on to giant Olympic rings while the Swiss musician Alain Roche performed Hymn to Apollo floating in the air playing a vertically suspended piano. The French singer Yseult gave a breathtaking performance of My Way, a nod to French-US relations as a French song that was rearranged in English for Frank Sinatra.

Paris said goodbye to its Olympics with a message about the importance of protecting the spirit of the games in an uncertain world riven by conflict.

The dramatic, pyrotechnic show was a fitting riposte to the epic, Technicolor riverside opening ceremony that broke with tradition by taking place along the Seine two weeks earlier. From that moment, the Paris Games had seen record ticket sales and TV viewing figures, and even a historic number of marriage proposals among athletes.

“Humanity is beautiful when it comes together,” said the theatre and opera director Thomas Jolly of his stadium show about celebrating “respect and tolerance” in a fragile world. He called the Games and the closing performance “a unique opportunity to share, reconcile and repair”.

The ceremony began before dusk beneath Paris’s groundbreaking Olympic cauldron suspended from a balloon, a dramatic ring of fire made up of electricity and LED spotlights to give the appearance of being ablaze.

The balloon-cauldron has become the city’s newest star attraction as thousands have gathered near the Louvre to watch it rise into the sky each night at sundown, and politicians are arguing that it should be kept in Paris permanently as a new landmark.

Beneath it, the award-winning young singer Zaho de Sagazan, whose voice and lyrics have transformed chanson française over the past two years, sang the classic 1950s ode to Paris Sous le Ciel de Paris, made famous by Édith Piaf. Suddenly, France’s star swimmer and gold-medal winner Léon Marchand, hailed in France as Le Roi Léon, appeared to whisk away the flame and the cauldron went out.

At that moment, more than 70,000 spectators in France’s biggest stadium began roaring and cheering as the action began. The Stade de France, which only days before had seen the high drama of the athletics relays and successes such as Armand Duplantis, the Swedish pole vaulter who broke his own world record, had now been transformed into a futuristic, glittering, undulating stage set.

Thousands of volunteers and athletes filled the stadium in a flag-waving moment of togetherness, not seen on this scale in these Games until now because the athletes had appeared in the opening ceremony in separate boats along the Seine.

Dancing, athletes, volunteers and spectators joined for one last time in belting out the dance anthem Freed from Desire, which had become an unofficial anthem at venues, followed by We are the Champions.

Paris had wanted its Games to be a giant open-air party, and the athletes’ final stadium appearance, dancing on the pitch, was no exception.

The ghostly gold traveller figure who landed from the sky was played by the French breakdancer Arthur Cadre, surrounded by hundreds of dancers and acrobats, as athletes stood around the stage looking on.

Flanked by athletes who had rushed on to the stage, the French electro-pop band Phoenix kicked off a music set that included the Belgian singer Angèle and the Cambodian rapper VannDa.

The Mission: Impossible star Cruise, abseiling in and then making off with the flag on a motorbike, set a Hollywood tone for the transfer to Los Angeles, the next host of the games in 2028.

Appearing on the Paris stage with the US gold-medallist gymnast Simone Biles, the Los Angeles mayor, Karen Bass, was the first black female mayor to receive the Olympic flag. She had acknowledged before the closing ceremony that the French capital had set a high bar, but said her city was a worthy successor.

“It will be a challenge, but it will be a challenge we can step up to,” Bass had told reporters this week. “I think our Games will really show the diversity and the international character of our city.”

Every detail of the more than two weeks of Olympic events in Paris had been conceived as a visual extravaganza. Even the athletics track had been painted an unprecedented purple for athletic events – a break with tradition aimed at dazzling spectators and TV audiences. Venues such as the beach volleyball under the Eiffel Tower and equestrian events at the Chateau of Versailles were chosen for their picturesque backdrops.

Paris had sought to reinvent the Games, aiming to breathe new life into the world’s biggest sporting event to attract a younger audience and inspire more cities to apply to host the games. With the motto Games Wide Open, Paris brought sport out of the stadium and into the city centre. It was aimed at drawing a line under the last Games in Tokyo, which were held largely without spectators during the Covid pandemic.

In a celebration of women in sport, the women’s marathon winners were awarded their medals at the closing ceremony – the Netherlands’s Sifan Hassan took gold – as thousands of athletes cheered. It was unprecedented for the women’s, rather than the men’s marathons, to close the Olympics. The marathon course had deliberately retraced the route of a French revolutionary march in 1789 led by women from Paris to Versailles to take grievances to the king.

The Stade de France closing ceremony was also a feat of logistics – rehearsals had taken place between 1am and 5am between athletics sessions at the stadium.

Some in the ceremony’s creative team, including the director Jolly, were under special protection because of online death threats after the opening ceremony. That opening extravaganza, which featured Celine Dion singing Piaf from the Eiffel Tower, was overwhelmingly loved in France; one poll showed 86% of French people deemed it a success.

But its displays of LGBTQ+ pride and French humour were too much for some. Donald Trump and French bishops were among those who took offence at one of the ceremony’s tableaux, titled Festivity, featured a cast of drag queens and, playing Dionysus, a semi-naked singer sitting in a bowl of fruit. Some Christian and conservative critics interpreted the scene as a parody of the Last Supper. The committee later apologised for any offence caused by parts of the ceremony.

At the closing ceremony, some of the loudest cheers came when Thomas Bach, president of the International Olympic Committee, spoke of the importance of sport bringing peace in times of conflict.

Au revoir les jeux! As ever it just sounds a little better in French. And frankly, everything has looked softer and more joyful seen through the lens of the Paris 2024 Olympics over the past 19 days. The last of which came to a formal end in Saint Denis with a closing ceremony that was genuinely uplifting in its echoes of the Summer Games that preceded it.

It was fitting the final note in Paris should be another show of colour. These have been the most beautiful and cloudless of Games. Olympic lore dictates that closing ceremonies will always end up feeling like an overblown imposition. This time around you just got the feeling everyone present wanted a chance to say goodbye.

The ceremony is, of course, also the start of something, the ritual of the never-ending cycle, passing the flame to Los Angeles 2028, which was represented here by a hand of US political and celebrity might, and indeed by 62-year-old Tom Cruise jumping off a roof on a wire, which was presumably non‑negotiable, Tom was very clear on that.

For Paris this has by now become a quietly gleeful hospital pass, Follow that. These have been the most vivid and visceral of Games, fully embedded in the city, and staged around structures and vistas that are in their own right a kind of emotional sucker punch. Yeah. Just the Pont Alexandre III there covered with bleeding and spent triathletes. No, really. I’m fine. Just hayfever.

These qualities have now entered into the emotional register of the summer Games. LA 2028 will be required to be at least a little bit beautiful and seductive and alluring. Paint me like one of your French Olympics.

The closing ceremony had the feel of a victory lap from the start. It was still 30C inside the Stade de France at kick-off time, but nobody really seemed to mind. The Stadium has been a success, barely tarted up but enough to provide a really boisterous show. As it was on Sunday night, packed with 71,500 people around a stage of generic angular plinths over a starry black carpet.

The 48-page closing ceremony media guide was, as ever, full of mind-boggling figures. Nine thousand athletes present. Nine thousand ceremony workers. One thousand projectors. Five hundred unicycles made of ham. Justin Timberlake performing Joe le Taxi while rolling around the athletics track inside a giant Camembert cheese wheel.

In reality, the performers in the French section were pretty great. The introductory outdoor number from Zaho de Sagazan at Versailles was stunning. At one point Léon Marchand wandered into shot in a suit and everyone just melted. In the stadium Emmanuel Macron and Thomas Bach also appeared in their box, hugging and looking grave (the Games is theatre: give it theatre).

It already feels like a lifetime ago that people were being offended by Thomas Jolly’s very Parisian ceremony. Pantomime, punk, cocking a snook, blue men, caricature. Meet: France. Jolly was back here, albeit this was a more formal affair. The athletes performed the usual hugely wholesome and heartwarming procession. Team GB’s flag bearers were Alex Yee, the men’s triathlon champion, and Bryony Page, who went through so many ups and downs en route to trampolining gold.

It did drag at moments. There was a very long minor chord ominous expressive dance number. There was a chaotic moment as all the athletes ran on stage and had to be told to get off before they ruined it. A band called Phoenix played some grumpy French pub rock. A French Cambodian rapper was pretty amazing.

Finally, Bach appeared on stage, along with the Paris committee chairmen, Tony Estanguet, who gave an excellent speech full of unfeigned pleasure and gratitude. At one point he even talked about having the “most proposals” at an Olympic Games. Oh get off. You.

“France recovered itself. We became one party,” he said, during the message of unity part. Hmm about that. The real world will of course now re-enter this picture and the real world is a chaotic place. At times during these Games Macron has resembled the character in a disaster movie who looks around and says, hey, I think we got away with it, just as the real tsunami rises behind him and fills the horizon.

Bach was reassuringly super-dull. He said the city of light had never shined so bright, in the voice of a man being forced to study a series of actuary documents for 48 hours straight. Then finally we got the handover, first the Olympic flag to the Mayor of Los Angeles, then some anthem stuff. Then finally, as hotly trailed, actual Tom Cruise appeared standing on the lip of the stadium roof, before jumping to his tragic and bloody death.

Not really. Cruise was instead lowered on a wire. Much had been made beforehand of his planned “death defying stunt” which slightly lost its edge when it emerged parts of it had been pre-recorded and he is patently walking around not actually dead at all. So … slight Buzz kill.

People grabbed and kissed him. He didn’t go away. Instead he ran on stage and grabbed the Olympic flag like he was reconquering the Pacific islands, ran off with it, got on a motorbike, fleeing to, and not from, the sounds of Red Hot Chili Peppers, which is much braver. The tableau at the end with the Hollywood sign and Olympic rings was very cool. That’s the image. That’s what we’re going to get.

So, eventually, at the Stade we got to the flame and its passage. As metaphors go the flame is a bit like the fabled village cooking pot, the one that’s never emptied, which we just keep on replenishing, chucking more on top, and somewhere at the bottom are molecules of the original recipe from all those years ago.

Baron de Coubertin’s jawbone is in there. One of Fanny Blankers-Koen’s hair grips. Amateurism, cinder tracks, a bouquet garni of neo-classical 1930s fascism. And now this new entity is being punted on top, Los Angeles 2028.

LA 2028 will be very different. “We do not have the Eiffel Tower, but we are the world capital of entertainment,” was the verdict of Michael Johnson, who obviously hasn’t seen Civil War. But LA will play to its strengths: Hollywood, the tech giants, its own legend.

The head of the LA28 committee is called Casey Wasserman, which is already a decent start. American sports administrators should be called things like Buck Flipburger and Remington Blazer-Epaulette III. The talk this week has included reusing existing infrastructure and the move to make LA 2028 “car‑free” (good luck with that).

This is another aspect of Paris 2024, a Games that covered its costs, that doesn’t reek of overspend and pointless legacy projects. This is the gift of Paris 2024 to that schlocky old travelling flame, the hands across the hurdles stuff that still lurks behind all this; and which was present, for all the politics at one remove, in the joy and spectacle of Paris en fete.

Scientists have developed a “holy grail” insulin that responds to changing blood sugar levels in real-time and could revolutionise treatment for millions of people with type 1 diabetes worldwide.

Patients currently have to give themselves synthetic insulin up to 10 times a day in order to survive. Constant fluctuation between high and low blood sugar levels can result in short- and long-term physical health issues, and the struggle to keep levels stable can also affect their mental health.

Scientists have found a solution that experts say comes as close to a cure for type 1 diabetes as any drug therapy could: smart insulin that lays dormant in the body and only springs into action when needed. Researchers in the US, Australia and China have successfully designed novel insulins that mimic the body’s natural response to changing blood sugar levels and respond instantly in real time.

Standard insulins stabilise blood sugar levels when they enter the body, but once they have done their job, they typically cannot help with future fluctuations. It means patients often need to inject more insulin again within just a few hours.

The new glucose-responsive insulins (GRIs) only become active when there is a certain amount of sugar in the blood to prevent hyperglycaemia (high blood glucose). They become inactive again when levels drop below a certain point, avoiding hypoglycaemia (low blood glucose). In future, patients may only need insulin once a week, experts believe.

Scientists behind the smart insulins have been awarded millions of pounds in grants to fast-track their development. The funding comes from the Type 1 Diabetes Grand Challenge, a partnership between Diabetes UK, JDRF and the Steve Morgan Foundation. It is investing £50m into cutting-edge research to help find new treatments for type 1 diabetes.

Dr Tim Heise, vice-chair of the novel insulins scientific advisory panel for the Type 1 Diabetes Grand Challenge, said smart insulin may herald a new era in the war on diabetes. “Even with the currently available modern insulins, people living with type 1 diabetes have to put lots of effort into managing their diabetes every day to find a good balance between acceptable glycaemic control on the one hand and avoiding hypoglycaemia on the other.

“Glucose-responsive – so-called smart – insulins are regarded as the holy grail of insulin as they would come as close to a cure for type 1 diabetes as any drug therapy could.”

Almost £3m has been awarded to six research projects that have developed different types of smart insulins. They include teams at Stanford University in the US, Monash University in Australia and Zhejiang University in China. The aim is to accelerate development and launch trials as soon as possible.

Each project aims to fine tune smart insulin to act faster and more precisely, relieving some or all of the huge burden of managing type 1 diabetes and reducing the risk of long-term complications. Four of the projects are focused exclusively on testing GRIs.

A fifth has developed a new ultrafast, short-acting insulin. Even with the fastest insulins that are now available, there is still a delay between the drug being administered and the point it starts to act on glucose in the blood. This can result in blood glucose rising to unsafe levels before insulin can act to lower it.

Faster insulins are also needed to improve the function of insulin pumps and hybrid closed loop technology, a system that relies on the stored insulin responding in real-time to changing blood glucose levels.

The sixth project is focused on a protein that combines insulin with another hormone, glucagon. Unlike insulin, which helps remove glucose from the blood, glucagon stimulates the liver to release more glucose when levels in the blood run low. Having both hormones included in one formulation could keep blood glucose levels stable by working to prevent high and low blood glucose levels.

“The funded six new research projects address major shortcomings in insulin therapy,” said Heise. “Therefore, these research projects, if successful, might do no less than heralding a new era in insulin therapy.”

Rachel Connor, the director of research partnerships at JDRF UK, said: “While insulin has been saving lives for over 100 years now, and previous research has driven important changes for people with type 1, it is still not good enough – managing glucose levels with insulin is really tough, and it’s time for science to find ways to lift that burden.

“By imagining a world where insulins can respond to changing glucose levels in real-time, we hope these six projects will help to create that new reality, relieving people with type 1 of the relentless demands that living with this condition places on them today.”

Dr Elizabeth Robertson, the director of research at Diabetes UK, said the projects had the potential to revolutionise type 1 diabetes treatment. “By supporting these groundbreaking research projects, we are aiming to develop new insulins that more closely mimic the body’s natural responses to changing blood sugar levels.

“This could significantly reduce the daily challenges of managing type 1 diabetes, and improve both the physical and mental health of those living with the condition. We are hopeful that this research will lead to life-changing advancements in type 1 diabetes care.”

Scientists have developed a “holy grail” insulin that responds to changing blood sugar levels in real-time and could revolutionise treatment for millions of people with type 1 diabetes worldwide.

Patients currently have to give themselves synthetic insulin up to 10 times a day in order to survive. Constant fluctuation between high and low blood sugar levels can result in short- and long-term physical health issues, and the struggle to keep levels stable can also affect their mental health.

Scientists have found a solution that experts say comes as close to a cure for type 1 diabetes as any drug therapy could: smart insulin that lays dormant in the body and only springs into action when needed. Researchers in the US, Australia and China have successfully designed novel insulins that mimic the body’s natural response to changing blood sugar levels and respond instantly in real time.

Standard insulins stabilise blood sugar levels when they enter the body, but once they have done their job, they typically cannot help with future fluctuations. It means patients often need to inject more insulin again within just a few hours.

The new glucose-responsive insulins (GRIs) only become active when there is a certain amount of sugar in the blood to prevent hyperglycaemia (high blood glucose). They become inactive again when levels drop below a certain point, avoiding hypoglycaemia (low blood glucose). In future, patients may only need insulin once a week, experts believe.

Scientists behind the smart insulins have been awarded millions of pounds in grants to fast-track their development. The funding comes from the Type 1 Diabetes Grand Challenge, a partnership between Diabetes UK, JDRF and the Steve Morgan Foundation. It is investing £50m into cutting-edge research to help find new treatments for type 1 diabetes.

Dr Tim Heise, vice-chair of the novel insulins scientific advisory panel for the Type 1 Diabetes Grand Challenge, said smart insulin may herald a new era in the war on diabetes. “Even with the currently available modern insulins, people living with type 1 diabetes have to put lots of effort into managing their diabetes every day to find a good balance between acceptable glycaemic control on the one hand and avoiding hypoglycaemia on the other.

“Glucose-responsive – so-called smart – insulins are regarded as the holy grail of insulin as they would come as close to a cure for type 1 diabetes as any drug therapy could.”

Almost £3m has been awarded to six research projects that have developed different types of smart insulins. They include teams at Stanford University in the US, Monash University in Australia and Zhejiang University in China. The aim is to accelerate development and launch trials as soon as possible.

Each project aims to fine tune smart insulin to act faster and more precisely, relieving some or all of the huge burden of managing type 1 diabetes and reducing the risk of long-term complications. Four of the projects are focused exclusively on testing GRIs.

A fifth has developed a new ultrafast, short-acting insulin. Even with the fastest insulins that are now available, there is still a delay between the drug being administered and the point it starts to act on glucose in the blood. This can result in blood glucose rising to unsafe levels before insulin can act to lower it.

Faster insulins are also needed to improve the function of insulin pumps and hybrid closed loop technology, a system that relies on the stored insulin responding in real-time to changing blood glucose levels.

The sixth project is focused on a protein that combines insulin with another hormone, glucagon. Unlike insulin, which helps remove glucose from the blood, glucagon stimulates the liver to release more glucose when levels in the blood run low. Having both hormones included in one formulation could keep blood glucose levels stable by working to prevent high and low blood glucose levels.

“The funded six new research projects address major shortcomings in insulin therapy,” said Heise. “Therefore, these research projects, if successful, might do no less than heralding a new era in insulin therapy.”

Rachel Connor, the director of research partnerships at JDRF UK, said: “While insulin has been saving lives for over 100 years now, and previous research has driven important changes for people with type 1, it is still not good enough – managing glucose levels with insulin is really tough, and it’s time for science to find ways to lift that burden.

“By imagining a world where insulins can respond to changing glucose levels in real-time, we hope these six projects will help to create that new reality, relieving people with type 1 of the relentless demands that living with this condition places on them today.”

Dr Elizabeth Robertson, the director of research at Diabetes UK, said the projects had the potential to revolutionise type 1 diabetes treatment. “By supporting these groundbreaking research projects, we are aiming to develop new insulins that more closely mimic the body’s natural responses to changing blood sugar levels.

“This could significantly reduce the daily challenges of managing type 1 diabetes, and improve both the physical and mental health of those living with the condition. We are hopeful that this research will lead to life-changing advancements in type 1 diabetes care.”

Greek authorities have warned people to stay indoors with their “windows closed” as more than 400 firefighters battled to contain blazes on the outskirts of Athens that were forcing the evacuation of entire communities, including at the historic site of Marathon.

Huge clouds of billowing smoke had by mid-afternoon on Sunday darkened the skies above the capital as 10 groups of “forest commandos” backed by water-bombing aircraft, helicopters and fire engines tried to douse flames fanned by gale-force winds of up to 80-90km/h on Sunday.

Volunteers had also joined the fight near the village of Varnava, about 35km (21 miles) north of the city.

“Forces are being continually reinforced but they face flames that in many cases exceed 25 metres [in height]”, said the fire brigade spokesperson Vassileios Vathrakogiannis.

While one fire in western Attica had been brought under control, a second blaze north-east of Athens was still not contained. By nightfall the inferno was reported to be racing eastwards with the efforts of water-dropping planes stymied by the powerful winds.

At least 10 communities around Varnava had been evacuated and firefighters were expected to continue their efforts throughout the night. Some people battled to save their houses from the fire by trying to douse the flames.

Authorities ordered residents of the historic town of Marathon, 40km east of Athens, to evacuate towards the beach town of Nea Makri because of a fire burning since Sunday afternoon.

Health officials urged people to limit their movements and stay inside, saying the thick smoke had seriously affected the quality of the air across the Attic basin. By 4pm the skies above the Greek parliament in central Syntagma Square had turned a yellowish brown as ash clouds pushed by the winds travelled southward.

At least eight people were taken to hospital with respiratory problems.

The prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, cut short his holiday and returned to Athens on Sunday evening to deal with the crisis.

Unprecedented temperatures – June and July were the hottest on record – after the warmest winter ever have turned Greece’s terrain into a tinderbox, environmentalists have said.

Greek temperatures are forecast to peak at 39C (102F) on Monday, with the highest readings expected in the country’s west.

In a first this summer, Greece registered a week-long heatwave before mid-June, a sign of the accelerated pace of climate breakdown.

At least 10 tourists, including the respected British nutritionist and TV presenter Dr Michael Mosley, are reported to have died earlier in the summer from heat exhaustion suffered as they took walks in blistering temperatures. Mosley is believed to have died barely two hours after he set off on a walk from a beach on the remote island of Symi in temperatures topping 40C.

Greece has been hit by hundreds of wildfires in recent months.

Sunday’s strong winds are showing no sign of waning and meteorologists predicted the days ahead were likely to be critical.

At least half of the country is expected to be under a “red alert”, a reflection of the heightened danger of wildfires due to the weather.

Speaking to the state broadcaster, ERT, the Athens Observatory’s research director, Kostas Lagouvardos, said: “What makes the situation so dangerous is the prolonged drought and very high temperatures that have lasted for so long.”

Agence Frence-Presse contributed to this report

Joe Biden has said it was his “obligation to the country” to drop out of the 2024 presidential election and prevent what he said would be “a genuine danger to American security” if Donald Trump won a second term of office.

The US president gave his reasoning for stepping aside in at-times an emotional interview with CBS News on Sunday, his first since quitting the race in July. He explained that losing the confidence of senior House and Senate Democrats, who feared his unpopularity would hurt them at the polls in November, had weighed on his mind.

Ultimately, Biden said, it was a combination of circumstances that led him to make his momentous decision not to seek re-election, which subsequently saw Vice-President Kamala Harris taking over the Democratic ticket and catching or surpassing Trump in several battleground states, according to new polling data.

“Although I have the great honor to be president, I think I have an obligation to the country to do the most important thing you can do, and that is we must, we must, we must defeat Trump,” he said.

Biden said he did not take the decision lightly, and made it in consultation with his family at home in Delaware. At the time, he said, he still believed he could win in November, but events had “moved quickly” after weeks of pressure and growing unease inside his party that, at 81, he was too old for the rigors of a second term.

Those fears were heightened by his disastrous debate performance against Trump in June. “I had a really bad day in that debate because I was sick. But I have no serious problem,” Biden said, denying he was impaired by any cognitive issue.

“The polls we had showed that it was a neck and neck race, it would have been down to the wire. But what happened was a number of my Democratic colleagues in the House and Senate thought that I was gonna hurt them in the races and I was concerned if I stayed in the race that would be the topic.

“I thought it would be a real distraction. [When] I ran the first time I thought of myself being a transition president. I can’t even say how old I am. It’s hard for me to get out of my mouth. Things got moving so quickly. And the combination was… a critical issue for me still… is maintaining this democracy.”

Former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, one of the senior Democrats whose cooling support for Biden was believed to have hastened his decision, gave her own interview Sunday to MSNBC’s Inside with Jen Psaki.

“I did not think we were on a path to victory,” she said, adding that she “wanted the decision to be a better campaign so that we could win”.

Pelosi praised Biden as a “pre-eminent” president. “He’s right there among the top few, a very consequential president,” she said.

Biden became emotional as he recalled a promise he made to his late son Beau about remaining in politics. “He said, ‘I know when it happens, you’re gonna want to quit. You’re not gonna stay engaged. Look at me. Look at me, Dad. Give me your word as a Biden. When I go, you’ll stay engaged. Give me your word.’ And I did.”

Later in the interview, recorded last week with CBS News chief election and campaign correspondent Robert Costa in the White House treaty room, Biden expressed his fear for the country if former US president Trump won in November.

“Mark my words, if he wins watch what happens. He’s a genuine danger to American security,” he said, adding that he was “not confident at all” there would be a peaceful transfer of power if Trump lost.

“We are at an inflection point in world history. We really are. The decisions we make in the next three or four years are going to determine what the next six decades look like, and democracy is the key.

“That’s why I made that speech in Johnson Center about the supreme court. The supreme court is so out of whack, so I propose that we limit terms to 18 years. There’s little regard by the Maga (make America great again) Republicans for the political institutions. That’s what holds this country together. That’s what democracy is about. That’s who we are as a nation.”

The president also had praise for Harris and Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor she named this week as her running mate.

“If we grew up in the same neighborhood, we’d have been friends. He’s my kind of guy. He’s real, he’s smart,” Biden said of Walz.

“I’ve known him for several decades. I think it’s a hell of a team.”

He said he would be campaigning with Harris in the weeks before the election, and was working with Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor Josh Shapiro, at one time a frontrunner to be Harris’s vice-presidential pick, on winning the key swing state.

“I’m going to be campaigning in other states as well. I’m going to do whatever Kamala thinks I can do to help most,” he said.

Other topics during the interview included Biden’s belief that a ceasefire and peace deal in Gaza were still possible before he leaves office in January, despite escalating civilian casualties there and in Lebanon.

Asked how he thought his presidency would be remembered, Biden cited leading the country out of the Covid-19 pandemic and economic successes.

“When I announced my candidacy I said we’ve got to do three things, restore the soul of America; build the economy from the middle out and the bottom up, not the top down; and bring the country together. No one thought we could get done, including some of my own people, what we got done,” he said.

“The biggest mistake we made, we didn’t put up signs saying: ‘Joe did it!’”

Australia’s coal and gas exports cause more climate damage than those from any other country bar Russia, according to a new study that argues the country is undermining a global agreement to transition away from fossil fuels.

The analysis, commissioned by the University of New South Wales’ Australian Human Rights Institute, found Australia was the third biggest fossil fuel exporter on an energy basis in 2021, trailing only Russia and the US.

Australia ranked second on an emission basis. It overtook the US due to a majority of Australia’s exports being coal, a particularly emissions-intensive fuel.

It meant that while Australia releases about only 1% of global emissions at home, it was linked to about 4.5% once its exports were counted.

The report, by non-profit science and policy organisation Climate Analytics, said based on government forecasts, Australia’s fossil fuel exports were expected to remain at roughly the current level until at least 2035 as it continued to approve new coal and gas export developments.

Climate Analytics’ chief executive, Bill Hare, said this was incompatible with a range of international commitments Australia had made, including a call backed by nearly 200 countries at the Cop28 climate summit in Dubai in December for the world to transition away from fossil fuels, “accelerating action this decade”.

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“Yet here we have the Australian government intent on a deliberate strategy that will see its gas exports soar, exporting billions of tonnes of emissions, inconsistent with achieving net zero, and completely inconsistent with the science of this issue,” he said.

Dr Gillian Moon, the project lead of the Australian Human Rights Institute’s climate accountability project, said it was striking that emissions from Australia’s fossil fuels exports had been about 30bn of CO₂ over the 63 years since 1961 and this was forecast to increase by 50% between now and 2035.

She said the country was continuing on this path despite being more vulnerable to the effects of the climate crisis than most other countries. “We have domestic [emissions reduction] targets, but nothing on our exports. We export 91% of our coal and about three-quarters of gas, and we have no plan to get off this trade,” she said. “The Australian public deserve to know the truth about this and the consequences for us.”

Moon said if Australia was serious about its climate commitments, it should be doing more to encourage countries that bought its fossil fuels – particularly the developed economies Japan, South Korea and Taiwan that take about two-thirds of its exports – to move more rapidly to renewable energy. She said it should be having similar discussions with like-minded fossil fuel exporters, such as Canada and Norway.

She said it was striking that there was no discussion about fossil fuel production at global climate conferences held at the end of each year. “We have to have a conversation about how we’re going to deal with this,” she said.

The analysis found if the global community were to live up to the headline goal of the landmark Paris climate agreement – that countries would try to limit global heating to 1.5C – emissions from fossil fuels would need to be reduced by 64% by 2035.

The report also said:

• Australian fossil fuel exports in 2023 were likely to lead to 1.15bn tonnes of CO2 – nearly three times as much was emitted from within the country.

• The country was responsible for 52% of global metallurgical coal exports and 17% of global thermal coal export in 2022. Metallurgical coal is used in steel-making, thermal coal in electricity generation.

• Australia more than doubled its liquefied natural gas export capacity in the five years prior to 2020, adding 62m tonnes a year.

• Only 19% of gas extracted in Australia is used within the country. The rest was either exported or used as energy by the export industry.

• Australian governments and regulators had continued to grant permits for new large-scale gas production and LNG export projects in 2021 and 2022. This appeared at odds with a net zero roadmap released by the International Energy Agency, which found global gas use should decline 18-22% by 2030 and 47-53% by 2035 compared with 2022 levels.

The Australian resources minister, Madeleine King, last month announced the government would award nine permits to six companies – four to Esso and one each to Beach Energy, Woodside, Chevron, Inpex and Melbana – to explore for new gas reserves off the country’s west and south-eastern coasts.

Data published by the Guardian this week found the Australian proposals were part of a surge of new oil and gas exploration by wealthy democracies – including the US, UK and Canada – that threatened to unleash nearly 12bn tonnes of planet-heating emissions and undermine national and global climate commitments.

A recent report by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a thinktank, challenged suggestions that Japan needed Australian gas to maintain its energy supply. It said demand for gas in the Asian country had fallen 25% over the past decade and the country was selling more LNG overseas than it bought from Australia.

Australia’s coal and gas exports cause more climate damage than those from any other country bar Russia, according to a new study that argues the country is undermining a global agreement to transition away from fossil fuels.

The analysis, commissioned by the University of New South Wales’ Australian Human Rights Institute, found Australia was the third biggest fossil fuel exporter on an energy basis in 2021, trailing only Russia and the US.

Australia ranked second on an emission basis. It overtook the US due to a majority of Australia’s exports being coal, a particularly emissions-intensive fuel.

It meant that while Australia releases about only 1% of global emissions at home, it was linked to about 4.5% once its exports were counted.

The report, by non-profit science and policy organisation Climate Analytics, said based on government forecasts, Australia’s fossil fuel exports were expected to remain at roughly the current level until at least 2035 as it continued to approve new coal and gas export developments.

Climate Analytics’ chief executive, Bill Hare, said this was incompatible with a range of international commitments Australia had made, including a call backed by nearly 200 countries at the Cop28 climate summit in Dubai in December for the world to transition away from fossil fuels, “accelerating action this decade”.

• Sign up for Guardian Australia’s free morning and afternoon email newsletters for your daily news roundup

“Yet here we have the Australian government intent on a deliberate strategy that will see its gas exports soar, exporting billions of tonnes of emissions, inconsistent with achieving net zero, and completely inconsistent with the science of this issue,” he said.

Dr Gillian Moon, the project lead of the Australian Human Rights Institute’s climate accountability project, said it was striking that emissions from Australia’s fossil fuels exports had been about 30bn of CO₂ over the 63 years since 1961 and this was forecast to increase by 50% between now and 2035.

She said the country was continuing on this path despite being more vulnerable to the effects of the climate crisis than most other countries. “We have domestic [emissions reduction] targets, but nothing on our exports. We export 91% of our coal and about three-quarters of gas, and we have no plan to get off this trade,” she said. “The Australian public deserve to know the truth about this and the consequences for us.”

Moon said if Australia was serious about its climate commitments, it should be doing more to encourage countries that bought its fossil fuels – particularly the developed economies Japan, South Korea and Taiwan that take about two-thirds of its exports – to move more rapidly to renewable energy. She said it should be having similar discussions with like-minded fossil fuel exporters, such as Canada and Norway.

She said it was striking that there was no discussion about fossil fuel production at global climate conferences held at the end of each year. “We have to have a conversation about how we’re going to deal with this,” she said.

The analysis found if the global community were to live up to the headline goal of the landmark Paris climate agreement – that countries would try to limit global heating to 1.5C – emissions from fossil fuels would need to be reduced by 64% by 2035.

The report also said:

• Australian fossil fuel exports in 2023 were likely to lead to 1.15bn tonnes of CO2 – nearly three times as much was emitted from within the country.

• The country was responsible for 52% of global metallurgical coal exports and 17% of global thermal coal exports in 2022. Metallurgical coal is used in steel-making, thermal coal in electricity generation.

• Australia more than doubled its liquefied natural gas export capacity in the five years prior to 2020, adding 62m tonnes a year.

• Only 19% of gas extracted in Australia is used within the country. The rest was either exported or used as energy by the export industry.

• Australian governments and regulators had continued to grant permits for new large-scale gas production and LNG export projects in 2021 and 2022. This appeared at odds with a net zero roadmap released by the International Energy Agency, which found global gas use should decline 18-22% by 2030 and 47-53% by 2035 compared with 2022 levels.

The Australian resources minister, Madeleine King, last month announced the government would award nine permits to six companies – four to Esso and one each to Beach Energy, Woodside, Chevron, Inpex and Melbana – to explore for new gas reserves off the country’s west and south-eastern coasts.

Data published by the Guardian this week found the Australian proposals were part of a surge of new oil and gas exploration by wealthy democracies – including the US, UK and Canada – that threatened to unleash nearly 12bn tonnes of planet-heating emissions and undermine national and global climate commitments.

A recent report by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a thinktank, challenged suggestions that Japan needed Australian gas to maintain its energy supply. It said demand for gas in the Asian country had fallen 25% over the past decade and the country was selling more LNG overseas than it bought from Australia.

Thousands of people have fled the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis after the Israeli military warned of a new operation to flush out Hamas militants that it says have regrouped there.

In al-Jala, a neighbourhood in the south of the city that the Israel Defense Forces had previously designated a humanitarian zone, residents on Sunday packed their belongings, uncertain where to seek refuge. Israel said rockets had been fired from the area.

“We don’t know where to go,” Amal Abu Yahia, a 42-year-old mother of three, told the Associated Press news agency. She took her children to al-Mawasi, a crammed tent camp by the coast, but could not find anywhere to shelter there.

Her husband was killed when an Israeli airstrike hit their neighbours’ house in March, but they had returned to Khan Younis in June to shelter in their severely damaged home. “This is my fourth displacement,” she said.

Vast swaths of Gaza have been bombed to rubble: Khan Younis suffered widespread destruction during the IDF’s months-long battle to take the city at the beginning of the year.

Israeli troops are increasingly being forced to return to areas that had been previous targets for intense fighting, re-engaging Hamas and other militants that have regrouped in urban areas.

The north of the territory is severed from the south by an Israeli military corridor, and the shrinking “humanitarian zones” that Israel says are safe for civilians are already overcrowded. Despite designating some areas as evacuation zones, notably al-Mawasi, the IDF has carried out strikes there.

Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, said in a post on X: “The people of Gaza are trapped & have nowhere to go. Just in the past few days, more than 75,000 people have been displaced in southwest Gaza.

“Some are only able to carry their children with them, some carry their whole lives in one small bag. They are going to overcrowded places where shelters are already overflowing.”

Israel’s new operation in Khan Younis comes amid speculation that ceasefire negotiations will restart in either Cairo or Doha later this week after calls from the US, Egypt and Qatar for both sides to resume talks. In a statement, the leaders of the three nations, which were instrumental in brokering a week-long ceasefire in November, said there were no excuses “from any party for further delay”.

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said his country would send a delegation to the talks beginning on 15 August, although he has been repeatedly accused of stalling on a deal to ensure his own political survival. Hamas is yet to respond to the invitation.

The renewed push for talks is seen as more vital than ever after last month’s assassinations of a top Hezbollah commander and Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s political chief. The killings, in Beirut and Tehran, which both the Lebanese group and Iran have blamed on Israel, threaten to transform the war in Gaza into a region-wide conflict.

Hezbollah and other Iranian allies in the region have said they will stop attacking Israel when the war in Gaza is brought to an end. Almost 40,000 people have been killed in the Gaza Strip in the conflict sparked by Hamas’s 7 October massacre in southern Israel, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage.

The US vice-president and democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris said on Saturday that the need for a ceasefire and hostage release deal was urgent.

“The deal needs to get done. It needs to get done now,” she told an event in Phoenix, Arizona. She and President Joe Biden had been working “around the clock” on negotiations, she added.

“Israel has a right to go after the terrorists that are Hamas. But as I have said many, many times, they also have, I believe, an important responsibility to avoid civilian casualties,” she said, in reference to the Israeli bombing of a school being used as a shelter in Gaza City on Saturday that killed about 80 people.

Also on Sunday, the office of the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, announced that he would visit Moscow next week to discuss the war with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.

Abbas, who is based in the West Bank, was last in Moscow in February, when Russia hosted reconciliation talks between Abbas’s Fatah, Hamas and other Palestinian factions. Several attempts to heal the rift between Fatah and Hamas since the latter took control of Gaza after a brief civil war in 2007 have failed.

The owner of a helicopter that crashed into the roof of a large hotel in the centre of Cairns, killing its pilot, says the flight was “unauthorised”.

Queensland ambulance said emergency services were called to the DoubleTree by Hilton hotel on the Esplanade, on the city’s main waterfront, about 1.50am on Monday. Hundreds of people were evacuated.

A spokesperson confirmed that two of the helicopter’s propellers came off and landed on the street and in the hotel pool.

Queensland police said the pilot died at the scene and forensic investigations were under way to formally identify him.

The pilot was the single occupant of the twin-engine helicopter, police said.

North Queensland-based charter company Nautilus Aviation, which runs scenic tours from nearby on the Cairns waterfront, confirmed on Monday morning that it owned the helicopter and was supporting the ongoing investigation.

“Nautilus Aviation are working closely with the Queensland Police, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau and other authorities as they investigate the unauthorised use of one of our helicopters in the early hours of this morning,” the company said in a statement.

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At a press conference on Monday, the Queensland police acting Ch Supt Shane Holmes said the helicopter was flown from the general aviation area at the Cairns airport and was “not in the air for a great deal of time” before the crash.

Holmes said the investigation would focus on the movements of the pilot prior to takeoff.

“We are working with a local aviation operator to understand the circumstances that led to the [helicopter] becoming airborne,” he said.

“I think it’s just by pure luck that … more people weren’t injured.”

The ATSB chief commissioner, Angus Mitchell, said the investigation would need to establish if the crash was “a transport safety event” or a regulatory or police matter.

Mitchell said the pilot had not been identified but it would be “very difficult to fly a helicopter if you’re not a pilot or if you’re not experienced”.

About 300 to 400 people were evacuated from the hotel building and there were “no injuries sustained by people on the ground”, the ambulance service said.

Two people from inside the hotel – a man in his 80s and a woman in her 70s – were taken to Cairns hospital in a stable condition.

Police said the crash had caused a fire on the roof of the hotel.

A report would be prepared for the coroner by the forensic crash unit and ATSB, police said.

Jill Ball and her husband, Robert, who had been staying at the DoubleTree hotel for a couple of nights before a holiday in Arnhem Land, said the noise of the crash was so loud it woke them both up.

Their room was diagonally opposite where the crash occurred, and they could see flames from the impact. Jill said they were initially told to wait in their room, before a second message was given to evacuate.

“It was just such a mess, in as much as there was no communication, it was so disorganised,” she said.

Jill said they were told to “walk this way, then … walk that way [and] the other way” before a bus driver from a tour group staying at the hotel began driving to the evacuation point, taking frightened people across at the direction of police.

“He was doing runs back and forwards and backwards, and he was really the only source of information we had,” she said. “[He] was just such a hero, he was very kind and caring.”

Jill and Robert were in the same bus as the two people who were later taken to hospital, who had been staying in a room near where the helicopter crashed, she said.

“They were just very stressed because, you know, their window had shattered in their room.”

Video on social media showed a fire on the roof of the building.

“A helicopter just flew into a building,” one person said on the audio of footage published to Facebook.

“Boy, that was going fast, that helicopter, too. Unbelievable. Red helicopter. Went past twice, it’s just going out of control that thing was.”

The noise generated by the impact had frightened those nearby, the Queensland ambulance senior operations supervisor in Cairns, Caitlin Denning, said.

“There were reports of it sounding like a bomb, and seeing the fire and smoke, a lot of the occupants of the hotel were unsure of the situation.

“There is a lot of unease here.”

Queensland police declared an exclusion zone around the crash site and members of the public were advised to avoid the area. Police were on the scene investigating the cause of the incident.

Additional reporting from AAP

A central London glass police box has been made to look like a tank of piranhas, in the seventh in series of works by the graffiti artist Banksy.

The elusive artist claimed the work as his own by featuring it on his Instagram account in a post at 1pm on Sunday.

The fish depicted on the police box are different in style from the previous six silhouetted designs that Banksy has claimed as his work on successive days over the past week.

One of the designs, featuring a wolf on a satellite dish, was removed by suspected thieves. Another of a stretching cat on an empty billboard was removed by contractors.

Two City of London police officers were initially seen examining Banksy’s new work before taking pictures. One officer told PA Media news agency they were asked to inspect the artwork after it was picked up on CCTV cameras, and that they were waiting to hear what would be done about it.

The governing body of the City of London later said it was working on options to “preserve” the new Banksy artwork that appeared on Sunday.

A City of London Corporation spokesperson said in a statement: “We’re aware of the works on the City of London police box on Ludgate Hill. We are currently working through options to preserve the artwork.”

Banksy’s Instagram account has revealed a new animal artwork each day for the past seven days. They have featured silhouettes of a goat, elephants, monkeys, a wolf, pelicans and a cat.

On Saturday, a piece showing a stretching cat on a damaged and empty advertising billboard was removed from its location in north-west London hours after it was revealed.

Crowds booed as the piece in Cricklewood was dismantled by three men who said they were hired by a contracting company to take down the billboard for safety reasons.

Hours after Banksy confirmed the design was his, crowds gathered from across London to see the piece before the men arrived.

A contractor, who only wanted to give his name as Marc, said they were going to take the billboard down on Monday and replace it, but the removal had been brought forward to Saturday in case someone ripped it down and left it unsafe.

A black board was first used to cover most of the cat at the request of the police, who wanted to stop people walking in the road in front of traffic.

The owner of the billboard has told police he will donate it to an art gallery.

The cat design was the second piece to be removed during the week after a painting of a howling wolf on a satellite dish was taken off the roof of a shop in Peckham, south London, less than an hour after it was unveiled.

“It’s a great shame we can’t have nice things and it’s a shame it couldn’t have lasted more than an hour,” a witness said.

The first piece of graffiti in Banksy’s animal-themed series, which was announced on Monday, is near Kew Bridge in south-west London and shows a goat with rocks falling down below it, just above a CCTV camera.

On Tuesday, the artist added silhouettes of two elephants with their trunks stretched towards each other on the side of a building in Chelsea, west London.

This was followed by three monkeys that seemed to swing underneath a bridge over Brick Lane, east London.

The fifth design, of pelicans pinching fish from a London chip shop sign in Walthamstow, north-east London, was revealed on Friday.

The Observer reported on Saturday that the series was designed to cheer up the public ­during a period when the news headlines had been bleak. Banksy’s support organisation, Pest Control Office, indicated that theorising about the deeper significance of each new image had been way too involved and the works had instead simply been designed to give ­people a moment of unexpected ­amusement.

The old English proverb “you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink” has been used since the 16th century to describe the difficulty of getting someone to act in their own best interests.

Now, research by equine scientists suggests the use of this phrase has been inadvertently maligning horses for centuries.

Horses have the ability to think and plan ahead and are far more intelligent than scientists previously thought, according to a Nottingham Trent University study that analysed the animal’s responses to a reward-based game.

The horses cannily adapted their approach to the game to get the most treats – while making the least effort.

“Previously, research has suggested that horses simply respond to stimuli in the moment, they don’t proactively look ahead, think ahead and plan their actions – whereas our study shows that they do have an awareness of the consequences and outcomes of their actions,” said the lead researcher, Louise Evans.

The three-stage game involved 20 horses, who were initially rewarded with a treat merely for touching a piece of card with their noses. Then, in the second stage, researchers started switching on a “stop light”. The horses were only given a snack if they touched the card while the stop light was off.

At first, they ignored the light and carried on indiscriminately touching the card, regardless of whether or not the light was on.

But when, in the third stage, researchers introduced a penalty for touching the card while the stop light was on – a 10 second timeout during which the horses could not play the game at all – the team found there was a sudden and highly significant reduction in errors by all the equine participants. The horses started correctly touching the card only at the right time to get a treat.

“That timeout was enough to immediately get the performance out of them that we wanted,” said Evans. “That was enough for the horses to go: ‘OK, let’s just play by the rules.’”

Instantly switching strategies in this way indicates horses have a higher level of cognitive reasoning than previously thought possible. It suggests that, rather than failing to grasp the tenets of the game, the horses had understood the rules the whole time but, astutely, had not seen any need to pay much attention to them in the second stage.

“When there was a timeout for getting something wrong, they switched on and started paying attention,” said Evans. This behaviour requires the horse to think into the future, researchers say, and is very goal-directed, with horses required to focus on what they want to achieve and the steps they need to take to do this.

Evans hopes the groundbreaking study, which will be published in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science, will help to improve welfare for horses. “Generally, when we start to think that animals may have better cognitive abilities than previously thought, their welfare does improve. But also, what we’ve shown is that, in training, you really don’t need to use aversive methods or anything too harsh to get really good performance out of horses.”