Vice-president and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris unveiled her economic campaign proposal in North Carolina to build what she called an “opportunity economy” focused on the middle class.

She said in Raleigh: “Your salary should be enough to provide you and your family with a good quality of life … such as, no child should have to grow up in poverty. Such as, after years of hard work, you should be able to retire with dignity, and you should be able to join a union if you choose.”

To lower the cost of living, Harris told the rally she intends to cut needless bureaucracy and red tape, pursue investigations of anti-competitive behavior in the food supply, and propose a federal ban on price-gouging in food.

Harris said inflation had fallen below 3% for the first time since March 2021, according to a recent federal report.

“Our supply chains have now improved, and prices are still too high,” Harris said. “Many of the big food companies are seeing their highest profits in two decades. And while many grocery chains pass along these savings, others still aren’t.

“Look, I know most businesses are creating jobs, contributing to our economy and playing by the rules. But some are not, and that’s just not right. And we need to take action when that’s the case.”

Harris’s comments came before next week’s Democratic national convention in Chicago, where political observers might expect to hear more detail about her economic agenda.

North Carolina is also a particular focal point for the new campaign. Barack Obama was the last Democratic presidential candidate to win North Carolina, eking out a win by a 0.32-percentage-point margin in 2008. Recent polling suggests North Carolina is close enough to contest in 2024, and even more so after Harris replaced Joe Biden when he dropped out in late July. Harris said she had visited the state 16 times as vice-president.

In her speech, Harris said she had worked at McDonald’s in her youth and understood the struggle of low-wage work, and that she worked as California’s attorney general to lower drug prices and to go after predatory lending in the housing market.

Red tape and barriers are constraining the housing supply, she said. “By the end of my first term, we will end America’s housing shortage by building 3m new homes and rentals that are affordable for the middle class,” she said.

“And we will make sure those homes actually go to working and middle-class Americans, not just investors.”

The purchase of single-family housing by corporate landlords in the real estate investment trust financial sector has become a significant national political issue.

“It can make it impossible then for regular people to buy or even rent a home,” Harris said, noting accusations of collusion raised by ProPublica in an investigation of the use of RealPage software. The Federal Trade Commission and US Department of Justice filed a joint legal brief in March addressing their concerns about algorithmic price fixing.

“It’s anti-competitive, and it drives up costs,” she said. “I will fight for a law that cracks down on these practices.”

Harris also proposed a $25,000 grant for first-time homebuyers to help with down-payments.

“Under my plan, more than 100 million Americans would get a tax cut,” Harris said, proposing a return of the earned income tax credit and child tax credit, and a $6,000 tax credit for new parents.

She contrasted her proposals to Donald Trump’s support for the FairTax, a national sales tax intended to replace income tax, and said taxpayers would pay thousands more under the proposals contained in the Project 2025 manifesto.

“He [Trump] plans to give billionaires massive tax cuts year after year,” she said. “And he plans to cut corporate taxes by over $1tn, even as they pull in record profits. And that’s on top of the $2tn tax cut he already signed into law as president, which, by the way, overwhelmingly went to the wealthiest Americans and corporations, and exploded the national deficit.

“I think if you want to know who someone cares about, look who they fight for.”

Joe Biden is out of the race for the White House and “Bidenomics” – the agenda he used to guide the world’s largest economy – looks like its time is over too. For his replacement, Kamala Harris, it’s all about the “opportunity economy”.

At a rally in North Carolina, Harris adopted the new slogan to capture her core ideals.

“As president, I will be laser-focused on creating opportunities for the middle class that advance their economic security, stability and dignity,” she said. “Together, we will be build what I will call an ‘opportunity economy’.”

The switch from Biden to Harris at the top of Democratic ticket has sparked an early turnaround in the party’s fortunes as she and Donald Trump head to the polls in November, but convincing Americans that there is anything like joy in the current economy will be a challenge.

At his own rally in North Carolina on Wednesday, Trump hammered his opponents over inflation. “I don’t order bacon anymore,” he claimed. “It’s gotten too expensive.”

Friday’s speech offered the most specific economic proposals Harris’s campaign has released so far. While it largely follows the policies Democrats pursued under Biden, Harris is placing a heavier emphasis on bringing prices down.

Harris said that Biden helped create 16m new jobs and brought inflation down to under 3% after Covid shut down the economy.

“Still, we know that many Americans don’t yet feel that progress in their daily lives,” she noted. “Costs are still high, and on a deeper level, for too many people, no matter how much they work, it feels so hard just to get ahead.”

It is an acknowledgement that even if the economy has surged on from Covid, it still feels off to many Americans. It’s also a subtle turn from Bidenomics, which put more focus on manufacturing and infrastructure.

Bidenomics was praised by economists as some of the most progressive domestic policies that have come out of the White House, but the president’s campaign appeared to struggle with selling the platform to the public.

In a Harris poll for the Guardian conducted in May, 70% of Republicans and 39% of Democrats indicated they believe Biden was making the economy worse. Meanwhile, over half of all polled believed the US was experiencing a recession.

The US has technically not been in a recession, generally defined as a decrease in economic activity, as measured by gross domestic product (GDP), over two quarters, but Americans for years have reported feeling like the economy was off – more of a “vibecession” than an actual recession. Much of that has to do with prices.

While inflation has fallen back to its lowest level since 2021 after peaking at 9.1% in June 2022, the highest level in a generation, over two years of inflation has left many voters unhappy.

“Prices are still too high,” Harris said on Friday. “Look, the bills add up: food, rent, gas, back to school, clothes, prescription medication. After all that, for many families, there’s not much left at the end of the month.”

Harris said on Friday that she would work to restore and expand the child tax credit first seen in the Covid-era American Rescue Plan, providing a $3,600 tax credit per child for working- and middle-class families. She is also proposing a new $6,000 credit for families with children in the first year of life.

The plan also outlined the basic details of a four-year plan to lower housing costs, including building 3m new housing units, creating tax incentives for starter home construction and expanding down-payment support for first-time homeowners.

But at the heart of her plan were policies aimed at the grocery store, where she said her administration will propose a federal ban on price gouging on food and groceries to “bring down Americans’ grocery costs and keep inflation in check”.

The campaign emphasized the proposals are just one part of Harris’s economic platform and outlined broader goals, including strengthening Social Security and Medicare, lowering the cost of education and childcare and empowering workers to bargain for higher wages.

A recent FT/University of Michigan poll showed Harris has a sliver of an edge over Trump when it comes to who voters trust to handle the economy. And in its monthly consumer sentiment survey, the University of Michigan found that consumer sentiments rose slightly in early August for the first time in five months, probably as a result of Harris entering the race.

She is testing out lines of attack that could dent confidence in Trump’s ability to oversee the economy. Criticizing his plan for widespread tariffs on foreign imports, and warning the move would “devastate” the country, Harris dubbed it “a Trump tax on gas, a Trump tax on food, a Trump tax on clothing, a Trump tax on over-the-counter medication”.

High levels of uncertainty around the US economy’s direction were underlined this month by a brief meltdown on Wall Street in the wake of July’s unemployment data. The next three months may be a bumpy ride.

Harris is trying to pitch herself as a challenger who can help make the economy work for all. “Now is the time to chart a new way forward to build an America where everyone’s work is rewarded and where talents are valued,” the vice-president said. “And where everyone has the opportunity not just to get by, but to get ahead.”

She has 80 days to make her case.

Kamala Harris’s surge in popularity since replacing Joe Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee has opened up a surprise second path to victory in November, according to a fresh analysis of recent voter surveys.

An aggregate of polls modelled by the Washington Post shows that the US vice-president has become newly competitive in four southern Sun belt states that were previously leaning heavily towards Donald Trump, the Republican nominee and former president.

If the trend holds, it means Harris could eke out an electoral college victory either by winning those states – Georgia, Arizona, Nevada and North Carolina – or, alternatively, by capturing three swing states in the midwestern Rust belt, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Trump, by contrast, would need to capture both groups of states to earn the 270 electoral college votes necessary to secure victory, according to the model.

The opening up of a potential second front in Harris’s pathway to victory may be the biggest boon yet from her elevation to the top of the Democratic ticket in place of Biden, whose only path to staying in office appeared to hinge on winning the three Rust belt states.

Harris has gained an average of two percentage points nationally, and 2.1% in seven battleground states, since replacing Biden, who pulled out of the race on 21 July after weeks of intense pressure over a bad debate performance the previous month.

The transformation in the party’s chances of retaining the White House amounts to a “reset” of the election race and might even make Harris a “slight favourite”, according to the analysis. It is largely due to renewed impetus in key swing states under the candidacy of Harris and Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor who she chose as her running mate.

The outcome of US presidential elections is determined not by the popular vote, but by which candidate wins a majority of 538 electoral college votes, which are allotted state by state.

Polls show many things, but in aggregate they appear to suggest that Harris now leads in the Rust belt states of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and has closed the gap in another, Michigan, to within one point of Trump, the former president and Republican nominee. Biden won all three states, albeit by narrow margins, in 2020.

But she has also significantly improved on Biden’s post-debate standing – when the president’s poll position evaporated badly in all key states and even began to deteriorate in states previously considered safe – in three Sun belt states, Nevada, Arizona and Georgia, plus North Carolina, where she has pulled close enough to Trump to be within the polls’ margin of error.

Biden won the first of those three states, again by narrow margins, in 2020 but lost North Carolina by less than two percentage points. Amid Harris’s recent surge, Democratic strategists have started to envision carrying the state, despite the party only having won it once in presidential elections since 1980.

The uptick in support makes her competitive in more states than Trump that would enable her to reach the required 270 electoral college votes.

However, Harris still trails Trump in the final tally, if the polls are accurate and the election were held now.

Another boon to Harris is a Washington Post/Ipsos poll that shows her choice of Walz as running mate playing better with voters than Trump’s selection of JD Vance, who has seemed to hit trouble with female voters because of his hardline anti-abortion views and track record of misogynistic comments about childless women.

The survey showed 39% of voters having a favourable view of Walz – who has been targeted by Republicans because of his left-leaning policies as Minnesota governor – and 30% unfavourable, giving him a positive rating of 9%. Vance, on the other hand, recorded a 32% favourable rating against 42% who saw him unfavourably, a negative rating that chimes with other polls, some of which have measured him as the most unpopular vice-presidential pick in history.

Reflecting her campaign’s bullishness about its prospects in the state as it approaches next week’s Democratic national convention, Harris was due to make a keynote economic speech in Raleigh, North Carolina, on Friday where she was expected to set out policies on price gouging, rising food prices and high housing costs. All are areas that Republicans see as potential vulnerabilities for Harris.

Vance, a senator for Ohio, was due to speak in the Wisconsin city of Milwaukee, following appearances in Pennsylvania and Michigan in recent days, mirroring the Trump campaign’s recognition of the need to win the states.

Donald Trump made hundred of thousands from his branded Bible and millions from his properties – but also owes millions for defamation and fraud cases, according to his latest financial disclosures that shed little light on the perennial question of whether the Republican presidential nominee is, in fact, solvent.

Voluminous disclosure documents to the US Office of Government Ethics to comply with election campaign laws show that, in addition to Trump’s US real estate holdings, he has global financial interests, including registered trademarks in China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Ukraine and Israel.

He also owns millions in cryptocurrency and has a six-figure investment in gold bars.

But the disclosures also hint at Trump’s substantial personal outgoings, including more than $500m owed to both the writer E Jean Carroll and the New York attorney general resulting from civil judgments involving defamation and accounting fraud.

Both judgments – $83m to Carroll and $454m to New York state – are subject to bonds while Trump appeals the decisions, a process that could take years.

Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home and private club in Florida, which formed part of a case against the Trump Organization involving inflated asset valuations, produced about $57m in income from the club, down about $8m from a previous disclosure.

The disclosures are not a profit-and-loss balance sheet – they only give broad ranges of income and assets – so alone they cannot determine whether Trump is in the red or the black. He has consistently resisted efforts to force the release of his tax returns, although two years ago a Democrat-controlled Congress released six years of Trump’s tax returns, dating to 2015, the year he announced his presidential bid.

Earlier this year, Trump joined Bloomberg Billionaires Index of 500 richest people, with a fortune of $6.5bn – a $4bn increase, resulting from a Spac merger of his social media company, Trump Media & Technology Group, which operates the Truth Social site where the former president posts most of his public messages. But the value of the media group has declined significantly in recent months by as much as $1.3bn.

The disclosure comes as US voters are asked to weigh the relative fortunes of candidates and their running partners ahead of November’s presidential vote. The Democratic candidate, Kamala Harris, is estimated to be worth $8m, while her running mate and Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, made headlines for being worth a modest $330,000.

The net worth of Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, who worked as a venture capitalist and wrote a successful memoir, is placed at $4m, including $250,000 in bitcoin. Joe Biden and Jill Biden’s wealth is placed at $10m, including the $400,000 annual salary he earns as president.

The particularities of Trump’s financial disclosures show that he earned $12m through licensing and royalty deals. Those include about $7m he earned from a NFT licensing deal that sells digital “trading cards”.

The former president also reported earning about $5m in royalties for his recent books Letters to Trump and Our Journey Together. A Bible, published in association with the country singer Lee Greenwood, earned $300,000.

There was no income reported from his gold high-top sneaker line.

Trump, who recently signaled his support for cryptocurrencies at a global crypto convention in Nashville, Tennessee, declares between $1 and $5m in Ethereum. His son Eric Trump, who currently runs the Trump Organization, recently posted on X that he had “truly fallen in love with Crypto” and alerted to an unspecified “big announcement”.

Alongside the former president’s disclosures, the former first lady Melania Trump said she had earned $237,500 from a booking to speak to Republicans in Florida, and about $330,000 from NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, which have recently included digital portraits of her celebrating Women’s History Month.

The documents also hint at changes in direction at Trump’s real estate empire. Three Chinese companies that may be related to real estate deals were dissolved, though he still owns trademarks in the country. He also paid off a Deutsche Bank mortgage of between $25m to $50m on his Chicago Trump International hotel.

• Military authorities in the eastern Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk urged civilians to speed up their evacuation on Friday because the Russian army was quickly closing in on what has been one of Moscow’s key targets for months. Pokrovsk officials said in a Telegram post that Russian troops were “advancing at a fast pace. With every passing day there is less and less time to collect personal belongings and leave for safer regions.” Pokrovsk is one of Ukraine’s main defensive strongholds and a key logistics hub in the eastern Donetsk region. Its capture would compromise Ukraine’s defensive abilities and supply routes and bring Russia closer than ever to its stated aim of capturing the whole region.

• Ukraine’s lightning offensive into several Russian border regions is designed to persuade Moscow to engage in “fair” talks about its war in Ukraine, an aide to Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Friday. “We need to inflict significant tactical defeats on Russia,” the Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak wrote on Telegram. “In the Kursk region, we clearly see how the military tool is objectively used to convince the Russian Federation to enter into a fair negotiation process.”

• Ukraine’s army chief, Oleksandr Syrskyi, said on Friday that Kyiv’s forces were advancing between one and three kilometres in some areas in Russia’s Kursk region. Ukraine has said it has taken control of 82 settlements over an area of 1,150 sq km (444 sq miles) in the region after it launched a major cross-border attack on 6 August. Briefing President Volodymyr Zelenskiy via video link, Syrskyi reported fighting in the area of Malaya Loknya, some 11.5km from the Ukrainian border.

• It appeared that Ukraine had largely cut off a significant area of Glushovsky district of Kursk and Russian troops there after blowing up two important bridges on the Seim river. A mass evacuation is under way in the Glushkov district, home to 20,000 people, and the destruction of one bridge had hindered their evacuation, the Russian news agency Tass reported.

• Italy’s ambassador to Moscow defended media “independence” on Friday after Russian authorities summoned her over an Italian television report in the embattled Kursk region, the foreign ministry said. Cecilia Piccioni faced a “strong protest” over the Italian broadcaster RAI’s reporting team, which “illegally entered Russia to cover the criminal terrorist attack by Ukrainian soldiers against the Kursk region”, the Russian foreign ministry said in a statement. Piccioni explained during the meeting that RAI, “and in particular the editorial teams, plan their activities in a totally free and independent way”, an Italian foreign ministry spokesman told Agence France-Presse.

• Economic sanctions imposed by the West on Russia will remain in place for decades, even if there is a peaceful settlement in Ukraine, a senior Russian foreign ministry official said on Friday. Russia became the most sanctioned country by the west after its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, surpassing Iran and North Korea. “This is a story for decades to come. Whatever the developments and results of a peaceful settlement in Ukraine, it is, in fact, only a pretext,” said Dmitry Birichevsky, head of the economic cooperation department at the foreign ministry.

• Russia added at least nine more people linked to late opposition leader Alexei Navalny to its blacklist of “terrorists and extremists” on Friday, exactly six months after he died in prison. Among those listed were Navalny’s former spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh and the chair of his Anti-Corruption Foundation, Maria Pevchikh, according to the website of Russian financial monitoring service Rosfinmonitoring.

• More than 200 vehicles that fell foul of London’s ultra-low emission zone (Ulez) have been sent to Ukraine to aid the country’s war effort, despite initial legal concerns over the plan. Transport for London said on Friday that 330 vehicles had been given the green light to be sent to Ukraine under the Ulez vehicle scrappage scheme. More than 200 are already in the eastern European country.

Ukraine’s lightning offensive into several Russian border regions is designed to persuade Moscow to engage in “fair” talks about its war in Ukraine, an aide to Volodymyr Zelenskiy has said, as Russian forces close in on the strategic city of Pokrovsk in Donetsk region.

“We need to inflict significant tactical defeats on Russia,” the Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak wrote on the Telegram messaging app. “In the Kursk region, we clearly see how the military tool is objectively used to convince the Russian Federation to enter into a fair negotiation process.

“We have proven, effective means of coercion. In addition to economic and diplomatic ones … we need to inflict significant tactical defeats on Russia.”

Podolyak made his comments as it appeared that Ukraine had largely cut off a significant area of Glushovsky district of Kursk and Russian troops there after blowing up two important bridges on the Seim river.

As Ukraine appeared to be consolidating its gains in Russia’s Kursk region, Moscow’s forces were advancing rapidly towards Pokrovsk, which for months has been one of their key targets.

Ukrainian military authorities urged civilians living in the city to speed up their evacuation on Friday. Pokrovsk officials said in a Telegram post that Russian troops were “advancing at a fast pace. With every passing day there is less and less time to collect personal belongings and leave for safer regions”.

Pokrovsk is one of Ukraine’s main defensive strongholds and a key logistics hub in the eastern Donetsk region. Its capture would compromise Ukraine’s defensive abilities and supply routes and bring Russia closer than ever to its stated aim of capturing the whole region.

In an update on Thursday, the Institute for the Study of War thinktank wrote: “Russian forces are maintaining their relatively high offensive tempo in Donetsk oblast, demonstrating that the Russian military command continues to prioritise advances in eastern Ukraine even as Ukraine is pressuring Russian forces within Kursk oblast.”

Russia has accused Nato and the west more widely of aiding the Ukrainian incursion, including by permitting the use of western-supplied equipment. But British officials said Ukraine was entitled under international law to use British-donated equipment in operations, including within Russia.

“There has been no change in UK government policy; under article 51 of the UN charter, Ukraine has a clear right of self-defence against Russia’s illegal attacks, [and] that does not preclude operations inside Russia,” the Ministry of Defence said.

It appears, however, there has been no change in the UK’s refusal to allow Ukraine to use British-supplied Storm Shadow missiles against targets inside Russia, suggesting a delicate balancing act.

The US so far has also deemed the incursion a protective move in which it is appropriate for Kyiv to use US equipment, officials in Washington said. But they expressed worries about complications as Ukrainian troops pushed further into enemy territory.

One US official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters that if Ukraine started taking Russian villages and other non-military targets using US weapons and vehicles, it could be seen as stretching the limits Washington has imposed, precisely to avoid any perception of a direct Nato-Russia conflict.

Ukraine has said that one of the aims of its current incursion into Russia is to counter artillery and missile fire into Ukraine and create a buffer zone.

Footage posted on Russian social media has purported to show western-supplied equipment – including a British-supplied Challenger 2 main battle tank – destroyed or captured during the Kursk offensive, although the tank depicted in the footage appears to be a Soviet-era T-64. Unverified reports have said that Challengers may have been used during the operation.

Russia’s defence ministry has also published footage that it said showed a Russian drone destroying a US-made Stryker armoured combat vehicle in Kursk.

On Friday, Russian forces said they had destroyed a Ukrainian reconnaissance and sabotage unit in Kursk that was armed with weapons from Nato countries, the state-run media agency RIA reported, citing unidentified security sources.

“Samples of small arms manufactured by the United States and Sweden have been seized at the liquidation site of a Ukrainian sabotage group near the village of Kremyanoe in the Kursk region,” RIA cited a Russian security official as saying.

Ukraine’s attack into Russia began on 6 August, when thousands of Ukrainian troops crossed Russia’s western border, in an embarrassment for the Russian military.

The US and other western powers, eager to avoid direct confrontation with Russia, said Ukraine had not given advance notice and that Washington was not involved.

So far Russia has mostly redeployed irregular units in its sluggish response.

Footage geolocated by the ISW placed Ukrainian troops just under 30km (18.6 miles) from the international border in Kursk. Although the Russian defence ministry claimed it had cleared some settlements of Ukrainian forces, Russian military bloggers suggested fighting was continuing.

On Thursday a number of Ukrainian news outlets identified several units of more than 100 recently captured Russian prisoners of war, suggesting a mix of regular and irregular forces, including Chechen fighters.

Fighting also appeared to be continuing at a border crossing into the Belgorod region – a second line of Kyiv’s advance – with conflicting reports over the status of the fighting.

While the Ukrainian attack has revealed weaknesses in Russia’s defences and changed the public narrative of the conflict, Russian officials said what they cast as a Ukrainian “terrorist invasion” would not change the course of the war. Russia has been advancing for most of the year in the key eastern sector of the 1,000km (620 mile) frontline and has vast numerical superiority.

Reuters and Associated Press contributed to this report

FBI agents have raided and searched the Virginia home of Dimitri Simes, an author and policy analyst, who advised Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election campaign and who currently hosts a current affairs program on Russia’s state-run Channel One.

The raid began on 13 August, the FBI told the local Rappahannock News, which first reported the story.

Simes, whose name was included more than 100 times in the 2019 Mueller report into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, told the paper he was out of the country and had not been notified about the search ahead of time. He was not aware he was the focus of any current law enforcement investigation, he said.

“I’m puzzled and concerned,” he said. “I have not seen a warrant. I was not contacted by any law enforcement or anyone else whatsoever.”

In an interview with Russian government-owned Sputnik News, Simes said on Friday that the raid “clearly is an attempt to intimidate, not only somebody from Russia, but just anyone who goes against official policies and particularly against the deep state”.

He added: “My suspicion is that instead of trying to get me to come to the United States and to interrogate me or even to arrest me, their real purpose is to make sure that I would not come back.”

Simes’s son, Dimitri Simes Jr, told Sputnik News that his father has not been in the United States since October 2022. “The Biden regime is terrified of being called out over Ukraine and Israel,” he tweeted on Friday. In another tweet, he added: “Elements of Biden regime are trying to disrupt any possibility for deescalation with Russia and plunge America into World War III.”

Simes, who was born in Moscow, emigrated to the United States in 1973. He served as an informal foreign policy adviser to President Richard Nixon before leading the Center for the National Interest for nearly three decades.

After meeting Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner at a luncheon in honor of Henry Kissinger in March 2016, Simes began providing the Trump campaign with informal counsel on foreign policy, including advising on a speech Trump gave envisioning greater cooperation with Russia.

Simes and the Center for the National Interest featured prominently in the Mueller report, which cleared them of any wrongdoing. Around the same time, Simes underwent a Senate finance committee investigation into his contacts with Russian Central Bank official Alexander Torshin and Maria Butina, who was sentenced to 18 months in prison for trying to infiltrate US conservative groups before the 2016 election.

Last year, Simes moderated a conversation with Russian president Vladimir Putin at the St Petersburg international economic forum. And in June, Simes participated in a closed-door meeting with Putin, the state-owned Russian news agency Tass reported.

Dozens of lawmakers became embroiled in a fisticuffs brawl in Turkey’s parliament on Friday as they argued over a jailed opposition deputy stripped of his parliamentary immunity this year.

The 30-minute ruckus, which left at least two lawmakers injured, forced the suspension of the hearing. Deputies eventually returned for a vote that rejected an opposition move to restore the parliamentary mandate of lawyer and rights activist Can Atalay.

Atalay won his seat in an election last year after campaigning from his prison cell.

The parliamentary turmoil erupted after ruling Justice and Development party (AKP) member Alpay Ozalan launched into Ahmet Sik, a member of the leftist Workers’ party of Turkey (TIP), who had condemned the government’s treatment of Atalay.

“It’s no surprise that you call Atalay a terrorist,” Sik said.

“All citizens should know that the biggest terrorists of this country are those seated on those benches,” he added, indicating the ruling majority.

Ozalan, a former footballer, walked to the rostrum and shoved Sik to the ground, said an Agence France-Presse journalist in parliament.

While on the ground, Sik was punched several times by AKP lawmakers. Dozens of lawmakers joined the fight.

Footage posted online showed the brawl and then staff cleaning blood stains from the parliament floor. A deputy from the Republican People’s party (CHP) and one from the Peoples’ Equality and Democracy (DEM) party suffered head injuries.

Ozgur Ozel, head of the main opposition CHP, denounced the violence.

“I am ashamed to have witnessed this situation,” he added.

The parliamentary speaker said the two deputies at the origin of the brawl would be sanctioned.

Atalay was deprived of his seat after an ill-tempered parliamentary session in January, despite efforts by fellow leftist deputies to halt the proceedings.

He is one of seven defendants sentenced in 2022 to 18 years in prison following a controversial trial that also saw the award-winning philanthropist Osman Kavala jailed for life.

From prison, Atalay, 48, campaigned for a parliament seat for the earthquake-ravaged Hatay province in a May 2023 election.

He was elected as a member for the leftist TIP, which has three seats in the parliament.

The win led to a legal standoff between President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s supporters and opposition leaders that pushed Turkey to the verge of a constitutional crisis last year.

Parliament’s decision in January to oust Atalay came after a ruling by the supreme court of appeals that upheld his conviction, clearing the way for the move to strip him of his parliamentary immunity.

But on 1 August, the constitutional court – which reviews whether judges’ rulings comply with Turkey’s basic law – said that Atalay’s removal as a member of parliament was “null and void”.

AKP and far-right Nationalist Movement party deputies joined forces to defeat the opposition motion on Friday.

Turkey’s parliament has previously voted to lift immunity from prosecution of opposition politicians – many of them Kurds – who the government views as “terrorists”.

Gaza has recorded its first polio case in 25 years, the Palestinian health ministry said on Friday, after the UN chief, António Guterres, called for pauses in the Israel-Hamas war to vaccinate hundreds of thousands of children.

Tests in Jordan confirmed the disease in an unvaccinated 10-month-old from the central Gaza Strip, the health ministry in Ramallah said.

According to the UN, Gaza, now in its 11th month of war, has not registered a polio case for 25 years, although type 2 poliovirus was detected in samples collected from the territory’s wastewater in June.

“Doctors suspected the presence of symptoms consistent with polio,” the health ministry said. “After conducting the necessary tests in the Jordanian capital, Amman, the infection was confirmed.”

The case emerged shortly after Guterres called for two seven-day breaks in the Gaza war to vaccinate more than 640,000 children.

Poliovirus, most often spread through sewage and contaminated water, is highly infectious. It can cause disfigurement and paralysis, and is potentially fatal. It mainly affects children under the age of five.

The UN health and children’s agencies said they had made detailed plans to reach children across the besieged Palestinian territory and could start this month. But that would require pauses in the 10-month-old war between Israel and Hamas, they said.

“Preventing and containing the spread of polio will take a massive, coordinated and urgent effort,” Guterres told reporters at UN headquarters in New York. “I am appealing to all parties to provide concrete assurances right away guaranteeing humanitarian pauses for the campaign.”

The World Health Organization and UN children’s fund Unicef said they were planning two seven-day vaccination drives across the Gaza Strip, starting in late August, against type 2 poliovirus (cVDPV2).

“These pauses in fighting would allow children and families to safely reach health facilities, and community outreach workers to get to children who cannot access health facilities for polio vaccination,” the agencies said in a statement.

After 25 years without polio, its re-emergence in the Gaza Strip would threaten neighbouring countries, it added. “A ceasefire is the only way to ensure public health security in the Gaza Strip and the region.”

During each round of the campaign, the health ministry in Gaza, alongside UN agencies, would provide “two drops of novel oral polio vaccine type 2 (nOPV2) to more than 640,000 children under 10 years of age”.

More than 1.6m doses of nOPV2 were expected to transit through Israel’s Ben Gurion airport “by the end of August”, the statement added.

The war was triggered by Hamas’s unprecedented 7 October attack on Israel, which resulted in the deaths of 1,198 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.

On Thursday, the death toll from Israel’s retaliatory military campaign in Gaza passed 40,000, according to the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza, which does not provide a breakdown of civilian and militant casualties.

Gaza has recorded its first polio case in 25 years, the Palestinian health ministry said on Friday, after the UN chief, António Guterres, called for pauses in the Israel-Hamas war to vaccinate hundreds of thousands of children.

Tests in Jordan confirmed the disease in an unvaccinated 10-month-old from the central Gaza Strip, the health ministry in Ramallah said.

According to the UN, Gaza, now in its 11th month of war, has not registered a polio case for 25 years, although type 2 poliovirus was detected in samples collected from the territory’s wastewater in June.

“Doctors suspected the presence of symptoms consistent with polio,” the health ministry said. “After conducting the necessary tests in the Jordanian capital, Amman, the infection was confirmed.”

The case emerged shortly after Guterres called for two seven-day breaks in the Gaza war to vaccinate more than 640,000 children.

Poliovirus, most often spread through sewage and contaminated water, is highly infectious. It can cause disfigurement and paralysis, and is potentially fatal. It mainly affects children under the age of five.

The UN health and children’s agencies said they had made detailed plans to reach children across the besieged Palestinian territory and could start this month. But that would require pauses in the 10-month-old war between Israel and Hamas, they said.

“Preventing and containing the spread of polio will take a massive, coordinated and urgent effort,” Guterres told reporters at UN headquarters in New York. “I am appealing to all parties to provide concrete assurances right away guaranteeing humanitarian pauses for the campaign.”

The World Health Organization and UN children’s fund Unicef said they were planning two seven-day vaccination drives across the Gaza Strip, starting in late August, against type 2 poliovirus (cVDPV2).

“These pauses in fighting would allow children and families to safely reach health facilities, and community outreach workers to get to children who cannot access health facilities for polio vaccination,” the agencies said in a statement.

After 25 years without polio, its re-emergence in the Gaza Strip would threaten neighbouring countries, it added. “A ceasefire is the only way to ensure public health security in the Gaza Strip and the region.”

During each round of the campaign, the health ministry in Gaza, alongside UN agencies, would provide “two drops of novel oral polio vaccine type 2 (nOPV2) to more than 640,000 children under 10 years of age”.

More than 1.6m doses of nOPV2 were expected to transit through Israel’s Ben Gurion airport “by the end of August”, the statement added.

The war was triggered by Hamas’s unprecedented 7 October attack on Israel, which resulted in the deaths of 1,198 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.

On Thursday, the death toll from Israel’s retaliatory military campaign in Gaza passed 40,000, according to the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza, which does not provide a breakdown of civilian and militant casualties.

Hurricane Ernesto bore down on Bermuda on Friday as a category 2 storm, threatening the British island territory with strong winds, a dangerous storm surge and potentially deadly flooding.

Ernesto, centered about 95 miles (150km) south-southwest of the archipelago at 8pm Atlantic Standard Time (0000 GMT on Saturday), was producing sustained winds of up to 100mph (155km/h) and had the potential to drop up to 9in (230mm) of rain, the US National Hurricane Center said.

The center of Ernesto is expected to pass near or over Bermuda on Saturday morning, making conditions ripe for storm surges and flash flooding by the afternoon.

“Folks, be under no illusion. This storm is the real deal,” said Michael Weeks, Bermuda’s national security minister, at a press conference on Friday.

He warned Bermudians to brace for 36 hours of hurricane- and tropical storm-force winds starting on Friday afternoon.

The winds had knocked out power for 5,400 of Bermuda’s 36,000 customers, the power utility Belco said. The company added it had called its repair crews back from the field because it was too dangerous to work.

Warren Darrell, 52, of Smith’s Parish, said he had stocked up on groceries for his family, battened down the hatches and removed furniture from the lawn in preparation for Ernesto’s arrival.

“I’m ready to play games with my daughters and wait,” he said. “I’m a bit worried, a little bit worried, but I think we’ll overcome. I think we’ll be fine.”

Winds, torrential rains and rip currents began picking up just before noon at John Smith’s Bay on Bermuda’s Main Island. The government planned to close a causeway bridge linking it to St George’s Island on Friday night. A number of tourists and locals were seen roaming around the south shore, while a person was windsurfing as waves grew in size before 2pm.

Bermuda, a collection of 181 small islands clustered more than 600 miles (965km) off the Carolina coast, can expect hurricane conditions to persist until Sunday, the National Hurricane Center director, Michael Brennan, said in an online briefing.

Fewer than a dozen hurricanes have made direct landfall on Bermuda, according to records dating to the 1850s.

Earlier this week, Ernesto grazed Puerto Rico as a tropical storm, bringing heavy rainfall to the US Caribbean territory and cutting power to about half of its 1.5 million customers.

About 250,000 homes and businesses remained without power as of Friday morning, according to Luma Energy, the island’s main electricity distributor.

Puerto Rico’s power grid is notoriously fragile. The island has experienced prolonged power outages in recent years when weather systems much more powerful than Ernesto rolled through.

Ernesto is the fifth named Atlantic storm of what is expected to be an intense hurricane season. Slow-moving Debby hit Florida’s Gulf coast as a category 1 hurricane just last week before soaking some parts of the Carolinas with up to 2ft of rain.

Evidence presented in the first trial of Lucy Letby showing which staff came in and out of the baby unit she worked on was incorrect, the Crown Prosecution Service has acknowledged.

The nurse was convicted last year of murdering seven babies and attempting to kill six others at the Countess of Chester hospital in north-west England. Letby, the worst child serial killer in British history, is serving 14 whole-life sentences, meaning she will never be released from prison.

A retrial at Manchester crown court last month found the 34-year-old from Hereford guilty of the attempted murder of another child, known as Baby K.

During the retrial, Nick Johnson KC, prosecuting, told the court that door-swipe data, showing which nurses and doctors were entering and exiting the intensive care ward, had been “mislabelled”.

The Crown Prosecution Service told the Telegraph that the discrepancy discovered was related to one door in the neonatal intensive care unit and that it had been corrected for the retrial.

A spokesperson for the Mersey-Cheshire Crown Prosecution Service said: “The CPS can confirm that accurate door-swipe data was presented in the retrial.”

David Davis, the Conservative MP, has written to Sarah Hammond, chief crown prosecutor of Mersey-Cheshire CPS, asking her to “urgently make clear” what timing errors were made during the first trial and how they related to the prosecution’s case.

Davis, who is planning to bring a parliamentary debate after the summer recess, said: “The door-swipe data is clearly vital to knowing which nurse was where at one point in time, and this in turn was vital to the prosecution’s case in the first trial.

“It is therefore essential that the CPS makes it plain whether those errors occurred throughout any of the evidence of the first trial.”

In the initial trial, the prosecution said Dr Ravi Jayaram, a consultant, had discovered Letby standing over Baby K at 3.50am on 17 February 2016. The baby was deteriorating and its breathing tube had been dislodged.

The prosecution said door-swipe data showed that the baby’s designated nurse had left the intensive care unit at 3.47am. But the data was amended in the retrial to show the nurse had returned at that time, meaning Letby was not alone.

During the retrial, the prosecution and the defence accepted that it was a genuine mistake, and the nurse was convicted of the attempted murder of Baby K.

Letby faced a three-week retrial on the single count of attempted murder, which she denied, after the jury in her original trial last year was unable to reach a verdict.

A public inquiry led by Lady Justice Kathryn Thirlwall will begin in September into how Letby was able to continue working with babies despite the concerns of senior doctors who connected her to a number of suspicious incidents.

A jury on Friday convicted a white Florida woman for shooting and killing a Black mother of four through her front door in a case that provoked outrage from civil rights advocates and the victim’s family.

Susan Lorincz denied the manslaughter of Ajike “AJ” Owens, who came to her house to remonstrate after the defendant assaulted two of Owens’ children on 2 June last year. Lorincz could receive a prison sentence of up to 30 years in prison at a hearing on a date to be determined.

Pamela Dias, mother of the 35-year-old victim, became emotional as the verdict was read after two and a half hours of deliberations.

“Oh God, thank you,” she said before leaving the courtroom.

The weeklong trial before an all-white jury in Marion county heard there was a history of conflict between Owens and Lorincz, whom neighbors said previously yelled racist slurs at Owens’ children, and struck one of them with a hurled roller skate on the day of the killing.

Other witnesses said Lorincz also threw an iPad and tried to strike the children with an umbrella.

The case has been mired in controversy since the moment Lorincz, 60, fired a single shot from inside her Ocala home that killed Owens, whom she admitted she could not see on the other side of the closed and locked door. She then insisted she acted in self-defense.

The defendant was arrested only several days later, after growing community unrest and initial comments from the Marion county sheriff, Billy Woods, that his hands were tied by Florida’s stand-your-ground law, which allows a person to use deadly force if they feel their life is in imminent danger.

Woods later conceded that the killing was not justified. But further anger was provoked by the state attorney Bill Gladson’s decision to charge Lorincz with manslaughter, not the second-degree murder charge Owens’ family was expecting.

“Her act of shooting through a door where she couldn’t see who was on the other side was a reckless and wanton disregard for human life, which are literally the words that come from the statute of second-degree murder in Florida,” said Melba Pearson, a civil rights attorney and director of prosecution projects at Florida International University’s Jack D Gordon Institute for Public Policy.

Pearson, a former assistant state attorney not involved in the case, questioned why Gladson decided not to file a murder charge with manslaughter as a lesser included offense.

“You argue to the jury, ‘This is a second-degree murder and if you disagree with me, well, here’s this other option of manslaughter, and if you really hated everything I did, hey, it is what it is, not guilty,’” she said.

“At least you’re giving the jury a menu if you’re not 100% confident. But to me, the facts of the case, everything that has come out in the trial, has not shaken my opinion that this was second-degree murder and it was undercharged deliberately.

“There’s no scenario where it doesn’t fit the textbook definition of the charge, but I’m going to be blunt. Central Florida is not exactly the most diverse area of the state, and sadly, there are people that hold, as we saw with the defendant, racist views.”

Dias said she was “shocked” at the all-white makeup of the jury of six women and two men, which the family’s attorney Anthony Thomas said was unrepresentative of the “racial and cultural diversity of Ocala”, a city with a minority population of 40%.

Prosecutors drew little attention to the racial aspects of the case as they called witnesses portraying Lorincz as a curtain-twitching neighbor who would frequently call law enforcement when she became annoyed by children playing loudly in a field next to her home.

Numerous times in previous months, officers testified, she called 911 after altercations with Owens or her children. The eldest two, boys now 13 and 10, were involved in the incident where Lorincz threw the skate, which led to their mother approaching Lorincz’s house and banging on the door.

Witnesses to the fatal shooting, meanwhile, gave evidence that Owens was neither armed nor attempting to break down Lorincz’s door, as the defendant insisted in a video of her police interview played in court.

“I felt like I was in imminent danger, she was so angry,” Lorincz told detectives. “She’s like, ‘I’m going to kill you!’ I thought she was coming right through that damn door.”

Lorincz declined to testify at her trial.

Several witnesses said they heard Owens banging loudly on the door, and one said he heard her say: “Come outside, bitch,” but none said they heard a death threat, and neither was one captured on a Ring doorbell recording of the encounter.

Additionally, prosecutors noted, Lorincz had legally purchased two handguns following a previous disagreement with Owens. They said she also made internet searches for the language of Florida’s “stand your ground” law that she later quoted to investigators.

“It was community and family members that went around to the neighbors and got the Ring footage that showed clearly that AJ was not trying to make entry into the house or anything like that, so it seemed to be a very shoddy, slack investigation from the beginning,” Pearson said.

“I just think there was an undercurrent of race and racism, and an assumption that the defendant must have been right and the victim was a violent, insert your stereotype here, type of person.”

In a statement before the verdict, Owens’ family said the trial had been “a grueling and emotional journey”.

“AJ’s death is not just a singular tragedy, it reflects the systemic racism that continues to permeate every facet of American life. Her story is a stark reminder of the countless lives that have been unjustly taken, the families that have been shattered and the communities that live in fear of racial violence,” they said.

“Yet in this moment of deep sorrow and reflection, we hold on to hope. We hope that this verdict will be a step toward recognizing the humanity in each of us, regardless of the color of our skin. We hope that it will be a catalyst for change, prompting a deeper examination of the structures and systems that allow such tragedies to occur.

“Above all, we hope that AJ’s life, her legacy and her light will continue to inspire and drive the fight for equality and justice.”

The Friends star Matthew Perry ordered his live-in personal assistant to give him several intravenous doses of ketamine on the day of his death last year, according to a statement by the assistant to investigators.

The actor, who was found drowned in a hot tub at his Los Angeles home last October, asked his assistant, Kenneth Iwamasa, to give him a dose at 8.30am, according to court papers.

Four hours later, while he watched a movie at his home, he asked Iwamasa to give him another shot. Then just 40 minutes after that, Perry directed him to give him a larger dose.

“Shoot me up with a big one,” Perry told Iwamasa, and instructed him to get the hot tub ready. The assistant gave Perry the dose and left the home to run errands, the papers say. When he returned, Perry was face-down in the water.

An autopsy report by the Los Angeles county medical examiner later recorded that Perry, 54, had died of “acute effects of ketamine” and that he had drowned in “the heated end of his pool”.

Ketamine is an anaesthetic that is often used recreationally, as well as to treat depression. Buprenorphine, an opioid often used to treat those addicted to heroin, also contributed to Perry’s death, the report found.

The arrest of five people on Thursday in connection with Perry’s death, including Iwamasa; two doctors, Mark Chavez and Salvador Plasencia; and the drug dealers Jasveen Sangha, AKA “the Ketamine Queen”, and Erik Fleming, has exposed a world of high-end drug dealing to the stars.

According to a timeline constructed from police reports, Perry’s last days were punctuated by an escalating search for the drug. Federal prosecutors allege that the five people charged “took advantage of Mr Perry’s addiction to enrich themselves”.

Law enforcement officials have said that Perry became increasingly reliant on ketamine, and had turned to illegal dealers after his request to a local clinic was denied.

The actor’s increasing dependence on the drug in some ways mirrors the death of the singer Michael Jackson, who had become dependent on a pseudo-legitimate dose of another anaesthetic, propofol.

Reports have detailed signs that Perry’s dependence had become life-threatening: he was found on several previous occasions unconscious and had been observed to lose his ability to speak or move after a dose.

According to Iwamasa’s statement, part of his job was to coordinate Perry’s doctor’s appointments and to ensure he took his medications. Iwamasa said he was introduced to Plasencia as a source for the drugs.

Plasencia had at one point discussed with the other doctor charged in the case, Chavez, how much money they could make from Perry, according to court documents.

“I wonder how much this moron will pay,” Plasencia texted Chavez. Prosecutors allege Chavez supplied 22 vials of ketamine and ketamine lozenges through a fraudulent prescription. Chavez allegedly replied: “Lets find out.”

Nigel Farage appears to have become the highest-earning MP, having made almost £1.2m a year from GB News.

In the first register of interests of the new parliament, the Reform UK MP declared that he was earning £97,900 a month as a presenter for GB News, the channel co-owned by the hedge fund billionaire Paul Marshall.

Farage also revealed that his visit to the US on 17 July – in the aftermath of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump – cost £32,000 and was funded by Christopher Harborne, a Thailand-based crypto investor who previously gave millions to the Brexit party. The purpose was recorded as “to support a friend who was almost killed and to represent Clacton on the world stage”.

A further £9,250 trip to the National Conservatism Conference in Brussels in April was funded by George Cottrell, an unofficial aide to Farage.

Cottrell, a high-profile figure in Farage’s entourage, spent eight months in an American jail in 2017 after being convicted of offering money-laundering services on the dark web. The crime was committed in 2014, before Cottrell worked for either the anti-EU party or Farage.

The MP’s social media earnings were also revealed, showing that he made £1,550 through X and £853 through Meta, as well as £4,000 from Cameo videos. The Clacton MP is also paid £4,000 a month by the Daily Telegraph.

Jo Maugham, founder of the Good Law Project, said: “You look at these numbers and you wonder, has Nigel Farage catapulted himself to the top of the list of highest earners in Clacton? Great for him, but it’s not really public service, is it?”

Previously, the highest-earning MP was Geoffrey Cox, the Tory MP, who also works as a barrister. He earns £293,400 from law firm Withers, and also collected a payment of £379,000 from an Indian chambers in July for work carried out in 2016 to 2018.

The newest register of interests also confirms that Keir Starmer was gifted four tickets with hospitality to a Taylor Swift concert by the Football Association, worth £4,000. The prime minister had previously raised eyebrows over the £76,000 of freebies and hospitality he has accepted while in opposition.

In terms of donations, the register revealed the huge amounts of cash given to new MPs by the Labour Together thinktank, formerly run by Starmer’s political strategist, Morgan McSweeney. Funded by private donors, the Starmerite outfit gave almost £900,000 towards the general election campaigns of 106 MPs.

The donations, of typically either £5,000 or £10,000, went predominantly to candidates not already in parliament. Only seven MPs held their seats prior to the election.

Almost half of the 211 new Labour MPs elected received donations towards their campaigns from Labour Together, now led by former MP Jonathan Ashworth. Ashworth replaced Josh Simons, who was elected as an MP.

In addition to the support for general election campaigning, Labour Together has in the past year paid for the provision of staff or research services of 10 ministers, including Rachel Reeves, Yvette Cooper and David Lammy.