Nearly two weeks after its surprise incursion into Russia, Ukraine finds itself struggling to find a balance between seizing territory across the border in Kursk and losing it at the heart of the eastern front in central Donetsk.

On Friday, Ukraine’s commander-in-chief, Oleksandr Syrskyi, claimed advances were being made of up to two miles a day inside Russia, but Moscow’s forces have gained about three miles this month as the Kremlin bets heavily on capturing the hub of Pokrovsk.

In the minds of many Ukrainians, the two struggles are related and the ultimate result uncertain. Russia had been expected to shift significant forces from the east to defend Kursk. But Hanna Shelest, a senior fellow with the Centre for European Policy Analysis, said that while the daring Ukrainian attack had “gone better than expected”, the reality was that “Russia has not probably moved enough forces from the eastern flank as had been hoped”.

On Thursday, the Institute for the Study of War, a US thinktank, said it believed that only “select elements of Russian irregular units” were being redeployed to Kursk – and that the Kremlin was likely to be “extremely averse to pulling Russian military units engaged in combat” near a priority sector like Pokrovsk.

Russia’s foreign ministry accused Ukraine on Friday of using US-made Himars rockets to blow up a strategic bridge north of Glushkovo in Kursk, seven miles north of the international border – a move that could lead to the cutting-off of a chunk of Russian territory along the frontline to the village’s south-west.

In Pokrovsk, meanwhile, officials have stepped up civilian evacuations. Serhiy Dobryak, head of the city military administration, warned that Russian forces had “almost approached” the city and that alarm about its future was growing.

Until a year ago, Pokrovsk was considered safe enough to act as a regional base where journalists and aid workers could stay overnight. Its road and rail connections link the central city of Dnipro with Kramatorsk and Sloviansk. Capturing it would in effect cut the part of Donetsk oblast still in Ukrainian hands in two.

On Friday evening, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy also linked the battles. The incursion into Kursk, he explained, was “about destroying the logistics of the Russian army and draining their reserves”. Syrskyi, he added, had briefed him “on our defensive steps in the Donbas” including those in Pokrovsk “as well as our advance in the Kursk region”.

Although Ukrainian soldiers in the country’s north-eastern Sumy region are happy enough with the early success across the border in Kursk, it is not hard to find doubters of the overall strategy. Oleksii, a member of the infantry, is one, though he does not want his unit or call sign identified.

“We should defend what we have. Attacking Kursk takes good soldiers away from Pokrovsk – and if it does divert some Russian troops, it only moves the problem of their numbers from one place to another,” he said, before adding a characteristically Ukrainian formulation: “My mother always told me: stand your ground.”

There are persistent rumours that Col Emil Ishkulov, the popular commander of Ukraine’s 80th brigade, now among those involved in the incursion into Kursk, was removed from his position at the end of July because he was opposed to the incursion into Russia – unsure his unit had the strength for the task. At the time, soldiers from the unit issued an unsuccessful public appeal for him to be reinstated.

Estonia, whose intelligence officials are some of the best analysts of Russian intentions, said on Friday there was no sign that Moscow had yet amassed enough forces for a full counterattack in Kursk and that its response was still ill-coordinated – reflecting, perhaps, a prioritisation of Donbas.

“There are no indications yet that the Russian armed forces have enough forces and areas to deploy such significant actions [a counterattack],” said Lt Col Mattias Puusepp, deputy chief of staff of the Estonian defence forces. “Actions taken are of a defensive nature – that is, they set up defensive lines, move units.”

On Saturday, however, there was one grim sign of Russian reprisal. A ballistic missile exploded in central Sumy, the Ukrainian city nearest to the cross-border incursion – the first time the city itself had been hit for nearly a week. Dramatic footage of a fire and burnt-out cars appeared on social media, and at two civilians were injured, according to local officials.

Sumy, which has a population of about 250,000, has remained busy and lively in the summer heat, though the noise of explosions from Russian glide bombs in the distance stepped up over last week. Its hospitals, though, have been filling up with frontline casualties, and an appeals for blood donations went out to help treat wounded soldiers a week ago. It took an hour for the need to be met.

The city has also received about 4,000 people fleeing the agricultural villages in the area towards the border in the north, many of whom plan to rent apartments.

In the border zone, six miles from the boundary, meanwhile, only a tiny handful of civilians and little functioning infrastructure remain. One shop with smashed windows was still selling groceries, but most places were boarded up. An aid agency, Global Empowerment Mission, supplies nearly 26,000 food rations every month because market supplies are absent, visiting frontline villages every week to distribute to the remaining population.

A few Ukrainians, however, insist on remaining, such as Valentyna Mykolaiivna, a pensioner from Yunakivka, who says she would not be willing to move out and live with one of her three daughters: “I’m just too old, I can’t start over. I don’t want to leave what I have.”

Valentyna showed the Observer around her home. It is a lot to give up: a substantial brick house, with a goose and chickens in the yard, and ripe sweetcorn, beetroot, apples and more growing in a field at the back where goats are tethered. It has been too dangerous to go to church, she says, but it is calm when we visit.

The risk to her is real, however, though the 62-year-old is emphatic that Ukraine’s military has done the right thing. “It is a good idea – they pushed them back. Let them stay where they are. Why do they want to come here? Don’t they have enough land?” she asks.

Later, she bends down and, from the Ukrainian earth, plucks a large watermelon to hand over as a gift.

• Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy says his forces are “strengthening” their positions in Russia’s Kursk region where Kyiv has been mounting a major ground offensive. He said his army chief Oleksandr Syrskyi had reported that Ukrainian troops continued their advance and also took more Russian servicemen as prisoners. Ukraine says it has seized more than 80 settlements over 1,150 square km (444 square miles) in Kursk since 6 August in the biggest invasion of Russia since the second world war. The latest battlefield reports could not be verified, but locals accuse the Russian government of downplaying the Ukrainian attack.

• Zelenskiy also renewed his calls for Ukraine’s western allies to allow long-range strikes on Russia: “The long-range capability for our forces is the answer to all most important, most strategic questions of this war,” Zelenskiy said. Western governments providing military aid to Ukraine have so far refused to allow Ukraine to use long-range weapons because of the perceived risk of escalation in the conflict.

• 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.

• Reporters from the Associated Press said that on a trip through Kursk organised by the Ukrainian government, they witnessed a “trail of destruction”. Alexander Kots, military correspondent with the pro-Kremlin newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, also said that Ukrainian pressure in Kursk “is not weakening yet”.

• Ukraine’s incursion into Russia has derailed plans to hold indirect talks in Qatar on halting strikes on energy infrastructure, the Washington Post reported, citing undisclosed official sources.

• Ukraine is reaping “huge political gains” from its military offensive into western Russia but the incursion is not altering the “anti-escalation approach” of the west, Polish interior minister Tomasz Siemoniak said. The United States and western powers, keen to avoid direct military confrontation with Russia, have said Ukraine had not given advance notice and that Washington was not involved.

• Safety at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant is deteriorating following a drone strike that hit a perimeter access road on Saturday, according to International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) director general Rafael Mariano Grossi. The warning followed the plant’s Russian management saying a Ukraine drone had dropped an explosive charge on a road used by staff, the Tass news agency reported earlier. Grossi expressed his alarm: “I remain extremely concerned and reiterate my call for maximum restraint from all sides,” he said.

• On Saturday, Russia’s defence ministry accused Ukraine of planning to attack the Kursk nuclear power plant and blame such a “provocation” on Moscow, Interfax news agency reported. The ministry said Russia would respond harshly in the event of such an attack, which it said would contaminate a large surrounding area. Kyiv denied Russia’s claims, calling them “insane propaganda”.

• Russia has lost 598,180 troops in Ukraine since the beginning of its full-scale invasion on 24 February 2022, according to the General Staff of Ukraine’s Armed Forces. This number includes 1,230 casualties Russian forces suffered over the past day.

• Russia is restricting access to information in a bid to limit criticism of its invasion of Ukraine, the UK’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) has said. In a post on X, the MoD said Russian authorities are “deliberately slowing” traffic on WhatsApp and YouTube and that the latter could be “blocked altogether in autumn 2024”.

• In Ukraine’s Donetsk region, where Moscow has made a string of advances in recent weeks, Ukraine’s military said 51 Russian attacks were stopped near Pokrovsk, a major logistics hub in the eastern region, and another 13 near the town of Toretsk in the last 24 hours.

• The Ukrainian air force said on Saturday that its air defences shot down 14 Russian drones fired in an overnight attack. In a statement, it said that the Shahed drones were downed over six Ukrainian regions in the south and centre of the country.

• Germany, the second largest contributor of aid to war-torn Ukraine, plans to halve its bilateral military aid to Kyiv in 2025, a parliamentary source told AFP on Saturday. Instead, the government of Olaf Scholz will bank on money generated from frozen Russian assets to continue supporting Kyiv, and is not planning “additional aid” to the 4 bn euros ($4.4bn) set aside in next year’s budget.

• Chechnya president Ramzan Kadyrov invited Tesla CEO Elon Musk to Russia on Saturday after being filmed behind the wheel of one of the company’s Cybertrucks mounted with a machine gun. He also said he would donate the vehicle to Russian forces fighting in the invasion of Ukraine. Messages left with Tesla seeking comment were not immediately returned.

The UN’s nuclear watchdog warned on Saturday that the safety situation at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant was “deteriorating” after a nearby drone strike.

Earlier on Saturday, Russia accused Ukraine of dropping an explosive charge on a road near the occupied plant in southern Ukraine.

The plant, which was seized by Russia’s forces early in the war, has come under repeated attacks that both sides have accused each other of carrying out.

International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) experts on site were informed of the detonation near essential plant facilities on Saturday and immediately visited the area, the agency said in a statement.

They reported that the damage “seemed to have been caused by a drone equipped with an explosive payload”, affecting the road between the plant’s two main gates.

“Yet again we see an escalation of the nuclear safety and security dangers facing the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant,” the IAEA head, Rafael Grossi, said in the statement.

“I remain extremely concerned and reiterate my call for maximum restraint from all sides,” he said.

The “nuclear safety situation” at the plant was “deteriorating”, the statement added.

The IAEA team on site reported “intense” military activity over the past week in the area, including very close to the plant, it added.

“The team has heard frequent explosions, repetitive heavy machine-gun and rifle fire and artillery at various distances from the plant,” it said.

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the IAEA has repeatedly urged restraint, saying it fears reckless military action could trigger a serious nuclear accident at the plant.

Kyiv and Moscow traded blame last weekend after a fire broke out at a cooling tower at the plant.

IAEA experts were able to visit the base of the cooling tower but have requested further access to assess the situation, according to the Vienna-based nuclear watchdog.

The fire resulted in “considerable damage”, but there was no immediate threat to nuclear safety, the agency said.

Extreme misogyny will be treated as a form of terrorism for the first time under government plans, it was reported.

Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, has ordered a review of the counter-terrorism strategy to address violence against women and girls and identify gaps in current legislation and examine emerging ideologies, according to the Sunday Telegraph.

Under the proposals, teachers would be legally required to refer pupils they suspect of extreme misogyny to Prevent, the UK government’s counter-terror programme.

Cooper told the Telegraph: “For too long, governments have failed to address the rise in extremism, both online and on our streets, and we’ve seen the number of young people radicalised online grow. Hateful incitement of all kinds fractures and frays the very fabric of our communities and our democracy.”

The Labour MP added: “Action against extremism has been badly hollowed out in recent years, just when it should have been needed most.

“That’s why I have directed the Home Office to conduct a rapid analytical sprint on extremism, to map and monitor extremist trends, to understand the evidence about what works to disrupt and divert people away from extremist views, and to identify any gaps in existing policy which need to be addressed to crack down on those pushing harmful and hateful beliefs and violence.

“That work will underpin a new strategic approach to countering extremism from government, working closely with communities to build consensus and impetus for our plans.”

The review is expected to be completed this autumn as part of a new counter-extremism strategy which is set to be unveiled by the Home Office next year.

There are several extremism categories ranked by the Home Office including “incel”, or “involuntarily celibate”, an online subculture in which a misogynistic worldview is promoted by men who blame women for their lack of sexual opportunities.

Last month, a senior police officer warned that online influencers like Andrew Tate could radicalise young men and boys into extreme misogyny in the same way terrorists draw in their followers.

Deputy chief constable Maggie Blyth, national lead for policing violence against women and girls (VAWG), said the influencing of young boys online is “quite terrifying”.

She said the Online Safety Act needs to go further and that faster action should be taken to protect children.

Blyth said senior officers who focus on violence against women and girls are in contact with counter-terrorism teams to look at the risk of young men being radicalised.

She said: “We know that some of this is also linked to radicalisation of young people online, we know the influencers, Andrew Tate, the element of influencing of particularly boys, is quite terrifying and that’s something that both the leads for counter-terrorism in the country and ourselves from a VAWG perspective are discussing.”

The National Police Chiefs’ Council published a report on violence against women and girls, framing it as a national emergency.

Tate is currently awaiting trial in Romania over allegations of rape, human trafficking and forming a criminal gang to sexually exploit women. He denies the charges.

Last year, counter-extremism workers warned of a rise in the number of cases being referred to them by schools concerned about the influence of Tate.

Incidents included the verbal harassment of female teachers or other pupils and outbursts echoing the influencer’s views.

One frontline worker handling cases under the Prevent programme told the Guardian: “He [Tate] obviously doesn’t fit within the Prevent sphere but incels do. He is parallel to them and has a crossover. When I’m in schools I find myself describing him, effectively, as toxic misogyny on steroids.”

Donald Trump tried to reset his campaign at a rally in battleground Pennsylvania on Saturday as polls show Kamala Harris pulling ahead in key swing states.

But the former president quickly broke away from the prepared speech about economic issues to launch personal attacks on Harris including accusations that her agenda is both communist and fascist, and that she has “the laugh of a crazy person”.

Trump’s written speech before a mostly filled 8,000-seat indoor arena in Wilkes-Barre focussed on economic policy, although a part of the audience left before he finished speaking. Some Republican strategists had hoped the former president could regain the initiative by zeroing in on issues on which opinion polls say voters have greater trust in Trump than the Democrats, such as inflation.

Trump attacked Harris as part of the Biden administration for the surge in prices that has hit many Americans hard and described increased household costs as “the Kamala Harris inflation tax”.

“She was there for everything,” he said in attempting to pin Biden’s policies on her.

Trump also likened Harris’s pledge on Friday to tackle high grocery costs by targeting profiteering by food corporations, and to bring down housing and prescription drug costs, to the Soviet Union’s economic system.

“In her speech yesterday, Kamala went full communist,” he said. “Comrade Kamala announced that she wants to institute socialist price controls. You saw that never worked before … It will cause rationing, hunger and skyrocketing prices.”

The former president challenged voters to ask themselves whether they were “better off with Kamala and Biden than you were under President Donald J Trump”, a question that many in Pennsylvania might answer in his favour.

But the impact was soon lost as Trump once again veered repeatedly away from the script with rambling discourses from immigration to China and trans people, often based on outright falsehoods.

At one point, he even acknowledged that was what he was doing.

“They’ll say he was rambling. I don’t ramble. I’m a really smart guy, you know, really smart. I don’t ramble. But the other day, anytime I hit too hard, they say he was rambling, rambling,” he said.

The audience, some wearing T-shirts proclaiming “I’m voting for a convicted felon” and chanting “Fight, fight, fight” in reference to the former president’s words shortly after he narrowly escaped an assassination attempt last month, urged Trump on.

When he returned to the script, Trump attacked Harris for her previous opposition to fracking, an unpopular stance in Pennsylvania, which is a major fracker, but he will not have helped himself in the Rust belt by saying he would cut spending on infrastructure such as renewing bridges and roads, which has provided jobs in the region.

Trump also challenged Harris’s legitimacy as the Democratic presidential candidate, describing it as “a coup” against Biden.

“Joe Biden hates her. This was an overthrow of a president,” he said.

Trump confused some in the audience with what appeared to be a claim that if Harris could become the candidate without a primary election, then so should he because he is so popular among Republicans.

“I said, so why are we having an election? They didn’t have an election. Why are we having an election?” he said.

Trump described Harris’s decision to pass over Pennsylvania’s governor, Josh Shapiro, as her running mate, as antisemitism in an apparent reference to debate about whether Shapiro’s support for Israel, including work for the Israel embassy in the past, would damage the Democratic campaign because of the war in Gaza .

“They turned him down because he’s Jewish. That’s why they turned him down. Now, we can be politically correct and not say that. I could say, well, they turned him down for various reasons. No, no, they turned him down because he’s Jewish,” said Trump.

“And I’ll tell you this, any Jewish person that votes for her or a Democrat has to go out and have their head examined.”

Through it all, Trump repeatedly returned to personal attacks on Harris, including a bizarre discourse on how she laughs, a mannerism that has proven popular among many younger voters in particular.

“Have you heard her laugh? That is the laugh of a crazy person. That is the laugh of a crazy, the laugh of a lunatic,” he said.

Donald Trump has tapped Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic Hawaii representative, to help prepare him for next month’s presidential debate with Kamala Harris.

The selection of Gabbard as rehearsal stand-in for the vice president, first reported by the New York Times, suggests that despite denials, the former president may be planning to prepare for the 10 September clash with greater-than-usual diligence.

Gabbard, an Iraq war veteran, had been floated as a potential Trump vice presidential pick. The former Democrat fell out with her party after standing in the 2020 presidential primaries after being smeared by Hillary Clinton as a “Russian asset”.

That generated a lawsuit in which Gabbard alleged that Clinton’s suggestion she was the Democratic candidate favored by Russia was “retribution” for Gabbard backing Clinton’s rival Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primary.

But Gabbard’s selection for Harris debate prep carries a potent history: during the 2020 Democratic primaries, Gabbard proved a formidable opponent to Harris when she excoriated the then California senator for jailing hundreds of Californians for marijuana violations while she was the state’s attorney general and then bragged about her own use of the drug.

“Kamala Harris is an empty suit,” Gabbard told Fox News last week. “In 2019, I confronted her with her hypocrisy – that what she said was very different from what she actually did.”

In an email to the Times, the Trump campaign said their candidate “does not need traditional debate prep but will continue to meet with respected policy advisers and effective communicators like Tulsi Gabbard”.

Despite downplaying the debate prep, Trump’s handlers are said to be wary of their candidate coming off too hot, as he did with Biden in 2020. This summer’s rematch was less a victory for Trump than a potential for disaster for a less-than-present Biden given his poor performance in the June debate.

Trump also faces difficulties in how to debate a woman after he was accused of being overbearing toward Hillary Clinton in 2016 and for placing several women who had accused her husband, Bill Clinton, of sexual misconduct in the front rows of the studio audience.

After Gabbard’s debate criticism of Harris in 2020, the now-vice president mocked Gabbard’s low standing in the polls. But Harris dropped out first, followed a month later by Gabbard.

The US presidential candidates Donald Trump and Kamala Harris will hold dueling campaign events this weekend in the critical political battleground state of Pennsylvania.

The former president was due to hold a Saturday rally in Wilkes-Barre in the north-east of the state, while the vice-president is on a bus tour of western Pennsylvania starting in Pittsburgh on Sunday, before the Democratic national convention kicks off on Monday in Chicago.

Separately, Tim Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate and Minnesota governor, was scheduled to hold a rally in La Vista, Nebraska, on Saturday.

According to an NYT/Siena College poll published on Saturday, Harris is now leading Trump among probable voters in Arizona by 50% to 45%, and North Carolina, 49% to 47%, while trailing narrowly in Nevada and in Georgia by a four-point margin.

But the three critical so-called Rust belt states, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, continue to preoccupy the rival campaigns, with Pennsylvania and its 19 electoral college votes considered key to both candidates’ chances of victory in November.

Since 2008, the trio have been reliable bellwethers of the outcomes of national elections. Pennsylvania’s electoral college votes, plus Michigan’s 15 and Wisconsin’s 10, are typically enough to put a candidate over the top in the race to secure the 270 total needed to win the White House.

The election forecaster Nate Silver calculates that Pennsylvania is more than twice as likely as any other to be the “tipping point” state for presidential victory this fall.

Both campaigns are on the hunt for support among white, non-college-educated voters, with the Harris-Walz ticket looking to shore up support among suburban voters and to drive up voter turnout in urban areas with large Black populations that Trump and his running mate, the Ohio senator JD Vance, are hoping to peel off.

Both campaign strategies are considered “win big, lose small” but with different focuses: for Democrats in Pennsylvania, that means looking for big margins in the cities and suburbs of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, while limiting losses in rural parts of the state such as Beaver county, close to Butler, where Trump was shot by a would-be assassin last month.

Trump won Pennsylvania in 2016 by around 44,000 votes, a margin of less than one percentage point, while Biden prevailed by just more than 80,000 votes in 2020, a 1.2% margin.

Harris is leading Trump by more than 2% in the state, according to the forecaster FiveThirtyEight. Recent polls – by Quinnipiac and by the New York Times and Siena College – placed Harris three and four percentage points ahead, respectively, among probable voters in the state.

“The Trump campaign believes there’s still some juice left in that orange for them in the heart of north-east Pennsylvania,” Chris Nicholas, the Pennsylvania Republican consultant, told the Philadelphia Inquirer last week.

Saturday’s Trump rally will be in the indoor Mohegan Sun Arena with a capacity of around 8,000 people. The Trump campaign has said the candidate would return to Butler in October but a date has not been announced.

Pennsylvania is also the recipient of more campaign spending than any other battleground. The Wall Street Journal calculated that of more than $110m spent across seven swing states since 22 July, when Joe Biden dropped out of his re-election race, $42m has been funneled into the state.

Democratic and Republican political groups have also reserved $114m in ad time in Pennsylvania from late August to November – more than twice than planned for Arizona, the next highest, at $55m.

The Pennsylvania push is set only to intensify. Harris and Walz and their spouses will making stops across Allegheny and Beaver counties on Sunday, while Trump will respond to Harris’s recent economic policy proposals at an event in York, Pennsylvania, on Monday and Vance will be in Philadelphia.

And Pennsylvania will again be in focus when ABC hosts the first Harris-Trump debate in Philadelphia on 10 September.

Reuters contributed reporting

About 125 firefighters tackled a blaze at Somerset House in central London on Saturday.

A pillar of smoke billowed from the roof of the Grade I-listed building on the Strand. London fire brigade (LFB) received its first call about the fire at 11.59am and sent 20 fire engines to the scene.

The LFB added that “around 125” firefighters were at the scene, with crews from Soho, Dowgate, Islington and surrounding fire stations attending.

There were no reported injuries. On Saturday evening, the LFB said the flames were now under control after part of the third floor and the roof were alight.

Crews were set to remain at the scene until Sunday to carry out further operations.

The cause of the fire at the building, opened in 1796, is not yet known and is being investigated.

LFB assistant commissioner Keeley Foster said: “The fire was located in part of the building’s roof space.

“The age and design of the building proved a challenge for crews as they initially responded.

“As a result, four of the brigade’s aerial ladders, including a 64-metre turntable ladder, were deployed to support firefighters as they carried out a complex and technical response. This included creating fire breaks in the roof, which has now limited the spread of flames.

“A number of staff and visitors left Somerset House before the brigade arrived and there are no reports of any injuries.

“Crews have been working incredibly hard through the very hot weather and heat of the fire to protect Somerset House from further damage.”

Parts of the venue will remain closed to the public “until further notice” but the Courtauld Gallery will reopen on Sunday, a spokesperson said.

Earlier, Somerset House posted on social media that all staff and public were safe after the fire broke out in “one small part of the building”.

“The site is closed,” the post said. “The London fire brigade arrived swiftly and we’re working very closely with them to control the spread of the fire.”

The building houses the Courtauld Gallery, an extensive art collection of paintings ranging from the Renaissance through to the 20th century. Among its most famed pieces are Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère and Vincent van Gogh’s Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear.

The director of Somerset House Trust said the fire broke out in the west wing of the building and there were “no artworks in that area”.

Jonathan Reekie said: “What I can confirm is that a fire was spotted at about midday in one corner of west wing; the site was immediately evacuated and the London fire brigade called, who arrived very quickly indeed.

“Everybody is safe and for now we want to let the London fire brigade get on and do their brilliant work.

“The west wing is mainly offices and back-of-house facilities, there are no artworks in that area.”

Dr Joe Kelly was working on the seventh floor of the Strand building next door when his friend sent him a photograph of the blaze. The 26-year-old physicist then looked out of his window to see clouds of smoke.

“Smoke was billowing out of the corner of Somerset House, which was a little bit terrifying,” he said. “It looked a bit like a scene from a film.”

Kelly added that he could smell the smoke from inside his building, since the windows are usually left open.

“It’s a very distinctly campfire sort of smell, that was the first thing that tipped us off to it,” he said.

“They got hoses on it really quickly and I think the response has been very quick.

“As far as I can tell, no one was harmed and it doesn’t look like there has been a lot of damage.”

The trust is a registered charity established in 1997 “to enhance the education of the public by the provision of a centre for the arts and to maintain the buildings for the benefit of the local and international community as an example of English national heritage”, according to the Charity Commission.

Alan Robinson, 71, a Catholic priest who works nearby and lives in Covent Garden, told PA Media that he was worried about the Courtauld Gallery’s “irreplaceable” art collection.

“I have no idea what the value of the collection is, but it’s millions [of pounds] – irreplaceable stuff,” he said.

A break-dancing event scheduled to be held at the venue was cancelled due to the blaze.

The London Battle had been set to run from 2pm to 8.30pm, to celebrate the sport’s Olympic debut in Paris.

About 125 firefighters tackled a blaze at Somerset House in central London on Saturday.

A pillar of smoke billowed from the roof of the Grade I-listed building on the Strand. London fire brigade (LFB) received its first call about the fire at 11.59am and sent 20 fire engines to the scene.

The LFB added that “around 125” firefighters were at the scene, with crews from Soho, Dowgate, Islington and surrounding fire stations attending.

There were no reported injuries. On Saturday evening, the LFB said the flames were now under control after part of the third floor and the roof were alight.

Crews were set to remain at the scene until Sunday to carry out further operations.

The cause of the fire at the building, opened in 1796, is not yet known and is being investigated.

LFB assistant commissioner Keeley Foster said: “The fire was located in part of the building’s roof space.

“The age and design of the building proved a challenge for crews as they initially responded.

“As a result, four of the brigade’s aerial ladders, including a 64-metre turntable ladder, were deployed to support firefighters as they carried out a complex and technical response. This included creating fire breaks in the roof, which has now limited the spread of flames.

“A number of staff and visitors left Somerset House before the brigade arrived and there are no reports of any injuries.

“Crews have been working incredibly hard through the very hot weather and heat of the fire to protect Somerset House from further damage.”

Parts of the venue will remain closed to the public “until further notice” but the Courtauld Gallery will reopen on Sunday, a spokesperson said.

Earlier, Somerset House posted on social media that all staff and public were safe after the fire broke out in “one small part of the building”.

“The site is closed,” the post said. “The London fire brigade arrived swiftly and we’re working very closely with them to control the spread of the fire.”

The building houses the Courtauld Gallery, an extensive art collection of paintings ranging from the Renaissance through to the 20th century. Among its most famed pieces are Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère and Vincent van Gogh’s Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear.

The director of Somerset House Trust said the fire broke out in the west wing of the building and there were “no artworks in that area”.

Jonathan Reekie said: “What I can confirm is that a fire was spotted at about midday in one corner of west wing; the site was immediately evacuated and the London fire brigade called, who arrived very quickly indeed.

“Everybody is safe and for now we want to let the London fire brigade get on and do their brilliant work.

“The west wing is mainly offices and back-of-house facilities, there are no artworks in that area.”

Dr Joe Kelly was working on the seventh floor of the Strand building next door when his friend sent him a photograph of the blaze. The 26-year-old physicist then looked out of his window to see clouds of smoke.

“Smoke was billowing out of the corner of Somerset House, which was a little bit terrifying,” he said. “It looked a bit like a scene from a film.”

Kelly added that he could smell the smoke from inside his building, since the windows are usually left open.

“It’s a very distinctly campfire sort of smell, that was the first thing that tipped us off to it,” he said.

“They got hoses on it really quickly and I think the response has been very quick.

“As far as I can tell, no one was harmed and it doesn’t look like there has been a lot of damage.”

The trust is a registered charity established in 1997 “to enhance the education of the public by the provision of a centre for the arts and to maintain the buildings for the benefit of the local and international community as an example of English national heritage”, according to the Charity Commission.

Alan Robinson, 71, a Catholic priest who works nearby and lives in Covent Garden, told PA Media that he was worried about the Courtauld Gallery’s “irreplaceable” art collection.

“I have no idea what the value of the collection is, but it’s millions [of pounds] – irreplaceable stuff,” he said.

A break-dancing event scheduled to be held at the venue was cancelled due to the blaze.

The London Battle had been set to run from 2pm to 8.30pm, to celebrate the sport’s Olympic debut in Paris.

A failure to show solidarity with African countries at the heart of the mpox outbreak will put the world at risk and harm preparations for future pandemics, health leaders have said.

The World Health Organization on Wednesday declared an international public health emergency in the face of rising cases that are spreading beyond the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where the virus is endemic.

More than 18,700 cases – and over 500 deaths – have been reported so far this year in Africa, already higher than for the whole of 2023. The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has declared a continental public health emergency.

Dr Ebere Okereke, associate fellow in the global health programme at Chatham House, said: “The consequences of failing to respond robustly to these declarations could be severe, potentially leading to the increased spread of new and more dangerous variants. The risk of a failure to act now is not just a risk to Africa, but to the rest of the world.”

Both declarations, she said, “provide an opportunity to test the global response to health emergencies in the post-Covid-19 era, to show that lessons of equity have been learned”.

The response to the Covid pandemic damaged relations among richer and poorer countries. Resources including vaccines, tests and PPE took much longer to reach developing countries than they did their wealthier counterparts.

Negotiations around a planned pandemic agreement governing how the world should respond to major disease outbreaks failed to meet a deadline for agreement this year at the World Health Assembly in Geneva. The issue of equity has proven a key sticking point – including how developing countries will be guaranteed access to drugs and treatment in return for their efforts capturing information on pathogens circulating in their territories.

Okereke said that how the global community responds to the declarations will be “a litmus test for the potential effectiveness of a future pandemic treaty”.

And an underwhelming response would cast doubt on the effectiveness of the current systems to declare emergencies, she said.

Nick Dearden, director of Global Justice Now, said: “Mpox has been endemic in a handful of African countries for years. Yet despite having the medicines to treat it, no serious action was taken until the outbreak posed a threat to the west.

“We saw this same inequity play out during the Covid pandemic, where lives lost in the global south were shamefully treated as collateral damage in pursuit of more and more pharmaceutical profiteering. It is inevitable, then, that the global south’s trust in the west has plummeted.”

Dearden said pharmaceutical corporations were “continuing to impede equitable access to vaccines in pursuit of higher profit” and called on rich countries, including the UK, to “stand up to big pharma” and back measures in the pandemic treaty negotiations “that would stop this deep inequity playing out time and time again”.

The US said it will donate 50,000 doses of the Jynneos vaccine against mpox to the DRC. But longer term, health leaders at Africa CDC have said a sustainable supply chain, including manufacturing on the continent, will be needed.

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 Özalan launched into Ahmet Şık, 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,” Şık said.

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

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

While on the ground, Şık 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.

Özgür Özel, 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”.

There is a rising risk of “full-scale regional war” in the Middle East, the foreign secretary, David Lammy, has warned, amid frantic international efforts to calm tensions with Iran and reach a ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas.

With the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, flying into Israel this weekend to push for a deal, Lammy has joined forces with his French counterpart, Stéphane Séjourné, to warn that now is a “perilous moment” for the region in the midst of widespread fears of escalation involving Tehran and allied militias in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen.

In a joint article for the Observer highlighting a growing cooperation between Britain and France, the pair state that the world is witnessing a “destructive cycle of violence” that has to be averted. “Fighting between Israel and Lebanese Hezbollah has intensified,” they write. “Iranian threats of further escalation mean the risks of a full-scale regional war are rising.

“One miscalculation, and the situation risks spiralling into an even deeper and more intractable conflict. This cycle, with its tendency towards escalation, is making progress towards a political solution harder.”

Tensions soared further on Saturday between Israel and the powerful Lebanese militia after an Israeli military airstrike in the south of the country killed at least 10 Syrian nationals. Israel said it had targeted a Hezbollah weapons depot.

The strike in Nabatieh province was one of the deadliest single Israeli attacks on Lebanon since Hezbollah and Israel started trading cross-­border fire the day after the 7 October Hamas invasion that triggered the war in Gaza. Hezbollah and Iran’s other regional allies have said they will stop attacking Israel when the war in Gaza is brought to an end.

The intervention from the two foreign ministers marks the latest sign of Lammy’s increasing willingness to work with European allies and follows the first joint UK-France visit in more than 10 years, when the pair visited Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories last week.

They say their trip shows “a new spirit of cooperation, in the interests of our national security, Europe’s security and the Middle East’s security”.

Their concerns over escalation come amid fears over Iranian retaliation against Israel after the assassination of Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran last month, as well as the killing of a top Hezbollah commander in Beirut.

Israel did not claim responsibility for Haniyeh’s death, but the Mossad, its intelligence agency, is well known for carrying out targeted killing operations overseas.

“An all-out conflict across the region is in nobody’s interests,” Lammy and Séjourné write. “All parties need to show restraint and invest in diplomacy. Any Iranian attack would have devastating consequences, not least in undermining current Gaza ceasefire negotiations.

“Our engagement reinforces our conviction that urgently securing such a deal is in the interests of Israelis, Palestinians and the wider region. Only a deal can relieve civilian suffering. Only a deal can restore communities’ sense of security. Only a deal can open up the space for progress towards a two-state solution – the only long-term route to safety, security and dignity for Israelis and Palestinians alike.”

Their comments coincide with Blinken arriving in Israel on Saturday to push for a deal that would secure a ceasefire and sanction the release of hostages from Gaza. The latest round of ceasefire talks in Doha ended on Friday without a breakthrough, but further negotiations are scheduled for this week in Cairo.

However, optimism from international mediators Qatar and Egypt, as well as US president Joe Biden, that talks are progressing well was dismissed by Hamas on Saturday.

Several rounds of negotiations since December have failed. “To say that we are getting close to a deal is an illusion,” Hamas political bureau member Sami Abu Zuhri said to AFP. “We are not facing a deal or real negotiations, but rather the imposing of American diktats.”

Although Hamas and Israel agreed in principle last month to implement a three-phase plan publicly proposed by Biden in May, both sides have since requested “amendments” and “clarifications”, leaving talks at an impasse.

Gaps include the continuing presence of Israeli troops on the Gaza-Egypt border, the sequencing of a hostage release, and the return of civilians from southern to northern Gaza. The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been accused by critics home and abroad of stalling for his own political gain.

The flurry of international activity to secure some kind of de-escalation comes as local health authorities reported that the Palestinian death toll in Gaza had surpassed 40,000 people. The strip has also recorded its first case of polio in 25 years.

An Israeli military airstrike on Az-Zawayda in central Gaza killed another 15 people from a single family, civil defence rescuers in the besieged territory said on Saturday.

About 170,000 displaced people are once again on the move across central and southern Gaza after fresh evacuation orders from Israel’s military, including areas previously designated as humanitarian “safe zones”.

The Israel Defense Forces announced a new ground operation in the Khan Younis area last week after it said areas it had told civilians to flee to had been used by Hamas to fire mortars and rockets towards Israel.

“This is one of the largest evacuation orders affecting the zone to date and it shrinks the size of the so-called ‘humanitarian area’ to about 41 sq km, or 11% of the total area of the Gaza Strip,” according to a report from the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the UN’s humanitarian agency.

There is a rising risk of “full-scale regional war” in the Middle East, the foreign secretary, David Lammy, has warned, amid frantic international efforts to calm tensions with Iran and reach a ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas.

With the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, flying into Israel this weekend to push for a deal, Lammy has joined forces with his French counterpart, Stéphane Séjourné, to warn that now is a “perilous moment” for the region in the midst of widespread fears of escalation involving Tehran and allied militias in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen.

In a joint article for the Observer highlighting a growing cooperation between Britain and France, the pair state that the world is witnessing a “destructive cycle of violence” that has to be averted. “Fighting between Israel and Lebanese Hezbollah has intensified,” they write. “Iranian threats of further escalation mean the risks of a full-scale regional war are rising.

“One miscalculation, and the situation risks spiralling into an even deeper and more intractable conflict. This cycle, with its tendency towards escalation, is making progress towards a political solution harder.”

Tensions soared further on Saturday between Israel and the powerful Lebanese militia after an Israeli military airstrike in the south of the country killed at least 10 Syrian nationals. Israel said it had targeted a Hezbollah weapons depot.

The strike in Nabatieh province was one of the deadliest single Israeli attacks on Lebanon since Hezbollah and Israel started trading cross-­border fire the day after the 7 October Hamas invasion that triggered the war in Gaza. Hezbollah and Iran’s other regional allies have said they will stop attacking Israel when the war in Gaza is brought to an end.

The intervention from the two foreign ministers marks the latest sign of Lammy’s increasing willingness to work with European allies and follows the first joint UK-France visit in more than 10 years, when the pair visited Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories last week.

They say their trip shows “a new spirit of cooperation, in the interests of our national security, Europe’s security and the Middle East’s security”.

Their concerns over escalation come amid fears over Iranian retaliation against Israel after the assassination of Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran last month, as well as the killing of a top Hezbollah commander in Beirut.

Israel did not claim responsibility for Haniyeh’s death, but the Mossad, its intelligence agency, is well known for carrying out targeted killing operations overseas.

“An all-out conflict across the region is in nobody’s interests,” Lammy and Séjourné write. “All parties need to show restraint and invest in diplomacy. Any Iranian attack would have devastating consequences, not least in undermining current Gaza ceasefire negotiations.

“Our engagement reinforces our conviction that urgently securing such a deal is in the interests of Israelis, Palestinians and the wider region. Only a deal can relieve civilian suffering. Only a deal can restore communities’ sense of security. Only a deal can open up the space for progress towards a two-state solution – the only long-term route to safety, security and dignity for Israelis and Palestinians alike.”

Their comments coincide with Blinken arriving in Israel on Saturday to push for a deal that would secure a ceasefire and sanction the release of hostages from Gaza. The latest round of ceasefire talks in Doha ended on Friday without a breakthrough, but further negotiations are scheduled for this week in Cairo.

However, optimism from international mediators Qatar and Egypt, as well as US president Joe Biden, that talks are progressing well was dismissed by Hamas on Saturday.

Several rounds of negotiations since December have failed. “To say that we are getting close to a deal is an illusion,” Hamas political bureau member Sami Abu Zuhri said to AFP. “We are not facing a deal or real negotiations, but rather the imposing of American diktats.”

Although Hamas and Israel agreed in principle last month to implement a three-phase plan publicly proposed by Biden in May, both sides have since requested “amendments” and “clarifications”, leaving talks at an impasse.

Gaps include the continuing presence of Israeli troops on the Gaza-Egypt border, the sequencing of a hostage release, and the return of civilians from southern to northern Gaza. The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been accused by critics home and abroad of stalling for his own political gain.

The flurry of international activity to secure some kind of de-escalation comes as local health authorities reported that the Palestinian death toll in Gaza had surpassed 40,000 people. The strip has also recorded its first case of polio in 25 years.

An Israeli military airstrike on Az-Zawayda in central Gaza killed another 15 people from a single family, civil defence rescuers in the besieged territory said on Saturday.

About 170,000 displaced people are once again on the move across central and southern Gaza after fresh evacuation orders from Israel’s military, including areas previously designated as humanitarian “safe zones”.

The Israel Defense Forces announced a new ground operation in the Khan Younis area last week after it said areas it had told civilians to flee to had been used by Hamas to fire mortars and rockets towards Israel.

“This is one of the largest evacuation orders affecting the zone to date and it shrinks the size of the so-called ‘humanitarian area’ to about 41 sq km, or 11% of the total area of the Gaza Strip,” according to a report from the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the UN’s humanitarian agency.

Elon Musk announced on Saturday that the social media platform X would close its operations in Brazil “effective immediately” due to what it called “censorship orders” from the Brazilian judge Alexandre de Moraes.

X claims Moraes secretly threatened one of its legal representatives in the South American country with arrest if it did not comply with legal orders to take down some content from its platform. Brazil’s supreme court, where Moraes has a seat, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The X service remains available to the people of Brazil, the billionaire Elon Musk’s platform said on Saturday.

Earlier this year, Moraes ordered X to block certain accounts, as he investigated so-called “digital militias” that have been accused of spreading fake news and hate messages during the government of the far-right former president Jair Bolsonaro.

Moraes opened an inquiry earlier this year into Musk after he said he would reactivate accounts on X that the judge had ordered blocked. Musk has called Moraes’s decisions regarding X “unconstitutional”.

After Musk’s challenges, X representatives reversed course and told Brazil’s supreme court that the social media giant would comply with the legal rulings.

Lawyers representing X in Brazil in April told the supreme court that “operational faults” had allowed users who were ordered blocked to stay active on the social media platform, after Moraes had asked X to explain why it allegedly had not fully complied with his decisions.

The disgraced former New York Republican congressman George Santos is expected to plead guilty on Monday in a deal with prosecutors on charges that he defrauded his campaign during his 2022 midterm elections, according to multiple reports.

Hints of a plea agreement came on Friday ahead of Santos’s federal criminal trial, which was set to start early next month. Prosecutors and defense attorneys suddenly scheduled a hearing without explicitly saying why.

Multiple donors to Santos’s previous election campaign told Talking Points Memo that they had been informed that a plea deal would be announced on Monday. TPM was the first outlet to report on alleged fraud by Santos involving the diversion of campaign funds for personal spending.

Santos’s attorney, Joe Murray, and the US attorney for the eastern district of New York, the federal prosecuting body with jurisdiction over the case, did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Saturday.

The former Republican congressman, a political unknown who flipped a key New York Democratic district stronghold in 2022, drew headlines after it was revealed that much of his résumé had been elaborately fabricated.

Despite this, Republican leadership in the House spent months standing by him. He was finally expelled in December 2023, less than a year after being sworn in to Congress. The Democrat Tom Suozzi won the special election to fill the vacated seat.

Santos, 36, a first-generation Brazilian American, had run as a member of a “new generation of Republican leadership” and as the “full embodiment of the American dream”.

He falsely claimed to have graduated from a New York college, worked at a major New York bank and run a pet rescue charity, and that his family owned a portfolio of 13 properties and that his mother had been at the World Trade Center when it was attacked by hijackers on 11 September 2001.

The holes in Santos’s story soon came to wide attention and he was ultimately indicted on 23 charges that included allegations of lying to Congress and spending campaign funds on luxuries including trips to casinos, Ferragamo shoes, Botox treatments and OnlyFans payments. He had pleaded not guilty and seemed to revel in proclaiming his innocence to a scrum of reporters outside court.

A scathing House ethics committee report on Santos’s conduct said he “was frequently in debt, had an abysmal credit score, and relied on an ever-growing wallet of high-interest credit cards to fund his luxury spending habits” and had “made over $240,000 cash withdrawals for unknown purposes”.

After leaving Congress, Santos began a sideline career as a Cameo performer, posting greetings to paying customers. It was success, at least briefly, with Santos earning more than he had as a US congressman.

He also attempted a congressional comeback, this time as an independent candidate, but that effort quickly fizzled.

If a plea deal emerges next week, it will follow a similar agreement with Santos’s campaign fundraiser, Sam Miele, who pleaded guilty to federal fraud charges last year, and that of his former campaign treasurer Nancy Marks.

The Romans were remarkable engineers, thousands of years ahead of us on everything from underfloor heating to plumbing. But even they had their off-days and made mistakes, a new discovery reveals.

Two wells built in the first century AD have been found in a field in Cambridgeshire by archaeologists from Mola (Museum of London Archaeology), and they reveal the trials and errors involved in a complex design and construction.

One of the wells was lined with wooden boards and another had a ladder inside, both “astonishingly preserved” after almost 2,000 years because of their water-logged conditions.

The wells were dug to a depth equivalent to the height of the average modern two-storey house. But the first well did not quite go to plan, caving in on itself as it was nearing completion because its walls had not been secured properly. The ladder they had been using was buried in that well as it collapsed.

The Roman builders would have gone back to their equivalent of the drawing-board before beginning work on another well about 20 metres away. This time, they learned from their mistake, lining the new well with timber in an impressive feat of engineering.

Simon Markus, project manager, told the Observer: “There would definitely be a significant amount of frustration in losing that amount of work. The fact that the ladder was in the well indicates that they were still working on the well at the time the collapse happened. They were about 8.5 metres down, so they were getting close to finishing the excavation.”

He added: “As we discovered when we first started our excavations here, the clay literally peels away from the more compacted earth and stone. We’ve all done a bit of DIY that hasn’t quite gone to plan, but this was a failure of Roman engineering on an industrial scale. A lot of effort would have gone into digging this well, which they then had to completely abandon.”

He spoke of the gruelling dig that would have been involved: “The tools they were using at the time were obviously very different from ours. The geology is quite solid. So it was a painstaking process. Just to see that level of work disappear in almost an instant would have been a major annoyance for them.”

The wells relate to a settlement that expanded from the iron age to the Roman period, becoming a hive of industrial activity between AD43 and 150. There is evidence of Romano-British metalworking, carpentry and woodworking all taking place inside a large, gated enclosure.

The inhabitants had obviously dug a well because they needed access to a water supply.

Some of the larger pieces of preserved timber even have decoration, including horizontal lines, which could offer a clue as to what was being produced in this ancient settlement.

The archaeologists believe that the Romans had recycled old furniture as building materials because they were unlikely to have decorated wood that no one was ever going to see at the bottom of a well.

The amount of waste wood discovered in the second well, used later as a rubbish dump, suggests a substantial industry. The contents will be carefully studied by specialists.

At the bottom of the well, archaeologists also found a cobbled stone surface, which would have helped to filter out the silt as the water came up through the ground, giving the Romans a slightly cleaner water source.

Mola archaeologists have also found evidence of a probable Roman road near the site, suggesting that the workshop was part of a wider trade network.

A man has suffered serious injuries after being struck by a whale while in a tinny in waters near the border of Queensland and New South Wales.

Jetski riders off the coast of Coolangatta called emergency services just before 9am on Sunday when a whale reportedly collided with the man in his boat.

Queensland police say the man in his 40s didn’t know the whale was there until it appeared in front of him.

He was knocked unconscious when he was struck by the whale’s tail, police say.

“[We] urge all boaties to always wear life jackets,” a spokesperson from Queensland police said.

“Fortunately this man remained in his boat.”

The man was brought to shore by paramedics and taken to Gold Coast University hospital where he was treated for facial and spinal injuries.

Queensland Ambulance Service said he was in a stable condition.