Ukraine has captured more than 150 Russian prisoners of war on some days in the cross-border military operation that a key civilian official said was the first of “several stages” in taking the fight to Moscow.

Oleksii Drozdenko, the head of the military administration in the Ukrainian city of Sumy, said the attack had fared better than expected and there had been only 15 casualties needing hospital treatment on the first day.

“Sometimes there are more than 100 or 150 prisoners of war a day,” Drozdenko said. Many of the Russian troops who have been guarding the border are young conscripts. “They do not want to fight us,” he added.

Several videos have circulated of Ukrainians capturing prisoners of war, including at the border in the first hours of the incursion on Tuesday 6 August. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has said Kyiv is increasing its “exchange fund” to swap for PoWs held by Russia.

Sumy is the Ukrainian city closest to the incursion and Drozdenko said he had been closely involved in the operation’s planning but had been sworn to secrecy, zipping his lips in a gesture to describe the importance of operational security before the surprise attack.

Other local civilian leaders, notably the Sumy region’s governor, Volodymyr Artyukh, have said they were not warned in advance, suggesting Drozdenko was in a trusted circle.

The city official, a Zelenskiy appointee who is the city’s de facto mayor after the previous incumbent was arrested and charged for allegedly receiving a bribe last autumn, said he could not say too much about the preparations for the incursion a fortnight ago because there was more to come.

“We see only part of this operation, in the future we will see several stages,” Drozdenko said, characterising the incursion as “not like previous raids” from Ukraine into Belgorod oblast to the east, which were largely led by anti-Kremlin Russian groups.

Though Drozdenko would not offer any more information, there are signs that Ukraine has introduced a new tactic to try to gain more Russian territory. On Sunday morning Ukraine’s air force released a video of a hole being blown in a bridge at Zvannoe, over the Seym River inside Kursk province.

A couple of days earlier another bridge over the Seym had been severed after a Ukrainian air attack, north of the village of Glushkovo, which is near the frontline of the incursion and subject to a civilian evacuation order by Russian authorities.

Though Ukraine has not spelled out its intentions, knocking out the three bridges over the Seym at Glushkovo, Zvannoe and Karyzh would complicate Russian reinforcement of a pocket of land to the west of the current incursion area and improve Ukraine’s prospects of seizing the land if its progress continues.

At the end of last week, Sumy and other neighbouring regions organised a humanitarian transport of food and medicine to Russian civilians in the occupied area, including from “our own food stores”, Drozdenko said. No Russian civilians had fled across the border to become refugees in Ukraine, he said.

Part of Drozdenko’s role was to ensure hospitals in Sumy were ready to receive casualties once the incursion started. “There is an unexpectedly low amount of wounded coming from this operation into the hospitals,” the official said.

“On the first day of the operation, there were only 15 casualties. Sixty, seventy per cent of them were very light, caused by bomb damage, shrapnel,” he added, reflecting the fact that the cross-border attack was a complete surprise to the Kremlin, which believed Ukraine would fight to defend its own territory.

At the end of last week, civilians in Sumy were asked to donate O-negative blood, suitable for emergency transfusions for any blood type. The need was met “in one hour”, the official said, which “confirms that our people support this operation”.

Sumy city, a quiet provincial capital in north-east Ukraine with a population of about 250,000, had not been involved in the fighting since the desperate early days of the war when it was surrounded and defended by a civilian militia, of which Drozdenko was part.

But the incursion has brought the war back to Sumy and the border areas to the north, with renewed air, missile and artillery strikes. “When we speak about seven months of 2024, January to July, there were approximately 400 strikes to border areas. But last week we had 200 strikes in only one week,” the official said.

Several thousand have fled the frontline regions, which have been subject to a mandatory evacuation up to 10km (6.2 miles) from the border in affected areas. Drozdenko said those fleeing would try to arrange their own accommodation or be housed in hostels in the city.

Sumy has been protected by air defence, with interceptions and launches heard and seen from the city centre over the last week. On Saturday morning one ballistic missile got through and landed in a street, damaging about 15 civilian cars and wounding two people, although not seriously.

People in Sumy were resilient despite the latest bombing, Drozdenko said, because the city had fought off the initial Russian invasion in March 2022, at a time when the regular army was 60 miles away.

Highlighting his own experience, he said: “Back then I was not feeling that optimistic. We took part in street fighting. I was almost nearly killed twice. It was very scary being shot at by a BTR [Russian armoured personnel carrier]. Now I’m not scared of anything.”

Fighting between Hezbollah and Israel has intensified over the weekend despite diplomatic efforts to de-escalate tensions between the two and prevent an expected Hezbollah and Iranian attack against Israel.

An Israeli attack on Saturday was one of the bloodiest for civilians since fighting began in October, killing 10 Syrian workers and their family members in what Israel said was a strike on a Hezbollah weapons depot in Nabatieh, south Lebanon. In response, Hezbollah launched a 55-missile barrage at the town of Ayelet HaShahar, in north Israel.

Three Unifil peacekeepers were also lightly injured in an explosion on Sunday while on patrol in the Lebanese border town of Yarin. A source within Unifil said they believed the soldiers were injured by a nearby Israeli airstrike, but that they were still investigating the incident.

The threat of a full-scale war looms larger than ever after 10 months of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, sparked by the latter launching rockets at Israel “in solidarity” with Hamas’s 7 October attack.

Hezbollah and Iran have vowed revenge against Israel for the assassination of the Hezbollah military chief of staff Fuad Shukr in Beirut and the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran. Israel has not claimed responsibility for Haniyeh’s killing, but has a history of carrying out targeted assassinations across the region.

Hezbollah released a video on Friday showcasing missile-laden trucks driving through an allegedly city-sized tunnel network, the first time the group had revealed its widely reputed tunnel network on camera.

A source in Hezbollah said: “The enemy [Israel] wants a war and is always attempting to pressure us, so we are ready for all possibilities.” They added that that the group’s rocket capabilities were “very large” and what was displayed in Friday’s video was just “a drop in the ocean of what Hezbollah possesses”.

The US and other western powers have been engaged in furious diplomacy since the dual assassinations in Beirut and Tehran. The US envoy Amos Hochstein visited both Tel Aviv and Beirut this week, while an emergency round of talks to forge a ceasefire in Gaza was held in Doha last week.

But western diplomats in Beirut say they have been left in the dark about Hezbollah’s promised retaliation against Israel and that the group has given no clue “where or when” the attack would take place.

In public, the media-savvy group has also been unusually silent. The Hezbollah secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah, has said that the anticipation of an attack is “part of the punishment” against Israel. It fits within the group’s historical doctrine of “strategic ambiguity”, revealing little about its military capabilities and intentions to maintain deterrence.

Neither the UK nor the US can speak directly with Hezbollah officials, but instead must pass messages through intermediaries in the Lebanese government or through the Amal political party, Hezbollah’s ally. The diplomatic game of telephones has further complicated western efforts to judge the Lebanese group’s thinking.

The credibility of Hochstein, the diplomat leading efforts to stop fighting between Hezbollah and Israel, has also taken a hit in Lebanon. Hezbollah-affiliated media accused him of “deceiving” Lebanese officials by providing false assurances in the run-up to the assassination of Shukr in Beirut.

“Hezbollah does not view Hochstein as a trustworthy negotiator,” Kassem Kassir, an analyst close to Hezbollah, said, adding that despite this, “there is no currently no alternative” to the US diplomat.

The Doha talks were launched in large part to head off an attack by Hezbollah and Iran, both of whom have said that fighting was designed to pressure Israel into a ceasefire in Gaza.

While talks seemed to have postponed a retaliation against Israel, Hezbollah has said an attack would still come, regardless of the prospects of a ceasefire.

The deputy secretary general of Hezbollah, Naim Qassem, insisted on Thursday that a response was “completely separate” from fighting in Gaza and would be carried out – though the group would cease its other operations against Israel in the event of a ceasefire.

The UK and French foreign ministers, David Lammy and Stéphane Séjourné, warned in the Observer on Sunday that the region was witnessing a “perilous moment”.

“One miscalculation, and the situation risks spiralling into an even deeper and more intractable conflict,” they wrote.

The Republican senator and Donald Trump loyalist Lindsey Graham has warned that Trump is in danger of losing the US presidential election if he continues to talk about Kamala Harris’s race and make other personal attacks instead of focusing on policy issues.

Graham’s comments came on Meet The Press when asked whether he agreed with Nikki Haley’s recent admonition that Trump and Republicans should “quit whining” and stop “talking about what race Kamala Harris is”.

“Yeah. I don’t think – I don’t look at Vice-President Kamala Harris as a lunatic,” Graham told moderator Kristin Welker. “I look at her as the most liberal person to be nominated for president in the history of the United States.”

He said the election should be fought on policy. “A nightmare for Harris is to defend her policy choices,” he said.

“President Trump can win this election,” Graham continued. “If you have a policy debate, he wins. Donald Trump the provocateur, the showman, may not win this election.”

Trump’s ad hominem digs against Harris have ranged from disparaging and false comments about her race and intelligence to snide remarks about her appearance. During a Saturday rally Trump said: “I’m a better looking person than Kamala” and that Harris had “the laugh of a crazy person”.

With Harris rising in the polls many saw Trump’s rally, in the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania, as an opportunity for him to reboot his campaign by focusing on issues of importance to voters, but he has instead continued to emphasize personal differences.

Trump has repeatedly questioned the racial identity of Harris, whose mother is Indian and father is Jamaican. In a chaotic appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists several weeks ago, Trump incorrectly claimed that Harris suddenly “became a Black woman” and falsely stated that she had only identified with her Indian background.

“Is she Indian or is she Black?” Trump remarked, prompting audible gasps. “I respect either one but she obviously doesn’t because she was Indian all the way and then all of sudden she became a Black woman.”

Alain Delon, the celebrated actor who starred in a string of classic films such as Plein Soleil, Le Samouraï and Rocco and His Brothers, has died aged 88, his children have told French media.

“Alain Fabien, Anouchka, Anthony, as well as [his dog] Loubo, are deeply saddened to announce the passing of their father. He passed away peacefully in his home in Douchy, surrounded by his three children and his family,” they said in a statement, adding that the family asked for privacy.

Identified with French cinema’s resurgence in the 1960s, Delon played a string of cops, hitmen and beautifully chiselled chancers for some of the country’s greatest directors, including Jean-Pierre Melville, René Clément and Jacques Deray. He also made films with auteurs including Luchino Visconti, Louis Malle, Michelangelo Antonioni and Jean-Luc Godard – though he never quite succeeded in his attempts to make it in Hollywood.

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, wrote on X that Delon had through his acting roles “made the world dream … he offered his unforgettable face to shake our lives”.

“He was more than a star. He was a French monument,” Macron added.

Brigitte Bardot, who starred with Delon in the 1961 film Amours Célèbres, was “devastated” by his death, according to the animal protection foundation she now runs.

“Today, it is with a heavy heart we learn of Alain Delon’s death. He was an exceptional man, an unforgettable artist and a great friend to animals,” the Brigitte Bardot Foundation said in a statement.

“Alain was a close friend of our president, Brigitte Bardot, who is devastated by his death. Their friendship, based on a shared love of animals and a shared concern for their welfare, was precious and genuine. Alain understood the profound link between man and animal.” Delon, a dog lover, once said he would wish to be reincarnated as a malinois.

The French culture minister, Rachida Dati, wrote: “We believe he was immortal … his talent, his charisma, his aura made him destined for a Hollywood career at a young age, but he chose France.”

Born in 1935 in Sceaux in the Paris suburbs, Delon was expelled from several schools before leaving at 14 to work in a butcher’s shop. After a stint in the navy (during which he saw combat in France’s colonial war in Vietnam), he was dishonourably discharged in 1956 and drifted into acting. He was spotted by the Hollywood producer David O Selznick at Cannes and signed to a contract, but decided to try his luck in French cinema and made his debut with a small role in Yves Allégret’s 1957 thriller Send a Woman When the Devil Fails.

Delon’s intense good looks made an immediate impact and he swiftly graduated to lead roles. In 1958 he was cast opposite Romy Schneider in Christine. They played a soldier and a musician’s daughter who fall in love. Delon and Schneider began a high-profile real-life romance off the set, which confirmed Delon’s burgeoning reputation as a sex symbol.

In 1960 he made two films that had a significant impact internationally: the Patricia Highsmith adaptation Plein Soleil (AKA Purple Noon) and Rocco and His Brothers. The former, a French-language version of The Talented Mr Ripley, turned Delon into a major star while Rocco, a saga about a southern Italian peasant family moving to the prosperous north, brought him into the orbit of Visconti, one of Europe’s foremost auteurs. Another Italian auteur, Antonioni, cast him as a smooth-talking stockbroker in 1962’s L’Eclisse. Delon reunited with Visconti in 1963 for The Leopard (AKA Il Gattopardo), a large-scale epic set in Risorgimento Sicily, adapted from the celebrated Lampedusa novel.

Such was Delon’s international profile that he began a serious attempt to break into English-language movies, starting with a small role in the Anthony Asquith-directed anthology comedy The Yellow Rolls-Royce. Delon appeared in Lost Command, about French paratroopers in the second world war, the Dean Martin western Texas Across the River, and Is Paris Burning?, another wartime epic starring Kirk Douglas. However, none were successful enough in Hollywood to establish him there, and Delon returned to France.

In 1967 he made the cult classic Le Samouraï with the director Jean-Pierre Melville, in which he played a raincoat-wearing hitman. That film’s domestic success kicked off a string of crime films, including The Sicilian Clan alongside Jean Gabin, the Marseille-set Borsalino directed by Deray, and another Melville classic, The Red Circle. Delon also found time to appear opposite Marianne Faithfull in Girl on a Motorcycle, in which a leather-clad Faithfull rides a bike across Europe, as well as in La Piscine opposite his former lover Schneider – which was remade in 2016 as A Bigger Splash with Tilda Swinton and Ralph Fiennes.

La Piscine coincided with a huge public scandal, the “Markovic affair”, which reached into France’s highest echelons after Delon’s bodyguard Stefan Markovic was found dead in a rubbish dump in 1968. François Marcantoni, a notorious underworld figure and longtime friend of Delon’s, was charged with murder but the charges were eventually dropped. The plot thickened when compromising photos belonging to Markovic were uncovered that allegedly showed members of the French elite, including the wife of the presidential candidate Georges Pompidou. In the end nothing was proved, but Delon’s close association with a gallery of unsavoury characters became widely known.

Through the 1970s Delon continued to make films at a steady pace, without the same level of impact as in previous decades. Monsieur Klein, in which Delon played an art dealer during the second world war whose identity is confused with a Jewish fugitive of the same name, won the César for best film in 1977; in 1985 he won the best actor César for Bertrand Blier’s surreal fable Notre Histoire. Delon also branched out, producing a string of films with his own company, making his directorial debut in 1981 with Pour la Peau d’un Flic, and promoting boxing and designing furniture.

Delon began to slow his output in the 1990s after playing a double role in Jean-Luc Godard’s Nouvelle Vague. In 1997 he announced his retirement from acting, but he returned in 2008 to play Julius Caesar in the French live-action hit Asterix at the Olympic Games.

Delon had a complicated personal life, including extended relationships with Schneider, Mireille Darc (from whom he separated in 1982 after 15 years together) and Rosalie van Breemen, a Dutch model with whom he had two children and from whom he separated in 2002. He was married to Nathalie Delon from 1964 to 1968; they had one child, Anthony, in 1964. In 1962 the singer and model Nico gave birth to a son, Christian; Delon denied paternity but the child was adopted by Delon’s mother.

The former culture minister Jack Lang spoke of Delon’s kindness and their friendship of more than 20 years. Lang said Delon was “an acting giant, prodigious … a prince of the cinema”.

“He was extremely modest, reserved, restrained, shy at the same time; even if he did express himself brutally from time to time, he did it with a flourish,” Lang said.

Valérie Pécresse, the president of the Île-de-France region, wrote on X: “Goodbye dear Alain.” Éric Ciotti, the leader of Les Républicains, wrote that Delon was a star apart: “France mourns a sacred giant who existed in the daily lives of French people across the generations and who will continue to thrill us for a long time to come.”

The writer and film director Philippe Labro wrote: “Goodbye friend. A wonderful collection of films, an incredible and fascinating personality. Beauty is not enough to explain the exceptional evolution of his talent. He was the ultimate star. The Samurai.”

The actor Alain Delon, with his finely chiselled features and glacial gaze, was known as the “ice cold angel”. As a young man, his handsome, impassive face was a blank page on which apparently any emotion could be written. This served to cover the passion or perversity beneath, a trait used effectively by such directors as Luchino Visconti, Louis Malle, Joseph Losey, Jean-Pierre Melville and Michelangelo Antonioni.

Delon’s best work was done in the 1960s and 70s, the first two decades of a career spanning half a century. After this exciting initial period, he settled down, with occasional exceptions, to consolidating his tough-guy persona, becoming one of the most popular male stars in French cinema.

In the light of his unpromising background, Delon, who has died aged 88, deserved the success he achieved. Born in Sceaux, a large suburb in the south of Paris, he as the son of Edith (nee Arnold) and Fabien Delon. They divorced when Alain was four, and he was brought up by foster parents until they died in a car accident. He then moved back to live with his mother and her new husband, Paul Boulogne, a butcher, to whom Delon was unhappily apprenticed when he was 14.

This was soon after he completed his sporadic education, having been expelled from several schools for bad behaviour. At 17, he joined the French navy, serving in Indochina as a parachutist during the siege of Dien Bien Phu.

Out of his four years in the military, Delon spent 11 months in prison for being “undisciplined”. In 1956, after being dishonourably discharged, he returned to civilian life, working as a porter, a waiter and a salesman. During this time he became friends with the actors Brigitte Auber and Jean-Claude Brialy, and went with them to the 1957 Cannes film festival.

There, his looks attracted attention, especially from a talent scout for the producer David O Selznick, who offered him a Hollywood contract, provided that he learned English. But after Auber persuaded the director Yves Allégret to cast the young would-be actor in Quand la Femme s’en Mêle (When a Woman Meddles, 1957), Delon decided to start acting in France.

Surrounded by such veterans as Edwige Feuillère, Jean Servais and Bernard Blier, Delon, looking much younger than 22, made an impression as a hitman, the sort of role he perfected in later films. Despite being touted as France’s answer to James Dean, Delon was closer to the young Alan Ladd.

In Sois Belle Et Tais-Toi (Be Beautiful But Shut Up, 1958), directed by Marc Allégret, Yves’s older brother, Delon was cast as a petty crook, partnered by Jean-Paul Belmondo, who was to equal Delon in popularity in the 60s and 70s. They were later to appear together again in Borsalino (1970), Borsalino and Co (1974) and as sexagenarian action heroes in Une Chance sur Deux (Half a Chance, 1998).

Christine (1958), a love story set in Vienna at the turn of the century, gave Delon his first major role as a romantic lead, opposite Romy Schneider. During the shooting of the film – a remake of Max Ophüls’ Liebelei (1932) – the couple fell in love and became engaged soon afterwards. The romance lasted four years, and Delon and Schneider remained close until her death in 1982. They appeared together on stage in 1961 in a Parisian production of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, directed by Visconti, as well as in the films La Piscine (The Swimming Pool, 1969) and Losey’s The Assassination of Trotsky (1972).

It was in 1960 that Delon became an international star with his portrayal of Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley in René Clément’s Plein Soleil (Purple Noon). With his pretty-boy looks, Delon perfectly reflected the calculated charm, indolence and coldness of the ambiguous character, who schemes to take his friend’s clothes, yacht, girlfriend and life.

In contrast, in the same year, Visconti cast him as a “wise fool” in Rocco and His Brothers, an epic three-hour neorealist drama. To save his poverty-stricken family, who have immigrated to Milan from southern Italy, Rocco (Delon) takes up boxing, a sport he detests. Dubbed into Italian, Delon does his best to convince as a saintly character, though it is doubtful whether any boxer could be so gentle and yet so successful.

Dubbed again into Italian, Delon was superb as an arrogant and materialistic stockbroker who has an affair with a translator (Monica Vitti) in L’Eclisse (Eclipse, 1962), the third in Antonioni’s trilogy of alienation. Delon’s third notable Italian film was Visconti’s The Leopard (1963), in which he played the dashing and cynical young revolutionary Tancredi. As a hotheaded opportunist who represents the future of Italy, Delon’s performance is in sharp contrast to Burt Lancaster’s contemplative one as his aristocratic uncle, who represents the past.

Back in France, Delon began to take on less challenging roles, mostly in swashbucklers and thrillers. The main interest of the conventional heist movie, Mélodie en Sous-Sol (Any Number Can Win, 1963), was the coming together of the biggest French star of the 30s, Jean Gabin, and the rising star of the 60s. As interesting was his pairing with Simone Signoret, 14 years his senior, in The Widow Couderc (1971).

Delon also appeared in several English-language films at the time, including The Yellow Rolls-Royce (1964), in which he was an Italian photographer cum gigolo making a play for a gangster’s moll (Shirley MacLaine), and a Spanish aristocrat in the comedy-western Texas Across the River (1966). At the time, Delon could claim to be an equal in fame to any movie star in large-budget films such as Once a Thief (1965), opposite Ann-Margret and Jack Palance; Lost Command (1966), a war film with Anthony Quinn and George Segal; and Red Sun (1971) with Charles Bronson and Toshiro Mifune, cashing in on Delon’s huge popularity in Japan.

In the artily erotic The Girl on a Motorcycle (1968), directed and photographed by Jack Cardiff, Delon played Marianne Faithfull’s lover, unzipping her leather gear with his teeth and murmuring: “Your toes are like tombstones.”

In 1964 Delon married Nathalie Barthélémy, who made her screen acting debut opposite him in Melville’s Le Samouraï (1967), the first of three ritualistic and atmospheric crime thrillers directed by Melville and starring Delon. In Le Samouraï, he was an expressionless hired killer; in Le Cercle Rouge (1970), he was a cool ex-con; and in Un Flic (Dirty Money, 1972), Melville’s final film, he was equally effective as a bitter cop.

Delon’s standing as a screen tough guy was enhanced when, in 1968, he and his wife, whom he was about to divorce, were implicated in a sensational political scandal. The discovery of the corpse of his bodyguard Stevan Marković in a rubbish dump – he had been shot in the head – led to revelations of drug and sex orgies involving a host of personalities from the world of politics and show business, including the wife of the president, Georges Pompidou.

Delon’s friend, the Corsican gangster François Marcantoni, was charged as an accessory to murder but was later released due to lack of evidence. Both Alain and Nathalie were held for questioning, but were not accused. What had alerted police was a letter Marković sent to his brother in which he wrote: “If I get killed, it’s 100% the fault of Alain Delon and his godfather François Marcantoni.”

In the same year, Delon began a 15-year relationship with the actor Mireille Darc, with whom he co-starred in Jeff (1969), the first film made by his own company, Adel, and a few other pictures.

During the same period, under Malle’s direction, he portrayed William Wilson, an Austrian officer and gambler, who murders his doppelganger, in one of three segments based on Edgar Allan Poe stories in Spirits of the Dead (1968).

Another of his outstanding performances was the title role of Losey’s Mr Klein (1976), as a French-Catholic art dealer who is mistaken for a Jew of the same name during the occupation in 1942. Unable to convince the Gestapo of the mistaken identity, he is deported.

Many years later, Delon claimed to be a supporter of the far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen. “He is dangerous for the political set because he’s the only one who’s sincere,” Delon declared. “He says out loud what many people think, and what the politicians refrain from saying because they are either too demagogic or too chicken. Le Pen, with all his faults and qualities, is probably the only one who thinks about the interests of France before his own.”

In the 80s, Delon, already a producer of a dozen movies, tried his hand at directing. His two films, Pour la Peau d’un Flic (For a Cop’s Hide, 1981) and Le Battant (The Fighter, 1983), were pale imitations of Melville. But, in 1984, Delon was given two of his last chances to display his acting talents. In Bertrand Blier’s Notre Histoire (Our Story), he was a morose alcoholic, and, in one of the most surprising casting decisions, he played the decadent gay dandy Baron de Charlus in Volker Schlöndorff’s Swann in Love, based on the first volume of Marcel Proust’s novel.

Following his dual role in Jean-Luc Godard’s Nouvelle Vague (1990), and a number of poorly received films, Delon announced his decision to retire from acting in 1997, although he did star in a television cop series, Frank Riva (2003-04), and made an unexpected appearance as Julius Caesar in Asterix at the Olympic Games (2008). A final TV role came in the drama Une Journée Ordinaire (2011), and he appeared as himself in S Novym Godom, Mamy! (2012), the story of a Russian New Year’s Eve, and Disclaimer (2019), as a talkshow guest.

An honorary Palme d’Or in 2019 provoked complaints against Delon’s history of misogynistic comments and support for the far right. The Cannes festival responded that its concern lay with achievement in cinema: “We’re not going to give (him) the Nobel peace prize.” Also that year came the video release of the song, Paroles, Paroles, that had given the singer Dalida and him a hit in 1973.

Delon, who became a Swiss citizen after many years’ residence in Geneva, with a second home in Douchy, south of Paris, spent most of his later years as president of a company that produced a variety of products such as perfume, wristwatches, clothing and sunglasses, all with the label AD.

The Velvet Underground singer Nico said that Delon was the father of her son Ari, though he denied it – the boy was adopted by Delon’s mother and stepfather, and took their surname, Boulogne; he died in 2023. Delon is survived by his son, Anthony, from his first marriage, and his children, Anouchka and Alain-Fabien, from his second marriage, to Rosalie van Breemen, which ended in divorce in 2002.

Alain Fabien Maurice Marcel Delon, actor and producer, born 8 November 1935; died 18 August 2024

At least 23 people were injured when two gondolas of a ferris wheel caught fire at a music festival near Leipzig in eastern Germany, the dpa news agency reported on Sunday.

The fire started in one gondola and spread to a second on Saturday night, police said. Four people suffered burns and one suffered injuries from a fall. Others, including first responders and at least four police officers, were to be examined in the hospital for possible smoke inhalation.

The incident took place at the Highfield festival at Störmthaler Lake near Leipzig. Police are investigating the cause of the fire.

As of Sunday morning, police were still unable to provide concrete information about the condition of those injured. The exact number of casualties had also not been determined.

The operator of the ferris wheel told dpa that no passengers were sitting in the gondola in which the fire started.

At least 23 people were injured when two gondolas of a ferris wheel caught fire at a music festival near Leipzig in eastern Germany, the dpa news agency reported on Sunday.

The fire started in one gondola and spread to a second on Saturday night, police said. Four people suffered burns and one suffered injuries from a fall. Others, including first responders and at least four police officers, were to be examined in the hospital for possible smoke inhalation.

The incident took place at the Highfield festival at Störmthaler Lake near Leipzig. Police are investigating the cause of the fire.

As of Sunday morning, police were still unable to provide concrete information about the condition of those injured. The exact number of casualties had also not been determined.

The operator of the ferris wheel told dpa that no passengers were sitting in the gondola in which the fire started.

A son of a notorious Cosa Nostra mafia boss has sparked fury in the Sicilian town of Corleone after writing a message on social media that was condemned as a “vile attack” against the Italian state.

On Ferragosto, a beloved national holiday in Italy marked on 15 August, “Salvuccio” Giuseppe Salvatore Riina, one of the sons of Salvatore “Totò” Riina, wished his social media followers a “happy holiday” from “via Scorsone 24, Corleone, Italy”.

The address was home to the Riina family for years but in 2018 the street’s name was changed to Via Terranova in tribute to the anti-mafia judge Cesare Terranova, who was shot dead in 1979 in an ambush orchestrated by the Corleone mafia boss Luciano Liggio.

The name change was ordered by the interior ministry commissioners who at the time were administering Corleone – as featured in The Godfather book and film trilogy – after its town hall was dissolved due to mafia infiltration.

Walter Rà, elected as the mayor of Corleone in June, described the incident as “cowardly” while reaffirming that the town had left its dark history behind and would not bow down to intimidation. “We won’t allow it,” he told Italian media. “We have turned the page here, nobody will make us go backwards.”

Salvuccio Riina later trimmed the post to take out the reference to “via Scorsone”.

Totò Riina died in prison in 2017. Nicknamed “the Beast”, he is believed to have ordered more than 150 murders, including the killing of a 13-year-old boy who was dissolved in acid. He also ordered the murders of the anti-mafia judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992.

His third son, Salvuccio, returned to live in Corleone in 2023 after serving almost nine years in prison for mafia association, money laundering and extortion and subsequently spending a period between Veneto and Abruzzo where he had been entrusted to a social services scheme. Corleone’s former administration had attempted to expel him in a move to protect the town from “reputational damage”.

The town’s current leaders said in a statement on Salvuccio Riina’s social media post: “Although we do not want to give further visibility to those who periodically look for it, we firmly distance ourselves from such declarations and firmly condemn such bravado, which sounds like a vile attack against the state and institutions.

“The utterances of Riina jr … do nothing but accentuate a negative and distorted vision of Corleone, tarnishing the efforts that are made every day by the community to free itself from a reputation linked to mafia and crime. Corleone is not mafia. Corleone is history, culture, freedom, but above all Corleone is legality, all characteristics that highly questionable characters will never be able to undermine.”

Salvuccio Riina is reported to have married his Spanish partner in Spain in June and to have hosted a post-wedding party at a restaurant in Corleone with 200 guests. In 2016 he wrote the controversial book Riina Family Life, which many bookshops refused to sell.

Totò Riina had three other children: Maria Concetta, Giovanni Francesco, and his youngest, Lucia. Giovanni Riina, also a Cosa Nostra mafioso, was given a life sentence in 1996. In 2019, Lucia Riina opened a restaurant called Corleone near the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, but she shut it down a year later.

Sperm donated in the UK is being exported and can be used to create large numbers of children across multiple countries, contradicting a strict 10-family limit that applies in the UK, experts warn.

A legal loophole means that, while a single donor can be used to create no more than 10 families in UK fertility clinics, there are no restrictions on companies making sperm or eggs available for additional fertility treatments abroad.

With the lifting of donor anonymity and the ability to track down genetic relatives on DNA testing sites, this raises the prospect of some donor-conceived children navigating relationships with dozens of biological half-siblings across Europe.

Prof Jackson Kirkman-Brown, chair of the Association for Reproductive and Clinical Scientists (ARCS), is among those calling on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) to tighten restrictions.

“If you believe that it’s necessary to enforce the 10-family limit in the modern world then logically that should apply wherever the sperm are from,” said Kirkman-Brown, who is also director of the Centre for Human Reproductive Science at the University of Birmingham. “There is data showing that some of the children who find the really big families struggle with that.”

Until five years ago, the UK was primarily an importer of sperm, largely from Denmark and the US. But, as a growing number of international sperm and egg banks have opened donor centres in the UK, the picture is becoming more complex.

From 2019-21, 7,542 straws of sperm were exported from the UK, according to data provided by the HFEA (one IVF cycle typically requires one straw of sperm). The European Sperm Bank, which accounted for 90% of exports, applies a worldwide limit of 75 families a donor and estimates that its donors help on average 25 families.

Cryos, the world’s largest sperm and egg bank, which opened a sperm donation unit in Manchester in April, said it “aims for 25-50 families per donor” worldwide.

Prof Lucy Frith, of the University of Manchester, who is researching donor-conceived experiences, says that making contact with biological half-siblings is often viewed positively. “But when numbers of siblings began to grow [it] felt unmanageable to have contact and relationships with a growing and indeterminate number of people,” she said. “There are no hard and fast figures of when the number becomes ‘too much’ and this depends on individuals, but generally over 10 was felt to be a large group.”

The potentially open-ended number of future siblings is another challenge. “Once you’ve frozen sperm it doesn’t get any older,” said Kirkman-Brown. In theory, a donor could continue to be used over years or even decades. “You can end up with donor siblings older than your parents, which is not somewhere we’ve been yet,” he added.

Others noted that the increasing commercialisation of the market contrasts with the altruistic basis for donation of sperm and eggs, with the UK law only allowing compensation for time and expenses.

“It’s presented to donors as a beautiful gift to help someone create a family, not as, ‘We’re going to maximise the number of births from your gametes and make as much money as we can from that,’” said Prof Nicky Hudson, a medical sociologist at De Montford University. “When you speak to donors and present these possibilities to them, they’re really surprised.”

Hudson is researching egg donation, which is emerging as a new market thanks to advances in egg freezing techniques and could expand further when compensation increases from £750 to £986 in October.

The shipping of eggs could open new frontiers for biological motherhood. “The idea of a dad to loads of children already exists in our cultural imagination,” Hudson added. “We don’t have that for women.”

“Egg donors really strongly rejected the idea of their eggs being shipped abroad,” she added. “One told me it’s akin to human trafficking.”

The rationale for enforcing the 10-family limit across licensed clinics, according to the HFEA, is that consultation with donors and donor-conceived people suggests this is the number people feel comfortable with in terms of the numbers of potential donor-conceived children, half-siblings and families that might be created.

“As the HFEA has no remit over donation outside of HFEA licensed clinics, there would be no monitoring of how many times a donor is used in these circumstances,” said Rachel Cutting, director of compliance and information at the HFEA.

Others suggested that this remit could be expanded, in a comparable way to the HFEA’s mandate that overseas donors cannot be anonymous.

“The HFEA is limited by its statutory duties, but it could stipulate that it will only import gametes that meet the UK limit (10 families), outside the UK,” said Frith. “So a donor who has donated in another country would have those offspring taken into account.”

“The HFEA’s position that this is outside its remit is not good enough,” said Sarah Norcross, director of the fertility charity Progress Educational Trust. “I’m not against there being more than 10 families if some are outside the UK, but 75, which some of these banks have alighted on, is a heck of a lot of relatives. Even if they say we can’t control the number of families abroad, they could insist that the number is made available to the recipient.”

Both the European Sperm Bank and Cryos said they expect to supply most of the UK sperm to the UK market, based on customer demand.

The European Sperm Bank added: “We follow this topic very closely and engage in dialogue with both donor-conceived individuals, families and expert groups to get more insights and a deeper understanding of their wishes and concerns.”

The head of the universities watchdog in England has said the “golden age of higher education” could be over and all options should be on the table as the funding crisis facing the sector is “significant”.

The Office for Students (OFS) interim chair, Sir David Behan, said increased tuition fees and lifting visa restrictions on international students could help revive embattled institutions.

“I think the resilience of the sector overall has been tested by a number of different forces … the global pandemic, the impact of leaving the European Union,” he told the Sunday Times.

“We’ve had industrial action, the cost of living crisis, the increasing cost of pensions and decreasing number of international students, and then, finally, domestic undergraduate fees remaining frozen since 2012 … and what it’s meant is that the fiscal deficit for some organisations is significant.”

He called on universities to explore mergers or partnership arrangements with other institutions, amid fears some institutions could be facing bankruptcy. “It’s important that universities revise their medium-term financial strategies … They can’t just carry on,” he said.

Asked whether the government should look at increasing tuition fees or lifting postgraduate visa restrictions, he said: “If we’re going to mitigate these risks to this sector, we need to look at all these possibilities as … we approach the budget in October, as we approach the spending review, there needs to be consideration of what the options are to secure the financial sustainability of the sector.”

University leaders have been calling for the raising of the annual tuition fee for domestic students in line with inflation to help institutions struggling financially. The previous government raised the cap on university tuition fees in England to £9,000 a year in 2012 but it has been fixed at £9,250 since 2017.

Universities argue costs have soared because of energy bills, inflation and compensation for students affected by lecturers’ strikes over pay and pensions. To boost their income, they have enrolled heavily from countries such as China, India and Nigeria, whose students pay up to £38,000 a year in tuition fees, but the recent restrictions on visas for overseas students has had an impact.

Thousands of graduates received their A-level results on Thursday when the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, said any large increase in tuition fees in the next five years would be “unpalatable”.

She told Sky News: “I do recognise the challenge, and I hear that message from institutions as well, but I think that’s a really unpalatable thing to be considering.

“Not least because I know that lots of students across the country are already facing big challenges around the cost of living, housing costs. Lots of students I speak to who are already working lots of jobs, extra hours, in order to pay for their studies.” She said the government intended to “reform the system overall”.

Some do it to explore their ancestral heritage or an unknown part of their identity. Others are hoping to find parents, siblings and new relatives.

More than 40 million people worldwide are thought to have tested their DNA ancestry via companies such as Ancestry, 23andMe and MyHeritage since the first genetic genealogy test was offered to the public in 2000.

Now, people are using their test results in a new way – to apply for citizenship in other countries, DNA experts say.

Prof Turi King, director of the Milner Centre for Evolution at Bath University, said: “The more people take tests and the more people find out their ancestry and who their biological parents are, the more they can use that evidence to get citizenship of a particular country.”

King, who also presents the BBC show DNA Family Secrets, thinks ancestry DNA testing will become an easy and more widespread way for some Britons to gain dual citizenship in the future. “This will only grow,” she said.

She said that Irish passports, with membership of the EU, would probably be among the most covet­ed. For decades, unmarried Irish mothers were coerced into giving up their children for adoption in Britain.

A spokesperson for Ireland’s Department of Foreign Affairs confirmed would-be Irish citizens have already started using DNA evidence to help prove they are entitled to Irish citizenship through a parent, and that this evidence is submissible in passport applications.

Richard Sayers, who appeared on DNA Family Secrets in 2022, is among the first Britons to have used evidence from a DNA ancestry database to gain EU citizenship. He traced his half-sibling through a DNA test, which revealed the identity of his father – an Irishman born in Galway.

“I went on the programme because I had no idea who my dad was or where he was from: my mum, who has passed away, just made up stories,” said Sayers, who was born and bred in Liverpool and previously thought he was an only child. “I just wanted some answers.”

After the show aired, using his DNA evidence and with his father’s help, he successfully applied to the British courts for a formal declaration of his true parentage in order to rectify his 54-year-old birth certificate last year. This then enabled him to successfully apply for an Irish passport.

“I always had a dream of living abroad when I was older,” said Sayers, a business analyst who voted Remain in 2016. Within weeks of his Irish passport arriving, he and his wife had decided to go on the “adventure of a lifetime”: they sold their house in Formby, Merseyside, and moved to La Manga in Spain in January. “We ­absolutely love it here.”

Last year, former Team GB Olym­pian Sarah Claxton, 44, traced her American father through ancestry DNA testing, which linked her to one of his grandchildren. “My mum only had a nickname for my dad,” she said. “When she found out she was pregnant with me, he had already gone back to the States.”

Claxton has Native American ancestry through her father and is planning to rectify her birth certificate with the help of both her parents, so that she can apply for US citizenship and get to know her dad and the rest of her American family better. “I want to get it and maybe live there,” she said.

If the practice of submitting DNA evidence becomes more common, countries may come up with new, more streamlined protocols, King said.

Louisa Ghevaert, a solicitor who specialises in UK fertility and family law, said she is receiving between three and five inquiries a month from people who want legal advice about how to apply to rectify an incomplete or inaccurate birth certificate.

Most have traced their biological parents – usually their fathers – through a DNA ancestry test or are considering doing so. “We’re only going to see more of these applications, because more people are likely to do these tests,” she said.

She said there are three main reasons why her clients want to put the names of their biological parents on their birth certificates. “I’m seeing a split between people with inheritance claims, people with personal identity and heritage as strong drivers, and people who are wanting to try to get citizenship.

“It’s a mixed bag, as one would expect – but I think Brexit has brought into focus, for lots of people, the benefits of having EU citizenship.”

Living with female flatmates at university makes male students less “macho”, new research from Essex University and Australia’s University of Technology Sydney has found.

The study, which followed a cohort of students at a UK university living in campus halls of residence over a one-year period, revealed that men living in mixed flats with female flatmates exhibited a significant decrease in competitiveness. There was no effect on women.

“The paper found living with more female flatmates means men’s competitiveness is more likely to go down over time,” said Dr Angus Holford, senior research fellow at Essex University and co-author of the research paper. “The flipside is that, with more male flatmates, it’s more likely to go up over time.”

Hyper-competitiveness among male students can have negative repercussions in the future; for example, leading to dysfunctional workplaces such as those exposed at Nike and ride-sharing company Uber. Masculinity contest culture can result in reduced innovation, increased bullying and harassment, and elevated rates of illness and depression among both male and female workers.

“It’s likely a group of colleagues will have a healthier, more productive relationship if there’s less competitiveness in the room,” Holford said.

Competitiveness, however, is not always a negative quality, he added. “Competitiveness is not necessarily toxic. People who are more competitive are getting higher grades, they go on to have higher salaries – later, they have higher life satisfaction,” he said. “So there is this sort of trade-off between what might be good for the individual and what might be good for organisations and society.”

The study involved assessing participants twice; once when they were in their first year of university and again when they entered their second. To measure their competitiveness, students were asked to complete an identical paid task where they could choose between either earning a fixed amount or a higher sum, depending on whether or not they won a competition.

Holford said that the new research has also shown that there is not an inborn gap in competitiveness between men and women, and neither is it an instinctive quality.

“We’re showing that competitiveness is not a fixed trait – there’s not an innate, permanent difference between the sexes. It actually responds quite quickly to the environment,” he said.

The new findings come as hundreds of thousands of young people are preparing to move into halls of residence or house shares before the new university year. Last Thursday’s A-level results were the strongest in England since 2010, and nationally 82% of applicants were able to get into their first choice university.

Most incoming university students will be hoping to enter halls of residence as term begins in September, but an acute shortage of accommodation may make the move more difficult for some. In recent years, UK university towns have grappled with a housing crisis, with students in some of the most popular university cities such as Bristol being housed miles away from campus in different towns.