Joe Biden took centre stage for perhaps the last time on Monday night when he addressed the Democratic national convention in Chicago – as the US president faces a backlash over one of his most complex legacies.

Thousands of protesters are converged in the host city earlier in the day to demand that the US end military aid to Israel for its ongoing war in Gaza. Activists have branded Biden “Genocide Joe” and called for the vice-president, Kamala Harris, to change course.

Harris herself made a surprise appearance at the convention Monday night, thanking Biden for his lifetime of service to the country and previewing the week ahead. The crowd in the Chicago’s United Center got on their feet and enthusiastically cheered and chanted.

Biden’s wife Jill and daughter Ashley spoke shortly before the president, speaking of his support for them and his decision to pass the torch to Harris.

“Weeks ago, when I saw him dig deep into his soul and decide to no longer seek re-election and endorse Kamala Harris,” Jill Biden said. “With faith and conviction, Joe knows that our nation’s strength doesn’t come from intimidation or cruelty, it comes from the small acts of kindness that heal deep wounds, from service to the communities that make us who we are, from love of a country that shines with promise and renewal. Kamala Harris knows that too.

Other prominent Democrats took the convention stage, including Hillary Clinton, a former secretary of state who backs Biden’s Gaza policy, and congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a progressive star who has criticised the administration and called for a ceasefire.

“Something is happening in America. You can feel it,” said Clinton, who was the first female presidential nominee of a major party.

Jamie Raskin, a representative from Maryland who served on the January 6 committee and led Trump’s second impeachment, said reelecting Trump would bring America “back to the days of election suppression and violent insurrection”. He suggested making Harris’ victory so large that even Trump and his allies can’t try to steal the election.

Andy Beshear, the governor of Kentucky who was a vice-presidential contender, focused his speech on Harris and Tim Walz’ support for reproductive rights. Republican abortion “policies give rapists more rights than their victims”, he said. And Senator Raphael Warnock from Georgia spoke about the need to protect democracy, invoking his faith to denounce Trump.

“I saw him holding the Bible, and endorsing a Bible, as if it needed his endorsement. He should try reading it,” Warnock said. “It says, do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with your God. He should try reading it. It says, love your neighbor as yourself.”

Many speakers pointed out the differences between Trump the convicted criminal and Harris the prosecutor. Representative Jasmine Crockett of Texas called Trump a “career criminal”, “fraudster”, and “cheat”, and contrasted him with Harris, who has always worked for the people.

Shawn Fain, president of the United Auto Workers, wore a T-shirt calling Donald Trump a scab during his speech, saying that “this election comes down to one question: which side are you on?”

“On one side we have Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, who have stood shoulder to shoulder with the working class,” he said. “On the other side, we have Trump and Vance, two lap dogs for the billionaire class who only serve themselves. So for us in the labor movement, it’s real simple. Kamala Harris is one of us. She’s a fighter for the working class, and Donald Trump is a scab.”

Lauren Underwood, a 37-year-old representative from Illinois, touted Biden and Harris’s role in helping pull the country out of the coronavirus pandemic, reminding viewers early in the programming Monday that “four years ago, it wasn’t safe to hold a convention like this”.

Democrats this week will dedicate time to highlighting concerns about Project 2025, the blueprint for a potential second Trump administration. A state senator from Michigan, Mallory McMorrow, held up a copy of the policy manual and read from its proposals Monday. “That is not how it works in America,” she said about the plans for Trump to weaponize the department of justice to his advantage. “That’s how it works in dictatorships.”

Women who suffered because of abortion bans in a post-Roe v Wade America or who obtained an abortion shared their stories from the convention stage, saying that Harris will fight for the rights of women and girls.

Just over a month ago Biden had been expecting to give Thursday’s closing speech as he accepted the Democratic nomination for 2024. But his withdrawal from the race last month, and the party’s consolidation around Harris, means that Biden will speak on opening night and then set off on a holiday.

The president has been reportedly working on his address with his long-time adviser Mike Donilon and chief speechwriter Vinay Reddy. He is expected to return to a familiar theme – the defence of democracy against Donald Trump – and tout Harris as the ideal successor.

It will be a bittersweet moment for the 81-year-old, who is still reportedly irked by the role that the senior Democratic figures Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer played in pressuring him to step aside amid questions about his mental fitness.

Still, the mood among Democrats is buoyant as opinion polls show Harris leading or tied with Trump in crucial swing states. The Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, told CNN’s State of the Union programme that the convention would be “like a rock concert”. Singers Jason Isbell and James Taylor performed Monday.

But the party is eager to avoid any repeat of their Chicago convention in 1968, when anti-Vietnam war protests and a police riot led to scenes of chaos that stunned the nation and contributed to the party’s defeat in November. But the protests in Chicago on Monday have so far been peaceful and smaller than anticipated.

The biggest protest group the Coalition to March on the DNC planned demonstrations for Monday and Thursday to coincide with Biden and Harris’s speeches. Organisers said they expected at least 20,000 activists to demonstrate, including students who protested against the war on college campuses.

The switch at the top of the ticket has given some activists pause but others contend that Harris is part of the Biden administration and so complicit. Her speech on Thursday will be watched closely for signs that she is willing to take a harder line against the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

“We need to hear from Vice-President Harris,” said Abbas Alawieh, a national uncommitted organizer and an uncommitted delegate from Michigan. “We need a plan.” Organizers said they needed something concrete to relay back to voters in their communities to convince them to turn out for Harris.

The convention has drawn an estimated 50,000 people to America’s third-biggest city including delegates, activists and journalists. Security is tight, with street closures around the convention centre, while police have undergone de-escalation training.

On the eve of the convention, Democrats released their party platform, a document of more than 90 pages presenting their policy priorities. The platform was voted on by the convention’s platform committee before Biden’s exit and repeatedly refers to his “second term”.

Speaking to the Guardian, former Barack Obama adviser David Axelrod said he saw the race as a dead heat and that the Harris campaign should fight against a sense of complacency in the party.

“Yes it’s largely tied across the battleground and she’s a point or two behind in the sun belt states,” he said. “And given where we were a few weeks ago, that’s a fantastic place to be. This race is now very close.”

On Monday, the convention is focusing on the Biden administration’s policy accomplishments; Tuesday will contrast Trump’s and Harris’s visions for America; Wednesday will emphasise the importance of protecting individual freedoms; Thursday is entitled “For Our Future”, underlined by Harris’s speech.

Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, will spend the week counter-programming the Democratic convention with a tour of battleground states, including Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Arizona and Georgia.

Andrew Roth and Rachel Leingang contributed reporting

A pediatric doctor who has treated patients in Gaza during the war told the Democratic party faithful about the horrors she witnessed there – children who lost their entire families, suffered debilitating injuries and amputations. So many left on their own that a term was coined: wounded child, no surviving family.

Dr Tanya Haj-Hassan was part of a panel centered on Palestinian human rights at the Democratic national convention, the first time the Democratic party has directly hosted an official panel on the topic. Haj-Hassan is one of dozens of medics who sent a letter to Joe Biden’s administration in July to share what they have witnessed while caring for people in Gaza.

Attendees, who numbered in the hundreds, wiped away tears as Haj-Hassan described what she saw and as other panelists detailed the losses they’ve experienced among family members in Gaza.

Haj-Hassan told of a young boy who came to the emergency room with half of his face and neck badly injured and said to her that because everyone he loved was in heaven, he wished he had died, too. She held the hands of children as they took their last breaths because there were no family members left to hold those hands.

Hala Hijazi, a party organizer on the panel who said she has had over 100 family members killed in Gaza, said she feels like she owes her family to speak out on Gaza. “My family’s dead, y’all. They’re dead. And I feel guilty because for 25 years I’ve been living my American dream while they are struggling,” she said.

The panel comes as Democrats convene in Chicago for a remade 2024 US election and rally around Kamala Harris, a more energetic choice than Biden was for many. Harris as the nominee gave “uncommitted” organizers – who launched a widespread anti-war protest vote during the primaries – hope that a ceasefire and changed Israel policy could be on the horizon. But they say they’re still waiting for Harris to articulate how she’s different from Biden on the issue.

Uncommitted wanted a prime spot on the main stage for Haj-Hassan to give voice to the Gaza war. So far, they have been granted the panel and a meeting space for press conferences, albeit far away from the center stage. One day into the convention, the organizers say they still want a main-stage speaking spot for a Palestinian American leader, something they have not heard back on from the DNC.

Still, they called the panel a move forward in the movement to convince the party and its delegates to support a ceasefire and arms embargo in Israel, a cause that drew thousands to the streets outside the convention and brought 30 uncommitted delegates to the Democratic convention after nearly 750,000 voters cast uncommitted ballots in the primaries.

Jim Zogby, the founder and president of Arab American Institute, said the panel represented the start of pressuring the party at the convention. “It is not the prize – the prize is a change in policy, that’s the prize, that’s what we want,” he said.

Panelists used the opportunity to issue a challenge to those few hundred gathered, many with ceasefire pins, shirts with the slogan “not another bomb” or in keffiyeh, to join cause at the convention and pressure Harris on Gaza.

The Democratic party platform does not include a call for an arms embargo or any differences from the Biden administration’s current policies. It says Biden has “been determined to broker an immediate and lasting ceasefire deal”, including the release of Israeli hostages, and says a “strong, secure, and democratic Israel is vital to the interests of the United States”. Party delegates will vote on approving the platform this week.

Some panelists said they believed Harris would and could change course and unite the Democratic party – a cause that they said is both morally correct but also politically sound, especially in a swing state like Michigan where the uncommitted movement was born.

“We need a kind of leadership from Kamala Harris that I know she’s capable of,” said former Michigan congressman Andy Levin.

Layla Elabed, a Michigan organizer of the national uncommitted movement, called on people in the crowd to stand if they had voted uncommitted, marched in protests, or believed there should be no difference between an Israeli or Palestinian child. She challenged Harris delegates to sign a petition to join the ceasefire cause. The crowd all stood, clapping and cheering.

“Congratulations, you’ve all just committed to making the Democratic party the home for Palestinian human rights,” she said.

Ukraine has destroyed a third bridge over the Seym River in the Kursk region, as part of an apparent attempt to expand what President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has described as a military “buffer zone” inside Russia.

According to Russian officials, the bridge in the village of Karyzh was damaged overnight by targeted Ukrainian “shelling”. It was the last major crossing on this part of the front, following the destruction on Friday and Saturday of two bridges further east over the same river.

Ukraine’s armed forces are now poised to push forward from their existing bridgehead around the Russian town of Sudzha, captured two weeks ago during a surprise offensive. They are seeking to encircle Russian troops – some of them conscripts – who are stuck south of the river in the Korenevsky district.

If the operation succeeds, Ukraine will gain another 700 sq km (270 sq miles) of Russian land. Russia has built pontoon bridges across the river in order to supply its forces, but these are vulnerable to close-range Ukrainian strikes from US-supplied Himars systems, truck-mounted mobile rocket launchers.

On Monday Kyiv captured two more Russian villages, Snagost and Apanasovka. The pace of its advance into Kursk oblast has slowed in recent days, however. The Kremlin has scrambled reserves to try to stop Ukrainian combat units from advancing further.

“The situation is messy there,” a senior Ukrainian official told the Guardian. “The Russians have pulled in extra troops. Some are capable, some are not. The Russians have found it extremely difficult to recapture lost territory.”

Ukraine’s commander-in-chief, Oleksandr Syrskyi, was waging a “high-speed” campaign, with his troops constantly on the move, the official said. Syrskyi wanted to avoid a dug-in “positional war”, similar to the one taking place in eastern Ukraine, the person said, adding: “It’s risky. But the narrative of the war has changed. Everything is possible.”

While Ukrainian forces have made quick progress around Sudzha, Russian troops have been steadily making gains in the east of Ukraine. On Monday they captured the town of Niu-York, raising the Russian flag and renaming the town Novgorodske, Kremlin military bloggers reported.

For months, Russian forces have also been edging closer to the Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk, gobbling up surrounding villages. Ukrainian defenders have retreated in the face of airstrikes on their positions, followed by round-the-clock infantry assaults.

On Monday Pokrovsk’s military administrator, Serhii Dobryak, said fighting was likely to engulf the city in less than two weeks. He urged residents to pack up and leave. About 60% had already gone, he said. He added that families with children would soon be forced to evacuate under emergency rules.

In neighbouring Myrnohrad – now just a few kilometres from the frontline – fewer than 16,000 people remained. Banks, pharmacies, shops and markets were closing, together with all organisations and institutions. The city hospital was shutting down as well, with the exception of a few doctors who would treat the wounded.

The imminent Russian attack on Pokrovsk will complicate Ukraine’s attempts to defend its Donbas region, where war has raged since 2014. The Russians are close to capturing a highway that links Pokrovsk to a string of major cities to the north, including the garrison settlements of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk.

The Kursk raid was conceived in part as a way to relieve pressure on Pokrovsk and the city of Toretsk, also under intense Russian fire. So far, though, the Kremlin has transferred irregular forces from the rear, as well as units based in the occupied south of Ukraine. If anything, it has thrown more resources into the battle for Pokrovsk.

Speaking on Sunday, Zelenskiy said Ukraine’s military incursion into Russia was carried out to create a permanent buffer zone. It would prevent further attacks by Moscow across the border, he suggested, after a Russian offensive in May against the Ukrainian city of Vovchansk. Fighting there continues.

Previously Zelenskiy said the incursion would protect communities in Ukraine’s bordering Sumy region from constant shelling. “It is now our primary task in defensive operations overall to destroy as much Russian war potential as possible and conduct maximum counteroffensive actions. This includes creating a buffer zone on the aggressor’s territory – our operation in the Kursk region,” he declared.

Zelenskiy urged Ukraine’s international partners to speed up deliveries of weapons. He also called on the US, UK and France to take crucial “decisions” – a plea for restrictions to be lifted on the use of long-range western weapons against strategic airbases and other military targets within Russia.

A spokesperson for Keir Starmer said British backing for Kyiv was unwavering. “The prime minister remains absolutely resolute in his support for Ukraine,” they said, adding that the ban on the use of British Storm Shadow missiles inside Russia remained.

Zelenskiy’s latest comments suggest Ukraine will seek to hold on to its gains in Kursk oblast, ahead of possible negotiations to end the war. On Monday Russia’s presidential aide Yuri Ushakov made clear Moscow was not ready for peace discussions because of what he called Ukraine’s Kursk “adventure”. “We will not talk,” he said.

• Volodymyr Zelenskiy has said Ukraine’s invasion of Russia’s Kursk region shows Kremlin threats of retaliation are a bluff as he urged Kyiv’s allies to loosen curbs on using their weapons against targets on Russian territory. Zelenskiy said Ukrainian forces had gained control of more than 1,250 sq km (483 sq miles) and 92 settlements in Kursk.

• Speaking to Ukrainian diplomats, the president said the “naive, illusory concept of so-called red lines” had “crumbled apart”. But restrictions imposed by allies remain, and Zelenskiy urged allies to be bolder in helping Ukraine. “The world sees that everything in this war depends only on courage – our courage, the courage of our partners. On brave decisions for Ukraine, on courage in supporting Ukraine.”

• Ukraine has destroyed a third bridge over the Seym River in Kursk, Dan Sabbagh writes, as part of an apparent attempt to expand what Zelenskiy has described as a military “buffer zone” inside Russia.

• Kyiv’s forces remain on the defensive in Ukraine itself – battling fiercely around the strategic eastern city of Pokrovsk, where Russia has steadily advanced in recent weeks. Russian troops on Monday were reportedly around 10km (six miles) from the outskirts, said Serhiy Dobriak, head of the local military administration.

• Civilians with small children in their arms and lugging heavy suitcases fled on Monday from Pokrovsk under orders to evacuate. Local authorities said Russian forces were advancing so quickly that families were instructed to leave the city and other nearby towns and villages starting on Tuesday. About 53,000 people still lived in Pokrovsk, officials said, and some of them had decided to get out immediately.

• Ukraine’s top general said Kyiv was also “doing everything necessary” to defend the eastern city of Toretsk as Moscow tries to threaten Ukrainian supply lines. Russia said its forces had captured the nearby town of Zalizne.

• Dmytro Lykhovii, spokesperson for Ukraine’s Tavria group of forces, said Russian ground assaults had decreased on the war’s southern Ukrainian front compared with last week. Likhovey did not say whether it was due to Ukraine’s invasion of the Kursk region, the official Ukrinform news agency said. In the Zaporizhia region around Orekhovo and Gulyai-Polye there had been no clashes for a third day. Only small Russian attacks were mounted on Ukrainian-held positions on the western side of the Dnipro river in the Kherson region, Lykhovii told Ukrainian media, but Russian aircraft continued to carry out strikes with glide bombs.

• The British prime minister, Keir Starmer, “remains absolutely resolute” in supporting Ukraine, his spokesperson said on Monday, after Zelenskiy suggested that UK support “has slowed down recently”.

• Back in Russia, an oil facility in Proletarsk, southern Rostov region, has burned for two days after a Ukrainian drone strike. Russian social media channels reported a massive fire and successive explosions, backed up by pictures and footage online, with 11 storage tanks said to have been destroyed. Forty-one firefighters needed hospital treatment, said the Rostov region governor, Vasily Golubev.

• Russian presidential aide Yuri Ushakov said Moscow was not ready to hold peace talks with Ukraine for now, given the Kursk attack. Ukraine has demanded a full withdrawal of Russian troops from its territory before it sits down for any talks.

Morgan Stanley International chairman Jonathan Bloomer is among those missing after a yacht carrying UK tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch sank off the coast of Sicily during a violent storm, an Italian official has said.

Salvatore Cocina, head of the civil protection agency in Sicily, said Bloomer and Chris Morvillo, a lawyer at Clifford Chance, were among the six people missing. Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter, Hannah, were also unaccounted for as of late Monday.

The update came as it was reported that Lynch’s co-defendant in a US trial related to the sale of his software company to Hewlett-Packard had died after being hit by a car in England.

The British-flagged Bayesian, a 56-metre sailboat, was carrying 22 people and anchored just off shore near the port of Porticello when it was hit by a tornado in the early hours of Monday morning, the Italian coastguard said in an earlier statement.

One man, understood to be the vessel’s chef, was confirmed dead. The coastguard said the missing had British, American and Canadian nationalities.

Fifteen people were rescued, including Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares, who owned the boat, and a one-year-old girl who was saved by her mother.

A spokesperson for Lynch, the co-founder of Autonomy, a software firm that became one of the shining lights of the UK tech scene, declined to comment. Survivors said the trip had been organised by Lynch for his work colleagues.

Once described as Britain’s Bill Gates, Lynch spent much of the last decade in court defending his name against allegations of fraud related to the sale of his software firm, Autonomy, to the US tech company Hewlett-Packard for $11bn.

The 59-year-old was acquitted by a jury in San Francisco in June, after he had spent more than a year living in effect under house arrest.

Hours after news of the sinking broke it emerged that his co-defendant at that trial, Stephen Chamberlain, had died after being hit by a car while out running in Cambridgeshire.

Chamberlain, the former vice-president of finance at Autonomy, was hit on Saturday morning and had been placed on life support, Reuters reported. In a statement Chamberlain’s lawyer, Gary Lincenberg, said he had died after being “fatally struck” by a car while out running.

On Monday, rescue divers were trying to reach the hull of Bayesian, which was carrying a crew of 10 people and 12 passengers, according to the Italian coast guard.

The boat had sunk to approximately 49 metres and the public prosecutor’s office in Termini Imerese was investigating the incident.

“The wind was very strong. Bad weather was expected, but not of this magnitude,” a coast guard official in the Sicilian capital Palermo told Reuters.

The captain of a nearby boat told Reuters that when the winds surged, he had turned on the engine to keep control of his vessel and avoid a collision with the Bayesian, which had been anchored alongside him.

“We managed to keep the ship in position and after the storm was over, we noticed that the ship behind us was gone,” Karsten Borner told journalists. The other boat “went flat on the water, and then down,” he added.

He said his crew then found some of the survivors on a life raft – including a baby girl and her mother – and took them on board before the coast guard picked them up.

Eight of those rescued, including the one-year-old, were transferred to hospitals and were all in a stable condition.

Domenico Cipolla, a chief physician at the Di Cristina hospital in Palermo where the one-year-old girl and her mother were admitted, said: “The baby is doing well. The mother is also in good condition, albeit with some minor abrasions. The father will also be discharged from the hospital soon.

“They have said that most of them were colleagues who worked for Lynch. They are deeply traumatised. As time passes, they realise more and more that this morning they lost many friends.”

Storms and heavy rainfall have swept down Italy in recent days after weeks of scorching heat, which had lifted the temperature of the Mediterranean sea to record levels, raising the risk of extreme weather conditions, experts said.

“The sea surface temperature around Sicily was around 30C (86F), which is almost 3 degrees more than normal. This creates an enormous source of energy that contributes to these storms,” said meteorologist Luca Mercalli.

“We can’t say that this is all due to global warming but we can say that it has an amplifying effect,” he told Reuters.

Mike Lynch, the software millionaire missing after the sinking of a superyacht off the coast of Sicily, is one of the few examples of a UK entrepreneur who has created a global technology company.

That fact has led to seemingly obligatory descriptions of him as “Britain’s Bill Gates” but, in truth, his story differs hugely from that of the Microsoft founder.

Less than three months ago, the 59-year-old was cleared of 15 counts of fraud he had faced in the US over the $11.1bn purchase of his company, Autonomy, by the Silicon Valley giant Hewlett-Packard in 2011, a case he feared would end with him dying in prison because of a lung condition.

“I have various medical things that would have made it very difficult to survive”, Lynch told the Sunday Times last month. “If this had gone the wrong way, it would have been the end of life as I have known it in any sense.”

Born in Ireland, Lynch was raised near Chelmsford in Essex, where his mother was a nurse and his father a firefighter.

He studied physics, mathematics and biochemistry at Cambridge University, eventually specialising in adaptive pattern recognition. His doctoral thesis is reportedly one of the most widely read pieces of research in the university library.

After launching a few early technology startups – including one that specialised in automatic number-plate, fingerprint and facial recognition software for the police – he created Autonomy in 1996.

Its software was used by companies to analyse huge caches of data and partly owed its efficacy to Bayesian inference, a statistical theory devised by the 18th-century statistician, philosopher and Presbyterian minister Thomas Bayes.

The superyacht that sank off Sicily during a violent storm in the early hours of Monday was called Bayesian.

Autonomy was an almost immediate business success. The company floated in Brussels in 1998, and rapid growth coupled with the dotcom boom would lead to a move to the London Stock Exchange, where Autonomy joined the FTSE 100 of top UK-listed companies.

Lynch’s triumphs led to him becoming a science adviser to David Cameron when he was prime minister and a non-executive director of the BBC, as well as receiving an OBE in 2006 for services to enterprise.

However, while Autonomy impressed HP enough to pay more than $11bn for the company in 2011, it only took a year for the US computing giant to take an $8.8bn writedown on its acquisition, saying it had discovered “serious accounting improprieties” at the UK company.

Lynch had effectively been involved in defending his reputation ever since – with the legacy of the claims continuing to have ramifications despite the entrepreneur always denying the allegations of wrongdoing.

Autonomy’s former finance director, Sushovan Hussain, was sentenced to five years in prison in the US after being convicted in 2018 of fraud in relation to the HP deal.

In 2022, Lynch lost a civil fraud case brought by HP in the UK, during which it was said that the businessman exerted control over Hussain and that it was inconceivable that Autonomy’s founder was unaware of the fraudulent practices alleged to have taken place at his company.

Mr Justice Hildyard, the high court judge in the case, had been due to rule on HP’s claim for $4bn in damages and had said the amount he intended to award would be much lower. Lynch had said he intended to appeal against the ruling.

At the companies he ran, Lynch is said to have put his own personal stamp, indulging his penchant for James Bond. Conference rooms were reportedly named after Bond enemies, such as Dr No and Goldfinger, and Autonomy even had a piranha tank in the atrium, in a nod to the 007 caper You Only Live Twice.

This professional portrait of Lynch seems slightly at odds with what is known about him personally: married, with two daughters, he was reported to spend his spare time building model railways and breeding koi carp.

Since being acquitted in the US, he had said he planned to address the imbalance he perceived in the extradition treaty between the UK and the US. “It has to be wrong that a US prosecutor has more power over a British citizen living in England than the UK police do,” he said.

He and his wife, Angela Bacares, who was reported to have been rescued from the Bayesian, were said to be worth £500m in this year’s Sunday Times Rich List.

One of Lynch’s daughters, aged 18, is also understood to be among the four Britons missing after the yacht sank. Two Americans and a Canadian person are also missing.

Stephen Chamberlain, once Mike Lynch’s co-defendant in a US fraud trial, has died after being hit by a car while out running in Cambridgeshire, his lawyer has said.

Chamberlain, the former vice-president of finance at British software firm Autonomy, was hit on Saturday morning and had been placed on life support, Reuters reported.

On Monday Lynch was reported missing after a superyacht sank off the coast of Sicily during a violent storm. One man, understood to be the vessel’s chef, was confirmed dead and six others, including Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter, Hannah, remained unaccounted for on Monday evening.

Chamberlain died after being “fatally struck” by a car while out running, his lawyer Gary Lincenberg said.

Lincenberg added: “He was a courageous man with unparalleled integrity, and we deeply miss him. He fought successfully to clear his good name, which lives on through his wonderful family.”

Cambridgeshire police had appealed for witnesses after the collision in Newmarket Road in the village of Stretham. The force had said a man in his 50s had been taken to hospital with serious injuries.

Chamberlain and Lynch were co-defendants in a fraud trial over the sale of Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard in 2011 for $11bn (£7bn).

The pair faced the same charges of fraud and conspiracy for allegedly scheming to inflate the company’s value before it was sold.

Both men were acquitted of all 15 charges by a jury in San Francisco in June.

After leaving Autonomy in 2012, Chamberlain worked as chief operating officer for cybersecurity firm Darktrace and volunteered as a finance director for League One football club Cambridge United.

Former Republican congressman George Santos pleaded guilty to committing wire fraud and aggravated identity theft in a federal fraud case marking yet another low point for a politician famed for the outlandish lies and fantasies he peddled during his short but high profile political career.

“I understand that my actions have betrayed my supporters and constituents,” Santos said in an emotional statement during the hearing. “I am committed to making amends and learning from this experience.”

The disgraced ex-congressman faces a two-year mandatory minimum sentence under federal guidelines, but in court US district judge Joanna Seybert estimated a possible sentencing range between six and eight years when he returns to court again on 7 February.

Santos, 36, had previously pleaded not guilty to a range of alleged financial crimes, including lying to Congress about his wealth, collecting unemployment benefits while actually working and using campaign contributions to pay for personal expenses.

The New York Republican entered the plea in a courtroom in Long Island just weeks before his trial was set to begin in early September. The prospect of a plea deal was raised late last week when a surprise court hearing was requested by prosecutors and Santos’s lawyers. Prior to the deal, two Santos campaign aides had already pleaded guilty to related crimes.

Santos was once touted as a rising political star after he flipped the suburban Long Island district in New York state. But his story rapidly unspooled in the glare of public life as reports emerged he had lied about having a career at top Wall Street firms and a college degree along with other questions of his biography.

Even in the Republican party of Donald Trump, where scandals over truth-telling have become an almost daily event, Santos managed to draw enormously negative attention. Members of his own party turned upon him, demanding he resign.

New scandals then emerged about his campaign funds.

Santos was first indicted on federal charges in May 2023, but refused to resign from office. Santos was expelled from Congress after an ethics investigation found “overwhelming evidence” that he had broken the law and exploited his public position for his profit.

Following the plea proceeding, US attorney Breon Peace said that after years of telling lies, Santos “had finally told the truth – and that truth is that he is a criminal”.

“As a result he’ll finally be held to account for his actions, he’ll go to prison for at least two years, be required to forfeit the money he made illegally and required to repay the victims he swindled,” Peace said.

Peace added that the government recognized that it was a “sad day when an elected official admits to criminal activity”. The residents of Santos’s congressional district, he added, had elected to him “to represent them honorably and honestly”.

“Instead they were badly deceived and came to learn they were victims of a fraud of unprecedented proportion and they had to watch helplessly as Santos rode into Congress on a campaign of lies,” he said.

Separately on Monday, in Manhattan federal court, the judge Denise Cote tossed out a lawsuit in which Santos claimed that late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, ABC and Disney committed copyright infringement and unjustly enriched themselves at his expense by using videos he made on the Cameo app for a Jimmy Kimmel Live! segment.

The judge said it was clear that Kimmel used the clips, which were also posted to YouTube, for the purposes of criticism and commentary, which is fair use.

Santos had begun selling personalized videos on Cameo in December shortly after his ouster from Congress. He subsequently launched, then quickly abandoned, a long shot bid to return to Congress as an independent earlier this year.

Prosecutors had been seeking to admit as evidence some of the financial falsehoods Santos told during his campaign, including that he’d worked at Citigroup and Goldman Sachs and that he had operated a family-run firm with approximately $80m in assets.

The two Santos campaign aides that had already pleaded guilty to crimes related to the former congressman’s campaign were his ex-treasurer, Nancy Marks, pleaded guilty in October to a fraud conspiracy charge and implicated Santos in an alleged scheme to embellish his campaign finance reports.

Sam Miele, a former fundraiser for Santos, pleaded guilty a month later to a federal wire fraud charge, admitting he impersonated a high-ranking congressional aide while raising money for Santos’s campaign.

He subsequently launched a long-shot bid to return to Congress as an independent earlier this year. After that failed, he said he was pleased to be a “somewhat private civilian” again.

“I really don’t miss the rubber chicken dinners and the rah-rah-rah parties and fundraisers,” he said of his short-lived political career as a elected politician.

The Associated Press contributed to this report

Former Republican congressman George Santos pleaded guilty to committing wire fraud and aggravated identity theft in a federal fraud case marking yet another low point for a politician famed for the outlandish lies and fantasies he peddled during his short but high profile political career.

“I understand that my actions have betrayed my supporters and constituents,” Santos said in an emotional statement during the hearing. “I am committed to making amends and learning from this experience.”

The disgraced ex-congressman faces a two-year mandatory minimum sentence under federal guidelines, but in court US district judge Joanna Seybert estimated a possible sentencing range between six and eight years when he returns to court again on 7 February.

Santos, 36, had previously pleaded not guilty to a range of alleged financial crimes, including lying to Congress about his wealth, collecting unemployment benefits while actually working and using campaign contributions to pay for personal expenses.

The New York Republican entered the plea in a courtroom in Long Island just weeks before his trial was set to begin in early September. The prospect of a plea deal was raised late last week when a surprise court hearing was requested by prosecutors and Santos’s lawyers. Prior to the deal, two Santos campaign aides had already pleaded guilty to related crimes.

Santos was once touted as a rising political star after he flipped the suburban Long Island district in New York state. But his story rapidly unspooled in the glare of public life as reports emerged he had lied about having a career at top Wall Street firms and a college degree along with other questions of his biography.

Even in the Republican party of Donald Trump, where scandals over truth-telling have become an almost daily event, Santos managed to draw enormously negative attention. Members of his own party turned upon him, demanding he resign.

New scandals then emerged about his campaign funds.

Santos was first indicted on federal charges in May 2023, but refused to resign from office. Santos was expelled from Congress after an ethics investigation found “overwhelming evidence” that he had broken the law and exploited his public position for his profit.

Following the plea proceeding, US attorney Breon Peace said that after years of telling lies, Santos “had finally told the truth – and that truth is that he is a criminal”.

“As a result he’ll finally be held to account for his actions, he’ll go to prison for at least two years, be required to forfeit the money he made illegally and required to repay the victims he swindled,” Peace said.

Peace added that the government recognized that it was a “sad day when an elected official admits to criminal activity”. The residents of Santos’s congressional district, he added, had elected to him “to represent them honorably and honestly”.

“Instead they were badly deceived and came to learn they were victims of a fraud of unprecedented proportion and they had to watch helplessly as Santos rode into Congress on a campaign of lies,” he said.

Separately on Monday, in Manhattan federal court, the judge Denise Cote tossed out a lawsuit in which Santos claimed that late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, ABC and Disney committed copyright infringement and unjustly enriched themselves at his expense by using videos he made on the Cameo app for a Jimmy Kimmel Live! segment.

The judge said it was clear that Kimmel used the clips, which were also posted to YouTube, for the purposes of criticism and commentary, which is fair use.

Santos had begun selling personalized videos on Cameo in December shortly after his ouster from Congress. He subsequently launched, then quickly abandoned, a long shot bid to return to Congress as an independent earlier this year.

Prosecutors had been seeking to admit as evidence some of the financial falsehoods Santos told during his campaign, including that he’d worked at Citigroup and Goldman Sachs and that he had operated a family-run firm with approximately $80m in assets.

The two Santos campaign aides that had already pleaded guilty to crimes related to the former congressman’s campaign were his ex-treasurer, Nancy Marks, pleaded guilty in October to a fraud conspiracy charge and implicated Santos in an alleged scheme to embellish his campaign finance reports.

Sam Miele, a former fundraiser for Santos, pleaded guilty a month later to a federal wire fraud charge, admitting he impersonated a high-ranking congressional aide while raising money for Santos’s campaign.

He subsequently launched a long-shot bid to return to Congress as an independent earlier this year. After that failed, he said he was pleased to be a “somewhat private civilian” again.

“I really don’t miss the rubber chicken dinners and the rah-rah-rah parties and fundraisers,” he said of his short-lived political career as a elected politician.

The Associated Press contributed to this report

George Santos’s plea deal invites a review of the former Republican representative’s most enduring, sometimes fabulous – but reliably pointless – false statements that destroyed the career of someone briefly seen as a potential young star of the Republican parties.

Here are some of the main ones.

The US secretary of state has said during a visit to Israel that the current round of ceasefire talks is “maybe the last opportunity” to broker a truce and a hostage and prisoner swap in the 10-month-old war in Gaza.

Antony Blinken met Israeli officials, including in a three-hour one-on-one with the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, on Monday during a 24-hour trip to Tel Aviv before he travels on to Egypt.

The US diplomat’s trip – his ninth since the war broke out – is part of renewed international efforts to broker a ceasefire after the recent assassinations of a top Hezbollah commander and Hamas’s political chief, Ismail Haniyeh, in Lebanon and Iran.

After the meeting, Blinken told reporters that Netanyahu “supports” the ceasefire proposal, according to the Associated Press.

“In a very constructive meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu today, he confirmed to me that Israel supports the bridging [ceasefire] proposal,” Blinken said. “The next important step is for Hamas to say yes.”

US officials have been accused of being too optimistic in their regular claims that negotiators were on the verge of striking a deal. But on Monday Netanyahu’s office also put out a rare public statement backing the US bridging proposal.

“The prime minister reiterated Israel’s commitment to the current American proposal on the release of our hostages, which takes into account Israel’s security needs, which he strongly insists on,” the statement read.

A spokesperson for Netanyahu confirmed that the prime minister had told Blinken that Israel had agreed to the bridging proposal, the New York Times reported.

The killings of Haniyeh and the Hezbollah commander had set the Middle East on edge, and a cessation of hostilities in Gaza has been seen as the best way to cool the regional tensions. Tehran and the powerful Lebanese militia have threatened retaliatory action.

“This is a decisive moment, probably the best, maybe the last, opportunity to get the hostages home, to get a ceasefire and to put everyone on a better path to enduring peace and security,” Blinken said before a meeting with Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog.

“It’s also time to make sure that no one takes any steps that could derail this process,” he said in a veiled reference to Iran. “And so we’re working to make sure that there is no escalation, that there are no provocations, that there are no actions that in any way move us away from getting this deal over the line, or for that matter, escalate the conflict to other places and to greater intensity.”

The latest negotiations began in Doha last week and are expected to resume in Cairo on Wednesday or Thursday, but optimism from international mediators at the close of two days of Qatar negotiations has not been matched by Israel or Hamas.

In its first official comments since the new round of talks began, Hamas said on Sunday night that the latest proposal on the table was a capitulation to Israel that “responds to Netanyahu’s conditions”, negating the possibility of future talks. Hamas is not directly participating in the latest round and is instead being briefed on developments by the mediators Qatar and Egypt.

Israel, too, has expressed an unwillingness to compromise on points such as the withdrawal of troops from the Gaza-Egypt border. Netanyahu said at the start of his weekly cabinet meeting on Sunday: “There are things we can be flexible on and there are things that we cannot be flexible on, which we will insist on.”

The plan would involve an initial six-week ceasefire during which a limited number of Israeli hostages would be freed in exchange for Palestinians held in Israeli jails, and the amount of humanitarian aid entering the strip would increase.

Unlike the week-long truce that collapsed at the end of November, this ceasefire would be indefinitely extendable while negotiators work on the next stage, which would involve another round of hostage and prisoner swaps and a drawdown of Israeli troops.

There have been reports of friction between Netanyahu and his negotiating team over the future of the Gaza-Egypt border zone, known in Israel as the Philadelphi corridor. The Israeli news website Ynet reported on Monday that the prime minister had refused to countenance giving up control of the area, although members of the security establishment, including his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, believed a compromise could be reached with the use of surveillance technology.

Netanyahu’s critics have repeatedly accused him of stalling on implementing a deal in order to appease his rightwing allies, who have threatened to collapse his government. The longtime Israeli leader sees staying in office as the best way of avoiding a conviction for corruption charges, which he denies.

An Israeli delegation travelled to Egypt on Sunday to discuss the possibility of a withdrawal mechanism from Rafah, but no progress was made on the issue and the delegation did not offer anything new, an Egyptian official told Agence France-Presse.

Hours after Blinken landed in Tel Aviv there was a small explosion in the city in which one person was killed and another injured. It was later claimed as a suicide bombing by the armed wings of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Hamas had stopped using the tactic in 2005.

The groups threatened to carry out more such attacks in Israel “as long as the occupation’s massacres, the displacement of civilians and the policy of assassinations continue”.

Despite Blinken’s plea that “no one takes any steps that could derail” the ceasefire talks, violence continued to rage in Gaza and on the Israel-Lebanon border on Monday. An Israeli soldier and two Hezbollah fighters were killed in cross-border clashes, the Israeli military and the Lebanese militant group confirmed.

On Monday night the Israeli army said it had hit “a number of Hezbollah weapons storage facilities” in Lebanon’s eastern Bekaa Valley.

At least three Israeli airstrikes hit towns in the Baalbek district, Lebanese state media reported.

Videos from the scene showed a large fire and multiple explosions after the initial strike, the Associated Press reported.

The Israeli army said that “following the strikes, secondary explosions were identified, indicating the presence of large amounts of weapons in the facilities struck”.

In Gaza, three people were reported killed in an Israeli airstrike in the southern village of Abassan, and airstrikes in Khan Younis killed a baby and injured several women, medics in the Hamas-dominated territory said. The Israeli military said it had struck “45 terrorist targets” in the past 24 hours and ground forces were operating in the Khan Younis area.

About 170,000 people have been displaced in the past week after the Israeli army issued new evacuation orders across southern Gaza, including for some areas previously designated as humanitarian safe zones. According to the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the UN’s humanitarian agency, just 11% of Gaza’s total area is now deemed “safe”, although Israel has also bombed the humanitarian zones on several occasions.

Almost all of the strip’s 2.3 million population have been displaced from their homes and 40,000 people have been killed amid a devastating humanitarian crisis, according to the local health authority.

About 1,200 people were killed and 250 taken hostage in Hamas’s 7 October attack on southern Israel that triggered the war.

US intelligence officials have confirmed that Iran was behind a hack of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, authorities said on Monday.

In a joint statement, the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said it attributed “recently reported activities to compromise former President Trump’s campaign” to Iran, and that the intelligence community is “confident that the Iranians have through social engineering and other efforts sought access to individuals with direct access to the presidential campaigns of both political parties”.

Iran’s efforts include “thefts and disclosures” and “are intended to influence the US election process”, the statement said.

The announcement comes a week after several news organizations, including the New York Times, the Washington Post and Politico, reported that they had received internal campaign records, including a dossier on Ohio senator JD Vance, Trump’s running mate.

The former president had blamed the Iranian government in the immediate aftermath, saying Microsoft informed the campaign about the hack. Trump also asserted that “only publicly available information” was taken.

Last week, Kamala Harris’s campaign said the FBI had warned that it had been targeted by foreign hackers. Officials with the vice-president’s campaign said its cybersecurity measured had successfully thwarted the hacking attempt.

The hacking efforts were part of a broader campaign to impact the US election, the intelligence officials’ statement said: “Iran perceives this year’s elections to be particularly consequential in terms of the impact they could have on its national security interests, increasing Tehran’s inclination to try to shape the outcome. We have observed increasingly aggressive Iranian activity during this election cycle, specifically involving influence operations targeting the American public and cyber operations targeting presidential campaigns.”

The FBI has been in contact with victims of the hacking and “will continue to investigate and gather information in order to pursue and disrupt the threat actors responsible”, the statement said, adding: “We will not tolerate foreign efforts to influence or interfere with our elections, including the targeting of American political campaigns.”

In 2016, Hillary Clinton’s campaign was hacked, leading to the release of internal emails, which became a major controversy in the presidential campaign. Russian intelligence officers were later indicted for that hack.

Donald Trump shared several AI-generated images of Taylor Swift and her fans vowing their support for his presidential campaign on Sunday, reposting them with the caption “I accept!” on his Truth Social platform. The deepfakes are part of a slew of images made with artificial intelligence that the former president has disseminated in recent days straddling the line between parody and outright election disinformation.

The AI-made images Trump shared over the weekend depict a series of young, smiling women in “Swifties for Trump” T-shirts, as well as one that shows Swift dressed as Uncle Sam encouraging people to vote for the Republican presidential nominee. Each image is a screenshot from X, formerly known as Twitter, and was originally posted by rightwing accounts with a history of sharing misinformation. Swift has not endorsed Trump.

Trump’s posts come days after he also shared an AI-generated image that depicted Kamala Harris holding a communist military rally at the Democratic national convention, as well as a deepfake video of him dancing with the X owner, Elon Musk, who has endorsed him. Trump’s embrace of AI-generated imagery threatens to further cloud an already murky information ecosystem around the 2024 presidential election. The former president routinely promotes falsehoods and conspiracy theories.

Concern over AI-generated content influencing elections has persisted throughout the recent boom in generative artificial intelligence, with researchers warning for years that the technology has the potential to make it easier to create disinformation campaigns and flood online platforms with low-grade content. AI-generated misinformation has circulated around elections all over the world, as video and images are used to troll opponents, fake endorsements and create deepfake audio intended to damage candidates.

While Trump shared AI-generated images in the past week, he also falsely claimed that a genuine image of one of Harris’s campaign rallies was the result of artificial intelligence and that the well-documented event never took place. His claim reflected a concept which disinformation researchers call the “liar’s dividend”, in which an increase in manipulated content leads to general skepticism of all media and makes it easier for people such as politicians to dismiss authentic images, audio or video as fake.

Although most AI image generators from industry mainstays such as OpenAI or Microsoft have put guardrails on what they can create, banning images of public figures and declining prompts for political imagery, some users have found workarounds for some AI models or turned to others that lack such safety measures. Musk’s Grok image generator, which debuted last week, is able to create a range of images based on prompts that similar tools will reject and has led to a recent spike in AI content around the election. These include images of political leaders, celebrities and copyrighted works, as well as sexualized and violent content.

Almost immediately after Musk released Grok’s AI image generator, deepfake images of Trump and Harris proliferated on X. Many news outlets also reported that the tool could create images of Swift, which was notable given that earlier this year AI companies faced intense backlash after sexualized deepfakes of the pop star circulated widely on social media. Swift has not endorsed a candidate for president, but in 2020 harshly criticized Trump for “stoking the fires of white supremacy” and vowed to vote him out of office.

Other Republican groups have also dabbled in sharing AI-generated imagery this election season, including Ron DeSantis’s campaign during his failed bid for the GOP nomination. The Florida governor’s campaign shared a fake image of Trump hugging Anthony Fauci, who is a frequent target for conservative attacks. The Republican National Committee also sparked controversy last year when it released a partially AI-generated attack ad against Joe Biden, depicting a hellscape following his hypothetical election win.

Donald Trump shared several AI-generated images of Taylor Swift and her fans vowing their support for his presidential campaign on Sunday, reposting them with the caption “I accept!” on his Truth Social platform. The deepfakes are part of a slew of images made with artificial intelligence that the former president has disseminated in recent days straddling the line between parody and outright election disinformation.

The AI-made images Trump shared over the weekend depict a series of young, smiling women in “Swifties for Trump” T-shirts, as well as one that shows Swift dressed as Uncle Sam encouraging people to vote for the Republican presidential nominee. Each image is a screenshot from X, formerly known as Twitter, and was originally posted by rightwing accounts with a history of sharing misinformation. Swift has not endorsed Trump.

Trump’s posts come days after he also shared an AI-generated image that depicted Kamala Harris holding a communist military rally at the Democratic national convention, as well as a deepfake video of him dancing with the X owner, Elon Musk, who has endorsed him. Trump’s embrace of AI-generated imagery threatens to further cloud an already murky information ecosystem around the 2024 presidential election. The former president routinely promotes falsehoods and conspiracy theories.

Concern over AI-generated content influencing elections has persisted throughout the recent boom in generative artificial intelligence, with researchers warning for years that the technology has the potential to make it easier to create disinformation campaigns and flood online platforms with low-grade content. AI-generated misinformation has circulated around elections all over the world, as video and images are used to troll opponents, fake endorsements and create deepfake audio intended to damage candidates.

While Trump shared AI-generated images in the past week, he also falsely claimed that a genuine image of one of Harris’s campaign rallies was the result of artificial intelligence and that the well-documented event never took place. His claim reflected a concept which disinformation researchers call the “liar’s dividend”, in which an increase in manipulated content leads to general skepticism of all media and makes it easier for people such as politicians to dismiss authentic images, audio or video as fake.

Although most AI image generators from industry mainstays such as OpenAI or Microsoft have put guardrails on what they can create, banning images of public figures and declining prompts for political imagery, some users have found workarounds for some AI models or turned to others that lack such safety measures. Musk’s Grok image generator, which debuted last week, is able to create a range of images based on prompts that similar tools will reject and has led to a recent spike in AI content around the election. These include images of political leaders, celebrities and copyrighted works, as well as sexualized and violent content.

Almost immediately after Musk released Grok’s AI image generator, deepfake images of Trump and Harris proliferated on X. Many news outlets also reported that the tool could create images of Swift, which was notable given that earlier this year AI companies faced intense backlash after sexualized deepfakes of the pop star circulated widely on social media. Swift has not endorsed a candidate for president, but in 2020 harshly criticized Trump for “stoking the fires of white supremacy” and vowed to vote him out of office.

Other Republican groups have also dabbled in sharing AI-generated imagery this election season, including Ron DeSantis’s campaign during his failed bid for the GOP nomination. The Florida governor’s campaign shared a fake image of Trump hugging Anthony Fauci, who is a frequent target for conservative attacks. The Republican National Committee also sparked controversy last year when it released a partially AI-generated attack ad against Joe Biden, depicting a hellscape following his hypothetical election win.

The president of the University of California has announced that the system would enforce bans on encampments as well as the use of masks to “conceal identity” in guidance that comes as schools across the US are planning for protests in support of Gaza similar to those that roiled campuses across the country.

Michael V Drake, the president of the 10-campus university system, said in a statement on Monday that the UC was taking steps to “ensure a safe, inclusive campus climate that fosters a free exchange of ideas”.

“Freedom to express diverse viewpoints is fundamental to the mission of the University, and lawful protests play a pivotal role in that process,” Drake wrote. “While the vast majority of protests held on our campuses are peaceful and nonviolent, some of the activities we saw this past year were not.”

Pro-Palestinian protests swept universities across the US and UC saw demonstrations at campuses from San Diego and Santa Cruz to Davis. At UCLA, demonstrators were violently attacked by a group of masked persons as law enforcement and campus security looked on.

The protests unfolded differently on the system’s various campuses, and some schools’ responses drew more scrutiny than others. But many of the schools, and the system as a whole, drew criticism, including by those who said the system was permitting an unsafe environment for Jewish students and those frustrated over the treatment of protesters.

Before classes began this week, Drake clarified policies around prohibiting encampments and “unauthorized structures” as well as masking in order to hide identity and refusing to reveal one’s identity to university personnel. He also directed university leaders to strictly and consistently enforce the rules.

The announcement comes as students, too, have been planning for the fall semester. At UCLA, student organizers with the Palestine Solidarity Coalition (a network that emerged from the school’s spring encampment and includes Students for Justice in Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace and UC Divest) spent their summer holding workshops, called the People’s University for a Liberated Palestine. As the new academic year begins, “students are also getting organized to spread education about divestment”, said Marie Salem, a PhD student and media liaison for the coalition.

Student protest efforts at the school may be hamstrung by the legal and academic disciplinary charges still hanging over more than 200 students arrested when police cleared the school’s encampment in May. The majority of those arrests were on misdemeanor charges, which the Los Angeles city attorney’s office handles. A spokesperson for the office told the Guardian that it had received five referrals on those cases. There is a one-year period in which charges can be filed. The county district attorney’s office, which handles felony charges, did not respond to a request for comment from the Guardian, but told the Los Angeles Times in August that all UCLA cases “are currently under review”. At least 55 students who were arrested in May also received letters from the university threatening to place a hold on their academic records or withhold their degrees.

“These legal efforts of repression of specifically our movement set really dangerous precedents for the future,” said Agnes, a recent UCLA graduate and member of Jewish Voice for Peace, who preferred only to use her first name.

Members of UCLA’s Faculty for Justice in Palestine spent the summer connecting students with legal aid and supporting them as they made their first appearances in court, said Graeme Blair, a UCLA political science professor and member of the group. In the new school year, they plan to closely monitor the university and UC system’s policies on encampments and policing on campus. To that end, faculty filed an amicus brief in opposition to a lawsuit three Jewish UCLA students filed that could limit protests on campus.

On 14 August, a US district judge ruled that UCLA cannot allow pro-Palestinian protesters to block Jewish students from accessing classes and other parts of campus. The university immediately appealed the ruling, arguing that protesters, not the university, blocked Jewish students’ access to the school. UCLA administration did not respond to the Guardian’s requests for comment on the injunction or other steps it is taking to prepare for the academic year.

Michael Madsen has been arrested on a domestic battery charge following “a disagreement” with his wife.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department confirmed that shortly after midnight on Saturday, they received a call from a woman alleging “her husband pushed her and locked her out of the house”. The woman was later confirmed to be the actor’s wife, DeAnna Madsen.

Madsen, who has starred in multiple Quentin Tarantino films including Reservoir Dogs, The Hateful Eight, Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood and Kill Bill, was arrested in Malibu, California on the misdemeanour charge.

The 66-year-old actor posted a $20,000 (£15,300) bond before being released from custody.

“It was a disagreement between Michael and his wife, which we hope resolves positively for them both,” a representative for Madsen told Variety.

During his career, Madsen also starred in the Free Willy film franchise as Glen Greenwood, the adoptive father of protagonist Jesse Greenwood – played by Jason James Richter in the first three films from 1993 until 1997.

He has also appeared in Thelma & Louise, Sin City and Donnie Brasco, as well as the James Bond film Die Another Day.

Press Association contributed to this report

A rocket company has vowed to return to regular operations “as soon as possible” after an explosion during a test at the UK’s new spaceport in Shetland.

The test was carried out by German company Rocket Factory Augsburg (RFA) which hopes to make the first UK vertical rocket launch into orbit.

Monday’s nine-engine test, which took place at SaxaVord Spaceport on the island of Unst, was one of the trials due to be carried out before progressing to launch.

RFA said an “anomaly” had led to “the loss of the stage” but there were no injuries.

“The launch pad has been saved and is secured, the situation is under control, and any immediate danger has been mitigated.”

RFA, which is based in Augsburg, Germany, said it was working with the spaceport and authorities to find the cause of the failure.

The company’s spokesperson said: “We develop iteratively with an emphasis on real testing.

“This is part of our philosophy and we were aware of the higher risks attached to this approach. Our goal is to return to regular operations as soon as possible.”

It comes three months after the site’s first rocket test was carried out and declared a success.

On that occasion, RFA fired the engines for eight seconds before shutting down.

Unst, which has about 650 inhabitants, is at the northernmost tip of the British Isles and was one of the first Viking outposts in the North Atlantic. Its location means that rockets lifting off from the site do not need to pass over populated areas, unlike those launched from other sites, which have to perform dog-leg manoeuvres, limiting the weight of the payload they can carry.

Late last year, the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) gave approval for the first rockets to take off into space from the island.

It will allow up to 30 satellites and other payloads to be launched into commercially valuable polar, sun-synchronous orbits, which are in high demand from satellite operators for communications and Earth observation.

Two men have been charged with murder in the killing of General Hospital actor Johnny Wactor, the Los Angeles district attorney’s office announced on Monday.

Wactor was shot and killed when he interrupted three thieves stealing the catalytic converter from his car on 25 May. Police said the 37-year-old had left work at a downtown LA rooftop bar with a coworker when he saw three men who had hoisted his car. Police said one of them fired at him without provocation and killed him.

“The loss of this talented young actor, who was in the prime of his life and had so much to offer the world, is deeply felt by all of us,” George Gascón, Los Angeles district attorney, said at a news conference.

The four suspects – Robert Barceleau, 18; Sergio Estrada, 18; Leonel Gutierrez, 18; and Frank Olano, 22, were all arrested Thursday. Gascón announced their charges today.

It is not clear whether any have yet retained lawyers. An email to the county public defender’s office seeking comment on the case was not immediately answered.

Barceleau and Estrada were both charged with murder as well as grand theft and attempted robbery.

Barceleau’s charges include special circumstances, including murder during an attempted robbery and personal use of a firearm, that after a conviction could lead to a life sentence without possibility of parole. Estrada’s charges have a maximum sentence of life in prison.

Gutierrez was charged with grand theft and attempted robbery, and Olano was charged with being an accessory after the fact.

Wactor’s death has become a rallying point for some in the city pushing for a more hardline approach to fighting crime.

A group consisting of family and friends calling itself “Justice for Johnny” held a rally last week calling for more urgency in the investigation, and another Monday morning calling for aggressive prosecution.

Police and public officials said that is exactly what is happening.

LAPD interim chief Dominic Choi said at Monday’s news conference that the investigation has been an “ongoing and relentless pursuit” in a “very difficult case”.

“I want to thank the LAPD for their work and partnership throughout the investigation and for their continued efforts to keep Angelenos safe and to bring justice to victims of violence,” Mayor Karen Bass said in a statement. “We must continue to take aggressive action to make our city safer. Those who commit crimes must be held fully responsible for their actions.”

Barceleau was being held without bail, and Estrada on just over $1m bail.

Associated Press contributed to this report