Describing the “contagious power of hope,” Michelle Obama made a call for values of “work and scrape and sacrifice” to be honored in the politics of the country.

“To be honest, I’m realizing that until recently, I have mourned the dimming of that hope. Maybe you’ve experienced the same feelings, a deep pit in my stomach, a palpable sense of dread about the future,” Obama told the Democratic national convention in Chicago.

The former first lady mourned her mother Marian Robinson with her speech – “the woman who showed me the meaning of hard work, humility and decency”, who died in May aged 86.

“She was glad to do the thankless, unglamorous work that for generations has strengthened the fabric of this nation,” Obama said.

Obama noted the sacrifices that Kamala Harris’s mother made to come to the United States from India, and how she instilled values of service and sacrifice in the Democratic nominee.

“Kamala Harris is more than ready for this moment,” Obama said. “No one has the monopoly on what it means to be an American. No one. Only Kamala Harris truly understand the unseen labor and unwavering commitment that has always made America great.”

Obama, a former hospital executive in Chicago, took direct and indirect swipes at the Republican nominee for president, Donald Trump, who has frequently antagonized the Obamas. Perhaps most notably, Trump was outspoken during Barack Obama’s campaign for president in 2008 about a racist movement that falsely claimed Obama was ineligible to be president because he was not a natural-born citizen of the United States.

Harris, Michelle Obama said, “understands that most of us will never be afforded the grace of failing forward. We will never benefit from the affirmative action of generational wealth. If we bankrupt a business or choke in a crisis, we don’t get a second, third or fourth chance. If things don’t go our way, we don’t have the luxury of whining or cheating others to get further ahead. If we see a mountain in front of us, we don’t expect there to be an escalator waiting to take us to the top.”

“Who is going to tell him [Trump] that the job that he is seeking might be one of those Black jobs,” Obama said, to thunderous applause.

Obama derided the politics of petty spite, of book banning and misogynistic attacks before introducing her husband.

“Let me tell you, going small is never the answer,” Obama said.

Kamala Harris has pushed back on Donald Trump for saying he has “no regrets” about overturning Roe v Wade and ending women’s access to abortion in much of the US.

“Yesterday, when he was asked if he has any regrets about ending Roe v Wade, Donald Trump, without even a moment’s hesitation – you would think you’d reflect on it for a second – said: ‘No regrets,’” said the vice-president at tonight’s rally in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, just after a raucous ceremonial roll call at the Democratic national convention being held in Chicago confirmed her as the party’s nominee for president.

“Bad behavior should result in a consequence. Well, we will make sure he does face a consequence, and that’ll be at the ballot box in November.”

The remarks come on the heels of the former president’s repeated boasts about overturning Roe v Wade.

On Monday, he told CBS News: “The federal government should have nothing to do with this issue. It’s being solved at the state level and people are very happy about it.”

He added: “No regrets, no. I wouldn’t have regrets. I did something most people felt was undoable.”

In her address, Harris touted her affordable housing plan to support first-time buyers and then moved on to criticizing Project 2025: “Can you believe they put that thing in writing? That plan tells us what they are up to. Donald Trump intends to give tax breaks to billionaires and big corporations … he wants to impose what is, in effect, a national sales tax, which will cost a typical family $3,900 a year.”

She warned about the potential end to the Affordable Care Act: “Remember what that was like when insurance companies could deny people with pre-existing conditions? Breast cancer survivors, children with diabetes, grandparents … being denied care. We’re not going back.”

Harris said the stakes were higher than ever before for the country.

“This is not 2016 or 2020,” she said, arguing that Trump has become more dangerous as he seeks a second term. “The stakes are higher,” she added, pointing to the supreme court’s immunity ruling for presidents. She raised Trump’s comments promising to be a dictator on his first day in office, and suggested he would terminate the constitution.

The speech was not without issue among the crowd. Someone had a medical emergency and, from the stage, Harris asked for medical help. She instructed rally-goers to clear a path. After a few moments, Harris declared: “We’re going to be OK. This is what we’re about, looking out for each other.”

The vice-president, alongside her running mate Tim Walz, made a brief virtual appearance at the Democratic convention, which is continuing.

At the start of her address to the convention, Harris praised Joe Biden: “Wasn’t he terrific last night? I know we are all deeply grateful for his lifetime of service to this nation. Thank you, Joe. We know this is going to be a tight race until the very end … We will win.”

She sounded hoarse, but energetic: “This is not just about us versus Donald Trump. This is about two very different visions for our nation. Ours is focused on the future.”

Stephanie Grisham, Donald Trump’s former press secretary, excoriated the Republican presidential nominee at the Democratic national convention on Tuesday, saying: “He has no empathy, no morals and no fidelity to the truth.”

Grisham, a Republican operative who also served as a spokesperson to Melania Trump, offered firsthand accounts of the former president’s behavior behind closed doors.

“I wasn’t just a Trump supporter, I was a true believer, I was one of his closest advisers. The Trump family became my family,” she said, saying she spent her holidays at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence. “I saw him when the cameras were off … Trump mocks his supporters. He calls them basement dwellers. On a hospital visit one time when people were dying in the ICU, he was mad that the cameras were not watching him.”

She continued: “He used to tell me: ‘It doesn’t matter what you say, Stephanie, say it enough and people will believe you.’” She repeated a story she has told before: that during the January 6 insurrection, she asked Melania Trump whether she could tweet that there was “no place for lawlessness or violence”, and the first lady gave a one-word reply: “No.”

Grisham earned applause when she said she was the first senior staffer to resign that day. She ended her short speech with an endorsement of Kamala Harris, saying: “I love my country more than my party. Kamala Harris tells the truth. She respects the American people and she has my vote.”

The Harris campaign and the Democratic national convention have been highlighting Republican voters who oppose Trump and are supporting the Democratic ticket.

Before Grisham, Kyle Sweetser, an Alabama voter, told the convention crowd that he voted for Trump three times and repeatedly donated to the Republican: “He told us he’d look out for blue-collar workers.” But Trump’s tariffs policy negatively affected him, he said: “Costs for construction workers like me were starting to soar. I realized Trump wasn’t for me. He was for lining his own pockets.”

Sweetster added: “I’m not leftwing, period. But I believe our leaders should bring out the best in us, not the worst. That’s why I’m voting for Kamala Harris. She’s tough. She’s going to tackle inflation. Trump will make it worse. I’m voting for Kamala Harris because she’ll make us proud to be American again.”

Other Republicans due to speak at the convention include Olivia Troye, a national security staffer who worked for Mike Pence, the former vice-president; Adam Kinzinger, a former Republican representative who has been a vocal critic of Trump; John Giles, the Republican mayor of Mesa, Arizona; and Geoff Duncan, the former lieutenant governor of Georgia.

Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, also showed up at the convention on Tuesday night. He and Trump have fallen out, and Cohen served as a witness for the prosecution in Trump’s hush-money trial in New York. It wasn’t exactly clear why he showed up, but when a reporter asked if he’d speak at the convention, he responded: “only if they let me” and “of course I would.”

Democratic convention highlights:

• When are Michelle and Barack Obama speaking?

• The lineup of notable Democratic speakers tonight

• Obama to bring message of hope to convention speech

• Here are the rising stars and politicians to watch this week

• What to know about Kamala Harris and Tim Walz

The father of the trainee doctor murdered during a rest break at a Kolkata hospital has spoken of his daughter’s love of medicine and the way her family had worked to support her vocation.

“We are a poor family and we raised her with a lot of hardship. She worked extremely hard to become a doctor. All she did was study, study, study,” he told the Guardian by telephone.

“All our dreams have been shattered in one night. We sent her to work and the hospital gave us her body. It’s all finished for us.

“My daughter isn’t coming back. I’m never going to hear her voice or laugh. All I can do now is concentrate on getting her justice,” he said.

The rape and murder of the doctor at RG Kar hospital in Kolkata on 9 August, and subsequent handling of the case by the authorities, has led to protests and strikes by doctors across India.

Her father, who cannot be named under an Indian law that protects the identity of the dead woman, said a career in medicine was all his only child had ever wanted. The 31-year-old had beaten the odds to qualify for one of approximately 107,000 places in India’s medical colleges, which more than a million aspiring doctors compete for every year.

She won a place at College of Medicine & JNM hospital in Kalyani in her home state of West Bengal. Her parents financed her dream with the precarious income her father earned as a tailor.

Remembering the day she confided in him she wanted to become a doctor, his voice broke. “She said: ‘Papa, it’s a good thing to become a doctor and help others. What do you think?’ I said: ‘OK, do it. We’ll help you.’ And look what happened,” he said.

Her ambition drove him to expand his tailoring business and the family’s finances improved to the point where, when his daughter fretted about safety on the hour-long bus ride between the hospital and their home in a crowded Kolkata suburb, he was able to borrow the money to buy her a car.

“At first, she told me to wait, she said we couldn’t manage the EMIs [monthly instalments] and she didn’t want to overburden us. But then she found the bus ride so tiring after a long shift that she agreed to the car,” said the father.

Although they remained in the same lower middle-class suburb where she grew up, and where everyone respected her as a local girl made good, her parents had recently renovated the house. The brass nameplate bore her name, not theirs, proudly prefixed by “Dr”.

The sense of disbelief in the neighbourhood has not faded since the news spread from house to house that “their” doctor’s bright day was done.

The location of this attack – in the hospital where the victim worked, which she and her family assumed was safe – and her public service as a doctor working a 36-hour shift have added to the public outrage over the crime.

The father said: “Like all parents, we worried about her safety but only while she was travelling. The moment she reached the hospital, we relaxed. She was safe. It’s like when we used to drop her off at school – once she was inside the gate, you feel she is safe,” he said.

In a post on X, the head of the Indian Medical Association, Dr RV Asokan, expressed anguish at the murder, saying “we failed her in life but did not fail her in death” – a reference to the protests, outcry and doctors’ strikes that have rocked the country since her body was discovered.

Her colleagues and neighbours describe a dedicated young doctor who wanted to pay off her parents’ debts and give them a comfortable life after their sacrifices to help her become a doctor.

One of her former teachers, Arnab Biswas, said that unlike many young people who chose medicine for its earning potential, she was “old school”, treating it as a vocation.

Having witnessed Covid-19 patients gasping for breath, she selected respiratory medicine when it came to choosing a medical specialism.

Her parents are broken. “She was my only child. We worked hard to make her a doctor … I will never be happy again,” a neighbour said the mother told her.

Neighbours, who consulted her over every ailment and were proud of her achievements, recall her feeding stray animals and gardening when she had the time. They are yearning to help the family in some way.

“The girl has gone now,” said one neighbour. “But we’ll stand by her parents so they don’t feel alone.”

Fierce fighting has continued inside Russia as Ukrainian troops tried to seize more territory and used kamikaze drones to blow up a Russian pontoon bridge across a strategic river crossing.

Satellite images showed that the temporary bridge on Tuesday had disappeared and there were large puffs of grey smoke. Russian forces built the pontoon between the villages of Zvannoe and Glushkovo after Ukrainian missiles destroyed three bridges across the Seym River.

Ukrainian forces are trying to expand their bridgehead in the Kursk region, after a surprise incursion two weeks ago. An estimated 2,000 to 3,000 Russian conscripts are now stuck in a pocket south of the river in the Glushkovsky district. Some civilians have escaped the area on small boats.

On Tuesday, the Ukrainian army reportedly captured another Russian village, Martynovka. Video also emerged of Ukrainian soldiers taking part in an intense firefight in the hamlet of Malaya Loknya, on a nearby part of the frontline. They fired from a Marder infantry fighting vehicle at Russian soldiers. Several houses were in flames.

Speaking on Monday, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said his forces controlled more than 1,250 sq km of “enemy territory”, in and around the Russian border town of Sudzha. The buffer zone now includes 92 settlements, seized as part of what he said was a “defensive operation”.

Zelenskiy acknowledged that he had not briefed close allies about the incursion in advance. He said “many representatives of the international community” would have dismissed the plan – the first major attack on Russian soil since the second world war – as “unrealistic”.

“This is why nobody was told about our preparations. Now the real success speaks for itself,” he said. Ukraine’s ground assault proved that Russia’s red lines – and its threats to escalate the war – were “naive” and “illusory”, Zelenskiy said. “They crumbled near Sudzha,” he said.

While Ukraine has made rapid progress in Kursk oblast, the Russian army has been going steadily forward across eastern Ukraine. On Tuesday the Kremlin confirmed it had seized Niu-York, a town that has been fought over since 2014. Another battle was happening in Hrodikva, a village close to the Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk, a Russian target and hub for Ukraine’s military.

Zelenskiy admitted the situation in Ukraine’s Donetsk oblast was “difficult”. There were 14 combat clashes in Toretsk – another city Moscow is close to capturing – and 34 in the Pokrovsk sector, according to Ukraine’s general staff. Many residents in Pokrovsk were leaving, after authorities warned fighting was likely to engulf the city in under two weeks.

Matthew Savill, the director of military sciences at the defence thinktank RUSI in London, said it was too early to say whether Ukraine’s Kursk attack was a brilliant stratagem that wrong-footed the Russians or a disastrous error that would ultimately wipe out its best forces. Russian media said the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, had ordered his generals to remove Ukrainian troops by 1 October.

Savill estimated Kyiv had committed about 8,000 battle-hardened troops, drawn from 12 brigades. Some units have reportedly been transferred from parts of the frontline in the east where Ukraine is under massive Russian pressure.

“It isn’t a vast counteroffensive and it isn’t a raid. It sits somewhere in between,” Savill said. “The Kursk operation is good for Ukrainian morale, changes the narrative and brings tactical advantages.” But he cautioned: “It has not had a significant operational impact in terms of Russia’s broader campaign. And Ukraine can ill afford to suffer casualties.”

Savill said Zelenskiy’s decision not to brief the White House and the UK government was understandable. The failure of Ukraine’s counteroffensive in 2023 was in part down to leaks, he said, adding: “I think the Ukrainians wanted to present their latest operation as a fait accompli. It changes the debate about escalation and the use inside Russia of [western] long-range weapons.”

On Tuesday, Ukraine’s parliament voted to ban the Russian-linked Ukrainian Orthodox church, which it accuses of siding with Moscow. The church is connected to Russia’s Orthodox church, which has supported and blessed Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Zelenskiy said the ban would boost his country’s “spiritual independence”. Russia condemned it as “illegal”. The Russian church has been furious over a 2019 schism that resulted in the creation of an independent Ukrainian Orthodox church, spiritually loyal to Moscow’s Istanbul-based rival Patriarch Bartholomew.

The Kremlin, meanwhile, said it had summoned a senior US diplomat to protest over what it called the “provocative actions” of American journalists who had travelled to Sudzha in Ukrainian-held Russian territory with Ukraine’s armed forces. It appeared to be referring to the Washington Post and CNN.

Russia’s foreign ministry claimed the US reporters had “illegally entered the Kursk region for propaganda coverage of the Kyiv regime’s crimes”.

• Ukraine has said large numbers of Russian servicemen – reportedly in the hundreds – gave themselves up during the Kursk offensive that began on 6 August. Agence France-Presse has visited a detention centre just across the border in Ukraine’s Sumy region. The agency said Ukrainian guards were standing nearby but the prisoners did not appear to be talking under duress.

• One 22-year-old Russian PoW – a conscript – said he and others were “simply abandoned by our command” when Ukrainian troops appeared and now he hoped “to be exchanged and go back home … to my family”. The deputy head of the detention facility, who gave his name as Volodymyr, told AFP that the PoWs were initially afraid but “came to life” after realising they were being well treated. “On the battlefield they are hated soldiers and when they are captured they become ordinary people.” Ukraine has said it is already in talks with Russia over an exchange for the Kursk PoWs.

• Ukraine’s army chief, Oleksandr Syrskyi, said its forces had reached 28-35km (17-22 miles) into Russia’s Kursk region, while Moscow was moving some of its troops from other directions to strengthen positions there. Russia has formed three new military groupings to bolster security in regions bordering Ukraine, the Russian defence minister, Andrei Belousov, has said. The groupings are named Kursk, Belgorod and Bryansk after their associated regions. Vladimir Putin’s government is facing criticism at home for breaking its promise that it would not send conscripts into battle against Ukraine.

• The internationally sanctioned, Kremlin-linked newspaper Izvestia has quoted Russian intelligence as saying US, British and Polish intelligence were involved in preparing the Ukrainian invasion of Kursk. Voldymyr Zelenskiy has insisted Ukraine’s allies were not informed as they would have ruled out the plan as “unrealistic”; while other officials and analysts have said telling the US and others would have made it impossible to keep the operation secret, based on past leaks.

• Russia hit energy infrastructure in northern Ukraine in a missile and drone attack and caused a huge fire that released chlorine into the air, Ukrainian officials said on Tuesday. The fumes came from an industrial facility that was attacked in the western region of Ternopil. People were urged to stay indoors. A strike in the north-eastern Sumy region bordering Russia caused blackouts for 72 settlements and more than 18,500 consumers.

• Ukrainian forces shot down three ballistic missiles and 25 of the 26 drones launched in Tuesday morning’s attack on nine regions, Ukraine’s air force commander said. It included Russia’s fifth missile attack this month on Kyiv, the capital.

• A 14-year-old boy died from his injuries in hospital after a Russian munition struck a kiosk a few metres from a children’s playground in Ukraine’s southern Zaporizhzhia region, said the regional governor, Ivan Fedorov.

• Russian authorities meanwhile struggled to put out a massive fire in the southern Rostov region for a third consecutive day at an oil depot hit by Ukrainian drones.

• Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Ukraine’s president, said the situation in Ukraine’s Donetsk oblast was “difficult”, write Dan Sabbagh and Luke Harding. There were 14 combat clashes in Toretsk – a city Moscow is close to capturing – and 34 in the Pokrovsk sector, according to Ukraine’s general staff. Many residents in Pokrovsk were leaving, after authorities warned fighting was likely to engulf the city in under two weeks.

• The Kremlin announced it had seized Niu-York, a town that has been fought over since 2014. Another battle was happening in Hrodikva, a village close to the Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk, a Russian target and hub for Ukraine’s military. The Russian defence minister, Andrei Belousov, said on national TV that Russia was sending additional troops to the Pokrovsk region.

• Ukraine’s parliament has passed a “historic” bill paving the way for a ban of the Russia-linked minority Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC). The legislation prohibits the Russian Orthodox Church on Ukrainian territory and envisages a ban, to be approved by a court decision, on religious organisations “affiliated” with it.

• The Czech Republic has announced it will use part of the interest generated from Russian central bank assets frozen in the EU to buy large-calibre ammunition for Ukraine. Western countries locked up about $300bn worth of sovereign Russian assets after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. EU countries are taking the interest earned on the assets and putting it into an EU fund to aid Ukraine’s fight. The Kremlin has called the plan “theft” and threatened legal action.

After just over two years of marriage, Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez have filed for divorce.

According to a report from Variety magazine, Lopez filed on Tuesday in Los Angeles county superior court. The official separation date is listed as 26 April.

The pair married in Las Vegas in July 2022 after re-sparking their relationship from two decades prior. Lopez, 55, and Affleck, 52, started a relationship in the early 2000s which the tabloids dubbed “Bennifer” at the time.

“Love is beautiful. Love is kind. And it turns out love is patient. Twenty years patient,” wrote Lopez in announcing their first, quickie Las Vegas wedding that July, and signing off as Jennifer Lynn Affleck.

After their Las Vegas nuptials, the two married again in a lavish ceremony in Georgia on 20 August 2022 – exactly two years ago.

The dissolution of their marriage follows reports that the two had been living separately. The pair had sold their Beverly Hills home and, in May, Lopez announced on her website that she was “heartsick and devastated” to be cancelling her This Is Me … Live summer tour.

“Please know that I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t feel that it was absolutely necessary,” she said, promising her fans that they’d be “together again”.

The tour was to be her first in five years, in support of her first solo album in a decade, This Is Me … Now and its companion film, a fictionalized look at her long love life, and a documentary.

The album, she said, was inspired by her rekindled relationship with Affleck. But the film was more “about your journey as a person, it’s about one person’s journey and what it takes to get from heartbreak back to love. Or a hopeless romantic’s journey in their search for love.” In the movie, she played a character called The Artist who, similarly, had decided as a child what she wanted to be when she grew up: “in love”.

Lopez and Affleck first met in 2001 on the set of the movie Gigli, in which they played criminals stuck on the same job. Their real-life friendship eventually turned into a relationship that caused a media frenzy as paparazzi took to calling the pair Bennifer in tabloids.

By November 2002 they were engaged, but their relationship fizzled out as quickly as it had begun. Their September 2003 wedding was postponed and then the couple officially broke up four months later.

Both stars moved on to other relationships, with Lopez marrying singer Marc Anthony in 2004 and Affleck marrying actor Jennifer Garner in 2005.

Lopez split with Anthony in 2011 while Affleck and Garner announced their separation in 2015.

In April 2021, team Bennifer rejoiced when the two were spotted hanging out together in Los Angeles. They were engaged a year later.

After just over two years of marriage, Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez have filed for divorce.

According to a report from Variety magazine, Lopez filed on Tuesday in Los Angeles county superior court. The official separation date is listed as 26 April.

The pair married in Las Vegas in July 2022 after re-sparking their relationship from two decades prior. Lopez, 55, and Affleck, 52, started a relationship in the early 2000s which the tabloids dubbed “Bennifer” at the time.

“Love is beautiful. Love is kind. And it turns out love is patient. Twenty years patient,” wrote Lopez in announcing their first, quickie Las Vegas wedding that July, and signing off as Jennifer Lynn Affleck.

After their Las Vegas nuptials, the two married again in a lavish ceremony in Georgia on 20 August 2022 – exactly two years ago.

The dissolution of their marriage follows reports that the two had been living separately. The pair had sold their Beverly Hills home and, in May, Lopez announced on her website that she was “heartsick and devastated” to be cancelling her This Is Me … Live summer tour.

“Please know that I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t feel that it was absolutely necessary,” she said, promising her fans that they’d be “together again”.

The tour was to be her first in five years, in support of her first solo album in a decade, This Is Me … Now and its companion film, a fictionalized look at her long love life, and a documentary.

The album, she said, was inspired by her rekindled relationship with Affleck. But the film was more “about your journey as a person, it’s about one person’s journey and what it takes to get from heartbreak back to love. Or a hopeless romantic’s journey in their search for love.” In the movie, she played a character called The Artist who, similarly, had decided as a child what she wanted to be when she grew up: “in love”.

Lopez and Affleck first met in 2001 on the set of the movie Gigli, in which they played criminals stuck on the same job. Their real-life friendship eventually turned into a relationship that caused a media frenzy as paparazzi took to calling the pair Bennifer in tabloids.

By November 2002 they were engaged, but their relationship fizzled out as quickly as it had begun. Their September 2003 wedding was postponed and then the couple officially broke up four months later.

Both stars moved on to other relationships, with Lopez marrying singer Marc Anthony in 2004 and Affleck marrying actor Jennifer Garner in 2005.

Lopez split with Anthony in 2011 while Affleck and Garner announced their separation in 2015.

In April 2021, team Bennifer rejoiced when the two were spotted hanging out together in Los Angeles. They were engaged a year later.

Joe Biden has approved a US nuclear strategy to prepare for possible coordinated nuclear confrontations with Russia, China and North Korea, according to a New York Times reported on Tuesday.

On Tuesday, the White House said the plan was approved by the US president earlier this year and was not a response to a single country or threat.

Spokesperson Sean Savett said that while “the specific text of the guidance is classified, its existence is in no way secret. The guidance issued earlier this year is not a response to any single entity, country, nor threat.”

The Times reported that the deterrent policy takes into account a rapid buildup of China’s nuclear arsenal, which will rival the size and diversity of the US and Russian stockpiles over the next decade, and comes as Russian president Vladimir Putin of Russia has threatened to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine.

The US-based Arms Control Association said it understood US nuclear weapons strategy and posture remained the same as described in the administration’s 2022 Nuclear Posture Review, and there had been no reorientation away from Russia and toward China.

Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, said that while US intelligence estimates suggest China may increase the size its nuclear arsenal from 500 to 1,000 warheads by 2030, Russia currently has about 4,000 nuclear warheads “and it remains the major driver behind US nuclear strategy”.

Biden approved the revised strategy – called the Nuclear Employment Guidance – in March, according to the Times, but an unclassified notification of the policy change has not yet been presented to Congress.

After years of nuclear arms reduction efforts, the administration has been signalling willingness to expand the US arsenal to counter China and Russia’s nuclear strategies more recently. In February, the US warned allies that Russia could be planning to put a nuclear weapon into space.

On Tuesday, the Times reported that two senior administration officials had earlier been permitted to allude to the revision in US nuclear strategy without disclosing its existence.

In June, Pranay Vaddi, a senior director of the national security council, warned that “absent a change” in nuclear strategy by China and Russia, the US was prepared to shift from modernization of existing weapons to expanding its arsenal.

Vaddi also alluded to the highly classified document, saying it emphasised “the need to deter Russia, the PRC [People’s Republic of China] and North Korea simultaneously”.

That comes as the last major nuclear arms control agreement with Russia, New Start, that sets limits on intercontinental-range nuclear weapons, expires in early 2026 with no subsequent agreement in place.

China and Russia are now more politically and economically aligned. Last month, Chinese and Russian long-range bombers patrolled together near Alaska for the first time and held live-fire exercises in the South China Sea.

The second administration official permitted to refer to the document, Vipin Narang, an MIT nuclear strategist who served in the Pentagon, said earlier this month that Biden had “issued updated nuclear weapons employment guidance to account for multiple nuclear-armed adversaries” and for “the significant increase in the size and diversity” of China’s nuclear arsenal.

“It is our responsibility to see the world as it is, not as we hoped or wished it would be,” the Times quoted Narang as saying. “It is possible that we will one day look back and see the quarter-century after the cold war as nuclear intermission.”

US secretary of state Antony Blinken said that “time is of the essence” to secure a Gaza ceasefire, as he wrapped up a Middle East tour with an agreement between Israel and Hamas still elusive.

The deal “needs to get done, and it needs to get done in the days ahead,” Blinken told reporters in Doha before departing for Washington, as he reiterated his call for Hamas to accept a “bridging proposal” for a deal, which he said Israel had accepted, and asked both parties to work towards finalising it.

Blinken and mediators from Egypt and Qatar have pinned their hopes on the bridging proposal which aims to narrow the gaps between the two sides in the 10-month-old war, after negotiations last week paused without a breakthrough. The US expects the ceasefire talks to continue this week.

Hamas is not directly participating in these negotiations and has said the latest proposal on the table veers too closely to Israel’s demands. However, on Tuesday, the militant group said comments by US president Joe Biden that they were backing away from an agreement with Israel were “misleading”.

The plan would involve an initial six-week ceasefire, during which a limited number of female, elderly and sick Israeli hostages would be freed in exchange for Palestinians held in Israeli jails. It would be indefinitely extendable while negotiators settled the second stage, in which soldiers and bodies would be returned, Israeli troops would begin to withdraw from Gaza and displaced Palestinian civilians would be allowed to return to their homes in the north of the strip.

One of the main sticking points to an agreement has been Hamas’s longstanding demand for a “complete” withdrawal of Israeli troops from all parts of Gaza, which Israel has reportedly rejected.

Blinken was asked in Qatar about Israeli troop withdrawal terms within the ceasefire framework and about a report in US publication Axios that quoted Netanyahu as saying he may have convinced Blinken that Israel should keep troops in the Philadelphi corridor, a strategic strip on the Gaza-Egypt border.

“The United States does not accept any long-term occupation of Gaza by Israel,” Blinken said. “More specifically, the agreement is very clear on the schedule and the locations of [Israel Defense Forces] withdrawals from Gaza, and Israel has agreed to that. So that’s as much as I know. That’s what I’m very clear about.”

On Tuesday, Netanyahu met the families of dead soldiers and hostages in Gaza. Some relatives told Israeli media that Netanyahu told them Israel will not abandon two strategic corridors in Gaza, the Philadelphi and Netzarim corridors. Netanyahu’s office did not comment about their account.

A White House spokesperson rejected as “totally untrue” that Netanyahu had told Blinken that Israel would never leave the Philadelphi and Netzarim corridors. Such statements are “not constructive to getting a ceasefire deal across the finish line”, the official said.

Earlier on Tuesday, Blinken flew from Israel to Egypt for talks with President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who told him that “the time has come to end the ongoing war”, according to an official Egyptian statement.

Egypt and Qatar are working alongside the US to broker a truce, which diplomats say would help avert a wider crisis that could draw in Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Fears of a regional escalation have mounted since Hezbollah and Iran vowed to respond after an attack last month, blamed on Israel, killed Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, shortly after an Israeli strike on Beirut killed a top Hezbollah commander.

In Gaza on Tuesday, at least 10 people were killed in an Israeli airstrike on a school housing displaced families west of Gaza City, the territory’s civil defence authorities said. Israel said the school was being used as a Hamas base.

Elsewhere, Israel recovered the bodies of six hostages who were seized during Hamas’s 7 October attack. An overnight operation in Khan Younis in southern Gaza found the bodies of Yagev Buchshtab, Alexander Dancyg, Avraham Munder, Yoram Metzger, Nadav Popplewell and Chaim Peri, all civilians abducted from their homes in kibbutzim adjacent to Israel’s barrier wall with the Gaza Strip, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said on Tuesday.

The military gave no details about how or when the men died. Over the past few months, the families of all six had announced the men had been killed after being briefed on IDF intelligence findings.

Reuters, the Associated Press and Agence France-Presse contributed to this report

Workers at a school in Solomon Islands discovered a buried stockpile of the second world war munitions as they “dug a hole for sewage”, police said.

More than 200 rust-caked projectiles – which once belonged to US troops – have been dug up and removed after they were found near a school staff member’s house, the Royal Solomon Islands Police Force said.

Japan and the United States fought viciously to control Solomon Islands at the height of the second world war, littering the South Pacific archipelago with unexploded ordnance – or UXOs – that still take lives today.

On Tuesday, Inspector Clifford Tunuki said the long-hidden weapons cache had been ferried away to a safe location and was now “waiting for safe destruction”.

The discovery was an “eye opener”, he said.

“The removal came about when the school discovered the stockpile of US projectiles in front of a staff house when they dug a hole for sewage,” police said in a statement.

The school in Solomon Islands capital Honiara suspended classes for several days, the Solomon Star reported.

Photos showed police removing the heavily corroded munitions by hand after digging them out with a shovel.

The latest find is part of devastating legacy in the Pacific region from the second world war.

Thousands of bombs were dropped on Pacific islands, including Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea and Palau, many of which failed to explode. Munitions depots were also established across the islands.

Two foreign bomb disposal experts were killed in Honiara in 2020 while working to map old weapons caches around the country.

In 2021, more than 100 unexploded second world war bombs were discovered in a back yard of a home in Honiara. The UXO were found by a man who was digging a hole for a new septic system at his property in a residential area.

Workers at a school in Solomon Islands discovered a buried stockpile of the second world war munitions as they “dug a hole for sewage”, police said.

More than 200 rust-caked projectiles – which once belonged to US troops – have been dug up and removed after they were found near a school staff member’s house, the Royal Solomon Islands Police Force said.

Japan and the United States fought viciously to control Solomon Islands at the height of the second world war, littering the South Pacific archipelago with unexploded ordnance – or UXOs – that still take lives today.

On Tuesday, Inspector Clifford Tunuki said the long-hidden weapons cache had been ferried away to a safe location and was now “waiting for safe destruction”.

The discovery was an “eye opener”, he said.

“The removal came about when the school discovered the stockpile of US projectiles in front of a staff house when they dug a hole for sewage,” police said in a statement.

The school in Solomon Islands capital Honiara suspended classes for several days, the Solomon Star reported.

Photos showed police removing the heavily corroded munitions by hand after digging them out with a shovel.

The latest find is part of devastating legacy in the Pacific region from the second world war.

Thousands of bombs were dropped on Pacific islands, including Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea and Palau, many of which failed to explode. Munitions depots were also established across the islands.

Two foreign bomb disposal experts were killed in Honiara in 2020 while working to map old weapons caches around the country.

In 2021, more than 100 unexploded second world war bombs were discovered in a back yard of a home in Honiara. The UXO were found by a man who was digging a hole for a new septic system at his property in a residential area.

Six people are now presumed dead after the super yacht they were onboard sank in a violent storm off the coast of Sicily.

Divers tried in vain on Tuesday to gain access to the inside of the sunken 56-metre Bayesian luxury vessel, where rescue crews believe those missing may have been trapped.

Those unaccounted for are the tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch and his teenage daughter Hannah Lynch; the Morgan Stanley International chair Jonathan Bloomer and his wife, Judy; and the Clifford Chance lawyer Chris Morvillo and his wife, Neda.

Rescuers said they were working on the assumption that the boat sank quickly after being hit by a tornadic waterspout in a storm at about 5am on Monday.

Vincenzo Zagarola of the Italian coastguard confirmed there had been no sign of the missing passengers more than 36 hours into the rescue mission.

He said: “We do not exclude that they are not inside the boat, but we know the boat sank quickly. We suppose that the six people missing may not have had time to get out.”

Asked about the likelihood of them being alive, he replied: “Never say never, but reasonably the answer should be not.”

The national director of Italy’s firefighting department divers, Giuseppe Petrone, said that his team of specialist divers had managed to locate a breach in the sailboat’s hull and were working to open a passage to reach the cabins where they hope to find the bodies of the six missing individuals.

“We have finally located a breach,” Petrone said. “Our men are working to open it.”

The divers are hampered by debris obstructing the cabin, and the need to surface after 10 minutes because the wreck lies about 150ft below the surface.

The UK’s Marine Accident Investigation Branch confirmed that four of its inspectors were being sent to Palermo.

Diving teams from the Italian firefighting service, who arrived from Rome, Sassari and Cagliari on Monday, completed a dive on Tuesday morning. Marco Tilotta, who is in charge of the firefighter-divers from Palermo, said there were numerous challenges in recovering bodies.

“The greatest challenge is the depth, which does not allow for immediate interventions. You have to consider that when we go underwater, we have three minutes to descend and eight minutes to work on the wreck. Then we have to begin the ascent phase.

“There is also the problem of accessing the vessel with all the belongings inside and the fact that the boat is positioned at 90 degrees. We have not yet entered the boat. We plan to do so soon and inspect every inch of the vessel.”

The Italian coastguard did confirm yesterday that a body recovered on Monday, was that of the vessel’s chef, Recaldo Thomas. He had dual Canadian and Antiguan citizenship and was one of 10 crew members on board.

Tilotta said that apart from that discovery, no others had been located. Fifteen people have so far been rescued, including Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares, who owned the boat, and a one-year-old girl with her mother.

Lynch co-founded Autonomy, a software business that became one of the shining lights of the UK tech scene in the mid-90s.

Once described as Britain’s Bill Gates, Lynch spent much of the past decade in court defending his name against allegations of fraud related to the sale of Autonomy to the US tech company Hewlett-Packard for $11.1bn.

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

As local people came to terms with the shock of the events of Monday, those also caught up in the storm gave information to crews at the dock in Porticello, close to where the vessel sank.

Karsten Borner, 69, the captain of a sailboat that was alongside the Bayesian, said the vessel carrying Lynch and 21 other passengers sank within minutes.

“We were also awakened by the storm,” Karsten said. “The first thing I did was to start the engines of my sailboat to give more stability to the vessel. I don’t know if the Bayesian did the same. It seems like they were also suddenly caught by the storm.

“After securing our boat, we immediately approached the Bayesian. But it had already sunk. I have never seen a vessel of this size go down so quickly. Within a few minutes, there was nothing left. Then we saw the raft with the 15 passengers. It was a tragedy.”

Fabio Cefalù, 36, a fisher from Porticello, was one of the first to attempt to help the Bayesian.

“I arrived at the port at 3.30am for a fishing trip,” he said. “But when we saw the first flashes of lightning, we decided to stop. At 3.55am, a mini tornado arrived. The docks of the port diverted it and it hit the sailboat head-on. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Cefalù said the whirlwind lasted about “10 minutes with strong winds and rain”.

He added: “We saw a flare 500 metres from the dock. We went to see what had happened. We only saw the floating debris of the boat. We immediately called the coastguard. The sea was terrible. The wind very strong. The storm destroyed my solar panels. The vessel was hit head-on. I thought I would find someone in the sea, but nothing. The boat had disappeared from the radar. In my opinion, the missing passengers are still onboard. They were caught in their sleep by the storm and didn’t have time to get out.”

Speaking to reporters, the British ambassador to Italy, Edward Llewellyn, said: “It’s a tragedy, I met with the survivors, I wanted to express my solidarity and that of the British embassy.”

Bayesian had completed a number of sailings in recent days, calling at various ports in Sicily, according to the ship-tracking website VesselFinder. The super yacht could accommodate up to 12 guests in six suites and was listed for rent for up to €195,000 (£166,000) a week. It was built in 2008 by the Italian company Perini Navi.

In a separate development on Monday, Lynch’s co-defendant at the US trial, Stephen Chamberlain, 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. In a statement Chamberlain’s lawyer, Gary Lincenberg, said he had died after being “fatally struck” by a car while out running.

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.”

Chamberlain’s family described the 52-year-old in a statement as a “much-loved husband, father, son, brother and friend”.

Lynch was awarded an OBE for services to enterprise in 2006, and appointed in 2011 to the science and technology council of the then prime minister, David Cameron. He was elected as a fellow to the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2008 and the Royal Society in 2014.

Sweden has issued licences to kill 20% of its brown bear population in the country’s annual bear hunt, which begins today, despite concerns from conservationists.

Officials have granted licences for just under 500 brown bears to be culled by hunters. That equates to about 20% of the total population, according to official figures, and would bring the number of bears in Sweden down to approximately 2,000 – a drop of almost 40% since 2008.

The high number of licences issued has alarmed conservationists, who say large predator populations in Europe could face collapse in some countries without proper protection. “It is a pure trophy hunt,” said Magnus Orrebrant, chair of the Swedish Carnivore Association. “Wildlife management in Sweden is about killing animals instead of preserving them to the best of our ability.”

Brown bears were hunted almost to extinction in Sweden in the 1920s, but thanks to careful management the population recovered to a peak of about 3,300 in 2008. Over the past five years, however, increasing numbers of bears have been hunted, culminating in a record 722 killed last year. This year, licences to shoot 486 bears have been issued, and a further indeterminate number could be shot where bears are assessed to be a threat to farm animals.

In November 2022, a new law gave local hunting associations more power to oversee the management of large predators, including bears. In recent years, hundreds of wolves and lynx have also been culled, fuelling ecologists’ concerns.

Magnus Rydholm, communications director for the Swedish Association for Hunting and Wildlife Management, said: “We are only following the directive of the Swedish government’s wildlife policy. It is all about a balance between humans and the large predators. That’s why the bear hunt starts tomorrow.”

But some hunters have expressed concerns over the declining number of brown bears. Anders Nilsson, a hunter in Norrland, in north Sweden, said: “There are those within the hunting community that are concerned about too many bears being killed off.”

If hunters continue to kill bears at a similar rate next year, the country will be only one annual hunt away from the minimum number of 1,400, considered necessary by the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency to maintain a viable population.

Brown bears are a “strictly protected species” in Europe, and conservationists argue that the high hunting quotas are in breach of the EU habitat directive, which says “deliberate hunting or killing of strictly protected species is prohibited”. Under EU rules, this prohibition can be lifted as a “last resort” to protect public safety, crops or natural flora and fauna.

Researchers are concerned that the brown bear is heading the same way as the moose population in Sweden, Orrebrant says, which has declined by 60% since the end of the last century.

Conservationists argue that a larger bear population would make Sweden a more attractive destination for ecological tourism, which would bring in more revenue than selling hunting licences.

Orrebrant said: “Because the hunters killed off too many moose, the bear is now suffering for it.”

Donald Trump has pledged to shield police officers from legal accountability if he is re-elected as president after falsely claiming the US is in the grip of a wave of violent crime that he blamed on the Black Lives Matter movement and people crossing the Mexican border.

Speaking to police officers in Michigan on Tuesday, the former president sought to pin responsibility for the imagined crisis on his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris, whom he characterised as among “Marxist district attorneys” with a record of being anti-police and pro-criminal during her term as the district attorney in San Francisco in the 2000s.

At the same time, Trump lamented his own legal difficulties, including his criminal convictions for fraud in New York and other looming prosecutions.

“They go after guys like me, but they don’t go after guys that kill people,” he said.

Flanked by local sheriffs in Howell, a small city in greater Detroit where a group of white supremacists marched last month chanting “We love Hitler, we love Trump” and carrying signs reading “White Lives Matter”, Trump painted a picture of Americans living in fear of leaving their homes because of crime.

“It’s just insane, but you can’t walk across the street to get a loaf of bread. You get shot, you get mugged, you get raped, you get … whatever it may be,” he said.

The former president claimed that this alleged crime wave materialised when Joe Biden and Harris took office.

“Since Comrade Kamala Harris took office, her administration’s crime statistics show she’s presided over a 43% increase in violent crime. These are all government numbers,” he claimed.

In fact, official statistics show that violent crime is at an almost 50-year low in the US.

Nonetheless, Trump pledged to “crack down on local Marxist DAs who refuse to enforce the law” while, he said, ruining the lives of police officers for doing their jobs.

“Over the past four years, the Marxist left has waged a vicious war on law enforcement in our country. They’ve taken away the dignity and the spirit and the life of some of these police officers, and that’s why you see it – the crime is so out of control in our country,” he claimed.

Trump said that the police “have a lot of difficulty with the laws of our land”.

“We’re going to get rid of that difficulty, because they shouldn’t have difficulty, our police,” he said.

Trump added: “We’re going to be guaranteeing immunities.”

The former president accused Harris of a “pro-crime, anti-police record”.

“She repeatedly endorsed defunding the police,” he said. “If she ever had a chance, she would do whatever she could to defund the police because that’s where her spirit is, that’s where her heart is, and we can’t have a president like that.”

In 2020, then senator Harris gave support to the “defund the police” movement in the wake of a white police officer’s murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. Harris said at the time that it was right that BLM questioned the amount of money spent on “militarising” police departments at the expense of social services, housing and education

“This whole movement is about, rightly, saying we need to take a look at these budgets and figure out whether it reflects the right priorities,” she told the radio programme Ebro in the Morning.

The former president also claimed that Harris bore responsibility for a rise in shoplifting as California’s attorney general a decade ago.

“She came up with a concept of, $950 and below you don’t even get prosecuted. So guys are walking into stores with calculators to figure [it] out,” he said, to the evident amusement of the police officers around him.

“Did you know that they have calculators adding it up? They want to make sure they’re under $950, but it didn’t matter, because they didn’t prosecute the ones that went over either.”

In fact, there is no such policy in California and the accusation appears rooted in a ballot measure passed by voters in 2014 that reclassified some thefts and misdemeanors.

Trump blamed much of the imagined increase in crime on people crossing the Mexican border, for which he also blamed Harris as the supposed “border tsar”, even though immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than US citizens. He also claimed that some Latin American countries are exporting their criminals to the US.

“We have criminals from all over the world pouring into our country right now,” he said.

However, Trump was upset about at least one instance of prosecutors upholding the law.

“We’re not getting justice in New York,” he said of his own conviction over paying hush money to an adult film star.

The former president is also facing criminal prosecutions over his attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, the storming of the Capitol on 6 January 2021, and his handling of classified documents.

“Anytime I fly over a state, they indict you. Got indicted more than the great Alphonse Capone,” he told the police officers, to laughter.

Ian McKellen says his fat suit “saved” him after he fell off stage during a London performance in June, though he remains in “agonising pain” while he recovers from the injuries.

The 85-year-old actor was two months into a season of Player Kings – as Shakespeare’s Falstaff – when he fell from the stage into the first row of the audience at London’s Noël Coward theatre. He subsequently withdrew from the show.

“My chipped vertebrae and fractured wrist are not yet healed,” McKellen told Saga magazine, in a new interview on Tuesday. “I avoid going out because I’m nervous someone might bump into me, and I’ve been dealing with agonising pains in my shoulders due to the jolt my body took. But the fat suit I wore for Falstaff saved my ribs and other joints, so I consider myself lucky.”

The Lord of the Rings actor said that he has “relived that fall I don’t know how many times. It was horrible.”

The fall happened during a fight scene, he said, where “my foot got caught in a chair, and trying to shake it off I started to slide on some newspaper that was scattered over the stage, like I was on a skateboard”.

He fell into the lap of “someone in the front row” and started screaming.

“It was very upsetting. The end [didn’t mean] my death. It was my participation in the play.”

McKellen said that he doesn’t feel guilty about the accident, but he continues to reassure himself that he isn’t “too old to act and it was just a bloody accident”.

“I didn’t lose consciousness, I hadn’t been dizzy, but I’ve not been able to go back,” he told Saga, adding that he remains in a neck brace and his right hand remains splinted.

Days after the injury, McKellen expressed interest in returning to the production, and thanked the “experts, specialists, and nurses” who were treating him in hospital.

A spokesperson for the Noël Coward theatre said at the time he was expected to make “a speedy and full recovery”, though he later left the show and was replaced by his understudy, David Semark.