Kamala Harris will on Thursday night face the biggest test of her political life so far when she addresses the Democratic national convention in Chicago in an effort to persuade American voters to defeat Donald Trump in November’s presidential election and put her in the White House.

The vice-president’s rocket-fueled campaign is still barely a month old following Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw from seeking re-election in the face of a disastrous debate performance and questions over his age and mental acuity.

Harris, and her vice-presidential pick, the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, have quickly overturned the election’s narrative, turning a solid Trump lead in the polls over Biden into a slight – but clear – advantage over the former Republican president.

In addressing the Democratic convention on Thursday night – and by proxy the wider US electorate watching in their millions on television – Harris will be making a direct pitch to voters to back her vision for the United States.

The last night of the joy-fueled convention in Chicago will feature another long list of speakers – secretaries, senators, governors, congressmen and activists.

Notable speakers include rising stars such as the Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, and the Arizona senator Mark Kelly; Democrats running in swing races such as the Pennsylvania senator Bob Casey, the Wisconsin senator Tammy Baldwin and the Arizona congressman Ruben Gallego, who is running for an open Senate seat in his home state.

Attenders will also hear from gun control advocates, including the Georgia congresswoman Lucy McBath, whose 17-year-old son was shot and killed in a “stand your ground” killing, as well as members of the “Tennessee Three” who were expelled from the state legislature after demanding action on gun control. Gabby Giffords, the former Arizona congresswoman who survived an assassination attempt, will also speak, along with other survivors and the families of victims of gun violence.

Thursday night’s theme is “For Our Future”. The evening will end with Harris’s historic acceptance speech in which she will become the first woman of color to accept a major party’s presidential nomination.

Harris’s campaign has sought to portray a more optimistic, future-focused view of the country than her rival, and perhaps also than that of the president, who based much of his pitch on dark warnings of Trump’s autocratic sympathies.

Over the course of the week at the convention, the audience has heard from the Democratic party’s most powerful players, who threw their support unequivocally behind Harris. Biden, Barack and Michelle Obama, Hillary and Bill Clinton, and Nancy Pelosi all gave prime-time speeches, as did some of the party’s rising stars, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Now it is expected that Harris’s speech will seek to lay out her personal story as she bids to become a historic president: the first female president and the first woman of color due to her south Asian and Black background.

Harris’s communications director, Michael Tyler, said the vice-president would share her personal story as the daughter of a working mother raised in a middle-class neighborhood, and a prosecutor who fought on behalf of sexual assault survivors and homeowners who lost everything in the foreclosure crisis.

He said she would share her “optimistic vision for America’s future, a new way forward” and draw a contrast with Trump’s Project 2025 agenda, a conservative policy blueprint from which the Republican ticket has tried to distance itself.

“On that stage tonight, you’ll see a champion for working people all across the country, a defender of our fundamental freedoms and a prosecutor who will make the case against Donald Trump,” he said. “Most importantly, what you’ll see is the next president of the United States.”

Across three days so far, speaker after speaker has already hailed Harris as a change-agent who would not only defeat Trump but lift the country higher, ushering in a new chapter of possibility and seek to return US politics to some semblance of normality since Trump came on to the political stage eight years ago.

The Harris campaign – and especially the outspoken Walz – has also displayed sharp elbows and an ability to insult and poke fun at Trump.

The switch in the polls and newfound edge has impressed many observers. “She has had a very good month not just because of a honeymoon, but because of the way she’s presented herself, the way her campaign has positioned her,” David Axelrod, a former top aide to Barack Obama, said.

Certainly it seems to have unsettled Trump and his campaign. Trump has adopted a policy of directly insulting Harris and inventing a series of nicknames for her while trying to paint her as a leftwing extremist and questioning her racial identity. But the jibes have had little effect and even drawn criticism from some senior Republicans.

They have not blunted her lead. Harris consistently tops Trump by three or four points in recent head-to-head surveys and has also improved her standing in the handful of key states that are crucial to victory. While the electoral contest remains impossibly close, she has widened the battleground once more from the Rust belt states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania to once again include Sun belt states such as North Carolina, Arizona and Georgia.

This week, however, has added a new hurdle for Harris, with the independent presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr posturing to drop out of the race and endorse Trump. This could mean some critical independent voters would back the Republican candidate.

“RFK was obviously funded in large part by Maga donors,” said Tyler during a press briefing on Thursday. “He carried a lot of Maga talking points throughout the campaign.”

Kennedy’s campaign said he would address the nation in Phoenix on Friday “about the present historical moment and his path forward”.

“My message is not for him,” Tyler said. “My message is for many of the undecided voters, many of whom found a home with him in the early stages of this campaign. If they were feeling disaffected about the state of the race, if they were looking for a new way forward … then there’s a home for them in Kamala Harris’s campaign.”

Throughout the convention so far, Democratic speakers have tried to make Trump seem small and diminished. They have sought to keep him on the back foot and in a reactive mode, responding to attacks and being kept off-balance.

The House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, compared Trump to an “old boyfriend” who has spent the last four years spinning the block, trying to get back into a relationship with the American people.

“Bro, we broke up with you for a reason,” Jeffries said.

“Kamala Harris has always understood the assignment,” said Laphonza Butler, a California senator and friend of Harris’s.

On Wednesday night, Walz offered a full-throated attack on Trump, a defense of his record running Minnesota and a passionate advocacy for Harris. After criticizing the Trump campaign, he led the crowd of cheering delegates in a chant of: “We’re not going back! We’re not going back!”

Democratic convention highlights:

• Tim Walz’s acceptance speech channeled grit and empathy

• Muslim Women for Harris disbands and withdraws support for candidate

• Democrats issue warning over Project 2025

• Meet the 200 TikTokers at the DNC

• What to know about Kamala Harris and Tim Walz

On the third night of the Democratic national convention, the group Muslim Women for Harris released a statement announcing that it was disbanding in response to the Harris-Walz campaign’s refusal to allow a Palestinian person to speak on the main stage.

The statement was released as members of the Uncommitted National Movement, which won 30 delegates to the convention, and their supporters held a sit-in outside of the convention. Ilhan Omar joined the demonstration for some time, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called in to the sit-in via FaceTime. The sit-in came after the anti-war group was told a Palestinian person would not be allowed to speak on the main stage – until then, whether or not such a speech would happen was up in the air.

During the sit-in, Muslim Women for Harris pulled their support for the Democratic nominee.

“We cannot in good conscience continue Muslim Women for Harris-Walz, in light of this new information from the Uncommitted movement, that VP Harris’ team declined their request to have a Palestinian American speaker take the stage at the DNC,” the group’s statement reads.

Kamala Harris’s campaign notably invited the family of Israeli hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin to speak on Wednesday, which Uncommitted supported. The group called for a similar platform for a Palestinian person.

“Uncommitted delegates urge the Democratic party to reject a hierarchy of human value by ensuring Palestinian voices are heard on the main stage. We are learning that Israeli hostages’ families will be speaking from the main stage. We strongly support that decision and also strongly hope that we will also be hearing from Palestinians who’ve endured the largest civilian death toll since 1948,” the Uncommitted statement read.

During the family’s speech, Goldberg-Polin’s father, Jon Polin, called for a return of the hostages and an end to “the suffering of the innocent civilians in Gaza”, joining other speakers like Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, who both made reference to Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza. During the course of the Democratic convention, calls for a ceasefire have been met with raucous applause from audience members. Still, some have said the party’s nods have fallen short.

“The family of the Israeli hostage that was on the stage tonight, has shown more empathy towards Palestinian Americans and Palestinians, than our candidate or the DNC has,” Muslim Women for Harris’s statement read. “This is a terrible message to send to Democrats. Palestinians have the right to speak about Palestine.”

Alana Zeitchik, who has multiple family members who are hostages, spoke out in support of having a Palestinian American speak on the main stage. “Rachel and Jon deserved every second on that stage. I also believe a Palestinian American voice deserves to be heard on that stage,” Zeitchik wrote on X. “I’d love to hear from @Ruwa4Georgia and I hope the DNC will give her the chance to be heard.”

Chicago, where the Democratic convention is being held this year, has one of the largest Palestinian communities in the United States. Muslim Women for Harris did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Democratic convention highlights:

• Tim Walz’s acceptance speech channeled grit and empathy

• Democrats issue warning over Project 2025

• Meet the 200 TikTokers at the DNC

• What to know about Kamala Harris and Tim Walz

The Saturday Night Live cast member Kenan Thompson carted out a massive version of the Project 2025 book onto the main stage at the Democratic national convention on Wednesday night. Despite the comedian’s involvement with the prop, which has been used throughout the convention, Democrats want voters to know that the conservative manifesto for a second Trump administration is no joke.

Democrats have sprinkled the words “Project 2025” into speech after speech for months, culminating in the big book’s spot on the big stage – a sign of the toxicity that the mere mention of the project has with voters of multiple political persuasions.

The project would dismantle much of what Democrats have done in the federal government under Joe Biden’s administration. The 900-plus-page policy outline, the Mandate for Leadership, is just one piece of the plan, which also involves assembling a roster of potential political appointees for jobs if Donald Trump wins, training those allies on how it thinks the government should work and coming up with a playbook to swiftly put those plans into place if Trump wins in November.

A poll from the University of Massachusetts Amherst released earlier this month showed that more than half of respondents had heard of Project 2025, and the majority of those surveyed did not agree with many of its aims.

Trump and his campaign have worked to distance the candidate from the project, which was put together by the conservative thinktank the Heritage Foundation. But many of the authors and groups behind the project have Trump ties, and the policy goals often align with things Trump has said he intends to do if he wins again. Trump’s team cheered when a Project 2025 leader announced he was stepping down from his role after pressure from the campaign.

After the Minnesota governor and vice-presidential nominee, Tim Walz, mentioned Project 2025 in his speech on Wednesday night, Trump called into Fox & Friends on Thursday morning to say it was “disgraceful” that Democrats keep tying him to it.

“They know I have nothing to do with it,” he said. “I had no idea what it was. A group of people got together, they drew up some conservative values, very conservative values, and in some cases perhaps they went over the line, perhaps they didn’t, but I have no idea what Project 25 is.”

Each night at the convention, an elected official has lugged the book back on to the stage to cite an exact page number for a policy that should concern Democrats. The Michigan state senator Mallory McMorrow talked about plans to weaponize the Department of Justice. The Pennsylvania state representative Malcolm Kenyatta talked about its plans to stop Medicare from negotiating drug prices. The Colorado governor, Jared Polis, pointed to plans to limit abortions and promote “traditional” families.

“Usually Republicans want to ban books but now they’re trying to shove this down our throats,” Kenyatta said.

The bit with SNL’s Thompson involved video appearances by a handful of Democrats from around the country who would be affected by policy changes the project suggests, including a teacher, a federal employee and a doctor.

“What do you do for a living?” Thompson asks an OB-GYN. “An OB-GYN that delivers babies? Uh-oh.”

“It’s bad news, isn’t it?” the OB-GYN responds.

“It sure is. On page 459, Project 2025 resurrects a law from the 1800s called the Comstock Act to ban abortion nationwide and throw healthcare providers in jail,” Thompson replies.

The speakers, including Thompson, reference a webpage put up by the Harris campaign to highlight parts of the project that are most egregious for Democrats.

“Just remember, everything that we just talked about is very real. It is in this book,” Thompson said. “You can stop it from ever happening by electing Kamala Harris as the president of the United States.”

Democratic convention highlights:

• Tim Walz’s acceptance speech channeled grit and empathy

• Muslim Women for Harris disbands and withdraws support for candidate

• Meet the 200 TikTokers at the DNC

• What to know about Kamala Harris and Tim Walz

Thailand has confirmed Asia’s first known case of a new, deadlier strain of mpox in a patient who had travelled to the country from Africa.

The department of disease control said laboratory tests on the 66-year-old had confirmed he was infected with the mpox Clade 1b variant.

“Thailand’s Department of Disease Control wishes to confirm the lab test result which shows mpox Clade 1b in a European patient,” the department said in a statement, adding that the World Health Organization (WHO) would be informed of the development.

The World Health Organization has declared a global public health emergency over the new variant, urging manufacturers to ramp up production of vaccines.

The patient landed in Bangkok on 14 August and was sent to hospital with mpox symptoms.

“We have monitored 43 people who have been in close contact with the patient and so far they have shown no symptoms, but we must continue monitoring for a total of 21 days,” said the department.

Anyone travelling to Thailand from 42 “risk countries” must register and undergo testing on arrival, the department added.

Mpox cases and deaths are surging in Africa, where outbreaks have been reported in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda since July.

Sweden also confirmed its first case of the more contagious variant earlier in August and Argentina has quarantined a cargo ship over a suspected case of mpox on board, although it is not known if it is the new faster spreading variant.

The disease is caused by a virus transmitted by infected animals but passed from human to human through close physical contact. It causes fever, muscular aches and large boil-like skin lesions.

While mpox has been known for decades, a new deadlier and more transmissible strain – known as Clade 1b – has driven the recent surge in cases.

Clade 1b causes death in about 3.6% of cases, with children more at risk, according to the WHO.

But Thongchai Keeratihattayakorn, head of the Thai Department of Disease Control, said that mpox was much less likely to spread rapidly than Covid-19 because of the close contact needed to catch it.

With Agence France-Presse and Reuters

US officials have expressed optimism that a ceasefire deal in the war in Gaza “is in sight”, despite growing indications from Israel and Hamas that a breakthrough is not imminent and as renewed fighting rages in parts of the Palestinian territory.

Washington has put pressure on both parties to accept a bridging proposal suggested during internationally mediated talks in Qatar last week, dispatching the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, on his ninth visit to the region since the conflict broke out 10 months ago. The latest round of negotiations, in which Hamas is not directly participating, were scheduled to restart in Cairo by Thursday but appear to have been postponed.

Hamas has said the latest proposal veers too closely to Israel’s demands, but characterised comments by the US president, Joe Biden, on Tuesday that it was backing away from an agreement as “misleading”.

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has reportedly refused to countenance an Israeli withdrawal from the Netzarim corridor that now bisects the Gaza Strip, or the Egypt-Gaza border – a red line for Hamas and for Cairo.

Israel’s Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper quoted “officials knowledgable about the negotiations” as saying “the chances for a deal are slim” but attempts were being made to hold talks in Cairo on Friday and Saturday.

It said, quoting the same source, that Netanyahu insisted on an Israeli army “presence along the Philadelphi corridor” on the Gaza Strip’s border with Egypt and that the US “demanded a significant withdrawal of troops” in two stages.

The paper said “the Americans understood the mistake” made by Blinken when he announced during his visit to Israel that Netanyahu had accepted a US proposal to bring the two sides closer together and that “the ball was now in Hamas’s court”.

Yet Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US ambassador to the UN, told the security council on Thursday that an agreement was “now is in sight”, after a phone call late on Wednesday in which Biden pressed Netanyahu on agreeing to a deal.

In the call between the leaders, in which the vice-president and presumptive Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, also took part, the US leader stressed to his Israeli counterpart “the urgency of bringing the ceasefire and hostage release deal to closure and discussed upcoming talks in Cairo to remove any remaining obstacles”, a White House statement said.

The renewed push for talks is seen as more vital than ever after the 31 July back-to-back assassinations of a top Hezbollah commander and Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s political chief. The killings in Beirut and Tehran, which the Lebanese group and Iran have blamed on Israel, threaten to transform the war in Gaza into a region-wide conflict.

It is hoped a ceasefire in Gaza would lower the temperature in the Middle East and dissuade Iran and Hezbollah from retaliatory action. Israel and the powerful Lebanese militia have traded intense rocket fire over the past two days and tensions on the “blue line” that separates Israel and Lebanon have steadily escalated since Hezbollah began firing on Israel in solidarity with Hamas a day after the 7 October attack that triggered the war.

On the ground, Gaza’s civil defence agency said at least three people were killed and 10 children wounded in an Israeli strike on Wednesday on a school turned shelter in Gaza City, and 22 people were killed in the past 24 hours. The Israeli military said the school contained a weapons storage facility.

Israeli troops and tanks are also pressing deeper into areas of the central and southern Gaza Strip as they battle Hamas fighters who have regrouped.

Approximately 170,000 displaced people have been forced to flee once again due to the new Israeli operations, including from areas previously designated as humanitarian “safe zones”.

Aid agencies say the remaining humanitarian zones, which comprise just 11% of the strip’s total area, are already too full to accommodate new arrivals.

Violence has escalated in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where the health ministry said three people were killed in an Israeli airstrike on a house in the Tulkarm refugee camp in the early hours of Thursday. The Israeli army said the strike was a counter-terrorism operation.

At al-Salam glass and ceramics factory on the outskirts of Hebron, the glassblowing furnace and the potter’s wheel are no longer in daily use; the room where artists decorate bowls and tiles with the traditional blues, yellows and reds of the Palestinian craft is sometimes empty.

The glass panes of one window and a door now bear the unmistakable spiderweb-like holes created by gunfire. Israeli soldiers at a nearby checkpoint fired live bullets at teenagers and young men throwing stones in an altercation a few weeks ago, said the factory’s owner, Sami al-Nader.

Hebron, a city in the south of the occupied West Bank, is far from the fighting between Hamas and Israel that has raged in the Gaza Strip for 10 months. But violence between Palestinians and the Israeli army and settlers in the West Bank has also reached a level not seen for 20 years, and new restrictions such as road closures, lockdowns and the cancellation of thousands of Israel work permits are suffocating the economy and daily life.

“The pandemic does not compare to what our business is going through now. We used to welcome tourists every day, and now, if we are lucky, we sell things on Saturdays only. We are not even getting online orders, because no one in Palestine has any money,” said Nader, 47.

“My family has owned the factory for more than 70 years. I do not want it to close under my watch.”

For better or worse, the Israeli and Palestinian economies are deeply intertwined: Israel relies on cheaper Palestinian labour, particularly in construction and agriculture, and before the war higher Israeli wages generated an estimated 20% of the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) GDP. In 2022, these workers contributed £3.05bn to the Palestinian economy, two-thirds of the PA’s total budget.

After the Hamas attacks of 7 October, however, Israel suspended entry for about 140,000 Palestinian workers from the West Bank. Only a fraction of those have since been restored, and Israel is trying to plug the gap with labourers from India.

As a result, unemployment and poverty in the West Bank have soared, putting the already unstable territory on the brink of a financial crash and fuelling unrest. In the West Bank’s refugee camps, set up after the creation of Israel in 1948 and even today still slum-like, young men told the Guardian that militant groups such as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad were the only employers they could find.

Unemployment in the first quarter of 2024 was up 11% to 35% year on year, according to the International Labour Organization, and the UN estimates a 13- to 16-year setback in human development.

Inflation is up, the PA has slashed salaries and cut workers, and Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, is withholding tax funds to the PA as a punitive measure for its cooperation with the international criminal court in The Hague. He has also repeatedly threatened to cut off Palestinian banks from the international banking system, which would cause the PA to collapse altogether.

“All Israeli administrations use the stick and the carrot with the PA, but the current government is pursuing particularly contradictory policies. Israel needs the PA to maintain security in the West Bank and protect settlers but they are leveraging what they can,” said Tahani Mustafa, a senior Palestine analyst at the Crisis Group thinktank.

“The other logic is that of collective punishment: although it’s not worked in the past they seem to still believe that if you impose an economic siege, and a siege on movement, and squeeze the people enough, they will obey.”

In Nahalin, a Palestinian village south of Jerusalem, father and son Mahmood and Yaqoub Dadouh, both skilled marble and stone workers, now spend most of their days doing projects in the garden. The lights are off in Mahmood’s huge kitchen and bathroom materials warehouse next door; he used to mainly supply Israelis from the nearby settlement of Beitar Illit, but not a single customer has come for the better part of a year.

Yaqoub, a father of two small girls, said he was still owed 16,000 shekels (£3,300) from a project in Israel that was cancelled after 7 October. The contractor is refusing to take his calls.

“We’ve already sold all of the gold, the jewellery. It was heartbreaking asking my wife to do that,” said Yaqoub, 29. “I think we can manage with our savings for another two months. After that I have no idea what we are going to do.”

There is no reliable data, but in the past few years people in the West Bank have begun finding ways to get through Israel’s various security barriers into Israel without permits, in search of better-paid work. It is a dangerous decision, but an estimated 40,000 Palestinians are still making the journey, sometimes staying in Israel undocumented for weeks at a time.

A cousin of the Dadouhs found work on a construction site in southern Israel a few weeks ago, the pair said. He has no insurance or rights and risks being caught, but is at least able to send money to his family.

“I think the situation is not sustainable,” Yacoub said. “They don’t want us any more – then end the occupation and let us work for ourselves.”

Israeli attacks on Palestinian water supplies in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip accounted for a quarter of all water-related violence in 2023, as armed conflicts over dwindling resources surged globally, according to new research.

Almost 350 water conflicts were documented worldwide in 2023, a 50% rise on 2022, which was also a record year, according to the Pacific Institute, a California-based nonpartisan thinktank tracking water violence. The violence included attacks on dams, pipelines, wells, treatment plants and workers, as well as public unrest and disputes over access to water, and the use of water as a weapon of war.

Overall, water-related violence has been rising steadily since 2000 but has surged in recent years as the climate crisis and growing scarcity exacerbate old conflicts over land, ideology and religion, economics and sovereignty, and new ones erupt, according to the Water Conflict Chronology. In 2000, just 20 water conflicts were documented by the tracker.

Regions with major jumps in water violence include Latin America and the Caribbean, a region hit by drought and unequal access to water resources, where year-on-year the number of incidents rose more than threefold to 48 in 2023. In Bolívar, Colombia, police fired guns and teargas to disperse residents protesting a 10-day water outage, injuring four.

Meanwhile in India, severe drought and community disputes over access to irrigation water for farmland drove a 150% increase in water conflicts last year, with 25 incidents including clashes between communities in the neighboring southern states of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka over the Cauvery River.

“All these cases highlight different aspects of the growing water crisis: the failure to enforce and respect international law; the failure to provide safe water and sanitation for all; and the growing threat of climate change and severe drought,” said Peter Gleick, co-founder of the Pacific Institute, an independent research and policy organization which created the conflict tracker in 1985.

“There was a massive uptick in violence over water in 2023, widely around the world, but especially in the Middle East.”

Water conflicts in the Middle East accounted for 38% of last year’s total, driven in large part by attacks on Palestinian water supplies and infrastructure in the occupied territories, according to the tracker, which monitors news reports, eyewitness accounts, UN reports and other conflict databases.

Israeli settlers and/or armed forces contaminated and destroyed water wells, pumps and irrigation systems on 90 occasions during 2023 – the equivalent of more than seven water-related acts of violence every month.

In Gaza, the water situation was already dire before Israel launched its war in retaliation for the deadly attack by Hamas on 7 October, after which much of the water and wastewater infrastructure in Gaza has been destroyed, damaged or left unusable.

In November, Israeli airstrikes partially destroyed solar panels and other infrastructure providing energy for the EU-supported Gaza Central wastewater treatment plant, which served 1 million people. In another attack, the Israeli military began pumping seawater into Hamas’s tunnel complex in an effort to destroy the clandestine transport and communications system, an action that risked “ruining the basic conditions for life in Gaza” – an element of the crime of genocide, a senior hydrologist told the Guardian in December.

In the West Bank, much of the water violence appeared to be linked to the annexation and settlements by Israelis that were ruled unlawful by the international court of justice in a landmark advisory opinion.

In one documented case from September, Israeli settlers from Shaarei Tikva reportedly pumped wastewater on to Palestinian agricultural lands east of Qalqilya, causing damage to olive trees and crops. In another from November, Israeli settlers reportedly demolished homes, a school’s water tanks and a water pipeline, and uprooted dozens of young olive trees in the occupied city of Hebron.

The Israeli foreign ministry has rejected the ICJ ruling as “fundamentally wrong” and one-sided. The government has been approached for comment.

Meanwhile, the number of water-related attacks in the war between Russia and Ukraine dropped by 26% compared with 2022 but remained high, with 32 reported incidents. This included Russian forces blowing up a dam on the Mokri Yaly River in mid-June 2023, causing flooding on both banks, reportedly to slow down a Ukrainian counteroffensive. In September, power lines and a water main were damaged by Ukrainian forces shelling in Gordeevka, Kursk.

“The large increase in these events signals that too little is being done to ensure equitable access to safe and sufficient water and highlights the devastation that war and violence wreak on civilian populations and essential water infrastructure,” said Morgan Shimabuku, senior researcher with the Pacific Institute.

“The new analysis exposes the increasing risk that climate change adds to already fragile political situations by making access to clean water less reliable in areas of conflict around the world.”

Doctors have begun trialling the world’s first mRNA lung cancer vaccine in patients, as experts hailed its “groundbreaking” potential to save thousands of lives.

Lung cancer is the world’s leading cause of cancer death, accounting for about 1.8m deaths every year. Survival rates in those with advanced forms of the disease, where tumours have spread, are particularly poor.

Now experts are testing a new jab that instructs the body to hunt down and kill cancer cells – then prevents them ever coming back. Known as BNT116 and made by BioNTech, the vaccine is designed to treat non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), the most common form of the disease.

The phase 1 clinical trial, the first human study of BNT116, has launched across 34 research sites in seven countries: the UK, US, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Spain and Turkey.

The UK has six sites, located in England and Wales, with the first UK patient to receive the vaccine having their initial dose on Tuesday.

Overall, about 130 patients – from early-stage before surgery or radiotherapy, to late-stage disease or recurrent cancer – will be enrolled to have the jab alongside immunotherapy. About 20 will be from the UK.

The jab uses messenger RNA (mRNA), similar to Covid-19 vaccines, and works by presenting the immune system with tumour markers from NSCLC to prime the body to fight cancer cells expressing these markers.

The aim is to strengthen a person’s immune response to cancer while leaving healthy cells untouched, unlike chemotherapy.

“We are now entering this very exciting new era of mRNA-based immunotherapy clinical trials to investigate the treatment of lung cancer,” said Prof Siow Ming Lee, a consultant medical oncologist at University College London hospitals NHS foundation trust (UCLH), which is leading the trial in the UK.

“It’s simple to deliver, and you can select specific antigens in the cancer cell, and then you target them. This technology is the next big phase of cancer treatment.”

Janusz Racz, 67, from London, was the first person to have the vaccine in the UK. He was diagnosed in May and soon after started chemotherapy and radiotherapy.

The scientist, who specialises in AI, said his profession inspired him to take part in the trial. “I am a scientist too, and I understand that the progress of science – especially in medicine – lies in people agreeing to be involved in such investigations,” he said.

He added: “It would be very beneficial for me, because it’s a new methodology not available for other patients that can help me to get rid of the cancer.

“And also, I can be a part of the team that can provide proof of concept for this new methodology, and the faster it would be implemented across the world, more people will be saved.”

Racz received six consecutive injections five minutes apart over 30 minutes at the National Institute for Health Research UCLH Clinical Research Facility on Tuesday.

Each jab contained different RNA strands. He will get the vaccine every week for six consecutive weeks, and then every three weeks for 54 weeks.

Lee said: “We hope adding this additional treatment will stop the cancer coming back because a lot of time for lung cancer patients, even after surgery and radiation, it does come back.”

He added: “I’ve been in lung cancer research for 40 years now. When I started in the 1990s, nobody believed chemotherapy worked.

“We now know about 20-30% [of patients] stay alive with stage 4 with immunotherapy and now we want to improve survival rates. So hopefully this mRNA vaccine, on top of immunotherapy, might provide the extra boost.

“We hope to go on to phase 2, phase 3, and then hope it becomes standard of care worldwide and saves lots of lung cancer patients.”

The Guardian revealed in May that thousands of patients in England were to be fast-tracked into groundbreaking trials of cancer vaccines in a revolutionary world-first NHS “matchmaking” scheme to save lives.

Under the scheme, patients who meet the eligibility criteria will gain access to clinical trials for the vaccines that experts say represent a new dawn in cancer treatment.

Lord Vallance, the science minister, hailed the launch of the lung cancer vaccine trial. “This approach has the potential to save the lives of thousands diagnosed with lung cancer every year,” he said. “We back our researchers so that they continue to be an integral part of projects that produce groundbreaking therapies, like this one.”

Racz hopes once his treatment is over he can get back to running and achieve his lifetime ambition: completing the London Marathon.

Doctors have begun trialling the world’s first mRNA lung cancer vaccine in patients, as experts hailed its “groundbreaking” potential to save thousands of lives.

Lung cancer is the world’s leading cause of cancer death, accounting for about 1.8m deaths every year. Survival rates in those with advanced forms of the disease, where tumours have spread, are particularly poor.

Now experts are testing a new jab that instructs the body to hunt down and kill cancer cells – then prevents them ever coming back. Known as BNT116 and made by BioNTech, the vaccine is designed to treat non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), the most common form of the disease.

The phase 1 clinical trial, the first human study of BNT116, has launched across 34 research sites in seven countries: the UK, US, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Spain and Turkey.

The UK has six sites, located in England and Wales, with the first UK patient to receive the vaccine having their initial dose on Tuesday.

Overall, about 130 patients – from early-stage before surgery or radiotherapy, to late-stage disease or recurrent cancer – will be enrolled to have the jab alongside immunotherapy. About 20 will be from the UK.

The jab uses messenger RNA (mRNA), similar to Covid-19 vaccines, and works by presenting the immune system with tumour markers from NSCLC to prime the body to fight cancer cells expressing these markers.

The aim is to strengthen a person’s immune response to cancer while leaving healthy cells untouched, unlike chemotherapy.

“We are now entering this very exciting new era of mRNA-based immunotherapy clinical trials to investigate the treatment of lung cancer,” said Prof Siow Ming Lee, a consultant medical oncologist at University College London hospitals NHS foundation trust (UCLH), which is leading the trial in the UK.

“It’s simple to deliver, and you can select specific antigens in the cancer cell, and then you target them. This technology is the next big phase of cancer treatment.”

Janusz Racz, 67, from London, was the first person to have the vaccine in the UK. He was diagnosed in May and soon after started chemotherapy and radiotherapy.

The scientist, who specialises in AI, said his profession inspired him to take part in the trial. “I am a scientist too, and I understand that the progress of science – especially in medicine – lies in people agreeing to be involved in such investigations,” he said.

He added: “It would be very beneficial for me, because it’s a new methodology not available for other patients that can help me to get rid of the cancer.

“And also, I can be a part of the team that can provide proof of concept for this new methodology, and the faster it would be implemented across the world, more people will be saved.”

Racz received six consecutive injections five minutes apart over 30 minutes at the National Institute for Health Research UCLH Clinical Research Facility on Tuesday.

Each jab contained different RNA strands. He will get the vaccine every week for six consecutive weeks, and then every three weeks for 54 weeks.

Lee said: “We hope adding this additional treatment will stop the cancer coming back because a lot of time for lung cancer patients, even after surgery and radiation, it does come back.”

He added: “I’ve been in lung cancer research for 40 years now. When I started in the 1990s, nobody believed chemotherapy worked.

“We now know about 20-30% [of patients] stay alive with stage 4 with immunotherapy and now we want to improve survival rates. So hopefully this mRNA vaccine, on top of immunotherapy, might provide the extra boost.

“We hope to go on to phase 2, phase 3, and then hope it becomes standard of care worldwide and saves lots of lung cancer patients.”

The Guardian revealed in May that thousands of patients in England were to be fast-tracked into groundbreaking trials of cancer vaccines in a revolutionary world-first NHS “matchmaking” scheme to save lives.

Under the scheme, patients who meet the eligibility criteria will gain access to clinical trials for the vaccines that experts say represent a new dawn in cancer treatment.

Lord Vallance, the science minister, hailed the launch of the lung cancer vaccine trial. “This approach has the potential to save the lives of thousands diagnosed with lung cancer every year,” he said. “We back our researchers so that they continue to be an integral part of projects that produce groundbreaking therapies, like this one.”

Racz hopes once his treatment is over he can get back to running and achieve his lifetime ambition: completing the London Marathon.

Ukraine has carried out a night-time drone attack on a Kremlin military airfield near the city of Volgograd and announced the capture of another village in Russia’s Kursk region, as Russian forces pressed on with their advance in the Donetsk region.

Volgograd’s governor, Andrei Bocharov, said the strike took place at about 3am. Local people reported a series of explosions. Several hours later, ammunition continued to detonate as a vast carpet of black smoke engulfed the area.

Ukraine’s SBU security service said it carried out the remote raid against the Marinovka airbase, about 45 miles (70km) west of Volgograd, near the city of Kalach-na-Donu.

The base is home to about 30 Su-34 and Su-35 fighter jets. The planes carry out regular bombing runs against Ukrainian positions on the frontline about 280 miles away, the SBU told the Kyiv Independent newspaper. It is unclear how many jets were damaged or destroyed.

One Russian witness filming the destruction suggested the airfield had been wiped out. “It’s a serious tragedy, folks. This is serious stuff. It’s all fucking on fire. And it’s fucking smoke. It’s all fucking exploding. That’s it,” he said as detonations continued.

Ukraine is waging an increasingly ambitious long-range drone campaign against critical Russian infrastructure, hitting more than 200 targets. They include oil depots, refineries and arms factories. Last week it struck two airbases: Borisoglebsk, 150 miles inside Russia, and Savasleyka, about 400 miles away.

On Tuesday it launched a major attack on Moscow and sent drones to the Arctic Murmansk region, more than 1,000 miles away, where Russian strategic bombers are located. Russia’s defence ministry said it downed all hostile unmanned aerial vehicles that infiltrated its territory.

Earlier on Thursday, drones hit a railway ferry with fuel tanks in the port of Kavkaz, not far from the road and rail bridge linking the Russian mainland with occupied Crimea. Black smoke billowed above the water. Kyiv has said it will knock out the “illegal” crossing across the Kerch Strait.

Also on Thursday, Volodymyr Zelenskiy travelled to the border area in Sumy region, from where Ukrainian troops sprang their surprise 6 August incursion deep into Russia. The president met his commander-in-chief, Col Gen Oleksandr Syrskyi.

One goal of the operation is to relieve pressure on Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, where Russian combat units have been pressing forward. So far this has not happened, with Moscow instead sending reinforcements from the rear and the occupied south of Ukraine. If anything it has stepped up the tempo of attack around the town of Pokrovsk, a key Ukrainian military hub.

In recent months, Russian forces have swallowed up villages to the east of Pokrovsk and are now a mere 7 miles away. They have advanced to within 3 miles of the neighbouring town of Myrnohrad. On Thursday people were packing up to leave, with shops, banks and other organisations having closed this week. The mood was said to be calm despite expectations of an imminent Russian assault.

Speaking in the Sumy area, Zelenskiy said the Ukrainian-controlled “buffer zone” on the Russian side of the border was saving lives. “Since the start of the Kursk operation there has been less shelling and fewer civilian casualties in the Sumy region,” he said. The armed forces had seized another settlement, he added, and taken more Russian soldiers as prisoners.

According to Telegram channels, Ukrainian soldiers have captured the village of Krasno-Oktyabrskoye, next to the Seym River. They previously destroyed three bridges and two pontoon crossings on the same stretch of frontline, using US-supplied Himars rockets, and pounded the Russian border town of Tetkino, farther west.

Several thousand Russian troops are now marooned in the Glushkovsky district south of the river. Ukraine is seeking to advance there and to increase its 480-square-mile bridgehead inside enemy territory. Video suggests Russian units are putting up strong resistance, with fierce battles in the town of Korenevo and elsewhere.

On Thursday Vladimir Putin accused Ukraine of trying to attack the Kursk nuclear power station. “The enemy tried to strike the nuclear power plant at night. The International Atomic Energy Agency has been informed,” Putin said during a televised government meeting.

Putin did not present any evidence for his claims or provide further details on the alleged attack.

The IAEA released a statement saying it had been told by Moscow drone fragments were found roughly 100 metres from the Kursk plant’s spent fuel nuclear storage facility.

The nuclear watchdog said its chief would visit the facility next week.

Russia’s FSB spy agency, meanwhile, has issued an arrest warrant for journalists working for CNN after they travelled on assignment to the Russian town of Sudzha, which is under the control of Ukraine’s military. The reporters include Nick Paton-Walsh, CNN’s chief international security correspondent, and two Ukrainian colleagues. Paton-Walsh, who is British, was the Guardian’s Moscow correspondent in the early 2000s.

This week the Kremlin summoned a senior US diplomat in Moscow and complained about “provocative” trips by American journalists to Russian territory.

Overall, Putin has played down Ukraine’s invasion, which is the first attack on Russia soil since the second world war. In a meeting with the heads of the affected border regions, he discussed the humanitarian situation without explaining what had caused it. More than 122,000 Russians living in the Kursk zone have fled.

Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to the head of Zelenskiy’s office, said the Kremlin had deliberately chosen to ignore bad news. “It is currently unable to counter the actions of Ukrainian forces in the Kursk region. To quell the growing anxiety among the population, our army’s advance and the loss of territory is being presented as a ‘new normal’,” he wrote on X.

Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro is facing a growing chorus of international outrage after the government-controlled supreme court endorsed his disputed claim to have won the presidential election.

Venezuela’s opposition has claimed Maduro tried to steal the 28 July election and has produced compelling evidence that its candidate, Edmundo González, was the winner.

Even countries such as Brazil and Colombia, whose leftwing leaders have longstanding ties to Maduro’s Chavista political movement, have refused to recognise his victory until detailed voting data is published.

On Thursday, Venezuela’s supreme court publicly certified Maduro’s supposed triumph, which would give the incumbent another six-year term. During a televised announcement, its president, Caryslia Beatriz Rodríguez Rodríguez, declared his re-election “indisputable” and called the court’s verdict “definitive”.

“Nothing will stop us in our sacred mission [of upholding the law],” Rodríguez, who is a member of Maduro’s ruling Socialist party, said in her 30-minute speech.

The court did not divulge any detailed voting data on which its ruling was based.

The decision prompted a flood of anger and criticism.

Gabriel Boric, Chile’s progressive president, accused Venezuela’s supreme court of “consolidating the fraud” allegedly perpetrated by Maduro after the recent election.

“Chile does not recognise this false, auto-proclaimed triumph of Maduro and co,” Boric wrote on X, voicing solidarity with the Venezuelans fighting for “democracy, justice and freedom”.

“Venezuela’s dictatorship is not the left,” he said.

The president of Uruguay, Luis Lacalle Pou, said: “The Maduro regime confirms what the international community has been denouncing: fraud.”

Lacalle said the move revealed “a dictatorship that closes all doors to an institutional and democratic life for its people”. “We must not remain silent or cease in defence of the Venezuelan cause,” he added.

Juanita Goebertus, the director of Human Rights Watch in the Americas, called the ruling “a crude attempt to judicially cover up electoral fraud”.

“The court is not impartial or independent,” Goebertus said, calling on the international community to continue demanding a credible and impartial evaluation of voting data.

Andrés Izarra, a former Maduro minister who now lives in exile, denounced what he called “a coup”. “No country will accept this judgment. And nor will the Venezuelan people,” he said.

Maduro’s rival in the election, González, rejected the verdict, calling it “null and void”.

After the court’s decision was announced, Maduro’s ministers and allies lined up to be interviewed on state television to declare the election crisis over.

The attorney general, Tarek William Saab, hailed what he called “a sublime and historic” moment. The foreign minister, Yván Gil, claimed the ruling “closes a chapter in Venezuela’s 28 July electoral process” and showed that the constitution had triumphed.

Maduro’s communications minister, Freddy Ñáñez, called the ruling a “happy ending” for Venezuelan people. “This will go down in history as an episode of the highest democratic order,” Ñáñez said. “I feel very content and I am absolutely certain that this is the mood on the streets.”

But the move looks almost certain to aggravate the crisis. Some fear that the political standoff could lead to bloodshed or even conflict.

“Somehow I don’t think saying ‘we won, just trust us’ is going to fix Maduro’s problem,” tweeted Geoff Ramsey, a Venezuela specialist at the Arsht Latin America Center.

Maduro’s administration has cracked down hard on dissenters since his claim of victory sparked two days of protests involving many of the poor communities that for years were loyal to his movement and its founder, Hugo Chávez. More than 20 people have been killed and more than 1,500 arrested.

Gonzalo Himiob, a human rights activist whose group, Foro Penal, is documenting the roundup of government opponents, said most of those targeted were from working-class areas.

“The government is sending them a message: ‘If you didn’t vote for us, you are now an enemy – and we can do whatever we want to our enemies,’” Himiob said.

Despite the pro-government court’s judgment, a growing body of evidence supports the opposition’s claim to have inflicted a severe defeat on Maduro, whose 11-year rule has coincided with a historic depression exacerbated by US sanctions.

One study, published by the political scientist and Latin America expert Dorothy Kronick, concluded that the voting data released by the opposition “almost certainly reflects actual votes cast”.

The security and sophistication of Venezuela’s electronic voting system was such that “even extraordinary levels of organisational prowess, conspiratorial acumen and resources could not perpetrate tally fraud that would produce the [opposition] campaign data without leaving traces in the paper trail – traces that, at least as of this writing, have not appeared,” argued Kronick, from the University of California, Berkeley.

Speaking after Thursday’s decision, Kronick said her findings were “not consistent with what we just heard from the supreme court”.

She added: “All the evidence points in the direction of this data that the [opposition] campaign published [being] valid and reflecting the votes cast on election day, which would mean that González won in a landslide.”

A transgender woman who sued a women-only social media app for alleged gender discrimination has been awarded $10,000 plus costs after a judge found she had been indirectly discriminated against in a landmark decision that tested the meaning and scope of the Sex Discrimination Act.

Roxanne Tickle, a transgender woman from regional New South Wales, sued the social media platform Giggle for Girls and its CEO, Sall Grover, claiming she was unlawfully barred from using the app in 2021 after the firm and Grover said she was a man.

On Friday morning, the federal court justice Robert Bromwich said the respondents had considered “sex” to mean an unchangeable sex of a person at birth.

“These arguments failed because the view propounded by the respondents conflicted with a long history of cases decided by courts going back over 30 years. Those … cases established that on its ordinary meaning sex is changeable,” he said.

Onboarding to the app required the user to upload a selfie verified as female by KairosAI gender detection software and then by Grover.

Tickle was barred after initially being allowed to join the platform – which was shut down in August 2022.

The judge said the evidence did not establish Tickle was excluded from Giggle directly “by reason of her gender identity although it remains possible that this was the real but unproven reason”.

Rather, the indirect discrimination case succeeded because Tickle was excluded from the use of the social media app “because she did not look sufficiently female”.

• Sign up for Guardian Australia’s free morning and afternoon email newsletters for your daily news roundup

Bromwich disagreed with Grover and Giggle’s arguments about the constitutionality of the protections for gender identity in the act – in line with the position of the sex discrimination commissioner.

Tickle had sought damages and aggravated damages amounting to $200,000, claiming that persistent misgendering by Grover resulted in constant anxiety and occasional suicidal thoughts.

In his written decision, Bromwich drew attention to the behaviour of Grover, including laughing at a caricature of Tickle during the trial.

“[Grover’s] explanation, that it was funny in the context of the courtroom, was obviously disingenuous. It was offensive and belittling and had no legitimate place in the respondents prosecuting their case.”

Tickle said Friday’s decision showed transgender people could stand up for themselves.

“I’m pleased by the outcome of my case and I hope it is healing for trans and gender diverse people. The ruling shows that all women are protected from discrimination,” she said outside court.

“I brought my case to show trans people that you can be brave and you can stand up for yourself. I can now get on with the rest of my life and have a coffee down the road with my friends, play hockey with my team and put this horribleness behind me.”

Changes to the Sex Discrimination Act in 2013 made it unlawful under federal law to discriminate against a person on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity or intersex status.

It is the first time that alleged gender identity discrimination has been heard by Australia’s federal court and goes to the heart of how gender identity – and being a woman – is interpreted. The outcome is likely to have wide-reaching implications for male and female spaces and activities and is being watched around the world.

Over the course of a three-day hearing in April, the court heard that Tickle had lived as a woman since 2017, had a female birth certificate and gender affirmation surgery and “feels in her mind that psychologically she is a woman”.

Tickle’s barrister Georgina Costello KC said that “Ms Tickle is a woman” but that “the respondents flatly deny that fact”.

Giggle and Grover’s team asserted that the case must focus on biological sex.

“Sex is discriminatory, it always has been and always will be … biological sex must prevail,” barrister Bridie Nolan said.

Grover told the court that she would not address Tickle as “Ms” and that, even if a transgender woman presented as female, had gender affirmation surgery, lived as a female and held female identity documents, Grover would still see her as a “biological male”.

The court heard that Grover started the app, intended as an “online refuge”, after receiving trauma therapy for social media abuse while living in the US.

The Australian Human Rights Commission acted as a friend of the court. Barrister Zelie Heger told the court that sex was no longer defined in the Sex Discrimination Act but that “importantly the act recognises that a person’s sex is not limited to [being a man or a woman]”.

The case has been closely followed by both women’s and trans rights supporters, with Bromwich admitting “this was never going to be an easy case for anybody”.

Tickle received support from the Grata Fund, while a crowdfunding campaign set up to cover Giggle for Girls’ legal costs raised more than $520,000.

A transgender woman who sued a women-only social media app for alleged gender discrimination has been awarded $10,000 plus costs after a judge found she had been indirectly discriminated against in a landmark decision that tested the meaning and scope of the Sex Discrimination Act.

Roxanne Tickle, a transgender woman from regional New South Wales, sued the social media platform Giggle for Girls and its CEO, Sall Grover, claiming she was unlawfully barred from using the app in 2021 after the firm and Grover said she was a man.

On Friday morning, the federal court justice Robert Bromwich said the respondents had considered “sex” to mean an unchangeable sex of a person at birth.

“These arguments failed because the view propounded by the respondents conflicted with a long history of cases decided by courts going back over 30 years. Those … cases established that on its ordinary meaning sex is changeable,” he said.

Onboarding to the app required the user to upload a selfie verified as female by KairosAI gender detection software and then by Grover.

Tickle was barred after initially being allowed to join the platform – which was shut down in August 2022.

The judge said the evidence did not establish Tickle was excluded from Giggle directly “by reason of her gender identity although it remains possible that this was the real but unproven reason”.

Rather, the indirect discrimination case succeeded because Tickle was excluded from the use of the social media app “because she did not look sufficiently female”.

• Sign up for Guardian Australia’s free morning and afternoon email newsletters for your daily news roundup

Bromwich disagreed with Grover and Giggle’s arguments about the constitutionality of the protections for gender identity in the act – in line with the position of the sex discrimination commissioner.

Tickle had sought damages and aggravated damages amounting to $200,000, claiming that persistent misgendering by Grover resulted in constant anxiety and occasional suicidal thoughts.

In his written decision, Bromwich drew attention to the behaviour of Grover, including laughing at a caricature of Tickle during the trial.

“[Grover’s] explanation, that it was funny in the context of the courtroom, was obviously disingenuous. It was offensive and belittling and had no legitimate place in the respondents prosecuting their case.”

Tickle said Friday’s decision showed transgender people could stand up for themselves.

“I’m pleased by the outcome of my case and I hope it is healing for trans and gender diverse people. The ruling shows that all women are protected from discrimination,” she said outside court.

“I brought my case to show trans people that you can be brave and you can stand up for yourself. I can now get on with the rest of my life and have a coffee down the road with my friends, play hockey with my team and put this horribleness behind me.”

Changes to the Sex Discrimination Act in 2013 made it unlawful under federal law to discriminate against a person on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity or intersex status.

It is the first time that alleged gender identity discrimination has been heard by Australia’s federal court and goes to the heart of how gender identity – and being a woman – is interpreted. The outcome is likely to have wide-reaching implications for male and female spaces and activities and is being watched around the world.

Over the course of a three-day hearing in April, the court heard that Tickle had lived as a woman since 2017, had a female birth certificate and gender affirmation surgery and “feels in her mind that psychologically she is a woman”.

Tickle’s barrister Georgina Costello KC said that “Ms Tickle is a woman” but that “the respondents flatly deny that fact”.

Giggle and Grover’s team asserted that the case must focus on biological sex.

“Sex is discriminatory, it always has been and always will be … biological sex must prevail,” barrister Bridie Nolan said.

Grover told the court that she would not address Tickle as “Ms” and that, even if a transgender woman presented as female, had gender affirmation surgery, lived as a female and held female identity documents, Grover would still see her as a “biological male”.

The court heard that Grover started the app, intended as an “online refuge”, after receiving trauma therapy for social media abuse while living in the US.

The Australian Human Rights Commission acted as a friend of the court. Barrister Zelie Heger told the court that sex was no longer defined in the Sex Discrimination Act but that “importantly the act recognises that a person’s sex is not limited to [being a man or a woman]”.

The case has been closely followed by both women’s and trans rights supporters, with Bromwich admitting “this was never going to be an easy case for anybody”.

Tickle received support from the Grata Fund, while a crowdfunding campaign set up to cover Giggle for Girls’ legal costs raised more than $520,000.

Gunmen armed with rocket-propelled grenades have ambushed a police convoy in eastern Punjab province, killing at least 11 officers and wounding seven others, authorities said.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack on Thursday in the Rahim Yar Khan district. The officers were ambushed while on patrol in a deserted area in search of robbers who operate in the region.

Punjabi police said the gunmen were probably robbers and not militants. The victims were taken to a nearby hospital.

There has been a surge in violence and attacks by militants in Pakistan in recent years but such a high number of police casualties in a single incident is rare.

Security forces often carry out operations against bandits in Punjab and in the southern Sindh province, where they hide in rural, forested areas. They have killed several police officers in attacks in recent months.

The Kacha area of Rahim Yar Khan district where the attack took place is known to have robbers’ hideouts along the Indus River, where hundreds of heavily armed bandits evade police.

Police said one of the police vehicles apparently broke down while passing through accumulated rainwater along farm fields, when dozens of bandits launched the attack. Pakistan has been lashed by monsoon rains since July.

Authorities swiftly condemned the attack, one of the deadliest on police in recent years. The president, Asif Ali Zardari, prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, and interior minister, Mohsin Naqvi, released statements denouncing it, expressing sorrow and describing the slain officers as martyrs.

Police were ordered to take immediate action against the attackers and Sharif demanded the best medical care for the wounded officers.

Earlier on Thursday, gunmen opened fire on a school van in Punjab, killing two children and wounding six other people, police said. No one claimed responsibility for that attack.

A Romanian court has ordered Andrew Tate to be placed under house arrest, his representative said, after he was among six people taken into custody in an investigation into human trafficking and sexual exploitation.

The former professional kickboxer and his brother Tristan were among six people detained on Wednesday for an initial 24 hours after Romania’s anti-organised crime prosecuting unit, Diicot, conducted four house searches in Ilfov county and the Bucharest municipality.

Diicot asked the Bucharest court to arrest the Tate brothers for 30 days, but the judge decided to place Andrew Tate under house arrest and Tristan under judiciary control for that period, their representative Mateea Petrescu said on Thursday.

“The Tates salute the decision and firmly deny all allegations levelled against them, emphasising that the accusations are baseless and unsupported by substantial evidence,” Petrescu wrote in a statement.

The Tate brothers were previously indicted in mid-2023, along with two Romanian women, for human trafficking, rape and forming a criminal gang to sexually exploit women, allegations they denied.

Before their latest detention the brothers had been subject to a travel ban, under which they were free to travel within Romania but not leave the country.

A self-described misogynist, Andrew Tate has gained millions of fans on social media by promoting an ultra-masculine lifestyle that critics say denigrates women.

A post on Tate’s account on X said: “All they try to do is damage my name with complete bullshit,” without specifying who was being referred to.

Diicot said in a statement that it had ordered the detention of six people for crimes including forming an organised criminal group, human trafficking, trafficking of minors, sexual intercourse with a minor and money laundering.

It said it had asked that three of the suspects remain in custody while another be put under house arrest.

According to Diicot, two of the accused used the “loverboy” method, which involves convincing people they are in a romantic relationship, to force 34 victims into making pornography which was then sold online for proceeds of more than $2.8m (£2.1m) and 887,000 crypto tokens.

Diicot alleges that one of the defendants forced a 17-year-old minor to produce pornography in Britain and Romania, creating profits of $1.5m. It also alleges the same defendant repeatedly had sexual relations with a 15-year-old victim.

A Sikh separatist leader was attacked on a California highway earlier this month in a shooting that his organization has described as an assassination attempt.

Satinder Pal Singh Raju, an organizer with Sikhs for Justice and an advocate for the establishment of an independent Sikh state, Khalistan, was traveling on the Interstate 505 near Sacramento on 11 August when the truck he was in was “sprayed with bullets”. He survived the shooting.

Raju is an associate of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Canadian advocate for Khalistan who was assassinated in Vancouver in 2023, according to Sikhs for Justice. The Canadian government has said there were “credible allegations” that “agents of the Indian government” were behind Nijjar’s death.

California has long been home to a strong Sikh independence movement, and Raju has helped organize referendum efforts in the state to show support for Khalistan.

The California highway patrol confirmed to the Guardian that a shooting had occurred and that it unfolded after 11.30pm on 11 August in Yolo county. The agency is investigating the incident, and no arrests have been made, Rodney Fitzhugh, a CHP spokesperson, said in a statement.

Raju told the Sacramento Bee that he was returning from an organizing meeting with colleagues when a car pulled up next to them in a rural area of the highway and began firing, prompting the driver of the truck to veer into a ditch. They fled the vehicle and hid behind a haystack where they called 911, the newspaper reported.

Sikhs for Justice shared video on social media that showed bullet holes in the window of the driver’s side and in the windshield of the Dodge Ram.

Following Nijjar’s killing, Raju and other members of Sikhs for Justice spent months in British Columbia to organize for their cause. Raju has also taken part in organizing in San Francisco and Sacramento and has said this incident will not deter him.

“The day of our death is already written. I am happy to survive. But this won’t change the work that we do,” Raju told the Los Angeles Times.

Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, the general counsel for Sikhs For Justice, said the shooting as part of “India’s unabated transnational violence”.

“Modi 3.0 Regime is continuing with its policy of transnational repression to violently suppress the global Khalistan Referendum campaign seeking liberation of Punjab from Indian occupation,” Pannun said in a statement.

A humpback whale has been freed after being entangled in ropes in Sydney Harbour. Jessica Fox, the second vice-president of volunteer organisation Orrca, confirmed the rescue late on Friday morning.

The whale was spotted about 1pm on Thursday by a tour group, who alerted Orrca.

At 9.30am on Friday, the mammal was between Middle Head and North Head, according to a video posted to Orrca’s Facebook page.

“The entanglement is ropes and buoys attached to the tail of the whale,” the group said at the time.

The New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service and Maritime NSW vessels were on site monitoring the whale and enforcing an exclusion zone, a spokesperson for the former said.

The large whale disentanglement team was dispatched to assist in freeing the animal.

Large orange buoys were attached to the entanglement to slow the whale and to make sighting the animal easier, according to the Orrca video, which noted the animal had been “going in circles in Sydney Harbour this morning making some erratic directional changes”.

A GPS tracker was reportedly attached to the whale on Thursday before rescue efforts were paused overnight. However, the tracker detached and the whale had to be re-located on Friday morning.

More details soon …