Police in Germany have said they cannot rule out a “terrorist motive” after a mass stabbing at a festival that left three people dead and injured eight others.

At a press briefing, police said they had detained a 15-year-old at his parents’ home in the early hours of Saturday in connection with the attack in Solingen, west Germany. But they added that he is not believed to be the prime suspect, who is still unknown.

Public prosecutor Markus Caspers said of the 15-year-old: “He is at this point only suspected of failing to report a crime.” He added that the suspect was alleged to have spoken with the perpetrator “shortly before the crime”.

He said that a “terrorist motive” could not be excluded, partly because the assailant did not appear to know his victims.

A woman, 56, and two men, 56 and 67, all from the region, were killed in the attack on Friday night, authorities said.

Police found at least one weapon that may have been used in the assault and are analysing it for DNA traces. They said they had had no indication in the run-up to the festival that there was a security threat.

People began leaving flower bouquets and candles in tribute to the victims at the site of the attack in the centre of Solingen.

Authorities set up a website for people to send in footage or information about the attack as well as a telephone hotline, and urged witnesses not to post relevant videos directly to social media.

The assailant, who is still at large, used a knife to attack people apparently at random in a crowd of thousands gathered for a festival at the central square in Solingen on Friday night. The frenzied assault, which happened at a festival of diversity during celebrations to mark the city’s 650th anniversary, lasted only minutes, witnesses said.

Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, who has been under pressure to fight a rise in knife violence in cities, said on Saturday that he was “shocked” by the “terrible event” and stood with the terrorised city in mourning the victims.

“I wish the injured a speedy recovery,” he said in a post on X. “The perpetrator must be caught quickly and punished to the full extent of the law.”

The authorities have deployed a “large contingent”, including helicopters, to search for the male assailant who fled the scene, and established road checkpoints. A spokesperson said it remained unclear which direction he had fled in and what means of transport he used.

“Both victims and witnesses are currently being questioned. The police are currently searching for the perpetrator with a large team,” the spokesperson said, urging the public to be vigilant and cautious.

Herbert Reul, the interior minister of North Rhine-Westphalia state – Germany’s most populous region, warned against speculation about the perpetrator’s background.

“You don’t want to believe what you see here at the crime scene. It’s upsetting,” Reul said.

“Out of nowhere, someone stabs people indiscriminately. We can’t say anything about the person or the motive yet,” he said, acknowledging that the police had very few leads.

The mass stabbing happened at a festival that was supposed to run through to Sunday, drawing up to 25,000 people each day with a programme including live bands, cabaret acts, acrobats and entertainment for children. The rest of the festival has now been cancelled, as were weekend festivities in nearby towns.

A police spokesperson said emergency services had received several calls at about 9.40pm with witnesses reporting that “an unknown person armed with a knife wounded several people at random”.

A large crowd had gathered around a stage with live music on the Fronhof market square in the city centre. Most of those injured are believed to have been attacked directly in front of the stage, the daily newspaper Bild reported, adding that the man appeared to target the throats of his victims.

The German DJ Topic, who is from Solingen, said in a post on Instagram he was performing on the stage when security personnel approached him and informed him of the attack.

He was asked to continue his set “to avoid causing a mass panic”, he said. “So I kept playing even though it was incredibly hard.” He said he was told to stop 10-15 minutes later, and “since the attacker was still on the run, we hid in a nearby store while police helicopters circled above us,” he wrote.

“I still can’t believe it … this was supposed to be a free festival for everyone. Really close friends of mine were there with their small kids,” he said in a video recorded in his childhood bedroom. “What’s happening to this world … my thoughts are with all the victims.”

Sascha Mosig, who was on his first night on the job for a security firm at the festival, said he suddenly saw a group of people running in his direction, some of them covered in blood. One screamed, “Knife.”

The 37-year-old told weekly newspaper Die Zeit that he went to the main square to help and saw lifeless bodies on the ground and people in shock.

“Blood was everywhere,” he said. “You know these images from war. This was one.”

Another witness, Lars Breitzke, told the local newspaper Solinger Tageblatt that he was a few metres from the attack, not far from the stage, and “understood from the expression on the singer’s face that something was wrong”.

“And then, a metre away from me, a person fell,” said Breitzke, who at first thought it was someone who was drunk. But when he turned around, he saw other people lying on the ground and several pools of blood, he added.

The authorities called on people to maintain calm as they left the city centre and witnesses said festivalgoers complied, avoiding a crush.

On Saturday morning, armed police were guarding a security perimeter, with witnesses describing a “ghostly” atmosphere in the normally bustling shopping district.

Solingen has about 160,000 inhabitants and is located near the bigger cities of Cologne and Düsseldorf.

The federal health minister, Karl Lauterbach, said he hoped “rescue teams can save the wounded who are still alive and that police can catch the cowardly and pathetic perpetrator”. The foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, said the “treacherous attack … shocked me deeply”.

The federal interior minister, Nancy Faeser, said security authorities were “doing everything they can to catch the perpetrator and determine the background to the attack”.

Germany has experienced a series of knife attacks over the past 12 months, with Faeser pledging earlier this month to crack down on knife crime with a reformed weapons law.

In May, German police shot and wounded a man who injured six people in a knife attack at a rightwing demonstration in the south-western city of Mannheim. Among the victims was a 29-year-old policeman who intervened and was fatally stabbed.

A manhunt is under way after three people were killed in a mass stabbing at a festival in Solingen in Germany on Friday night.

Here is what we know so far:

• A 15-year-old has been arrested in connection to an attack that killed three people and injured eight at a diversity festival in the western German city of Solingen, police said.

• Terrorism has not been ruled out as a motive. The prosecutor Markus Caspers said police were looking at terror as a possibility, saying there was no other obvious motive and that the attacker appeared to be unknown to the victims.

• It is not known if the 15-year-old was the attacker. German media have reported that the teenager is suspected of speaking to the attacker before the incident.

• The three people killed were two men, 67 and 56, and a woman, 56.

• Eight others were injured, four are fighting for their lives, police said.

• Police said that they had found “multiple knives” in the area and were looking at which, if any, were used in the attack.

• The stabbings took place during a festival of diversity to mark the city’s 650th anniversary, which began on Friday and was supposed to run through to Sunday.

• Witnesses alerted police shortly after 9.30pm on Friday night to an unknown attacker having wounded several people with a knife in the city’s central square, the Fronhof.

• Authorities cancelled the remainder of the weekend festival.

• The German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, said the perpetrator must be caught quickly and punished to the fullest extent of the law.

• The country’s interior minister, Nancy Faeser, said in an update on X that police were still searching for the attacker and trying to establish a motive.

Germany has experienced a steep rise in knife violence in recent years, and the mass fatal stabbing in the western city of Solingen will compound the pressure on the government to crack down on the problem, officials and analysts said.

Security authorities say attacks with knives are particularly concentrated in city centres and at railway stations, leading the country’s interior minister, Nancy Faeser, this month to call for restrictions on the weapons in public spaces, days before the assault that claimed the lives of three people at a festival in Solingen.

Faeser has proposed only allowing the carrying of knives with blade lengths of 6cm, down from the 12cm currently allowed, with exceptions only for household knives in closed packaging that have just been bought.

She told public broadcaster ARD on 11 August: “We want a general ban on dangerous switchblades and will present the relevant amendments to weapons laws soon.”

She added that local governments should create more weapon-free and particularly knife-free zones in their communities.

“Brutal violent acts are being carried out with knives that lead to the worst injuries or can be deadly,” she said, outlining the need for action.

Police statistics show a nearly 6% year-on-year increase in serious bodily assaults using a knife, to 8,951 cases in 2023 compared with 2022. These included attacks in which victims were injured or threatened with a knife.

Federal police, who are also responsible for security at railway stations, said knife crimes there had soared last year to 777 attacks, with 430 cases recorded in the first half of this year.

Charité hospital in Berlin reported treating as many stab wounds in the first six months of 2024 as in the entirety of 2023, according to public broadcaster RBB – about 50 to 55 cases.

Germany’s 16 states have long been calling for tougher federal measures to address the rash of knife crimes. Faeser had called for better police enforcement of existing weapons laws after police shot and wounded a man in May who injured six people in a knife attack at a rightwing demonstration in the south-western city of Mannheim. Among the victims was a 29-year-old policeman who intervened and was fatally stabbed.

The country has already outlawed the purchase or possession of certain bladed weapons, including butterfly knives, which can carry a prison sentence of up to three years or a fine. So-called one-hand knives, which can be easily opened, and knives with 12cm blades or longer may not be carried outside one’s home or property.

On Saturday, in the aftermath of the deadly assault in Solingen, which also badly injured five people, Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, promised tough action against the assailant. “The perpetrator must be caught quickly and punished to the full extent of the law,” Scholz posted on X.

Meanwhile, MPs from the co-ruling Social Democrats (SPD), Scholz and Faeser’s party, stepped up their calls for stricter laws.

Dirk Wiese, the deputy head of the SPD parliamentary group, told the daily newspaper Rheinische Post: “It is clear to me that our security services must have more powers to recognise such perpetrators in time, particularly in the digital sphere.

“At the same time, we have got to finally make progress on knife bans in light of the probable terror attack on the city festival in Solingen.”

The far-right Alternative für Deutschland party has attempted to seize on street crime and knife violence as an issue, particularly in campaigning for three state elections next month in eastern Germany in which it is expected to perform well.

Party co-leader Alice Weidel last month claimed in a television interview that there had been “more than 15,000” knife crimes in 2023, calling it a “record” and accusing young immigrant men of being disproportionately responsible.

Weidel later corrected last year’s figure to 13,844, which included robberies in which a knife was used to threaten the victim.

Federal police have only been collecting specific statistics on knife crime since 2021, making annual comparisons difficult and reliant on data compiled from individual states.

Criminologist Dirk Baier warned that stricter laws were unlikely to root out knife assaults.

“That won’t scare off young perpetrators,” he told public broadcaster MDR. “And in weapons-ban zones you’ve got to have checks and the question is whether we have enough personnel.”

He called for youth education to address the surge in stabbings, “explaining for example that you’re most likely to hurt yourself if you carry a knife”.

“You can’t solve the problem with a law,” he said. “It’s a social problem and has to be addressed with social measures.”

The sinking of the superyacht Bayesian off the coast of Sicily that led to the deaths of seven people could be the result of human error, Italian prosecutors have suggested.

The Bayesian, carrying 22 passengers, sank off the coast of Sicily early on Monday morning after being struck by a powerful type of wind called a downburst.

Seven people died, including the British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter Hannah. Fifteen people survived, including Lynch’s wife, whose company owned the Bayesian, and the yacht’s captain..

Ambrogio Cartosio, the head of the prosecutor’s office in Termini Imerese, said in a press conference at the town’s court on Saturday that his office has opened an initial investigation into manslaughter and negligent shipwreck.

“This tragedy would be even more heart-wrenching if our investigations were to prove that the sinking of the vessel was caused by actions not in accordance with the maritime code,” Cartosio said.

“We are only in the initial phase of the investigations … At this stage, precisely because the investigation could develop in any way, we are absolutely not ruling anything out,” Cartosio said, adding that the investigation was not aimed at any single person.

“For me, it is probable that offences were committed, that it could be a case of manslaughter, but we can only establish that if you give us the time to investigate,” he said, according to a BBC translation.

During the briefing, Bentivoglio Fiandra from the local fire rescue service, said “the bodies were found in the highest part of the ship, as it was clear people were trying to hide in cabins on the left-hand side”. The ship landed on its right-hand side after it sank.

“The first five bodies were found in the first cabin on left-hand side and the final body was found in the third cabin,” Fiandra said.

Italian officials said it would be difficult to fully investigate the sinking if the wreck is not recovered.

Fiandra said 123 dives were conducted by 30 divers for a total of 4,370 minutes.

The prosecutor in charge of the case, Raffaele Cammarano, said the yacht had been hit by a downburst, which are powerful winds that descend from a thunderstorm and spread out quickly once they hit the ground.

Experts are baffled by how the Bayesian sank within 60 seconds. Italian media, speaking with coastguard sources, reported that a hatch allegedly remained opened and that the keel was partially raised, leading to the vessel sinking rapidly.

Investigators declined to respond to a question about the hatch, stating that it would be premature to answer before the vessel had been recovered.

Pulling the Bayesian out of the sea may help investigators determine what happened, but the operation is likely to be complex and costly. The wreck is lying apparently intact on its side at a depth of 50 metres (164ft).

“It’s in the interests of the owners and managers of the ship to salvage it,” Cartosio said, adding “they have assured their full cooperation”.

Officials suggested that passengers who died were probably “asleep whereas the others who survived weren’t”.

Search efforts began immediately, with divers from the fire brigade working non-stop. Recovering the bodies was not simple.

The first body to be recovered was that of chef Recaldo Thomas on Monday afternoon. Four more bodies were recovered on Wednesday morning, those of Lynch’s attorney from Clifford Chance, Chris Morvillo, and Morgan Stanley International’s chair, Jonathan Bloomer, along with their respective spouses, Neda and Judy.

Mike Lynch’s body was found in the evening and his death was confirmed on Thursday. On Friday divers retrieved the body of his daughter, Hannah.

Once described as Britain’s Bill Gates, Lynch was beginning a new life, after being cleared in June of fraud charges in the US relating to the purchase of his company, Autonomy, by Hewlett-Packard in 2011. The tycoon opted to celebrate in style in Italy alongside his family. They were enjoying a lavish voyage around Sicily onboard the Bayesian, a magnificent 56-metre (184ft) yacht.

Prosecutors said the captain of the Bayesian, James Cutfield, 51, from New Zealand, would undergo more questioning, adding that he had been “extremely cooperative”.

Magistrates said British and American authorities were involved in the investigation.

The British ambassador to Italy, Ed Llewellyn, published a post on X on Saturday, thanking the Italian rescue teams and divers.

“I express my deep gratitude to the Italian authorities, rescue teams and divers for working tirelessly following the sinking of the Bayesian,” Llewellyn said.

Hamas has sent a delegation to Cairo to be briefed on progress in peace talks, but an official from the group said it would not participate directly in the negotiations it had been boycotting for the past 10 days.

Hamas representatives were expected on Saturday in the Egyptian capital, where negotiators from Israel, the US, Egypt and Qatar have been holding talks on a elusive deal that would involve the release of Israeli hostages, the freeing of Palestinian detainees and a ceasefire.

The delegation was confirmed in a statement by a senior Hamas official Izzat al-Rishq, but another unnamed Hamas official, quoted by the French press agency AFP, said the Hamas representatives would not take part in the talks.

The current sticking point in the negotiations is the insistence of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, that any peace agreement must allow an Israeli presence along the Egypt-Gaza border, a strip of land known as the Philadelphi corridor, and on a road bisecting the Gaza Strip, the Netzarim corridor.

Hamas has rejected any such presence, saying it contravenes a three-stage peace plan announced by Joe Biden at the end of May, and later endorsed by the UN security council, which ultimately envisages a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.

Hamas has said it accepts that deal, but has boycotted the current round of talks on the grounds that the proposal has been fundamentally changed, and it has rejected US claims that it has backed away from the agreement.

The White House insists that the peace plan outlined by Biden has been accepted by Israel, but Netanyahu has repeatedly called its terms into question, vowing his government would continue the war until Hamas is completely obliterated.

The prime minister insists that an Israeli presence in the Philadelphi corridor is essential to prevent arms smuggling to Hamas from Egypt. The government of Abdel Fatah al-Sisi in Cairo, has argued, however, that it has taken rigorous action against the smuggling and the cross-border smuggler tunnels and that an Israeli presence would raise questions about Egyptian sovereignty and territorial integrity.

After a visit to the region by the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, the US claimed to have secured Israeli agreement to a compromise solution, which it urged Hamas to accept, but has not so far released details of what it claimed was a “bridging proposal”.

The US is represented at the Cairo talks by the Central Intelligence Agency director, William Burns, and the US special envoy to the region, Brett McGurk. Israel’s lead negotiators are the directors of the Mossad spy agency and the Shin Bet security agency, David Barnea and Ronen Bar. The Qatari prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, was expected to arrive in Cairo on Saturday.

As the talks continue in Cairo, Israel has kept up its military campaign, now in its 11th month, triggered by a Hamas surprise attack on southern Israel on 7 October, which killed nearly 1,200 people, while another 250 were taken hostage. More than 100 hostages are still in Gaza but many of them are feared dead.

According to the Gaza health authorities, more than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza during Israel’s retaliatory military campaign. Fifty Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire in Gaza on Saturday alone. In recent weeks, Israel has issued an increasing number of evacuation orders to Palestinians in Gaza, nearly all of whom have already been displaced multiple times by the offensive and are living in makeshift camps.

Many Palestinians sheltering in areas previously identified by Israel as “humanitarian zones” have been ordered to leave this month, with the result that the displaced population is being crammed into an ever shrinking area with minimal provision of food and water.

Health conditions have constantly worsened and the World Health Organization has confirmed the first case of polio in Gaza for more than a quarter of a century, a baby partially paralysed by the virus, but reported to be in a stable condition.

While the US and its regional allies have tried to keep negotiations alive to stop the bloodshed in Gaza, there have been persistent signs that the conflict has the capacity to spread across the region. Iran’s ally, Hezbollah, has been exchanging fire with Israeli forces daily across the Lebanese-Israeli border, and there is a rising tide of violence on the West Bank, largely driven by extremist Israeli settlers.

Bar has described the settler attacks on Palestinians as terrorism and a substantial threat to Israeli national security, because of the likelihood of them starting a spiral of violence.

On Saturday afternoon, local media reported that two Israeli men had gone missing in the West Bank town of Qalqilya. An Israeli army effort to rescue them was met by roadside bombs, and an exchange of fire, the reports said. The fate of the two missing men was unclear by Saturday evening.

Russia and Ukraine have exchanged 115 prisoners of war from each side after the United Arab Emirates (UAE) acted as an intermediary.

It is the first such exchange since Ukraine launched a surprise attack into Russia’s Kursk region on 6 August, the biggest inside Russian territory by a foreign power since the second world war.

It came as Ukraine marked 33 years of independence on Saturday, the anniversary of the Act of Declaration of Independence of Ukraine, when Kyiv resolved to leave the Moscow-based Soviet Union.

According to the Russian defence ministry, the Russian servicemen swapped were captured in the Kursk region.

All released Russian soldiers are now in Belarus and will receive medical treatment and rehabilitation upon their return to Russia. The ministry expressed gratitude for the UAE’s role in facilitating the prisoner swap.

The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, posted a picture with Ukrainian prisoners wrapped in the country’s blue and yellow flags and hugging each other. He said the returned were servicemen from the border guards, the national guard, navy and the armed forces.

Zelenskiy expressed gratitude to the Ukrainian troops who helped replenish the pool of prisoners for exchange.

Kyiv said it has carved out a buffer zone in an area that Russia, which sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine in February 2022, has used to attack targets in Ukraine.

According to Dmytro Lubinets, Ukraine’s commissioner for human rights, 82 of the returned Ukrainians defended the port of Mariupol in 2022.

Confirming its role in facilitating the exchange, the UAE foreign ministry said that the total number of captives exchanged through its mediation efforts now stood at 1,788.

It is the seventh such exchange the UAE has mediated since Russia invaded Ukraine. An Emirati official earlier said that Russia and Ukraine were to swap prisoners following mediation by the Gulf state.

Abu Dhabi, a close security partner of the US, has maintained warm relations with Moscow throughout the war, frustrating some western officials. It has also strengthened ties with Kyiv.

UAE officials say their ability to talk to a range of international actors means that they can in effect mediate between parties and promote cooperation and security.

On Saturday, Zelenskiy signed a law ratifying the Rome Statute, allowing Ukraine to join the International criminal court. The law published on the parliament’s website is also key to Ukraine’s efforts to move closer to the European Union.

Hours after being endorsed by the third-party candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr, Donald Trump said he would release “all of the remaining documents pertaining to the assassination of John F Kennedy” if he were elected president in November, as part of a proposed new commission on presidential assassination attempts, including the one that targeted him.

Speaking at a rally in Glendale, Arizona, Trump also pledged that, if elected, he would “establish a panel of top experts” that would work with Kennedy, a prominent anti-vaccine advocate, to investigate childhood health problems. The 13 July assassination attempt on Trump is already being officially investigated, including by the Secret Service and the FBI.

Kennedy, the scion of one of the country’s most famous Democratic political dynasties, got a roar of approval from Republicans when he joined Trump on stage at a Republican campaign rally in Glendale, Arizona. “Bobby! Bobby!” the crowd chanted.

Kennedy had announced earlier on Friday that he was suspending his third-party campaign for president and endorsing Trump. Kennedy’s vice-presidential pick, Nicole Shanahan, had previously spoken out about the campaign’s belief that staying in the race would result in a victory for Harris, because “we draw votes from Trump”. Kennedy said he would remove himself from the ballots in swing states, where he might siphon electoral college votes from Trump, while staying on the ballot in other states.

In a brief speech at the rally, Kennedy said Trump would “make America healthy again” and that he would be a president “who is going to protect us against totalitarianism”.

In praising Kennedy for his support, Trump referenced Kennedy’s father, a Democratic US senator and attorney general, and his uncle, a Democratic president. “I know they are looking down right now and they are very, very proud of Bobby. I’m proud of Bobby,” Trump said.

Kerry Kennedy, one of RFK’s sisters, told a Washington Post reporter earlier in the day that her brother’s embrace of Trump was “obscene”, and said: “I think if he were alive today my father would have detested almost everything about Donald Trump.”

Trump’s vice-presidential pick, JD Vance, has recently been linked to a conservative group that advocates repealing the 1964 Civil Rights Act, an anti-discrimination law which was introduced by John F Kennedy and became law after his assassination.

In a joint statement before the Glendale Trump rally, five of Kennedy’s siblings – Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Courtney Kennedy, Kerry Kennedy, Chris Kennedy and Rory Kennedy – called RFK’s endorsement of Trump “a betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold” and “a sad ending to a sad story”. They said they were supporting the Democratic ticket of Harris and Walz.

As temperatures exceeded 100F (38C) in Arizona, local news outlets reported that more than 100 people had been treated for heat exhaustion as they waited to get inside the Trump rally, with some getting medical treatment on site, and some being transported to a hospital.

Kennedy joined Trump in Glendale less than 24 hours after Arizona’s secretary of state confirmed that Kennedy’s campaign had officially requested to be removed from ballots in Arizona.

Election officials in Arizona and Ohio confirmed that Kennedy’s name will not be on the ballot in their states, and he is also listed as withdrawn from the race on the Texas secretary of state’s website. Kennedy’s campaign has also reportedly filed paperwork to remove his name from the ballot in Pennsylvania.

But in key battleground states of Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin, election officials said it was too late for Kennedy to take his name off the ballot even if he wants to do so.

Trump’s suggestion that he would create a government panel of experts to work with Kennedy to investigate children’s health problems in the US is notable, given Kennedy’s track record.

In recent decades, Kennedy, an environmental lawyer, has become “among the most influential spreaders of fear and distrust around vaccines” and “has traveled the world spreading false information about the pandemic”, the Associated Press reported. His Twitter account was named as “the top superspreader” of misinformation about Covid-19 by a medical journal article in 2022. The Associated Press has investigated the consequences of Kennedy’s advocacy on individual families and “how Kennedy had capitalized on the pandemic to build [Children’s Health Defense, his advocacy group] into a multimillion-dollar misinformation engine”.

Kennedy has for years falsely claimed that vaccines cause autism, and more recently he has made series of other lurid health claims, including that wifi causes “leaky brain”, school shootings might be linked to antidepressants and that chemicals in water were making children transgender.

Some Kennedy supporters said they found his endorsement of Trump frustrating, because they had been drawn to RFK Jr as an alternative to the two-party system, and because some were not willing to vote for Trump.

Kennedy, like Trump’s own vice-presidential pick, JD Vance, has previously savaged Trump publicly and privately. He reportedly called Trump “probably a sociopath”, “barely human” and “the worse [sic] president ever” in text messages, according to the New Yorker.

In 2020, Kennedy publicly called Trump a “bully” and said he had “discredited the American experiment with self-governance”, and more recently he called Trump’s criticism of him “unhinged”.

It went both ways: in May, Trump had attacked Kennedy in a social media post on Truth Social, calling Kennedy “junior” and labeling him “one of the most Liberal Lunatics ever to run for office”.

Trump referenced their past differences at the Glendale rally, saying: “He also went after me a couple times. I didn’t like it.”

Trump had praised Kennedy and said, contrary to the available evidence, that Kennedy would have defeated Joe Biden if he had stayed in the Democratic presidential primary, rather than deciding in October 2023 to launch an independent bid for the presidency.

Sam T Levin and the Associated Press contributed reporting

Hours after being endorsed by the third-party candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr, Donald Trump said he would release “all of the remaining documents pertaining to the assassination of John F Kennedy” if he were elected president in November, as part of a proposed new commission on presidential assassination attempts, including the one that targeted him.

Speaking at a rally in Glendale, Arizona, Trump also pledged that, if elected, he would “establish a panel of top experts” that would work with Kennedy, a prominent anti-vaccine advocate, to investigate childhood health problems. The 13 July assassination attempt on Trump is already being officially investigated, including by the Secret Service and the FBI.

Kennedy, the scion of one of the country’s most famous Democratic political dynasties, got a roar of approval from Republicans when he joined Trump on stage at a Republican campaign rally in Glendale, Arizona. “Bobby! Bobby!” the crowd chanted.

Kennedy had announced earlier on Friday that he was suspending his third-party campaign for president and endorsing Trump. Kennedy’s vice-presidential pick, Nicole Shanahan, had previously spoken out about the campaign’s belief that staying in the race would result in a victory for Harris, because “we draw votes from Trump”. Kennedy said he would remove himself from the ballots in swing states, where he might siphon electoral college votes from Trump, while staying on the ballot in other states.

In a brief speech at the rally, Kennedy said Trump would “make America healthy again” and that he would be a president “who is going to protect us against totalitarianism”.

In praising Kennedy for his support, Trump referenced Kennedy’s father, a Democratic US senator and attorney general, and his uncle, a Democratic president. “I know they are looking down right now and they are very, very proud of Bobby. I’m proud of Bobby,” Trump said.

Kerry Kennedy, one of RFK’s sisters, told a Washington Post reporter earlier in the day that her brother’s embrace of Trump was “obscene”, and said: “I think if he were alive today my father would have detested almost everything about Donald Trump.”

Trump’s vice-presidential pick, JD Vance, has recently been linked to a conservative group that advocates repealing the 1964 Civil Rights Act, an anti-discrimination law which was introduced by John F Kennedy and became law after his assassination.

In a joint statement before the Glendale Trump rally, five of Kennedy’s siblings – Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Courtney Kennedy, Kerry Kennedy, Chris Kennedy and Rory Kennedy – called RFK’s endorsement of Trump “a betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold” and “a sad ending to a sad story”. They said they were supporting the Democratic ticket of Harris and Walz.

As temperatures exceeded 100F (38C) in Arizona, local news outlets reported that more than 100 people had been treated for heat exhaustion as they waited to get inside the Trump rally, with some getting medical treatment on site, and some being transported to a hospital.

Kennedy joined Trump in Glendale less than 24 hours after Arizona’s secretary of state confirmed that Kennedy’s campaign had officially requested to be removed from ballots in Arizona.

Election officials in Arizona and Ohio confirmed that Kennedy’s name will not be on the ballot in their states, and he is also listed as withdrawn from the race on the Texas secretary of state’s website. Kennedy’s campaign has also reportedly filed paperwork to remove his name from the ballot in Pennsylvania.

But in key battleground states of Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin, election officials said it was too late for Kennedy to take his name off the ballot even if he wants to do so.

Trump’s suggestion that he would create a government panel of experts to work with Kennedy to investigate children’s health problems in the US is notable, given Kennedy’s track record.

In recent decades, Kennedy, an environmental lawyer, has become “among the most influential spreaders of fear and distrust around vaccines” and “has traveled the world spreading false information about the pandemic”, the Associated Press reported. His Twitter account was named as “the top superspreader” of misinformation about Covid-19 by a medical journal article in 2022. The Associated Press has investigated the consequences of Kennedy’s advocacy on individual families and “how Kennedy had capitalized on the pandemic to build [Children’s Health Defense, his advocacy group] into a multimillion-dollar misinformation engine”.

Kennedy has for years falsely claimed that vaccines cause autism, and more recently he has made series of other lurid health claims, including that wifi causes “leaky brain”, school shootings might be linked to antidepressants and that chemicals in water were making children transgender.

Some Kennedy supporters said they found his endorsement of Trump frustrating, because they had been drawn to RFK Jr as an alternative to the two-party system, and because some were not willing to vote for Trump.

Kennedy, like Trump’s own vice-presidential pick, JD Vance, has previously savaged Trump publicly and privately. He reportedly called Trump “probably a sociopath”, “barely human” and “the worse [sic] president ever” in text messages, according to the New Yorker.

In 2020, Kennedy publicly called Trump a “bully” and said he had “discredited the American experiment with self-governance”, and more recently he called Trump’s criticism of him “unhinged”.

It went both ways: in May, Trump had attacked Kennedy in a social media post on Truth Social, calling Kennedy “junior” and labeling him “one of the most Liberal Lunatics ever to run for office”.

Trump referenced their past differences at the Glendale rally, saying: “He also went after me a couple times. I didn’t like it.”

Trump had praised Kennedy and said, contrary to the available evidence, that Kennedy would have defeated Joe Biden if he had stayed in the Democratic presidential primary, rather than deciding in October 2023 to launch an independent bid for the presidency.

Sam T Levin and the Associated Press contributed reporting

The Philippine government accused China on Saturday of firing flares just metres away from one of its aircraft as it flew patrols over the South China Sea in the past week.

A Chinese fighter jet “engaged in irresponsible and dangerous manoeuvres” on 19 August as the plane from the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR) made a “maritime domain awareness flight” near Scarborough Shoal, the National Task Force for the West Philippine Sea said.

The unprovoked Chinese “harassment” included “deploying flares multiple times at a dangerously close distance of approximately 15 metres from the BFAR Grand Caravan aircraft”, the task force added in a statement.

Flares were also launched near the same plane from the China-held Subi Reef on 22 August as the patrol craft was “monitoring and intercepting poachers encroaching upon the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone and the territorial seas” of the Philippines, it added.

Flares are usually employed by military aircraft as decoys to protect them from missiles, but also for illumination.

Beijing claims most of the South China Sea and has been involved in tense maritime confrontations with Manila on the strategic waterway in recent months, sparking fears of armed conflict that could draw in the US, a Filipino military ally.

China’s foreign ministry said on Friday that two Philippine military aircraft flew into its airspace over Subi Reef, which Manila also claims, on 22 August.

The Chinese side undertook “necessary countermeasures in accordance with the law, in order to protect its own sovereignty and security”, it said in a statement.

The Philippine government said the BFAR plane was a civilian Cessna aircraft.

The Chinese statement did not mention any 19 August incident over Scarborough Shoal, which China seized from the Philippines at the end of a 2012 standoff.

The Scarborough Shoal incident occurred hours after Philippine and Chinese coast guard vessels collided near Sabina Shoal, with the Filipino side reporting structural damage on both of its patrol ships.

The shoal is 140km (86 miles) west of the Philippine island of Palawan and about 1,200km from Hainan island, the nearest Chinese landmass.

The Philippines has also accused a Chinese air force plane of making a “dangerous manoeuvre” and dropping flares in the path of a Filipino air force plane that was patrolling over Scarborough on 10 August.

In June, the Philippine military said one of its sailors lost a thumb in a confrontation off Second Thomas Shoal when the Chinese coast guard, wielding sticks, knives and an axe, also confiscated or destroyed Philippine equipment including guns.

Beijing has blamed the escalation on Manila and maintains its actions to protect its claims are legal and proportional.

It has continued to press its claims to almost the entire South China Sea despite an international tribunal ruling that its assertion has no legal basis.

Manila on Saturday urged Beijing to “immediately cease all provocative and dangerous actions that threaten the safety of Philippine vessels and aircraft engaged in legitimate and regular activities within Philippine territory and exclusive economic zone”, as well as freedom of navigation and overflights.

“Such actions undermine regional peace and security, and further erode the image of the PRC [People’s Republic of China] with the international community,” the task force statement said.

Producers of PFAS chemicals and semiconductors, a key part of most electronics, have formed a group that develops industry-friendly science aimed at heading off regulation as the facilities release high levels of toxic waste, documents seen by the Guardian show.

The group, called the PFAS Consortium, was formed during a boom in domestic semiconductor production spurred by the Chips and Science Act that has led to $825bn in investment aimed at shoring up the industry.

Left unchecked, however, the boom could also generate huge levels of toxic waste, experts fear. The semiconductor industry is a prolific polluter and a major source of unregulated and unmonitored toxic PFAS, or “forever chemicals”, some of which also turn into potent greenhouse gas.

“Hardly anyone has been paying attention to the toxic waste from the industry as it grows at an enormous rate,” said Lenny Siegel, a member of Chips Communities United, a group working with industry and administration officials to try to put in place environmental safeguards.

“Next time you do a Google search or chat, you’re using chips … that were produced in a way that released PFAS in an environment irreversibly.”

Testing data from 2022 from one US production plant, or fab, seen by the Guardian showed as much as 78,000ppt of PFAS in wastewater from some samples. The EPA legal limit for several common compounds is 4ppt.

Public health advocates are increasingly sounding the alarm and calling for simple protections to curb semiconductor PFAS waste while pushing the industry to find safer alternatives, but manufacturers have mobilized in response.

The consortium’s white papers circulated among policymakers make their case against regulations. In a document titled “Impact of a potential PFAS restriction”, the consortium acknowledges its PFAS pollution, but repeatedly stresses that there are very few regulations and opposes proposals to monitor or restrict waste.

Finding safer alternatives is “impossible in some instances”, the paper states, adding that finding alternatives would require “stepping back decades in technological advancement”.

It touts industry efforts to cut back on waste, stating that the industry would continue to voluntarily reduce pollution “if exemptions [to regulation] are granted”.

That seems to have caught lawmakers’ attention: a bipartisan amendment in the defense bill that is likely to be approved would exempt new semiconductor manufacturing projects from environmental review – legislation on which federal records show lobbying by the Semiconductor Industry Association trade group, which organized the PFAS consortium.

In a statement, Laurie Beu, the Semiconductor Industry Association executive director, said the consortium “is a purely technical effort comprised of industry experts around the world and dedicated to collecting the data needed to formulate an industry approach to PFAS based on science”.

The Chips Act is at odds with the Biden administration’s 2021 sweeping plan to rein in PFAS pollution, and policymakers were largely ignoring the public health consequences, Siegel said. However, a group of US senators, including Ed Markey of Massachusetts, recently urged the commerce department to impose stricter regulations on chip producers.

“The public provided over $50bn in investment in this industry and they should be able to reasonably expect they won’t in turn be exposed to toxic chemicals … or breathe polluted air,” Markey said.

PFAS are a class of about 15,000 chemicals often used to make products resistant to water, stains and heat. They are called “forever chemicals” because they do not naturally break down, and are linked to cancer, liver problems, thyroid issues, birth defects, kidney disease, decreased immunity and other serious health problems.

Producing semiconductors is a highly complex process and PFAS are an essential ingredient used in as many as 1,000 steps at the nanometric level, industry documents state, including photolithography and plasma processing.

Production plants are notorious for contaminating nearby drinking water and the air with an array of dangerous toxins like TCE, arsenic and chloroform. Silicon Valley is the nation’s Superfund capital in large part because of the industry’s toxic messes, and when public pressure prompted the tech companies to open plants abroad, their operations sickened employees in those countries.

“It’s not just PFAS – this is a very dirty business,” said Arlene Blum, head of the Green Science Policy Institute, a public health advocacy group.

Still, the amendment to the defense bill authored by the Democratic senator Mark Kelly would kill the environmental review of semiconductor production projects in which companies are required to disclose the types and quantities of pollution from their proposed facilities.

Environmental groups use the review as an opportunity to push for the commerce department to require monitoring and treatment of PFAS wastewater, which is not currently required by law.

“It seems like a really bad idea to exempt these plants from regulation,” Blum added.

‘It’s a hard challenge’

The chipmaking process emits PFAS into the water and air. Industry uses fluorinated gases, or PFAS gas, in a range of processes, and the toxicological risks of the gases are largely unknown.

Their climate consequences, however, are clear – once in the atmosphere, the fluorinated gas can turn into TFA, a greenhouse gas with a life of more than 1,000 years. Researchers in recent years have been alarmed by the ever-growing level of TFA in the air, water, human blood and elsewhere in the environment.

Though industry captures some fluorinated gas, it cannot be destroyed. Sometimes manufacturers attempt to incinerate or destroy the chemicals thermally, but that often fails to fully eliminate the compounds and can create dangerous byproducts.

“It is a hard challenge because they are using so many different kinds of PFAS,” said Ariana Spentzos, science and policy associate with Green Science Policy Institute. “Industry says, ‘Incinerate it and it’ll be fine,’ but it turns out … you’re just emitting different PFAS.”

As with other industries, chip makers have switched from using PFOA and PFOS, two of the most toxic PFAS compounds, to using smaller replacement chemicals. The PFAS Consortium touts the switch in its white papers as evidence of its environmental stewardship, but studies increasingly show replacement PFAS chemicals are also dangerous.

PFBS, a common replacement compound found in industry wastewater, is comparatively less toxic, but still more toxic than most other regulated substances, Siegel noted.

Some chip makers ship captured PFAS to hazardous waste facilities. But deep-well-injection facilities are prone to leaking, while other shipments end up at incinerators that simply send the chemicals into the surrounding environment.

That’s why public health advocates are pushing for alternatives to PFAS instead of waste management, Siegel said.

“They want to ship PFAS to a permitted treatment facility, but the way I interpret that, in the absence of more data, is they’re going to send it to a community of color to be incinerated and that is likely to create toxic byproducts,” he added.

Chip makers lobby Congress to kill regulations

Chipmakers with the PFAS Consortium are largely part of the Semiconductor Industry Association, a trade group that does legislative and regulatory battle for the producers.

Chipmaker TSMC, a Taiwanese multinational, has paid about $160,000 for an annual membership to the trade group and $50,000 annually to be a part of the consortium, documents show. Federal election records detail how the Semiconductor Industry Association, armed with its PFAS Consortium science highlighting the industry’s case for avoiding PFAS regulation, spent about $1.5m lobbying Congress and the Biden administration last year.

It is on pace to far exceed that figure this year, and that includes lobbying for the defense bill that would kill environmental reviews.

“The consortium lobbies very strongly against those measures,” Siegel said. Though industry is working to find alternatives, “they are trying to figure out what they can do without disrupting their production”, he added.

The consortium’s Beu said in a statement that it cannot speak to individual members’ lobbying.

“We remain focused on providing the tools needed to support industry commitments to track and reduce PFAS, the availability of alternatives, and the development of further abatement technologies,” she said.

The consortium also claims in its white papers that it will take years or decades to remove PFAS from some parts of its production process, and that it may be impossible to remove some of the chemicals.

That may be, “but they don’t get to wash their hands of the issues” and should increase research and development into alternatives, said Spentzos. She pointed to the University of Massachusetts working with the hi-tech materials manufacturer Transene in 2022 to quickly and successfully develop an alternative to PFAS in the semiconductor etching process.

“They really do have to innovate and make safer alternatives for PFAS … but this is a great example of that taking a lot less time than they expected,” Spentzos said.

Nearly 300,000 Bangladeshis are taking refuge in emergency shelters from floods that inundated vast areas of the country, disaster officials said.

The floods were triggered by heavy monsoon rains and have killed at least 42 people in Bangladesh and India since the start of the week, many in landslides.

Lufton Nahar, 60, speaking from a relief shelter in Feni, one of the worst-hit districts near the border with India’s Tripura state, said: “My house is completely inundated. Water is flowing above our roof. My brother brought us here by boat. If he hadn’t, we would have died.”

The country of 170 million people is crisscrossed by hundreds of rivers and has experienced frequent floods in recent decades.

Monsoon rains cause widespread destruction every year but the climate crisis is shifting weather patterns and increasing the number of extreme weather events.

Highways and railway lines were damaged between the capital, Dhaka, and the main port city of Chattogram, making access to badly flooded districts difficult and disrupting businesses.

The flooding happened weeks after a student-led revolution toppled its government.

Among the worst-affected flood-hit areas is Cox’s Bazar, a district home to about 1 million Rohingya refugees from neighbouring Myanmar.

Sarat Kumar Das, a disaster agency official in the Indian state of Tripura, told Agence-France Presse that 24 people had been killed on the Indian side of the border since Monday.

Another 18 had been killed in Bangladesh, according to the disaster management ministry secretary, Md Kamrul Hasan, who said “285,000 people are living in emergency shelters” and adding that 4.5 million people in total had been affected.

When the floods hit, Bangladesh was recovering from weeks of civil unrest that culminated in the autocratic ex-leader Sheikh Hasina fleeing the country.

With an interim government led by the Nobel peace prize laureate Muhammad Yunus still finding its feet, ordinary Bangladeshis have been crowdfunding relief efforts, organised by the same students who led the protests that led to the ousting of Hasina, who remains in India after fleeing Dhaka.

Crowds visited Dhaka University on Friday to offer cash donations as students loaded rice sacks and crates of bottled water on to vehicles for areas affected by the deluge.

Much of Bangladesh is made up of deltas where the great Himalayan rivers, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, wind towards the sea after coursing through India. Several tributaries of the two transnational rivers were still overflowing/ However, forecasts showed rain was likely to ease in the coming days.

French police have been ordered to step up security around Jewish places of worship, schools and centres across the country after a police officer was injured in an explosion outside a synagogue.

The incident in La Grande-Motte, a Mediterranean resort east of Montpellier, is being investigated by France’s specialist antiterrorism prosecutor.

Two cars, one of which is believed to have contained a bottle of gas, parked in front of the Beth Yaacov synagogue, were set alight outside at about 8.30am on Saturday. Two doors at the building were also set alight, according to police.

Police officers, who have opened an inquiry into “attempted murder linked to a terrorist organisation”, are trying to identify an individual captured on CCTV walking away from the vehicles minutes before the explosion.

Emmanuel Macron, the president, said the synagogue attack was a “terrorist act” and assured that “everything is being done to find [its] perpetrator”.

“The fight against antisemitism is a constant battle,” Macron said on X.

The acting prime minister, Gabriel Attal, and the acting interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, were travelling to the scene on Saturday afternoon.

Darmanin said the fire was “an obviously criminal act”.

He wrote on X: “I want to assure our Jewish fellow citizens and the local community of my full support, and say that at the request of the president of the republic, Emmanuel Macron, all means are being mobilised to find the perpetrator.”.

In a letter to the country’s prefects, who are local government officials, the minister called for “immediate reinforced protection” around Jewish places of worship and for “absolute vigilance” and protection for those entering and leaving synagogues and Jewish schools.

Yonathan Arfi, the president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France (Crif), said: “Exploding a gas canister in a car outside the synagogue in La Grande-Motte at a time when worshippers were due to arrive is not just an attack on a place of worship, it is an attempt to kill Jews.”

The police officer was taken to Montpellier hospital with injuries linked to the blast. A police spokesperson said his life was not in danger.

Five people inside the synagogue at the time of the explosion and fires, including the rabbi, escaped injury.

There has been a surge in antisemitic acts in France since the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October 2023. Darmanin told journalists earlier this month the number of reported acts had almost tripled since the start of 2024, with 887 incidents compared with 304 during the same period last year. In 2023 there were 1,676 reported antisemitic incidents, four times more than the previous year, the minister said.

He is one of the world’s most famous novelists, with more than 150m copies of his fantasy masterpieces sold across the globe, but JRR Tolkien always dreamed of finding recognition as a poet.

Tolkien struggled to publish his poetry collections during his career, although he included nearly 100 poems in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

Now, half a century after his death, 70 previously unpublished poems are to be made available in a landmark publication. The Collected Poems of JRR Tolkien will be published by HarperCollins next month, featuring more than 195 of his poems.

His son and literary executor, Christopher Tolkien, had wanted his father’s poetic talent to be better known and, before his own death in 2020, worked on the project with two leading Tolkien experts, the husband-and-wife Christina Scull and Wayne Hammond.

Hammond told the Observer that there are “remarkably good” unpublished poems in the collection: “This will show even more Tolkien’s love of language, his love of words.”

Scull said: “The poems will add more to our view of Tolkien as a creative writer.”

They waded through a “great mass” of manuscripts and typescripts, some in Christopher’s possession and others in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, among other archives. The texts ranged from “beautiful calligraphy to the worst scrawl”, Hammond said.

During the first world war, Tolkien had been a signals officer with the Lancashire Fusiliers when he was posted to France and saw action on the Somme. In late 1916, he was invalided home with trench fever, a bacterial disease that almost certainly saved his life as his battalion was all but annihilated.

The unpublished material includes war poems, metaphorical works that are concerned with life, loss, faith and friendship rather than trenches and battles. Scull was particularly moved by an unfinished poem, The Empty Chapel, about a lone soldier hearing marching feet and drumming. “I found it very affecting,” she said.

In its extensive fragmentary drafts, Tolkien wrote: “I knelt in a silent empty chapel/ And a great wood lay around/ And a forest filled with a tramping noise/ And a mighty drumming sound/…

“O ye warriors of England that are marching dark/

“Can ye see no light before you but the courage in your heart.”

Tolkien’s humour emerges in a poem titled Monday Morning, where everything goes wrong for him, from slipping on soap to falling down stairs. It begins: “On Monday morning all agree/ that most annoying things can be./ Now I will tell you in this song/ of one when everything went wrong./ The sun was early shining bright,/ but not, of course, for my delight:/ it woke the birds who woke mama,/ who woke the boys, who woke papa;/ it came and hit me in the eye,/ though still I wished in bed to lie …”

Scull and Hammond struggled to make sense of a poem, titled Bealuwérig, that Tolkien had written in Old English. It features the name Bealuwearge, Old English for “malicious outlaw”, which recalls Tolkien’s fell creature in The Lord of the Rings, the Balrog, and the wolf-like beasts in The Hobbit called Wargs.

They were looking up words in Old English dictionaries, but could not find them – eventually discovering that Tolkien had been translating Lewis Carroll’s famous nonsense poem Jabberwocky into Old English, making up words to represent Carroll’s made-up words.

Hammond said: “Well, no wonder I couldn’t find the words in dictionaries.”

Each poem has an entry showing its development through various drafts, sometimes over decades.

In the introduction, the editors write: “Because his most commercially successful writings, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, have had so many readers, and because they include between them nearly one 100 poems (depending on how one counts), Tolkien’s skill as a poet ought to be already well known …

“Many who enjoy his stories of Middle-earth pass over their poems very quickly or avoid them altogether, either in haste to get on with the prose narrative or because they dislike poetry in general, or think they do. It is their loss, for they are missing elements integral to the stories which help to drive their plots and contribute to character and mood.”