Israel has carried out airstrikes in Lebanon in what it described as a pre-emptive action before a planned large-scale Hezbollah attack, and Hezbollah launched a drone and rocket salvo against northern Israel, in a significant escalation of a simmering cross-border conflict.

Two Hezbollah fighters and a militant from an allied group were killed in the strikes on Lebanon. An Israeli navy officer was killed and two other service members injured on a patrol boat off the coast of northern Israel that was hit by shrapnel from an Iron Dome interceptor missile, Israeli media reported.

The Iranian-backed Lebanese Shia group said it had used drones and more than 320 rockets against 11 Israeli military sites as a “first phase” of its response to the death of one of its top commanders, Fuad Shukr, in an Israeli airstrike last month. It did not say when a second phase may come.

Hezbollah said it had completed its operations, which it claimed were successful, and was unaffected by the Israeli airstrikes, but a spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), Nadav Shoshani, said the Hezbollah rocket and drone assault had been “part of a larger attack that was planned and we were able to thwart a big part of it this morning”.

Shoshani said 100 Israeli fighter jets took part in the pre-dawn strikes, which had destroyed Hezbollah missile launch tubes, some of which had been aimed towards central Israel.

Israel’s foreign minister, Israel Katz, insisted his country did not want a full-scale war but said it would “act according to developments on the ground”. Any Hezbollah missile attack on Israeli cities would be likely to trigger a massive Israeli response that would bring the prospect of an all-out war much closer.

Even without such a missile attack, Sunday’s hostilities between the IDF and Hezbollah were the most substantial since last October, when Hezbollah fired on northern Israeli settlements in solidarity with Hamas in Gaza. More than 80,000 Israelis were evacuated from the border area and the two sides have exchanged almost daily fire in recent weeks.

Israel said it still expected an “extensive” Hezbollah response and declared a 48-hour state of emergency, giving the military special powers. Sirens sounded in towns across northern Israel, Tel Aviv airport was closed for a few hours and incoming flights were diverted.

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said the leaders of Hezbollah and Iran should know that the response was “another step towards changing the situation in the north and returning our residents safely to their homes” and that “this is not the end of the story”.

The White House said the US president, Joe Biden, was monitoring events, adding that Israel had the right to self-defence but that the US would “keep working for regional stability”.

The airstrikes and Hezbollah rocket and drone salvo have come at a time when the US and its regional allies are holding talks with Israel and Hamas aimed at agreeing a ceasefire in Gaza.

The Biden administration hopes that a hostage-for-ceasefire deal in Gaza would calm regional tensions and make the conflict less likely to spread. The persistent failure to reach a Gaza deal, however, makes a regional war more likely as the Palestinian death toll climbs. It is already estimated at more than 40,000, while violence is spreading across the West Bank, driven by militant Israeli settlers seeking to seize Palestinian land.

Sean Savett, a spokesperson for the US national security council, said in a written statement: “President Biden is closely monitoring events in Israel and Lebanon. He has been engaged with his national security team throughout the evening. At his direction, senior US officials have been communicating continuously with their Israeli counterparts.

“We will keep supporting Israel’s right to defend itself, and we will keep working for regional stability,” Savett added.

The Israeli news outlet Ynet cited reports from Lebanon saying the air force struck 40 targets.

“Most of the strikes were in the valleys [away from populated areas], and besides the Syrian, we have no injuries,” a source within a first responder organisation which serves south Lebanon, told the Guardian. Hezbollah fighters are known to use the heavily forested areas of south Lebanon for cover as they carry out attacks against Israel.

Netanyahu and the defence minister, Yoav Gallant, were in an underground IDF situation room in the early hours of Sunday to oversee the airstrikes, and the country’s security cabinet was due to meet at 7am, as Israel braced for the possibility of more cross-border fire.

“Hezbollah will soon fire rockets, and possibly missiles and UAVs [drones], towards Israeli territory,” the IDF spokesperson, Rear Adm Daniel Hagari, said.“From right next to the homes of Lebanese civilians in the south of Lebanon, we can see that Hezbollah is preparing to launch an extensive attack on Israel, while endangering Lebanese civilians.

“Hezbollah’s ongoing aggression risks dragging the people of Lebanon, the people of Israel, and the whole region, into a wider escalation,” Hagari said.

Gallant talked to his US counterpart, the defence secretary, Lloyd Austin, to update him on the unfolding situation. ​​“Minister Gallant and Secretary Austin discussed the importance of avoiding regional escalation,” the Israeli defence ministry said in a statement.

The statement added that Gallant had “emphasised that Israel’s defence establishment is determined to defend the citizens of Israel and will use all the means at its disposal to remove imminent threats”.

A Pentagon account of the call said Austin had “reaffirmed the United States’ ironclad commitment to Israel’s defence against any attacks by Iran and its regional partners and proxies”.

If Israel and Hezbollah wanted an all-out war it would have happened a long time ago. Each side would welcome the destruction of the other, but the time has not been right so far for either of them to plunge into a full-scale conflict.

The intense exchange of hostilities across the Israel-Lebanese border on Sunday morning once more took the parties to brink of such a war, but once again they paused and pulled back.

In terms of munitions expended, it was the biggest engagement for many months. Israel put 100 jet fighters in the air, which conducted sorties over seven hours and struck more than 40 sites with missiles, but killed only three people , according to the count as of Sunday evening.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) were clearly taking far more care over civilian casualties in Lebanon than they have in Gaza. While Israel insists it will fight until Hamas is completely obliterated, its foreign minister, Israel Katz, stressed on Sunday his government had no interest in such an existential fight with Hezbollah.

According to its own version of events, Hezbollah launched 320 rockets and a large number of drones on Sunday morning, but caused only a small handful of injuries. The only Israeli fatality was caused by debris from an interceptor missile. The Lebanese Shia militia claimed nonetheless to have achieved its aims, to avenge a commander killed by Israel last month. Its spokesperson stretched credulity by claiming its plans had not been affected in any way by the earlier Israeli airstrikes, but the aim of the message was clear, to draw a line under the day’s hostilities and reduce pressure on Hezbollah to keep the battle going.

Both sides have compelling reasons not to go to war now. Israel does not have the stamina for another front while it has not yet managed to eliminate Hamas completely in Gaza and with the West Bank being driven to the brink of a wider explosion of violence by hardline settlers and their backers inside the Israeli state.

IDF commanders are also aware that a war with Hezbollah could not be won without a ground invasion, which would have a heavy cost in Israeli lives. Despite recent upgrades, Israeli tanks are still considered highly vulnerable to ambush.

Benjamin Netanyahu has good reason to keep Israel in a state of conflict, as it helps fend off a reckoning with the electorate and the courts, where he faces corruption charges. The prime minister and his security cabinet may be weighing further sorties after Sunday’s apparent success, but that is a long way from sending young foot soldiers over the border or provoking Hezbollah missile attacks on Tel Aviv or other cities.

For its part, Hezbollah’s leadership has assets to protect in Lebanon, political and economic, that would be devastated in a war with Israel. The group’s regional patron, Iran, is clearly not ready for a conflict either and has deferred for now its own threatened response to Israel’s killing of the Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran last month.

Hezbollah and Iran do not share the apocalyptic self-destructive impulses of Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas commander in Gaza, who launched his surprise 7 October attack on Israel based on the mistaken assumption his allies in Beirut and Tehran would join the battle.

Just because neither Israel nor Hezbollah wants all-out war now, does not mean it is not going to happen, however. Both sides are using very crude tools – high explosives mainly – to send each other messages, and the room for miscalculation is always high.

The IDF was reportedly on the brink of going to war in Lebanon immediately after 7 October, on the strength of faulty intelligence suggesting that Hezbollah was involved in the attack and its fighters were about to pour over the northern border.

The potential for unintended consequences was also high on Sunday. If the IDF account of events was accurate, its warplanes blew up dozens of launch sites and thwarted planned Hezbollah strikes against strategic targets in central Israel. If one of those strikes had caused substantial casualties, the political pressure on the Netanyahu government to clear Hezbollah out of southern Lebanon could easily have become irresistible.

The room for error is likely to be greatest when each of the parties try to guess the other’s internal political dynamics. For example, when Israel killed the Hezbollah commander, Fuad Shukr in an airstrike on south Beirut last month, there was no way of knowing how many rockets or missiles Hezbollah would deem sufficient to avenge him, or where they should be aimed. If Netanyahu extends the bombing campaign, he runs the risk of triggering Iranian involvement in support of its proxy.

Similarly, while driving more than 80,000 Israelis from their homes with its cross-border bombardment, Hezbollah could not possibly gauge the political pressure it would put on the Netanyahu coalition to take over southern Lebanon so that the displaced residents could return.

In the midst of this mutual recklessness, the US is desperately trying to mitigate the risk. The Biden administration’s principal aim since 7 October – and principal achievement, US officials argue – has been to prevent the Gaza war becoming a regional conflagration.

Washington has urged restraint on its friends, while moving its forces into the region to deter its enemies. The central strategy – or the essential hope at least – is that a hostages-for-peace agreement in Gaza would also defuse the worsening confrontation on Israel’s northern border.

Talks continue this week and American briefers still insist, despite evidence to the contrary from recent experience, that a deal is within reach. But there are serious doubts over whether Netanyahu or Sinwar really want an end to the fighting. War can break out without both sides wanting it, but the same cannot be said about peace.

• Hezbollah has said it hit 11 Israeli military sites, fired more than 320 rockets and sent drones flying into northern Israel on Sunday as part of the “first phase” of its response to Israel’s killing of the movement’s top commander in a strike on Beirut last month. The Iran-backed group had vowed a significant response to the targeted killing of Fuad Shukr, raising fears that months of tit-for-tat strikes could escalate into an all-out war.

• Early on Sunday, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it had launched strikes inside Lebanon after assessing that Hezbollah was preparing to fire rockets and missiles towards Israel. Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, the top Israeli military spokesperson, said 100 warplanes struck more than 40 Hezbollah launch areas, eliminating thousands of rocket launcher barrels aimed for immediate fire towards Israel.

• A person was killed in an Israeli drone strike on a car in the town of Khiam in south Lebanon on Sunday morning, while at least four others were reported as injured in separate strikes, a medical source told the Guardian.

• Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, declared a state of emergency for the next 48 hours, a declaration which gives the IDF powers to issue restrictions on civilian movement. The Israeli security met at 7am local time with the full cabinet due to meet on Sunday afternoon.

• The prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said Israel would take all measures necessary to defend itself and that it would harm “whoever harms us”. He said Israel’s strikes on Sunday are “not the end of the story” in its military campaign against Hezbollah. Foreign minister Israel Katz has said Israel will respond to developments on the ground but does not seek a full-scale war.

• Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels praised attacks by Hezbollah on Israel and renewed threats to launch their own assault in response to Israeli strikes on a port in Yemen last month.

• Gallant spoke to his US counterpart, Lloyd Austin, about the airstrikes on Lebanon, assuring the defence secretary they were defensive in nature.

• US National Security Council spokesperson Sean Savett said “President Biden is closely monitoring events in Israel and Lebanon.” “At his direction, senior US officials have been communicating continuously with their Israeli counterparts,” Savett said. “We will keep supporting Israel’s right to defend itself, and we will keep working for regional stability.”

• Hezbollah said it targeted an identified “special military target” as well as Israel’s Iron Dome platforms and other sites but that the full response would take “some time”, Reuters reported. Hezbollah said its attack involved more than 320 Katyusha rockets aimed at multiple sites in Israel and a “large number” of drones.

• It later announced the military operation was “completed” for the day. The Lebanese group denied that Israel’s pre-emptive strikes, launched just before its own attack, affected its own operation. “The enemy’s claims about the pre-emptive action it carried out, the targets it struck and its disruption of the resistance’s [Hezbollah’s] attack, are empty,” Hezbollah’s statement read. It added that all drones were launched as scheduled “towards the desired targets”.

• Flights to and from Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv were temporarily suspended, and Israel’s cabinet was to meet at 7am (4am GMT), Israeli media reported. Air raid sirens were reported throughout northern Israel. Jordan’s flag carrier Royal Jordanian suspended flights to Beirut on Sunday “due to the current situation”, the state news agency reported, without clarifying the exact timeframe for the suspension. Air France cancelled its flights to Tel Aviv and Beirut until Monday at least.

• The attacks came as Egypt hosts a new round of talks aimed at ending Israel’s war with Hamas, now in its 11th month. Egypt’s president, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, warned America’s top general, CQ Brown, who is chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, of the dangers of a major conflict in Lebanon.

• At least 40,405 Palestinian people have been killed and 93,468 injured in Israeli strikes on Gaza since 7 October, the Gaza health ministry said in a statement on Sunday. In the last 24-hours alone, 71 Palestinians were killed and 112 were injured in what the enclave’s health ministry called three “massacres” by Israel in the Gaza Strip.

A suspect arrested over a stabbing rampage in the western German city of Solingen is thought to be a member of Islamic State, federal prosecutors have said, after Friday’s attack in which three people died and eight were injured.

Düsseldorf police and prosecutors said in a joint statement early on Sunday that the suspect in custody was a 26-year-old Syrian man who had turned himself in.

A spokesperson for German federal prosecutors, who have taken over the investigation of the case, also said the man was suspected of being a member of Islamic State. The extremist group on Saturday claimed responsibility for the attack without providing any evidence.

“The involvement of this person is currently under intensive investigation,” the joint statement said. The man was later identified by federal prosecutors as Issa Al H, with his last name omitted in line with German privacy laws.

Wearing handcuffs and leg shackles, he was taken on Sunday from the police station in Solingen to make a first appearance before a judge at the federal court of justice in Karlsruhe.

The frenzied knife attack unfolded over a few minutes on Friday evening at a festival of diversity to celebrate the 650th anniversary of Solingen, a city of 160,000 people near Cologne and Düsseldorf. Three people from the region – one woman and two men – were killed and eight others were injured, four of them seriously.

Citing officials, the Associated Press reported that a 15-year-old boy was arrested on suspicion he knew about the planned attack and failed to inform authorities, but that he was not the attacker. Two female witnesses told police they overheard the boy and an unknown person before the attack speaking about intentions that corresponded to the bloodshed.

The attack is already stirring debate about Germany’s asylum policy ahead of regional elections in Saxony and Thuringia on 1 September, where the far-right, anti-immigration Alternative für Deutschland is expected to do well.

The leader of the centre-right CDU opposition party Friedrich Merz said Germany should stop admitting further refugees from Syria and Afghanistan in a letter on his website entitled “enough is enough”.

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

The festival , which was supposed to run through to Sunday, drawing up to 25,000 people, was cancelled, as were weekend festivities in nearby towns.

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.”

Germany’s federal criminal police office has said there have been around a dozen Islamist-motivated attacks since 2000. One of the biggest was in 2016, when a Tunisian man drove a truck into a Christmas market in Berlin, killing 12 and injuring dozens.

Max Kennedy, the brother of Robert F Kennedy Jr, has implored the public to ignore his sibling’s decision to drop out of the 2024 presidential election and endorse Donald Trump’s campaign to return to the White House.

In op-ed for the Los Angeles Time, Max Kennedy said “Trump was exactly the kind of arrogant, entitled bully” that his father, former US senator and attorney general Robert F Kennedy, stood against before he was assassinated in 1968 as he pursued the Democratic presidential nomination.

Max Kennedy predicted his father would have admired the Democratic nominee for November’s election, Vice-President Kamala Harris, because she was a former prosecutor as well.

“Her career, like his, has been all about decency, dignity, equality, democracy and justice for all,” Max Kennedy wrote.

“I’m heartbroken over my brother Bobby’s endorsement of Donald Trump,” the piece added. “Robert F Kennedy’s life was dedicated to promoting the safety, security and happiness of the American people.”

Robert F Kennedy Jr made the announcement to suspend his independent presidential campaign on Thursday. He soon appeared with Trump at a political rally in Arizona where he formally backed the former president, who clinched the Republican nomination despite his conviction on 34 felony charges of falsifying business records to conceal hush-money payments to adult film actor Stormy Daniels, among various other legal problems.

Kennedy said he planned on removing his name from the 2024 presidential election ballot in swing states to boost Trump’s chances of retaking the Oval Office. But Kennedy said he would remain on the ballot in other states that are not expected to decide the presidential race.

In an interview with Fox News on Sunday, Robert F Kennedy Jr claimed his campaign was undermined by “censorship” by the media – and not being included in the June presidential debate that preceded Joe Biden’s decision to halt his presidential re-election bid.

Kennedy also described his periodic conversations with Trump before Thursday’s endorsement announcement, including one hours after the failed assassination attempt of the former president in July.

While they agreed that they would be able to continue criticizing each other in connection with issues on which they don’t see eye to eye, “he invited me to form a unity government”, Kennedy said of Trump.

Kennedy’s presidential bid and endorsement of Trump has drawn sharp criticism from the rest of his family. And, before its suspension, his campaign was replete with controversies, including a sexual assault allegation made against him by a former staffer and the proliferation of numerous conspiracy theories over vaccine safety, Covid 19, wireless internet, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and antidepressants.

Max Kennedy, a lawyer, is younger than his former presidential candidate brother. He is the ninth child of Robert F Kennedy and Ethel Kennedy – and he was the nephew of John F Kennedy, who was president when he was assassinated in 1963.

He characterized his brother’s endorsement of Trump as “inconceivable”, noting how he had offered Harris his endorsement in exchange for a position in her administration if she won. But Max Kennedy said his brother received no response from the Harris camp and successfully offered the same deal to Trump.

“It is all the more tragic because of our brother’s name. To carry the name Robert F Kennedy Jr means a special legacy within a legacy,” Max Kennedy wrote, explaining his father’s record cut a stark contrast with Trump’s on anti-racism, immigration, the rule of law, the environment and gun control. Max Kennedy said the same was true with respect to truth and democracy, apparently an allusion to Trump’s falsehoods about having been robbed of victory in the 2020 presidential race by electoral fraudsters, which drove his supporters to mount the deadly US Capitol attack in early January 2021.

“I love Bobby. But I hate what he is doing to our country,” Max Kennedy wrote. “It is worse than disappointment. We are in mourning.

“Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine I would be motivated to write something of this nature. With a heavy heart, I am today asking my fellow Americans to do what will honor our father the most: Ignore Bobby and support vice-president Kamala Harris and the Democratic platform. It’s what is best for our country.”

Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign says it has now raised $540m for its election battle against Donald Trump.

The vice-president’s campaign has had no problems getting supporters to open their wallets since Joe Biden announced on 21 July he was ending his run for re-election to the White House and quickly endorsed Harris. The campaign said it saw a surge of donations during last week’s Democratic national convention in Chicago where Harris and her vice-presidential running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, accepted their nominations.

“Just before vice-president Harris’ acceptance speech Thursday night, we officially crossed the $500m mark,” the campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon wrote in a memo released by the campaign on Sunday. “Immediately after her speech, we saw our best fundraising hour since launch day.”

Trump has also proved to be a formidable fundraiser but appears to be outpaced in her month-old campaign. The Republican nominee and former president’s campaign announced earlier this month that, alongside its related affiliates, they had raised $138.7m in July – less than what Harris took in during her candidacy’s opening week. Trump’s campaign reported $327m in cash on hand at the start of August.

The Harris fundraising totals were raised by Harris for President, the Democratic National Committee and joint fundraising committees.

O’Malley Dillon said that nearly a third of contributions during convention week came from first-time contributors. About one-fifth of those first-time contributors were young voters and two-thirds were women, groups that the campaign sees as critical constituencies that Harris needs to turn out to win in November.

The Harris campaign says it has also seen a surge in volunteer support for the vice-president. During convention week, supporters signed up for nearly 200,000 volunteer shifts to help the campaign.

The Russian-born founder of Telegram, Pavel Durov, is due to appear in a French court later on Sunday, after his arrest at a Paris airport over alleged offences related to the messaging app.

Sources told the AFP news agency that the Franco-Russian tech billionaire would appear in court after being detained by police at Le Bourget airport. French investigators had issued a warrant for Durov’s arrest as part of an inquiry into allegations of fraud, drug trafficking, organised crime, promotion of terrorism and cyberbullying.

Durov is accused of failing to take action to curb the criminal use of his platform and was stopped after arriving in Paris from Baku on his private jet on Saturday night. “Enough of Telegram’s impunity,” said one investigator who expressed surprise that Durov flew to Paris knowing he was a wanted man.

Russian authorities have accused France of “refusing to cooperate”. The Russian embassy in Paris has asked for access to Durov and said France had so far “avoided engagement” on the situation.

Durov left Russia in 2014 after refusing to comply with Kremlin demands to shut down opposition groups on the VK social network that he founded when he was 22. He left VK after a dispute with its Kremlin-linked owners and turned his focus to Telegram, the app he founded with his brother Nikolai in 2013.

Initially, Telegram was similar to other messaging apps, but has since diverged to become more of a social network in its own right. As well as communicating one-to-one, users can join groups of up to 200,000 people and create broadcast “channels” that others can follow and leave comments on.

With 950 million active monthly users, Telegram has become a major source of information – and disinformation – about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Durov lives in Dubai, where Telegram is based, and holds citizenship of France and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). He recently said he had tried to settle in Berlin, London, Singapore and San Francisco before choosing Dubai, which he praised for its business environment and “neutrality”.

In the UAE, Telegram faces little pressure to moderate its content, while western governments are trying to crack down on hate speech, disinformation, sharing of images of child abuse and other illegal content.

Telegram offers end-to-end encrypted messaging and allows users to create channels to disseminate information to followers. Especially popular in the former Soviet Union, the app is widely used by the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, and his circle, as well as politicians throughout Ukraine, to release information about the war. It is also one of the few places where Russians can get unfiltered information about the conflict, after the Kremlin tightened media controls in the wake of the full-scale invasion.

Its apparently unbreakable encryption has made Telegram a haven for extremists and conspiracy theorists. Investigative journalists at the central European news site VSquare said it had become the “‘go-to’ tool for Russian propagandists, both leftwing and rightwing radicals, American QAnon and conspiracy theorists,” concluding it was an “ecosystem for the radicalisation of opinion”.

The app was also used widely by far-right agitators plotting anti-immigration rallies in England and Northern Ireland in the wake of the stabbing of three children at a Southport dance class last month.

The anti-racism campaign group Hope Not Hate concluded that Telegram had become the “app of choice” for racists and violent extremists and “a cesspit of antisemitic content” with minimal moderation or effort from the app to curb extremist content.

The former Russian president turned hawkish deputy head of Russia’s security council, Dmitry Medvedev, claimed that Durov had made a mistake by fleeing Russia and thinking he would never have to cooperate with security services abroad. “He miscalculated,” Medvedev said. “For all our common enemies now, he is Russian – and therefore unpredictable and dangerous.”

Writing on X after the arrest, the rightwing US commentator and conspiracy theorist Tucker Carlson described Durov as “a living warning to any platform owner who refuses to censor the truth at the behest of governments and intel agencies”.

In an interview with Carlson earlier this year, Durov said the app should remain a “neutral platform” and not “a player in geopolitics”.

In the interview, Durov said he got the idea to launch an encrypted messaging app after coming under pressure from the Russian government when working at VK.

He said users “love the independence” of the Telegram app. “They also love the privacy, the freedom, [there are] a lot of reasons why somebody would switch to Telegram,” he told Carlson.

The billionaire social media tycoon Elon Musk reposted a clip from that interview where Durov praised Musk’s takeover of X as “a great development” with the hashtag “FreePavel”. He followed up with a second tweet: “Liberté! Liberté! Liberté?”

Commenting on the arrest, Robert F Kennedy Jr, who last week abandoned his own presidential bid to support Donald Trump, said: “The need to protect free speech has never been more urgent.”

A Russian missile has struck a hotel in the Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk where a team working for the Reuters news agency was staying, leaving one person trapped under the rubble, two people hospitalised and two others less seriously injured.

Reuters said the missing person and those taken to hospital were part of a team of six who were working in the eastern Donetsk region. “One of our colleagues is unaccounted for, while another two have been taken to hospital for treatment,” the news agency said.

The other three had been accounted for, it added, and said it was seeking further information and would provide an update in due course. Ukrainian authorities said a search and rescue operation was taking place at the site.

Russia has been bombing hotels in frontline areas for more than a year. A double-tap missile strike on the Druzhba hotel in Pokrovsk, also in the Donetsk region, killed seven people last August. A further 11 were injured in a bombing of a hotel in Kharkiv in January.

Four civilians were reported to have been killed and 13 injured in the Sumy region, local police said, on a day in which Russian attacks targeted 50 different sites. The Sumy region borders Russia’s Kursk province, where earlier this month Ukrainian forces launched a surprise cross-border incursion, gaining more than 480 sq miles (1,250 sq km) of territory.

Ukraine’s incursion into Kursk appears to have stalled, however, with fighting still said to be taking place around Korenevo, 15 miles (24km) inside the Russian border. Progress north and east of Sudzha, the principal settlement taken by Ukraine, has also been limited in the past week.

Russian officials said five people were killed by Ukrainian shelling in Rakitnoye in the Belgorod region, to the south of Kursk and to the east of the incursion area. The Russian regional governor, Vyacheslav Gladkov, said 13 more were injured.

Ukraine and Russia agreed to swap 115 prisoners of war on Saturday after Kyiv had seized hundreds during the Kursk incursion. However, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, was criticised by Denys Prokopenko, the commander of the Azov brigade, for not negotiating the return of the estimated 900 fighters from the unit still held by Russia. “Precious opportunity and time have been lost,” he said.

Zelenskiy, speaking at a joint news conference with the leaders of Poland and Lithuania, said the cross-border incursion had in part been a preventive move to stop Russia taking the city of Sumy. Other objectives included capturing Russian prisoners of war, creating a buffer zone, and some that he could not disclose publicly.

Zelenskiy also promoted his top military commander, Oleksandr Syrskyi, from the rank of colonel general to full general, in a reward for the success of the incursion, whose careful planning had the hallmarks of the chief of staff.

In Russia, Vladimir Putin held a meeting with the chief of the general staff, Valery Gerasimov. The Kremlin said they discussed “countering enemy forces invading the Kursk region and measures being taken to destroy them”.

The bellicose language was more marked than recent Russian statements, which have generally downplayed the significance of the incursion, describing the response as counter-terrorist.

A Russian missile has struck a hotel in the Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk where a team working for the Reuters news agency was staying, leaving one person trapped under the rubble, two people hospitalised and two others less seriously injured.

Reuters said the missing person and those taken to hospital were part of a team of six who were working in the eastern Donetsk region. “One of our colleagues is unaccounted for, while another two have been taken to hospital for treatment,” the news agency said.

The other three had been accounted for, it added, and said it was seeking further information and would provide an update in due course. Ukrainian authorities said a search and rescue operation was taking place at the site.

Russia has been bombing hotels in frontline areas for more than a year. A double-tap missile strike on the Druzhba hotel in Pokrovsk, also in the Donetsk region, killed seven people last August. A further 11 were injured in a bombing of a hotel in Kharkiv in January.

Four civilians were reported to have been killed and 13 injured in the Sumy region, local police said, on a day in which Russian attacks targeted 50 different sites. The Sumy region borders Russia’s Kursk province, where earlier this month Ukrainian forces launched a surprise cross-border incursion, gaining more than 480 sq miles (1,250 sq km) of territory.

Ukraine’s incursion into Kursk appears to have stalled, however, with fighting still said to be taking place around Korenevo, 15 miles (24km) inside the Russian border. Progress north and east of Sudzha, the principal settlement taken by Ukraine, has also been limited in the past week.

Russian officials said five people were killed by Ukrainian shelling in Rakitnoye in the Belgorod region, to the south of Kursk and to the east of the incursion area. The Russian regional governor, Vyacheslav Gladkov, said 13 more were injured.

Ukraine and Russia agreed to swap 115 prisoners of war on Saturday after Kyiv had seized hundreds during the Kursk incursion. However, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, was criticised by Denys Prokopenko, the commander of the Azov brigade, for not negotiating the return of the estimated 900 fighters from the unit still held by Russia. “Precious opportunity and time have been lost,” he said.

Zelenskiy, speaking at a joint news conference with the leaders of Poland and Lithuania, said the cross-border incursion had in part been a preventive move to stop Russia taking the city of Sumy. Other objectives included capturing Russian prisoners of war, creating a buffer zone, and some that he could not disclose publicly.

Zelenskiy also promoted his top military commander, Oleksandr Syrskyi, from the rank of colonel general to full general, in a reward for the success of the incursion, whose careful planning had the hallmarks of the chief of staff.

In Russia, Vladimir Putin held a meeting with the chief of the general staff, Valery Gerasimov. The Kremlin said they discussed “countering enemy forces invading the Kursk region and measures being taken to destroy them”.

The bellicose language was more marked than recent Russian statements, which have generally downplayed the significance of the incursion, describing the response as counter-terrorist.

America’s fraught 2024 election could be hit by far-right violence, warns a high-profile FBI informant who spent years infiltrating the Klu Klux Klan in a new book.

Joe Moore spent a decade tasked with infiltrating KKK chapters in Florida to investigate enduring ties between law enforcement and the white supremacist organization, an assignment that included disrupting a murder plot by a trio of Klansmen who worked as prison guards.

Now the former US army sniper is out with a book, White Robes and Broken Badges, detailing those experiences – and applying the lessons he learned to an approaching election freighted with fears of the impact of far-right and white supremacist groups.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll in May reported that two out of three Americans said they were concerned that political violence could follow the 5 November election.

“Unfortunately, I think it’s relevant to any time in our nation’s history, not just this election,” Moore says. Far-right ideology has two origins, he has come to learn. “One is geographical, where you are raised up in an area where that ideology is simply a part of a belief system. The second is a generational origin in which it’s handed down.”

And so begins a story of how Moore, living near Gainesville in the 2010s, became involved with white supremacists in Florida, rose to the position of Grand Knighthawk, the klan’s security official, and disrupted a plot by Klansmen, all prison guards, to murder a Black former inmate, and of bringing down two major KKK figures, Grand Dragon Jamie Ward and Exalted Cyclops Charles Newcomb.

“In my first tour inside the KKK – the nation’s first domestic terrorist group, founded more than 150 years ago – I foiled a plot to assassinate then candidate Barack Obama, only to witness the Klan use his election as a rallying cry and recruiting tool that ignited a firestorm within the white nationalist right,” Moore writes in the book.

After serving in foreign authoritarian countries, he continues, “nothing I witnessed in any of them scares me as much what we’re facing at home now. Should we be afraid? With the 2024 election looming, and democracy itself on the ballot, the answer is yes, we should be very afraid.”

Moore described meeting a regional Klan leader, or Grand Dragon, who lived near Rosewood, Florida, the site of a racist massacre of dozens of Black people and the destruction of the town in 1923. “After an evening at the Grand Dragon’s home I walked over to remnants of Rosewood and realized that I had the power to stop the next Rosewood,” he says.

Moore’s extraordinary tale has been told previously – both as an Associated Press story in 2021 corroborated using court records and trial transcripts, and as a documentary, Grand Knighthawk: Infiltrating the KKK, but Moore’s new account comes with an immediate political message.

The foreword is written by the Democratic congressman Jamie Raskin, who last week described his experience during the January 6 riot to Democratic conventioneers in Chicago. In the book, Raskin describes the “mobilization of domestic violent extremist groups to act as the frontline shock troops in the assault”.

Moore, Raskin writes, “shows how the KKK remains a central entry point and organizing force for violent white nationalism in America”.

Moore says he tried to remain politically neutral, for doing otherwise would mean risking mistakes. But finding the right people to report the corruption he had uncovered was more difficult – Florida officials, he claims, didn’t want to hear his message of KKK infiltration into law enforcement.

“It was far more prevalent and consequential than officials were willing to admit, so much so that state officials came out and said there was no information that the issue was any more broad than the case in front of them. But I had a list of officers that were active members and actively recruiting other people and sending active Klan members into the law enforcement hiring process as well.”

The KKK may not be the force it once was, but other white nationalist organizations moved in to adopt the messaging and the membership, among them militia groups and movements like the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters.

Moore estimates that by 2014, one-third of all Klan members were also members of another similar organization and the transition was being encouraged at the highest levels of the organization.

“It just so happens that geographical and generational origins are dispersed, so if America was to have another civil war it would not be north versus south, but it would be families and geographical locations against other families and geographical locations.”

White supremacists moved north in the US – joining homegrown ones already there – for reasons of economic prosperity “but they brought with them the generational origins of racism and seed different areas of the north for racism to grow generationally”, he adds.

White Robes is ghost-written by Jon Land, author of the insurrectionist thriller Murder at the CDC, dozens of mystery-suspense novels and the teen comedy film Dirty Deeds, that produces a clash between style and message.

No matter. Moore has an informed point when it comes to the infiltration of law enforcement – some 20% of those arrested during the January 6 Capitol attack are believed to have some relationship to US law enforcement.

“Criminal organizations of all kinds want to gain access to police powers, be it prisons, local police or state police. They want information to have control of their environment,” Moore points out. “But the KKK is not about controlling their environment to make money but to fulfill an ideology to bring about a new government or system.”

That in turn seeds generations below who also join law enforcement with racist ideology, he says. “It comes down to propagandizing, a self-fulfilling cycle of ideology and survivability. They fear for the loss of their ideology.”

The government of Trinidad and Tobago wants to remove a depiction of three ships used by Christopher Columbus from its coat of arms, in a move hailed by a historian as important in addressing historical inaccuracies and shrugging off colonial identities.

The Caribbean country’s prime minister, Keith Rowley, announced a plan on 18 August to replace the ships with a representation of Trinidad and Tobago’s national instrument, the steelpan.

The ships depicted are those used by Columbus in his expeditions to the Caribbean, which paved the way for centuries of European colonial rule and enslavement in the region.

In recent years, Caribbean countries have pushed back against what they see as a false narrative that Columbus discovered their islands, which, in fact, were populated when he arrived. Some have even removed references to the Italian explorer’s discovery in national holidays.

But there has been public concern that removing the ships from the coat of arms would erase important moments from Trinidad and Tobago’s history.

Dr Claudius Fergus, a historian who chairs the National Committee on Reparations, said: “This is not an attack on the history of the Caribbean. It’s not an attempt to erase but rather to correct … Every generation has an obligation to reinterpret their history and to correct the falsehoods on which some of that history would have been written.”

The committee is a local arm of the Caricom Reparations Commission, a Caribbean-wide body that seeks justice and compensation from institutions and governments for crimes committed during the transatlantic slave trade.

A longtime advocate for the elimination of colonial icons from the country, Fergus welcomed the announcement as an important step toward purging its colonial identity.

Rowley received applause when he announced his decision to pursue the change at a convention for his People’s National Movement party.

He said: “You see the three Columbus boats in the emblem? They will go. And we have enough votes in the parliament to do it. I can announce now that as soon as the legislative adjustment is made, that amendment should be made before 24 September.”

Fergus described the replacement of the ships with the steelpan as significant. “The steelpan was born in Laventille, the margins of [the capital, Port of Spain] – some might call it the ghetto – and the steelpan from its birth faced extreme racism and class prejudices from the general society, the church, and from many governmental figures at the time … so it was a slow progress towards assistance until today where the steelpan is embraced,” he said.

Rowley’s announcement has divided public opinion in Trinidad and Tobago. In Woodford Square in Port of Spain, renowned as the place where the country’s first prime minister, Eric Williams, delivered some of his most important speeches, there were opposing views on the issue.

Roberto, who did not want to give his full name, felt the government should prioritise other issues. He said: “There are people living below the poverty line. That’s the first thing I would deal with.” He was also concerned about the potential effect on people’s knowledge of their history. He added: “If they remove that history, who will teach my children and my grandchildren their history?”

Brunan Tavernier, a telecommunications worker, described the issue of colonial identity as irrelevant. “It has nothing to do with crime or anything else that is going on in the country,” he said.

For others, removing the ships is an important decision. “It’s about time,” said Yafeu Iregi, adding that he hoped it signalled a change in the status quo for Caribbean islands.

The planned removal of the ships is just one part of the national debate on colonial identity. On Wednesday, a cabinet-appointed committee will review the placement of statues, monuments and signage in Trinidad and Tobago and will host a public consultation to gauge views on the issue.

Trinidad and Tobago’s announcement is part of a growing trend in Caribbean countries, which are shrugging off colonial identities and legacy structures. In 2022, Barbados removed the British monarch as head of state, with other Caribbean nations now reviewing the option of following suit.

The armed guard assigned to Mike Lynch while he faced fraud charges has described how close he became to the “loving” tech entrepreneur and his family.

Appointed by the court, Rolo Igno, said he was supposed to stay distant but that the professional relationship “quickly dissolved” when Lynch invited him to spend time with his family.

Lynch and six others were killed when his luxury superyacht Bayesian sank off the coast of Sicily early on Monday after it was struck by a powerful storm wind called a downburst.

Lynch had been celebrating his acquittal from fraud charges relating to the £8.6bn sale of his software company Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard in 2011. He was cleared in June after a trial at a federal court in San Francisco, California.

In an interview with the Press Association, Igno said he had the “privilege” of spending “almost every waking moment” with Lynch while he was in custody in San Francisco. He said the job had been unlike any other and had been “life changing”.

“As an executive protection agent, the number one rule is simple, don’t ever get close to the principal,” he said. “They aren’t your friends, they’re a client and the relationship is strictly professional. But with Mike, that didn’t fly with him and for me that rule quickly dissolved.”

Igno described how when he had first escorted Lynch and his daughters, Hannah and Esme, to lunch, they did not hesitate to include him.

“I opened the door for them and told Mike: ‘If you need anything at all sir, I’ll be right at this table by the entrance’,” Igno told PA. “He chuckled and in his confident way, Mike replied: ‘No, no, no, you’ll be sitting with us.’

“When I hesitated, not wanting to disrupt their family time, he insisted, saying: ‘Rolo, do you want me to tell my beautiful daughters that the tough and handsome security guy, who was a former marine, didn’t want to sit with us because he was intimidated by them?’ How could I possibly say no to that?

“So, I joined them, sitting at the far end of the table, feeling out of my element but gradually realising how genuine and loving they all were.”

Igno said he enjoyed the job so much that he was excited to return to San Francisco after time off “just to be around Mike”.

He said the year he spent living with Lynch “allowed me to experience first-hand his loving and caring heart,” adding that the security team “became less of a detail and more like a family”.

Italian prosecutors announced on Saturday that they had opened a manslaughter and negligent shipwreck investigation into the deaths of seven people in the sinking of the Bayesian. Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares, was one of 15 passengers and crew rescued after the Bayesian sank.

Describing being with the family in Ravello, Italy, earlier this month, Igno said it was one of his “most cherished memories”, adding: “Overlooking the stunning Amalfi coast, Mike came up to me and said: ‘Rolo, I feel so much better knowing you will always have my family’s back.’

“He was right, and Mike, if you’re listening, I will always have your back. I will forever be here for Angela and Esme.”

Igno added: “My family will miss your masterful storytelling, and we will forever regret not seeing you do the robot dance that night, we were so close. Hannah, my family and I will miss your beautiful smile, your loving soul and your calming presence. My daughter Emma will never forget the time you two shared.”

There were five others killed in the incident. The yacht’s chef, Recaldo Thomas, Morgan Stanley International’s bank chair, Jonathan Bloomer, his wife Judy Bloomer, the Clifford Chance lawyer Chris Morvillo and his wife Neda Morvillo all died in the disaster.

According to the prosecutor in charge of the case, Raffaele Cammarano, some passengers may not have been able to escape from the yacht because they were asleep.

Armed with a powered screwdriver, a crowbar and a handheld scanner, the Norwegian customs officers climbed up a tower of refrigerated containers. With the striking scenery of the Oslofjord behind them and the refrigerator fans whirring, they forced open the back of a sealed banana container from Costa Rica.

“You can get a glimpse of how much space there is inside,” customs officer Gard Belgen told the Observer during a visit to the port last week. Pointing inside the unit holding the fan and cooling vents, he added: “And on top you can fit multiple packages. If you had time to stick them in properly, you could get somewhere between 50 and 70 kilos.”

Every week, thousands of containers come through Oslo port – at least 100 of them carrying bananas, largely from Ecuador and Costa Rica. It is here that customs officials are fighting a so-called “cocaine tsunami” that is hitting Europe.

They are underfunded, understaffed and under-resourced – there is just one mobile scanner capable of analysing an entire container in one go, and it is shared between three ports. With dozens of border crossings taking place with neighbouring Sweden and Finland, Norwegian customs is fighting an almost impossible battle. As the EU tightens its border controls, it is feared that the non-EU country’s vulnerabilities are being exploited by criminals and its borders flooded with drugs shipments, many of which are thought to be going undetected.

Last year, the Norwegian customs service made 1,847 drug seizures – more than in the previous 10 years combined – including record quantities of cocaine.

In March last year, about 800kg of cocaine was seized from a banana warehouse in the Oslo suburb of Groruddalen, eclipsing the previous record for size of seizure several times over. A few weeks later, a further 900kg was found at the same place. And then in July, a further 600kg was uncovered. In total, more than two tonnes were seized at the warehouse.

Meanwhile, in April last year on the west coast of Norway, 150kg of the drug was found under a ship from Brazil. Customs said that criminals had intended to retrieve it using divers, but that it had been intercepted before they could get there.

It has since emerged that during the March seizure, customs officers were being watched by six Swedish men, some of whom have been linked to the Swedish criminal network Foxtrot. Police believe they were there to collect the drugs; Belgen says the port is regularly monitored by gangs.

“We know it’s being watched. You can pick any spot in the woods and see all over,” he said, pointing to the forested hillside overlooking the area where containers were being moved around by cranes and scanned.

On the ground, customs officers demonstrated how a container is checked. A cylinder containing coconut oil was found to have nothing additional inside it – if it did, air bubbles might have indicated bags of cocaine. Another container, this time rectangular and non-refrigerated, also passes through the X-ray.

“If I’m going to smuggle something, this door is the only way in and out,” said Belgen, pointing to the ­container’s hatch on the screen. “I will hide it in the bottom or furthest from the door.”

He pulled up a recent X-ray image of a banana container to demonstrate how they can be used to hide drugs packages, which often show up as black squares in the images.

Øystein Børmer, director general of Norwegian customs, said smugglers were exploiting legal ship traffic and legal goods to get drugs in. “We are also aware of the risk of Norway becoming a gateway to Europe from South America, as the EU puts in place stronger control measures to combat the same threat,” he said.

Customs, he added, was on the frontline of the problem. “Smugglers continuously change their modus operandi – and it is necessary, with a broad and dynamic response to this severe threat. If we focus our resources on one spot, the smugglers just move elsewhere.”

The mayor of Oslo, Anne Lindboe, has warned that the city is becoming “a preferred port in Europe for criminal, hardened gangs”. It was, she added, “slightly too poorly guarded”.

While scanning as many containers as possible seems like an obvious solution, Per Olav Sønju, head of Norwegian customs’ cargo section, said that could only happen when there were staff to operate the equipment, which was not always the case.

Even if the big scanner is available, it requires employees from the port, owned by Turkish port operator Yilport Holding, to lift the container with a crane and place it to be scanned.

“There are too many containers to do this all the time,” he said, sitting at a kitchen table in the Norwegian customs office in Oslo.

Drug smuggling, he said, was “rapidly increasing here in Oslo and Norway”, adding: “The challenge is that we are few people, we have minimal resources and we have not enough equipment.

“The people who are doing this kind of job are too badly paid, and the containers and the potential for smuggling is way too big compared to what we can achieve.”

While there had been an increase in the use of intelligence when it came to drug smuggling, nothing compared to physically being there, he said, and there were “big holes in the fence”.

The leader of Norway’s trade union for customs officials, Karin Tanderø Schaug, said gangs were using the poorly guarded land border between Sweden and Norway to move drugs around using snow scooters and sledges. “They are very creative and we don’t have the muscles to do much about it.”

Cross-border crime is increasingly becoming an issue across the Nordic countries. The justice ministers of Denmark and Sweden last week announced a joint initiative to try to prevent Swedish children being recruited by Danish gangs. And Norwegian police recently said Swedish gangs were operating across all of Norway’s 12 police districts.

Tanderø Schaug said there were fears that if Norway did not act forcefully and soon, it could end up in a similar situation to Sweden, where there are regular drug-related shootings, with children as young as 12 being recruited to commit violence.

“If we are not there [on the border], it’s just a free pass and it will spread into society,” she said. “We have an escalation of violence and weapons in Norway. Police are worried.”

The border with Sweden is a growing source of concern for customs officials.

“What we are worried about is that Norway is becoming like Sweden because we have such a big border and Norway and Sweden are very tied together,” said Tanderø Schaug. “When something is being established in Sweden, it is naive to think it will never come to Norway.”

Customs was an essential part of tackling that, she said. “It’s important to take it seriously and act on it … we can make a difference in this fight and in this threat.”

But the prevalence of cocaine was already showing itself in Norwegian society, she said, which has the third highest cocaine consumption in Europe among young adults. Even if the drug is not apparent at the border, because they do not have the tools to detect it, they know it is getting in: “We see it in society – in clubs, discos, parties.”

The solution, she said, was to have more staff and more scanners. “We have to have new customs officers and tools all the way along the border. Not only in Oslo, but on the coast and the border to Sweden.”

Skjalg Fjellheim, a minister in Norway’s treasury department, said the government had allocated 118m kroner (£9m) to strengthening customs work against drug trafficking in the revised 2024 budget and that the 2025 budget would bring the figure up to over 200m kroner.

A 102-year-old military veteran has become Britain’s oldest skydiver.

Manette Baillie, from Benhall Green in Suffolk, jumped out of plane over Beccles on Sunday to mark her birthday and raise money for three charities, which she described as “very dear to my heart”.

Baillie, who served with the Women’s Royal Naval Service (Wrens) in Egypt during the second world war, said before the jump: “You must always look for something new. I was once married to a paratrooper but have never done [a sky-dive] myself.”

Baillie has raised more than £10,000 of her £30,000 fundraising target for the East Anglian Air Ambulance, Motor Neurone Disease Association and her local Benhall and Sternfield Ex-servicemen’s and Village Club, which she says “is the heart and soul of our lovely community and is in need of considerable refurbishment”.

She was supported on Sunday morning by a large crowd of spectators, including members of her local community, who travelled to the airfield to watch her momentous jump. Baillie has lived in Benhall Green since 1961.

Speaking after the jump, she told Sky News: “When the door opened I thought, there is nothing more I can do or say. Just jump.”

“Well, I suppose I jumped,” she added, “I remember my legs going out and it’s a kind of blur. I shut my eyes. We seem to travel at a very fast speed.”

Baillie came up with the idea of sky-diving after hearing about a friend’s 85-year-old father who had done a parachute jump – and wanted to do another as soon as he landed. She said at the time: “If an 85-year-old man can do it, so can I.”

In successfully completing the jump, she has broken the record for Britain’s oldest parachutist, which was previously set by Verdun Hayes, from Devon, in May 2017, when he jumped at the age of 101 and 38 days.

Before the jump, she received messages of support from wellwishers including a personal letter from the Prince of Wales, as well as tips from expert parachutists.

After she landed with a grin on her face, she was presented with a bouquet of flowers by representatives from East Anglian Air Ambulance.

“We love hearing about the inspirational stories from EAAA supporters,” the charity said, “so we were completely overwhelmed when we heard about Manette’s kindness and her exciting plans to celebrate her 102nd birthday.”

She has a personal reason for supporting the charity – an air ambulance saved her son’s life after a diving accident on the Isle of Wight in 1969.

It is not her first adrenaline-fuelled challenge. In the run-up to her 100th birthday, Baillie, who still regularly drives, raced a Ferrari at Silverstone, clocking up speeds of 130mph.

In his letter to Baillie, Prince William, who previously volunteered for the charity, wrote: “Catherine and I hear you will be marking your 102nd birthday next week with a parachute jump! Knowing you celebrated your 100th birthday by racing a Ferrari around Silverstone, we are not surprised.

“From my time with East Anglian Air Ambulance, I know how many lives are saved due to the generosity of people like you.”

Baillie told the Telegraph that the letter came as a “complete surprise”.

Speaking before her jump, Baillie told BBC Radio Suffolk that the fact that she remains fit and well is what, in part, encourages her to take on her thrill-seeking challenges.

“I’ve been so lucky to be fit and well that I’ve got to do something with it, that’s really the back of it,” she said. “I can’t just waste it, other people are crippled with arthritis and I’m not.”

She told BBC Radio 4: “I really don’t do fear, it’s no good.”

She said her secret to a long and fulfilling life was “community, friends and being among people”.

“Keep busy, be interested in everything, be kind to those around you and let them be kind to you,” she added. “And don’t forget to party.”