The UK has moved to immediately suspend 30 arms export licences to Israel after a review by the new Labour government found a “clear risk” that UK arms may be used in serious violation of humanitarian law relating to the treatment of Palestinian detainees and the supply of aid to Gaza.

The suspension will cover components for military aircraft including fighter aircraft, helicopters and drones.

The Foreign Office said the two-month review had raised concerns about the way Israel had conducted itself in the conflict in Gaza.

No definitive conclusion has been reached about whether UK arms export licences have contributed to the destruction in the territory. But the scale of the destruction and the number of civilian deaths caused great concern, the Foreign Office said.

The suspensions represent one-tenth of the 350 extant licenses and do not include parts for the F-35 Joint Fighter Strike programme unless the UK-supplied part is specific to a jet plane for use exclusively by Israel.

The move, which was coordinated between the Foreign Office, the business department and the attorney general, is likely to help the foreign secretary, David Lammy, overcome what may a highly charged revolt at the Labour party annual conference.

But it will lead to strains with Joe Biden’s administration in the US, which has repeatedly said it sees no basis in international humanitarian law to suspend arms exports.

The UK government is also facing a growing range of domestic court challenges, including proceedings due to start on Tuesday.

Officials were reluctant to link the 30 suspended arms export licences to specific breaches of international humanitarian law but pointed out that the government had been in so far fruitless negotiation with the Israeli government to gain access to Palestinian detainees either through British judicial figures or the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Ministers were eager to emphasise that the suspension did not represent a step away from the UK’s commitment to Israel’s security and pointed out that such suspensions had occurred in previous Israeli conflicts.

Suspension decisions were endorsed by Margaret Thatcher in 1982, Gordon Brown in 2009 and under the coalition government in 2014. Arms export licences were also suspended to Egypt in 2013 and Russia in 2014.

Officials said Lammy and his aides had been given no access to the decision-making process on arms sales made by the previous Conservative government. But Labour ministers will have reached a different decision on the basis of similar evidence.

The Conservatives conducted four reviews of the evidence of Israel’s compliance with international humanitarian law but never published the conclusions or explanations. Lammy, by contrast, published an explanation of his legal reasoning.

More details soon …

Israel’s first nationwide general strike since the Hamas attacks of 7 October, which was convened in support of a deal to free hostages held in Gaza, has ended after eight hours with a court order for workers to go back to their jobs.

The strike was organised amid widespread public anger at the government’s handling of the war in Gaza after the discovery of the bodies of six hostages at the weekend.

It was called by Israel’s largest trade union, Histadrut, from 6am on Monday, closing government and municipal offices as well as schools and many private businesses. Israel’s international airport, Ben Gurion, was reported to have shut down at 8am local time (6am BST) for two hours.

The Tel Aviv labour court ordered an end to the strike on Monday, ruling that it was politically motivated and had not been called for economic reasons.

The chair of Histadrut, Arnon Bar-David, said in a statement before the strike: “I have come to the conclusion that only our intervention can shake those who need to be shaken.

“A deal is not progressing due to political considerations and this is unacceptable.”

The Israeli finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich – a far-right leader who opposes a truce in the war – was among those who had called on the court to move to ban the strike.

The strike action took place after tens of thousands of Israelis took to the streets on Sunday night, cutting off the Ayalon highway, the motorway running through the heart of Tel Aviv, and lighting fires in the streets. A few dozen police officers tried to contain the protest but were unable to push it back. Local media reported that 29 people had been arrested.

The union called the strike after the Hostages and Missing Families Forum campaign group backed the idea in order to force the government to reach a deal for the return of the remaining hostages taken during Hamas’s attacks on 7 October. Israel’s opposition leader Yair Lapid also supported the move.

“Were it not for the delays, sabotage and excuses” in months of mediation efforts, the six hostages “would likely still be alive”, a statement from the group said, referring to the discovery of Carmel Gat, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Eden Yerushalmi, Alexander Lobanov, Almog Sarusi and Ori Danino in tunnels “dozens of metres” underground during fighting in Rafah, southern Gaza.

The Histadrut union has not taken such drastic action since March 2023, over Netanyahu’s controversial judicial overhaul plans.

The military spokesperson Daniel Hagari said all six hostages “were abducted alive on the morning of 7 October” and “brutally murdered by Hamas terrorists shortly before we reached them”.

However, the discoveries pointing to Hamas executions did little to deflect widespread fury towards Benjamin Netanyahu and his rightwing coalition for failing to agree a US-backed hostages-for-peace deal with Hamas, which has been on the negotiating table since late May. The longtime Israeli leader has been repeatedly accused of stalling on a ceasefire deal for his own political gain.

On Sunday, Netanyahu asked the hostage Lobanov’s parents for “forgiveness for not succeeding in bringing Sasha back alive”.

Some analysts said the public outcry over the six hostages who died could signal a new level of political pressure on Netanyahu. “I think this is an earthquake. This isn’t just one more step in the war,” said Nomi Bar-Yaacov, associate fellow in the International Security Programme at Chatham House, shortly before Sunday’s protests.

The US president, Joe Biden, said he was “devastated and outraged” by the hostage deaths, but told reporters he was “still optimistic” a deal could be reached.

With Agence France-Presse and Associated Press

Leaders of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland have demanded that their party be included in coalition negotiations in two states where it won nearly a third of the vote in elections on Sunday, in results that have scrambled the political landscape a year before a general election.

Although the political earthquake from the elections in eastern Germany had been long foreseen, the centrist governing parties proved incapable of stopping the rise of the AfD, which came first in Thuringia state with nearly 33% of the vote and a close second in Saxony with almost 31%.

The three parties in the chancellor Olaf Scholz’s unpopular government each scored in the single-digit percentage points in a stinging rebuke from voters, leaving another of the EU’s main powers, along with France, politically chastened and hamstrung.

Valérie Hayer, a French politician who leads the liberal Renew Europe grouping in the European parliament, called the state results “unprecedented” and said on X that “a dark day for Germany is a dark day for Europe”.

Wolfgang Kubicki, a deputy head of Germany’s co-ruling liberal Free Democrats and one of the German government’s fiercest internal critics, said Berlin had itself to blame for the rout. “People have the impression this coalition is hurting the country,” he said. “And it is certainly hurting the Free Democratic party.”

The AfD chapters in Saxony and Thuringia have been designated as “rightwing extremist” by the security authorities. Sunday’s result in Thuringia marked the first time since the Nazi period that a far-right party has claimed the top spot in a state election, raising questions about how long the democratic parties can keep it out of power by refusing any cooperation.

Scholz called the results “bitter” and “worrying”. He said: “Our country cannot and must not get used to this. The AfD is damaging Germany. It is weakening the economy, dividing society and ruining our country’s reputation.”

The night’s other big winner was the new leftwing-conservative populist party the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), named after its founder who broke off from the far-left Linke party last year, leaving it in tatters.

The BSW, which calls for higher taxes on top earners, curbs on immigration and an end to military assistance for Ukraine, scored nearly 16% in Thuringia and almost 12% in Saxony.

The election results underlined the festering cultural differences between east and west 35 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, with many voters in the former communist region highly receptive to anti-western and pro-Russian appeals.

Both the Afd and the BSW are also expected to perform well in a state election in Brandenburg, the region surrounding Berlin, on 22 September.

Given the fractured results handed back by voters, the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which outperformed the remaining parties, will probably have to cobble together ideologically improbable coalitions spanning right to left in both states in order to govern.

Whether such governments can prove stable and capable of addressing the patently unsatisfied electorate’s main concerns will be a vexing question as the campaign for the national vote in September 2025 begins.

In Saxony, only an alliance of the CDU, which has governed the state since reunification in 1990, with the BSW and Scholz’s Social Democrats would have a ruling majority if the far right is excluded.

“It won’t be easy,” the state premier, Michael Kretschmer, of the CDU, said of the upcoming coalition talks. “But with a lot of discussions and the will to do something for this state, we can succeed in building a stable government with this election result in Saxony.”

In Thuringia, a minority government of the same parties – CDU, BSW and Social Democrats – looks most likely, prompting howls of protest from the far right. “The voter wants the AfD taking part in the government,” the AfD co-leader Alice Weidel insisted.

The AfD’s top candidate in Thuringia, Björn Höcke, who has repeatedly used Nazi rhetoric at his rallies and called into question Germany’s atonement for the Holocaust, also cried foul. “If you want stability in Thuringia, you have to integrate the AfD,” he said. “Any constellation in which the AfD is not included won’t do this state any good.”

The AfD won a blocking minority in Thuringia, meaning it will be able to stand in the way of judicial appointments and amendments to the state constitution.

Meanwhile, analysts said the BSW now looked poised to clear the 5% hurdle in next year’s national election, potentially making it even harder for the traditional big-tent parties, the CDU and the SPD, to form a ruling coalition.

As his party will probably name the premier in both regions, the CDU leader, Friedrich Merz, emerged from the state polls strengthened in his bid to become the conservatives’ challenger to Scholz in the general election.

Merz has steadily moved his party to the right in the period since Angela Merkel, a moderate Christian Democrat, left office in 2021. He has seized on a mass stabbing in the western city of Solingen last month allegedly by a Syrian asylum seeker due for deportation to call for a tougher line on immigration.

On Tuesday he will meet representatives of the federal government and Germany’s 16 regional states for an “immigration summit”. Last week Scholz’s coalition announced plans to tighten knife laws and benefits for asylum seekers as well as more deportations in the wake of the Solingen attack.

Donald Trump has drawn ridicule and accusations of hypocrisy after accusing Kamala Harris of mistreating Mike Pence, the former vice-president who his supporters said should be hanged during the January 6 insurrection that he incited.

The Republican’s nominee’s comments came in an interview with Fox News, when he also singled out Harris’s 2018 cross-examination of Brett Kavanaugh during Senate confirmation hearings after Trump, then president, nominated him as a justice on the US supreme court.

“They say she has many deficiencies, but she’s a nasty person,” Trump told the interviewer, Mark Levin. “The way she treated Mike Pence was horrible. The way she treats people is horrible. The way she treated Justice Kavanaugh in that hearing – in the history of Congress, nobody’s been treated that way.”

Trump’s comments prompted a response from Harris’s campaign, which appeared to interpret it an example of age-related confusion and evidence that the former president, who is 78 and now the oldest presidential candidate in US history following Joe Biden’s withdrawal, is in mental decline.

“In a stunning senile moment, Donald Trump just suggested it was Kamala Harris who treated Mike Pence poorly,” the campaign posted on X, linking to video footage of Trump’s comments.

“Donald Trump clearly cannot remember anything. Retweet to make sure all Americans see this hypocritical and senile moment.”

In fact, Trump may have been referring to a 2020 vice-presidential debate between Harris and Pence, when the now Democratic nominee twice told her opponent “I’m speaking” when he tried to interrupt her as she articulated an argument.

However, the comments evoked social media references to Trump’s notorious treatment of Pence after his presidential election defeat to Biden, when he tried to pressure the vice-president into refusing to certify the results in Congress, as dictated by the US constitution, and then egged on a mob to attack the US Capitol while Pence was inside.

Posting on social media, David Corn, a journalist with Mother Jones, wrote: “What? Did she call him the p-word and incite the violent mob that chanted ‘Hang Mike Pence’? Because if she did, she probably should drop out of the race.”

On the morning of the 6 January 2021 Capitol attack, Trump reportedly told Pence: “You can either go down in history as a patriot, or you can go down in history as a pussy.”

Later, with the crowd baying for the vice-president’s blood, Trump allegedly told aides that “Mike Pence deserves it”.

Last year, Trump renewed his assault against Pence at a time when the former vice-president – who has refused to endorse his current presidential bid – was running for the Republican nomination, calling him “delusional” and “not a very good person”.

Speaking to CNN last week along with her running mate, Tim Walz, Harris – who Trump has called “nasty” several times – confirmed to interviewers Dana Bash that she and and the former president have never met.

His allusion to her treatment of Kavanaugh – one of three conservative justices Trump appointed to America’s highest court – referred to Harris’s question to him over abortion at the 2018 confirmation hearing, which took place when she was a senator.

“Can you think of any laws that give government the power to make decisions about the male body?” Harris asked Kavanaugh, who parried by asking for “a more specific question”.

When Harris persisted, Kavanaugh – one of six supreme court justices to vote in favour of a landmark ruling striking down a woman’s legal right to abortion in 2022 – haltingly acknowledged that he could not think of any “right now.”

Harris has put restoring abortion rights at the centre of her presidential campaign.

Trump also suggested in the Fox News interview that he “had every right” to interfere in trying to annul the 2020 election results.

“Who ever heard you get indicted for interfering with a presidential election, where you have every right to do it,” he said.

Joyce Vance, a former federal prosecutor and US attorney during the Obama administration, posted on X: “There’s no right to ‘interfere’ with a presidential election. This is the banality of evil right here – Trump asserting he can override the will of the voters to claim victory in an election he lost.”

Donald Trump told a Fox News host that he thinks God believes he will “straighten out” the country after he survived an assassination attempt in July at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania.

“I think you think like, if you believe in God, you believe in God more. And somebody said like, why? And I’d like to think that God thinks that I’m going to straighten out our country,” Trump told Mark Levin on Life, Liberty & Levin after the host asked him if the shooting on 13 July had strengthened his belief in the almighty.

In recent months the former US president and current Republican presidential candidate has increasingly sought to mobilise his religious base and some of its most extreme elements – such as Christian nationalists – as he seeks to get re-elected to the White House.

Trump has previously suggested that it was divine intervention that the bullet from Matthew Crook’s gun merely clipped his ear. Soon after the shooting, he told reporters, “I’m not supposed to be here. I’m supposed to be dead.”

“By luck or by God, many people are saying it’s by God I’m still here,” he said.

During his Fox News interview, Trump pivoted to floating God’s political purpose for his survival. “Our country is so sick and it’s so broken. Our country is just broken. And maybe that was the reason, I don’t know. I don’t know, a lot of people have said that.”

For evidence, he cited the view of his sons, both hunters, who had told him, he said, “there was no chance that he (Crooks) could have missed from that distance”. He added that he thought the shooter, who had been spotted by rallygoers, “was probably rushed”.

Trump praised his Secret Service detail, which has come under intense criticism for failing to stop Crooks before he took up position on a rooftop less than 300ft away from the stage and fired off eight shots, killing one and seriously wounding two others.

“Obviously, somebody should have been on top of that roof. And there was some problems. But I have to tell you – Secret Service. They were on top of me and they were bullets were flying over us–and there wasn’t one of them that said, ‘Oh gee, I’m not doing that,’” Trump said.

The former US president’s invocation of a divine purpose comes as his former commerce secretary Wilbur Ross publicly warned him against being too “big and strong” in his upcoming debate against Vice-President Kamala Harris on 10 September.

“The only danger is Trump being big and strong and a man,” Ross told radio host John Catsimatidis over the weekend. “He has to be careful not to be seen as piling on a woman. People don’t like to see a woman pushed too hard,” Ross said.

During his term in the White House, Trump advisers frequently went on TV to express opinions that they wanted the president to consider. Ross said the debate should not be about theatrics but rather about “real topics” like inflation, foreign affairs, and the country’s southern border.

“I think he needs to smoke her out as to what her positions are on those topics and subject them to real debate,” Ross said. “I think if he sticks to those issues, I think he’ll do just fine.”

A husband who allegedly drugged his wife and invited more than 80 strangers to rape her at their home for almost a decade went on trial on Monday in a case that has shocked France.

Fifty men accused of taking part in the abuse of the woman are also on trial at the court in Avignon.

Police say Dominique P crushed sleeping tablets and anti-anxiety medication and mixed it into his wife’s evening meal or in her wine at their home in Mazan, near Carpentras in Provence. The father of three recruited men to rape and sexually abuse her from a online chatroom, where members fantasised about performing sexual acts on non-consenting partners.

The presiding judge, Roger Arata, announced that all hearings would be public, granting the woman her wish for “complete publicity until the end” of the court case, according to one of her lawyers, Stéphane Babonneau.

The trial would nonetheless be “a horrible ordeal” for her, said another of her lawyers, Antoine Camus.

“For the first time, she will have to live through the rapes that she endured over 10 years,” he told Agence France-Presse, adding that his client had “no recollection” of the abuse that she discovered only in 2020.

The woman, who arrived at the court supported by her three children, did not want a trial behind closed doors because “that’s what her attackers would have wanted”, Camus said.

The accused men were instructed to avoid smelling of any kind of fragrance or cigarette smoke to avoid alerting his wife and to leave if she moved so much as an arm, investigators said.

He was arrested on 2 November 2020, after a security guard caught him filming up the skirts of women in the local supermarket. Police found a file labelled “abuses” on a USB drive connected to his computer that contained 20,000 of images and films of his wife being raped almost 100 times.

Since his arrest he “always declared himself guilty”, his lawyer has said, adding that he had said: “I put her to sleep, I offered her, and I filmed.”

Health records reportedly show he obtained 450 sleeping pills in one year alone.

The 50 men on trial with him include a local councillor, nurses, a journalist, a former police officer, a prison guard, soldier, firefighter and civil servant, many of whom lived around Mazan, a town of about 6,000 inhabitants. The men were aged between 26 and 73 at the time of their arrests.

Several of the accused have denied the charges, telling police they had no idea the woman, whom Dominique P married in 1973, was not a willing partner and accused him of tricking them. Detectives were unable to identify and trace more than 30 other men who were recorded.

Investigators said the woman was devastated to learn of the abuse, saying she had no recollection whatsoever of being raped. She had been drugged “almost to a state of coma”, investigators added.

“One morning she woke in a panic with a new haircut without understanding how this was possible. She went to her hairdresser, who told her she had been in the previous day,” Babonneau said.

The woman’s lawyer said his client, now divorced, believed she had an illness nobody could explain and consulted several doctors, always accompanied by her husband, who blamed her symptoms on tiredness after looking after their grandchildren. Her three children and other relatives suspected she had Alzheimer’s disease.

Dominique P is also accused of the rape and murder of a 23-year-old estate agent in Paris in 1991. Sophie Narme was drugged, raped and stabbed in the chest.

Another estate agent, 19, was attacked in similar circumstances but escaped after fighting back. Police have said DNA extracted from blood at the scene matched his profile.

The trial in Avignon is expected to last four months. Dominique P, 71, and the 50 other defendants face 20 years in prison if convicted of aggravated rape.

If the Chinese Communist party truly believes it has a territorial claim to Taiwan, then it should also be trying to take back land from Russia, Taiwan’s president, Lai Ching-te, has said.

Lai made the remark in an interview to local media on Sunday, noting Beijing’s very different approach to two similar historical moments of territorial loss.

Under the rule of Xi Jinping, the CCP claims Taiwan is a Chinese province run by illegal separatists, and he has vowed to annex Taiwan under what it calls “reunification”.

Beijing says Taiwan has been part of China since “ancient times” but was taken by Japan during the “century of humiliation”, the period between 1839 and 1949 during which China was repeatedly subject to defeat and subjugation. Complete restoration of China’s losses in that time is a driving narrative of the CCP, and today is largely focused on Taiwan.

However, Lai, who was elected president in January, noted that China also lost land to Russia during that period but was not making any effort to take it back. He said this showed Beijing’s plans to annex Taiwan – which it has not ruled out using force to achieve – were not driven by territorial integrity.

“If it is for the sake of territorial integrity, why doesn’t it take back the lands occupied by Russia that were signed over in the treaty of Aigun? Russia is now at its weakest, right?” he said, referencing an 1858 treaty in which Russia annexed about 1m sq km of Chinese territory, including Haishengwei – today known as Vladivostok.

“You can ask Russia (for the land back) but you don’t. So it’s obvious they don’t want to invade Taiwan for territorial reasons,” Lai said.

He said Beijing’s true motivations were geopolitical, wanting to change the world order in its favour. Taiwan is a major island in the first island chain of the Pacific, and control would give the CCP highly strategic access and passage, as well as increased control of the Taiwan strait.

Wen-ti Sung, a China analyst at the Australian National University, said the treaty of Aigun was China’s most humiliating defeat of the 20th century, in terms of total land area lost, but noted that Chinese officials had repeatedly attended Russian economic forums in Vladivostok, “thereby conferring legitimacy to Russian rule over the territory”.

“If the driver of Chinese ambition towards Taiwan is to bring the ‘century of humiliation’ to a complete end then you’d expect China to prioritise taking back from Russia the land lost in the treaty of Aigun,” Sung said.

“But Beijing is not, and barely ever talks about it, let alone gets anywhere near talk that it will recover those territories ‘by force if necessary’.”

The Qing, China’s largest and last imperial dynasty, signed over Taiwan to Japan in 1895 in another “unequal” treaty, and in 1945 at the end of the second world war it was handed over to the Republic of China government, which fled China in 1949 after being defeated by the Communists in the Chinese civil war, establishing an authoritarian government in exile on Taiwan.

Taiwan transitioned to democracy in the late 1980s, and is one of Asia’s most vibrant. Its elected government says Taiwan is a sovereign nation and that its future is for its people, not the CCP, to decide.

China’s government is yet to respond to Lai’s remarks.

Chi-hui Lin and Reuters contributed to this report

If the Chinese Communist party truly believes it has a territorial claim to Taiwan, then it should also be trying to take back land from Russia, Taiwan’s president, Lai Ching-te, has said.

Lai made the remark in an interview to local media on Sunday, noting Beijing’s very different approach to two similar historical moments of territorial loss.

Under the rule of Xi Jinping, the CCP claims Taiwan is a Chinese province run by illegal separatists, and he has vowed to annex Taiwan under what it calls “reunification”.

Beijing says Taiwan has been part of China since “ancient times” but was taken by Japan during the “century of humiliation”, the period between 1839 and 1949 during which China was repeatedly subject to defeat and subjugation. Complete restoration of China’s losses in that time is a driving narrative of the CCP, and today is largely focused on Taiwan.

However, Lai, who was elected president in January, noted that China also lost land to Russia during that period but was not making any effort to take it back. He said this showed Beijing’s plans to annex Taiwan – which it has not ruled out using force to achieve – were not driven by territorial integrity.

“If it is for the sake of territorial integrity, why doesn’t it take back the lands occupied by Russia that were signed over in the treaty of Aigun? Russia is now at its weakest, right?” he said, referencing an 1858 treaty in which Russia annexed about 1m sq km of Chinese territory, including Haishengwei – today known as Vladivostok.

“You can ask Russia (for the land back) but you don’t. So it’s obvious they don’t want to invade Taiwan for territorial reasons,” Lai said.

He said Beijing’s true motivations were geopolitical, wanting to change the world order in its favour. Taiwan is a major island in the first island chain of the Pacific, and control would give the CCP highly strategic access and passage, as well as increased control of the Taiwan strait.

Wen-ti Sung, a China analyst at the Australian National University, said the treaty of Aigun was China’s most humiliating defeat of the 20th century, in terms of total land area lost, but noted that Chinese officials had repeatedly attended Russian economic forums in Vladivostok, “thereby conferring legitimacy to Russian rule over the territory”.

“If the driver of Chinese ambition towards Taiwan is to bring the ‘century of humiliation’ to a complete end then you’d expect China to prioritise taking back from Russia the land lost in the treaty of Aigun,” Sung said.

“But Beijing is not, and barely ever talks about it, let alone gets anywhere near talk that it will recover those territories ‘by force if necessary’.”

The Qing, China’s largest and last imperial dynasty, signed over Taiwan to Japan in 1895 in another “unequal” treaty, and in 1945 at the end of the second world war it was handed over to the Republic of China government, which fled China in 1949 after being defeated by the Communists in the Chinese civil war, establishing an authoritarian government in exile on Taiwan.

Taiwan transitioned to democracy in the late 1980s, and is one of Asia’s most vibrant. Its elected government says Taiwan is a sovereign nation and that its future is for its people, not the CCP, to decide.

China’s government is yet to respond to Lai’s remarks.

Chi-hui Lin and Reuters contributed to this report

Indigenous activists and lawyers in Brazil have voiced shock and dismay after the federal police chief leading the investigation into the murders of Bruno Pereira and Dom Phillips was unexpectedly removed from the case.

Francisco Badenes, an experienced investigator, had been running the inquiry into the 2022 deaths of the Brazilian Indigenous expert and the British journalist since the second half of that year.

Pereira and Phillips were ambushed and killed near the Amazon town of Atalaia do Norte while returning from a reporting trip to the entrance of one of Brazil’s largest Indigenous territories.

Badenes was also responsible for investigating the 2019 murder of Maxciel Pereira dos Santos, an officer from the Indigenous protection agency Funai who had worked with Pereira and was killed in the nearby border city Tabatinga.

Late last month, for reasons that remain unclear, the Brasília-based investigator was taken off both cases, as well as a third scrutinising a 2020 massacre allegedly perpetrated by military police officers in another part of the Amazon.

Eliesio Marubo, a lawyer for Univaja, the Indigenous association where Pereira worked, said removing Badenes from those cases was “a big step backwards”. He feared it would hinder police investigations and efforts to combat the organised crime network suspected of committing those crimes and others.

“This is prejudicial [to the inquiry] … There needs to be a public interest justification for changing him – and I don’t see any kind of public interest justification here,” said Marubo, who was Pereira’s friend.

Thais Rego Monteiro, a lawyer who represents Santos’s family, said they were “dismayed, saddened and disheartened” by reports that Badenes – who has spent much of the last 30 years investigating murders and death squads – had been removed.

Monteiro, who did not know the reasons for the change, called Badenes a diligent, skilful and efficient investigator who had made significant breakthroughs in the Santos case after years of inaction. “[Relatives] feel downcast and really troubled at this change,” Monteiro said, calling it “an impediment to the advance and the conclusion of this investigation”.

The federal police declined to make an official comment on the changes. However, a federal police source confirmed a new investigator would take charge of the three inquiries and said they hoped the change would speed up the investigations into the murders of Phillips, Pereira and Santos.

In a statement, Univaja voiced “deep concern” over the situation and said there was “intense suspicion” over the unexplained move. The group, which is based in Atalaia do Norte, has asked the justice ministry for an urgent clarification.

Pereira and Phillips were killed while journeying along the Itaquaí River early on 5 June 2022. They had been visiting Indigenous patrol teams. These are trying to protect the Javari valley Indigenous territory, a vast expanse of rainforest reputedly containing the world’s largest concentration of isolated peoples.

The alleged murderers – a trio of fishers called Amarildo da Costa de Oliveira, Oseney da Costa de Oliveira and Jeferson da Silva Lima (also known as Pelado da Dinha) – are being held in custody in high-security prisons and are expected to face trial next year. They are suspected of committing the crime on behalf of Ruben Dario da Silva Villar, whom police have accused of running a transnational illegal fishing network that preys on those protected Indigenous lands. Villar has also been arrested and charged.

Amarildo da Costa de Oliveira and Jeferson da Silva Lima confessed to the murders in the days after Pereira and Phillips disappeared but later claimed they had acted in “self-defence” after being shot at by the Indigenous expert. Their co-accused have denied involvement in the crime.

However, Indigenous activists suspect an even bigger conspiracy could lie behind the killings of Phillips, Pereira and Santos and say criminal groups continue to operate in the remote region where they were murdered.

Marubo, who hoped Badenes would be reinstated, said he feared replacing the investigator would hamper efforts to catch the criminals responsible for the murders and for illegal poaching, drug trafficking and mining in the Javari.

“This will really make the investigation take a different course to the course that we believe will lead to the true culprits – not just for the murders of Bruno and Dom, but Maxciel too,” he said.

One of the world’s most notorious people smugglers, who abused his position as a high-ranking member of the Libyan coastguard, has been shot dead in Tripoli, officials in Italy and Libya have said.

Abd al-Rahman Milad, known as Bija, was killed as he left the naval academy in Janzour, Tripoli, riding in a vehicle driven by a chauffeur. The car was hit by a barrage of heavy gunfire, Italian intelligence announced.

A UN security report accused Bija of being “directly involved in the sinking of migrant boats using firearms”. He was considered to be the leader of a criminal organisation operating in the Zawiya area in north-west Libya, about 28 miles west of Tripoli.

In 2017, the Italian newspaper Avvenire documented Bija’s presence in Sicily. He had obtained a pass to enter Italy in his role in the Libyan coastguard to take part in a meeting attended by north African delegates from a handful of international humanitarian agencies.

The meeting was part of a series of summits after the deal signed in February 2017 by Marco Minniti, then the Italian interior minister, and Fayez al-Sarraj, then the leader of Libya’s UN-recognised government, introducing a new level of cooperation between the Libyan coastguard and Italian agencies to intercept migrant dinghies at sea and bring them back to Libya, where aid agencies have said refugees suffered torture and abuse.

In 2020, after news of Bija’s participation in the meeting emerged, officials in Tripoli issued an arrest warrant. He was released a year later and promoted from a captain to a major.

Two Italian journalists, Nancy Porsia and Nello Scavo, a reporter for Avvenire, who had extensively covered Bija’s criminal smuggling activities, found themselves under protective escorts after receiving death threats.

Porsia wrote on Facebook: “As a human being, I express a thought to his son who is not even two years old today for the loss of his father. His threats against me and my family are part of a story that is still being written.”

The reasons behind Bija’s killing are unclear. According to Scavo, “Bija had frequently threatened to expose secrets about the dealings between Libyan authorities and human traffickers”.

Nasa astronaut Butch Wilmore has reported a “strange noise” coming from the stricken Boeing Starliner space capsule whose problems have left him and colleague Suni Williams stuck in orbit for six months longer than they anticipated when they blasted off from earth in June.

Wilmore radioed mission control in Houston on Saturday to report a pulsing sound from a speaker inside the capsule. “I’ve got a question about Starliner,” Wilmore said. “There’s a strange noise coming through the speaker … I don’t know what’s making it.”

That set off a hunt for what is causing the noise in the spacecraft that has been dogged with helium leaks and propulsion issues and is now set to return on autopilot to a landing point in New Mexico, without Wilmore and Williams, on 6 September after Nasa decided it was too risky for astronauts to fly in.

The pair are now slated to return to Earth in a capsule built by Boeing competitor Space X, in February. In order to get Wilmore and Williams down, two Nasa astronauts set to join the international space station will be left behind from a mission later this month.

The source of the pulsing noise coming from Boeing spacecraft has not yet been traced. Wilmore asked Houston flight controllers to see if they could listen but ultimately Wilmore, apparently floating in Starliner, had to put his microphone up to the speaker.

“Alright Butch, that one came through,” Mission control radioed Wilmore. “It was kind of like a pulsing noise, almost like a sonar ping.” Wilmore radioed back: “I’ll let y’all scratch your heads and see if you can figure out what’s going on … Call us if you figure it out.”

The strange ping was captured and shared by a Michigan-based meteorologist named Rob Dale and was first reported by Ars Technica. According to the outlet, audio oddities in spacecraft are not unusual. In 2003, Chinese astronaut Yang Liwei said he heard what sounded like an iron bucket being struck by a wooden hammer.

The acclaimed Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar has called for euthanasia to be legalised worldwide.

Almodóvar was speaking ahead of the world premiere of his first English language feature, The Room Next Door, which stars Tilda Swinton as a journalist with cancer who decides to end her own life and asks an old friend, played by Julianne Moore, to help.

“This movie is in favour of euthanasia,” said Almodóvar, 74, at a press conference at the Venice film festival. “It is something we admire about the character of Tilda, she decides that getting rid of cancer can only be done by making the decision she actually makes.

‘If I get there before, cancer will not win over me,’ she says. And so she finds a way to reach her objective with the help of her friend, but they have to behave as if they were criminals.”

Spain legalised euthanasia in 2021 and is one of only 11 countries in which any form of assisted dying is legal. In the UK, assisted suicide is punishable by up to 14 years’ imprisonment, while euthanasia is regarded as either manslaughter or murder. The maximum penalty is life imprisonment.

“There should be the possibility to have euthanasia all over the world,” said Almodóvar. “It should be regulated and a doctor should be allowed to help his patient.”

The director added that his film could also be viewed as a memento mori for those who choose to close their eyes to the climate emergency.

“We have to stop this denying of the danger,” said Almodóvar, “that the planet is in danger. Climate change is not something neglectable [sic]; we have to pay greater attention.”

However, the director said he tried “to be optimistic” as it is “the best way to resist”.

Swinton, who previously worked with Almodóvar on 40-minute lockdown short The Human Voice said she was unafraid of her own mortality.

“I’m personally not frightened of death and I have never been,” she said. “I know that we stop … I know it’s coming, I feel it coming and see it coming. I support my friends when they transition, let’s say.

“I think the whole journey towards accepting death can be long for some people, for some reason and with certain experiences in my life, it came quite early.

“One of the things this film is a portrait of is self-determination, someone who decides to take her life and her living and her dying into her own hands.

“It’s about a triumph, I think, this film,” she continued, adding that she also has “faith in the inevitability of evolution, wherever it takes us”. In the film, Moore’s character becomes a proxy for Swinton’s character’s late mother, and the mother-daughter relationship, said Swinton, was a “journey, an adventure that’s always going to sustain us”.

Moore said she had long been drawn to the vitality of Almodóvar’s work. “There’s such a tremendous life force in Pedro’s movies,” she said, “and that’s what we all respond to. It’s almost like, when you’re watching these movies, you could hear everybody’s heartbeat.”

She applauded as “so unusual” Almodovar’s eagerness to treat the friendship between two older women with weight and dignity. Before working with the director, she said, she had assumed that there was something “innately Spanish” about his work – rather than an aesthetic particular to the man himself.

This was corrected after she first set foot in his apartment and “saw all of his movies come alive right there! ‘Oh my God, it’s all here!’ It just vibrated with life and humanity.”

Swinton said she had first seen Almodóvar’s breakout film, Women on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), in the company of Derek Jarman, with whom she was living and working at the time.

“We all immediately went: ‘There’s a cousin in Madrid and we are waving at you!’”

Yet while “London culture was trying to marginalise us,” continued Swinton, Jarman and his collective were impressed by the fact Almodóvar “was never marginal”.

“Pedro was always right in the centre. He was always the face of a huge cultural movement. We admired it and fed off it.”

Swinton recalled gingerly approaching the director at a party and suggesting they work together. “I’ll learn Spanish for you,” she remembered telling him. “I’ll play a mute for you – I don’t care.

“To step into his frame when you have the privilege to know the vernacular of that space so well is one of the major privileges of my life.”

The Room Next Door is Almodovar’s 25th film and the followup to Parallel Mothers (2021), which also premiered at Venice and won the festival’s best actress award for Penélope Cruz, Almodóvar’s most frequent on-screen collaborator.

The film premieres on Monday evening and will also play at the New York film festival in October, with an awards season-friendly release date expected later this year.