The father of the teen suspected in the Georgia school shooting has been arrested, the Georgia bureau of investigation has said.

Colin Gray, 54, was arrested by the bureau in connection to the shooting at Apalachee high school. Colin is the father of Colt Gray, the 14-year-old who is suspected of fatally shooting two students and two teachers with an assault-style rifle at the high school on Wednesday.

He is charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second degree murder and eight counts of cruelty to children, the Georgia bureau said.

“His charges are directly connected with the actions of his son and allowing him to possess a weapon,” Chris Hosey, director of the Georgia bureau of investigations, told reporters on Thursday evening.

“What are we facing? Heartbreak. A young person brought a gun into a school, committed an evil act and took lives, and injured people not just physically but mentally,” said Barrow county sheriff Jud Smith during the news conference.

The teenager has been charged as an adult in the deaths of the school students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, and educators Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Christina Irimie, 53, the director of the Georgia bureau of investigation, Chris Hosey, said.

At least nine other people – seven students and two teachers – were taken to hospitals with injuries and all are expected to make a full recovery, Smith said.

Colin Gray is being held at the Barrow county detention center.

More than a year ago the alleged shooter was interviewed by Georgia police after they received tips about online posts threatening a school shooting. Police did not have enough probable cause to arrest him then, according to the Georgia bureau of investigation.

In that 2023 inquiry, the father said he had hunting guns in the house but that his son did not have unsupervised access to them, and the son denied making the threats online, the FBI said.

Georgia state and Barrow county investigators say the younger Gray used an “AR platform style weapon”, or semiautomatic rifle, to carry out the attack in which two teachers and two 14-year-old students were killed.

It remained unclear how the shooter obtained the weapon.

Investigators have yet to comment on what may have motivated the first US campus mass shooting since the start of the school year.

Jackson county sheriff’s investigators closed the case after being unable to substantiate that either Gray was connected to the Discord account where the threats were made, and did not find grounds to seek the needed court order to confiscate the family’s guns, according to police reports released by the sheriff’s office on Thursday.

“This case was worked, and at the time the boy was 13, and it wasn’t enough to substantiate,” Janis Mangum, Jackson county sheriff, said in an interview. “If we get a judge’s order or we charge somebody, we take firearms for safekeeping.”

The younger Gray was taken into custody shortly after the shooting and was being held without bond at Gainesville regional youth detention center, Glenn Allen, the Georgia department of juvenile justice communications director, said on Thursday.

His arraignment is set for Friday morning before a Georgia superior court judge in Barrow county by video camera.

While parents are not usually held criminally liable if their child shoots someone, recent high-profile events are evidence that they could face charges in the future. In November 2023, Deja Taylor of Virginia was sentenced to 21 months on two federal charges after her then six-year-old son shot his teacher in January.

The elder Gray’s arrest also comes months after the unprecedented conviction of the parents of a Michigan high school student who shot and killed four students on 30 November. In February Jennifer Crumbley was convicted on four counts of involuntary manslaughter. The next month, her husband James Crumbley was convicted on the same charges. The pair was sentenced to serve at least 10 years in prison.

“I didn’t really think about what precedent it was setting,” Karen McDonald, the prosecutor for Oakland county who brought the case against the Crumbleys, told CNN on Thursday. “If nothing else I would’ve hoped that the highly publicized details of this case would steer parents and make them think twice.”

“It’s enraging that this could still happen when it’s so easily preventable,” she continued.

The Chinese government is ending its international adoption program, and the US is seeking clarification on how the decision will affect hundreds of American families with pending applications.

At a daily briefing on Thursday, Mao Ning, a spokesperson for the Chinese foreign ministry, said China was no longer allowing intercountry adoptions of the country’s children, with the only exception for blood relatives to adopt a child or a stepchild.

She didn’t explain the decision other than to say that it was in line with the spirit of relevant international conventions.

In a phone call with US diplomats in China, Beijing said it “will not continue to process cases at any stage” other than those cases covered by an exception clause. The embassy is seeking clarification in writing from China’s ministry of civil affairs, the US state department said on Thursday.

The state department said: “We understand there are hundreds of families still pending completion of their adoption, and we sympathise with their situation.”

Many people have adopted children from China over the decades, visiting the country to pick them up and then bringing them to a new home overseas.

US families have adopted 82,674 children from China, the most from any foreign country.

China suspended international adoptions during the Covid-19 pandemic. The government later resumed adoptions for children who had received travel authorisation before the suspension in 2020, the US state department said in its latest annual report on adoptions.

A US consulate issued 16 visas for adoptions from China from October 2022 through to September 2023, the first in more than two years, the state department report said. It wasn’t clear if any more visas had been issued since then.

In January, Denmark’s only overseas adoption agency said it was winding down operations after concerns were raised about fabricated documents and procedures, and Norway’s top regulatory body recommended stopping overseas adoptions for two years pending an investigation into several cases.

Beijing’s announcement also has followed falling birthrates in the country. The number of newborn babies fell to 9.02 million in 2023, and the overall population declined for the second consecutive year.

“My chest was completely exposed and I felt embarrassed,” writes a Japanese girl after undergoing an annual health checkup at her middle school. Another says: “Before the exam our teacher told us we would have to lift up our tops and bra … I didn’t want to do it but I couldn’t say no.”

The testimony from two 13-year-olds, seen by the Guardian, is typical of the discomfort – and in some cases trauma – felt by children attending schools in Japan that can require boys and girls as young as five – and as old as 18 – to strip to the waist during health examinations.

It has sparked anger among parents and campaigners who have called on education and health authorities to end the practice before the new academic year begins in April.

Noriko Tabuchi, a city councillor in Matsuyama, first became aware of topless school health checkups through one of her English conversation class students. “She was 13 and hadn’t been able to tell her parents, but I could see she was troubled and asked her what was wrong,” says Tabuchi, who has since met other girls, all aged 12 and 13, who were told to strip to the waist by visiting doctors.

There is no unified policy on whether children should undress or remain clothed during the checkups, with local education boards left to decide in conjunction with visiting health professionals. Some schools require children to keep their bodies covered, while others insist that they remove their T-shirts and, among girls, bras. One western Japanese city senior high schools – whose oldest students are 18 – requires that pupils are topless during the checks.

Surveys show that most teachers want the requirement to end, while one poll of middle schoolchildren, aged 12-16, found that 95.5% of respondents were unhappy about removing their clothes. “The health exams can have serious repercussions for children,” says Akiyo Tanaka, a city councillor in Nishinomiya. “Some of them continue to experience trauma into adulthood.”

‘Awful to remove clothes in front of strangers’

As the issue attracts the attention of media and national politicians, campaigners say they face resistance from the Japan Medical Association and education officials who are reluctant to take on the influential body. “In some cases, doctors, who are almost always men, have threatened to stop performing the exams if they are forced to change the procedure,” said a person familiar with the issue who asked not to be named.

“They insist it is impossible to conduct a proper exam if children are fully clothed. And the children are in no position to refuse. The schools are really concerned about this and want something to be done.”

The Japan Medical Association has not responded to the Guardian’s request for comment.

“Girls of my daughter’s age are embarrassed to talk about their bodies to their own parents,” says Chiyoko Suda, whose 13-year-old daughter begged her not to confront the school after she underwent a health check semi-naked. “So you can imagine how awful it is for them to have to remove their clothes in front of strangers.”

Some regions began conducting more invasive health checkups during the years of postwar austerity, when schools took on a bigger role in ensuring that children were healthy and properly fed.

Doctors have said topless exams are necessary to check for signs of atopic dermatitis, heart irregularities and other conditions. “Many doctors, especially senior ones, are conservative and they simply do not like to change their ways,” says Kentaro Iwata, a professor of infectious diseases at Kobe university hospital.

Asked if there was any medical basis for insisting that children remove their clothing to undergo a “proper” examination, Iwata said: “Not that I know of. It might slightly improve the quality of the sound of the heartbeat, but I do not think this contributes to improving children’s health.”

Complaints about the health exams have come from parents of children attending schools across the country, including Yokohama, where authorities said at least 16 primary schools required pupils to remove their tops and bras.

This is despite a notice issued by the education ministry at the start of the year requesting boards of education to “establish a medical examination environment with consideration for the privacy and feelings of the students” by allowing them to wear their PE kits or cover their upper bodies with a towel “to the extent that it does not interfere with the accuracy of the examination”.

The ministry also called for separate examinations for boys and girls, the use of partitions or curtains, for teachers and staff of the same sex as the children to be present, and for parents and guardians to be given advance notice that, in some cases, doctors may require children to raise their shirts to ensure an accurate diagnosis.

Kyoto city changed its policy under pressure from parents, telling schools that children should “in principle” be permitted to wear their underwear and PE kit. Other schools have followed suit.

“It would be better if the education ministry provided more specific guidelines so that local governments and schools can be consistent,” Satoshi Kodama, a professor and medical ethics specialist at Kyoto University, told the Mainichi Shimbun.

Mai Okumura said her middle school daughter had initially brushed off her health exam, during which she had to remove her T-shirt and bra. “When I asked her about it, she said it couldn’t be helped as the rules had been decided by adults,” says Okumura.

Sachiko Shimada’s daughter had been similarly reluctant to strip to the waist but felt unable to protest. “I was shocked when she came home and told me she had had to lift up her shirt and bra so that her breasts were showing,” Shimada says.

“This shows a total lack of respect for their privacy and dignity.”

The names of the children’s mothers have been changed at their request.

Donald Trump told Jewish donors on Thursday that they would be “abandoned” if Kamala Harris becomes president.

In his speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas, the Republican presidential candidate also said he would ban refugee resettlement from “terror-infested” areas such as Gaza and arrest “pro-Hamas thugs” who engage in vandalism, an apparent reference to the college student protesters.

While Trump sketched out few concrete Middle Eastern policy proposals for a second term, he painted a potential Harris presidency in cataclysmic terms for Israel.

“You’re going to be abandoned if she becomes president. And I think you need to explain that to your people … You’re not going to have an Israel if she becomes president,” Trump said without providing evidence for such a claim.

Under both Trump and Joe Biden, similar numbers of Palestinians were admitted to the US as refugees. From fiscal year 2017 to 2020, the US accepted 114 Palestinian refugees, according to US state department data, compared with 124 Palestinian refugees from fiscal year 2021 to 31 July of this year.

Trump also said US universities would lose accreditation and federal support over what he described as “antisemitic propaganda” if he is elected to the White House.

“Colleges will and must end the antisemitic propaganda or they will lose their accreditation and federal support,” Trump said, speaking remotely to a crowd of more than 1,000 donors.

Protests roiled college campuses in spring, with students opposing Israel’s military offensive in Gaza and demanding institutions stop doing business with companies backing Israel.

Republicans have said the protests show some Democrats are antisemites who support chaos. Protest groups say authorities have unfairly labeled their criticism of Israel’s policies as antisemitic.

The Association of American Universities, which says it represents about 70 leading US universities, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In the United States, the federal government does not directly accredit universities but has a role in overseeing the mostly private organizations that give colleges accreditation.

The Harris campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Trump’s speech.

The Democratic presidential candidate has hewed closely to the president’s strong support of Israel and rejected calls from some in the Democratic party that Washington should rethink sending weapons to Israel because of the heavy Palestinian death toll in Gaza.

She has, however, called for a ceasefire in Gaza, calling the situation there “devastating”.

Health authorities in Gaza say more than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli assault on the enclave since the 7 October 2023 attacks led by Hamas.

Approximately 1,200 Israelis were killed in the surprise attack and about 250 were taken hostage, according to Israeli tallies.

The subsequent assault on Gaza has displaced nearly its entire 2.3 million population, caused a hunger crisis and led to genocide allegations at the world court that Israel denies.

Donald Trump told Jewish donors on Thursday that they would be “abandoned” if Kamala Harris becomes president.

In his speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas, the Republican presidential candidate also said he would ban refugee resettlement from “terror-infested” areas such as Gaza and arrest “pro-Hamas thugs” who engage in vandalism, an apparent reference to the college student protesters.

While Trump sketched out few concrete Middle Eastern policy proposals for a second term, he painted a potential Harris presidency in cataclysmic terms for Israel.

“You’re going to be abandoned if she becomes president. And I think you need to explain that to your people … You’re not going to have an Israel if she becomes president,” Trump said without providing evidence for such a claim.

Under both Trump and Joe Biden, similar numbers of Palestinians were admitted to the US as refugees. From fiscal year 2017 to 2020, the US accepted 114 Palestinian refugees, according to US state department data, compared with 124 Palestinian refugees from fiscal year 2021 to 31 July of this year.

Trump also said US universities would lose accreditation and federal support over what he described as “antisemitic propaganda” if he is elected to the White House.

“Colleges will and must end the antisemitic propaganda or they will lose their accreditation and federal support,” Trump said, speaking remotely to a crowd of more than 1,000 donors.

Protests roiled college campuses in spring, with students opposing Israel’s military offensive in Gaza and demanding institutions stop doing business with companies backing Israel.

Republicans have said the protests show some Democrats are antisemites who support chaos. Protest groups say authorities have unfairly labeled their criticism of Israel’s policies as antisemitic.

The Association of American Universities, which says it represents about 70 leading US universities, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In the United States, the federal government does not directly accredit universities but has a role in overseeing the mostly private organizations that give colleges accreditation.

The Harris campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Trump’s speech.

The Democratic presidential candidate has hewed closely to the president’s strong support of Israel and rejected calls from some in the Democratic party that Washington should rethink sending weapons to Israel because of the heavy Palestinian death toll in Gaza.

She has, however, called for a ceasefire in Gaza, calling the situation there “devastating”.

Health authorities in Gaza say more than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli assault on the enclave since the 7 October 2023 attacks led by Hamas.

Approximately 1,200 Israelis were killed in the surprise attack and about 250 were taken hostage, according to Israeli tallies.

The subsequent assault on Gaza has displaced nearly its entire 2.3 million population, caused a hunger crisis and led to genocide allegations at the world court that Israel denies.

Donald Trump has quietly wound down his presidential campaign in states he was targeting just six weeks ago amid polling evidence showing that Kamala Harris’s entry into the presidential race has put them out of reach and narrowed his path to the White House.

The Republican presidential nominee’s campaign has diverted resources away from Minnesota, Virginia and New Hampshire – states Trump was boasting he could win while Joe Biden was the Democratic candidate – to focus instead on a small number of battleground states.

Money is being poured into the three “blue wall” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, which were all carried by Biden in 2020 and are seen as vital to the outcome of November’s election.

Special attention is being paid to Pennsylvania, which has 19 electoral college votes, and where a new CNN poll shows Trump and Harris tied at 47% each.

Resources have also been transferred to southern and south-western Sun belt states – namely North Carolina, Georgia Nevada and Arizona – where Trump previously had healthy leads over Biden that have been whittled away since Harris replaced the US president at the top of the Democratic ticket.

Maga Inc, a Trump-supporting Super Pac, has recently spent $16m in adverts in North Carolina as polls have shown Harris close to drawing even in a state the Democrats carried just once in presidential elections since 1980.

The tactical shift is a graphic sign of how the dynamics of the electoral contest have shifted since the Republican national convention in July, when euphoric Trump campaigners talked confidently of winning Minnesota, Virginia and New Hampshire.

Democrats have carried all three in recent presidential polls but Biden’s support showed signs of serious erosion following June’s calamitous debate performance in Atlanta – prompting bullish Republican forecasts that they would be “in play” in November.

An internal Trump campaign memo even before the debate posited ways that the former president could carry Minnesota and Virginia – partly helped by the presence of the independent candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr, whose campaign was initially thought to pose a greater threat to Biden before contrary polling evidence changed Trump’s calculus.

As optimism surged, Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, held a rally in Minnesota shortly after the Republican convention, while the campaign said it planned to open eight offices in the state and build up staff.

Since then, Harris replaced Biden and chose the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, as her running mate – helping her to shore up local support – while Kennedy has suspended his campaign and endorsed Trump.

Harris’s ascent has also infused the Democrats’ supporters with fresh enthusiasm, leading to a surge in popularity that has propelled her into a small but consistent national poll lead and a fundraising bonanza that saw her campaign raise $540m in August alone.

The predicted rash of new Trump offices and hires in Minnesota appears not to have happened, Axios reported.

In Virginia – the site of Vance’s first solo rally after being appointed to the ticket – Trump has not staged a rally for six weeks and the campaign has stopped citing memos claiming it can flip the state. Its apparent slide down the priority list is a far cry from 28 June, when the former president staged a rally in Chesapeake a day after his ultimately race-changing debate with Biden.

The clearest evidence of the switch in campaign’s thinking has come in New Hampshire, which a former Trump field worker said this week that it was no longer trying to win.

Trump has not appeared there since winning the Republican primary in January and has not sent a major surrogate since the spring, despite New Hampshire being identified by Michael Whatley, chair of the Republican National Committee, after the June debate as one of the states the Trump campaign was targeting to expand its electoral wining map.

Recent polls have shown Harris leading outside the margin of error.

“This election is going to be won in those seven swing states,” Lou Gargiulo, the co-chair of Trump’s campaign in New Hampshire, told Politico. “That’s where the effort’s got to be put.”

The founder of the Telegram messaging app, Pavel Durov, under investigation in France, has said that French authorities should have approached his company with their complaints rather than detaining him, calling the arrest ‘“misguided”.

Durov, writing on his Telegram channel early on Friday in his first public comments since his detention last month, denied any suggestion the app was an “anarchic paradise”.

The Russian-born multi-billionaire said the investigation into the app was surprising in that French authorities had access to a “hot line” he had helped set up and they could have contacted Telegram’s EU representative at any time.

“If a country is unhappy with an internet service, the established practice is to start a legal action against the service itself,” he wrote.

“Using laws from the pre-smartphone era to charge a CEO with crimes committed by third parties on the platform he manages is a misguided approach.”

Telegram, he said, was not perfect, but he denied any abuse associated with the app.

“But the claims in some media that Telegram is some sort of anarchic paradise are absolutely untrue,” he wrote. “We take down millions of harmful posts and channels every day.”

Durov, now a French national, was detained late last month in France amid an investigation into crimes related to child sexual abuse images, drug trafficking and fraudulent transactions associated with the app.

He has been charged by the French judiciary for allegedly allowing criminal activity on the messaging app but avoided being detained in jail before the case is heard with a €5m bail. He was granted release on condition that he report to a police station twice a week and remain in France.

The charges against Durov include complicity in the spread of sexual images of children and a litany of other alleged violations on the messaging app.

His surprise arrest has put a spotlight on the criminal liability of Telegram, the popular app with about 1 billion users, and has sparked debate over free speech and government censorship.

Reuters contributed to this report

• Vladimir Putin on Thursday said his main aim in Ukraine after 30 months of fighting was to capture the eastern Donbas area. The Russian offensive in February 2022 failed in its expansive goal to capture the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, in the west, and Moscow has been unable to take full control of its supposedly annexed oblasts – administrative regions – of Luhansk and Donetsk in the geographical Donbas region.

• Putin claimed the Ukrainian offensive in Russia’s Kursk region had no effect, and that by bringing “quite well-prepared units” into Kursk from elsewhere, Ukraine had made Moscow’s advance in Donbas quicker. “The enemy weakened itself in key areas, our army has accelerated its offensive operations.”

• Ukraine’s top military commander, Oleksandr Syrskyi, countered Putin’s narrative in an interview broadcast on Thursday, saying the Kursk incursion was working and that there had been no Russian advances on Pokrovsk, a key sector of the Ukrainian front, for six days. “The enemy hasn’t advanced a single metre in the direction. In other words, our strategy is working,” he told CNN. Syrskyi said the military had also noted a decrease in shelling, and in the intensity of the Russian offensive in other sectors.

• The Institute for the Study of War wrote this week in an assessment on the Kursk offensive: “The wider impacts of the Ukrainian incursion into Kursk Oblast on the war and any envisioned diplomatic solution to the war are not yet clear, and assessments of these impacts are premature.” Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said on Thursday that Ukraine was “maintaining the defined lines” in the Kursk region and one goal was to show Russians “what is more important to him [Putin]: occupation of the territories of Ukraine or the protection of his population”, while also strengthening Ukraine’s hand for “fair” negotiations.

• Ukraine has achieved “a lot” in its Kursk offensive into Russia but it’s hard to say how the situation will develop next, the Nato secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, said on Thursday. “Only the Ukrainians can make the difficult choices that are needed, such as where to deploy their forces and what type of warfare is appropriate in this situation.”

• Stoltenberg emphasised that Ukraine had the right to self-defence, including having the opportunity to hit military targets on Russian territory. “I am glad that many Nato countries have given that opportunity, and those that still have restrictions have softened the restrictions so that Ukraine can defend itself,” Stoltenberg said.

• Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and Zelenskiy will meet on Friday in Frankfurt, according to a German government spokesman. The “one-on-one” talks will come as Ukraine’s military backers, including the US, hold their regular Ramstein Group meeting at the German airbase of the same name. The US defence chief, Lloyd Austin, is due to host the meeting.

• Ukraine’s parliament has approved the appointment of Andrii Sybiha as foreign minister, replacing Dmytro Kuleba as part of the biggest government reshuffle since the full-scale Russian invasion, Peter Beaumont writes. Critics have said that the reshuffle represents a consolidation of power by a small group of Zelenskiy loyalists allied with Andriy Yermak, the head of the president’s office.

• Zelenskiy has demanded quick results from his new top team – calling on them to deliver more investment into Ukraine’s arms sector, advance negotiations on EU membership, work to secure Ukraine’s financial stability and deliver “more support for the frontline”.

• The death toll from a Russian missile strike on Ukraine’s city of Poltava rose to 55 with more than 300 wounded, Ukrainian officials said on Thursday. The strike hit the Poltava military communications institute on Tuesday, according to Ukrainian officials who did not specify how many of the victims were military or civilian.

• The US charged five Russian military officers on Thursday with conducting cyberattacks on civilian systems in Ukraine and other systems in the US and Nato countries. FBI special agent William DelBagno said the WhisperGate malware attack in January 2022 “could be considered the first shot of the war” and was intended to cripple Ukraine’s government and critical infrastructure by targeting financial systems, agriculture, emergency services, healthcare and schools, DelBagno said. All remain at large, wanted along with a civilian Russian hacker for a combined $60m reward.

• Poland backed away on Thursday from earlier claims that a drone had likely entered its airspace during a Russian attack on Ukraine in August, after a 10-day analysis and search for the object produced no results. General Maciej Klisz, head of the Polish army’s operational command, said it was “a very high probability there was no violation of the airspace of the Republic of Poland on August 26.” He said, however, that violations were likely to happen again during Russian attacks on Ukraine.

• Ukraine said 75 countries and international organisations have agreed a “shared vision” of measures to ensure the uninterrupted supply of Ukrainian agricultural products and help global food security, in a follow-up meeting to the peace summit hosted by Switzerland in June. They also also committed to additional efforts to implement international law during the online meeting.

Alice Guo, a fugitive former mayor of a town in the Philippines accused of having links to Chinese criminal syndicates, has arrived back in the Philippines after she was deported from Indonesia.

Guo, whose case has gripped the Philippines, was the subject of an arrest warrant after she failed to appear before a Senate inquiry investigating financial scams and human trafficking found to be taking place at a sprawling compound in her town, Bamban, in Tarlac province.

She was arrested on Tuesday at a hotel in the Indonesian city of Tangerang. She arrived in Manila on Friday on a private plane flanked by Philippine law enforcement authorities, including the country’s interior minister, Benjamin Abalos Jr, who led her handover from Indonesian authorities in Jakarta.

“I have received death threats and I am asking for the help [of Philippine authorities],” Guo told a press briefing shortly after her arrival in Manila.

Guo has faced questions from senators and investigators over her business dealings and alleged links to the compound. Increasingly, she has also been quizzed over her identity due to discrepancies in her documents, and allegations she was in fact Chinese. One senator questioned if she was a Chinese spy.

Guo has denied any wrongdoing and maintains she is the “love child” of a Chinese man and his wife’s helper, who was a Filipina.

It had been reported on Wednesday that her extradition could face complications as Indonesia hoped for her to be handed over in exchange for the Australian national Gregor Haas, who is wanted by Jakarta for alleged drug smuggling – a charge that could lead to the death penalty.

However, the department of justice undersecretary, Nicholas Felix Ty, told the Philippine news outlet Rappler on Wednesday that there had been no official request from Indonesia for a prisoner swap.

Krishna Murti, the chief of the international division of Indonesia’s national police, told Associated Press in Jakarta that “exchange efforts are still being negotiated” over the return of Haas.

Guo had already been dismissed from her post as mayor for grave misconduct, and on Thursday an arrest was issued against her for two counts of graft.

In addition, the Philippines’ anti-money laundering council recently filed several charges of money laundering against her and 35 others before the department of justice, accusing them of laundering more than 100m pesos (£1.3m). The presidential anti-organised crime commission has also filed qualified human trafficking charges, now under consideration by the office of the prosecutor.

Reuters contributed to this report

Alice Guo, a fugitive former mayor of a town in the Philippines accused of having links to Chinese criminal syndicates, has arrived back in the Philippines after she was deported from Indonesia.

Guo, whose case has gripped the Philippines, was the subject of an arrest warrant after she failed to appear before a Senate inquiry investigating financial scams and human trafficking found to be taking place at a sprawling compound in her town, Bamban, in Tarlac province.

She was arrested on Tuesday at a hotel in the Indonesian city of Tangerang. She arrived in Manila on Friday on a private plane flanked by Philippine law enforcement authorities, including the country’s interior minister, Benjamin Abalos Jr, who led her handover from Indonesian authorities in Jakarta.

“I have received death threats and I am asking for the help [of Philippine authorities],” Guo told a press briefing shortly after her arrival in Manila.

Guo has faced questions from senators and investigators over her business dealings and alleged links to the compound. Increasingly, she has also been quizzed over her identity due to discrepancies in her documents, and allegations she was in fact Chinese. One senator questioned if she was a Chinese spy.

Guo has denied any wrongdoing and maintains she is the “love child” of a Chinese man and his wife’s helper, who was a Filipina.

It had been reported on Wednesday that her extradition could face complications as Indonesia hoped for her to be handed over in exchange for the Australian national Gregor Haas, who is wanted by Jakarta for alleged drug smuggling – a charge that could lead to the death penalty.

However, the department of justice undersecretary, Nicholas Felix Ty, told the Philippine news outlet Rappler on Wednesday that there had been no official request from Indonesia for a prisoner swap.

Krishna Murti, the chief of the international division of Indonesia’s national police, told Associated Press in Jakarta that “exchange efforts are still being negotiated” over the return of Haas.

Guo had already been dismissed from her post as mayor for grave misconduct, and on Thursday an arrest was issued against her for two counts of graft.

In addition, the Philippines’ anti-money laundering council recently filed several charges of money laundering against her and 35 others before the department of justice, accusing them of laundering more than 100m pesos (£1.3m). The presidential anti-organised crime commission has also filed qualified human trafficking charges, now under consideration by the office of the prosecutor.

Reuters contributed to this report

A French woman whose husband has admitted drugging her and inviting more than 80 men to rape her over the course of a decade has said she “was sacrificed on the altar of vice” and treated “like a rag doll”.

Gisèle Pélicot, 72, said “police saved my life” when they investigated her husband, Dominique Pélicot’s, computer in November 2020, after a security guard caught him filming up the skirts of women in a supermarket near their home in a village in southern France.

Police said they found a file labelled “abuses” on a USB drive connected to his computer that contained 20,000 images and films of his wife being raped almost 100 times.

Recounting the moment in November 2020 when police first showed her images of a decade of sexual abuse orchestrated by her husband, Pélicot, who had been drugged to the point of unconsciousness, told the court: “My world fell apart. For me, everything was falling apart. Everything I had built up over 50 years.”

She said she had barely recognised herself in the images, saying she was motionless. “I was sacrificed on the altar of vice,” she said. “They regarded me like a rag doll, like a garbage bag.

“When you see that woman drugged, mistreated, a dead person on a bed – of course the body is not cold, it’s warm, but it’s as if I’m dead.” She told the court rape was not a strong enough word, it was torture.

She told a panel of five judges that she had only found the courage to watch the footage in May this year. “Frankly, these are scenes of horror for me,” she said.

Referred to by her first name in court, Gisèle Pélicot has waived her right to anonymity in order for the trial to be held in public, with the support of her three adult children. She said she was testifying “for all women” who had been assaulted while drugged and to ensure “no woman suffers this”.

Her husband this week answered “yes” in court when asked if he was guilty of the drugging and attacks. His lawyer said that after his arrest he “always declared himself guilty”, saying: “I put her to sleep, I offered her, and I filmed.”

Police have said that between 2011 and 2020, Dominique Pélicot crushed sleeping tablets and anti-anxiety medication and mixed them into his wife’s evening meal or in her wine at their home in Mazan, near Carpentras in Provence. He then enlisted men to rape and sexually abuse her, contacting them via an online chatroom, where members discussed preferences for non-consenting partners.

The accused men recruited by her husband 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. Fifty men are on trial for allegedly taking part in the rape and abuse.

Speaking in a calm and clear voice, Gisèle Pélicot told the court how she and her husband had married when they were 21, had three children and seven grandchildren, and had been very close. “We weren’t rich but we were happy. Even our friends said we were the ideal couple,” she said.

She told the court that without knowing she was being regularly drugged at night, she had begun to have difficulties remembering things and concentrating and even feared taking the train to see her adult children in case she missed her stop. She said she had lost weight and at one point had difficulty controlling her arm.

Worried she was suffering from the start of Alzheimer’s disease, she discussed the subject with her husband. She said he had supported her and booked an appointment with a specialist, who said it was not Alzheimer’s.

Asked by the judge if she had experienced gynaecological issues, Gisèle Pélicot said yes. She said medical tests during the police investigation showed she had been infected with several sexually transmitted diseases.

She said in the hours after being told by police what had happened to her she felt like dying. She described how she had to explain the trauma to her adult children, saying her daughter’s scream “was etched into my memory”.

She left the house with two suitcases, “all that was left for me of 50 years of life together”. Since then, “I no longer have an identity … I don’t know if I’ll ever rebuild myself,” she said.

Gisèle Pélicot, who has been supported in court by her children, has been praised by lawyers for her strength and calm at the trial. She said she appeared solid but was “in ruins” and did not know how her body had withstood the abuse and now the trial.

The 50 men on trial with her husband 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 did not know Gisèle Pélicot was not a willing partner, accusing her husband of tricking them. Detectives were unable to identify and trace more than 30 other men who were recorded.

Gisele Pélicot said she had recognised only one of her alleged rapists, a man who had come to discuss cycling with her husband at their home. “I saw him now and then in the bakery; I would say hello. I never thought he’d come and rape me,” she said.

Gisèle Pélicot’s lawyer, Antoine Camus, said she did not want a trial behind closed doors because “that’s what her attackers would have wanted”.

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

US investigators have indicted a prominent Russian state television personality and his wife for violating sanctions and for money laundering as the White House targets Kremlin influence operations before the US presidential election.

Dimitri Simes, a television presenter and producer for Russia’s state-owned Channel One, was charged with receiving more than $1m (£759,000) in compensation, a personal car and driver and a stipend for a flat in Moscow, despite the television station’s designation as sanctioned in 2022 by the US’s Office of Foreign Assets Control. He and his wife, Anastasia, were charged with money laundering to hide the proceeds of his work for Channel One.

Anastasia Simes, 55, was also charged with buying arts and antiquities for a sanctioned Russian oligarch, Aleksandr Udodov, and then storing the works in their home in Virginia before they were shipped onward to Russia. The works were bought from galleries and auction houses in the United States and Europe.

The couple faces 20 years in prison for each count if convicted. They left the US after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and are now believed to be in Russia, the justice department said.

“Joe Biden and his stooges are impotent cowards,” wrote Dimitri Simes Jr, their son, on X. “Our family is safe and sound in Russia. We will not be intimidated. In fact, we’re only going to get louder. Stay tuned!” He claimed that the Biden administration wanted to jail his father for “exposing its suicidal Ukraine policy”.

Simes, who had had contact with a number of members of Donald Trump’s orbit, also figured prominently in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian influence on the 2016 elections. He was never charged with a crime as part of that investigation.

The new allegations against Simes come one day after the US treasury department sanctioned Margarita Simonyan, who works for the state-controlled broadcaster RT, and nine other employees for running a covert disinformation network in the US that included well-known conservative American influencers who unwittingly took millions of dollars in Kremlin cash.

The US influencers Tim Pool, Dave Rubin and Benny Johnson have addressed allegations that the US content creation company they were associated with had been provided with nearly $10m from Russian state media employees to publish videos with messages in favour of Moscow’s interests and agenda, including over the war in Ukraine.

On Thursday, the conservative media company Blaze Media said it had terminated its contract with the YouTuber Lauren Chen. Chen and her husband founded Tenet Media, which received as much as $10m from intermediaries to the Russian government, according to the justice department indictment and US media reports, and then paid out large sums of money to conservative figures to produce online videos meant to influence the 2024 election. The American influencers and media personalities acted unwittingly, according to the indictment.

“Three things are certain in life: death, taxes and RT’s interference in the US elections,” Simonyan quipped in response.

Simes, 76, resided until recently in Huntly, Virginia, and had established himself as a prominent Russian political commentator who frequently voiced pro-Kremlin views on television and in print in his accented but fluent English.

Simes is also the former president of The Center for the National Interest thinktank, which was established by Richard Nixon and calls itself “America’s voice for strategic realism”.

“These defendants allegedly violated sanctions that were put in place in response to Russia’s illegal aggression in Ukraine,” the US attorney Matthew Graves said in a statement. “Such violations harm our national security interests – a fact that Dimitri Simes, with the deep experience he gained in national affairs after fleeing the Soviet Union and becoming a US citizen, should have uniquely appreciated.”

Two of the people who died on the British tech tycoon Mike Lynch’s yacht, which capsized and sank off the coast of Sicily in August, reportedly died from asphyxiation when they ran out of oxygen in the cabins.

A source close to the investigation told the Guardian that Chris Morvillo, a lawyer at Clifford Chance, and his wife, Neda, “did not have water in their lungs, trachea, and stomach”.

The source, who described their deaths as “death by confinement”, confirmed the version provided by the firefighters’ divers and the coastguard, who had stated that the passengers trapped in the cabins had probably attempted to consume the oxygen in the air bubble that had formed as the boat sank.

Despite the clear evidence from the initial examinations, the source added that “the results are still provisional, as histological exams on samples taken from the bodies will be needed to ascertain the cause of death”.

The superyacht Bayesian sank off the coast of Porticello, a fishing village near Palermo, when the area was hit by violent storms. Seven people died, including Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter, Hannah.

Fifteen people survived, including Lynch’s wife, whose company owned the Bayesian. It is thought that it was struck by a downburst, a gusty wind associated with storms.

Italian prosecutors have placed three crew members under investigation for manslaughter and shipwreck, including the captain of the yacht, James Cutfield, 51, from New Zealand. Being investigated in Italy does not imply guilt and does not mean formal charges will follow.

According to the local fire rescue service, “the bodies were found in the highest part of the ship, as it was clear people were trying to hide in cabins on the left-hand side”. The ship landed on its right-hand side after it sank, plunging to a depth of about 50 metres.

Officials believe the passengers sought escape routes, reaching the opposite side of the vessel they were in. The space to breathe was quickly shrinking as the water rapidly flooded the rooms and the air bubble was becoming increasingly unbreathable owing to the rise in carbon dioxide.

The body of Recaldo Thomas, the onboard cook, was found in the water near the vessel. Five of the victims were reportedly found in different rooms from those indicated by survivors.

According to the newspaper La Repubblica, Morgan Stanley International’s chair, Jonathan Bloomer, and his wife, Judy, are also believed to have died from suffocation, with the results of their autopsies reportedly identical to those of the Morvillos.

The Guardian cannot independently verify the information regarding the Bloomers.

The head forensic doctor at the Policlinico hospital in Palermo, who is carrying out autopsies on the bodies of the victims, declined to comment.

Autopsies are expected on the bodies of Lynch and Hannah on Thursday, while in the afternoon investigators will begin a technical assessment on the sunken yacht to verify whether a hatch was open, which could have led to its sinking.

The prosecutor’s office has been examining videos and photographs taken by local people on the night of the storm, as well as surveillance camera footage. In recent weeks the coastguard has visited all homes and public places with surveillance cameras.

Italian officials said it would be difficult to investigate the sinking fully unless the wreck is recovered.

Donald Trump announced in a speech on Thursday that, if elected, he would form a government efficiency commission, a policy idea that Elon Musk has been pushing him to take on. The former president claimed the tech billionaire had agreed to lead the commission.

Trump made the attention-grabbing announcement during a campaign event at the Economic Club of New York, but gave no specific details about how the commission would operate.

He reiterated Musk’s argument that such a commission would cut unnecessary spending, while also saying that he would massively walk back government regulations.

“I will create a government efficiency commission tasked with conducting a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government, and making recommendations for drastic reforms,” Trump told the crowd.

Musk and Trump have forged an increasingly close alliance over the past year, as the SpaceX and Tesla CEO has thrown his full support behind Trump’s presidential campaign. Musk’s backing of Trump has consequently given the world’s richest man a direct line to influence Republican policy – and, if Trump were to actually create an efficiency commission, sweeping powers over federal agencies.

Musk’s potential involvement in Trump’s proposed commission would create obvious conflicts of interest, as his businesses, such as SpaceX and Neuralink, are both regulated by, and have business with, numerous government agencies.

Musk reposted news of Trump’s plans on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, which he bought for $44bn, and suggested he would accept such a position. “I look forward to serving America if the opportunity arises,” Musk posted. “No pay, no title, no recognition is needed.”

Musk raised the idea of an efficiency commission with Trump during their interview on X last month, with Musk offering to “help out on such a commission”. Musk has frequently pushed for deregulation and opposed government oversight into his businesses, while at the same time facing investigations and lawsuits over a range of allegations including breaking labor laws, violating animal-welfare protections and engaging in sexual harassment.

Although Musk and Trump formerly had an acrimonious relationship – Trump once referred to Musk as a “bullshit artist”, while Musk said Trump was too old to run for president – the two have formed a symbiotic relationship in recent months.

Musk, who frequently engages with far-right activists on X and promotes anti-immigration content, has attacked Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, as a communist, while his allies in the tech community have poured money into a Super Pac backing Trump.