Western leaders should not be intimidated by Kremlin threats of nuclear escalation, the head of the CIA said on Saturday, and be willing to consider allowing Anglo-French Storm Shadow missiles to be used inside Russia.

Bill Burns, on a visit to London alongside the head of MI6, said the US had brushed off a previous Russian nuclear scare in autumn 2022, demonstrating that threats from Moscow should not always be taken literally.

“Putin’s a bully. He’s going to continue to sabre rattle from time to time,” Burns said. “We cannot afford to be intimidated by that sabre rattling … we got to be mindful of it. The US has provided enormous support for Ukraine, and I’m sure the president will consider other ways in which we can support them.”

The CIA director also said the US was working very hard on fresh proposals for a ceasefire in Gaza with new “texts and creative formulas”. A new plan, being devised with the help of mediators from Qatar and Egypt, would emerge, he hoped, “in the next several days”.

However, it was unclear, Burns added, whether Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, and Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar were willing to strike a deal. It was a question of political will, he said: “Whether or not leaders on both sides recognise that enough is enough and that the time has come to finally make some hard choices.”

Israel had succeeded in “severely degrading” Hamas’s military capabilities over the past 11 months, Burns said, but had not eliminated the movement in a war that had created a severe humanitarian crisis. “It is also a movement and an idea,” the spy chief said, and you could only “kill an idea with a better idea”, meaning there needed to be some long-term hope for Palestinians.

On Ukraine, the veteran spy chief was asked whether there was too much nervousness in Washington and other western capitals about the risk of escalating the war by giving permission for Storm Shadow, a missile with a range of at least 190 miles, to be used inside Russia.

“None of us should take lightly the risks of escalation,” Burns told an audience at a Financial Times event in London – and said there had actually been a belief within the CIA that Russia might use tactical nuclear weapons on the battlefield in Ukraine in the first year of the war.

“There’s a moment in the fall [autumn] of 2022 when I think there was a genuine risk of potential use of tactical nuclear weapons,” by Russia in Ukraine Burns said, but he insisted he believed such concerns should not be taken too seriously. “I never thought … we should be unnecessarily intimidated by that,” he added.

At the time, Russian troops had been pushed back in northern Ukraine and had abandoned Kherson in the south, prompting a belief that Russia might seek to use a nuclear weapon if a rout developed. In any event, the frontline stabilised shortly afterwards.

Burns said that Joe Biden, the US president, had sent him to pass on a direct warning to Sergey Naryshkin, the head of the Russian foreign intelligence service, at a meeting in Turkey in November 2022 “to make very clear what the consequences of that kind of escalation would be” – and that a similar approach was in place today.

So far, the White House has been notably hesitant about allowing the use of Storm Shadow and other long-range missiles inside Russia, such as the US-made Atacms, despite repeated pleas from Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy, including one made on Friday.

Burns voiced concern that Iran was considering whether to supply ballistic missiles to Russia, but would not confirm whether the CIA believed it had done so. It would be a “dramatic escalation” of the relationship between the two countries; Tehran so far has supplied only less effective drones for Russia to use in Ukraine.

Burns and his British counterpart, the MI6 chief, Sir Richard Moore, had never appeared in public together before the surprise appearance at the event at London’s Kenwood House in Hampstead. Tight security meant that audience members were told only 15 minutes in advance who would be appearing.

Moore said there were concerns that Russian spies were becoming increasingly reckless in the UK, Europe and elsewhere as the war in Ukraine continues. “I think Russian intelligence services have gone a bit feral, frankly,” the British spy chief said, as shown by a spate of arson attacks in the UK and elsewhere in Europe.

Thousands of people took to the streets in France on Saturday to protest against Emmanuel Macron’s appointment of the centre-right Michel Barnier as prime minister, with leftwing parties accusing the president of stealing legislative elections.

Macron named Barnier, a conservative and the EU’s former Brexit negotiator, as prime minister on Thursday, capping a two-month-long search after his ill-fated decision to call a legislative election that delivered a hung parliament divided in three blocs.

Barnier, in his first interview in office, said on Friday night that his government, which lacked a clear majority, would include conservatives, members of Macron’s camp and, he hoped, some from the left.

He faces the daunting task of trying to drive reforms and the 2025 budget, as France is under pressure from the European commission and bond markets to reduce its deficit.

The left, led by the far-left France Unbowed (LFI) party, has accused Macron of a denial of democracy and stealing the election after the president refused to pick the candidate of the New Popular Front (NFP) alliance, which came top in the July vote.

The pollster Elabe published a survey on Friday showing 74% of French people thought that Macron had disregarded the results of the elections, with 55% believing he had stolen them.

In response to the appointment of Barnier, whose centre-right Les Républicains party is only the fourth largest bloc in parliament, with fewer than 50 lawmakers, leftwing party leaders, unions and student bodies called for mass protests on Saturday before new action, including possible strikes on 1 October.

The LFI said 130 protests would take place across the country.

Barnier was continuing consultations on Saturday as he sought to form a government, a tricky job given he faces a potential vote of no confidence, especially with an urgent draft budget for 2025 due to be discussed in parliament at the start of October.

NFP and the far-right National Rally (RN) together have a majority and could oust the prime minister through a confidence vote should they decide to collaborate.

The RN gave its tacit approval for Barnier, citing a number of conditions for it to not back a vote of no confidence, making it the de facto kingmaker for the new government.

“He is a prime minister under surveillance,” the RN party leader, Jordan Bardella, said on Saturday. “Nothing can be done without us.”

Keir Starmer’s former pollster, Deborah Mattinson, is to meet Kamala Harris’s campaign team in Washington this week to share details of how Labour pulled off its stunning election win by targeting key groups of “squeezed working-class voters who wanted change”.

The visit comes ahead of a separate trip by Starmer to Washington on Friday to meet US president Joe Biden, his second since becoming prime minister. It will also be his first since Biden stepped down and Harris became the Democratic nominee.

With the race for the White House on a knife-edge, Mattinson, who stepped down from Starmer’s office after the election, and the prime minister’s former director of policy, Claire Ainsley, who will also attend the briefings, believe the same strategy that delivered for Labour could play an important role in Harris defeating Donald Trump on 5 November.

Writing in the Observer, Mattinson and Ainsley say many of the concerns of crucial undecided voters will be similar on both of sides of the Atlantic.

“These voters – often past Labour voters – had rejected the party because they believed that it had rejected them. Often Tory voters in 2019, they made up nearly 20% of the electorate. Labour’s focus on economic concerns, from affordable housing to job security, won them back.

“For Harris, addressing core issues such as housing, prices and job creation could also win over undecided US middle-class voters, many of whom face similar economic pressures. Labour set about finding out as much as possible about these voters and applying that knowledge to all aspects of campaigning.

“They were patriotic, they were family oriented, they were struggling with the cost of living: squeezed working-class voters who wanted change.”

Mattinson coined the phrase “hero voters” to describe a group who were more often than not pro-Brexit and persuadable by political leaders if they felt they would address their fundamental core concerns.

The collaboration, they believe, could help tilt the balance by delivering voters in key US battlegrounds.

“Before November’s presidential election, Harris has turned on its head a contest that looked like a foregone conclusion in Trump’s favour. However, as the data shows clearly, it is still too close to call. We believe that adopting a similar hero-voter approach could make a vital difference, just as it did here in the UK.

“The start point is to identify and understand Harris’s hero voters – undecided voters who have considered Trump and live in the handful of the most crucial battleground states.”

Mattinson and Ainsley were invited by the Democratic thinktank the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), with which Ainsley has been working since leaving Starmer’s team in late 2022.

Recently, they have been polling among US voters and conducting focus groups to try to understand what will win them over and which groups matter most.

“The context is very different but the parallels are almost uncanny,” they write. “This group – who in the US self-define as middle class rather than working class, as the same group might in the UK – is struggling.

“Its members believe that the middle class is in jeopardy, out of reach for people like them, denied the dream of homeownership that previous generations took for granted, unable to cover the essentials, and hyper-aware of the cost of groceries, utilities and other bills. Many work multiple jobs just to keep afloat.”

Among those that the two former Starmer aides are likely to meet are Megan Jones, the senior political adviser to vice-president Harris, and Will Marshall, founder of the PPI, who had dealings with top New Labour figures, including Tony Blair, when the party was trying to learn from the electoral success of Bill Clinton’s Democrats in the early to mid-1990s, before the 1997 general election.

Mattinson and Ainsley say they had far more time to plan their strategy in detail than have members of the Harris campaign. But they suggest that fine-tuning the Democratic strategy could help sustain recent momentum and give the party a better chance of crossing the finishing line victorious.

“From the point where we defined our hero-voter focus, we had three years to mainline the thinking through party activity. Team Harris has less than three months. But looking at what they have achieved in the past few weeks, success now looks within reach. Hero voters may just help to close that gap.”

As next week’s crucial presidential debate looms into view, Kamala Harris has maintained her narrow lead over Donald Trump in head-to-head polls but is locked in a tighter race in the crucial swing states needed to win the US election.

Ever since Harris entered the contest – after Joe Biden dropped out following a disastrous debate performance that highlighted fears over his age and mental acuity – the vice-president has ridden a wave of support and enthusiasm, turning the race on its head. A solid but slight Trump advantage morphed into a Harris lead.

But as Harris faces her first ever debate as a presidential nominee, there are signs that her upwards swing has hit a ceiling. Meanwhile, Trump will be hoping the debate offers his campaign a chance to recapture some momentum.

Yet the race remains so tight in the swing states – and with a Republican advantage in the electoral college – that one commentator on Politico this week called it the “equivalent of a knife fight in a phone booth”.

At the same time, the narrow geographical focus of the election is sharply coming into view, with the first ballots to determine the next occupant of the White House due to be mailed out to voters.

North Carolina had aimed to start mailing out its presidential ballots on Friday. But in what might be seen as a metaphor for the cliffhanging nature of the contest between Harris and Trump, what should have been standard protocol was delayed by a dispute over whether Robert F Kennedy Jr, hitherto running as an independent candidate, should have a place on the ballot.

Kennedy, who suspended his campaign on 23 August and endorsed Trump, is suing the North Carolina board of elections over its refusal to remove his name from the ballot in a state where surveys show the result on a knife edge.

A judge on the state’s supreme court ruled against him on Thursday but gave him 24 hours to appeal – resulting in a temporary delay to ballots being dispatched. And on Friday, the state’s appeals court issued an interim stop on the dissemination of mail-in ballots to allow Kennedy’s appeal to be heard.

The postponement added another layer of suspense to a contest that could not be tighter, according to fresh Guardian analysis of recent polls.

In a state with 16 electoral college votes up for grabs but where a Democratic presidential candidate has won only once since 1980, Trump and Harris are deadlocked at 48.07%.

The figures illustrate why Kennedy – who is trying to help Trump after concluding that his presence in the race was draining his support – is so keen to remove his name from the ballot.

A tiny number of voters putting their cross next to Kennedy’s name on ballot papers could be enough to deprive Trump of the only one of seven swing states he won in his 2020 defeat at the hands of Joe Biden.

The North Carolina imbroglio shows in a microcosm what has become a reality of this – and, increasingly, all – US presidential elections: that while voters will flock to the polls across all 50 states, some states matter more than others under America’s unique electoral college.

The system designates a set number of electors for each state based on population – with 539 for the entire country, meaning that 270 electoral college votes are needed to win.

While the outcome in numerous states is a foregone conclusion – with many southern and midwestern states reliably Republican and others like New York and California solidly Democratic – the roughly equal partisan division of such states in electoral vote terms means much rests on the small number where party loyalties are evenly split.

It also means that the national polling figures – while indicative of overall trends – are not what necessarily decides the election. The Guardian’s latest national poll tracker, taken over a 10-day average, showed Harris at 47.5% compared with 43.9% for Trump, which is encouraging for her but probably not a big enough cushion to guarantee an electoral college win if replicated on polling day.

In this context, arguably even more important than North Carolina is Pennsylvania, one of the Democrats’ designated “blue wall” states – along with fellow battlegrounds Michigan and Wisconsin – and sometimes given a “Rust belt” label because of its status as the heartland of the US steel industry.

Biden won it by slightly more than 80,000 votes in 2020, capturing its 19 electoral votes.

This time, various permutations suggest that it might be key to the paths being charted by both Harris and Trump to reach the magic 270 total.

That explains why the state has become such a focal point of both campaigns’ activity in recent days; On Monday, Harris appeared with Biden at a Labor Day parade in Pittsburgh in their first joint campaign appearance since she replaced him atop the Democratic ticket, while Trump attended a televised town hall event hosted by Fox News and fronted by Sean Hannity on Wednesday.

This Tuesday, the candidates will meet in their only scheduled presidential debate in Philadelphia, the biggest city in Pennsylvania.

The data shows Harris with a wafer-thin lead in the state of 1.7% – 48.9% to 47.2% – within the margin of error. Other polls show the race even tighter; a CNN survey this week had candidates tied at 47% each.

The tight scenario underpins why states like Pennsylvania and North Carolina – and others like Georgia and two “Sun belt” states, Nevada and Arizona – are now the targets of the lion’s share of campaign resources. Maga Inc, a Trump-backing Super Pac, recently spent a reported $16m in adverts for North Carolina while the Trump campaign has diverted its efforts away from other less winnable locations to focus on the seven battleground states.

In the war of resources and ad spending, Harris may have the advantage. Figures published on Friday showed her campaign had outraised Trump’s by $361m to $130m in August, and had raised a total of $615m since she became her party’s nominee in July.

It seems an eye-watering sum and surely enough to sustain a message across this vast country. But the clarion call will be heard loudest in those states where the result is likely to remain too close to call even after polls close.

He was the most distinguished artist of the late 19th century – a grandee who entertained Queen Victoria at his home in Holland Park and was president of the Royal Academy for nearly two decades.

Frederic Leighton was feted for his portraits of women, especially his stunning Flaming June, currently the centrepiece of an exhibition at the Royal Academy. But he actually preferred painting landscapes and very occasional seascapes, one of which, Bay of Cadiz, Moonlight, he adored.

But this alluring view of a full moon and its shadow over the sea had been lost since the early 20th century. Despite Leighton House Museum, his former west London home, trying to find it over the past 100 years, it is only now that it has resurfaced.

“We know he loved Bay of Cadiz, Moonlight, because he referred to it in letters to his father and friends when abroad in places like Damascus and on the Nile,” says Daniel Robbins, senior curator of Leighton House Museum.

“He also wrote to Valentine Prinsep, a pre-Raphaelite artist who was staying in Venice, of “envy” that he was in the Italian city for a full moon. And, in yet another letter, Leighton tells of his own joy of once seeing it in its glory in Capri.

“He clearly loved the moon and the effect of its light,” says Robbins. And yet Bay of Cadiz, Moonlight, created on a trip to southern Spain in 1866, is his only known painting of the moon over water, though he also did a handful of nocturnal landscapes.

Born to wealthy parents, Leighton took regular trips to southern Europe, north Africa and the Middle East to paint. However, shortly after his death his 100 or so landscapes, which had been kept in his house, were sold by his two sisters. Four, including the Cadiz painting, were bought by the wealthy solicitor and art collector Wickham Flower.

“We know that Flower then lent these four to Leighton’s old home after a local painter, Emilie Barrington, took out a lease to run the Holland Park house as a venue for the arts. The painting was still there in the early 20th century, but had mysteriously been catalogued as Bay of Naples, Moonlight.”

However by 1926, when Barrington handed over the house to the borough of Kensington and Chelsea, there was no sign of the painting.

Fast forward a century, and the auctioneers Christie’s tipped off Leighton House that a private owner was selling the painting, but with no information about its whereabouts over the past 100 years. In June, the museum bought it for £32,000 with financial help from the Arts Council, the V&A and Friends of Leighton House.

Now, experts looking at Bay of Cadiz, Moonlight, are drawing links between Leighton’s dark sky over water with James Whistler’s Nocturnes, his beautiful paintings of the night, particularly over the Thames.

“Records here show that Whistler, who lived close by, had dinner with Leighton on at least one occasion in the late 1860s,” says Robbins. “And, as Leighton displayed his landscapes on the walls of his rooms as well as propped up on furniture for guests to look at, Whistler could have seen the Cadiz picture.”

Both Robbins and Hannah Lund, co-curator of Leighton House’s land and seascape exhibition opening in November, which will include the Cadiz work, also believe that Whistler was quite or even very likely to have been inspired by this lunar painting. “It has so much of the atmosphere and aesthetic of Whistler’s Nocturnes,” says Lund. Whistler began his series in the early 1870s, not long after his visit to Leighton’s house.

Leighton remains the only artist to have been elevated to the House of Lords, but is also the holder of the shortest peerage as he died in January 1896, just one day after his appointment was gazetted.

The family of a Turkish-American woman shot dead while demonstrating against Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank have demanded an independent investigation into her death.

Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, 26, was “shot in the head” while participating in a demonstration in Beita in the West Bank on Friday, the UN rights office said.

“Her presence in our lives was taken needlessly, unlawfully, and violently by the Israeli military,” Eygi’s family said in a statement.

“A US citizen, Ayşenur was peacefully standing for justice when she was killed by a bullet that video shows came from an Israeli military shooter.

“We call on President [Joe] Biden, Vice-President [Kamala] Harris, and Secretary of State [Antony] Blinken to order an independent investigation into the unlawful killing of a US citizen and to ensure full accountability for the guilty parties.”

The Israeli military said its forces “responded with fire toward a main instigator of violent activity who hurled rocks at the forces and posed a threat to them” during the protest.

Eygi was a member of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a pro-Palestinian organisation, and was in Beita on Friday for a weekly demonstration against Israeli settlements, according to ISM.

The group on Saturday dismissed claims that ISM activists threw rocks at Israeli forces as “false” and said the demonstration was peaceful.

“Ayşenur was more than 200 metres away from where the Israeli soldiers were and there were no confrontations there at all in the minutes before she was shot,” ISM said.

In recent years, pro-Palestinian demonstrators have frequently held weekly protests against the Eviatar settlement outpost overlooking Beita, which is backed by far-right Israeli ministers.

During Friday’s protest, Eygi was shot in the head, according to the UN rights office and Rafidia hospital, where she was pronounced dead.

Turkey said she was killed by “Israeli occupation soldiers”, with the country’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan condemning the Israeli action as “barbaric”.

Washington called it a “tragic” event and has pressed its close ally Israel to investigate.

But her family has demanded an independent investigation.

“Given the circumstances of Ayşenur’s killing, an Israeli investigation is not adequate,” her family said.

On Saturday, AFP footage showed Eygi’s body, wrapped in a blue cloth, kept in a morgue next to the body of a teenage girl who was killed the previous day in a separate incident in the West Bank.

The Palestinian health ministry said the Palestinian girl was shot and killed by “occupation (Israel) bullets” in Qaryut, near Beita.

On Saturday, the Nablus governor, Ghassan Daghlas, accused Israeli forces of killing the two.

“Both were killed by the same bullets … The same bullets,” he said, referring to Israeli forces.

“We call out the international community to stop the insane war on Palestine. Bullets do not differentiate between activists and a Palestinian child,” he said.

Eygi’s family said she had always advocated for “an end to the violence against the people of Palestine”.

Israeli settlements in the West Bank – where about 490,000 people live – are illegal under international law.

Since Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel, which triggered the war in Gaza, Israeli troops or settlers have killed at least 662 Palestinians in the West Bank, according to the Palestinian health ministry.

At least 23 Israelis, including security forces, have been killed in Palestinian attacks during the same period, according to Israeli officials.

The family of a Turkish-American woman shot dead while demonstrating against Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank have demanded an independent investigation into her death.

Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, 26, was “shot in the head” while participating in a demonstration in Beita in the West Bank on Friday, the UN rights office said.

“Her presence in our lives was taken needlessly, unlawfully, and violently by the Israeli military,” Eygi’s family said in a statement.

“A US citizen, Ayşenur was peacefully standing for justice when she was killed by a bullet that video shows came from an Israeli military shooter.

“We call on President [Joe] Biden, Vice-President [Kamala] Harris, and Secretary of State [Antony] Blinken to order an independent investigation into the unlawful killing of a US citizen and to ensure full accountability for the guilty parties.”

The Israeli military said its forces “responded with fire toward a main instigator of violent activity who hurled rocks at the forces and posed a threat to them” during the protest.

Eygi was a member of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a pro-Palestinian organisation, and was in Beita on Friday for a weekly demonstration against Israeli settlements, according to ISM.

The group on Saturday dismissed claims that ISM activists threw rocks at Israeli forces as “false” and said the demonstration was peaceful.

“Ayşenur was more than 200 metres away from where the Israeli soldiers were and there were no confrontations there at all in the minutes before she was shot,” ISM said.

In recent years, pro-Palestinian demonstrators have frequently held weekly protests against the Eviatar settlement outpost overlooking Beita, which is backed by far-right Israeli ministers.

During Friday’s protest, Eygi was shot in the head, according to the UN rights office and Rafidia hospital, where she was pronounced dead.

Turkey said she was killed by “Israeli occupation soldiers”, with the country’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan condemning the Israeli action as “barbaric”.

Washington called it a “tragic” event and has pressed its close ally Israel to investigate.

But her family has demanded an independent investigation.

“Given the circumstances of Ayşenur’s killing, an Israeli investigation is not adequate,” her family said.

On Saturday, AFP footage showed Eygi’s body, wrapped in a blue cloth, kept in a morgue next to the body of a teenage girl who was killed the previous day in a separate incident in the West Bank.

The Palestinian health ministry said the Palestinian girl was shot and killed by “occupation (Israel) bullets” in Qaryut, near Beita.

On Saturday, the Nablus governor, Ghassan Daghlas, accused Israeli forces of killing the two.

“Both were killed by the same bullets … The same bullets,” he said, referring to Israeli forces.

“We call out the international community to stop the insane war on Palestine. Bullets do not differentiate between activists and a Palestinian child,” he said.

Eygi’s family said she had always advocated for “an end to the violence against the people of Palestine”.

Israeli settlements in the West Bank – where about 490,000 people live – are illegal under international law.

Since Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel, which triggered the war in Gaza, Israeli troops or settlers have killed at least 662 Palestinians in the West Bank, according to the Palestinian health ministry.

At least 23 Israelis, including security forces, have been killed in Palestinian attacks during the same period, according to Israeli officials.

Police searching for a British man believed to have been swept away by heavy flooding in Mallorca have found a body.

It comes after the body of a British woman was found on the Spanish tourist island on Wednesday.

Both people are believed to have been swept away in a flash flood.

Emergency services had been searching the area near the Torrent de Pareis canyon in Sa Calobra since Wednesday.

The Spanish Civil Guard told Reuters that the body of a man was found by emergency services on Friday.

The Torrent de Pareis canyon is deep and about 5km (3 miles) long, beginning in Lluc in the heart of the Serra de Tramuntana mountain range and running all the way to the sea. Walking the route can be dangerous as some sections of the canyon are prone to flooding. A tourist website warns that although the canyon is usually traversable, visitors should check the weather conditions before setting out. “The sheer cliffs that define the gorge are so tall and steep that there are no easy exits from the canyon anywhere along the way,” the website warns.

Earlier this week, authorities warned that “very intense storms” were imminent on the Balearic Islands and a large area of Spain’s eastern coast, and encouraged people to avoid venturing outdoors due to strong winds and heavy rain.

The mountain rescue brigade in the Balearic Islands said that 10 other tourists who had been trapped by floods had been rescued after being “surprised by the storm”. A helicopter assisted in rescuing 10 other hikers who had become trapped in the Serra de Tramuntana mountain range on Tuesday.

A Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office spokesperson said: “We are supporting the families of a British man and woman following their deaths in Mallorca and are in contact with local authorities.”

Boris Johnson failed to disclose that he met a uranium lobbyist while prime minister before entering into a new business with a controversial Iranian-Canadian uranium entrepreneur, the Observer can reveal.

Johnson’s new company Better Earth Limited also employs Charlotte Owen, a junior aide with just a few years work experience whom he elevated to the House of Lords last year at the age of 29, sparking intense controversy.

Transparency campaigners say there appear to be “serious public interest questions to be answered” over the nature and timeline of Johnson’s relationship with his co-director, Amir Adnani, the founder, president and CEO of Uranium Energy Corp, a US-based mining and exploration company, championed by former Trump advisor Steve Bannon.

Amir Adnani, a Canadian citizen who is the director of a network of offshore companies based in the British Virgin Islands, incorporated Better Earth in December last year. On 1 May, Companies House filings reveal, “The Rt Hon Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson” was added as a director and co-chairman. And this summer, Charlotte Owen – now Baroness Owen of Alderley Edge – joined the company to work alongside him as its vice president.

The Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (Acoba), which oversees ex-ministerial appointments, explicitly warned Johnson in April 2024 that the “broad overlap” between his roles in office and at Better Earth may entail “unknown risks” because of the lack of transparency over the firm’s clients. A statement from the Cabinet Office noted the potential for a conflict of interests particularly because of “the unknown nature of Better Earth’s clients – specifically that there is a risk of a client engaging in lobbying the UK government.” The committee also told the former prime minister it feared “that you could offer Better Earth unfair access and influence across government”.

Acoba was reassured that Johnson “did not meet with, nor did you make any decisions specific to Better Earth during your time in office”. But the Observer can reveal that Johnson met Scott Melbye, the executive vice-president of Uranium Energy Corp – Adnani’s company – in the House of Commons in May 2022 when he was still prime minister.

Adnani’s social media post about the event claimed that Melbye and Johnson spoke about “nuclear power and uranium”.

Neither Johnson or Adnani have responded to press inquiries about this encounter or when they first met. The encounter was not recorded in the prime minister’s official diary.

Uranium is the raw ingredient for the enriched uranium needed to fuel nuclear reactors. Just days before leaving office, Johnson announced a £700m investment in the controversial Sizewell C reactor stating the country needed to “Go nuclear, go large!”. At the time, Caroline Lucas, the then Green MP and former party leader, described Sizewell C as “massively costly, achingly slow and carries huge unnecessary risks”.

Among those who cheered the Sizewell C investment was Adnani. He excitedly posted the announcement on his Twitter account: “Boris Johnson plans to sign off on new £30bn nuclear plant in his final week in power! #uranium.”

Adnani has appeared at least twice on former Donald Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, and on one occasion told him that his ambition was to achieve “full spectrum energy dominance”.

Headquartered in a serviced office building in Sevenoaks, Better Earth describes itself as an “energy transition company”. Its website, which is currently under construction, says it will “work directly with national governments and regions that are seeking both inward investment and/or to reduce their emissions ahead of 2030”.

The apparent lack of transparency extends beyond the nature of the firm’s clients: the company no longer has a person of significant control registered at Companies House. The initial filing states that its single share is owned by another company called “Emissions Reduction Corp” registered in Carson City, Nevada.

US company searches reveal the firm was previously called Carbon Royalty Corporation, a Delaware-based company whose directors include Adnani and Nicole Shanahan, who was until recently Robert F Kennedy Jr’s running mate in his campaign for US president before he endorsed Trump. Delaware is a “dark” jurisdiction but sources suggest Carbon Royalty Corporation has raised $40m since it was incorporated in 2021 and its investors appear “undisclosed”, although this is not illegal.

Baroness Margaret Hodge, the former Labour MP who led parliament’s Public Accounts Committee from 2010-2015 said there were “at least four very serious public interest questions” to be answered about the appointment.

“What on earth is an ex-prime minister of the United Kingdom doing, working for a company with an opaque structure? In my experience those who choose to have a UK company owned by a foreign entity only do that because they may have something to hide. What is it in this case? Given the sensitivities around nuclear capabilities we should know who he is in business with, where the money is coming from and why he is using a financial structure that appears to hide the beneficial ownership of the company.”

The former chair of the UK Atomic Energy Authority, Professor Roger Cashmore, predicts an “economic bonanza” in the nuclear sector in the decades to come but said that it came with risks. He said that Britain desperately needed an entire generation of new nuclear reactors to underpin its COP commitment to wean the country off fossil fuels but added that he was worried about the competence of many of the market entrants.

“What I really worry about is the technical expertise of many of the people coming in. That’s where the real shortage is. And what that means is that there’s a lot of snake oil merchants in the business offering surefire investments when really there’s no such thing.

“And obviously Boris Johnson has no expertise in this area himself, he’s just a front man. I have no idea who these people are he’s in business with so I’m not passing any judgment, but I do wonder how much homework he’s done.”

Better Earth, Amir Adnani and Boris Johnson declined to respond to the Observer’s inquiries about Better Earth’s line of work, funding or any other matters.

The appointment also raises further question marks over Johnson’s relationship with Baroness Owen, a previously unknown junior political adviser who had worked for a matter of months with Johnson at Number 10. Her appointment to the Lords, where she took the title Baroness Owen of Alderley Edge in July last year, became the subject of intense speculation. With just a few years’ job experience under her belt, she now holds the position for life. In her maiden speech in November last year, she thanked Johnson for “putting a great deal of trust in me”.

That trust has now been extended to a senior role in his new company, Better Earth, though her role has also not been widely publicised. She recently updated her House of Lords page to note that she has a paid position as “Vice President, Better Earth Limited (energy transition company)” though she does not appear on the company’s website, X feed or LinkedIn page.

Owen mentioned climate only briefly in her maiden speech earlier this year, preferring to showcase her interest in technology, and has no previous employment experience in environmental, nuclear, or green issues. She declined to answer any of the Observer’s questions about her role.

Owen joins two other former Conservative ministers at the firm: Chris Skidmore, who resigned the whip and the party over Rishi Sunak’s oil and gas plan, is Better Earth’s COO, while Nigel Adams, a Johnson ally and former minister without portfolio, is CEO. There is no suggestion that either Skidmore or Adams were in breach of transparency rules.

Before Johnson became a director of Better Earth in May this year, he wrote to Acoba, the government watchdog, alerting them to the appointment. This came during the same period Acoba had accused him of refusing to answer its questions about whom he’d met as a consultant on behalf of a hedge fund, Merlyn Advisors, during a trip to Venezuela.

The incident led the committee’s chairman, Eric Pickles, to warn that Johnson’s behaviour had proved its rules were “unenforceable”.

A Pakistani man living in Canada is facing federal criminal charges for allegedly planning to carry out a mass shooting in New York against Jewish people on the anniversary of the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack in Israel, the US justice department announced on Friday.

Muhammad Shahzeb Khan, 20, was arrested Wednesday in Canada and charged with attempting to provide material support as well as resources to a foreign terrorist organization: in this case, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham.

“The defendant is alleged to have planned a terrorist attack in New York City around October 7 of this year with the stated goal of slaughtering, in the name of [the Islamic State], as many Jewish people as possible,” the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, said in a press release.

More than 1,200 people were killed on 7 October during the Hamas-led attacks in southern Israel, including more than 40 Americans. Israel responded with a military onslaught in Hamas-run Gaza that has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians and left the region facing a high risk of famine, as the Associated Press recently reported.

Khan began posting on social media about his support for the Islamic State last November, according to a justice department criminal complaint summarizing the charges against him.

In August, undercover law enforcement agents began communicating with Khan, who later created a private group chat to parse out details around the planned attack.

Khan allegedly urged the agents – without realizing they were law enforcement – to obtain weapons for the mass shooting that he planned against Jewish people.

He allegedly told officers the that he aspired to carry out the attack in New York City because of its large Jewish population, even asking agents to scout several neighborhoods there and assess how large their Jewish populations were.

“[W]e are going to NYC to slaughter them,” said Khan, according to the complaint.

For weeks, Khan finalized other details associated with his planned attack, including researching short-term rental properties close to the attack site, arranging for a human smuggler to help him cross the US-Canada border and making sure that others would be able to carry out the terrorist plot if he was detained.

“[If] we succeed with our plan this would be the largest attack on US soil since 9/11,” said Khan, according to the complaint.

Law enforcement apprehended Khan while he attempted to cross over into the United States. He was arrested in Ormstown, Canada, about 12 miles (18km) from the US-Canada border.

He faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted.

A suburban Detroit judge is no longer handling cases after a court official turned over recordings of her making anti-gay insults and referring to Black people as lazy.

Oakland county probate judge Kathleen Ryan was removed from her docket on 27 August for unspecified misconduct. Now the court’s administrator has stepped forward to say he blew the whistle on her, secretly recording their phone calls.

“I just want to make it right … I want to keep my job and do it in peace,” Edward Hutton told WXYZ-TV. “And I want the people in Oakland county that come to court to get a fair shake, to have their day in court, to have an unbiased trier of fact.”

The judge didn’t talk to the TV station. But her attorneys, Gerald Gleeson and Thomas Cranmer, said: “We look forward to vindicating judge Ryan in the appropriate forum.”

Probate judges in Michigan handle wills and estates, guardianships and cases that involve the state’s mental health laws.

In the phone recordings, Ryan uses a anti-gay slur against David Coulter, the county’s highest elected official, who is gay. She also referred to Blacks in the US as lazy.

“I’m not systemically racist. I’m a new racist,” said Ryan, who was first elected in 2010.

It is legal to record phone calls in Michigan if one party consents. In this matter, it was Hutton, who said Ryan had called him at work and after-hours for years.

Hutton said he sent the recordings in August to Coulter; Elizabeth Clement, the chief justice of the Michigan state supreme court; and other officials. Chief probate judge Linda Hallmark then suspended Ryan, with pay, while she’s investigated by a judiciary watchdog, the Michigan judicial tenure commission.

Ryan’s father, James Ryan, was a state and federal judge. A brother, Daniel Ryan, was also a judge.

A zoo in Baltimore is mourning the death of an African penguin that helped save his kind from extinction by leaving behind more than 200 descendants while living far longer than expected.

The remarkable creature in question is Mr Greedy, who was euthanized because of health problems related to his age: 33, or well past African penguins’ 18-year median life expectancy, said an announcement from his home, the Maryland zoo.

“This one bird was incredibly important to the continued existence of African penguins throughout the world,” the Maryland zoo’s bird curator and program leader, Jen Kottyan, said in a statement. Kottyan said Mr Greedy had a hand in siring 230 descendants across five generations, all but staving off extinction for a species that nonetheless faces a real risk of ceasing to exist within the next decade.

Mr Greedy hatched in 1991 alongside his lifelong mate, Mrs Greedy. Both arrived at the zoo in 1992 and were paired up when they reached reproductive age in 1994, Kottyan said.

The duo’s partnership withstood five US presidencies, the Covid-19 pandemic as well as myriad other significant events both domestic and international.

Kottyan separately told the Washington Post that Mr and Mrs Greedy – African penguins No 821 and 832, respectively – enjoyed “a huge success rate with offspring”.

“They were such a good pair,” Kottyan said to the Post. “Solid and reliable.”

Kottyan explained to the newspaper that Mr Greedy earned his nickname by demonstrating aggression to collect fish as well as materials to nest from his fellow penguins at the zoo.

“He was a go-getter,” Kottyan said, adding that his nickname transferred over to Mrs Greedy because her being paired with him meant she was “guilty by association”.

Mrs Greedy became the Maryland zoo’s oldest living penguin after her mate’s death, the organization said on Thursday. The zoo said Mrs Greedy determines what is next for her through her behavior.

“If she shows interest, the zoo will pair her with a single male in the colony as a companion,” the institution’s statement said.

In her statement provided by the zoo, Kottyan said Mr Greedy’s death was painful. “It’s tough to lose an animal who has been such a welcome presence at our zoo for three decades, but all of us are proud that he is survived by five generations of offspring.”

The Maryland zoo said it is home to North America’s largest colony of African penguins, which are native to the coasts of Namibia and South Africa. The colony has successfully bred more than 1,000 chicks as part of one of the zoo’s signature animal programs – and one of its most popular visitor attractions.

African penguins are considered a protected species, but that has not prevented their numbers from declining dramatically, said the statement from the zoo, which first opened in 1876.

Commercial fishers compete with penguin colonies for access to the creatures’ main food source, imperiling the animals. Penguins are also vulnerable in the wild to ocean pollution – including spills from oil tankers – as well as humans’ disturbing their nesting grounds, the zoo said.