Russia has revoked the accreditation of six British diplomats in Moscow on accusations of espionage, just as Keir Starmer lands in Washington to discuss letting Ukraine use long-range missiles deep inside Russian territory.

The FSB security agency said on Friday it had taken the measure after uncovering documents showing that part of the Foreign Office was helping coordinate what it called “the escalation of the political and military situation” in Ukraine.

The Foreign Office said, however, that the move had been made last month as part of a continuing diplomatic tit-for-tat between the two countries. In May, the British government expelled the Russian defence attache, accusing him of being an undeclared intelligence officer, and removed diplomatic status from several Russian-owned buildings in the UK.

A Foreign Office spokesperson said: “The accusations made today by the FSB against our staff are completely baseless … We are unapologetic about protecting our national interests.” Sources indicated the British diplomats had left Russia weeks ago and were now being replaced.

Moscow made the announcement just as the British prime minister was preparing for crunch talks with the US president, Joe Biden, over allowing Ukraine to use Storm Shadow missiles inside Russia.

Volodymyr Zelenskiy, the Ukrainian president, has been pushing for months for permission to use the missiles, including during talks this week with the British foreign secretary, David Lammy, and the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken. Sources say Britain and the US have decided to allow Ukraine to use long-range missiles, but are not yet ready to announce it and are unlikely to do so during Starmer’s trip.

Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, warned on Thursday night that such a move would put Nato countries “at war with Russia”. Starmer, however, told reporters on the trip to Washington: “Russia started this conflict. Russia illegally invaded Ukraine. Russia can end this conflict straight away. Ukraine has the right to self-defence.”

The FSB said in its statement: “The facts revealed give grounds to consider the activities of British diplomats sent to Moscow by the directorate as threatening the security of the Russian Federation.”

It added: “In this connection, on the basis of documents provided by the Federal Security Service of Russia and as a response to the numerous unfriendly steps taken by London, the ministry of foreign affairs of Russia, in cooperation with the agencies concerned, has terminated the accreditation of six members of the political department of the British embassy in Moscow in whose actions signs of spying and sabotage were found.”

The six diplomats were named on Russian state TV, which also showed photographs of them.

An FSB employee told Rossiya-24: “The English did not take our hints about the need to stop this practice [of carrying out intelligence activities inside Russia], so we decided to expel these six to begin with.”

The FSB said Russia would ask other British diplomats to return home if they were found to be engaged in similar activity.

The Russian foreign ministry spokesperson, Maria Zakharova, was cited by the state Tass news agency as saying the activities of the British embassy in Moscow had gone beyond diplomatic convention, accusing it of carrying out deliberate activity designed to harm the Russian people.

European leaders have dismissed Vladimir Putin’s warning that the west would be directly fighting Russia if it allowed Kyiv to strike Russian territory with western-made long-range missiles.

The US and UK are discussing, in conjunction with other allies, allowing Kyiv to strike military targets inside Russia with Storm Shadow missiles, which can hit targets up to 155 miles (250km) from their launch site.

The Russian president said on Thursday that any western decision to let Kyiv use longer-range weapons against targets inside Russia would put Nato “at war” with Moscow.

“This would in a significant way change the very nature of the conflict,” Putin said, adding that Russia would take “appropriate decisions based on the threats that we will face”.

The Kremlin’s calculus remains unclear as Russia – a nuclear power – continues fighting in Ukraine and collaborating with countries such as Iran, which western capitals have accused of providing Moscow with ballistic missiles.

But European leaders have downplayed the significance of the Russian leader’s threats.

“It is necessary to take all events in Ukraine and on the Ukrainian-Russian front very seriously, but I would not attach excessive importance to the latest statements from president Putin,” said the Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk. “They rather show the difficult situation the Russians have on the front,” he added.

The British prime minister, Keir Starmer, also responded to Putin’s threats, telling reporters: “Russia started this conflict. Russia illegally invaded Ukraine. Russia can end this conflict straight away. Ukraine has the right to self-defence.”

Starmer, who will meet the US president, Joe Biden, in Washington on Friday, said the UK had provided “training and capability” to help Ukraine repel the Russian invasion and he was visiting Biden partly because “there are obviously further discussions to be had about the nature of that capability”.

On Friday, the Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said there was no doubt that the Russian president’s message had reached those it was intended for.

But in Nato policy circles, there was a sense that Putin’s comments should not be taken at face value.

“I think that the Russian regime, and especially the president, usually does this when he doesn’t know how to respond – it’s usually just rhetoric,” said Peter Bátor, a defence policy expert who until recently served as Slovakia’s ambassador to Nato.

“If we learn one lesson in this Russian aggression against Ukraine, it’s that we should not listen to Putin. He has been lying to us all the time,” the former ambassador said.

A senior diplomat from eastern Europe, who spoke on condition of anonymity, argued there should be no restrictions on how weapons were used. “According to international law, one country is allowed to defend its sovereignty and territorial integrity against the aggression of another how it sees fit,” the diplomat said. “The simple fact that military support to Ukraine comes with limitations is actually the problem.”

The source said: “We see more Russian attacks on civilian Ukrainian infrastructure, more hybrid actions against allies and more drones and missiles entering Nato airspace on the eastern flank – Latvia, Poland, Romania.”

The diplomat added: “Putin threatened the west before and he will continue to do so as long as these threats have an impact.”

When Keir Starmer meets Joe Biden at the White House on Friday, the war in Ukraine – and an expected move to lift restrictions on Ukraine’s use of long-range Storm Shadow missiles – will be at the top of the agenda.

The meeting follows a week of diplomatic choreography between the British and Americans, culminating in the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, and UK foreign secretary, David Lammy, travelling to Kyiv on Wednesday.

Ukraine has for months been asking for restrictions on the use of western-supplied Storm Shadow missiles to be loosened, but, until now, Kyiv’s allies have been reluctant to give the green light. Owing to the sensitivity and significance of such a decision – which the Guardian reported this week has already been made in private – no official announcement is expected.

What are Storm Shadow missiles, and why does Ukraine want them?

Storm Shadow missiles can hit targets up to 155 miles (250km) from their launch site – meaning they could strike deep into Russian territory. They are powerful enough to penetrate bunkers and ammunition stores and damage airfields, and can be precisely targeted.

They were developed in an Anglo-French collaboration, and manufactured by a joint venture also involving Italy, using components supplied by the US. Consequently, all four countries would have to sign off on any change to the conditions attached to their use, even if they are not the direct suppliers themselves.

Ukraine already has Storm Shadow missiles but it is permitted to use them only within its own territory. Kyiv has been lobbying for months for that to change so it can direct them at targets on Russian soil, arguing it is being hampered in its efforts to defend itself against missile and glide bomb attacks launched against its cities and frontline targets from within Russia. While it does have drones and cruise missiles that can strike within Russia, it does not have enough of them to make a significant impact – and they are often intercepted.

Ukraine has meanwhile used domestically produced long-range drones to strike Moscow and beyond, and its operations have been increasingly successful. On Monday a drone attack shut three Moscow airports. Another strike this month damaged an oil refinery on the outskirts of the capital.

Speaking to the Guardian in May, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said Biden’s equivocation and incremental approach to providing western weapons had cost lives. It allowed the Kremlin to “hunt” Ukrainians, he complained.

Why has the west not allowed Ukraine to use the missiles in Russia?

Throughout the war, the US and its allies have sought to strike a balance between giving Ukraine the weapons it needs to defend itself while avoiding any move that could be viewed as a provocation and lead to direct involvement in the war.

On Thursday, Vladimir Putin said any western decision to let Kyiv use such longer-range weapons against targets inside Russia would mean Nato would be “at war” with Moscow – a dramatic escalation of his rhetoric about the war which began with the Russian invasion in February 2022.

“This would in a significant way change the very nature of the conflict,” the Russian president told a state television reporter. “It would mean that Nato countries, the US, European countries, are at war with Russia. He added that Russia would take “appropriate decisions based on the threats that we will face” as a result.

What has changed?

Several factors. Ukraine is facing a lot of pressure on the frontline, and fears a difficult winter ahead. Its surprising cross-border incursion into Kursk last month has reframed thinking on the use of weapons on Russian soil and acted as a reminder that Ukraine is at its most effective when it is changing the dynamic of the conflict.

Matthew Savill, the director of military sciences at the defence thinktank Rusi in London, said Ukraine had not briefed allies in advance about its incursion into Kursk. “It changed the debate about escalation and the use inside Russia of long-range weapons,” he said.

There was also news this week that Russia had received a new batch of ballistic missiles from Iran.Lammy suggested on Wednesday that this had changed strategic thinking in London and Washington

In August, Politico reported that Ukrainian officials visiting Washington would present a list of long-range targets within Russia that could be hit. While the White House has argued that Russia has been moving key assets out of range, it now appears to have been persuaded that enough meaningful targets are available to have an impact.

What are the benefits and risks of allowing Storm Shadow to be used within Russia?

There is an inherent tension in how Ukraine believes the weapons can be effective: by degrading Russia’s ability to strike against targets in Ukraine, but also by bringing the war further on to Russian soil, in theory thereby making the costs to Putin more acute.

Despite having lost between 68,000 and 150,000 soldiers, according to some estimates, and with hundreds of thousands more wounded, Putin does not appear to have paid any significant political cost. Making ordinary Russians more fearful of the consequences of the war in Ukraine might make him pay more attention. But that is a narrow tightrope to walk.

A strike that caused many civilian casualties could be very problematic for the west, and if it was caused by a Storm Shadow missile it would be very hard to deny western involvement.

Savill also cautioned that it would be “very, very hard to knock out” Russian airbases, which were “mostly lots of concrete” and “hundreds of kilometres” beyond the frontline. ATACMS missiles with cluster bomblets would be more effective than non-cluster-armed Storm Shadows, he suggested.

Fears are rising that the vote count in November’s presidential election could be disrupted as a result of the proliferation of Donald Trump’s lies about stolen elections and rampant voter fraud in the key swing states where the race for the White House will be decided.

A new survey of eight vital swing states reveals that at least 239 election deniers who have signed up to Trump’s “election integrity” conspiracy theories – including the false claim that the 2020 election was rigged against him – are actively engaged in electoral battles this year. The deniers are standing for congressional or state seats, holding Republican leadership positions, and overseeing elections on state and county election boards.

The report by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), a watchdog group focusing on special interests distorting US democracy, reveals the extent of denial in the eight critical states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. It shows that corrosive efforts to damage public confidence in elections have proliferated there despite the drubbing the election denial movement received in the 2022 midterms.

Among the deniers identified by CMD are: 50 Republicans running for Congress; six vying for state executive offices; 81 leaders of local Republican organizations; and 102 current members of state and county election boards. They have all backed attempts to delegitimize elections even to the point, in some cases, of participating in the 6 January 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol.

“What was striking to us about our research is how much election denialism and the voter fraud lie have infiltrated and taken over the Republican apparatus in each of these critical states,” said CMD’s executive director Arn Pearson.

The danger inherent in the spread of election denial in the battleground states is amplified by the harrowingly close state of the presidential race. The latest New York Times – Siena College poll puts Trump and his Democratic rival, Kamala Harris, essentially neck-and-neck in seven states (the poll does not include New Mexico).

With the margin of victory expected to be razor thin in at least some of these states, there are likely to be opportunities for bad actors to wreak havoc during the vote count. Meanwhile, Trump continues to pour fuel on the fire with his inflammatory remarks, repeating the lie that he won in 2020 during Tuesday’s presidential debate.

CMD’s most disturbing finding is that there are more than 100 election deniers currently sitting on election boards that can influence the way the vote is counted and certified. The boards span 61 counties across all eight swing states.

Deniers wield majority power on the election boards in 14 of those counties. Six are concentrated in just one state – Pennsylvania, the swing state which perhaps more than any other is seen by both campaigns as the path to the White House.

“With 102 deniers on election boards in the swing states, the potential for creating chaos is enormous,” Pearson said.

The most likely way in which election boards could disrupt vote counts is to refuse to certify results in an attempt to delay or subvert a narrow Harris victory. Two Republican members of the Wayne county board of canvassers that covers Detroit, Michigan, briefly refused to certify results in 2020.

By 2022, the practice of refusing to certify had snowballed to election boards in five of the eight swing states. The fear is that similar attempts to destabilize the smooth processing of the vote count will be even more prevalent after election day on 5 November.

“The nightmare scenario is that they’ll hold up certification. They’ll force state officers to go to court to compel them to certify the results while they spread disinformation about widespread voter fraud and non-citizen voting,” Pearson said.

He added: “The big threat is that this will create a similar, or even more heightened atmosphere of the sort that led to the January 6 insurrection.”

In Georgia the peril is particularly acute, as it is the only swing state where deniers have a grip on the statewide election board. At a recent rally in Atlanta, Trump praised the three election deniers who hold the majority on Georgia’s state election board by name, lauding Rick Jeffares, Janice Johnston and Janelle King as “pitbulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory”.

Among the innovations that the trio have introduced are new rules that allow them to put vote certification on hold while they carry out “investigations” into unspecified irregularities. Marc Elias, a leading election lawyer who now advises the Harris campaign, called the rules “somewhere between insidious and insane”.

Elias told the New Yorker Radio Hour that this was the equivalent in a football game of giving “the scoreboard operator the opportunity to investigate for themselves whether a touchdown was scored”.

Deniers wielding power on local election boards have the potential to disrupt federal elections in November, including the presidential contest, by blocking certification of county results. In Cochise county, a Republican stronghold in the south of Arizona, two election supervisors, Tom Crosby and Peggy Judd, are due to stand trial next month charged with criminal offenses relating to their delaying the certification of the 2022 election outcomes; both have pleaded not guilty.

Rick Hasen, an authority on election law at UCLA law school, said that the new research highlighted how election denial had become an article of faith on the right. “To show you are a loyal Trumpist Republican, you have to claim the last election was stolen.”

Hasen added that though there was potential for chaos and delays in the vote count as a result of the proliferation of conspiracy theories, the electoral system was now better prepared. The 2022 Electoral Count Reform Act has clarified the process of certifying electoral college votes in the presidential race, making it more difficult for trouble to be sowed either at the state level or in Congress.

“Trump is laying the groundwork to contest the election and deligitimize a Democratic victory, but it’s going to be harder for him to mess with the rules this time,” Hasen said.

Pennsylvania is suffering most from the scourge of election denial, numerically speaking, with 49 election deniers in influential positions. That includes 29 election administration officials.

The importance of the state, which offers a rich crop of 19 electoral college votes out of the 270 needed to win, is underlined by the fact that 10 of the past 12 presidents prevailed in Pennsylvania. Biden took it by 80,555 votes – a margin of 1.2% over Trump.

Ten deniers are running to represent Pennsylvania in Congress, including David McCormick, who has been echoing Trump’s false claims about voting fraud in his campaign for a US Senate seat, and the incumbent House member Scott Perry who was so deeply involved in the conspiracy to overturn Biden’s victory in 2020 that he sought a presidential pardon from Trump.

Read more about the 2024 US election:

• Fears mount that election deniers could disrupt vote count in US swing states

• Microsoft billionaire fights US election disinformation

• Palestinian advocacy groups pressure Harris as election looms

• Presidential poll tracker

A campaign is under way to drive the UN relief agency for Palestinians, Unrwa, out of existence, its commissioner general has said, days after 18 people were killed when Israeli jets bombed an Unrwa school in Gaza.

Philippe Lazzarini said in an interview that the Israeli government was seeking to close down the agency, having failed to persuade western donors to stop funding it on the grounds of allegations about links between Unrwa staff and Hamas.

“This deliberate attempt to eliminate Unrwa and prevent it from operating would have devastating consequences for the multilateral system, the UN and the cause of a Palestinian transition to self-determination,” Lazzarini said.

On Wednesday Unrwa said six staff members had been killed in two airstrikes that hit al-Jaouni school in Nuseirat, in central Gaza – the highest death toll among its staff in a single incident. The Israel Defense Forces said the strikes killed nine Hamas members, three of whom had doubled as Unrwa workers.

Lazzarini said the IDF had not previously informed his agency that the three staff were Hamas members. “None of these names have ever been on any IDF list notified to us, so I have absolutely no way of being able to authenticate or not,” he said. “These people were working in the shelter … There was no indication they were military operatives.”

Unrwa, one of the UN’s largest agencies, has 13,000 staff working in Gaza and more than 30,000 in the region providing health and educational facilities to Palestinian refugees.

Lazzarini called for an independent investigation, pointing out the total number of Unrwa staff killed in the conflict since 7 October last year had reached 220.

He said: “There is a deliberate attempt to eliminate and dismantle the agency and the reason behind that has nothing to do with neutrality issues, but there is a political purpose behind it. Ultimately there is a desire to strip the Palestinians of refugee status and beyond that to undermine the future Palestinian aspiration for self-determination. That is why Unrwa has become such a target.

“We should make absolutely no mistake that this is more than an attack on Unrwa, but on the broader multilateral system and on the UN. This is a campaign to dismantle Unrwa and push out the broader humanitarian community.”

Lazzarini pointed out three pieces of legislation going through the Israeli parliament: one to label Unrwa as a terrorist organisation, another to remove all immunities from Unrwa staff and a third to deny Unrwa access to buildings under Israel’s control. He said the draft bills were enjoying large support.

In addition, he said the Israeli government was not renewing visas for key Unrwa staff and NGOs.

“It is unconscionable that a UN member state call a UN agency whose mandate comes from the UN security council to be labelled a terrorist organisation. It will set a precedent for other governments to label UN organisations when they act in a way the state does not approve,” he said.

Lazzarini also warned that a generation of unschooled children living in despair was emerging on the border with Israel, some of whom he feared could turn to extremism.

“Education was the last asset these children had, but they live in the rubble and are deeply traumatised,” he said. “The more we wait to bring them back to the educational environment, the more I believe we will be sowing seeds for more hatred, for more resentment and for more extremism.”

Lazzarini said it had become banal to assert that international law had been ignored in Gaza, but after meeting Arab leaders in Cairo this week he said “it is hard to estimate how much they feel western double standards are being applied”.

He said his agency had responded promptly and seriously to the initial Israeli allegations that 12 staff members had taken part in the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October. He said 10 staff had been sacked immediately and two investigations completed, including one by the former French foreign minister Catherine Colonna.

“We have wasted no time in implementing her recommendations, including strengthening the screening of staff and the guidelines governing staff political advocacy. We cannot police what staff think around the family table, but we can set clear limits on what can be said at work, and seek to train staff in the principles of neutrality and work for the UN.”

He said every country that had suspended Unrwa funding, save for the US, had now restored it, leaving a shortfall of $450,000 (£340,000).

The 7 October attack resulted in the deaths of 1,205 people, mostly civilians. Israel’s retaliation has killed at least 41,118 people in Gaza, according to the territory’s health ministry.

On Friday the World Health Organization director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, hailed the success of the first phase of a polio vaccination campaign in Gaza, after more than 560,000 children received a first dose.

“This is a massive success amidst a tragic daily reality of life across the Gaza Strip,” Tedros said on X. Disease has spread with Gaza lying in ruins and the majority of its 2.4 million residents forced to flee their homes due to Israel’s military assault – often taking refuge in cramped and unsanitary conditions.

The body of the Turkish-American activist Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi has landed in Istanbul to continue to its final resting place in her family’s home town on the Aegean coast, with the coffin carried by a procession of Turkish honour guard soldiers.

An autopsy report conducted in the Israeli-occupied West Bank town of Nablus lists Eygi’s cause of death as a brain haemorrhage after a bullet penetrated her skull, as the 26-year-old attended a pro-Palestine protest in nearby Beita.

Eygi had arrived in the West Bank just five days earlier and attended the protest with the International Solidarity Movement, a group dedicated to bringing observers trained in non-violent methods to protests.

The report describes how Eygi’s clothing and hair tie were soaked in blood, and that her head showed further signs of injury that occurred when she dropped to the ground as the bullet struck.

The Israeli military said this week that Eygi was shot “indirectly and unintentionally” by one of its soldiers, drawing a rebuke from the activist’s family who said they were “deeply offended by the suggestion that her killing by a trained sniper was in any way unintentional”.

“Let us be clear, an American citizen was killed by a foreign military in a targeted attack,” they said. “The appropriate action is for President Biden and Vice-President Harris to speak with the family directly, and order an independent, transparent investigation into the killing of Ayşenur, a volunteer for peace.”

Turkish public prosecutors said they would conduct their own investigation into Eygi’s death, with a second autopsy due to be performed at a forensic medicine centre in the coastal city of İzmir before a funeral in her family’s nearby home town of Didim in the coming days. Her family, who moved with Eygi from Turkey to Seattle when she was less than a year old, described her as a “kind-hearted, silly and passionate soul”, and called on Biden not to accept the Israeli military’s description that Eygi was struck by accident.

While Eygi’s family called on US officials to do more, her killing has spurred a widening rift between Turkey and the Israeli government, further inflaming tensions as the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, condemned Eygi’s killing and pledged to make Israel “account for its crimes against humanity before the law”.

Announcing the repatriation of Eygi’s body, Turkey’s foreign ministry said: “We will make every effort to ensure that this crime does not go unpunished.”

Erdoğan has been fiercely critical of the Israeli assault on Gaza, which has killed more than 41,000 people since October, while officials have expressed alarm about Israeli settlers praying in the grounds of al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, one of the holiest sites in Islam.

The Turkish president also announced a halt to much of the estimated £5.3bn in annual exports to Israel last May after years of improvements in the relationship, much of them signalled through trade.

A month later, Erdoğan told a meeting of his Justice and Development party officials in his family home town of Rize that Turkey could intervene “so that Israel can’t do these ridiculous things to Palestine”, without suggesting what form this might take.

The president’s fiery stance has only drawn Ankara closer to countries that were previously regional foes. This month, the foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, addressed the Arab League in Cairo, the first time a Turkish official has done so in more than a decade.

Fidan called for “joint action to put pressure on the international community to reject Israel’s actions”, warning that any countries supporting Benjamin Netanyahu would be “held accountable”.

In August, Turkey formally applied to support South Africa’s case against Israel at the international court of justice in The Hague, which accuses Israel of committing genocide in Gaza and calls on Israeli forces to immediately cease fighting in the Palestinian territory.

One of India’s most prominent opposition leaders has been granted bail after spending almost six months in jail for a corruption case he alleged was politically motivated.

On Friday, India’s supreme court ruled that, Arvind Kejriwal, who is the chief minister of Delhi, should be immediately released from jail in Delhi, where he has been held since his arrest in March.

The judges ruled that as his trial was unlikely to be completed for some time, his “prolonged incarceration amounts to unjust deprivation of liberty”.

The arrest of Kejriwal, who was detained alongside other senior members of his Aam Aadmi party (AAP), took place just a few weeks before the beginning of the national elections and sent shock waves across the country.

Kejriwal has been one of the most outspoken critics of the prime minister, Narendra Modi, and his AAP party has grown to be a significant electoral force in recent years, winning regional elections in Delhi and Punjab. His party is part of an alliance with dozens of other opposition parties that was fighting against Modi and his Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) in the election.

The election returned Modi and the BJP to power in June, but with a much reduced majority in coalition with other parties.

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has accused Kejriwal and others in his party of corruption and taking $1bn in bribes in an alleged scam involving liquor licensing in Delhi.

Kejriwal denied the allegations, maintaining that his arrest was illegal and the case was a political conspiracy by the government to hinder the opposition before the election, where Modi was seeking a third term in office. The Modi government has denied any involvement in the cases, stating that the CBI acts independently.

The supreme court granted Kejriwal temporary bail in May to allow him to campaign in the election but he had to return to jail in early June.

Friday’s decision to release Kejriwal comes after other senior detained members of AAP were granted bail in the same case. Among them was his former deputy chief minister, Manish Sisodia, who spent more than 18 months behind bars. After the judgment in Kejriwal’s case, Sisodia said: “Today, once again, truth has won in the fight against lies and conspiracies. The locks of the dictator’s prison are broken by the power of truth.”

In a separate judgment, the supreme court justice Ujjal Bhuyan raised questions of the timing and necessity of Kejriwal’s arrest, stating that it had been “unjustified” and that his continued incarceration was “untenable”.

Despite pressure, Kejriwal had refused to step down from his position and had continued to rule the Delhi government from behind bars since March. The new bail conditions set by the supreme court judges do not give him the freedom to return to his duties as chief minister as normal, preventing him from going to the government secretariat, holding meeting with officials or signing certain documents.

Kejriwal left Tihar jail on Friday and pledged to continue fighting the “anti-national forces working to weaken our country”. It is likely to provide a boost to the AAP, which will be fighting in forthcoming state elections in Haryana and to keep power in the Delhi elections early next year.

Journalists from more than a dozen media outlets in Hong Kong have been harassed and targeted in what the city’s largest journalist association said was a “systemic and organised attack” over recent months.

The harassment included death threats, and threatening and defamatory complaint letters being sent to reporters’ families and their employers, as well as landlords and neighbours, the Hong Kong Journalists Association (HKJA) said.

Selina Cheng, the chair of the HKJA, told a press conference on Friday that the association had observed a “severe wave of trolling and harassment” between June and August, including emails and letters sent to workplaces, social media accounts and home addresses. The letters threatened people’s personal safety, connections and employment. Some had been pressured to give up their profession or union positions, she said.

Cheng said: “This type of intimidation and harassment, which includes sharing false and defamatory content and death threats, damages press freedom in Hong Kong and we should not tolerate it. HKJA and I believe all journalists in Hong Kong welcome criticism and debate. This is not it.”

Employees from at least 15 international and local outlets including Hong Kong Free Press (HKFP), InMedia and HK Feature were targeted, along with members of the HKJA executive committee and journalistic education institutions. Cheng said it appeared the harassment was aimed at journalists “as a community” rather than specific individuals.

Cheng said the main form of harassment involved similarly worded anonymous complaints “from people who proclaimed themselves as ‘patriots’”. Some recipients were told they could be breaching national security laws by continuing to associate with the journalists. Letters sent to smaller organisations resembled “ransom letters”, while other messages included threatening motifs and pictures, or personal information posted to Wikipedia. The HKJA said it was concerned about how personal information and addresses had been obtained.

Since the government’s crackdown on Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement and the introduction of the national security law, the city’s once free media has become increasingly constrained. Journalists have come under increasing pressure, with major outlets such as Apple Daily and Stand News forced to close, journalists and editors prosecuted, and visas denied to foreign reporters.

In a statement published on Friday, HKFP condemned what it called a “recent surge in online and offline harassment of independent media in Hong Kong”.

The outlet said anonymous letters had been sent to the landlord of HKFP’s director and editor-in-chief, Tom Grundy, and property agencies last week “containing defamatory claims, falsities and threats of ‘unimaginable consequences’ and ‘collateral damage’ unless he was evicted from the property and district”.

The agencies and landlord ignored the threats, which Grundy reported to police on Saturday. HKFP said it was the third time the outlet had made police reports in recent years related to harassment and intimidation, and urged the authorities to investigate thoroughly.

Cheng said the HKJA had contacted Meta and the Wikimedia Foundation, which had both responded immediately and launched investigations. She said Wikimedia had found one user who had posted personal information from multiple accounts and had been blocked. She said the HKJA had also reported incidents to police and had not ruled out legal action.

Journalists from more than a dozen media outlets in Hong Kong have been harassed and targeted in what the city’s largest journalist association said was a “systemic and organised attack” over recent months.

The harassment included death threats, and threatening and defamatory complaint letters being sent to reporters’ families and their employers, as well as landlords and neighbours, the Hong Kong Journalists Association (HKJA) said.

Selina Cheng, the chair of the HKJA, told a press conference on Friday that the association had observed a “severe wave of trolling and harassment” between June and August, including emails and letters sent to workplaces, social media accounts and home addresses. The letters threatened people’s personal safety, connections and employment. Some had been pressured to give up their profession or union positions, she said.

Cheng said: “This type of intimidation and harassment, which includes sharing false and defamatory content and death threats, damages press freedom in Hong Kong and we should not tolerate it. HKJA and I believe all journalists in Hong Kong welcome criticism and debate. This is not it.”

Employees from at least 15 international and local outlets including Hong Kong Free Press (HKFP), InMedia and HK Feature were targeted, along with members of the HKJA executive committee and journalistic education institutions. Cheng said it appeared the harassment was aimed at journalists “as a community” rather than specific individuals.

Cheng said the main form of harassment involved similarly worded anonymous complaints “from people who proclaimed themselves as ‘patriots’”. Some recipients were told they could be breaching national security laws by continuing to associate with the journalists. Letters sent to smaller organisations resembled “ransom letters”, while other messages included threatening motifs and pictures, or personal information posted to Wikipedia. The HKJA said it was concerned about how personal information and addresses had been obtained.

Since the government’s crackdown on Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement and the introduction of the national security law, the city’s once free media has become increasingly constrained. Journalists have come under increasing pressure, with major outlets such as Apple Daily and Stand News forced to close, journalists and editors prosecuted, and visas denied to foreign reporters.

In a statement published on Friday, HKFP condemned what it called a “recent surge in online and offline harassment of independent media in Hong Kong”.

The outlet said anonymous letters had been sent to the landlord of HKFP’s director and editor-in-chief, Tom Grundy, and property agencies last week “containing defamatory claims, falsities and threats of ‘unimaginable consequences’ and ‘collateral damage’ unless he was evicted from the property and district”.

The agencies and landlord ignored the threats, which Grundy reported to police on Saturday. HKFP said it was the third time the outlet had made police reports in recent years related to harassment and intimidation, and urged the authorities to investigate thoroughly.

Cheng said the HKJA had contacted Meta and the Wikimedia Foundation, which had both responded immediately and launched investigations. She said Wikimedia had found one user who had posted personal information from multiple accounts and had been blocked. She said the HKJA had also reported incidents to police and had not ruled out legal action.

A US appeals court late on Thursday declined to interfere with a lower court decision to keep Donald Trump’s already-decided criminal case, over hush money paid to an adult film star, in state court, dealing another blow to the former US president’s bid to move the case to federal court.

On 29 August, nearly three months after he was convicted in the first-ever criminal trial of a US president, Trump asked US district judge Alvin Hellerstein to move the case from New York state court in Manhattan to federal court, arguing the trial violated his constitutional rights.

Trump, the Republican nominee for president in the 5 November election, said that if the case were moved, he would ask the federal court to dismiss it altogether because jurors at trial saw evidence of his official acts as president.

He said that violated the US supreme court’s landmark decision finding presidents have broad immunity from prosecution for official acts.

Hellerstein denied that request on 3 September, finding that the case dealt with “private, unofficial acts, outside the bounds of executive authority”. Trump asked the second US circuit court of appeals to put that decision on hold while it considered the merits of his appeal.

A three-judge panel at the second circuit denied Trump’s request, citing Judge Juan Merchan’s delay of Trump’s sentencing date to 26 November from 18 September. Merchan wrote that he wanted to avoid the unwarranted perception of a political motive.

Merchan will now decide on 12 November whether the case should be dismissed because of the supreme court’s immunity decision, which stemmed from a separate, federal criminal case Trump faces over his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden. Trump has pleaded not guilty in that case, amid many legal woes still hanging over him.

In the New York state case, a jury on 30 May found Trump guilty of felony falsification of business records to hide his former lawyer Michael Cohen’s $130,000 payment to adult film actor and producer Stormy Daniels for her silence before the 2016 election about a sexual encounter she says she had with Trump. The former president denies having sex with Daniels, and has vowed to appeal his conviction once he is sentenced.

France’s Catholic church has said it will open its records on allegations of sexual abuse and harassment made against a priest whose campaigning for the poor and homeless resulted in him being venerated as a modern-day saint.

The Conference of Bishops of France (CEF) said their records on Abbé Pierre, the founder of the charity Emmaüs, who died in 2007, would be made available without the usual delay of 75 years from the time of death.

Seven women accused Abbé Pierre of sexual assault in July, and Emmaüs said since then it had received a further 17 testimonies including “very serious” accusations of sexual abuse on a number of victims, including at least one who was a child at the time of the alleged offences.

In a joint statement, the Abbé Pierre Foundation, Emmaüs France and Emmaüs International, said: “The violence and extreme seriousness of certain of these new testimonies have come as a further shock at the heart of our organisations.” They reiterated their “total support for the victims”, praising the “courage” of those who had come forward. “We believe them and we stand by them,” it said.

Until last year, Abbé Pierre was a revered national icon considered the epitome of Christian self-sacrifice for his humanitarian work. However, church archives show it was aware of concerns over his behaviour from as far back as the 1950s.

Emmaüs, which has 425 branches in 41 countries, is acting to distance itself from its founder and will vote on removing the priest’s name from its logo at a special general assembly in December. The Abbé Pierre Foundation is to change its name, and the Abbé Pierre memorial centre in Esteville, Normandy, where the late priest resided for many years, will close permanently.

Adrien Chaboche, the head of Emmaüs International, said: “Our movement is shocked by these revelations that have brought about a before and an after in our history.”

Speaking to RFI radio, Chaboche added: “Each branch will have to reflect on how much space to give to Abbé Pierre. We’re not giving instructions but we encourage people to be responsible in the choices they make since Abbé Pierre’s image is now also that of a sexual predator.”

Emmaüs had hired an independent consultancy called Egaé to look into the accusations and gather further statements from alleged victims. The allegations date from the 1950s to 2005 and are reported to have taken place in France, Switzerland, the US and Morocco.

The Egaé report, published on 17 July, claimed there had been “repeated sexual contact with a vulnerable person”, “repeated penetrative sex acts” and “sexual contact with a child”.

One woman claimed she had been “forced to watch Abbé Pierre masturbate and to perform oral sex in a Paris apartment” in 1989. Another claim relates to a woman who said the priest kissed her “with his tongue” and touched her chest in the mid 1970s, when she was nine years old.

Investigators said there were more accounts of alleged abuse but it had excluded those made anonymously or where those making the claim were reluctant to give full details.

Abbé Pierre was born Henri-Antoine Grouès in 1912 and was a Capuchin monk before being ordained in 1938. He joined the French Resistance during the the second world war and became an MP when the conflict ended.

The CEF has expressed its “pain” and “shame” over the accusations and announced full cooperation in the investigation. The church has been shaken by a 2021 report by the Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse in the Church, which identified more than 3,000 cases of sexual abuse by priests since 1950.

Chaboche told RFI Emmaüs was exploring how to compensate victims. “It’s a long, difficult process,” he said.

Dozens of kilograms of cocaine have been found in banana deliveries to four of a French supermarket chain’s stores, with police unsure who the intended recipient was.

Staff at Grand Frais branches in the Bourgogne-Franche-Comté region in eastern France were astonished to find between 40kg (88lb) and 50kg of drugs hidden under pallets of bananas and were anxious to reassure customers that the cocaine had not come into contact with the fruit.

Now detectives are attempting to solve the mystery of how the drugs, believed to have originated in Colombia, came to be in the pallets and – more importantly – for whom they were destined.

Olivier Caracotch, the public prosecutor for Dijon, in Burgundy, said 10kg of cocaine had been found in the fruit delivery to the Grand Frais store in Beaune. Between 10kg and 12kg were found in similar deliveries to three other stores.

A spokesperson for Grand Frais said: “We are working closely with police to ensure that the investigation runs smoothly and that our staff and customers are safe.” The supermarket refused to give further information.

Bananas appear to be the fruit of choice for South American drug traffickers, after the seizure of a number of cocaine shipments in Europe. Most of the cocaine originated from Colombia.

In July, sniffer dogs found 6,000kg of cocaine worth an estimated £173m hidden in a banana shipment in Ecuador that was destined for Germany. In August, customs agents in the northern Greek city of Thessaloniki discovered about 93kg of cocaine in a ship from Ecuador carrying bananas.

In May, about 250kg of cocaine was found hidden in banana boxes at a stock warehouse in Colmar in eastern France. Police also found a GPS tracking device in the consignment. Detectives believed the drugs were intended to be delivered to Germany but had been sent to France by mistake.

In March, Bulgarian customs officials seized 170kg of cocaine from a ship transporting bananas to Europe from Ecuador, while a month earlier, British officials said they had found 5.7 tonnes of cocaine in a similar shipment, the largest ever class A drug bust in the UK.

The big-budget epic Shōgun is set to become a historic winner at this weekend’s Emmy awards, a ceremony that itself is also making history.

It’s the second Emmys in the same year, an unprecedented and expensive challenge for the industry, a traffic jam necessitated by last year’s dual strikes, which led to a postponement.

January’s rescheduled Emmys saw major wins for The Bear and the final season of Succession but without the presence of the latter, all eyes are on whatever the next major drama contender will be.

Leading the nominations is Shōgun with 25, the long-gestating historical epic becoming the first Japanese-language show to receive a nomination for best drama series and only the second non-English-language show after Squid Game. At last weekend’s Creative Arts Emmys, where technical and some smaller acting awards are handed out, the show picked up 14 awards, the most any show has won during that ceremony.

“It’s completely surreal to imagine that this show, after the past five, six years, is a show that so many people got recognized for,” co-creator Justin Marks told the Hollywood Reporter. “Because we were just trying to survive it, all of us together, and trying to figure out how to make it – there wasn’t really a mold for this.”

The series is favourite to win more awards this Sunday, which could see historic wins for actors at a ceremony that has not tended to award performers of Asian descent. In January, the Beef star Ali Wong became the first woman of Asian descent to ever win a lead Emmy.

The TV academy still has work to do with gender parity after a report from the Women’s Media Center showed that women are still underrepresented in non-acting categories, receiving just 34% of this year’s nominations.

The breakout Netflix hit Baby Reindeer, about Richard Gadd’s alleged experience with a stalker, is also expected to triumph in its limited series categories with 11 nominations. The ceremony comes in the same week as the announcement of a defamation trial date set to start in May 2025. The streamer is being sued for $170m after the inspiration for Gadd’s stalker, Fiona Harvey, has claimed the show is pushing “the biggest lie in television history”.

After taking home a total of 10 awards for its first season, the restaurant-based hit The Bear is also expected to dominate the comedy categories again, beating out Only Murders in the Building and Abbott Elementary. Last weekend saw it winning seven, including one for Jamie Lee Curtis as guest star. “I’m the luckiest girl in the world,” she said of her first Emmy.

The producers of this weekend’s awards have promised a continuation of this January’s upbeat theme, staying away from mean-spiritedness and snark. They have recruited the father-son duo, and Schitt’s Creek co-stars, Eugene and Dan Levy as “relatable” hosts.

“For two Canadians who won our Emmys in a literal quarantine tent, the idea of being asked to host this year in an actual theater was incentive enough,” they said in a statement.

The evening will also see major reunions onstage for the casts of shows including Happy Days, The West Wing and Saturday Night Live, celebrating its 50th year.

The producers are also hoping for an uptick in viewers after the most recent telecast attracted an audience of just 4.3 million, a new low for the awards show.