More than 100 Ukrainian prisoners of war will be able to return to their families after an exchange of captured members of the Russian and Ukrainian armed forces.

The prisoner swap on Saturday, mediated by the United Arab Emirates, involved 206 military personnel from both countries.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said that of the 103 Ukrainian “warriors” who were released, 82 were soldiers and privates and 21 were officers, including police officers and border guards.

Photographers captured the moment that the smiling and emotional Ukrainians, wrapped in their country’s flag, embraced their fellow soldiers after being swapped at an unknown location in Ukraine.

They looked pale and thin, and all of the men released had shaved heads. One kneeled on the ground, his national flag draped around his shoulders, and stared down at his homeland as he made an emotional phone call.

In return for their freedom, Ukraine has handed over 103 Russian military personnel taken prisoner in the Kursk border region when Ukrainian forces launched a surprise incursion in August.

The Russian defence ministry said in a statement that all these Russians were now in Belarus, “where they are being provided with the necessary psychological and medical assistance, as well as an opportunity to contact their relatives”.

It is the second such swap since Ukraine’s incursion into the Kursk region, and occurred after mediated negotiations between the two countries.

UAE officials said that the number of captives exchanged through its mediation efforts now stood at 1,994.

On Saturday, Ukraine made a new call on the west to allow it to strike deeper into Russia, after a meeting on Friday between Joe Biden and Keir Starmer failed to produce a visible shift in British and US policies on the use of long-range weapons.

Zelenskiy has been pushing for months to use British Storm Shadow missiles, which can strike targets at least 190 miles (300km) away, to bomb airbases, missile sites and other military targets inside Russia.

So far, the US has only allowed Kyiv to use American-provided weapons to strike within a limited area inside Russia’s border with Ukraine.

“Russian terror begins at weapons depots, airfields and military bases inside the Russian Federation,” the Ukrainian presidential adviser Andriy Yermak said on Saturday.

“Permission to strike deep into Russia will speed up the solution.”

On Thursday, Vladimir Putin warned western leaders that allowing Ukraine to use western-made long-range missiles would amount to Nato being at war with Russia.

At Friday’s foreign policy summit with Starmer at the White House, Biden said he did not accept that and then told reporters: “I do not think much about Vladimir Putin.”

Joe Biden has dismissed the sabre-rattling threats made by Vladimir Putin as the US president met the UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, at the White House.

Biden said on Friday afternoon he did not accept that Ukraine using western-made Storm Shadow missiles to bomb targets in Russia would amount to Nato going to war with Moscow.

At a foreign policy summit, Biden said: “I do not think much about Vladimir Putin.”

Biden and Starmer’s top foreign policy teams were meeting at the Blue Room in the White House. At the start of the meeting, James Matthews from Sky News jumped the gun by asking Biden: “What do you say to Vladimir Putin’s threat of war?”

Biden scolded him. “You be quiet, I’m going to speak, OK?” the president said, before beginning his prepared remarks.

Also present at the Blue Room meeting were Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, and David Lammy, the UK foreign secretary. Other British participants included Tim Barrow, the national security adviser, and Starmer’s chief of staff, Sue Gray.

Starmer flew over from London on Thursday for the working meeting amid escalating tensions with the Kremlin after the UK had indicated that the US had agreed to allow Ukraine to use Storm Shadow missiles to bomb Russia.

After the summit, Starmer said the meeting was not about a particular decision on Storm Shadow. “Well, we’ve had a long and productive discussion on a number of problems, including Ukraine, as you’d expect, the Middle East, and the Indo-Pacific, talking strategically about tactical decisions,” he said.

However, Biden indicated the topic came under discussion between the leaders and their teams. In response to a shouted question asking how soon he was prepared to let Ukraine fire missiles deeper into Russia, Biden said: “We’re going to discuss that now.”

Neither of the presidential candidates, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, were in the capital and available to meet Starmer because both were campaigning.

Starmer said he had never spoken to Harris. The prime minister did speak to Trump briefly after the former president survived an assassination attempt in the summer.

The British Storm Shadow missiles, made by a European company, can strike targets at least 190 miles away and Ukraine wants to use them to bomb airbases, missile sites and other military targets in the Russian heartlands.

Earlier, Russia announced it had revoked the accreditation of six British diplomats in Moscow on accusations of espionage. Moscow’s FSB domestic spy agency said on Friday that it had acted on documents showing part of the Foreign Office was helping coordinate what it called “the escalation of the political and military situation” in Ukraine.

The Foreign Office, however, said the move had been made last month as part of a continuing diplomatic tit-for-tat. Sources indicated the British diplomats had left Russia weeks ago and were being replaced.

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.”

The British government expelled the Russian defence attache in May, accusing him of being an undeclared intelligence officer, and removed diplomatic status from several Russian-owned buildings in the UK.

The Biden-Starmer meeting was called at the request of the UK, the White House said. After a short one-to-one between the leaders, no press conference was scheduled.

The UK government has for days been dampening down expectations of a public announcement about Storm Shadow being used in Ukraine – though the discussions prompted Putin to warn on Thursday that allowing Ukraine to use western-made long-range missiles would amount to Nato being at war with Russia.

Starmer, however, told reporters as he flew into Washington: “Russia started this conflict. Russia illegally invaded Ukraine. Russia can end this conflict straight away. Ukraine has the right to self-defence.” Putin had been expected to counter talk of fresh help for Kyiv with threats.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has been pushing for months for permission to use the missiles, including during talks this week with Lammy and Blinken.

British sources say London and Washington have decided to allow Ukraine to use long-range missiles, but are not yet willing to announce it. Deploying the missiles, western officials add, should be part of a wider plan designed to try to bring about an end to the full-scale war.

Zelenskiy pleaded on Friday for the US and UK to speed up the process and allow Kyiv to make the war “more difficult for Russia”.

In a lengthy statement, Zelenskiy said: “Anyone who sees a map where Russia launches its strikes from, trains its forces, keeps its reserves, locates its military facilities, and what logistics [it] uses clearly understands why Ukraine needs long-range capabilities.”

Ukrainian leaders are intensely frustrated that the Kremlin is able to launch deadly missile strikes across Ukraine, while they are unable to target sites in Russia because the weapons available are manufactured in the west and until now western governments have not approved such use.

Storm Shadow is made by a company controlled by British, French and Italian interests, and some of its components are made in the US, giving all four countries a veto on its use. Ukraine has only a limited long-range missile capability of its own making.

The Russian embassy in London said Britain was wasting money in supporting Ukraine, that any arms donated would “likely go up in smoke” and that the policy of helping Kyiv would “provide no relief to ordinary Brits, who are preparing to tighten their belts as winter approaches”.

• Keir Starmer and Joe Biden have discussed letting Ukraine fire long-range, western-supplied missiles into Russia, while stopping short of any formal announcement. Vladimir Putin has threatened it would amount to Nato joining the war. The UK prime minister told reporters at the White House that he had a “wide-ranging discussion about strategy” with the US president but that it was not just a meeting about “a particular capability”.

• Before the meeting, officials had said Starmer would press Biden to back his plan to let British Storm Shadow be used to strike inside Russia. Britain’s PM indicated he and Biden would discuss the plan at the UN general assembly in New York the week after next “with a wider group of individuals”.

• Biden dismissed Vladimir Putin’s sabre-rattling threats, saying he did not accept that Ukraine using Storm Shadows missiles against Russia proper would amount to Nato going to war with Moscow, reports Dan Sabbagh in Washington. “I do not think much about Vladimir Putin,” Biden said.

• Moscow’s ambassador to the UN told the security council on Friday that loosening the missile strike restrictions would mark an escalation to “direct war” between Moscow and Nato. Washington officials accused Putin of trying to scare Nato countries away from supporting Ukraine, reports Andrew Roth. In Europe, leaders played down Putin’s threats. The Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, said: “I would not attach excessive importance to the latest statements from President Putin. They rather show the difficult situation the Russians have on the front.”

• Zelenskiy said the Ukrainian incursion into Russia’s border region of Kursk had produced the desired result of slowing Moscow’s advance on another front in Ukraine’s east. The Ukrainian president said in Kyiv on Friday that Russia’s counterattack in Kursk produced no major successes – contradicting Vladimir Putin’s accounts of Russian advances on both fronts. Zelenskiy said Russia had about 40,000 troops on the Kursk front. “So far we have seen no serious [Russian] success.” Russia’s defence ministry said on Friday its troops had taken back 10 villages out of 100 that Kyiv had occupied. The battlefield reports of either side were not able to be independently verified.

• The Ukrainian general staff said on Friday that Russian forces had focused their assaults near the town of Kurakhove, about 33km (20 miles) south of the key logistics hub of Pokrovsk in Ukraine’s Donetsk region. Russia’s defence ministry said its forces had captured Dolynivka, positioned between Pokrovsk and Kurakhove, the latest in a series of localities Moscow says it has seized.

• Volodymyr Zelenskiy said 49 Ukrainian prisoners of war had been returned from Russia, with Agence France-Presse witnessing the group being greeted at the border with Belarus. The Ukrainian president did not clarify whether it was part of an exchange with Russia, as is usually the case, but AFP journalists had earlier seen Russian prisoners of war being loaded on to a bus near the border.

• Romania started training its first group of Ukrainian F-16 pilots this week, the Nato country’s defence ministry said. The first four pilots had started their “theoretical training”, a ministry spokesperson told AFP, with practical training to follow “towards the end of the year”.

• Drone fragments fell on a municipal building in Kyiv’s Obolon district north of the city centre early on Saturday, said the mayor. Writing on Telegram, Vitali Klitschko said no fire broke out and emergency services were sent. He earlier said air defence units had been in action. A Reuters witness said explosions were heard. The head of Kyiv’s military administration, Serhiy Popko, urged people to remain in shelters as drones still posed a threat. The air raid alert was later lifted for the city but remained in effect for several regions of central Ukraine.

• Russia announced it had revoked the accreditation of six British diplomats in Moscow on accusations of espionage. Moscow’s FSB domestic spy agency said on Friday that it acted on documents showing part of the UK Foreign Office was helping coordinate what it called “the escalation of the political and military situation” in Ukraine. The Foreign Office, however, said the move had been made last month as part of a continuing diplomatic tit-for-tat. Sources indicated the British diplomats had left Russia weeks ago and were already being replaced.

• The US has imposed new sanctions on Russia over its role to “undermine democracies”, the US secretary of state said. “The actions we’re exposing today and the actions we exposed last week do not incorporate the full scope of Russia’s efforts to undermine democracies,” Antony Blinken said. “Far from it.”

• Volodymyr Zelenskiy said he would meet Joe Biden “this month” to present his “victory plan” on how to end the war with Russia. The Ukrainian leader gave no details on how to end more than 30 months of fighting, saying only that his proposal would involve “a system of interconnected solutions that will give Ukraine enough power – enough to put this war on a course to peace”.

• The German chancellor has said he will not send long-range missiles requested by Ukraine. Germany possesses powerful Taurus cruise missiles. Olaf Scholz said on Friday: “Germany has made a clear decision about what we will do and what we will not do. This decision will not change.”

• Boris Johnson met with Zelenskiy in Kyiv and renewed calls for permission for Storm Shadow strikes on Russia aimed at “stopping the appalling Russian attacks with glide bombs and now Iranian missiles”. Zelenskiy also met with The American actor Michael Douglas and his son Dylan in Kyiv. The Ukrainian president said that they, alongside Ukraine’s first lady, Olena Zelenska, discussed “the situation in our country, cooperation with partners, support for Ukraine, and the fourth Summit of Ladies and Gentlemen”.

• Ukraine’s government has approved a 2025 draft budget with a strong focus on defence spending, the prime minister said. Denys Shmyhal said on Friday that the draft, to be submitted to parliament, provided for 2tn hryvnias (US$48.2bn) in revenues and 3.6tn hryvnias in expenditures. The draft also included a provision of 2.22tn hryvnias (US$53.5bn) for defence. “The priority for this budget is very clear – the country’s defence and security,” he said. “We will again direct all domestic resources to these objectives.”

The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, has announced new sanctions against the Russian state-backed media company RT, formerly known as Russia Today, after new information gleaned from the outfit’s employees showed it was “functioning like a de facto arm of Russia’s intelligence apparatus”.

The Russian government in 2023 established a new unit in RT with “cyber operational capabilities and ties to Russian intelligence”, Blinken claimed, with the goal of spreading Russian influence in countries around the world through information operations, covert influence and military procurement.

“Today, we’re exposing how Russia deploys similar tactics around the world,” Blinken said. “Russian weaponization of disinformation to subvert and polarize free and open societies extends to every part of the world.”

The US treasury would sanction three entities and two individuals tied to Rossiya Segodnya, the Russian state media company, Blinken said. The decision came after the announcement earlier this month that RT had funneled nearly $10m to conservative US influencers through a local company to produce videos meant to influence the outcome of the American presidential election in November.

Speaking to reporters from the state department on Friday, Blinken accused RT of crowdfunding weapons and equipment for Russian soldiers in Ukraine, including sniper rifles, weapon sights, body armor, night-vision equipment, drones, radio equipment and diesel generators. Some of the equipment, including the recon drones, could be sourced from China, he said.

“While the crowdfunding campaign is out in the open, what’s hidden is that this program is administered by the leaders of RT,” Blinken said. They included the RT head, Margarita Simonyan, who was among nine employees of the company targeted with a visa ban earlier this month.

Blinken also detailed how the organisation had targeted countries in Europe, Africa and North and South America. In particular, he said that RT leadership had coordinated directly with the Kremlin to target the October 2024 elections in Moldova, a former-Soviet state in Europe where Russia has been accused of waging a hybrid war to exert greater influence. In particular, he said, RT’s leadership had “attempted to foment unrest in Moldova, likely with the specific aim of causing protests to turn violent”.

“RT is aware of and prepared to assist Russia’s plans to incite protests should the election not result in a Russia-preferred candidate winning the presidency,” Blinken said.

As a result of RT’s efforts to “weaponise disinformation”, Blinken said, the US, UK and Canada would launch a “joint diplomatic campaign … to rally allies and partners around the world to join us in addressing the threat posed by RT and other machinery of Russian disinformation and covert influence”.

A group of Israeli hostages were huddled in a tunnel in Gaza a few days after they had been dragged from their homes on 7 October, when the man who had plotted their abduction appeared out of the subterranean gloom.

His hair and beard were grey and his dark-ringed eyes stared out from under thick black brows. It was a face familiar to them from a thousand broadcasts and newspaper stories: Yahya Sinwar. The Hamas leader in Gaza was the most feared man in Israel, even before he ordered the October raid in which 1,200 people – two-thirds of them civilians – were killed and 250 taken hostage.

In fluent Hebrew, perfected over more than 22 years in an Israeli prison, Sinwar reassured them that they were safe and would soon be exchanged for Palestinian prisoners. One of the hostages, Yocheved Lifshitz, an 85-year-old veteran peace campaigner from the Nir Oz kibbutz, had no time for his show of concern for their welfare and challenged the Hamas leader to his face.

“I asked him how he wasn’t ashamed to do something like this to people who had supported peace all these years?” Lifshitz told the Davar newspaper after her release following 16 days in captivity. “He didn’t answer. He was quiet.”

A video recorded on Hamas security cameras at about the same time, on 10 October, and found by the Israeli military some months later, shows Sinwar following his wife and three children through a narrow tunnel and disappearing into the murk.

That was the last sighting of the man who unleashed the Gaza war. According to Gaza health officials, 41,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, have been killed in a devastating Israeli response that has flattened much of the territory, driving 90% of the population from their homes and bringing 2.3 million people to the edge of famine. Through all this, the prime target of the Israeli bombardment has remained at large and apparently unscathed.

The nearly year-long hunt for Sinwar has involved a mix of advanced technology and brute force, as his pursuers have shown themselves prepared to go to any lengths, including causing extremely high civilian casualties, to kill the Hamas leader and destroy the tight circle around him.

The hunters are a taskforce of intelligence officers, special operation units from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), military engineers and surveillance experts under the umbrella of the Israeli Security Agency, more widely known by its Hebrew initials or the acronym Shabak.

Personally and institutionally, this team is seeking redemption for the security failures that allowed the 7 October assault to happen. But despite their motivation, they have so far failed to pin down their quarry.

“If you’d told me when the war began that more than 11 months later he would still be alive, I would have found it amazing,” said Michael Milshtein, a former head of the Palestinian affairs section in Israeli Military Intelligence (Aman). “But remember, Sinwar prepared for a decade for this offensive and IDF intelligence was very surprised by the size and length of the tunnels under Gaza and how sophisticated they were.”

The IDF estimates there are 500km (300 miles) of tunnels under Gaza, an entire underground city. A second important challenge, according to at least some in the defence establishment, is that Sinwar is likely to have surrounded himself with human shields.

Ram Ben-Barak, a former deputy director of the Mossad, said: “Because of the hostages, we are very careful with what we are doing. I believe if there were no such restrictions, we would have found him easier.”

Whether or not Sinwar has a ring of human shields around him, the potential presence of hostages has not prevented the IDF from dropping hugely powerful 2,000lb (900kg) bombs on suspected Hamas hideouts in recent weeks. Out of its two primary war aims, the Netanyahu government puts the destruction of Hamas above the rescue of the hostages.

There is no shortage of expertise among Sinwar’s hunters. Targeted killings have been a core tactic of Israel’s military since the founding of the state. Since the second world war, Israel has assassinated more people than any other country in the western world.

Yahalom, a special section within the Combat Engineering Corps, has more experience in tunnel warfare than any of its counterparts in western armies, and has access to state-of-the-art US-made ground-penetrating radar. The clandestine signals intelligence unit 8200 is a global leader in electronic warfare and has been eavesdropping on Hamas communications for decades.

The Shin Bet lost many of its sources in Gaza after Israel pulled out of the territory in 2005, but worked hard to rebuild its network of informants after Israel launched its ground invasion last October, recruiting from among the desperate flows of Palestinians fleeing the onslaught.

Despite the capabilities of this formidable taskforce, it has come close to catching Sinwar just once, in a bunker beneath his home town of Khan Younis in late January. The fugitive warlord had left behind clothing and more than 1m shekels (over £200,000) in wads of banknotes. This was seen by some as a sign of panic, though the Hamas leader was ultimately estimated to have left a few days before Israeli forces raided the bunker.

The assumption made by Sinwar’s trackers is that he has long since abandoned using electronic communication, well aware of the skills and technology possessed by his pursuers. It was not only Hebrew that Sinwar studied in Israeli jail but also the habits and culture of his enemy.

“He really understands the basic instincts and the deepest feelings of Israeli society,” said Milshtein, now at the Moshe Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University. “I’m quite sure every move he makes is based on his understanding of Israel.”

Sinwar still communicates with the outside world, albeit with apparent difficulty. The long negotiations over a ceasefire in Cairo and Doha have often been paused while messages are sent to and from the subterranean commander. One strong possibility is that Sinwar uses couriers to remain in command, drawn from a small and shrinking coterie of aides he trusts, starting with his brother Mohammed, a senior military commander in Gaza.

It is the hope of the team hunting Sinwar that the need for contact with couriers, to issue orders and control the hostage negotiations, will ultimately prove his undoing, just as a courier led American trackers over several years to Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

It is believed that it was a courier who led the Israeli hunters to their biggest scalp of the war so far. At 10.30am on 13 July, Mohammed Deif, Hamas’s veteran commander who had topped Israel’s most wanted list since 1995, emerged from a hiding place near a camp for displaced people at al-Mawasi to take in some air with a close lieutenant, Rafa’a Salameh. Within an instant, both men were killed by bombs dropped by Israeli jet fighters – at least, according to IDF accounts – along with scores of Palestinians. Hamas insists Deif is still alive but he has not been seen since.

Many in the Israeli security establishment rued what they saw as a missed historic opportunity in September 2003 when they had planes ready to bomb a house where the entire Hamas leadership was holding a meeting. After furious argument in the military chain of command, the air force used a precision missile fired into the presumed meeting room, rather than flattening the whole building with a hail of bombs, out of concern for civilian casualties. They picked the wrong room and the Hamas leaders survived.

By July this year, the likelihood of killing large numbers of civilians was no longer an obstacle. In targeting Deif, the air force used 2,000lb bombs, the very weapons the Biden administration had stopped sending in May because of their indiscriminate destructive force. Israel reportedly dropped eight of them on 13 July. Ninety Palestinians in the vicinity were killed and nearly 300 injured.

“It seems that the main source for the attack on Mohammed Deif, that actually gave the information about his location, was a human source – one of these messengers that go from one tunnel or shelter to another and bring messages between one commander to another,” Milshtein said. “So maybe there will be an opportunity to follow one of these messengers [to Sinwar], or if one of them is an agent of Israel’s Shin Bet.”

Yossi Melman, a co-author of Spies Against Armageddon and author of other books on Israeli intelligence, said Deif may have made a mistake that Sinwar was unlikely to repeat.

“Deif was maybe more arrogant or maybe he told himself they tried to kill me so many times, and I lost an eye and an arm but I still survived, so maybe God is with me,” Melman said. “The Shabak and the army were waiting just for this opportunity. All these targeted killings are about waiting for the one minor mistake by the other side. But Sinwar is more cautious. He is not a military commander who has show himself to be among his people.”

On Tuesday this week, the air force again dropped 2,000lb bombs on al-Mawasi, designated by Israel as a “humanitarian zone”. At least 19 people were killed and 60 injured. The IDF said it had carried out “precision strikes” on Hamas targets, but did not specify the target.

It is possible that a deal will be made in which Sinwar goes into exile, and some suggest he may already be across the border, hiding in a tunnel on the Egyptian side of the Rafah border. That would cut against the conventional wisdom about the ideological zeal of a man who rose through Hamas ranks as the executioner of suspected informers.

“My personal assessment is that the likelihood of this option is very low,” said Milshtein, whose job in the Aman military intelligence service was to study Sinwar and other Hamas leaders. “It is in his basic DNA to stay in Gaza and to fight until death. He will prefer to die in his bunker.”

Ben-Barak, the former Mossad deputy chief, agreed. “I don’t think he will cross into Egypt, because the moment that people know he is not in Gaza, the whole [Hamas] operation will collapse – its morale and so on. That’s why I don’t think he would do that. He’s not a coward.”

Sinwar’s death or capture would undoubtedly be hailed as a major military success by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, which has made the destruction of Hamas’s “military and governing capabilities” a primary war aim. Whether it would stop the war is quite another question.

“When we catch him, the situation will be much better, maybe for a couple of weeks,” Ben-Barak said. “After that, someone else will come. It is an ideological war, not a war about Sinwar.”

Milshtein said: “After almost 50 years of assassinations, we understand this is a basic part of the game. Sometimes it is necessary to assassinate a very prominent leader. But when you start to think it will be a gamechanger and that an ideological organisation will collapse because you kill one of its leaders, that is a total mistake.

“I’m quite sure that someone will replace, or actually has already replaced, Mohammed Deif, and if Sinwar is killed there will be someone else … You cannot create a fantasy. It will not end the war.”

Donald Trump repeated racist claims about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, on Friday, doubling down on anti-immigrant rhetoric as residents in the town have faced bomb threats and have detailed their fears amid harassment.

“In Springfield, Ohio, 20,000 illegal migrant Haitians have descended upon a town of 58,000 people, destroying their way of life. They’ve destroyed the place,” Trump said during a rambling press conference at his golf course in Los Angeles. “People don’t like to talk about it. Even the town doesn’t like to talk about it, because it sounds so bad for the town. They live there … for years it was a great place. Safe. Nice. Now they have 20,000 and I actually heard today it’s 32,000.”

He later added: “We will do large deportations from Springfield, Ohio, large deportations. We’re gonna get these people out. We’re bringing them back to Venezuela,” stating the incorrect country where most of the immigrants are from.

Haiti is one of 16 countries the US government has granted temporary protective status (TPS) to because of ongoing conflict, making it easier for immigrants to get authorization to work in the United States. As president, Trump tried to end TPS for Haiti and referred to the country as a “shithole”.

Trump’s comments come after Tuesday’s presidential debate in which he first repeated the false claim that migrants in Springfield are stealing and eating people’s dogs and cats. The claim has been repeatedly debunked.

Springfield has received several bomb threats this week, prompting it to close its government buildings and evacuate its schools. Haitian residents in the town have reported receiving severe threats and harassment, according to the Haitian Times.

JD Vance, who represents the residents of Springfield as Ohio’s US senator, continued to attack the town on Friday, leaning into racist tropes that immigrants were responsible for bringing disease and crime to the community.

Just before Trump spoke in California, Joe Biden condemned his attacks on Haitians in Springfield.

“A community that’s under attack in our country right now. It’s simply wrong. There’s no place in America. This has to stop – what he’s doing. It has to stop,” Biden said at the White House.

An internal Secret Service investigation has confirmed that multiple, substantial communication breakdowns preceded the 13 July attempted assassination of Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania.

The Washington Post, citing unnamed officials, reported on Saturday that the former president’s security detail failed to direct local police to secure the roof of the building used by the gunman.

The Secret Service had discussed placing heavy equipment and flags between the stage and what would become Thomas Matthew Crooks’ perch
atop a glass factory 300ft away to block the clear sight lines from the roof.

But supervisors who arrived at Butler for the rally found cranes, trucks and flags were not placed in a way that blocked the line of sight.

Crook was later able to climb on to the roof and fire a rifle seven times, killing one spectator, wounding Trump in the ear and injuring two others, before being shot dead by Secret Service snipers.

The internal probe, known as a mission assurance investigation, found that unlike security details guarding a sitting president and vice-president that have military support, the Secret Service uses a command post separate from local police to protect political figures who are not serving in office.

But in Butler, Trump’s security detail had no way of communicating with local police guarding the perimeter of the fairground.

The astonishing lack of communication led to Crooks being able to get on the roof despite reports of a suspicious person carrying a rangefinder an hour before Trump was due to speak that were not relayed to the Secret Service. It took rally-goers to alert local police to a man “bear-crawling” on the roof before he loosed off shots at the former president, with one clipping Trump’s ear.

Instead, local countersnipers were instructed to text a photo of Crooks to just one Secret Service agent, and agents never heard local police radio traffic about trying to track him down. Butler county police also reportedly warned the Secret Service that they would not be able to post a patrol car next to the building but received no further instruction.

Kimberly Cheatle resigned as director of the agency days after the shooting after saying the roof’s slope was too steep for agents to manage. Acting agency director Ronald Rowe said in a statement to the outlet that “the Secret Service cannot operate under the paradox of ‘zero fail mission’ while also making our special agents and uniformed division officers execute a very critical national security mission by doing more with less”.

The report also found that the Secret Service had been slow to beef up Trump’s security even after it received reports of an Iranian plot to kill political candidates. Rowe testified to Congress later in July that he was “embarrassed” by security lapses and vowed to reform the agency’s practices. Two separate congressional investigations are also looking at security lapses.

The Trump campaign has said it has sometimes been forced to cancel or postpone events over concerns that security is insufficient and followed years of requests from Trump aides for greater security. Both the first lady, Jill Biden, and the vice-president, Kamala Harris, were in Pennsylvania that day, lending credence to claims that the Secret Service was stretched too thin.

“I think the American people are going to be shocked, astonished and appalled by what we will report to them about the failures by the Secret Service in this assassination attempt on the former president,” Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal told Fox News after being briefed on the internal review.

Less than half an hour into Tuesday’s presidential debate, former president Donald Trump deployed an updated version of a century-old slur against immigrant communities: that newcomers are eating other people’s pets and vermin.

“They’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats,” Trump said about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. In the past four years, 15,000 Haitians have settled in the city of almost 60,000, most of whom through a legal resettlement program for migrants. “They’re eating the pets of the people that live there, and this is what’s happening in our country, and it’s a shame.”

Though city officials confirmed that they have received no such reports, and the baseless claim quickly drew condemnation, false claims about Haitians eating pets went viral on rightwing social media, and were quickly amplified by conservative lawmakers. The Ohio senator and vice-presidential candidate JD Vance wrote on X on Monday about reports of “Haitian illegal immigrants” abducting and eating pets and causing “general chaos” in Springfield.

People of Haitian descent say these xenophobic attacks are nothing new for their community, and experts say the “dog eater” trope is a fearmongering tactic white politicians have long deployed against immigrants of color, particularly those of Asian descent.

“The way white Americans have positioned themselves as culturally and morally superior, this is low-hanging fruit to rally xenophobia in a very quick way,” said Anthony Ocampo, a professor of sociology at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.

Demonizing immigrants through falsehoods about their diet is a political tactic that originated in the late 19th century, during the height of anti-Chinese sentiment, said May-lee Chai, author and professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University.

Before the 1888 presidential election, Grover Cleveland’s campaign published trading cards that featured cartoonish sketches of Chinese men eating rats, and smeared his opponent, Benjamin Harrison, as “China’s presidential candidate”, according to the book Recollecting Early Asian America: Essays in Cultural History.

“It’s a very old political trope to dehumanize Chinese male immigrants and show them as a threat to white American workers,” Chai said. Chinese workers posed not only a “labor threat” in the restaurant industry but also a “civilization threat”, she added, as one rationale for the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was that Chinese immigration would contribute to the “browning of America”.

An urban legend alleging that Chinese restaurants serve dog meat, cat meat or rats dates back to the beginning of Chinese immigration to the US. An editorial from a Mississippi newspaper in 1852, for example, laments that trade with China is “not what it ought to be”, then says, “and besides, the Chinese still eat dog-pie”.

Chinese people may have been the first immigrant group to be widely profiled as “dog eaters”, but the slur was soon directed at other Asian communities, said Robert Ku, author of Dubious Gastronomy: The Cultural Politics of Eating Asian in the USA.

At the 1904 world’s fair in St. Louis, organizers reportedly forced the Indigenous Igorot people from the Philippines to butcher and eat dogs for entertainment – an event that cemented the stereotype against Filipinos. By the late 20th century, Ku said, groups including Koreans, Filipinos and Cambodians became “principally stereotyped as dog eaters”.

More recently, in 2016, the Oregon county commissioner and US Senate hopeful Faye Stewart accused Vietnamese refugees of “harvesting“ dogs and cats for food. And last May, a false claim that a Laotian and Thai restaurant in California served dog meat caused months of harassment and eventual closure of the business.

The myth of the “dog-eating Asian” has persisted for so long, Ku said, that had Trump targeted Asian immigrants instead of Haitians, the public outrage may have been more muted. “The fact that the slur was directed at Haitians in some ways has confused a lot of people,” Ku said, “since Haitians, as far as I know, have never before been stereotyped as dog eaters.”

Since animals such as dogs and cats are considered “honorary humans” in the US, Ku said, a slur such as “dog eater” or “cat eater” carries serious ramifications. In presenting immigrants as a danger to household pets, he said, Trump was “in effect portraying immigrants as perpetrators of the most savage or heinous act that is humanly possible – cannibalism”.

The stereotyping of Haitians as savage pet eaters could lead to a rise in racial violence, experts say. In Springfield this week, bomb threats led to the closure of city hall and schools. Republicans have also rallied around the death of an 11-year-old boy – who was in a bus struck by a minivan driven by a Haitian immigrant – to further demonize the community. Nathan Clark, the boy’s father, asked Trump and Vance to stop using his son’s name for “political gain”.

“If you make it seem like a group is savage or uncivilized, it makes it a lot easier to scapegoat and enact harmful laws against [them],” Ocampo said.

Kamala Harris has re-established a crucial polling advantage over Donald Trump following this week’s debate, which a clear majority of voters believe she won, according to a range of surveys.

The latest Guardian polling trends tracker shows the US vice-president regaining a small lead over the Republican nominee since Tuesday’s encounter in Philadelphia, a shift from surveys at the start of the week when the pair were essentially tied.

The movement is supported by individual polls, some of which show Harris with a bigger lead than the 0.9% advantage displayed in the Guardian tracker.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll, the first to be conducted since the debate, had Harris ahead by five points, 47 to 42%, a 1-point rise on the lead recorded in the week after last month’s Democratic national convention.

A separate Morning Consult survey published on Thursday showed a similar lead, 50 to 45%, up from the three- to four-point advantage Harris was registering before the debate. Tellingly, the poll reflected a loss of support for Trump, perhaps supporting some pollsters’ argument that his erratic performance in Tuesday’s encounter – which was watched by 67.1 million viewers – damaged his credibility.

Two other polls by YouGov and Leger give Harris a four- and three-point lead respectively. Generally, the post-debate polls present a rosier outlook for the vice-president than surveys beforehand, which suggested that the surge in popularity she experienced after replacing Joe Biden as the Democrats’ nominee had stalled, allowing Trump to draw close to even in national polls, and even edge ahead in one New York Times/Siena survey.

All available indicators suggest that the turnaround has been triggered by the events of the debate, where Harris was broadly seen as cutting a calm, controlled figure while getting under the skin of Trump – who repeatedly veered off policy message to go on wild tangents about immigrants and crowd sizes at his rallies.

While so far declining Harris’s challenge of a second debate, the former president nevertheless claims that he won the exchange.

Survey respondents beg to differ. The Reuters/Ipsos polls showed 53% who had heard something about the encounter believed that Harris had come out on top, as opposed to 24% thinking Trump had prevailed. The Morning Consult poll showed a similar margin, 55-25%, in favour of thinking Harris had won.

That is broadly in line with three earlier post-debate polls – conducted by CNN, YouGov and CNN – which gave Harris an average debate-winning margin of 23%.

“She definitely got a bump – and if those polls are accurate, a little more of a bump than I thought,” said John Zogby, a veteran pollster who believes key moments in some debates had small but decisive impacts on the outcomes of past presidential elections.

“Clearly Kamala Harris won the debate. There are enough polls out to show that and other observers beyond the polls also believe that she won. I think, more importantly, Trump lost the debate. He lost a lot of credibility, in addition to having lost the debate.”

The burning question, however, is whether one lost debate translates into a lost election.

Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster and strategist who forecast in advance of the debate that its winner would prevail in November, suggested that the sour nature of Trump’s showing had sealed his electoral fate.

“It was a pretty negative performance. Pretty pessimistic, cynical, contemptuous and I think that this will cost him, yes,” he told the interviewer Piers Morgan. “I think that he loses because of this debate performance.”

Although eight weeks separate Tuesday’s debate from election day on 5 November, the wafer-thin polling margins – particularly in key battleground states – mean the ripples emanating from Trump’s multiple miscues are likely to have an outsize effect, Luntz argued.

“There are very few undecided voters left,” he said. “It’s about 5% of the vote – and they only matter in seven states. And those states are too close to call. So essentially we are looking at less than 1% of America. But they heard nothing from Trump to give them a sense of anything that would be different going forward.”

Zogby, by contrast, said it was “too early to tell” the debate’s electoral impact and identified weaknesses in Harris’s performance that may return to haunt her.

“She lost some points on substance,” he said. “Right from the very beginning [when she was asked] can you tell the American people that they’re better off than they were three and a half years ago … she jumped right into the future. That’s going to dog her because three-quarters of the US voters think the country is headed in the wrong direction – and the blame goes to the party on top and the president on top. She owns the administration’s successes, but she also owns inflation and the economy.

“So I will say advantage to her on presentation and being cool, but there was no knockout blow.”

One additional piece of fallout from Tuesday’s debate might tilt the balance in Harris’s direction – the intervention of Taylor Swift.

The singer endorsed Harris immediately after the event, a move that prompted about 400,000 people to visit a voter registration link she posted on her Instagram, which has 284 million followers.

A late young voter registration surge favouring the Democrats could significantly affect the electoral role played by the age 18-29 voter demographic, among which Harris’s current 15% lead over Trump compares unfavourably with the 28% advantage Biden held in his 2020 election victory.

In a segment on CNN, Harry Enten, the network’s polling specialist, illustrated a trend towards Republican registration among voters under 30 in battleground states that are key to winning the White House.

In Pennsylvania and North Carolina, two fiercely contested swing states, the GOP had drastically whittled back the Democrats’ lead among young voters of four years ago, thanks to a superior registration drive, he said, the effect of which Harris could only hope Swift’s endorsement could reverse.

“Kamala Harris will absolutely welcome in the support of Taylor Swift if she can move young voters at all,” Enten said. “The bottom line is [Harris] is not doing as well among young voters as you might expect the Democrat to necessarily be doing, based upon history.”

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

The world’s oldest Jewish newspaper, the Jewish Chronicle, has removed a series of sensational articles relating to the Gaza war after claims that the material was fabricated by a “freelance journalist” who had also misrepresented his résumé.

After an investigation last week into the author, Elon Perry, the Jewish Chronicle put out a two-paragraph announcement late on Friday night, saying that it was unsatisfied with explanations supplied by the journalist regarding his assertions.

“The Jewish Chronicle has concluded a thorough investigation into freelance journalist Elon Perry, which commenced after allegations were made about aspects of his record. While we understand he did serve in the Israel Defense Forces, we were not satisfied with some of his claims.

“We have therefore removed his stories from our website and ended any association with Mr Perry.

“The Jewish Chronicle maintains the highest journalistic standards in a highly contested information landscape and we deeply regret the chain of events that led to this point. We apologise to our loyal readers and have reviewed our internal processes so that this will not be repeated.”

Founded in 1841, the JC – as it is familiarly known – has long been a respected institution in British Jewish life, attracting prominent Jewish journalists and writers to contribute. But the recent events have caused consternation about the direction of the paper as it has drifted further right under its editor, Jake Wallis Simons, and amid question over who owns it.

The extraordinary events of the past week, which have now seen a series of high-profile articles taken down, began several months ago when a writer described as a British-based Israeli journalist began contributing a series of reports allegedly based on Israeli intelligence sources.

Highly sensational, the articles purported to describe blow-by-blow Israeli operations – including what would be regarded as sensitive details – and intelligence purportedly gathered by Israel on the fugitive Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and his plans.

Journalists covering the Gaza conflict, already dubious about the veracity of the material, were unable to establish a meaningful record of Perry’s bona fides as described by the paper. Those suspicions were pushed into the open last week as a series of reports in the Israeli media described Perry’s articles as “fabrications”.

In recent months, there have been suggestions in the Israeli media that stories have been placed in European newspapers, including one in the German tabloid Bild, that are based on fake or misrepresented intelligence, planted as part of an effort to support prime minister Benjamin’s Netanyahu’s negotiating position over Gaza.

At a 4 September press conference for foreign media, Netanyahu suggested that if the Gaza border area with Egypt known as the Philadelphi Corridor – a sticking point in negotiations between Hamas and Israel for a ceasefire-for-hostages-deal – was not under Israeli military control, then Sinwar could use it to escape, perhaps taking hostages with him.

The following day, an article by Perry in the JC had turned that into reality. The piece claimed that intelligence existed showing that Sinwar planned to escape to Iran with the hostages, derived from the interrogation of a senior Hamas figure and a document found late in August.

Picked up by various Israeli media – and also promoted by Netanyahu’s son Yair and his wife Sara – the story, however, was quickly knocked down as a “wild fabrication”, with an IDF spokesman describing it as baseless.

Digging by reporters in Israel and elsewhere also quickly established that Perry’s claims about his background, including his supposed work as a journalist and academic, and parts of his military record, were untrue or questionable.

In particular, Perry faced questions about his claim to have served as a soldier during the famous Entebbe hostage rescue mission in 1976 and that he was a professor at Tel Aviv University for 15 years.

The removal of the articles, after an investigation formally announced by the paper only the day before, raises serious questions for JC editor Wallis Simons, a former novelist who has written for the Mail, the Telegraph and Spectator.

Despite being provided with a series of questions, Wallis Simons and the JC have so far declined to describe how Perry – an individual with no discernible journalistic track record, let alone as an investigative reporter – came to be writing for the paper or what due diligence had been exercised over an increasingly fantastic series of claims. Perry was contacted by the Observer about the removal of his stories but he did not respond.

The Perry affair comes on top of growing disquiet over the paper’s recent direction. In February, the Sunday Times Whitehall editor, Gabriel Pogrund, aired his misgivings about the paper on social media, including over its murky ownership arrangements that have puzzled observers.

“The coarseness and aggression of the JC’s current leadership is such a pity and does such a disservice to our community,” wrote Pogrund. “It also once again poses the question: who owns it!? How is it that British Jews don’t know who owns ‘their’ paper. Moreover, how can a paper not disclose its ownership? It’s an oxymoron. I hate having to pose the question publicly but I asked privately more than a year ago to no avail.”

Pogrund’s reservations are widespread among liberal British Jews, who feel it no longer represents them as it once did.

“There was a sense that it was in the pocket of no one. It worked for the whole Jewish community, and because of that it had a greater institutional reach … in the Jewish community,” said one figure familiar with the paper’s history and role.

“It has become much narrower in its outlook and campaigns on a particular set of issues.”

The question of the ownership of the JC was examined in an article by Alan Rusbridger, the former editor of the Guardian, in Prospect magazine earlier this year. He suggested the paper was ultimately backed by a billionaire American, who has denied the claim.

Among those commenting on the Jewish Chronicle’s removal of Perry’s articles were some who had been reposting them, including Eylon Levy, the combative former Israeli government spokesman who apologised for circulating the misleading articles to his 200,000 followers.

“The @JewishChron has removed the dodgy stories by ‘freelance journalist’ Elon Perry and ended its work with him,” wrote Levy on X. “This is exactly how media should treat reporters who quote dodgy sources. My apologies to anyone misled by my posting of these reports.”

Some were sceptical, however, that the removal of Perry’s stories would end the issue, including Ben Reiff of +972, one of the Israeli publications involved in exposing the fabrications.

“It seems that by firing Elon Perry @JewishChron is hoping to put this whole affair to bed, as if decisions weren’t made at the very top to employ a fake journalist, publish nine fake articles without verifying sources, and use the paper [as] an active agent in a pro-Bibi influence op,” wrote Reiff on X.

The world’s oldest Jewish newspaper, the Jewish Chronicle, has removed a series of sensational articles relating to the Gaza war after claims that the material was fabricated by a “freelance journalist” who had also misrepresented his résumé.

After an investigation last week into the author, Elon Perry, the Jewish Chronicle put out a two-paragraph announcement late on Friday night, saying that it was unsatisfied with explanations supplied by the journalist regarding his assertions.

“The Jewish Chronicle has concluded a thorough investigation into freelance journalist Elon Perry, which commenced after allegations were made about aspects of his record. While we understand he did serve in the Israel Defense Forces, we were not satisfied with some of his claims.

“We have therefore removed his stories from our website and ended any association with Mr Perry.

“The Jewish Chronicle maintains the highest journalistic standards in a highly contested information landscape and we deeply regret the chain of events that led to this point. We apologise to our loyal readers and have reviewed our internal processes so that this will not be repeated.”

Founded in 1841, the JC – as it is familiarly known – has long been a respected institution in British Jewish life, attracting prominent Jewish journalists and writers to contribute. But the recent events have caused consternation about the direction of the paper as it has drifted further right under its editor, Jake Wallis Simons, and amid question over who owns it.

The extraordinary events of the past week, which have now seen a series of high-profile articles taken down, began several months ago when a writer described as a British-based Israeli journalist began contributing a series of reports allegedly based on Israeli intelligence sources.

Highly sensational, the articles purported to describe blow-by-blow Israeli operations – including what would be regarded as sensitive details – and intelligence purportedly gathered by Israel on the fugitive Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and his plans.

Journalists covering the Gaza conflict, already dubious about the veracity of the material, were unable to establish a meaningful record of Perry’s bona fides as described by the paper. Those suspicions were pushed into the open last week as a series of reports in the Israeli media described Perry’s articles as “fabrications”.

In recent months, there have been suggestions in the Israeli media that stories have been placed in European newspapers, including one in the German tabloid Bild, that are based on fake or misrepresented intelligence, planted as part of an effort to support prime minister Benjamin’s Netanyahu’s negotiating position over Gaza.

At a 4 September press conference for foreign media, Netanyahu suggested that if the Gaza border area with Egypt known as the Philadelphi Corridor – a sticking point in negotiations between Hamas and Israel for a ceasefire-for-hostages-deal – was not under Israeli military control, then Sinwar could use it to escape, perhaps taking hostages with him.

The following day, an article by Perry in the JC had turned that into reality. The piece claimed that intelligence existed showing that Sinwar planned to escape to Iran with the hostages, derived from the interrogation of a senior Hamas figure and a document found late in August.

Picked up by various Israeli media – and also promoted by Netanyahu’s son Yair and his wife Sara – the story, however, was quickly knocked down as a “wild fabrication”, with an IDF spokesman describing it as baseless.

Digging by reporters in Israel and elsewhere also quickly established that Perry’s claims about his background, including his supposed work as a journalist and academic, and parts of his military record, were untrue or questionable.

In particular, Perry faced questions about his claim to have served as a soldier during the famous Entebbe hostage rescue mission in 1976 and that he was a professor at Tel Aviv University for 15 years.

The removal of the articles, after an investigation formally announced by the paper only the day before, raises serious questions for JC editor Wallis Simons, a former novelist who has written for the Mail, the Telegraph and Spectator.

Despite being provided with a series of questions, Wallis Simons and the JC have so far declined to describe how Perry – an individual with no discernible journalistic track record, let alone as an investigative reporter – came to be writing for the paper or what due diligence had been exercised over an increasingly fantastic series of claims. Perry was contacted by the Observer about the removal of his stories but he did not respond.

The Perry affair comes on top of growing disquiet over the paper’s recent direction. In February, the Sunday Times Whitehall editor, Gabriel Pogrund, aired his misgivings about the paper on social media, including over its murky ownership arrangements that have puzzled observers.

“The coarseness and aggression of the JC’s current leadership is such a pity and does such a disservice to our community,” wrote Pogrund. “It also once again poses the question: who owns it!? How is it that British Jews don’t know who owns ‘their’ paper. Moreover, how can a paper not disclose its ownership? It’s an oxymoron. I hate having to pose the question publicly but I asked privately more than a year ago to no avail.”

Pogrund’s reservations are widespread among liberal British Jews, who feel it no longer represents them as it once did.

“There was a sense that it was in the pocket of no one. It worked for the whole Jewish community, and because of that it had a greater institutional reach … in the Jewish community,” said one figure familiar with the paper’s history and role.

“It has become much narrower in its outlook and campaigns on a particular set of issues.”

The question of the ownership of the JC was examined in an article by Alan Rusbridger, the former editor of the Guardian, in Prospect magazine earlier this year. He suggested the paper was ultimately backed by a billionaire American, who has denied the claim.

Among those commenting on the Jewish Chronicle’s removal of Perry’s articles were some who had been reposting them, including Eylon Levy, the combative former Israeli government spokesman who apologised for circulating the misleading articles to his 200,000 followers.

“The @JewishChron has removed the dodgy stories by ‘freelance journalist’ Elon Perry and ended its work with him,” wrote Levy on X. “This is exactly how media should treat reporters who quote dodgy sources. My apologies to anyone misled by my posting of these reports.”

Some were sceptical, however, that the removal of Perry’s stories would end the issue, including Ben Reiff of +972, one of the Israeli publications involved in exposing the fabrications.

“It seems that by firing Elon Perry @JewishChron is hoping to put this whole affair to bed, as if decisions weren’t made at the very top to employ a fake journalist, publish nine fake articles without verifying sources, and use the paper [as] an active agent in a pro-Bibi influence op,” wrote Reiff on X.

Michaela Mabinty DePrince, a trailblazer and inspiration to many in the ballet world, has died at 29, a spokesperson announced on her Instagram page on Friday. No cause of death has yet been reported.

“Her life was one defined by grace, purpose, and strength,” the caption said. “Her unwavering commitment to her art, her humanitarian efforts, and her courage in overcoming unimaginable challenges will forever inspire us. She stood as a beacon of hope for many, showing that no matter the obstacles, beauty and greatness can rise from the darkest of places.”

DePrince’s family released a statement following the announcement of her death.

“I am truly in a state of shock and deep sadness. My beautiful sister is no longer here,” Mia DePrince wrote. “From the very beginning of our story back in Africa, sleeping on a shared mat in the orphanage, Michaela (Mabinty) and I used to make up our own musical theater plays and act them out. We created our own ballets … When we got adopted, our parents quickly poured into our dreams and arose the beautiful, gracefully strong ballerina that so many of you knew her as today. She was an inspiration.”

Born Mabinty Bangura in Sierra Leone, DePrince was sent to an orphanage aged three, after both of her parents died in the country’s civil war. At the orphanage, she experienced mistreatment and malnourishment, she told the Associated Press in 2012.

“I lost both my parents, so I was there [the orphanage] for about a year and I wasn’t treated very well because I had vitiligo,” she said at the time. “We were ranked as numbers, and number 27 was the least favorite and that was my number, so I got the least amount of food, the least amount of clothes and whatnot.”

After receiving word that the orphanage would be bombed, DePrince described walking shoeless for miles to reach a refugee camp. Her mother, who adopted DePrince and two other girls, including Mia, from the orphanage after meeting them in Ghana in 1999, said Michaela was “sick and traumatized by the war”, with tonsillitis, fever, mononucleosis and swollen joints. DePrince was four when she was adopted and moved to the United States.

Her passion for ballet began as a young girl in Sierra Leone after she saw a photo of a ballerina. But despite beginning to train in ballet at five, DePrince still experienced trials. At eight, she was told the US was not ready for a Black girl ballerina, even though she had been selected to perform the role of Marie in The Nutcracker. When she was nine, a teacher told her mother that Black girls were not worth investing money in.

DePrince eventually attended the Rock School for Dance Education, a prestigious and selective ballet school.

At 17, she was featured in First Position, a documentary that follows six dancers as they prepare for the Youth America Grand Prix. She received a scholarship to study at American Ballet Theatre’s Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School of Ballet. After graduating from high school, DePrince worked at the Dance Theatre of Harlem, becoming the youngest principal dancer in the theatre’s history.

In 2012, she performed in her first professional full ballet in South Africa. The following year, she joined the Dutch National Ballet’s junior company.

Audiences who are unfamiliar with ballet might recognize DePrince from Beyonce’s Lemonade, in which the then 21-year-old dances wearing an old-fashioned tutu and headpiece. In 2021, she joined the Boston Ballet as a second soloist. That year, she performed the leading role in Coppelia, a ballet film.

At the Boston Ballet, DePrince told reporters about how Black dancers who came before her helped motivate her despite experiencing racism and xenophobia.

“I’m very lucky,” DePrince said at the time. “There was Lauren Anderson – I had somebody to look up to. The Houston Ballet. Heidi Cruz, the Pennsylvania Ballet when I was younger. There’s also Misty Copeland. There’s not a lot of us. But what I always try to think about, and what my passion is, is spreading more poppies in a field of daffodils, so to have more Black and brown dancers.”

Even with her successes, DePrince did not forget her early childhood. She became a humanitarian and throughout her career expressed a desire to open a school for dance and the arts in Sierra Leone.

“That would be amazing – I’d like to use the money we earn from this book [a memoir, Hope in a Ballet Shoe] to open the school,” DePrince told the Guardian in 2015. “It’ll have to be when I retire from dancing. The arts can change you as a person. Dancing helped me share my emotions and connect to my family – it helped me feel like I was special and not the ‘devil’s child’. Those kids won’t have the same opportunities I had, and I don’t think they deserve that.”

She spent much of her career advocating for and promoting the inclusion of Black dancers in ballet.

“There are practically no Black people in ballet, so I need to speak out,” she told the Guardian.

In lieu of flowers, DePrince’s family has asked people to donate to War Child, an organization DePrince supported.

“This work meant the world to her, and your donations will directly help other children who grew up in an environment of armed conflict,” they wrote. “Thank you.”

Close Donald Trump ally Laura Loomer told a white nationalist conference in 2022 that she considered herself a “white advocate”, according to a recording of the speech obtained by the Guardian.

Loomer has come under scrutiny in recent days after being seen accompanying Trump on a flight to the presidential debate on Tuesday, and a subsequent string of racist tweets aimed at Kamala Harris.

That caused a political firestorm after Trump’s disastrous debate performance, with Harris emerging the clear winner. In particular, Trump’s raising of false claims around Haitian immigrants in Ohio eating pets triggered outrage and mockery of him.

Some observers have placed the blame on Trump’s performance partly due to his recent closeness to Loomer, including being pictured standing with him in his entourage at this week’s 9/11 commemorations.

The revelation of Loomer’s comments about being an advocate for white people is likely to further fuel the controversy around Trump’s relationship with Loomer, not least because they are just the latest in a long line of extremist remarks by the podcaster and self-described journalist.

Her attendance at the American Renaissance conference was reported at the time by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), but the contents of her speech have not been scrutinized until now.

The American Renaissance conference, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, is a venue where “racist ‘intellectuals’ rub shoulders with Klansmen, neo-Nazis and other white supremacists”.

Loomer spoke to the conference in November 2022, after losing a Republican primary in Florida’s conservative 11th district that August. To the applause of the audience, Loomer said: “I consider myself to be a white advocate and I openly campaigned for the United States Congress as a white advocate.”

Apart from her claim to be a “white advocate”, Loomer’s speech was focused on her grievances with traditional and social media companies and the Republican party, all of whom she blamed for her loss.

She claimed that during her campaign, “local TV stations would actually not allow me to have a congressional debate even though every other congressional candidate was able to have a televised debate in their district, because they called me a white supremacist”.

Loomer continued: “And they said that I was, you know, too much of a nationalist and too far right, because I openly ran my campaign to the right of the GOP.”

She said: “I have been a Republican my entire life, but unfortunately we live in a two-party system, which really just feels like a uniparty, but I’m here to tell you today that the Republican party is no longer rightwing enough for me.”

She then struck a hopeful note about a third party. “So perhaps they’re going to be an alternative in the future some day.”

Loomer then turned her sights on “Kevin McCarthy and the Congressional Leadership Fund and the Republican party”, saying they had “made such an effort this year to spend hundreds of millions of dollars … to get the Hispanic vote pushing to get the Black vote” while they also “used millions of dollars, by their own admission, to campaign against America First nationalist candidates”.

Loomer told the gathered white nationalists that “the top three issues I focused on in my campaign were election integrity, combating big tech social media censorship and election interference, and a 10-year minimum immigration moratorium”.

She said: “I was one of the first candidates to campaign in favor of mass deportations in an immigration moratorium and I was the first candidate to campaign on breaking up big tech.”

Loomer’s anti-immigrant rhetoric to the conference echoes Trump’s policy positions. In recent days the former president has repeated his promises to carry out mass deportations, and during the debate he falsely accused Haitian immigrants of eating pets.

Loomer told the conference crowd that her positions had “demonized – as I mentioned – as an extremist by even my own Republican party”.

But the remarks at the conference hardly stand alone.

Weeks earlier, in a podcast recording before the conference, Loomer thanked Jared Taylor, the podcast’s host and conference organizer, for his “white advocacy and being a white advocate and pioneering the intellectual discussion, right around race and demographics in this country”.

In March, in her podcast appearance before the primary, Loomer told Taylor that “my district is also the whitest district in the entire state of Florida”, and that she was pursuing “issues of [critical race theory] and anti-white racism and anti-white hatred”, and opposing the “anti-white Christian mentality the Democrats are pushing”.

Loomer asserted to Taylor that Democrats were “trying to persecute white people. They’re trying to persecute Christians, the most persecuted people in the world.”

Loomer added: “I look forward to being their advocate when I win my race and, you know, get elected as their next congresswoman.”

Loomer subsequently lost to Congressman Daniel Webster.

Loomer emerged as an anti-Muslim, pro-Trump activist during Trump’s first run at the White House in 2016. She has a long history of controversies, including protesting against a performance of Julius Caesar she saw as anti-Trump, handcuffing herself to Twitter’s headquarters to protest her deplatforming there, and now attacking migrants and Kamala Harris in the wake of Trump’s debate performance, which has been widely portrayed as disastrous for his campaign.

The Guardian has contacted Loomer for comment.

Next to the network of the highways that crisscross Turkey, among the lush forests or mountain peaks that dot the country, large stray dogs are a common sight. Most are pale white Akbaş dogs or Kangal shepherds, with their distinctive dark muzzle, pale golden coat and large bodies designed to herd livestock, although on the streets of Istanbul they are more commonly found lazing outside coffee shops, rotund and docile from a lifetime of treats.

In cities at least, the stray dogs are popular enough to be seen as part of the architecture. One particularly large and sleepy example that dozes outside an ice-cream shop on Istanbul’s main shopping street has become a local celebrity nicknamed “The Boulder”, complete with a string of rave reviews left by delighted tourists. The dog is marked as an Istanbul tourist attraction on Google Maps, which features a recommendation to avoid petting him.

Despite their welcome presence on the streets in some parts, Turkey’s estimated 4 million stray dogs have become the focus of a furious national debate. Last December, a 10-year-old boy was mauled by a pack of strays while walking to school, prompting president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to pledge that the government would find a solution. “It is our duty to protect the rights of our people harmed by stray dogs,” he said.

In late July, Turkish lawmakers worked overnight to push through a last-minute bill they claimed would resolve the issue of stray dogs, quickly sowing the seeds of outrage among opposition groups and animal rights activists. The new law, called the “massacre law” by its opponents, requires already underfunded and crowded Turkish shelters to take in strays to be vaccinated, spayed or neutered before putting them up for adoption, adding that any that are ill or pose a risk to humans will be euthanised. Mayors who fail to comply can face penalties, including up to two years in prison.

The new law quickly proved just as divisive as the dogs’ presence, pitting Turks who view their country as a nation of animal lovers where street strays are treated well, against supporters of the state, who say decisive action is needed for public safety. Proponents of the law claim that stray dogs are a blight, with Erdoğan calling them “a problem that no other developed country has”, and pointing to a need to control the fabric of city life at street level. Opposition activists have united against the law, calling on the authorities to properly enforce previous legislation – also introduced by Erdoğan – which calls on local councils to vaccinate and neuter the dogs, rather than threatening penalties and a cull.

At a protest in Istanbul, where police quickly surrounded demonstrators to assess whether their placards met their approval, a large crowd chanted “get your hands off our animals”.

Zeynep Tekin said she had turned out to protest because she feared the crackdown on stray animals represents the state’s latest effort to control public life, worried about where it might lead. The government, she said, should instead show care by properly funding municipal shelters to improve conditions, which activists believe would prove most effective.

“This is about much more than an animal rights issue … this is a war between the Turkish government and the oppressed,” she said, concerned that the authorities could seek to remove other minority groups from public life if this new law went unchallenged.

The same exuberance permeated a gathering of hundreds of animal rights and leftwing activists, with some eager to unite around a cause that has fuelled their longstanding discontent with the conservative shift under two decades of AKP rule. Others said they were focused entirely on the dogs, as they waved approved placards showing puppies alongside Turkish flags. “We’re here to defend the right to life,” said protester Tulin Yeniçeri. “This isn’t anything political.”

Longtime volunteer İnci Kutay recalled her time at a municipal shelter in Istanbul, where she described the “terrible conditions” of just two square metres of space for each dog. Sending more animals to these facilities was a death sentence, she said, and one she feared would be enacted brutally due to low budgets.

“This is why we object to the new law – the municipalities don’t cover the costs for the animals currently in your care. How are they going to do this for the ones they collect? At least if they are released they have a chance for a good life in the neighbourhood,” she said.

Proponents of the new law include Murat Pinar, who founded the Safe Streets Association after his daughter died when she was hit by a truck while running away from stray dogs in the town of Antalya. He said he wanted an end to what he called the “disorderly conduct” of the protests against the new law.

Previous measures to curb the problem weren’t enough, he said, calling the protesters members of “marginal groups like feminists, LGBTQ and even some groups that are considered terrorist organisations in our country”.

Next to the network of the highways that crisscross Turkey, among the lush forests or mountain peaks that dot the country, large stray dogs are a common sight. Most are pale white Akbaş dogs or Kangal shepherds, with their distinctive dark muzzle, pale golden coat and large bodies designed to herd livestock, although on the streets of Istanbul they are more commonly found lazing outside coffee shops, rotund and docile from a lifetime of treats.

In cities at least, the stray dogs are popular enough to be seen as part of the architecture. One particularly large and sleepy example that dozes outside an ice-cream shop on Istanbul’s main shopping street has become a local celebrity nicknamed “The Boulder”, complete with a string of rave reviews left by delighted tourists. The dog is marked as an Istanbul tourist attraction on Google Maps, which features a recommendation to avoid petting him.

Despite their welcome presence on the streets in some parts, Turkey’s estimated 4 million stray dogs have become the focus of a furious national debate. Last December, a 10-year-old boy was mauled by a pack of strays while walking to school, prompting president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to pledge that the government would find a solution. “It is our duty to protect the rights of our people harmed by stray dogs,” he said.

In late July, Turkish lawmakers worked overnight to push through a last-minute bill they claimed would resolve the issue of stray dogs, quickly sowing the seeds of outrage among opposition groups and animal rights activists. The new law, called the “massacre law” by its opponents, requires already underfunded and crowded Turkish shelters to take in strays to be vaccinated, spayed or neutered before putting them up for adoption, adding that any that are ill or pose a risk to humans will be euthanised. Mayors who fail to comply can face penalties, including up to two years in prison.

The new law quickly proved just as divisive as the dogs’ presence, pitting Turks who view their country as a nation of animal lovers where street strays are treated well, against supporters of the state, who say decisive action is needed for public safety. Proponents of the law claim that stray dogs are a blight, with Erdoğan calling them “a problem that no other developed country has”, and pointing to a need to control the fabric of city life at street level. Opposition activists have united against the law, calling on the authorities to properly enforce previous legislation – also introduced by Erdoğan – which calls on local councils to vaccinate and neuter the dogs, rather than threatening penalties and a cull.

At a protest in Istanbul, where police quickly surrounded demonstrators to assess whether their placards met their approval, a large crowd chanted “get your hands off our animals”.

Zeynep Tekin said she had turned out to protest because she feared the crackdown on stray animals represents the state’s latest effort to control public life, worried about where it might lead. The government, she said, should instead show care by properly funding municipal shelters to improve conditions, which activists believe would prove most effective.

“This is about much more than an animal rights issue … this is a war between the Turkish government and the oppressed,” she said, concerned that the authorities could seek to remove other minority groups from public life if this new law went unchallenged.

The same exuberance permeated a gathering of hundreds of animal rights and leftwing activists, with some eager to unite around a cause that has fuelled their longstanding discontent with the conservative shift under two decades of AKP rule. Others said they were focused entirely on the dogs, as they waved approved placards showing puppies alongside Turkish flags. “We’re here to defend the right to life,” said protester Tulin Yeniçeri. “This isn’t anything political.”

Longtime volunteer İnci Kutay recalled her time at a municipal shelter in Istanbul, where she described the “terrible conditions” of just two square metres of space for each dog. Sending more animals to these facilities was a death sentence, she said, and one she feared would be enacted brutally due to low budgets.

“This is why we object to the new law – the municipalities don’t cover the costs for the animals currently in your care. How are they going to do this for the ones they collect? At least if they are released they have a chance for a good life in the neighbourhood,” she said.

Proponents of the new law include Murat Pinar, who founded the Safe Streets Association after his daughter died when she was hit by a truck while running away from stray dogs in the town of Antalya. He said he wanted an end to what he called the “disorderly conduct” of the protests against the new law.

Previous measures to curb the problem weren’t enough, he said, calling the protesters members of “marginal groups like feminists, LGBTQ and even some groups that are considered terrorist organisations in our country”.

Iceland’s biggest fishing company is suing an art student at London’s high court for spoofing its website and issuing a fake public apology over a high profile corruption scandal.

The costly lawsuit, which will be heard this month, is feared by the student’s supporters to have a potentially chilling effect on artists engaging critically with large corporations, while also raising questions about the UK’s status as the go-to litigation jurisdiction for powerful businesses.

Oddur Eysteinn Friðriksson, a 41-year-old Icelandic artist and MA fine arts student at the University of Bergen who goes under the moniker Odee, describes his practice as “culture jamming”, a term used for artists such as US duo The Yes Men or British street artist Banksy, who impersonate brands or companies to draw attention to corporate malpractices.

For his 2023 work, We’re Sorry, Odee copied the corporate identity of Samherji, one of Europe’s largest fishing and fish processing companies, and on 11 May 2023 launched the website samherji.co.uk, containing a statement entitled: “Samherji Apologizes, Pledges Restitution and Cooperation with Authorities.”

The pretend apology related to a corruption scandal known as the “Fishrot files”: in 2019, documents released by WikiLeaks and investigations by Icelandic media suggested Samherji had allegedly bribed officials in Namibia in exchange for profitable trawling rights.

Two Namibian ministers and Samherji’s chief executive resigned in the wake of the scandal. In a genuine 2021 apology, the fishing company conceded that “mistakes were made”, while strongly denying allegations of bribery. Investigations are ongoing in both Namibia and Iceland.

In addition to the website, Odee sent out a press releases from samherji@samherji.co.uk to 100 media outlets in 20 countries that acknowledged “the severity of the allegations against us, which include corruption, bribery, and neocolonialism”.

A 10-metre mural containing the same text went on display a week later at Reykjavík’s contemporary art museum, as part of Friðriksson’s BA graduation show.

“Icelanders have been very critical of imperialist tactics throughout history. So to have this company drag the reputation of the country through the mud and put this huge stain on our history was just appalling,” Odee told the Observer. “An apology with promise of restitution and cooperation with the authorities is the only thing that can actually settle this matter”.

Samherji reacted swiftly, putting out a statement identifying the spoof before it was picked up as genuine by the media, and filing an application for an interim injunction that led to the website being taken down on 24 May last year.

Around the same time Samherji filed a complaint in London accusing Odee of trademark infringement and malicious falsehood and seeking damages, which will be heard at the high court on 25 September.

In preliminary proceedings, lawyers representing Samherji have insisted they are not complaining about the allegations per se but “the way the allegations are made”, and that the like-for-like impersonation of their corporate identity meant Odee’s “culture jamming” intervention did not qualify as parody.

The case is reminiscent of a landmark lawsuit which ended litigation between French fashion house Louis Vuitton and the Danish-Dutch artist Nadia Plesner over her use of images of its luxury bags in her work. The court eventually ruled in her favour, which allowed her to exhibit her painting Darfurnica, which dealt with the Darfur genocide.

Plesner, as well as The Yes Men, have written letters of support for the Icelandic artist.

One factor that distinguishes the two cases is that Louis Vuitton sued in the Netherlands, where there was negative media attention.

Another is that Plesner managed to sell her work for $45,000. Odee, meanwhile, said that though he has received offers for We’re Sorry, he would not sell it as a matter of principle.

In preliminary hearings, the high court judge initially questioned whether “Iceland is not the better place for this sort of issue to be ventilated”, though later appeared satisfied with the prosecution’s argument that the spoofed website’s co.uk suffix meant it was targeted at the UK.

Andra Matei, a Paris-based free speech lawyer whose legal NGO Avant Garde Lawyers has been supporting Odee in the case, suggested that comparatively high legal fees in the UK also meant a London-set lawsuit would lend a natural advantage to a big corporation such as Samherji.

The company did not respond to a question from the Observer asking to explain why it was suing the artist under English jurisdiction.

Odee said he had so far raised more than 33,000 Norwegian krone (£2,350) via a crowdfunding scheme, but would need about 150,000 NOK to defend himself at this point.

He said he had rejected two offers for a settlement since it would have hinged on him destroying the artwork and never publicly talk about it in the future. He added: “I would never settle with Samherji, I believe that freedom of speech will prevail.”

“We want Odee to have his day in court,” Matei told the Observer. “How important is it for us that artists get to express themselves freely and amplify important questions on issues like corruption and injustice? These are conversations we need to be having as a society.”

Odee was previously threatened with legal action by the now defunct Icelandic low-budget airline WOW Air, after launching a spoof new airline with the similar-looking name MOM Air, which charged passengers for toilet paper, soap and life jackets.

“Culture jamming is artistic jiu jitsu,” he said. “The more force someone applies to silence it, the harder they tend to fall.”

Anthony Albanese has dismissed Elon Musk’s claims the Labor government was “fascist”, saying the US billionaire needed to recognise X “has a social responsibility”.

“If Mr Musk doesn’t understand that, that says more about him than it does about my government,” the Australian prime minister said on Saturday.

Musk, who owns the social media platform X, formerly Twitter, made the comments about new legislation aimed at tackling deliberate lies spread on social media, which could see social media companies fined up to 5% of their annual turnover.

Musk responded to a post on X about Australia’s measures by simply posting: “Fascists”.

Musk has clashed with the Australian government multiple times over the past year, including over requests for X to take down clips of a Sydney bishop allegedly being stabbed.

In April the eSafety commissioner ordered X to remove the graphic content and initiated proceedings in the federal court to have the material taken down. In June the eSafety commissioner discontinued the proceedings, but a separate administrative appeals tribunal review of the topic is expected to be heard in October.

During the months-long saga, Musk accused the government of suppressing free speech.

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Albanese was also asked on Saturday about the huge uptake of renewable power, including in opposition leader Peter Dutton’s home state of Queensland.

The PM said the figures for the uptake of rooftop solar power showed voters were embracing renewables and understood their benefits.

“What these figures show is that Australians know that the cheapest form of energy is renewables. That’s why they’re putting it on their roofs,” he said.

“Nuclear energy is the most expensive, the slowest to roll out, and Peter Dutton is relying upon technology that doesn’t even exist anywhere in the world. What these figures show is that voters themselves are rejecting the idea that nothing should happen until the 2040s and sometime in the future.”

In June, Dutton announced the Coalition planned to build seven nuclear power plants and two small modular reactors. The nuclear pledge drew unanimous blowback from state premiers but Dutton told supporters he was prepared to override state nuclear bans.

Analysis from the Smart Energy Council found the controversial energy plan would cost taxpayers a minimum of $116bn – the same cost as delivering the Albanese government’s plan for 82% renewables by 2030, and an almost 100% renewable energy mix by 2050 – and as much as $600bn while supplying just 3.7% of Australia’s energy mix by 2050.

Children who use more personal care products like sunscreen, lotion, soaps and haircare items have higher levels of toxic phthalates in their bodies, new research finds, and the highest levels were found in Black and Latino children.

The study checked more than 600 urine samples from four- to eight-year-olds for phthalates, which are highly toxic endocrine disruptors that can alter hormone production, and are linked to reproductive, immune system and metabolic diseases. They are also considered developmental toxicants that impact children’s behavior and learning ability.

The study’s findings are “concerning”, said Michael Bloom, a George Mason University researcher and lead author of the study.

“The results show that the use of skincare products on children are sources of exposure to these chemicals,” Bloom said. “What also definitely raises concern is that these products tend to be used frequently and over long periods of time.”

Phthalates are common plasticizers used in plastic containers across the economy, and many companies also add them as ingredients to personal care products to help stabilize them or carry fragrances. Phthalates can migrate from plastic containers into personal care items, and recent testing has also found them widely contaminating food and medications.

Children are especially vulnerable when absorbing phthalates because they have a greater area of skin surface relative to their body weight, and because their metabolic systems may not be fully developed to help process the compounds. Still, little research on children’s exposure to the chemicals in personal care products exists, Bloom said.

Though the body eliminates the chemicals quickly, humans are exposed to such a high level of them and via so many routes that the consistent exposure presents a health risk.

“The habits that predispose us to exposure to these chemicals, like use of lotion, tend to be routine, so we often end up with a scenario in which by the time we eliminate one dose … we’re putting on lotion the next morning, and this state of pseudo persistence can emerge,” he said.

The use of lotions like moisturizers or sunscreens, as well as oils, were associated with the highest levels in children. Those who reported using lotions in the previous 24 hours showed higher levels of the type of phthalate that migrates from plastic into products, while hair oil usage was strongly associated with the type of phthalates intentionally added to products.

The study found boys tended to have higher levels than girls, and the varying levels among racial groups may have to do with socioeconomic factors, brand preferences, accessibility, methods of product application or frequency of use, Bloom said.

Cheaper products that are purchased from a dollar store instead of a higher end store are more likely to have product with higher levels of phthalates because it has likely been in a plastic tube for longer and potentially being subjected to higher heat, two issues that cause the chemicals to migrate at greater rates.

Products that are labeled “phthalate-free” are typically more expensive, but that only means the chemicals were not intentionally added to the product. Phthalates from containers can still migrate into “phthalate-free” products and the study found no difference in the levels of the chemical in the urine of those who used “phthalate-free” products compared with those who did not.

Little regulation around the chemicals exists. The Food and Drug Administration allows a limited number of phthalates to be added to personal care items, but there is no monitoring or limits on the amount of the chemical that can be in the product.

That makes it virtually impossible for consumers to knowingly avoid the chemicals. Bloom noted the European Union has limits on many types of phthalates in personal care items, so it is possible to make effective products that are not contaminated with the chemicals.

The study, its authors wrote, should “promote discussions among policymakers that regulate manufacture and packaging of personal care products to eliminate endocrine disrupting chemical exposure disparities among children”.

In the scene from Back to the Future where Michael J Fox plays Johnny B Goode on stage and gets so caught up in the music that he knocks over his own amp, the room descends into a shocked and disapproving silence.

A similar silence descended on the audience of a Boston gig on Friday night when Perry Farrell – AKA the “godfather of alternative music” – shoved his guitarist Dave Navarro with his fist during a song and then, clearly enraged, squared up to him and threw another punch, sending Navarro backwards.

Farrell had to be physically restrained by crew members after the brawl and was bundled off stage as fans began to boo. A few minutes later, the house lights came on and the show ended.

The incident between the two veteran band members, which appeared to take Navarro by surprise, was caught on camera from multiple angles by audience members.

Farrell’s wife, Etty Lau, posted on Instagram that the frontman was upset by being “drowned out” by his bandmates playing too loudly and he was unwell.

Lau said her husband had been struggling with “tinnitus and a sore throat every night” that has affected his voice, and he “felt that the stage volume had been extremely loud and his voice was being drowned out by the band”.

Lau added there had been “tension and animosity between the band members” but felt this atmosphere was also “the magic that made the band so dynamic”.

She wrote: “When the audience in the first row, [they] started complaining up to Perry cussing at him that the band was planning too loud and that they couldn’t hear him, Perry lost it.

“He wasn’t singing, he was screaming just be to be heard.”

On social media, fans who had attended the gig to see the newly reunited Jane’s Addiction on tour reported that “problems” started during an earlier song, when Farrell allegedly shouted at Navarro. Witnesses said they continued throughout the set, which one fan pointed out included a song ironically entitled Summertime Rolls.

On X, a videographer who said he’d attended the show, tweeted that Farrell “had a huge bottle of wine with him all evening”.

Farrell, 65, began his career in the American post-punk band Psi Com in the 1980s, before becoming the lead singer of Jane’s Addiction.

The band, which created its unique blend of psychedelic rock, punk and heavy metal music, had an acrimonious breakup in 1991. For years, Eric Avery, a founding member, repeatedly refused to take part in reunion tours but rejoined the band after a 12-year hiatus in 2022. However, Navarro, now 57, was unable to join the band’s reunion tour that year or last year because of long Covid.

The band were finally reunited for their first show together in 14 years in May earlier this year and were in the middle of a long tour of the US.

There appeared to be tensions between band members earlier this week in New York City, when the band played two nights at The Rooftop at Pier 17, NME reported.

Farrell is understood to have told the crowd at Pier 17 that his voice was not in great shape. “Ladies and gentlemen, I have to be honest with you. Something’s wrong with my voice. I just can’t get the notes out all of a sudden,” he said.

Bassist Eric Avery later acknowledged the poor New York performance in an Instagram post, writing: “Looking forward to getting another crack at this spectacular rooftop venue tonight. I’m optimistic we will be better.”