A new series of extraordinary explosions aimed at Hezbollah – this time targeting walkie-talkies – has killed at least 20 and wounded more than 450 in cities across Lebanon, as international observers warned that the simultaneous detonation of thousands of booby-trapped communications devices may constitute a war crime.

The targeted detonations of the walkie-talkies came one day after more than 2,800 were injured and 12 killed by exploding pagers in an attack blamed on Israel that world leaders and diplomats have warned could lead to an all-out conflict between Israel and the powerful militant group despite efforts by the US and UN to avert an escalation with Hezbollah.

A source in Hezbollah confirmed that walkie-talkies used by the group were targeted in Wednesday’s attack. A senior security source said the individual explosions were “small in size”, similar to Tuesday’s attacks.

UN secretary general António Guterres condemned the attacks and called for restraint from both Hezbollah and Israel, while the UN security council was convened to meet on Friday to discuss the unprecedented operations in what appeared to be a massive supply chain breach by Israeli intelligence.

Guterres also suggested the operation may have been planned as a prelude to a major Israeli attack on Lebanon. “Obviously the logic of making all these devices explode is to do it as a pre-emptive strike before a major military operation,” Guterres told reporters.

In a potentially related move, the Israeli defence minister, Yoav Gallant, said Israel was shifting its military focus towards the front with Hezbollah, during a visit to an air force base on Wednesday.

“The centre of gravity is shifting northward, meaning we are increasingly diverting forces, resources and energy towards the north,” Gallant said, adding that the goal was to return displaced northern residents to their homes.

He further complimented the Israeli Intelligence Agency, the Mossad, for “great achievements”, but stopped short of claiming responsibility for the two days of attacks in Lebanon.

“I have said it before, we will return to the citizens of the north to their homes in security and that’s exactly what we are going to do,” the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said in a video statement.

Israel and Hezbollah, an Iran-backed faction that controls swaths of Lebanon, have been trading attacks across a shared border in a battle that has threatened to escalate into a regional war.

Reports in Israeli media have suggested that Netanyahu and his military advisers may have decided to detonate the devices this week over concerns that Hezbollah was close to discovering the operation to booby-trap the group’s communications equipment, which was launched at least five months ago.

The attacks began just a day after Biden administration adviser Amos Hochstein met Netanyahu and Gallant in an effort to de-escalate tensions with Hezbollah. After that, the Israeli PM announced that returning tens of thousands of Israeli residents to their homes in northern Israel had become a key war aim, suggesting Israel could be preparing for further escalation.

US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, who is visiting Egypt to discuss the US-led proposal for a Gaza ceasefire, appeared to suggest that Israel had timed the strike to derail a potential breakthrough in those talks.

When US and other mediators believed they were making progress on a ceasefire deal in Gaza, Blinken said, “time and again, we’ve seen an event that … threatens to slow it, stop it, derail it,” he said, regarding Tuesday’s explosions in Lebanon. Unusually, Blinken was not scheduled to visit Israel during the Middle East trip.

Meanwhile, diplomats and human rights organisations warned that the strikes, which targeted thousands of pagers and hundreds of walkie-talkies ordered by Hezbollah, were indiscriminate and violated human rights law.

“Simultaneous targeting of thousands of individuals, whether civilians or members of armed groups, without knowledge as to who was in possession of the targeted devices, their location and their surroundings at the time of the attack, violates international human rights law and, to the extent applicable, international humanitarian law,” said Volker Türk, the UN high commissioner for human rights, in a statement.

“Customary international humanitarian law prohibits the use of booby traps – objects that civilians are likely to be attracted to or are associated with normal civilian daily use – precisely to avoid putting civilians at grave risk and produce the devastating scenes that continue to unfold across Lebanon today,” said Lama Fakih, Middle East and north Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “The use of an explosive device whose exact location could not be reliably known would be unlawfully indiscriminate, using a means of attack that could not be directed at a specific military target and as a result would strike military targets and civilians without distinction.”

“A prompt and impartial investigation into the attacks should be urgently conducted,” Fakih said.

The fresh waves of strikes marked a second day of chaos in Lebanon and in particular in Hezbollah’s stronghold in Beirut, where one of the walkie-talkies exploded at a funeral for three Hezbollah members and a child who had been killed by an exploding pager the day before.

Twenty people were killed and at least 450 injured as a result of the new round of explosions, Lebanon’s health ministry said. The ministry added that first responders had almost finished transferring people to hospitals.

Several solar power systems exploded in people’s homes across Lebanon, according to the National News Agency, injuring at least one girl in the town of al-Zahrani, south Lebanon. Pictures of exploded solar panels, fingerprint readers and other devices circulated on social media, though it was unclear whether they blew up by themselves or were near walkie-talkies that exploded.

Images of the exploded walkie-talkies examined by Reuters showed an inside panel labeled “ICOM” and “made in Japan.”

ICOM said in a brief statement on its website that it was aware of media reports that walkie-talkies with stickers bearing its logo had exploded in Lebanon. “We are currently trying to establish the facts and will provide updates on our website as new information becomes available,” it said.

The wireless communications company, based in the western city of Osaka, has offices in several other countries, including the US, Germany and China. The firm has previously said that production of model IC-V82, which appeared to be the model in images seen by Reuters, was phased out in 2014.

Japan’s chief cabinet secretary, Yoshimasa Hayashi, told reporters the government was aware of reports regarding the walkie-talkies and that the government was gathering information.

Hezbollah and the Lebanese government have blamed Israel for Tuesday’s attack, with the former threatening a “fair punishment” for the explosion.

Pictures showed broken and singed communication devices amid scenes of destruction. The Guardian saw multiple pictures of an Icom IC-V82 two-way radio that had seemingly exploded.

In a video, a member of Hezbollah in the southern suburb of Beirut can be seen taking part in a funeral for fighters killed on Tuesday when a blast occurs somewhere on his body, knocking him to the ground and sending the crowd around him running.

While paramedics rushed to evacuate wounded from affected areas, a group of men attacked a UN peacekeeping patrol transiting through the city of Tyre in south Lebanon. A video showed men throwing stones at two UN Interim Force in Lebanon (Unifil) armoured personnel carriers on the side of one of the main thoroughfares in the city.

“The situation is under control right now. The Lebanese armed forces intervened but this is a serious breach of our freedom of movements,” Unifil spokesperson Andrea Teneti told the Guardian, adding that no injuries occurred, but there were material damages.

Israel has not claimed responsibility for either of the attacks, but reports suggest it managed to place explosives in thousands of pagers bought by Hezbollah.

The Israeli ministry of defense has also moved the 98th Division, whose forces until recently had been fighting in the Gaza Strip, to the northern region of Israel, after the cabinet’s decision to shift most of the military’s capabilities to the region. The 98th Division will join the 36th Division, which has been deployed in northern Israel for several months.

In addition, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) decided to deploy a limited recruitment of reserves in the north, including air defence, Home Front Command and Medical Corps personnel.

On Wednesday, Maj Gen Uri Gordin, head of the IDF’s Northern Command, visited a drill carried out by reservists of the IDF’s 179th Brigade, which is simulating fighting in Lebanon, including manoeuvring in enemy territory.

“The mission is clear: we are determined to change the security reality as soon as possible. The commitment of the commanders and the troops here is complete, with peak readiness for any task that will be required,” Gordin said in a statement provided by the IDF.

Netanyahu and president Isaac Herzog met for a security briefing on Wednesday morning, Herzog’s office announced. No details were released after the meeting.

Meanwhile, the IDF said dozens of rockets were fired from Lebanon at the western Galilee in the afternoon, striking open areas. They did not cause any injuries.

A drone, allegedly launched from Iraq, was also intercepted by an Israeli fighter jet early on Wednesday morning, the IDF said.

It may be years before the full story is told of how the coordinated explosions of thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah were orchestrated. But, even without Israel publicly admitting responsibility, it is clear that the attack must have been carefully planned – however uncertain its consequences.

Experts generally believe a small mount of stable explosive was carefully implanted into each sabotaged device. Alan Woodward, a professor of cybersecurity at Surrey University, said: “There wouldn’t need to be much explosive, as proximity to a human body means it would cause injury even if it was a few grams.”

The first wave of explosions – which occurred from about 3.30pm local time on Tuesday – appear to have been triggered by a special message from Hezbollah leadership, implying, Woodward argued, a specific modification of the pagers’ embedded software. This meant it would trigger an explosion when the appropriate message was sent.

It may have been a default setting on the pagers, but the trigger message came with a cynical twist. Eyewitnesses say the pager bleeped, then paused, then detonated – giving enough time for them to be brought closer to the owner’s face – which is why Lebanese doctors reported treating multiple hand and eye injuries after the blast.

Twelve people were killed and about 2,800 injured in Tuesday’s explosions, and 14 died in a second wave of blasts that followed on Wednesday when walkie-talkies starting blowing up. This suggests the attacks amounted to a concerted attempt to disrupt Hezbollah’s communications – the kind of activity that could be a prelude to a bombing raid of south Lebanon or other conventional military attack.

Sabotaging the pagers is not a trivial undertaking, and amounts to a compromise of the supply chain, said Oleg Brodt, a director at Ben-Gurion University’s Cyber Labs. It may even have required either the cooperation of the manufacturers, or for Israel’s Mossad spy agency – or whoever carried out the attacks in Lebanon – to have manufactured the doctored pagers themselves, though this is speculative.

The pagers bore the logo of an apparently hapless Taiwanese manufacturer, Gold Apollo. Its founder, Hsu Ching-Kuang, said his company had subcontracted the manufacture of the AR-924 model involved in the attack to the little-known Budapest-based BAC Consulting KFT, a deal he said had been struck three years ago.

From here the trail goes strange, then cold. BAC Consulting was registered in Hungary in 2022 and provided a Budapest address on its website, the same address used by multiple companies. Its chief executive is Cristiana Bársony-Arcidiacono, according to her profile on LinkedIn, and she is described as a graduate of the London School of Economics (LSE) and a native speaker of both Hungarian and Italian.

When the Guardian called, Bársony-Arcidiacono asked how the reporter had got the number and then hung up. However, she confirmed to NBC that her company worked with Gold Apollo. Asked about the pagers and the explosions, Bársony-Arcidiacono said: “I don’t make the pagers. I am just the intermediate [sic]. I think you got it wrong.” Later, Hungarian officials also said the pagers had not been made in the country.

BAC Consulting’s website went down on Wednesday, but internet archives of the site were full of generic pictures of coastlines and vague descriptions of its work without any reference to pager manufacture. Previous posts by Bársony-Arcidiacono on LinkedIn feature pro-Russian, anti-Ukraine comments and a complaint “how does it make no one says anything about US colonization”?

Making the deadly booby-trapped pagers is only half the story, however. Whoever did so had a good intelligence picture inside Hezbollah – an understanding that the Mossad and Israel’s other security agencies did not have of Hamas prior to 7 October. They knew that Hezbollah had placed an order for about 5,000 pagers, after the group’s leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, had warned in February against using mobile phones.

“Your phone is their agent,” the Hezbollah secretary general warned at the time, not anticipating that his group’s enemies would be willing to plant explosives inside pagers instead.

The assailants also knew who would be supplying the sabotaged devices to Hezbollah, and had a way of ensuring they could control their delivery to the militant group – as well as their manufacture or compromise.

“The scale, destruction and precision of the attack suggests a sophisticated operation months in the making,” said Emile Hokayem from the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Though Israel has not claimed responsibility for the attack, few doubt its security forces were behind the effort – extraordinary because it involved thousands of devices rather a single booby-trapped phone of the type used to assassinate the Hamas leader Yahya Ayyash in 1996.

Yoav Gallant, the country’s defence minister, called Lloyd Austin, his US counterpart, “several minutes” before the pagers began exploding to tell him that an operation in Lebanon was coming, according to the Axios website. No specifics were shared, and the state department said the US had not been forewarned of the attack plan – though Gallant’s phone call comes close to an acknowledgment of responsibility.

But however sophisticated the planning, the reality is that many civilians were harmed as the pagers exploded. One video captured a pager exploding in a grocery store; others showed adults and children in hospital with severe penetrating traumatic injuries to their heads, bodies and limbs. Human Rights Watch, a monitoring group, said human rights law “prohibits the use of booby traps … precisely to avoid putting civilians at grave risk”.

In the immediate aftermath, Yossi Melman, a co-author of Spies Against Armageddon and other books on Israeli intelligence, asked “why would you waste a valuable intelligence asset that could be used in a more urgent time?” amid fears of an all-out war between Israel and Hezbollah. But it appears Israel has been wanting to step up its attack on the militant group, two days after its security cabinet said allowing 60,000 displaced people to return safely to their homes in the north of the country was now a war aim.

Hokayem argued that the pager operation, followed now by the walkie-talkie attack, “represents a humiliating blow and a major operational security failure for Hezbollah”, already reeling from the assassination by airstrike of its top military commander in July.

“The large number of casualties and their distribution across the country have had a deep impact on Lebanese society and on Hezbollah’s constituency,” he concluded. But it is also likely to risk retaliation, and an intensification of hostilities, as both sides teeter on the brink of war.

Additional reporting by Michael Safi

The detonation of walkie-talkies around Lebanon a day after scores of pagers used by Hezbollah officials blew up is a one-two punch that drives home the extent of Israel’s penetration of its Shia foe’s defences across its northern border.

It represents utter humiliation for Hezbollah that its security can be so effortlessly breached twice, and be shown incapable of protecting its own people.

Israel has not admitted responsibility for the blasts but there is little doubt around the region that this was an operation bearing the Mossad’s hallmarks. The more difficult questions concern its purpose: do these attacks represent tactical surprise for its own sake, or are they part of a broader strategy, and where does that strategy lead? Is this a prelude to an all-out war in Lebanon, or a substitute for one?

The miniature bombs have gone off in Lebanon at a time of increasingly bellicose language from Netanyahu’s coalition. At a late-night meeting on Tuesday, the security cabinet agreed to broaden the country’s stated war aims from Gaza to the north, to include the goal of enabling the return of over 60,000 Israelis displaced by cross-border exchanges with Hezbollah since the conflict erupted on 7 October.

The security logic in Israel is that those people cannot go home to their northern towns and villages while Hezbollah is still entrenched in southern Lebanon, between the border and the Litani river.

The hope of the Biden administration and other brokers in the region is that a negotiated ceasefire in Gaza would also defuse tensions on the Israel-Lebanon border, allowing displaced Israelis to return without further escalation. No such ceasefire has materialised, however, while the talk of a new Israeli war in Lebanon has gathered momentum. Netanyahu’s office has reportedly been briefing in recent days that one of the reasons the prime minister is considering dumping the defence minister, Yoav Gallant, is that Gallant’s enthusiasm for a war in Lebanon has dimmed.

As always with Netanyahu, it is hard to tell how much of this whispered campaign is really about military intentions, and how much is about domestic politics and the prime minister’s constant need to tend to his coalition to keep him in power. He is talking to Gallant’s would-be replacement, Gideon Sa’ar, the leader of the New Hope party, whose members could help stabilise the coalition’s standing.

While there are manoeuvres in the corridors of the Knesset, there are few signs of corresponding offensive deployments on the Lebanese border. Israel Defense Forces (IDF) units continue to be rotated out of Gaza to go north, but they are exhausted and in insufficient numbers to launch a ground attack.

Israel could greatly intensify its aerial campaign in Lebanon, but few if any military observers believe that the threat represented by Hezbollah and its formidable arsenal of missiles and rockets can be blunted from the air alone. And a ground offensive on Hezbollah’s home turf in southern Lebanon would be costly in terms of Israeli casualties and therefore politically risky.

The detonating devices in Lebanon offer Netanyahu the benefits of a spectacular, daring success, showing he is taking the battle to the enemy in the north, in the knowledge that Hezbollah, and its Iranian backers, have looked anxious to avoid being drawn into a full-scale war with Israel. The Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, sought to mislead his followers by exaggerating the success of a mass rocket and drone attack last month against strategic targets like Israeli intelligence headquarters, to lessen internal political pressure to inflict greater damage on Israel.

Nasrallah is now under even more pressure to deliver a spectacular success of his own. The Israeli security agency, Shin Bet, claimed this week to have foiled a Hezbollah plot to assassinate a former senior member of the country’s security establishment. If such a plot had succeeded, the demands within Israel for the IDF to deal with the Hezbollah threat “once and for all” would have grown significantly.

It is an inherently unstable situation. Hezbollah needs to maintain its credibility as the tip of the spear of Islamic resistance to Israel. Netanyahu needs to keep Israel in a continual state of war to put off the threat of elections, and with them his risk of a fall from office with corruption charges pending in the courts. Both seek to stay on the brink of a wider war, without the power necessarily to stop events taking on a momentum of their own and taking the region over the edge.

In an unprecedented security breach, thousands of pagers and walkie-talkie radios belonging to members of Hezbollah detonated across Lebanon in simultaneous explosions on Tuesday and Wednesday, killing at least 26 people and wounding thousands of others.

Hospitals across Lebanon were overwhelmed with an influx of patients after the pager attack on Tuesday, and a field hospital was set up in the southern city of Tyre to accommodate the wounded.

Hezbollah has blamed Israel and vowed to retaliate. Israel has declined to comment on the blasts, but Tuesday’s explosions came just hours after the military announced it was broadening its aims in the war sparked by the Hamas attacks on 7 October to include its fight against Hezbollah along the border with Lebanon.

It remains unclear how exactly such an audacious attack was carried out, but here is what we know so far.

More than 100 Republican former national security and foreign policy officials on Wednesday endorsed Kamala Harris for president in a joint letter, calling Donald Trump “unfit to serve” another term in the White House.

Former officials from the presidential administrations of Republicans Ronald Reagan, George H W Bush, George W Bush and Donald Trump, as well as Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama voiced their support for Harris, the Democratic nominee for president in this November’s election. They were joined by some former GOP members of Congress.

The letter said: “We believe that the president of the United States must be a principled, serious, and steady leader.”

It went on: “We expect to disagree with Kamala Harris on many domestic and foreign policy issues, but we believe that she possesses the essential qualities to serve as president and Donald Trump does not. We therefore support her election to be president.”

Among the signees were former defense secretaries William Cohen and Chuck Hagel, who served in the Clinton and Obama administrations, respectively. Others include William Webster, a former CIA and FBI director under the Reagan and first Bush administrations, as well as Michael Hayden, a former CIA and NSA director under the younger Bush and the Obama administrations.

“We firmly oppose the election of Donald Trump. As president, he promoted daily chaos in government, praised our enemies and undermined our allies, politicized the military and disparaged our veterans, prioritized his personal interest above American interests, and betrayed our values, democracy, and this country’s founding document,” the letter added.

Pointing to Trump’s involvement in the 6 January 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol, his “susceptibility to flattery and manipulation” by authoritarian leaders such as Vladimir Putin of Russia and Xi Jinping of China, and “chaotic national security decision-making”, the former officials called Trump unfit to serve again as president or in “any office of public trust”.

The former officials also pointed to Harris’s support for Nato and Israel, as well as her commitment to signing the bipartisan border security package that Republicans blocked, and her pledge to appoint a Republican to her administration as reasons for their endorsement.

Several former Trump officials who signed the letter include Mark Harvey, a former special assistant to the president, and Elizabeth Neumann, a former assistant secretary of Homeland Security.

In recent weeks, a handful of Republicans have crossed party lines to endorse Harris, including the former Virginia representative Barbara Comstock. In an interview with CNN, Comstock explained her decision, saying: “After January 6, after Donald Trump has refused for four years to acknowledge that he lost [the 2020 election], and his threats against democracy, I think it’s important to turn the page.”

Other Republicans who have endorsed Harris include Alberto Gonzales, a Republican attorney general who served under the W Bush administration, the former Illinois representative Adam Kinzinger, as well as Trump’s former press secretary Stephanie Grisham and communications director Anthony Scaramucci.

The Teamsters International, which represents over 1.3 million workers, declined to endorse a candidate ahead of November’s presidential election – but released data suggesting most of its members backed Donald Trump over Kamala Harris.

The union’s decision to not make an election endorsement, for the first time in almost three decades, comes in the wake of scrutiny of its president, Sean O’Brien, becoming the first Teamsters leader to address the the Republican national convention in July. John Palmer, vice-president at large at the Teamsters, called the decision to appear at the convention, “unconscionable” given Trump’s record opposing labor unions.

Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, met with the Teamsters this week for a roundtable discussion prior to the decision. Trump and Joe Biden attended roundtable with the union earlier this year.

“Unfortunately, neither major candidate was able to make serious commitments to our union to ensure the interests of working people are always put before big business,” O’Brien said in a statement on Wednesday. “We sought commitments from both Trump and Harris not to interfere in critical union campaigns or core Teamsters industries – and to honor our members’ right to strike – but were unable to secure those pledges.”

Polling data released by the union ahead of the announcement showed that its members supported Biden over Trump, though more recent surveys conduct by the union revealed membership supported Trump over Harris.

The Teamsters National Black Caucus endorsed Harris last month.

In response to the non-endorsement, Teamsters against Trump, a grassroots group of Teamster members and retirees, announced they will expand campaigning efforts to elect Vice President Kamala Harris.

The California Teamsters also came out on 18 September to endorse Harris in response to the Teamsters International’s lack of endorsement.

“When it comes to my vote for President, as a proud Teamster there’s no contest. Donald Trump doesn’t give a damn about the working class. As President, Trump didn’t lift a finger to help Teamsters whose pensions were in danger. Instead, he installed his billionaire friends in the White House and did everything he could to stop workers from organizing into unions,” said James Larkin, a member of Teamsters Local 299 in Detroit, Michigan and member of the group, in a statement.

Iranian hackers sought to interest President Joe Biden’s campaign in information stolen from rival Donald Trump’s campaign, sending unsolicited emails to people associated with the then-Democratic candidate in an effort to interfere in the 2024 election, the FBI and other US agencies have said.

The FBI confirmed on 12 August that it was investigating a complaint from Donald Trump’s presidential campaign that Iran had hacked and distributed a trove of sensitive campaign documents. On 19 August intelligence officials confirmed that Iran was behind the hack.

There’s no indication that any of the recipients in Biden’s campaign team responded, officials said on Wednesday, and several media organisations approached over the summer with leaked stolen information have also said they did not respond.

Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign called the emails from Iran “unwelcome and unacceptable malicious activity” that were received by only a few people who regarded them as spam or phishing attempts.

The emails were received before the hack of the Trump campaign was publicly acknowledged, and there’s no evidence the recipients of the emails knew their origin.

The announcement is the latest US government effort to call out what officials say is Iran’s brazen, ongoing work to interfere in the election, including a hack-and-leak campaign that the FBI and other federal agencies linked last month to Tehran.

Iran has denied interfering in US affairs. On Wednesday its permanent mission to the United Nations in New York said the latest allegations were “fundamentally unfounded, and wholly inadmissible.”

US officials in recent months have used criminal charges, sanctions and public advisories to detail actions taken by foreign adversaries to influence the election, including an indictment targeting a covert Russian effort to spread pro-Russia content to US audiences.

It’s a stark turnaround from the government’s response in 2016, when Obama administration officials were criticised for not being forthcoming about the Russian interference they were seeing on Trump’s behalf as he ran against Hillary Clinton.

In this case, the hackers sent emails in late June and early July to people who were associated with Biden’s campaign before he dropped out. The emails “contained an excerpt taken from stolen, non-public material from former President Trump’s campaign as text in the emails,” according to a statement released by the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

The agencies have said the Trump campaign hack and an attempted breach of the Biden-Harris campaign are part of an effort to undermine voters’ faith in the election and to stoke discord.

The Trump campaign disclosed on 10 August that it had been hacked and said Iranian actors had stolen and distributed sensitive internal documents. At least three news outlets – Politico, The New York Times and The Washington Post – were leaked confidential material from inside the Trump campaign. So far, each has refused to reveal any details about what it received.

It has been reported that among the documents was a research dossier that the Trump campaign had done on the Republican vice-presidential nominee, JD Vance.

In a statement, Harris campaign spokesperson Morgan Finkelstein said the campaign has cooperated with law enforcement since learning that people associated with Biden’s team were among the recipients of the emails.

Trump’s campaign said the leaks was “further proof the Iranians are actively interfering in the election” to help Harris.

Intelligence officials have said Iran opposes Trump’s reelection, seeing him as more likely to increase tension between Washington and Tehran. Trump’s administration ended a nuclear deal with Iran, reimposed sanctions and ordered the killing of Iranian Gen. Qassem Suleimani, an act that prompted Iran’s leaders to vow revenge.

Iran’s intrusion on the Trump campaign was cited as just one of the cyber-attacks and disinformation campaigns identified by tech companies and national security officials at a hearing Wednesday of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Executives from Meta, Google and Microsoft briefed lawmakers on their plans for safeguarding the election, and the attacks they’d seen so far.

“The most perilous time I think will come 48 hours before the election,” Microsoft president Brad Smith told lawmakers during the hearing, which focused on American tech companies’ efforts to safeguard the election from foreign disinformation and cyber-attacks.

Iranian hackers sought to interest President Joe Biden’s campaign in information stolen from rival Donald Trump’s campaign, sending unsolicited emails to people associated with the then-Democratic candidate in an effort to interfere in the 2024 election, the FBI and other US agencies have said.

The FBI confirmed on 12 August that it was investigating a complaint from Donald Trump’s presidential campaign that Iran had hacked and distributed a trove of sensitive campaign documents. On 19 August intelligence officials confirmed that Iran was behind the hack.

There’s no indication that any of the recipients in Biden’s campaign team responded, officials said on Wednesday, and several media organisations approached over the summer with leaked stolen information have also said they did not respond.

Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign called the emails from Iran “unwelcome and unacceptable malicious activity” that were received by only a few people who regarded them as spam or phishing attempts.

The emails were received before the hack of the Trump campaign was publicly acknowledged, and there’s no evidence the recipients of the emails knew their origin.

The announcement is the latest US government effort to call out what officials say is Iran’s brazen, ongoing work to interfere in the election, including a hack-and-leak campaign that the FBI and other federal agencies linked last month to Tehran.

Iran has denied interfering in US affairs. On Wednesday its permanent mission to the United Nations in New York said the latest allegations were “fundamentally unfounded, and wholly inadmissible.”

US officials in recent months have used criminal charges, sanctions and public advisories to detail actions taken by foreign adversaries to influence the election, including an indictment targeting a covert Russian effort to spread pro-Russia content to US audiences.

It’s a stark turnaround from the government’s response in 2016, when Obama administration officials were criticised for not being forthcoming about the Russian interference they were seeing on Trump’s behalf as he ran against Hillary Clinton.

In this case, the hackers sent emails in late June and early July to people who were associated with Biden’s campaign before he dropped out. The emails “contained an excerpt taken from stolen, non-public material from former President Trump’s campaign as text in the emails,” according to a statement released by the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

The agencies have said the Trump campaign hack and an attempted breach of the Biden-Harris campaign are part of an effort to undermine voters’ faith in the election and to stoke discord.

The Trump campaign disclosed on 10 August that it had been hacked and said Iranian actors had stolen and distributed sensitive internal documents. At least three news outlets – Politico, The New York Times and The Washington Post – were leaked confidential material from inside the Trump campaign. So far, each has refused to reveal any details about what it received.

It has been reported that among the documents was a research dossier that the Trump campaign had done on the Republican vice-presidential nominee, JD Vance.

In a statement, Harris campaign spokesperson Morgan Finkelstein said the campaign has cooperated with law enforcement since learning that people associated with Biden’s team were among the recipients of the emails.

Trump’s campaign said the leaks was “further proof the Iranians are actively interfering in the election” to help Harris.

Intelligence officials have said Iran opposes Trump’s reelection, seeing him as more likely to increase tension between Washington and Tehran. Trump’s administration ended a nuclear deal with Iran, reimposed sanctions and ordered the killing of Iranian Gen. Qassem Suleimani, an act that prompted Iran’s leaders to vow revenge.

Iran’s intrusion on the Trump campaign was cited as just one of the cyber-attacks and disinformation campaigns identified by tech companies and national security officials at a hearing Wednesday of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Executives from Meta, Google and Microsoft briefed lawmakers on their plans for safeguarding the election, and the attacks they’d seen so far.

“The most perilous time I think will come 48 hours before the election,” Microsoft president Brad Smith told lawmakers during the hearing, which focused on American tech companies’ efforts to safeguard the election from foreign disinformation and cyber-attacks.

Homes are being evacuated in the northern Italian region of Emilia-Romagna as Storm Boris, which has killed at least 24 people in central and eastern Europe since last week, swept into the country, causing severe flooding and landslides.

Pounding rain hit Emilia-Romagna late on Wednesday afternoon and the situation rapidly worsened as night fell.

Jader Dardi, the mayor of Modigliana, a town in Forlì-Cesena province that was also hit badly by devastating regional flooding in May 2023, said the river had “exploded”.

“The situation is very dramatic,” he told Sky TG 24. “It is worse than in 2023.”

Water surged downstream, causing floods in the hamlet of Marzeno in Brisighella.

“A sudden and large wave is arriving from Modigliana, passing through the hamlet of Marzeno,” according to a message on the social media page of Brisighella’s town hall urging people in the affected areas to evacuate their homes. Displaced people would be accommodated in a school, the post added.

Luca Della Godenza, the mayor of Castel Bolognese, said the situation was “well beyond the worst forecasts”.

“The situation is getting worse and it’s getting worse more rapidly,” he wrote on Facebook. “The river level is constantly being monitored and has reached 6.19 metres in Tebano. The fire brigade and local police have been mobilised and will be using megaphones to warn citizens of the serious situation we’re experiencing.”

He urged residents in the area to ascend to the higher floors of their homes.

The Savena river in Bologna was also rising rapidly, the town hall warned on Wednesday night. Officials have ordered the evacuation of ground floor and basement homes in the affected areas.

Some roads have also been blocked due to landslides.

Severe weather warnings are in place in Emilia-Romagna and neighbouring Marche for the next 24-36 hours. Schools will be closed on Thursday and people have been advised to avoid travel and, where possible, to work from home.

The flooding in Emilia-Romagna in May 2023 claimed 17 lives and caused €8.5bn (£7.2bn) worth of damage.

Since last week Storm Boris has brought widespread flooding and torrential rain in the Czech Republic, Romania, Poland and Austria. The death toll rose to at least 24 on Wednesday as the Czech Republic reported its fourth and fifth victims.

Scientists say that extreme rainfall and flooding have become increasingly common and more intense because of human-caused climate breakdown.

The EU’s crisis management commissioner, Janez Lenarčič, said on Wednesday that flooding in central Europe and deadly forest fires in Portugal were joint proof of the climate crisis.

“Make no mistake. This tragedy is not an anomaly. This is fast becoming the norm for our shared future,” Lenarčič told MEPs. “Europe is the fastest warming continent globally and is particularly vulnerable to extreme weather events.”

• Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said on Wednesday he would “probably” meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who will be in the US next week to address a meeting of the UN security council on Russia’s war in his country. “Probably, yes,” Trump said in response to a question from a reporter about whether he will meet the Ukrainian leader. Trump did not provide further details. Zelenskiy said in August he wanted to present a peace plan to US President Joe Biden, vice-president Kamala Harris and Trump. While Trump and Zelenskiy talked over the phone in July, they have not talked in person since Trump’s 2017-2021 term.

• Zelenskiy said on Wednesday that his “Victory Plan”, intended to bring peace to Ukraine while keeping the country strong and avoiding all “frozen conflicts”, was now complete after much consultation. Zelenskiy pledged last month to present his plan to Biden, presumably next week when he is in the US. While providing daily updates on the plan’s preparation, Zelenskiy has given few clues of the contents, indicating only that it aims to create terms acceptable to Ukraine, now locked in conflict with Russia for more than two and a half years.

• The Biden administration still is not convinced that it should give Ukraine the authority to launch long-range missiles deeper into Russia, and US officials say they are seeking more detailed information about how Kyiv would use the weapons and how they fit into the broader strategy for the war, the Associated Press reported on Wednesday. US officials said they have asked Ukraine to spell out more clearly its combat objectives. The report comes a week after Biden discussed easing restrictions on Ukraine’s use of long-range missiles supplied by the west with British prime minister Keir Starmer.

• A Ukrainian drone attack on a large Russian weapons depot caused a blast that was picked up by earthquake monitoring stations, in one of the biggest strikes on Moscow’s military arsenal since the war began. Pro-Russian military bloggers said Ukraine struck an arsenal for the storage of missiles, ammunition and explosives in Toropets, a historic town more than 300 miles north of Ukraine and about 230 miles west of Moscow. Videos and images on social media showed a huge ball of flame rising high into the night sky and detonations thundering across a lake, in a region not far from the border with Belarus.

• The European Union must be quick to increase its defences as Russia may be ready for a confrontation in six to eight years, the nominee to be the EU’s first defence commissioner told Reuters in an interview. Andrius Kubilius, a former prime minister of Lithuania, has been tapped to boost the continent’s arms industry, by getting EU countries to spend more on European weapons and procure jointly – as well as by getting companies themselves to cooperate more across borders. The new post reflects how security has risen to the top of the EU’s political agenda since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. “Defence ministers and Nato generals agree that Vladimir Putin could be ready for confrontation with Nato and the EU in six to eight years,” Kubilius, a fierce critic of Russia and a supporter of Ukraine, said on Wednesday.

• Putin on Wednesday said he had ordered a boost of Russia’s army to 1.5 million active soldiers earlier this week to ensure a well-trained military. The president on Monday signed a decree boosting the number of active troops by 180,000 soldiers – making the Russian army the second largest in the world by active troop size.

• Russia’s counteroffensive to retake Ukrainian-held territory in the Kursk region has been “stopped”, a spokesperson from Ukraine’s military administration there told AFP on Wednesday, after Moscow said it was beginning to repel the surprise incursion. Russia earlier this month said it had taken back several villages from Ukraine in the region, where Kyiv has held on to swathes of land since its shock offensive began more than a month ago. “They tried to attack from the flanks, but they were stopped there,” spokesperson Oleksiy Dmytrashkivsky from Ukraine’s military administration in Kursk told AFP.

• The British government on Wednesday said it summoned Russia’s ambassador to condemn what it called Moscow’s “unprecedented and unfounded public campaign of aggression against the UK”. Andrei Kelin was told that Russia’s behaviour, including its “malicious and completely baseless” claims of spying against six British diplomats, contravened the Vienna Convention on diplomatic relations, the foreign ministry said.

• The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has indefinitely postponed a staff mission to Moscow this week to review the Russian economy for the first time since the invasion of Ukraine, after the move came under heavy criticism from several of Kyiv’s European allies. After revelations in the Guardian of widespread condemnation, the IMF said it would spend more time gathering information for a “rigorous analysis”.

Venezuela’s opposition candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia, has said he was coerced into signing a letter recognizing Nicolás Maduro as the winner of the country’s disputed election as a condition for letting him flee to Spain.

The revelation of the letter is the latest strain to the country’s political crisis, which was exacerbated by the disputed election results and González’s recent departure for exile in Spain.

“I had to either sign it or deal with the consequences,” Gonzalez wrote on X, citing “very tense hours of coercion, blackmail and pressure”.

He said Maduro allies brought him the document when he was in the Spanish embassy in Caracas before fleeing to Spain to request asylum, following the 28 July presidential election that the opposition insists he won.

“At that point I considered I could be of more use free than if I were imprisoned and prevented from fulfilling the tasks entrusted to me” by voters, he said.

The document states it was meant to be confidential, but Jorge Rodríguez, head of the national assembly and Maduro’s chief negotiator, presented it during a nationally televised press conference hours after a local news outlet published parts of it.

Rodríguez told reporters González signed the letter of his own volition. González, however, in a video posted on social media said he signed it under coercion.

“They showed up with a document that I would have to sign to allow my departure from the country,” González said.

Rodríguez, questioned about González’s video message, threatened to reveal audio of his conversations with González if he did not take back his assertions.

Venezuela’s national electoral council, which is stacked with Maduro loyalists, declared Maduro the election winner hours after polls closed. Unlike previous presidential elections, electoral authorities did not provide detailed vote counts.

But the opposition coalition collected tally sheets from 80% of the nation’s electronic voting machines and posted them online. González and opposition leader María Corina Machado said the voting records showed the former diplomat won the election with twice as many votes as Maduro.

González became the subject of an arrest warrant over an investigation into the publishing of the tally sheets.

Global condemnation over the lack of transparency prompted Maduro to ask Venezuela’s supreme tribunal of justice, whose members are aligned with the ruling party, to audit the results. The high court reaffirmed his victory.

Venezuela’s next presidential term begins on 10 January and lasts six years.

Venezuela’s opposition candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia, has said he was coerced into signing a letter recognizing Nicolás Maduro as the winner of the country’s disputed election as a condition for letting him flee to Spain.

The revelation of the letter is the latest strain to the country’s political crisis, which was exacerbated by the disputed election results and González’s recent departure for exile in Spain.

“I had to either sign it or deal with the consequences,” Gonzalez wrote on X, citing “very tense hours of coercion, blackmail and pressure”.

He said Maduro allies brought him the document when he was in the Spanish embassy in Caracas before fleeing to Spain to request asylum, following the 28 July presidential election that the opposition insists he won.

“At that point I considered I could be of more use free than if I were imprisoned and prevented from fulfilling the tasks entrusted to me” by voters, he said.

The document states it was meant to be confidential, but Jorge Rodríguez, head of the national assembly and Maduro’s chief negotiator, presented it during a nationally televised press conference hours after a local news outlet published parts of it.

Rodríguez told reporters González signed the letter of his own volition. González, however, in a video posted on social media said he signed it under coercion.

“They showed up with a document that I would have to sign to allow my departure from the country,” González said.

Rodríguez, questioned about González’s video message, threatened to reveal audio of his conversations with González if he did not take back his assertions.

Venezuela’s national electoral council, which is stacked with Maduro loyalists, declared Maduro the election winner hours after polls closed. Unlike previous presidential elections, electoral authorities did not provide detailed vote counts.

But the opposition coalition collected tally sheets from 80% of the nation’s electronic voting machines and posted them online. González and opposition leader María Corina Machado said the voting records showed the former diplomat won the election with twice as many votes as Maduro.

González became the subject of an arrest warrant over an investigation into the publishing of the tally sheets.

Global condemnation over the lack of transparency prompted Maduro to ask Venezuela’s supreme tribunal of justice, whose members are aligned with the ruling party, to audit the results. The high court reaffirmed his victory.

Venezuela’s next presidential term begins on 10 January and lasts six years.

The US Federal Reserve cut interest rates on Wednesday for the first time in four years, stepping back from its aggressive bid to cool the world’s largest economy and reduce inflation.

America’s central bank, which lifted rates to a two-decade high after price growth surged to its highest level in a generation, announced a cut of 50 basis points.

Policymakers at the Fed also expect to cut rates by an additional 50 basis points this year, according to projections released alongside the news. After rising on the news, Wall Street ended the day down slightly, with the S&P 500 dropping 0.29%.

“It’s amazing to me how even when markets get what they seemingly want, they immediately want more,” Steve Sosnick, chief market strategist at Interactive Brokers told Reuters.

Inflation has fallen dramatically since peaking in summer 2022, although many consumers are still grappling with higher costs – from groceries and fuel to rent and travel fares – after years of price increases.

As tens of millions of Americans prepare to cast their votes in November, the strength of the economy, and concern about its direction, has become a critical issue in the presidential election campaign.

The Fed’s decision to lower its benchmark federal funds rate to between 4.75% and 5% marks a significant turning point in its battle against inflation.

Jerome Powell, its chair, had declared last month that “the time has come” for action.

Addressing reporters on Wednesday, he said: “This decision reflects our growing confidence that, within appropriate recalibration of our policy stance, strength in the labor market can be maintained in a context of moderate growth and inflation moving sustainably down to” the Fed’s 2% target.

He stressed that after a “good, strong start”, officials would make future rates decisions at each respective policy meeting – rather than commit to more cuts today – and expressed optimism that the US will steer clear of recession. “I don’t see anything in the economy that suggests the likelihood of a downturn is elevated,” he said. “I don’t see that.”

Asked whether the central bank is playing catch-up, and responding to weaker data on the jobs market, Powell said: “We don’t think we’re behind. We think this is timely, but I think you can take this as a sign of our commitment not to get behind.”

At the onset of the pandemic, as strict Covid-19 lockdowns and restrictions roiled the world, Fed policymakers cut rates to close to zero. Stimulus bills approved by Congress pumped trillions of dollars into the US economy.

Within a year, vaccines arrived, restrictions were loosened, and many people started to spend more time outside their homes again. Consumer demand, shored up by the stimulus packages, remained remarkably resilient.

As inflation started to soar in 2021, Fed officials, including Powell, initially dismissed it as a “transitory” effect of the pandemic’s fluctuations in supply and demand. The following year, however, they changed tack – and embarked upon an extraordinary campaign to tame its rapid rise.

The Fed hiked rates at 11 consecutive meetings in 2022 and 2023, and then held them at between 5.25% and 5.5% for more than a year, in an effort to pull price growth back down to its target.

While the consumer price index has not yet reached this level, it’s getting there. The most recent reading, for August, came in at 2.5%: its lowest level since February 2021.

As the labor market has cooled, raising fears of a broader economic slowdown, the Fed has faced mounting pressure to budge.

“It is clearly the time for the Fed to cut rates,” the Democratic senators Elizabeth Warren, Sheldon Whitehouse and John Hickenlooper wrote to Powell on Monday. “In fact, it may be too late: your delays have threatened the economy and left the Fed behind the curve.”

Powell defended the central bank’s decisions. “Our patient approach over the past year has paid dividends,” he said. “Inflation is now closer to our objective and we have gained greater confidence that inflation is moving sustainably toward 2%.”

Around the world, other central banks will be watching closely. Ratesetters on the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee are due to make their next decision on Thursday.

While the Fed is independent, its decision to cut rates less than 50 days before the election is likely to attract political scrutiny. Donald Trump, who broke with protocol during his presidency to pressure the central bank to reduce rates, has argued it should not do so with polling day so close.

Trump has also suggested he would deserve a say on Fed decisions, should he re-enter the White House. Kamala Harris has insisted she would not “interfere” in its deliberations.

Powell bluntly denied that the Fed’s latest decision had anything to do with the election.

“This is my fourth presidential election at the Fed, and it’s always the same,” he told reporters. “We’re going into this meeting in particular and asking what the right thing to do for the people we serve. And we do that, and we make a decision as a group, and then we announce it. That’s always what it is. It is never about anything else.”

Hip-hop mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs will have to await trial on sex-trafficking and racketeering charges in a Brooklyn jail instead of his luxurious Miami Beach mansion after a second judge refused to grant a $50m bail package offered by his lawyers.

On Wednesday, US district judge Andrew L Carter Jr denied Combs’s request to be released to home detention with GPS monitoring, pointing to the possibility that Combs may tamper with witnesses.

Carter’s denial marks the second refusal to grant Combs the hefty bail package, which included the $50m bond, as well as the passports of his children and mother.

The 54-year-old was initially denied bail and ordered to jail on Tuesday after he was federally charged with sex trafficking and racketeering. Combs has pleaded not guilty.

The arrest of Combs came roughly six months after federal authorities conducting a sex-trafficking investigation raided his homes in Los Angeles and Miami.

The three-count, 14-page indictment alleges racketeering conspiracy; sex trafficking by force, fraud or coercion; and transportation to engage in prostitution.

The federal indictment contained graphic details, including that Combs would force sex-trafficking victims to engage in group sex acts with associates of his in what he referred to as “freak offs” – sometimes for days at a time – while he recorded video of the encounters and masturbated to them. The encounters were so physically exhausting for him and his victims – whom he would allegedly force to ingest drugs – that all “typically received IV fluids to recover”, the indictment said.

“For decades, SEAN COMBS, a/k/a ‘Puff Daddy,’ a/k/a ‘P Diddy,’ a/k/a ‘Diddy,’ a/k/a ‘PD,’ a/k/a ‘Love,’ the defendant, abused, threatened, and coerced women and others around him to fulfill his sexual desires, protect his reputation, and conceal his conduct,” the indictment reads.

It added that during the raids on Combs’s Miami and Los Angeles homes earlier this year, investigators seized drugs and more than 1,000 bottles of baby oil and lubricant, as well as three AR-15s guns with defaced serial numbers.

The indictment also alleges that Combs subjected victims to various forms of abuse, in addition to having maintained control over them through “physical violence, promises of career opportunities, granting and threatening to withhold financial support, and by other coercive means, including tracking their whereabouts, dictating the victims’ appearance, monitoring their medical records, controlling their housing, and supplying them with controlled substances”.

Combs’s alleged criminal conspiracy, the indictment says, “relied on employees, resources, and influence of the multi-faceted business empire that he led and controlled – creating a criminal enterprise whose members and associates engaged in, and attempted to engage in, among other crimes, sex trafficking, forced labor, kidnapping, arson, bribery, and obstruction of justice”.

His lawyers tried unsuccessfully on Tuesday and Wednesday to keep him out of jail. In addition to offering the bond, his lawyers pledged that Combs would turn over his passport and said he was attempting to sell his private jet. They said that “conditions at Metropolitan detention center in Brooklyn are not fit for pre-trial detention”.

Prosecutors argued that Combs was “a serious flight risk” and that his net worth was close to $1bn, including more than $1m in personal cash on hand as of last December.

With Combs set to face jail time in Brooklyn’s Metropolitan detention center, he will be joining a string of other high-profile detainees who have spent time there including R Kelly, Ghislaine Maxwell, Michael Cohen and Sam Bankman-Fried.

Social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, became accessible to many users in Brazil on Wednesday as an update to its communications network circumvented a block ordered by the country’s supreme court.

The X update used cloud services offered by third parties, namely the security firm Cloudflare, allowing some Brazilian users to take a route outside of the country to reach X, even without a virtual private network, according to Abrint, the Brazilian Association of Internet and Telecommunications Providers.

The number of Brazilians accessing X is unknown, according to Abrint. X did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

“I believe the change was probably intentional. Why would X use a third-party service that ends up being slower than its own?” said Basilio Perez, a board member at Abrint.

Last month, after a months-long dispute between X owner Elon Musk and Brazilian justice Alexandre de Moraes, the supreme court ordered Brazil’s mobile and internet service providers to block the platform. Access to X was shut within hours. Initially, Musk’s satellite internet service provider Starlink said it would continue to allow access to X in defiance of the ban, but it backtracked those proclamations.

Perez added it would be difficult to block X a second time because of the technical change and the ubiquity of Cloudflare, meaning prohibiting access to its services could jeopardize government agencies and financial services providers: “You can’t just block Cloudflare because you would block half of the internet.”

Any revised order from Brazil’s national telecommunications agency Anatel, which is responsible for implementing the court ruling, will need to be more specific, according to Perez. Anatel has identified the problem and is working to first notify content delivery network providers, followed by telecom companies, to block access again to X in Brazil, according to a person familiar with the situation. The same person said it is not clear how long it will take for the providers to comply with the order.

The day before X became available once again, the White House had criticized Brazil’s digital embargo.

“When it comes to social media, we have been very clear that we think that folks should have access to social media. It’s a form of freedom of speech,” said Karine Jean-Pierre, the press secretary, in response to a question from Raquel Krähenbühl, a reporter for the Brazilian outlet TV Globo.

Musk responded to the statement via X, writing, “Unexpected, but appreciated.” On Monday, the White House had called Musk “irresponsible” for posting a tweet wondering why “no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala”, which he later deleted.

British politicians and international organisations have had their accounts on X hacked on Wednesday night.

MPs including Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, and the Labour MPs Chris Elmore and Carolyn Harris all shared the same message on the social media site. Although quickly removed, the messages could still be read on TweetDeck, a dashboard used to manage accounts on X, formerly Twitter.

The messages, which also included a lengthy code, said: “THIS IS HACKED ACCOUNT!!!! INTRODUCING HACKED ON SOLANA on each account we hack we publish the token address so we pump it and make profits together.”

The message on the justice secretary’s account was posted at 7.53pm and had been deleted by 7.55pm. It is not the first time a British politician’s account on the website has been hacked. Jeremy Corbyn’s Twitter account was hijacked in 2016 when a series of expletive-laden tweets were posted.

One aimed an insult at the then prime minister, David Cameron, while another expressed opposition to the Trident nuclear defence programme.

Other accounts that posted the same message on Wednesday evening include the World Health Organization, the Great British Menu and the India branch of the technology company Lenovo.

While many quickly deleted the hacked message, some remained visible for some time. The British comedian and actor Sooz Kempner shared to X that her account was also hacked and she had changed her password.