Israeli warplanes carried out dozens of strikes across southern Lebanon late on Thursday, hours after Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, threatened “tough retribution and just punishment” for the wave of attacks that targeted the organisation with explosives hidden in pagers and walkie-talkies.

The Israeli military said it had hit hundreds of rocket launchers which it said were about to be used “in the immediate future”.

The bombardment included more than 52 strikes across southern Lebanon, the country’s state news agency NNA said. Three Lebanese security sources told the Reuters news agency that they were the heaviest aerial strikes since the conflict began in October.

As Israeli jets roared over Beirut in a show of force earlier in the day, Nasrallah threatened retribution against Israel “where it expects it and where it does not”.

On Tuesday, thousands of pagers used by Hezbollah exploded simultaneously, killing 12 people, including two children, and wounding up to 2,800 others across Lebanon. A day later, 25 people were killed and more than 450 wounded when walkie-talkies exploded in supermarkets, on streets and at funerals, stoking fears that a full-blown war between Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran, and Israel could be imminent.

There was no comment from Israel, which hours before Tuesday’s explosions had announced it was broadening the aims of its war in Gaza to include the return of northern residents who had been evacuated from their homes due to attacks by Hezbollah.

Nasrallah admitted that the explosive attacks – the biggest security breach for Hezbollah since its foundation in the 1980s – had been a major blow to the organisation.

The attacks “crossed all red lines”, Nasrallah said, appearing in front of a featureless red background at an unidentified location. “The enemy went beyond all controls, laws and morals.”

As tensions in the Middle East spiralled, senior diplomats from the US, Britain, Germany, France and Italy met on Thursday in Paris before a UN security council meeting planned for Friday. Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, was to join his counterparts in the French capital after discussing the possibility of a Gaza truce in Cairo.

US President Joe Biden believes there can still be a diplomatic resolution to escalating tensions between Israel and Hezbollah, his spokesperson said.

The White House warned all sides against “an escalation of any kind”.

The Lebanese foreign minister, Abdallah Bou Habib, warned that the “blatant assault on Lebanon’s sovereignty and security” was a dangerous development that could “signal a wider war”.

The Israel Defense Forces’ chief of staff, Lt Gen Herzi Halevi, announced on Thursday that Israeli battle plans for the northern front had been “completed and approved”. On Wednesday, the Israeli defence minister, Yoav Gallant, described “the start of a new phase in the war” triggered by the Hamas attacks into Israel last October.

The retired Brig Gen Amir Avivi, who leads the Israel Defense and Security Forum, which is a group of hawkish former military commanders, said: “There’s a lot of pressure from the society to go to war and win. Unless Hezbollah tomorrow morning says: ‘OK, we got the message, we’re pulling out of south Lebanon,’ war is imminent.”

The Lebanese army said on Thursday it was blowing up pagers and suspicious telecom devices in controlled blasts in different areas. It called on citizens to report any suspicious devices.

Lebanese authorities banned walkie-talkies and pagers from being taken on flights from Beirut airport until further notice, the National News Agency reported. Such devices were also banned from being shipped by air.

Nasrallah’s speech on Thursday was keenly watched. Analysts said the Hezbollah leader needed to show defiance of Israel without committing to further escalation, which could lead to a war that Hezbollah’s sponsors in Tehran have sought to avoid. He also needed to rally his demoralised followers.

Magnus Ranstorp, a terrorism expert at the Swedish Defence University and a pioneer of western studies of Hezbollah, said: “This is a huge humiliation for an organisation that prides itself on its security. They were lured into a trap … There were some civilian casualties, but most were Hezbollah people who will now be out of action for some time.”

Hezbollah is a keystone member of Iran’s “axis of resistance”, which includes Hamas, the Houthis and other militant groups across the Middle East.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards commander, Hossein Salami, told Nasrallah on Thursday that Israel would face “a crushing response from the axis of resistance”, according to Iranian state media.

In Israel, a man whom security forces said they arrested for plotting assassinations against senior political figures has been named as 73-year-old Moti Maman. Maman, from Ashkelon, near the Gaza Strip, was arrested last month and indicted on Thursday. The Shin Bet internal security service and the Israeli police have claimed that Iran was backing the plot to kill senior defence officials and possibly the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

The preliminary findings of a Lebanese investigation into the blasts were that the pagers had been booby-trapped, a security official said. “Data indicates the devices were pre-programmed to detonate and contained explosive materials planted next to the battery,” the official said, requesting anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.

A source close to Hezbollah, asking not to be identified, said the pagers were “recently imported” and appeared to have been “sabotaged at source”.

After reports that the pagers had been ordered from a Taiwanese manufacturer, Gold Apollo, the company said they had been produced by its Hungarian partner BAC Consulting KFT, which has a licence to use its brand. A government spokesperson in Budapest said the company was “a trading intermediary, with no manufacturing or operational site in Hungary”.

Icom, the Japanese communications equipment maker whose walkie-talkies are thought to have been detonated on Wednesday, said the devices may have been a discontinued model containing modified batteries.

Hezbollah has traded near-daily cross-border fire with Israel since Hamas’s 7 October attacks sparked the war in Gaza.

In his speech, Nasrallah vowed to continue the conflict with Israel until a ceasefire in Gaza was reached.

“The Lebanese front will not stop until the aggression on Gaza stops”, despite “all this blood spilt”, he said.

Israel said on Thursday it had bombed six Hezbollah “infrastructure sites” and a weapons storage facility in southern Lebanon, a stronghold of the organisation.

Eight people were reported to have been injured by antitank missiles fired by Hezbollah into northern Israel, and two were hurt in a drone attack.

Since October, more than 500 people have been killed in Lebanon by Israeli strikes, most of them fighters with Hezbollah and other armed groups but also more than 100 civilians. In northern Israel, at least 23 soldiers and 26 civilians have been killed by strikes from Lebanon.

About 60,000 Israelis were evacuated from their homes along the contested border with Lebanon and have been unable to return for fear of being targeted by Hezbollah.

In a separate development on Thursday, Israeli media reported that Israel had submitted a new ceasefire proposal to the US, under which all hostages held in Gaza would be released at the same time in exchange for ending the war. Israel would also agree that the Hamas leader, Yahya Sinwar, along with his family and thousands of operatives, could leave Gaza for a third country “through a safe passage”.

There has been no official reaction to the reports.

The president and founder of the Taiwanese pager company linked to pagers used by Hezbollah has been questioned by prosecutors and released, as the hunt for the origins of devices that detonated across Lebanon this week spreads across the globe.

Gold Apollo’s president, Hsu Ching-kuang, has said his company did not manufacture the pagers used in the attack on Tuesday, and that they were made by a Budapest-based company BAC which has a licence to use its brand.

He was questioned in Taiwan on the same day that Icom, a Japanese communication equipment maker whose walkie-talkies are thought to have been detonated in a second wave of attacks on Wednesday, said the units used may have been a discontinued model containing modified batteries.

At least nine people were killed and nearly 3,000 wounded when pagers used by Hezbollah members detonated simultaneously across Lebanon on Tuesday, in an attack the Iran-backed group blamed on Israel. A day later, 25 people were killed and more than 450 wounded when walkie-talkies exploded in supermarkets, on streets and at funerals.

In Taiwan, Hsu declined to answer reporters questions as he left a Taipei prosecutors office late on Thursday. Taipei prosecutors have not issued any statements so far about their investigations into Gold Apollo.

Taiwan’s government has said it is investigating what happened and police have made several visits to Hsu’s company, in a small, unassuming office in Taipei’s next door city of New Taipei.

On Friday morning Taiwan’s minister of economic affairs said he could say “with certainty” that the components used in the pagers were not made in Taiwan.

In Japan, handheld radio manufacturer Icom said the devices used in the attacks on Wednesday appeared to be their IC-V82 handheld radio, which had been exported overseas, including to the Middle East, between 2004 and 2014.

“We can’t rule out the possibility that they are fakes, but there is also a chance the products are our IC-V82 model,” Icom’s director, Yoshiki Enomoto, said on Wednesday, according to the Kyodo news agency. The firm sold about 160,000 units of the model in Japan and overseas before ending production and sales in 2014.

“The production of the batteries needed to operate the main unit has also been discontinued, and a hologram seal to distinguish counterfeit products was not attached, so it is not possible to confirm whether the product shipped from our company,” it said in a statement on its website. It added that products for overseas markets are sold exclusively through its authorised distributors, and that its export programme is based on Japanese security trade control regulations.

Icom said all of its radios are manufactured “under a strict management system” at a subsidiary production site in Wakayama prefecture in western Japan.

“No parts other than those specified by our company are used in a product,” it said. “In addition, all of our radios are manufactured at the same factory, and we do not manufacture them overseas.”

Hezbollah has vowed to retaliate against Israel, which has not claimed responsibility for the detonations. The two sides have been engaged in cross-border warfare since the Gaza conflict erupted last October.

Reuters contributed to this report

A meticulous manufacturing operation, probably controlled by an Israeli front company, is emerging as the most likely way thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies containing hidden explosives ended up in the hands of Hezbollah operatives.

Experts said the sabotaged devices appeared to use small amounts of military grade plastic explosives that could be carefully assembled only over a period of time, amid reports that they were manufactured by an Israeli front company with links to Europe.

“It looks like what was used was a high grade plastic military explosive,” said Trevor Lawrence, the head of Cranfield University’s Ordnance Test and Evaluation Centre, which tests bombs on Salisbury Plain. “You only need around 5g, but it is a complex job to insert them into the pagers and ensure they still worked.’

Military plastic explosives are not commercially available, but are able to kill and cause significant injuries if they are close to a person, particularly their head and torso, Lawrence said. This tallies with the injuries caused in Lebanon this week. “Causing injury with explosives is all about proximity,” he added.

A report in the New York Times, based on intelligence briefing, said the exploding pagers were manufactured by an Israeli front company, which even went to the trouble of shipping normal pagers to other clients.

Israel has not claimed responsibility for the sophisticated deadly double attack, widely considered to be the work of the Mossad intelligence agency, which killed 37 and wounded hundreds this week.

Casualties included Hezbollah fighters and operatives but also civilians, with explosions going off in supermarkets and hospitals, while a walkie-talkie exploded on Wednesday during a funeral for three members of the militant group. A child was killed when pagers blew up the day before.

The pagers bleeped with a fake message from a Hezbollah commander, then went silent before exploding, by which time many users had lifted the devices to read. Mohamad Jawad Khalifeh, a surgeon at the American University of Beirut, told the pro-Hezbollah newspaper Al-Akhbar that more than 90% of the injuries they were treating were double injuries to the eye and fingertips.

There are examples of intelligence agencies taking control of companies, such as the CIA and West German intelligence’s secret ownership of Crypto, which secured diplomatic communications for as much as 40% of the world’s embassies during the cold war and in the two decades that followed.

But controlling a company to manufacture covert weapons in quantity is something different – and has raised questions about whether the remotely exploding devices are legal under international law.

Prof Janina Dill, an international law specialist at Oxford University, said: “The attacking party would have struggled to verify whether the individuals using the pagers were legitimate targets of attack due to a fighting role in Hezbollah.” They would have “had little information about the circumstances in which the pagers detonated”.

A deliberately confusing web of front companies, some based in Europe, appear to be behind the delivery of the devices.

Bulgarian intelligence said it was examining reports that a firm, Norta Global, was behind the shipment of the pagers, which in turn was using a Hungarian firm, BAC Consulting, as a front.

The Bulgarian security service, DANS, said that it could find “no customs operations have been carried out with the goods in question”, though its searches were continuing.

No company called Norta Global crops up on the social media networking site LinkedIn or web searches, though there is a deleted website with a reverse name Global Norta. Internet archives reveal only the most basic website, shorn of identifying information.

A day earlier, Hungarian authorities said they had no evidence that BAC Consulting had manufactured the pagers in the country, though it held a licence from their original Taiwanese manufacturer, Go Apollo. BAC’s chief executive, Cristiana Bársony-Arcidiacono, said it was just an intermediary.

Plastic explosives are also difficult to detect, particularly in small quantities, and normally require the adding of a taggant, a special chemical marker, to ensure their origin can be known. Given the apparent goal to target Hezbollah fighters and leaders, it is unlikely that this will have taken place.

Lawrence said more explosive was likely to have been used in the walkie-talkies, which would account for the higher number of fatalities on Wednesday in fewer attacks. The death toll was 25, compared with 12 killed by the exploding pagers.

The Japanese walkie-talkie manufacturer, Icom, whose name and logo appears on the IC-V82 devices that exploded on Wednesday, said it had not made the handset since 2014. The batteries had also been discontinued, it added, though counterfeits circulate widely in the Middle East.

The fact that Israel was apparently able to ascertain that Hezbollah wanted 5,000 pagers and made use of walkie-talkies as an alternative to the mobile phones its leader had banned this year – and successfully supply them about five months ago – suggests a high degree of intelligence.

Chuck Freilich, a former deputy national security adviser in Israel, said there would be “100 steps in an operation like this, all of which have to be perfect”, adding that such is the ambition of the attack on Hezbollah this week it would make sense only as part of the beginnings of a military escalation.

“This has exposed what appears to be a remarkable strategic capability,” Freilich said, though he questioned if the Israeli military was ready for a major war in the north given it had been fighting in Gaza for nearly a year.

Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, said the attacks on Tuesday and Wednesday “could be considered war crimes or a declaration or war”.

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.

Russia’s military command had anticipated Ukraine’s incursion into its Kursk region and had been making plans to prevent it for several months, according to a cache of documents that the Ukrainian army said it had seized from abandoned Russian positions in the region.

The disclosure makes the disarray among Russian forces after Ukraine’s attack in early August all the more embarrassing. The documents, shared with the Guardian, also reveal Russian concerns about morale in the ranks in Kursk, which intensified after the suicide of a soldier at the front who had reportedly been in a “prolonged state of depression due to his service in the Russian army”.

Unit commanders are given instructions to ensure soldiers consume Russian state media daily to maintain their “psychological condition”.

The Guardian could not independently verify the authenticity of the documents, though they bear the hallmarks of genuine Russian army communications. In late August, the Guardian met the Ukrainian special operations team who seized them, hours after they had left Russian territory. The team said they had taken Russian interior ministry, FSB and army documents from buildings in the Kursk region and later provided a selection to view and photograph.

Some of the documents are printed orders distributed to various units, while others are handwritten logs recording events and concerns at specific positions. The earliest entries are dated late in 2023, while the most recent documents are from just six weeks before Ukraine launched its incursion into the Kursk region on 6 August.

The documents mostly come from units of Russia’s 488th Guards Motorised Rifle Regiment, and in particular the second company of its 17th Battalion.

Ukraine’s incursion into Kursk took Kyiv’s western partners and many in the Ukrainian elite by surprise, as planning had been restricted to a very small number of people. But Russian military documents contain months of warnings about a possible incursion into the area and an attempt to occupy Sudzha, a town of 5,000 residents that has now been under Ukrainian occupation for more than a month.

An entry from 4 January spoke of the “potential for a breakthrough at the state border” by Ukrainian armed groups and ordered increased training to prepare to repel any attack. On 19 February, unit commanders were warned of Ukrainian plans for “a rapid push from the Sumy region into Russian territory, up to a depth of 80km [50 miles], to establish a four-day ‘corridor’ ahead of the arrival of the main Ukrainian army units on armoured vehicles”.

In mid-March, units at the border were ordered to boost defensive lines and “organise additional exercises for the leadership of units and strongpoints regarding the proper organisation of defences” in preparation for a Ukrainian cross-border attack.

In mid-June, there was a more specific warning of Ukrainian plans “in the direction Yunakivka-Sudzha, with the goal of taking Sudzha under control”, which did indeed happen in August. There was also a prediction that Ukraine would attempt to destroy a bridge over the Seym River to disrupt Russian supply lines in the region, which also later happened. The June document complained that Russian units stationed at the front “are filled only 60-70% on average, and primarily made up of reserves with weak training”.

When the Ukrainian attack came on 6 August, many Russian soldiers abandoned their positions, and within a week Ukraine had taken full control of Sudzha. “They ran away, without even evacuating or destroying their documents,” said a member of the special operations team who seized the files.

During Moscow’s chaotic retreat, Ukrainian forces captured hundreds of Russian soldiers, many of whom were conscripts, who are not generally expected to face battle. The parents of one conscript soldier from the second company, featured in the documents, recorded a tearful video appeal in August, identifying him as their 22-year-old son Vadim Kopylov, saying he had been taken prisoner near Sudzha and calling on Russian authorities to exchange him.

The documents give an insight into Russian tactics over the past year, in one case speaking of the need to create decoy trenches and positions to confuse Ukrainian reconnaissance drones. “Models of tanks, armoured vehicles and artillery launchers should be created as well as mannequins of soldiers, and they should be periodically moved around,” reads one order.

It adds that a few soldiers should be sent to the decoy positions to light fires at night and walk around with torches, and that Russia should create radio chatter about the decoy positions, with the aim of having it intercepted. It is unclear if such positions were ever created; members of a Ukrainian unit flying reconnaissance drones in the area in recent weeks told the Guardian they had seen no evidence of such positions.

In March, the Russian documents note that there were increasing incidents of Ukrainian sabotage groups disguising themselves for work behind Russian lines by wearing Russian uniforms. “To prevent enemy infiltration into our combat formations … commanders are to implement the use of identification marker variant n6, made from materials 8cm wide, to be attached using invisible tape,” reads an order from that month.

Buried in the dry, meandering official language are signs of serious problems with morale at the front. “The analysis of the current situation regarding suicides shows that the issue of servicemen dying as a result of suicidal incidents remains tense,” reads one entry. It recounts an incident that reportedly took place on 20 January this year, when a conscript soldier entered the summer washing area at a guard post and shot himself in the abdomen.

“The investigation into the incident determined that the cause of the suicide and death was a nervous and psychological breakdown, caused by his prolonged state of depression due to his service in the Russian army,” reads the handwritten report of the incident.

To prevent further such incidents, unit commanders are instructed to identify soldiers who “are mentally unprepared to fulfil their duties or prone to deviant behaviour, and organise their reassignment and transfer to military medical facilities”.

Further instructions on keeping up morale come in an undated, typed document that explains that soldiers should get 5-10 minutes a day as well as an hour once a week of political instruction, “aimed at maintaining and raising the political, moral and psychological condition of the personnel”.

Donald Trump has complained bitterly to Jewish donors that a majority of Jews vote against him in US presidential elections, suggesting that the Democratic party has a “curse on you”.

The Republican presidential candidate made the remarks during a speech on Thursday at the Israeli-American Council national summit in Washington, where he used hyperbolic language to warn that victory for his opponent Kamala Harris would result in Israel being wiped off the map.

Airing grievances at the end of a disjointed speech, with US and Israel flags behind him, Trump claimed that his support among Jewish voters went from 25% in 2016 to 29% in 2020. “And based on what I did and based on my love – the same love that you have – I should be at 100,” he carped.

Trump asserted that he had been “the best president by far” for Israel but a new poll shows him still below 40% among Jewish voters. “That means you’ve got 60% voted for somebody that hates Israel. And I say it – it’s going to happen – it’s only because of the Democrat hold or curse on you. You can’t let this happen. Forty percent is not acceptable, because we have an election to win.”

Trump has been criticised for associating with extremists who promote antisemitic rhetoric, such as the far-right activist Nick Fuentes and the rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West. When the former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke endorsed Trump in 2016, Trump responded that he knew “nothing about David Duke, I know nothing about white supremacists”.

But during his four years in office, Trump approved a series of policy changes long sought by many advocates of Israel, such as moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, officially recognising the Golan Heights as being under Israel’s sovereignty, and terminating Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal.

At Thursday’s donor event, entitled “Fighting Anti-Semitism in America”, Trump told the mostly supportive audience: “My promise to Jewish Americans is this: with your vote I will be your defender, your protector, and I will be the best friend Jewish Americans have ever had in the White House. But in all fairness, I already am.”

He criticised Harris over the Biden administration’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war, and for what he branded antisemitic protests on college campuses and elsewhere. “Kamala Harris has done absolutely nothing. She has not lifted a single finger to protect you or to protect your children.”

But the former president returned again and again to what is evidently a political sore point: his persistent struggle among Jewish voters. He repeated a talking point that Jewish people who vote for Democrats “should have their head examined”.

He went on: “I will put it to you very simply and gently. I really haven’t been treated right. But you haven’t been treated right because you’re putting yourself in great danger and the United States hasn’t been treated right.”

He claimed that Israel “will cease to exist” within two or three years if he does not win the election. “I have to tell you the truth and maybe you’ll be energised because there’s no way that I should be getting 40% of the vote. I’m the one that’s protecting you. These are the people who are going destroy you and you have 60% of Jewish people essentially voting for that.”

Trump claimed that a recent poll in Israel was 99% favourable towards him, though it was unclear what poll he was citing. He went on to boast: “Everybody loves me. I could run for prime minister but I’d have to learn your language. That’s a tough language to learn … I’m the most popular person in Israel. But here it doesn’t translate. It is a strange thing.”

Concluding his remarks, the former president reiterated: “I believe that Israel will be wiped off the face of the earth if I don’t win.” He described, without evidence, Harris as “anti-Israel” and “anti-Jewish”, even though the vice-president is married to a Jewish man, Doug Emhoff.

Trump was introduced by the megadonor Miriam Adelson, a co-owner of the Dallas Mavericks NBA team and the widow of billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. Critics have likened the Adelsons’ ability to pull public policy on Israel away from public opinion to the National Rifle Association’s influence on gun laws.

Miriam Adelson praised Trump’s “beautiful Jewish daughter” Ivanka and urged the gathering to support him. “All of us Jews must vote for him,” she said. “It is our sacred duty in gratitude for everything he has done and trust in everything he will yet do.”

Earlier on Thursday, leaders of the Uncommitted Democratic protest vote movement said the group would not endorse Harris for president, but also urged supporters to vote against Trump. The group, which opposes the Biden administration’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war, has called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and an end to US weapons transfers to Israel.

North Carolina’s Republican gubernatorial nominee, Mark Robinson, referred to himself as a “black NAZI!” on a pornography website’s message board, according to a new CNN report about the current lieutenant governor who has already been marked by scandal and controversial comments.

According to CNN’s reporting, Robinson referred to himself as a “perv” in archived messages because he “enjoyed watching transgender pornography”. The messages were made between 2008 and 2012 on “Nude Africa”, a pornographic website that includes a message board.

He also expressed support for reinstating slavery. “Slavery is not bad. Some people need to be slaves. I wish they would bring it [slavery] back. I would certainly buy a few,” he wrote in October 2010.

In March 2012, during the Obama administration, he wrote: “I’d take Hitler over any of the shit that’s in Washington right now!”

Robinson, North Carolina’s first Black lieutenant governor, is facing the Democrat Josh Stein, the state attorney general, in November. Republicans have reportedly been pressuring Robinson to withdraw from the race as rumors swirled about CNN’s report on Thursday. North Carolina’s deadline for a candidate to drop out is also Thursday and the deadline to remove his name from the ballot has passed.

In a video posted to social media, Robinson accused his opponent of leaking the story to CNN and vehemently denied making the comments.

“You know my words. You know my character,” Robinson said. “And you know that I have been completely transparent in this race and before. Folks, this race right now, our opponents are desperate to shift the focus here from the substantive issues and focus on what you are concerned with, to salacious tabloid trash. We cannot allow that to happen.”

Robinson likened the story to the “high-tech lynching” of the supreme court justice Clarence Thomas during contentious confirmation hearings three decades ago. “We’re not going to let them do that. We are staying in this race. We’re in it to win it,” he said.

Late on Thursday, the North Carolina Republican Party stood by Robinson, saying Democrats were resorting to a smear campaign because they were losing on policy.

“Mark Robinson has categorically denied the allegations made by CNN but that won’t stop the Left from trying to demonize him via personal attacks,” the party said in a statement.

At least one North Carolina Republican, US Representative Richard Hudson, called CNN’s reporting “very concerning” and said he thought Robinson needed to do more to reassure voters the allegations were untrue.

CNN’s story details decades-long links between the “minisoldr” identity on chat boards and email addresses known to be Robinson’s.

Because Republicans already control North Carolina’s legislature, a Robinson victory would give them a trifecta and unilateral control over policymaking in a critical battleground state.

Robinson has a history of controversial statements. He has described Covid-19 as a “globalist” conspiracy to destroy Donald Trump. In 2021, he referred to transgender and homosexual people as “filth”. He has also said people who are gay are equivalent to “what the cows leave behind” as well as “maggots” and “flies”.

Robinson has not led in a poll since June. A recent Emerson College poll put Robinson behind by eight points.

North Carolina is a critical swing state in the presidential election. Carolina Journal, a conservative policy magazine in North Carolina, reported today that the Trump campaign had asked Robinson to leave the race, and would no longer allow Robinson to appear on stage with the former president. Trump gave Robinson his full-throated endorsement in March, calling him “Martin Luther King on steroids”.

The CNN piece quoted Robinson denigrating King in obscene, racist terms in posts from 2011, calling him a “commie bastard”, “worse than a maggot”, a “ho fucking, phony”, and a “huckster”.

“I’m not in the KKK. They don’t let blacks join,” Robinson posted, according to CNN. “If I was in the KKK I would have called him Martin Lucifer Koon!”

Kamala Harris sat down with Oprah Winfrey on Thursday for a “virtual rally” that included a wide ranging sit-down interview, during which Harris attacked her opponent’s stance on reproductive rights and pledged to sign a border security bill thwarted by Senate Republicans, but largely kept her guard up with the legendary television interviewer.

The event, helmed by one of the all-time masters of the television talkshow, was filled with celebrity cameos and heart-wrenching personal stories. It was live-streamed from Michigan, a key battleground state.

“There’s a real feeling of optimism and hope making a comeback … for this new day that is no longer on the horizon but is here. We’re living it,” Oprah told the audience of 400 in-person attendees and the more than 200,000 others who tuned in virtually.

The star-studded list of remote attendees included Tracee Ellis Ross, Julia Roberts, Meryl Streep, Chris Rock and Ben Stiller, who tuned in from their living rooms to express their enthusiasm for the Harris-Walz ticket.

“​I wanna bring my daughters to White House to meet this Black woman president,” Rock said. “I think she will make a great president and I’m ready to turn the page. All the hate and negativity, it’s gotta stop.”

“Hello, President Harris,” Meryl Streep greeted her, then covered her mouth. “Oop!”

“Forty-seven days,” Harris responded, laughing.

Oprah faced a challenge in sitting down across from Harris, who has been known among journalists since the beginning of her career as a rigidly controlled, repetitive interviewee.

Harris did not open up much, even when Oprah asked her about her sudden transformation after Biden endorsed her to take over the presidential campaign.

But Oprah did provoke one moment of unexpected candor, when she noted her surprise at learning that Harris has long been a gun owner.

“If somebody breaks in my house, they’re getting shot,” Harris said. She laughed, sounding surprised at herself. “Sorry. Probably shouldn’t have said that. But my staff will deal with that later.”

“I’m not trying to take everyone’s guns away,” Harris added.

During the nearly 90-minute conversation, Harris spoke directly with members of the audience, who raised their concerns about immigration, the cost of living and the crackdown on reproductive rights.

Oprah said Americans were grieving with Haitians and people mistaken for Haitians, who were now living in fear because the Trump campaign had spread lurid, false claims about them. But she added that many Americans on the left, the right and in the middle did have genuine concerns about immigration into the US.

In response to an audience member’s question about what she would do to promote border security, Harris blamed Donald Trump for killing legislation that would have provided more funding for law enforcement at the border.

“The bill would have allowed us to have more resources to prosecute transnational criminal organizations,” Harris said. “Donald Trump called up his folks and said, ‘Don’t put that bill on the floor for a vote.’ He preferred to run on a problem instead of addressing the problem. And he put his personal political security before border security.”

Also in attendance were the mother and sisters of Amber Nicole Thurman, a woman who died after failing to receive prompt medical care in 2022 when she experienced complications from taking abortion pills, just weeks after Georgia’s abortion ban went into effect. A recent report deemed her the first “preventable” death to be confirmed as a result of Georgia’s ban.

Her family blamed Donald Trump and his supreme court picks for her death. “They just let her die because of some stupid abortion ban. They treated her like she was just another number,” Thurman’s older sister said of the medical professionals she had turned to for help.

“You’re looking at a mother who is broken,” Thurman’s mother said, through tears. “It’s the worst pain that a parent could ever feel. I want you all to know that Amber was not a statistic. She was loved by a strong family and we would have done whatever to get our baby the help that she needed. Women around the world need to know that this was preventable.”

Harris gave her condolences to the family and reiterated that Trump chose his three supreme court justices with the intention of getting abortion bans to spread across states. “They did as he intended,” Harris said.

Thursday evening’s Unite for America live-streamed rally brought together 400 groups that have held virtual rallies for the Harris-Walz ticket.

The first virtual rally was organized by Win with Black Women, the group that, within hours of Joe Biden dropping out of the race, brought 44,000 Black women on to a Zoom call to strategize and raise money for the Harris campaign.

“We knew that we needed to get to work,” Jotaka Eaddy, founder of Win with Black Women, said during the event. “It was a moment in our country to show what Black women have always done.”

Despite big bumps following the Democratic national convention and the 10 September presidential debate, the race between Harris and Donald Trump remains tight, with both candidates polling at 47%, according to the most recent poll from the New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer and Siena College.

One of 50 men accused of raping the French woman Gisèle Pelicot after she was drugged by her husband accepted the charges on Thursday, saying he was sorry for what he did.

Lionel R, a 44-year-old supermarket worker and father of three, was among dozens of men accused of participating in the mass rape of Pelicot over a decade in a trial that has shocked France.

Gisèle Pelicot’s then husband, Dominique Pelicot, has admitted to drugging her into the state of a “deep coma” and inviting strangers he met in online chatrooms to rape her.

Gisèle Pelicot, who said she had not consented, requested that the trial be open to the public to raise awareness about the use of drugs to commit rape and sexual abuse.

Lionel R admitted in court that he had indeed raped Gisèle Pelicot on 2 December 2018, though he said he had not intended to. “Since I never obtained Mrs Pélicot’s consent, I have no choice but to accept the facts,” he told the court.

He said to Gisèle Pelicot: “I am sorry, I can only imagine the nightmare you’ve lived through … and I am part of this nightmare. I know my apologies won’t change what happened, but I wanted to tell you that.

“If I had known she wasn’t aware [of what would happen], I wouldn’t have gone there,” he told the court. “I should have checked that she was OK with it. I didn’t talk to her, so I could not get her consent. I feel guilty for what I did.

“I never told myself: ‘I will rape that woman’,” he said. However, he admitted: “I’m guilty of rape.” He added that he should have left when he saw she was unconscious, and that it was cowardly of him not to have said anything.

Lionel R also tried to shift some of the blame on to Dominique Pelicot, telling the court he had done what the husband had told him to do. He said Pélicot’s explanations were “not very clear”, but he had believed he was simply participating in a game.

“There was talk of medical drugs. Sometimes of her taking them and sometimes of him administering them to her,” he said. “I didn’t ask myself too many questions,” he added.

He said: “I never imagined that she might not be part of this game. That was my first huge error.”

Dominique Pelicot has admitted the charges, telling the court he was “a rapist”. He has said the men he recruited online all knew they were coming to rape his unconscious, drugged wife.

A total of 50 men aged between 26 and 74 are accused of raping Gisèle Pelicot in her bedroom in southern France between 2011 and 2020 after being invited by her husband. The accused include a fire officer, prison warden, a nurse and a journalist.

Some men have admitted Pelicot told them he was drugging his then wife, while others claimed they believed they were participating in a couple’s organised game.

Pelicot told the court he regularly drugged his wife and contacted the men online.

The trial continues until December.

One of 50 men accused of raping the French woman Gisèle Pelicot after she was drugged by her husband accepted the charges on Thursday, saying he was sorry for what he did.

Lionel R, a 44-year-old supermarket worker and father of three, was among dozens of men accused of participating in the mass rape of Pelicot over a decade in a trial that has shocked France.

Gisèle Pelicot’s then husband, Dominique Pelicot, has admitted to drugging her into the state of a “deep coma” and inviting strangers he met in online chatrooms to rape her.

Gisèle Pelicot, who said she had not consented, requested that the trial be open to the public to raise awareness about the use of drugs to commit rape and sexual abuse.

Lionel R admitted in court that he had indeed raped Gisèle Pelicot on 2 December 2018, though he said he had not intended to. “Since I never obtained Mrs Pélicot’s consent, I have no choice but to accept the facts,” he told the court.

He said to Gisèle Pelicot: “I am sorry, I can only imagine the nightmare you’ve lived through … and I am part of this nightmare. I know my apologies won’t change what happened, but I wanted to tell you that.

“If I had known she wasn’t aware [of what would happen], I wouldn’t have gone there,” he told the court. “I should have checked that she was OK with it. I didn’t talk to her, so I could not get her consent. I feel guilty for what I did.

“I never told myself: ‘I will rape that woman’,” he said. However, he admitted: “I’m guilty of rape.” He added that he should have left when he saw she was unconscious, and that it was cowardly of him not to have said anything.

Lionel R also tried to shift some of the blame on to Dominique Pelicot, telling the court he had done what the husband had told him to do. He said Pélicot’s explanations were “not very clear”, but he had believed he was simply participating in a game.

“There was talk of medical drugs. Sometimes of her taking them and sometimes of him administering them to her,” he said. “I didn’t ask myself too many questions,” he added.

He said: “I never imagined that she might not be part of this game. That was my first huge error.”

Dominique Pelicot has admitted the charges, telling the court he was “a rapist”. He has said the men he recruited online all knew they were coming to rape his unconscious, drugged wife.

A total of 50 men aged between 26 and 74 are accused of raping Gisèle Pelicot in her bedroom in southern France between 2011 and 2020 after being invited by her husband. The accused include a fire officer, prison warden, a nurse and a journalist.

Some men have admitted Pelicot told them he was drugging his then wife, while others claimed they believed they were participating in a couple’s organised game.

Pelicot told the court he regularly drugged his wife and contacted the men online.

The trial continues until December.

This autumn, for a limited time, Earth will be getting a second moon.

According to a study published this week, an asteroid roughly the length of a city bus will be captured by Earth’s gravitational pull and orbit our planet for about two months, becoming a “mini moon”.

It will spend time with Earth from 29 September until 25 November before returning to its home, an asteroid belt revolving around the sun.

“The object that is going to pay us a visit belongs to the Arjuna asteroid belt, a secondary asteroid belt made of space rocks that follow orbits very similar to that of Earth,” Carlos de la Fuente Marcos, a professor at Universidad Complutense de Madrid and the lead author of the research, told Space.com.

He explained that some of the asteroids in the Arjuna belt can approach relatively close to Earth, about 2.8m miles (4.5m km) away.

If they’re also going relatively slowly for asteroids – at velocities of around 2,200mph (3,540km/h) – then their paths become more strongly affected by the Earth’s gravity than usual.

“Under these conditions … the object may become a temporary moon of Earth,” he said, adding it would happen to the asteroid in question starting next week and last about two months.

He added that it would not follow a full orbit around the Earth.

The asteroid was discovered on 7 August by the Asteroid Terrestrial-Impact Last Alert System (Atlas), a Nasa-funded program.

It measures about 10 meters long, which is tiny compared with the Earth’s moon, with has a diameter of about 3,474km.

The object will be “too small and dim for typical amateur telescopes and binoculars”, Marcos added. “However, the object is well within the brightness range of typical telescopes used by professional astronomers.”

The scientists added that they believe the asteroid mini moon will return to Earth’s orbit again in 2055.

This is not the first mini moon the Earth has had. The researchers wrote in their paper that two mini moon events occurred in 1981 and in 2022.

Two days before South Carolina is scheduled to execute a man on death row, the key witness for the prosecution has come forward to say that he lied at trial and the state was putting to death an innocent man.

Khalil Divine Black Sun Allah, 46, is due to be killed by lethal injection on Friday. His attorneys filed emergency motions to halt the execution, citing new testimony asserting that Allah was wrongfully convicted, but the state supreme court denied the requests late Thursday, saying the execution should proceed.

Allah, who was previously known as Freddie Owens, was convicted of an armed robbery in November 1997 and the murder of a convenience store cashier named Irene Graves. He was 19 years old at the time. Allah has long asserted his innocence in the killing of Graves, a 41-year-old mother of three, who was shot in the head during the robbery.

There was no forensic evidence tying Allah to the shooting. The state’s central evidence against Allah was testimony from his friend and co-defendant, Steven Golden, who was also charged in the robbery and murder. Golden and Allah were due to face a joint murder trial, but as the case was starting in 1999, Golden pleaded guilty to murder, armed robbery and criminal conspiracy and agreed to testify against Allah.

Surveillance footage at the store showed two masked men with guns, but they were not identifiable in the footage. Golden, who was 18 years old at the time of the robbery, said at the trial that he and Allah had been the men in the footage, and that it was Allah who shot Graves.

But on Wednesday, two days before the scheduled execution, Golden came forward with an explosive affidavit, stating that Allah “is not the person who shot Irene Graves” and “was not present” during the robbery. Golden said he concealed the identity of the “real shooter” out of fear that “his associates might kill me”, and that he was coming forward now because he wanted “a clear conscience”.

“I don’t want [Allah] to be executed for something he didn’t do,” he wrote in the new affidavit.

Golden said he was high when police questioned him days after the robbery, and the detectives claimed they knew Allah had been with him: “They told me I might as well make a statement against [Allah], because he already told his side to everyone and they were just trying to get my side of the story. I was scared that I would get the death penalty if I didn’t make a statement.”

He alleged prosecutors later promised him that he would not face the death penalty or life in prison if he testified against Allah, and he agreed.

In a response filed on Thursday, the attorney general’s office suggested that Golden was not credible, saying he “has now made a sworn statement that is contrary to his multiple other sworn statements over twenty years”. Lawyers for the state also noted that people in Allah’s life at the time testified that Allah had confessed to them that he was the shooter. Allah’s attorneys rejected the allegations that he had previously confessed, suggesting that testimony was unreliable.

The state supreme court sided with the attorney general, ruling the new evidence did not amount to “exceptional circumstances” warranting a reprieve.

The justices said Golden’s new statement was “squarely inconsistent” with his repeated past testimony, and that there was “no indication of the circumstances under which Golden was asked to sign his most recent affidavit”. The justices also maintained that other evidence suggested Allah’s guilt.

Gerald “Bo” King, one of Allah’s lawyers, criticized the court’s decision not to intervene “despite compelling evidence of his innocence that emerged only yesterday”, adding in a statement Thursday night: “South Carolina is on the verge of executing a man for a crime he did not commit. We will continue to advocate for [Allah].”

Allah’s execution would be the first in 13 years in South Carolina and could be the start of a rapid series of executions in the coming months in the state. The state supreme court recently announced five additional executions that it would seek to schedule after Allah is killed, saying they would be spaced apart by at least 35 days.

South Carolina had unofficially paused executions in 2011 as pharmaceutical companies stopped supplying lethal injection drugs, fearing public pressure. But the state restocked its supply after it passed a law last year shielding the identity of suppliers.

Allah’s attorneys had raised a series of objections to his execution in recent weeks, before Golden’s new statement. They noted Allah had been convicted of murder without a jury explicitly ruling that he pulled the trigger. Prosecutors told jurors at his trial that they could convict him for murder simply if they believed he was present during the robbery, and his lawyers have argued that the death penalty should not be applied to a defendant found guilty as an “accomplice”.

His lawyers have also noted that he endured a lifetime of severe violence and trauma and had been diagnosed with brain damage.

If executed, Allah would be one of the youngest people at the time of the crime to be put to death by South Carolina in decades.

Allah’s lawyers have also filed a clemency petition with the governor’s office to stop the execution.

The Rev Hillary Taylor, executive director of South Carolinians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, said on Thursday it would be a “huge miscarriage of justice” if the execution proceeds: “Khalil should not have to die for somebody else’s wrongdoing. That is not accountability. That is not justice.”

Police in southern Pakistan have shot dead a blasphemy suspect during an alleged shootout with armed men, in the second such killing in a week.

Police identified the man as Shah Nawaz, a doctor in the Umerkot district in the southern Sindh province, who had gone into hiding two days ago after being accused of insulting Islam’s prophet Muhammad and sharing blasphemous content on social media.

The local police chief, Niaz Khoso, said Nawaz was “killed just by chance” on Wednesday night when officers signaled two men riding on a motorcycle to stop in Mirpur Khas, a city in Sindh.

Khoso said that instead of stopping, the two men opened fire and tried to flee, prompting police to return fire. One of the suspects fled on the motorcycle, while the other was killed, he said.

Khoso claimed that it was only after the shootout that officers learned that the killed man was the doctor being sought by them for the alleged blasphemy.

Videos circulating on social media showed local clerics throwing rose petals at police and praising officers for killing the blasphemy suspect. There was no immediate clarification from the Sindh government about the circumstances in which the suspect was killed.

The killing of Nawaz drew strong condemnation from the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), which said it was “gravely concerned by the alleged extrajudicial killing of two people accused of blasphemy.”

“This pattern of violence in cases of blasphemy, in which law enforcement personnel are allegedly involved, is an alarming trend,” it said in a statement. HRCP asked the government to conduct an independent inquiry to ascertain who was responsible for Nawaz’s death and ensure those responsible for it were punished.

The killing of Nawaz came a day after Islamists in a nearby city, Umerkot, staged a protest demanding his arrest and burned his clinic.

The latest killing comes a week after an officer opened fire inside a police station in the south-western city of Quetta, fatally wounding another suspect held on accusations of blasphemy.

The man had been arrested last Wednesday after officers rescued him from an enraged mob that claimed he had insulted Muhammad. He was killed by a police officer, who was then arrested.

However, the tribe and the family of the killed man said they forgave the officer and that the man had hurt the sentiments of Muslims by insulting Muhammad.

Though killings of blasphemy suspects by mobs are common, such killings by police are rare in Pakistan, where accusations of blasphemy – sometimes even just rumours – often spark rioting and rampage by mobs that can escalate into killings.

Under Pakistan’s controversial blasphemy laws, anyone found guilty of insulting Islam or Islamic religious figures can be sentenced to death – though authorities have yet to carry out a death sentence for blasphemy.

Pakistan has witnessed a surge in attacks on blasphemy suspects in recent years.

In June, a mob broke into a police station in the north-western town of Madyan, snatched a detainee who was a tourist, and then killed him over allegations that he had desecrated Islam’s holy book.

Last year, a mob in Punjab province attacked churches and homes of Christians after claiming they saw a local Christian and his friend desecrating pages from a Qur’an. The attack in the district of Jaranwala drew nationwide condemnation, but Christians say the men linked to the violence are yet to be put on trial.

Police in southern Pakistan have shot dead a blasphemy suspect during an alleged shootout with armed men, in the second such killing in a week.

Police identified the man as Shah Nawaz, a doctor in the Umerkot district in the southern Sindh province, who had gone into hiding two days ago after being accused of insulting Islam’s prophet Muhammad and sharing blasphemous content on social media.

The local police chief, Niaz Khoso, said Nawaz was “killed just by chance” on Wednesday night when officers signaled two men riding on a motorcycle to stop in Mirpur Khas, a city in Sindh.

Khoso said that instead of stopping, the two men opened fire and tried to flee, prompting police to return fire. One of the suspects fled on the motorcycle, while the other was killed, he said.

Khoso claimed that it was only after the shootout that officers learned that the killed man was the doctor being sought by them for the alleged blasphemy.

Videos circulating on social media showed local clerics throwing rose petals at police and praising officers for killing the blasphemy suspect. There was no immediate clarification from the Sindh government about the circumstances in which the suspect was killed.

The killing of Nawaz drew strong condemnation from the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), which said it was “gravely concerned by the alleged extrajudicial killing of two people accused of blasphemy.”

“This pattern of violence in cases of blasphemy, in which law enforcement personnel are allegedly involved, is an alarming trend,” it said in a statement. HRCP asked the government to conduct an independent inquiry to ascertain who was responsible for Nawaz’s death and ensure those responsible for it were punished.

The killing of Nawaz came a day after Islamists in a nearby city, Umerkot, staged a protest demanding his arrest and burned his clinic.

The latest killing comes a week after an officer opened fire inside a police station in the south-western city of Quetta, fatally wounding another suspect held on accusations of blasphemy.

The man had been arrested last Wednesday after officers rescued him from an enraged mob that claimed he had insulted Muhammad. He was killed by a police officer, who was then arrested.

However, the tribe and the family of the killed man said they forgave the officer and that the man had hurt the sentiments of Muslims by insulting Muhammad.

Though killings of blasphemy suspects by mobs are common, such killings by police are rare in Pakistan, where accusations of blasphemy – sometimes even just rumours – often spark rioting and rampage by mobs that can escalate into killings.

Under Pakistan’s controversial blasphemy laws, anyone found guilty of insulting Islam or Islamic religious figures can be sentenced to death – though authorities have yet to carry out a death sentence for blasphemy.

Pakistan has witnessed a surge in attacks on blasphemy suspects in recent years.

In June, a mob broke into a police station in the north-western town of Madyan, snatched a detainee who was a tourist, and then killed him over allegations that he had desecrated Islam’s holy book.

Last year, a mob in Punjab province attacked churches and homes of Christians after claiming they saw a local Christian and his friend desecrating pages from a Qur’an. The attack in the district of Jaranwala drew nationwide condemnation, but Christians say the men linked to the violence are yet to be put on trial.

A well-known Georgian transgender model has been murdered, local officials said, a day after the government passed legislation that will impose sweeping curbs on LGBTQ+ rights in the country.

Georgia’s interior ministry said Kesaria Abramidze, 37, was believed to have been stabbed to death in her apartment in suburban Tbilisi on Wednesday.

Georgian media later reported that a man had been arrested in connection with the crime.

Abramidze was one of the country’s first openly trans public figures. Her death follows controversial legislation on “family values and the protection of minors” that will allow officials to outlaw Pride events and censor films and books.

The law, which was approved by the Georgian parliament on Tuesday in its third and final reading, includes bans on same-sex marriages and gender-affirming treatments. It is expected to be another point of contention between Georgia and the EU as the country seeks to join the bloc.

Critics argue that the bill, initially introduced by the ruling Georgian Dream party in the summer, mirrors laws enacted in neighbouring Russia, where authorities have implemented a series of repressive anti-LGBTQ+ measures over the past decade.

Although the motive behind Abramidze’s murder remains unclear, her death was swiftly cast by Georgian civil society as part of a state campaign against minorities in the country.

Under the Georgian Dream party, which has taken an increasingly anti-liberal stance, the country has seen a rise in violence against LGBTQ+ people.

Last year, hundreds of opponents of gay rights stormed an LGBTQ+ festival in Tbilisi, forcing the event to be cancelled. This year, tens of thousands of people marched in the capital to promote “traditional family values” at an event attended by the ruling party amd the deeply conservative and influential Orthodox church.

“There is a direct correlation between the use of hate speech in politics and hate crimes,” the Social Justice Center, a Tbilisi-based human rights group, said in its statement reacting to the murder.

“It has been almost a year that the Georgian Dream government has been aggressively using homo/bi/transphobic language and cultivating it with mass propaganda means,” it added.

On Wednesday, Josep Borrell, the EU’s top diplomat, called on the Georgian government to withdraw the “family values” law, warning it would harm Georgia’s chances of joining the bloc. The legislation would “increase discrimination & stigmatisation”, he said on X.

After Abramidze’s death, Michael Roth, the Social Democratic party chair of the Bundestag foreign affairs committee in Germany, echoed that call. “Those who sow hatred will reap violence. Kesaria Abramidze was killed just one day after the Georgian parliament passed the anti-LGBTI law,” Roth wrote on X.

The introduction of the law comes just five weeks before parliamentary elections that many see as a litmus test of whether Georgia, once one of the most pro-western former Soviet states, will now drift towards Russia.

The country’s pro-western president, Salome Zourabichvili, whose functions are mostly ceremonial, is expected to veto the law before it comes into effect. However, Georgian Dream and its allies have enough seats in parliament to override her veto.

Earlier this year, the Georgian Dream also pushed through the divisive “foreign influence” law, which western critics argue is authoritarian and Russian-inspired, and has derailed the country’s EU aspirations.

Meanwhile, tributes have started to pour in for Abramidze, who represented Georgia at Miss Trans Star International in 2018 and had more than 500,000 followers on Instagram.

“Kesaria was iconic! Provocative, wise, incredibly brave! A trailblazer for Georgia’s trans rights,” Maia Otarashvili, a Georgian political scientist, wrote on X.

Zourabichvili said the murder should be a “wake-up call” for Georgian society.

“A terrible murder! The death of this beautiful young woman … should not be in vain!” the president wrote on Facebook.

Two men have been killed in New Caledonia during a police operation to detain activists suspected of involvement in May’s deadly unrest which was sparked by attempts from Paris to change voting rights in the French Pacific territory, officials said.

The deaths during the overnight operation south of the capital Nouméa took the death toll in the months of unrest in the French Pacific territory to 13.

Public prosecutor Yves Dupas said on Thursday that security forces on an observation mission fired two shots after being “directly threatened by a group of armed individuals”.

The first “hit a man, aged 30, positioned as a lone gunman, in the right side of the abdomen,” Dupas said in a statement. “The second shot hit a man, aged 29, in the chest.”

Police were looking for around a dozen people suspected of involvement in attacks on security forces.

“We’re not terrorists, we’re not in a state of war,” said one mother in the village where the security operation was taking place.

Last week, French authorities in New Caledonia announced an extended curfew, banning gatherings and travel across the archipelago from 6pm to 6am for fear of protests by the Indigenous Kanak people around next week’s anniversary of the French takeover of the Pacific territory.

The Kanak people have long sought to break free from France, which first took the Pacific archipelago in 1853 and only granted citizenship to all Kanaks in 1957.

The latest violence flared on 13 May in response to attempts by President Emmanuel Macron’s government to amend the French constitution and change voting lists in New Caledonia, which Kanaks feared would further marginalise them by granting more rights to recent arrivals from mainland France.

Macron declared a state of emergency two days later, rushing in 3,500 troops to help police quell the unrest. Thirteen people, mostly Kanaks, have now died in the violence, including two members of the security forces. One of them was killed after his weapon accidentally discharged.

The aim of police intervention overnight Wednesday was to arrest 10 people who have been suspected of participating in two-weeks of violence in May that included blocking whole districts around the capital and beyond, the archipelago’s main road, arson and looting.

In June, 11 Kanak activists were arrested in a broad police raid targeting the Field Action Coordination Unit. The detentions were part of a police investigation launched on 17 May, just days after protests against the Paris-pushed voting reform turned violent.

Seven of them, including Christian Tein, a Kanak leader of the pro-independence movement known as the Field Action Coordination Unit, were flown 17,000 kilometres away to mainland France for pretrial detention.

The charges that they face include complicity in attempted murder, organised theft with a weapon, organised destruction of private property while endangering people, and participation in a criminal group with an intent to plan a crime.

Tein’s group accused French authorities of “colonial practices” and demanded the activists’ immediate release and return to their homeland. In a recent statement, posted on social media the group vowed that “the Kanak people will never give up on their desire for independence with peaceful means.”

In the past seven months, the Field Action Coordination Unit has organised peaceful marches in New Caledonia against French authorities and the Paris-backed voting reform.

The reform has now been side-lined as Macron’s new prime minister Michel Barnier wrestles with political blocks in a fractured parliament to form a government following inconclusive legislative elections in July.

Agence France-Presse and Associated Press contributed to this report

• Ukraine’s offensive into the Russian border region of Kursk diverted about 40,000 Russian troops away from the frontline, Zelenskyy said on Thursday. Kyiv launched its Kursk offensive on 6 August in a bid to pull Moscow’s forces away from eastern Ukraine, where the Russian army has captured a string of villages in recent months.

• Russia’s defence ministry said its forces had captured the village of Heorhiivka, east of the city of Kurakhove, in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region. The General Staff of Ukraine’s military, in an afternoon report, referred to the village as one of several engulfed by fighting. Popular Ukrainian military blog DeepState said the village was in Russian hands. In his nightly video address, Zelenskyy said that Ukraine’s forces had “managed to diminish the occupiers’ assault potential in Donetsk region,” though the situation remained difficult in areas subjected to the heaviest attacks, near Kurakhove and another key Russian target, the city of Pokrovsk.

• Russian forces hit a geriatric care home in the Ukrainian city of Sumy and targeted its energy sector in a new wave of airstrikes on Thursday, killing at least one civilian, Ukrainian officials said. During a daytime strike on the northern city, a Russian guided bomb hit a five-storey building, regional and military officials said. One person was killed and 12 wounded, the interior ministry said. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said rescue teams were checking to see whether people were trapped under rubble. Images from the site shared alongside the ministry’s post showed elderly patients evacuated from the damaged building lying on the ground on carpets and blankets.

• The UN human rights monitoring mission in Ukraine said attacks on the power grid probably violated humanitarian law while the International Energy Agency said in a report that Ukraine’s electricity supply shortfall in the critical winter months could reach about a third of expected peak demand. Moscow has repeatedly attacked the Sumy region, which borders Russia’s Kursk region, the site of a major Ukrainian incursion in which Kyiv says it seized over 100 settlements.

• Zelenskyy will meet Joe Biden and Kamala Harris at the White House next week in what is likely to be his last such visit before US elections that could upend Washington’s policy on Kyiv. Zelenskyy is expected to share a “victory plan” with the US leaders to end the war with Russia during the visit on 26 September – as Kyiv frets that a second Donald Trump presidency could loosen US commitment to Ukraine. In a separate announcement, Zelenskyy said he would also meet Trump.

• Ramzan Kadyrov, the powerful leader of Russia’s Chechen Republic, accused Elon Musk on Thursday of disabling a Tesla Cybertruck that he claimed to have received from the billionaire last month. Kadyrov, who has ruled Chechnya with an iron fist for over 17 years, shared a video in August of him driving around in the electric vehicle with what appeared to be a machine gun mounted on its roof. Kadyrov said he received the vehicle from Musk, a claim that the Tesla owner called a lie on his social media platform, X. “Now, recently, Musk remotely disabled the Cybertruck,” said Kadyrov in a post on his Telegram account. It was not possible to independently verify Kadyrov’s claims.

• The US imposed sanctions on Thursday on a network of five groups and one person for enabling payments between Russia and North Korea to support Moscow’s war in Ukraine and Pyongyang’s weapons programs, the Treasury Department said. The US and Ukraine, as well as independent analysts, say Pyongyang is helping Russia by supplying rockets and missiles in return for economic and other military assistance from Moscow.

• Artillery shells sold by Indian arms makers have been diverted by European customers to Ukraine and New Delhi has not intervened to stop the trade despite protests from Moscow, according to 11 Indian and European government and defence industry officials, as well as a Reuters analysis of commercially available customs data. The transfer of munitions to support Ukraine’s defence against Russia has occurred for more than a year, according to the sources and the customs data.

• Germany is set to approve close to 400m euros ($450m) in additional military aid to Ukraine, according to a finance ministry letter seen by Reuters on Thursday. The funds are in addition to about 8 billion euros budgeted for Ukraine in 2024.

• Russia on Thursday opened the trial of an 18-year-old girl who stuck a 19th-century Ukrainian poem on a statue to protest Moscow’s offensive in Ukraine. Daria Kozyreva faces up to five years in prison. She was arrested in February for posting a verse from a poem by Ukraine’s national poet, Taras Shevchenko, on a statue of him in St Petersburg. Elsewhere, a court jailed a student in the country’s Far East for almost two months on Thursday for making positive statements about a Ukrainian paramilitary unit that Moscow classifies as a “terrorist” group.

• President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that Russia was ramping up drone production by around ten times to nearly 1.4m this year to ensure victory in Ukraine. “In total, about 140,000 unmanned aerial vehicles of various types were delivered to the armed forces in 2023,” Putin said. “This year, the production of drones is planned to increase significantly. Well, to be more precise, almost 10 times.”

Social media and online video companies are collecting huge troves of your personal information on and off their websites or apps and sharing it with a wide range of third-party entities, a new Federal Trade Commission (FTC) staff report on nine tech companies confirms.

The FTC report published on Thursday looked at the data-gathering practices of Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube, Discord, Reddit, Amazon, Snap, TikTok and Twitter/X between January 2019 and 31 December 2020. The majority of the companies’ business models incentivized tracking how people engaged with their platforms, collecting their personal data and using it to determine what content and ads users see on their feeds, the report states.

The FTC’s findings validate years of reporting on the depth and breadth of these companies’ tracking practices and call out the tech firms for “vast surveillance of users”. The agency is recommending Congress pass federal privacy regulations based on what it has documented. In particular, the agency is urging lawmakers to recognize that the business models of many of these companies do little to incentivize effective self-regulation or protection of user data.

“Recognizing this basic fact is important for enforcers and policymakers alike because any efforts to limit or regulate how these firms harvest troves of people’s personal data will conflict with their primary business incentives,” FTC chair Lina Khan said in a statement. “To craft effective rules or remedies limiting this data collection, policymakers will need to ensure that violating the law is not more lucrative than abiding by it.”

The FTC is also asking that the companies mentioned in the report invest in “limiting data retention and sharing, restricting targeted advertising, and strengthening protections for teens”.

Notably, the report highlights how consumers have little control over how these companies use and share their personal details. Most companies collected or inferred demographic information about users such as age, gender and language. Some collected information about household income, education and parental and marital status. But even when this type of personal information was not explicitly collected, some companies could analyze user behavior on the platform to deduce the details of their personal lives without their knowledge. For instance, some companies’ user interest categories included “baby, kids and maternity”, which would reveal parental status, or “newlyweds” and “divorce support”, which would reveal marital status. This information was then used by some companies to tailor what content people saw to increase engagement on their platforms. In some cases, that demographic information was shared with third-party entities to help target them with more relevant advertisements.

Whatever product was in use, it was not easy to opt out of data collection, according to the FTC. Nearly all the companies said they fed personal information to automated systems, most often to serve content and advertisements. On the flipside, almost none of them offered “a comprehensive ability to directly control or opt-out of use of their data by all Algorithms, Data Analytics, or AI”, per the report.

Several firms say it’s impossible to even compile a full list of who they share your data with. When the companies were asked to enumerate which advertisers, data brokers or other entities they shared consumer data with, none of these nine firms provided the FTC with a full inventory.

The FTC also found that despite evidence that children and teens use many of these platforms, many of the tech companies reported that, because their platforms are not directed at children, they do not need different data-sharing practices for children under 13 years of age. According to the report, none of the companies reported having data-sharing practices that treated the information collected about and from 13- to 17-year-olds via their sites and apps differently than adult data, even though data about minors is more sensitive.

The FTC called the companies’ data-minimization practices “woefully inadequate”, finding that some of the companies did not delete information when users requested it. “Even those Companies that actually deleted data would only delete some data, but not all,” the report stated.

“That is the most basic requirement,” said Mario Trujillo, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “The fact that some weren’t doing that even in the face of state privacy laws that require it proves that stronger enforcement is needed, especially from consumers themselves.”

Some of the firms have disputed the report’s findings. In a statement, Discord said the FTC report was an important step but lumped “very different models into one bucket”.

“Discord’s business model is very different – we are a real-time communications platform with strong user privacy controls and no feeds for endless scrolling. At the time of the study, Discord did not run a formal digital advertising service,” Kate Sheerin, Discord’s head of public policy in the US and Canada, said in a statement.

A Google spokesperson said the company had the strictest privacy policies in the industry. “We never sell people’s personal information and we don’t use sensitive information to serve ads. We prohibit ad personalization for users under 18 and we don’t personalize ads to anyone watching ‘made for kids content’ on YouTube,” said Google spokesperson, José Castañeda.

The other firms either did not provide an on-the-record comment or did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

However, if companies dispute the FTC’s findings, the onus is on them to provide evidence, says the Electronic Privacy Information Center (Epic), a Washington DC-based public interest research organization focused on privacy and free speech.

“I used to work in privacy compliance for companies, and let’s just say I believe absolutely nothing without documentation to back up claims,” said Epic global privacy counsel, Calli Schroeder. “And I agree with the FTC’s conclusion that self-regulation is a failure. Companies have repeatedly shown that their priority is profit and they will only take consumer protection and privacy issues seriously when failing to do so affects that profit.”