Israeli soldiers have been filmed pushing three apparently lifeless bodies from a rooftop during a raid in the occupied West Bank on Thursday, in the latest in a series of suspected violations by Israeli forces since the start of the Israel-Hamas war that rights groups say show a pattern of excessive force toward Palestinians.

The incident took place in the town of Qabatiya in the northern West Bank, where the Israeli military has been carrying out large-scale raids since late August that the Palestinian health ministry says have killed dozens of people.

The Israel Defense Forces said in a statement: “This is a serious incident that does not coincide with IDF values ​​and the expectations from IDF soldiers. The incident is under review.” The IDF declined to comment when asked if the soldiers involved were being investigated.

The Associated Press (AP) said one of its journalists had witnessed the incident. The agency could not immediately confirm the identities or whereabouts of the bodies, nor the death toll from the Israeli raid.

Israel said its troops had killed seven militants on Thursday, four during a gun battle and three in an airstrike on a car carrying people who had fired at its soldiers. As of Friday, no militant group had claimed any of the dead as its fighters.

Ameed Shehadeh, a correspondent for Al-Arabi who also witnessed the incident, told CNN: “A bulldozer tried to demolish the house to bring the bodies down. That didn’t work. Soldiers went up and kicked and pushed the bodies off the roof, as we have seen.”

He said a fourth body had been thrown off an adjacent roof a few metres below.

In footage obtained by AP, three soldiers can be seen picking up what appears to be a stiff body and dragging it towards the edge of a roof as troops stand on the ground below. The soldiers on the roof peer over the edge before heaving the body off.

On an adjacent rooftop, the soldiers hold another apparently lifeless body by its limbs and swing it over the edge. In a third instance, a soldier kicks a body toward the edge before it falls from view. Photographs captured by AP during Thursday’s raid show an Israeli army bulldozer moving near the buildings where the bodies were dropped.

When withdrawing from raids, the army usually leaves behind any Palestinians killed by Israeli gunfire. Occasionally it takes them to Israel.

Under international law, soldiers are supposed to ensure bodies, including those of enemy combatants, are treated decently.

“There is no military need to do this. It’s just a savage way of treating Palestinian bodies,” said Shawan Jabarin, the director of the Palestinian rights group Al-Haq, after watching the footage.

He said the video was shocking but not surprising, and he was doubtful Israel would properly investigate. The Israeli military rarely prosecutes soldiers in cases of reported harm to Palestinians, rights groups say. “The most that will happen is that soldiers will be disciplined, but there will be no real investigation and no real prosecution,” he said.

The Palestinian politician Mustafa Barghouti called the treatment of the bodies “a barbaric act that shows the extent of the degradation and brutality of the behaviour of the occupation army”.

The US national security council spokesperson John Kirby said: “We’ve seen that video, and we found it deeply disturbing. If it’s proven to be authentic, it clearly would depict abhorrent and egregious behaviour by professional soldiers.”

Tensions remain high in the West Bank, where Israeli military operations have been going on for week, posing a significant threat to local communities. A UN worker was fatally shot by a sniper while on the roof of his home in the northern West Bank on Saturday.

More than 700 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire in the West Bank since the war in Gaza erupted on 7 October, according to the Palestinian health ministry. The northern West Bank has been the scene of some of the worst violence since the start of the war.

Israel claims the raids are necessary to stamp out militancy, which has flared since 7 October. In that time, Palestinian gunmen have attacked Israelis at checkpoints and staged several attacks inside Israel.

Israel staged its deadliest raid into the northern West Bank since the war began earlier this month, killing at least 33 people.

In a separate development on Friday, Israeli forces killed at least 14 Palestinians in tank fire and airstrikes on northern and central areas of the Gaza Strip, medics said, as tanks advanced further into north-west Rafah near the border with Egypt. Residents reported heavy fire and explosions in the eastern areas of the city, where Israeli forces blew up several houses.

The Israeli military has said that forces operating in Rafah had killed hundreds of militants, located tunnels and explosives and destroyed military infrastructure.

The unrelenting fighting between the Israeli troops and Hamas militants in the territory is taking place at the same time as a parallel conflict between Israel and Hezbollah intensified this week.

Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse contributed to this report

David Lammy chaired a Cobra meeting to discuss preparations to evacuate remaining Britons from Lebanon, having already urged UK nationals to leave the country amid hostilities with Israel.

The foreign secretary led meetings in Whitehall on Friday as officials try to avoid a repeat of the chaos in which British people scrambled to leave Afghanistan when the Taliban took over in 2021.

There is no order to evacuate citizens yet, but fears of an all-out war are growing after an escalation of Israeli air strikes and targeted attacks on Hezbollah militants with exploding devices.

Lammy expressed concern about “rising tensions and civilian casualties” in Lebanon after strikes on Hezbollah targets in the south of the country on Thursday.

He repeated the Foreign Office’s warning to British nationals, urging them to leave Lebanon “while commercial options remain”, as the situation “could deteriorate rapidly”.

Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has vowed to retaliate after the attacks that targeted Lebanese militants with exploding pagers, killing and injuring many people.

On Thursday evening, Lammy said he had spoken to the Lebanese prime minister, Najib Mikati, and “expressed my deep concern over rising tensions and civilian casualties in Lebanon”.

He said that they had discussed “the need for a negotiated solution to restore stability and security” across the border between Israel and Lebanon.

Ministry of Defence insiders said no order had been given to organise an evacuation of the 16,000 or so British nationals in Lebanon but they said that plans were being sharpened this week, in response to the deteriorating situation.

The decision not to do so indicates that Israel has not told the UK it is planning a significant intensification of military action against Hezbollah, even allowing for the exploding pager and walkie talkie attacks widely attributed to its security agencies.

Military personnel and Foreign Office officials were deployed in early August as as part of preparatory planning for a range of possible conflict scenarios. These were being revised and updated this week, defence sources added.

Several European operators suspended flights in and out of Beirut and Tel Aviv this week and the only direct flights available out of the country, according to the flight comparison site Skyscanner, are with the Lebanese carrier Middle East Airlines.

Military transport planes could be made available if there are no commercial flights, such as the A400M Atlas or the C17 Globemaster. Chinook twin engine helicopters could also be used to evacuate smaller numbers in a hurry. The RAF base at Akrotiri in Cyprus would be the hub of any air evacuation effort.

The first choice of evacuation point would be Beirut’s international airport given the quality of the facilities, although it could prove problematic if there is a major outbreak of fighting, rendering the facility unsafe. The 2021 evacuation of Afghanistan used Kabul’s main airport, although evacuations from Sudan in April 2023 were done via an airbase near Khartoum.

Israeli warplanes carried out dozens of strikes across southern Lebanon late on Thursday, hours after Nasrallah 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 that it said were about to be used “in the immediate future”.

The bombardment included more than 52 strikes across southern Lebanon, the Lebanese 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.

The hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah followed Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October, and Israel’s subsequent war on Gaza. Both Hamas and Hezbollah are backed by Iran.

A FCDO spokesperson said: “The foreign secretary has chaired a meeting of COBR this morning on the latest situation in Lebanon and to discuss ongoing preparedness work, with the risk of escalation remaining high.

“The safety of British nationals is our number one priority which is why we’re continuing to advise people to leave Lebanon now while commercial routes remain available.”

A Holocaust survivor has chosen to mark her 80th birthday on Friday by bringing her friends together for a solidarity vigil outside an Israeli prison where hundreds of Palestinian inmates arrested after the 7 October attack are being held.

Prof Veronika Cohen, who was born in the Jewish ghetto of Budapest and was saved by what she has described as “a series of miracles”, turned her birthday into a protest in front of Neve Tirtza women’s prison in Ramla.

The protest was aimed at exposing the degrading treatment faced by Palestinian prisoners, as well as bringing attention to Israel’s systematic use of administrative detention – which allows for indefinite detention without charge or trial – during the Gaza war.

“At a time, particularly during this crucial moment, when you think there are no more hearts left to break, mine shattered upon learning about the deplorable conditions endured by Palestinian detainees,” said Cohen, a professor emeritus at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance. “Furthermore, I made the decision to stand before this prison where Khalida Jarrar, a Palestinian politician, has been unjustly imprisoned for over 10 months, without any trial received or specific criminal charge pressed against her.”

Jarrar, 61, a senior Palestinian feminist politician and a prominent figure in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a faction in the Palestine Liberation Organisation, was arrested by the Israeli army on 26 December, along with other activists of her leftist party, after troops stormed the West Bank city of Al-Bireh, near Ramallah, at dawn.

In June, Jarrar – who was elected in 2006 to the Palestinian assembly as a PFLP representative, and has long been an advocate of women’s rights – was ordered to serve another six months behind bars without charge or trial under administrative detention, one day before her previous detention order was due to expire.

“I think about her unbearable situation,” said Cohen, a co-founder of the Rapproachment Group for Israeli-Palestinian dialogue. “I can’t stop thinking of a woman in her 60s who has already suffered so much in life, and who finds herself in prison without ever being judged.

“A woman imprisoned under administrative detention that can continue for an indefinite time, that may not even have an end. A woman put in solitary confinement, without light, without windows … I thought I had to do something. I wanted to highlight her case, to set her free, or at least to improve her living conditions in prison.”

According to the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, which has released a report alongside the organisations Adalah, HaMoked and Physicians for Human Rights, almost 10,000 Palestinians are held in Israeli detention, a 200% increase from recent years.

Among them are approximately 8,000 Palestinians classified as “security” detainees – citizens of Israel and residents of the occupied West Bank, including Jerusalem, held either under military or criminal law. More than 30% of administrative detainees are held without charge or trial, in prison facilities managed by the Israeli Prison Service (IPS). According to the report, inmates are subjected to widespread physical and mental abuses.

“As of June 2024, at least 14 detainees have died in IPS custody since October 7, with forensic evidence suggesting that at least some of these deaths were connected to instances of severe violence by IPS officers,” the report says, while at least other 40 Palestinians have died in military camps.

On Wednesday, the Israeli supreme court rejected a request by civil society organisations to shut down the notorious Sde Teiman prison, which holds Palestinians from Gaza and where human rights violations have been reported, including inmates regularly being kept shackled to hospital beds, blindfolded and forced to wear nappies.

The Israel Defense Forces said in a statement that “detainees are handcuffed according to their level of risk and their state of health”.

Cohen was one of the few Jewish children who survived the Holocaust in the Budapest ghetto. Nearly 80,000 Jews were killed in the Hungarian capital, shot on the banks of the Danube and then thrown into the water.

“I survived thanks to mother and my father, who had been deported to a labour camp,” said Cohen, who has also served on the committee for Israel’s national music curriculum. “He used to say that he would return because I was still alive, and that was the only reason keeping him alive – to reunite with his daughter.”

When Cohen arrived in Israel in 1979, she says she realised she had to fight against the occupation “as it was destroying us and the Palestinians”.

She said: “We cannot build a strong, democratic country without ending the occupation. So, much of my efforts were focused on fostering dialogue between Palestinians and Israelis. I have an optimistic belief that if we get to know each other, the destruction would stop.

“You can assume what I feel about the current government, which is not my government. That’s why, in these tragic times, I wanted to do something special for my birthday.”

She added: “My birthday is a special thanks for being alive, thanks to the creator, and the way I want to thank the creator is by doing something for one of his creatures.”

South Carolina is set to execute a man on death row on Friday, days after the key witness for the prosecution came forward to say 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 at 6pm. His lawyers filed emergency motions for a delay this week, citing new testimony suggesting he was wrongfully convicted. But the state supreme court ruled Thursday that the execution should proceed.

The last hope for Allah, who was previously known as Freddie Owens, is a grant of clemency from the state’s Republican governor, who has said he would announce a decision just before the execution is set to start.

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.

Allah is due to be executed in front of three media witnesses at the Broad River correctional institution in Columbia, a spokesperson for the prison said. The state gave Allah a choice of lethal injection, electrocution or firing squad, but Allah objected to signing off on a method, saying that amounted to suicide and violated his Muslim faith. His attorney chose lethal injection for him.

Allah was convicted of the armed robbery and murder of convenience store cashier Irene Graves in November 1997. He was 19 at the time. Graves, a 41-year-old mother of three, was shot in the head during the robbery. Allah has long asserted his innocence.

Prosecutors had no forensic evidence connecting Allah to the shooting. Surveillance footage at the store showed two masked men with guns, but they were not identifiable.

The state’s case rested on testimony from Allah’s friend and co-defendant, Steven Golden, who was also charged in the robbery and murder. As their joint trial was beginning, Golden pleaded guilty to murder, armed robbery and criminal conspiracy and agreed to testify against Allah. Golden, who was 18 at the time of the robbery, said Allah shot Graves.

But on Wednesday, two days before the scheduled execution, Golden signed a bombshell affidavit recanting his testimony, saying Allah “is not the person who shot Irene Graves” and “was not present” during the robbery. Golden’s declaration said he was high when police questioned him days after the robbery, and that he was pressured into writing a statement blaming Allah.

“I substituted [Allah] for the person who was really with me,” he wrote, saying he concealed the identity of the “real shooter” out of fear that “his associates might kill me”. He did not identify this person.

Golden said he agreed to plead guilty and testify when prosecutors assured him he would not face the death penalty or a life sentence if he cooperated – a deal that was not disclosed to the jury.

“I don’t want [Allah] to be executed for something he didn’t do,” he wrote in the new affidavit. “This has weighed heavily on my mind and I want to have a clear conscience.”

The state attorney general filed a response on Thursday suggesting Golden’s new statement was not credible and did not warrant a new trial. Lawyers for the state also argued that other evidence pointed to Allah’s guilt, alleging that Allah had confessed to the shooting to his mother and girlfriend. But Allah’s lawyers rejected the claims of the “jilted former girlfriend” and said his mother had “disavowed” a statement police had her sign suggesting her son had confessed.

“This court has the power and the responsibility to ensure that the state of South Carolina does not kill one of its citizens for a crime he did not commit,” Allah’s lawyers wrote on Thursday.

The attorney general’s office declined to comment. The state supreme court sided with the attorney general, ruling the new evidence did not amount to “exceptional circumstances” warranting a reprieve and suggesting other evidence supported Allah’s guilt.

Allah’s lawyers have also argued in recent weeks that a death sentence was not appropriate for his conviction. He was found guilty of murder without a jury explicitly ruling that he pulled the trigger. Prosecutors told jurors they could convict him for murder simply if they believed he was present during the robbery. It is rare for people to be executed for murders they did not directly commit.

His lawyers have also noted that he endured a childhood of severe violence and was diagnosed with brain damage. And Allah would be one of the youngest people at the time of the crime to be put to death by South Carolina in decades.

South Carolina has not conducted an execution since 2011. Faced with growing backlash, pharmaceutical companies stopped selling lethal injection drugs to the state, but last year South Carolina passed a shield law to conceal the identity of suppliers and has since purchased pentobarbital, a sedative.

The state supreme court last month announced five executions it plans to schedule after Allah, saying they would be spaced at least 35 days apart.

The Rev Hillary Taylor, executive director of South Carolinians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, said on Thursday that the flaws in Allah’s case were a reminder that “the death penalty is not given to the ‘worst of the worst’, it is given to the people who are least able to represent themselves in court. That is extremely unjust.”

“Khalil should not have to die for somebody else’s wrongdoing. That is not accountability,” she added.

Ensley Graves-Lee, Graves’s daughter, said in an interview Thursday that it had taken a toll on her family to have their tragedy back in the news in recent weeks and that she was shocked to learn of new developments in the case.

“I understand that it is probably difficult for the other side, and I’m sure they would do anything to save someone they love,” said Graves-Lee, who was 10 years old when her mother was killed. “I have to remind myself that I have had no choice in any of the matter. I was 10 when she died and 12 when the verdict came … I had no choice in the death penalty at all.” She added: “I feel like I’m preparing for a funeral … I don’t know if there’s closure after it, but I’m just trying to get past this part that was already decided for me.”

Graves-Lee, a speech pathologist, said she wanted her mother remembered for how hard she worked for her three children, holding down three retail jobs at the time of her death: “She dedicated her life to her children.” She said her mother took extra jobs so she and her brother could pursue dancing and gymnastics. “I’m sure she had dreams for herself, but she always put us first, any sport or any activity we wanted to do, she allowed us to do.”

She also recalled her mom taking them to the mountains and looking at houses in the neighborhood they fantasized buying. She died 1 November, but had already done Christmas shopping for her children, and her former coworkers at a Kmart sent the gifts she had purchased.

“I hate that my mother can’t be here. The circumstances took a lot away from the both of us. My children don’t have their grandmother. She didn’t get to see her children grow up. And it wasn’t fair to her,” Graves-Lee said. “I’m hoping that she’s at rest after tomorrow, too.”

Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Russian dissident freed in the biggest prisoner swap since the cold war, has appealed to Keir Starmer during a meeting in Downing Street to not let hundreds of political prisoners in Russia and Belarus quietly “die off”.

Kara-Murza, who was released last month two years into a 25-year sentence after speaking out against the war in Ukraine, said he had told the prime minister on Friday that organising further such swaps was a matter of “life and death”.

The 43-year-old Russian politician, who has British citizenship after moving to England as a child, was one of 16 westerners and Russians, including five German nationals, exchanged last month for 10 Russian nationals, including two minors.

The deal marked the first time in 40 years that Russian political prisoners had been released by the Kremlin as part of a swap.

The White House said that Alexei Navalny, who died in a Russian prison camp last year, had been due to be part of the exchange.

Kara-Murza, a father of three, who survived two poisoning attempts in 2015 and 2017, said he had made the case for further swaps to Starmer and in all his recent meetings with senior politicians, including the US president, Joe Biden, and the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz.

The deal under which he had been released had been an “unequal” arrangement, he said, involving murderers, spies and hackers being swapped for people who had committed no crimes, but there was no alternative, Kara-Murza insisted.

“There can be nothing more valuable, more important for democracy, than human life,” he said at a press conference at the Royal United Services Institute. “I know what it’s like just to wake up every morning in a cell two by three metres, four walls, a small window covered by bars, just essentially walking in a small circle all day, staring at walls. You have no one to speak to, nothing to do, no one to go to and this is how the rest of your life is going to continue … This is not just a question of unjust imprisonment, although that in itself would be unacceptable … it’s a question, very literally, of life or death.”

Among the cases referenced by Kara-Murza were Alexei Gorinov, 63, an elected official of Moscow’s Krasnoselsky district council, who was the first person in Russia to be arrested for his opposition to the war in Ukraine, and Maria Ponomarenko, 46, a journalist from Siberia imprisoned for accusing the Russian air force of bombing a theatre in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, who is on hunger strike.

“We need to be advocating, to be getting them out,” Kara-Murza said, adding that the argument that such deals encouraged Kremlin to take hostages was “fallacious” as Putin was going to lock up his opponents anyway.

Kara-Murza, who had been held in a high security prison in Siberia, said he had also talked to Starmer about the need for a strategic plan for Russia after Vladimir Putin.

Authoritarian regimes appeared stable from the outside but change could happen in an instant, he said, and it was vital not to repeat the mistakes of the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

There would need to be a reckoning with those who committed crimes during Putin’s 25 years in power and a plan to reintegrate Russia into the rules-based order, he said.

“One of the things that has occupied my mind for a long time, but especially these past few weeks that I’ve been out of prison, is that we have no right to miss the next opportunity for change in Russia,” he said.

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”.

The former Harrods owner Mohamed Al Fayed was a “monster” whose sexual abuse of women could be compared with the cases of Jimmy Savile, Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein, lawyers representing dozens of survivors have said.

Speaking at a press conference in London on Friday, barristers acting for 37 of the women announced their intention to bring a civil case against Harrods, the luxury London department store, where they said a system was put in place to protect Fayed during his decades of abuse.

“We will say it plainly: Mohamed Al Fayed was a monster,” said Dean Armstrong KC, adding that he had “never seen a case as horrific as this”.

He compared Fayed’s case to that of Savile because “in this case as in that, the institution, we say, knew about the behaviour”. He added: “Epstein because, in that case, as in this, there was a procurement system in place to source the women and girls – as you know there are some very young victims. And Weinstein, because it was a person at the very top of the organisation who was abusing his power.”

The announcement of the survivors’ planned civil case against Harrods comes after allegations of sexual assault against Fayed were aired in a BBC documentary on Thursday.

Fayed was accused of raping five women and sexually abusing at least 15 others when they worked for him at the luxury department store, according to that investigation. More than 20 women said they had been sexually assaulted by him, and that Harrods had covered up the abuse.

On Friday, Armstrong told reporters: “Our single aim is to seek justice for the survivors of the sexual abuses of Mohamed Al Fayed, who we say was enabled by an unsafe system of work, which Harrods established, maintained, certainly acquiesced to, and – we say – facilitated during this chairmanship. We believe the system not only enabled, but potentially allowed to a knowing extent the widespread sexual abuse of the survivors that we represent.”

The prominent US lawyer Gloria Allred called Harrods a “toxic, unsafe and abusive environment” under Fayed. She said the allegations included “serial rape, attempted rape, sexual battery, and sexual abuse of minors. They involved doctors administering invasive gynaecological exams as a condition of employment for some of the employees”.

Allred, who was introduced by her colleagues as the world’s leading women’s rights attorney, told reporters survivors had said they knew doctors had reported the results of those medical examinations to Fayed because he would use their details to put them down.

“The allegations involve coverups, threats and a quarter of a century of sexual abuse by Mohammed Al Fayed after he purchased Harrods and became its chairman,” Allred said. “Harrods is often referred to as the most beautiful store in the world… many women dreamed of working there, to be associated with this prestigious corporation and to further their careers. However, underneath the Harrods glitz and glamour, was a toxic, unsafe and abusive environment.”

So toxic, said Armstrong, that the survivors believed it amounted to an “abject failure of corporate responsibility”.

Maria Mulla, a barrister representing the same clients, said the Harrods offices were under video surveillance, and the phone lines were “bugged”. But this did not extend to Fayed’s own office.

She said the women – even including girls as young as 16 – were often followed, and that a member of Fayed security was tasked with finding out about their personal lives, listening in to their phone calls, and reporting back to him.

Bruce Drummond, another barrister representing the survivors, said the abuse was “absolutely horrific”, adding that the “effects have lasted years, and in some instances for decades, and even continue to this day … This has life-changing and lifelong effects on these dear ladies”.

Drummond added that some survivors had ended up in psychiatric care, and reporters were told some had struggled to form healthy intimate relationships with men in their later lives. “Some continue to suffer nightmares, depression and anxiety. So we’re here today to say to the world that this was not right,” Drummond said.

Fayed had previously been accused of sexually assaulting and groping multiple women, but a previous police investigation did not lead to any charges.

Harrods said: “We are utterly appalled by the allegations of abuse perpetrated by Mohamed Al Fayed. These were the actions of an individual who was intent on abusing his power wherever he operated and we condemn them in the strongest terms. We also acknowledge that during this time as a business we failed our employees who were his victims and for this we sincerely apologise.

“The Harrods of today is a very different organisation to the one owned and controlled by Al Fayed between 1985 and 2010, it is one that seeks to put the welfare of our employees at the heart of everything we do.”

The legal team also represents women who were employed by the Paris Ritz and investigations were ongoing into “all entities that he had involvement in” – including Fulham Football Club. The club said it was “deeply troubled and concerned” about the case and were “in the process of establishing whether anyone at the club is or has been affected”.

Mohamed Al Fayed, who female former employees accused of sexual assault in a BBC investigation this week, was flamboyant, extrovert and a thorn in the side of the royal family.

That today, a year after his death at the age of 94, he is still making headlines reflects a life much mired in controversy.

A scrapper, who never shied away from a fight, he took on the House of Windsor, the House of Commons with the “cash for questions” scandal, and business rivals.

He may have been the owner of Harrods, arguably Britain’s most prestigious store, and acquired a slice of British cultural life with ownership of Fulham FC and the satirical magazine Punch, but he died never having gained the one thing he desperately craved: citizenship, and with it full acceptance into British society.

His most high-profile war was against the royals and the “establishment” over the death of his beloved son Dodi alongside Diana, Princess of Wales, in a 1997 Paris car crash while being driven by Henri Paul, a Fayed employee who was over the alcohol limit.

Grief-stricken, Fayed embarked on an embittered and vengeful campaign. Dodi, he claimed, had told him the princess was pregnant and the couple were to be engaged. There was no evidence, and it undoubtedly caused unimaginable distress to her bereaved family and friends.

He would persist, too, for 10 years with allegations that Diana, Dodi and Paul were “murdered” in an act orchestrated by MI6 on the instructions of the late Duke of Edinburgh and involving the former prime minister Tony Blair.

“I am a father who lost his son,” he told the coroner conducting the inquests into the deaths. “I am fighting unbelievable forces. But with your power as a judge, you have to force MI6 to open their box and find the result.” The coroner dismissed claims of a “plot” as having “not a shred of evidence” to support them.

Born in Alexandria, Egypt, the son of a school inspector, Fayed rose from selling lemonade and sewing machines to working for the Saudi businessman and arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, advising the Sultan of Brunei and launching his own shipping business.

He was already wealthy when he moved to Britain in the 1970s, intent on building a business empire. In 1979, with his brother Ali, Fayed bought the Paris Ritz hotel.

He set his sights on Harrods, becoming locked in a bitter battle with the business tycoon and head of the mining conglomerate Lonrho, “Tiny” Rowland. Fayed won, though Rowland later accused him of breaking into his safety deposit box at the department store, claims which led to Fayed, along with others, being arrested in March 1998 but never charged.

Fayed bought Fulham FC, taking over the Division Two club 1997, with his spending on players and managers including Kevin Keegan and Roy Hodgson seeing them rise to the Premier League. Fans were bemused, however, when, in 2011, two years after Michael Jackson’s death, Fayed erected a statue of his pop singer friend at the Craven Cottage ground. When he sold the club in 2013 it was taken down.

In politics, he was at the centre of the 1994 “cash for questions” scandal, with claims he had paid the then Tory MPs Neil Hamilton and Tim Smith thousands of pounds to illegally table questions in the Commons on his behalf. Hamilton sued for libel and lost. The cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken was another scalp, forced to resign after the Harrods boss revealed he had been staying free at the Ritz in Paris at the same time as Saudi arms dealers. Aitken was later jailed for perjury after libel proceedings against the Guardian.

British citizenship continued to elude him, despite having four British children by his second wife, paying millions in tax, giving millions to charities such as Great Ormond Street hospital, and financing films, including Chariots of Fire. “Why won’t they give me a passport? I own Harrods and employ thousands of people in this country,” he said.

Turning down his second application in 1999, the then Labour home secretary, Jack Straw, decided Fayed had a “general defect in his character”, citing the safety deposit box and “cash for questions” controversies.

Fayed was first accused of sexual abuse in the late 1980s, but the allegations did not lead to criminal charges. In 2009, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), then led by Keir Starmer, elected not to prosecute him after claims he had sexually assaulted a 15-year-old girl in Harrods. He denied all allegations against him and attended a voluntary police interview.

Claims of sexual misconduct against the billionaire businessman were the subject of pieces by Vanity Fair in 1995, ITV in 1997 and Channel 4 in 2017.

Donald Trump’s sweeping threats if he wins the presidency again to name a special prosecutor to “go after” Joe Biden and take legal action against other foes would subvert the rule of law in America and take the country towards authoritarianism, former justice department officials and scholars have warned.

Trump’s escalating legal threats have targeted “corrupt election officials” lawyers, donors and others he falsely deems out to steal November’s presidential election, and have popped up variously on his Truth Social platform, at campaign events and at an elite police group he addressed this month in North Carolina.

Trump’s menacing pledges to essentially weaponize the justice department against opponents would mark a sharp break with the Department of Justice’s mission statement, which cites as core values “independence and impartiality”.

Ex-justice officials warn that Trump’s barrage of intimidating verbal assaults are unprecedented, and suggest he would undermine longstanding traditions of justice department independence if he wins the presidency, thus badly undermining the rule of law.

“Donald Trump is making many public threats to use the legal system to punish his enemies, which seems to be anyone who opposes him,” said the former deputy attorney general Donald Ayer, who served in the George HW Bush administration. “This conduct is utterly without precedent in campaign history, threatens all of our freedoms, and violates our basic rule of law.”

Other justice veterans raise similar red flags.

“Trump’s escalating threats to pervert the criminal justice system need to be taken seriously,” said the former justice department inspector general Michael Bromwich. “We have never had a presidential candidate state as one of his central goals mobilizing the levers of justice to punish enemies and reward friends. No one has ever been brazen enough to campaign on an agenda of retribution and retaliation.”

Critics note that Trump and top allies at the conservative Heritage Foundation, which produced a far-right blueprint for a new Trump administration dubbed Project 2025, have signaled plans to overhaul the justice department to give the president and loyalists more power in decisions about who to investigate and prosecute.

Not coincidentally, Trump’s sweeping attacks and threats come as he faces multiple federal charges from special counsel Jack Smith of conspiring to overturn his loss in 2020 to Biden and improperly retaining hundreds of classified documents after he left office. While a Florida judge in a widely criticized move dismissed the documents case, Smith in August appealed that decision.

Trump this year was convicted on 34 counts of business fraud in New York for altering his company books to hide $130,000 in hush-money payments to the adult film star Stormy Daniels who had alleged an affair with Trump before he took office in 2016.

During his debate on 10 September with Kamala Harris, Trump derided all these charges and others as “fake cases”. Previously, Trump has painted his conviction in New York and the federal charges as one sprawling political conspiracy stemming from the “weaponization” of the justice department and has vowed Biden is “going to pay a big price” for the various prosecutions Trump faces.

Former prosecutors and some ex-Republican members of Congress warn Trump’s barrage of legal threats pose serious dangers of politicizing the justice department for his agenda of retribution.

“Trump will use the power of the federal government, and especially DoJ, to intimidate and possibly prosecute all sorts of political opponents he deems hostile to him,” said former Republican representative Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania. “That’s one of the many reasons he’s unfit to be president.”

Likewise, ex-federal prosecutor Paul Rosenzweig warned: “Trump is threatening to prosecute those who stole the election from him in his warped reality,” adding that “his threats to undermine the rule of law have escalated.

“Trump is no conservative, he’s a radical. There’s a reason why we have a long tradition of trying to isolate the attorney general from political influence.”

Ominously, Trump’s threats of prosecuting foes now seems to dovetail with his new conspiratorial charges of election fraud this year, in a clear echo of his false claims that he lost in 2020 due to rampant voting fraud.

On Truth Social on 7 September, Trump starkly warned: “WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again.”

To drive home his dark threat, Trump added: “Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials. Those involved in unscrupulous behaviour will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.”

Repeating debunked claims that Democrats played a role in sizable fraud in 2020, Trump vowed that he, legal scholars and attorneys were “watching the Sanctity of the 2024 Presidential Election very closely”.

In a similar vein, Trump urged the national board of the Fraternal Order of Police that endorsed him this month to help “watch for the voter fraud, because we win without voter fraud … We win so easily.”

Trump added that he thought police could help him “just by watching, because, believe it or not, they’re afraid of that badge”.

Such targeted threats raising the phoney spectre of election fraud to rob Trump of victory this year, are prompting some ex-prosecutors to worry that Trump may be able to intimidate non-partisan election workers.

“We often worry that the threat of criminal prosecution will chill appropriate conduct,” the Columbia law professor and ex-prosecutor Daniel Richman said. “So I do fear that those who are charged with independent roles in elections will lean over backwards to accommodate Trump, at the cost of their actual neutrality.”

If Trump wins, Richman cautioned that he may not face serious congressional checks.

“Historically, Congress has played an important, although variable role, in preventing presidents from abusing their authority over prosecutions. But the Republican party right now can’t be counted on to do that.”

In a related sign of Trump’s disregard for legal norms, Trump has repeatedly extolled many of the convicted participants in the violent attack on the Capitol on January 6 as “patriots” and “hostages” and promised that he would seriously consider pardons for a number of them.

At a Wisconsin rally this month Trump pledged if he wins this fall to “rapidly review the cases of every political prisoner unjustly imprisoned by the Harris regime”. Although four of his supporters died of various causes on January 6 and a police officer died within days, Trump last month falsely claimed at a news conference that no one died due to the insurrection.

Without mentioning Trump, the attorney general, Merrick Garland, on 12 September in a fiery speech to US attorneys nationally and justice department staff denounced any moves that would turn the department into a “political weapon”, and the “escalation of attacks” against its career staff.

“Our norms are a promise that we will not allow this nation to become a country where law enforcement is treated as an apparatus of politics,” Garland added.

Taken together, Trump’s nonstop threats to use the Department of Justice to go after his political foes and others he imagines are out to steal the election are at sharp variance with democratic principles, say legal experts.

“The essence of a justice system in a democracy is that it is responsive to the rule of law,” the former federal judge and Dickinson College president John Jones told the Guardian. “Trump’s fulminations are anything but. At bottom he means it to have a chilling effect on supporters of a rival.”

Trump’s verbal assaults are “unprecedented in the annals of American democracy and have hallmarks of authoritarianism”.

Donald Trump’s sweeping threats if he wins the presidency again to name a special prosecutor to “go after” Joe Biden and take legal action against other foes would subvert the rule of law in America and take the country towards authoritarianism, former justice department officials and scholars have warned.

Trump’s escalating legal threats have targeted “corrupt election officials” lawyers, donors and others he falsely deems out to steal November’s presidential election, and have popped up variously on his Truth Social platform, at campaign events and at an elite police group he addressed this month in North Carolina.

Trump’s menacing pledges to essentially weaponize the justice department against opponents would mark a sharp break with the Department of Justice’s mission statement, which cites as core values “independence and impartiality”.

Ex-justice officials warn that Trump’s barrage of intimidating verbal assaults are unprecedented, and suggest he would undermine longstanding traditions of justice department independence if he wins the presidency, thus badly undermining the rule of law.

“Donald Trump is making many public threats to use the legal system to punish his enemies, which seems to be anyone who opposes him,” said the former deputy attorney general Donald Ayer, who served in the George HW Bush administration. “This conduct is utterly without precedent in campaign history, threatens all of our freedoms, and violates our basic rule of law.”

Other justice veterans raise similar red flags.

“Trump’s escalating threats to pervert the criminal justice system need to be taken seriously,” said the former justice department inspector general Michael Bromwich. “We have never had a presidential candidate state as one of his central goals mobilizing the levers of justice to punish enemies and reward friends. No one has ever been brazen enough to campaign on an agenda of retribution and retaliation.”

Critics note that Trump and top allies at the conservative Heritage Foundation, which produced a far-right blueprint for a new Trump administration dubbed Project 2025, have signaled plans to overhaul the justice department to give the president and loyalists more power in decisions about who to investigate and prosecute.

Not coincidentally, Trump’s sweeping attacks and threats come as he faces multiple federal charges from special counsel Jack Smith of conspiring to overturn his loss in 2020 to Biden and improperly retaining hundreds of classified documents after he left office. While a Florida judge in a widely criticized move dismissed the documents case, Smith in August appealed that decision.

Trump this year was convicted on 34 counts of business fraud in New York for altering his company books to hide $130,000 in hush-money payments to the adult film star Stormy Daniels who had alleged an affair with Trump before he took office in 2016.

During his debate on 10 September with Kamala Harris, Trump derided all these charges and others as “fake cases”. Previously, Trump has painted his conviction in New York and the federal charges as one sprawling political conspiracy stemming from the “weaponization” of the justice department and has vowed Biden is “going to pay a big price” for the various prosecutions Trump faces.

Former prosecutors and some ex-Republican members of Congress warn Trump’s barrage of legal threats pose serious dangers of politicizing the justice department for his agenda of retribution.

“Trump will use the power of the federal government, and especially DoJ, to intimidate and possibly prosecute all sorts of political opponents he deems hostile to him,” said former Republican representative Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania. “That’s one of the many reasons he’s unfit to be president.”

Likewise, ex-federal prosecutor Paul Rosenzweig warned: “Trump is threatening to prosecute those who stole the election from him in his warped reality,” adding that “his threats to undermine the rule of law have escalated.

“Trump is no conservative, he’s a radical. There’s a reason why we have a long tradition of trying to isolate the attorney general from political influence.”

Ominously, Trump’s threats of prosecuting foes now seems to dovetail with his new conspiratorial charges of election fraud this year, in a clear echo of his false claims that he lost in 2020 due to rampant voting fraud.

On Truth Social on 7 September, Trump starkly warned: “WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again.”

To drive home his dark threat, Trump added: “Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials. Those involved in unscrupulous behaviour will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.”

Repeating debunked claims that Democrats played a role in sizable fraud in 2020, Trump vowed that he, legal scholars and attorneys were “watching the Sanctity of the 2024 Presidential Election very closely”.

In a similar vein, Trump urged the national board of the Fraternal Order of Police that endorsed him this month to help “watch for the voter fraud, because we win without voter fraud … We win so easily.”

Trump added that he thought police could help him “just by watching, because, believe it or not, they’re afraid of that badge”.

Such targeted threats raising the phoney spectre of election fraud to rob Trump of victory this year, are prompting some ex-prosecutors to worry that Trump may be able to intimidate non-partisan election workers.

“We often worry that the threat of criminal prosecution will chill appropriate conduct,” the Columbia law professor and ex-prosecutor Daniel Richman said. “So I do fear that those who are charged with independent roles in elections will lean over backwards to accommodate Trump, at the cost of their actual neutrality.”

If Trump wins, Richman cautioned that he may not face serious congressional checks.

“Historically, Congress has played an important, although variable role, in preventing presidents from abusing their authority over prosecutions. But the Republican party right now can’t be counted on to do that.”

In a related sign of Trump’s disregard for legal norms, Trump has repeatedly extolled many of the convicted participants in the violent attack on the Capitol on January 6 as “patriots” and “hostages” and promised that he would seriously consider pardons for a number of them.

At a Wisconsin rally this month Trump pledged if he wins this fall to “rapidly review the cases of every political prisoner unjustly imprisoned by the Harris regime”. Although four of his supporters died of various causes on January 6 and a police officer died within days, Trump last month falsely claimed at a news conference that no one died due to the insurrection.

Without mentioning Trump, the attorney general, Merrick Garland, on 12 September in a fiery speech to US attorneys nationally and justice department staff denounced any moves that would turn the department into a “political weapon”, and the “escalation of attacks” against its career staff.

“Our norms are a promise that we will not allow this nation to become a country where law enforcement is treated as an apparatus of politics,” Garland added.

Taken together, Trump’s nonstop threats to use the Department of Justice to go after his political foes and others he imagines are out to steal the election are at sharp variance with democratic principles, say legal experts.

“The essence of a justice system in a democracy is that it is responsive to the rule of law,” the former federal judge and Dickinson College president John Jones told the Guardian. “Trump’s fulminations are anything but. At bottom he means it to have a chilling effect on supporters of a rival.”

Trump’s verbal assaults are “unprecedented in the annals of American democracy and have hallmarks of authoritarianism”.

Three Kenyans who were abducted last month after taking part in an anti-government protest have resurfaced, amid anger directed at a police chief who belatedly honoured a court summons in relation to the disappearances shortly after they were found.

Bob Njagi, and brothers Aslam and Jamil Longton were found in Kiambu county, north of Nairobi, Faith Odhiambo, the president of the Law Society of Kenya (LSK), said in the early hours of Friday.

“I am informed that Jamil Longton and his brother Aslam were dumped at Gachie border of Kiambu and Nairobi by their captors,” she posted on X, before writing another message about Njagi: “At around 1 am Bob Njagi managed find his way to Tigoni police station and for assistance. He is alive and well”.

Social media images show the brothers appearing distressed after their release.

“I thank Kenyans who stood by us,” Jamil Longton said in a video posted by Odhiambo. “We’ll share more information through the president of the Law Society of Kenya.

The three went missing on 19 August after being taken away by people alleged to be police. The brothers were abducted in the afternoon after they left their house, while Njagi was ejected from a bus by masked men that night and put into another vehicle.

Their disappearances came in the wake of deadly anti-government protests that lasted nearly two months and in which dozens went missing.

LSK filed a case against the government and the Directorate of Criminal Investigations relating to the disappearance of the three men.

The matter caught national attention after the acting inspector general of police, Gilbert Masengeli, snubbed court summons to answer questions about their whereabouts.

Last Friday, after Masengeli had failed to honour the summons seven times, a judge ordered him to serve six months in prison for contempt of court, suspending the sentence for seven days to give him another change to appear before the court. On Friday Masengeli made a last-minute appearance and apologised for his absence, thus avoiding the conviction.

“We believe (the men’s release) was intended to provide immediate grounds for (Masengeli) to challenge his conviction,” Cornelius Oduor of the Kenya Human Rights Commission told Agence France-Presse.

While the contempt charge against Masengeli was dropped, the case into the men’s disappearance is set to continue.

The case once again turned the spotlight on widespread abductions and enforced disappearances in Kenya, and the general lack of accountability by authorities.

The Independent Police Oversight Authority, a civilian watchdog body for police work, is investigating many complaints of such cases, including from the recent anti-government protests.

In a rare conviction, three police officers were last year handed sentences including the death penalty for the murder of a human rights lawyer and two other people six years after their bodies were found inside gunny bags in a river.

Otsieno Namwaya, associate director at Human Rights Watch, said the abduction of Njagi and the Longton brothers “falls in the pattern of the other abductions” involving the police.

“The most unfortunate thing is that everything that they’re doing is in violation of the law,” he said. “These illegalities have to end, and secondly, the people who are involved need to know they have violated the law and they need to be held to account.”

Hussein Khalid, executive director of the Haki Africa human rights organisation, said it’s “a good thing” that Njagi and the Longton brothers have been found alive, and their finding “begins the quest for justice”.

“We must know who was holding these individuals,” he said. “We want action taken against them and we will not relent.”

Parents who find themselves exasperated by their child’s fussy eating, take heart: the refusal to tuck into a broader range of foods is largely down to genes rather than parenting, according to scientists.

Researchers investigated eating habits in toddlers to teenagers and found that on average fussiness over food changed little from 16 months to 13 years old. There was a minor peak in pickiness at seven years, then a slight decline thereafter.

When they looked into the drivers of fussy eating, DNA emerged as the dominant factor. Genetic variation in the population explained 60% of the differences in pickiness at 16 months, rising to 74% and more from three to 13 years old, the study found.

The finding suggests that eating only a narrow range of foods and grimacing at the prospect of trying something new are more down to nature than nurture. It also points to windows of opportunity when interventions to encourage a more varied diet might be more effective.

Dr Zeynep Nas, a behavioural geneticist at UCL, said: “The main takeaway from this work is that food fussiness is not something that arises from parenting. It really does come down to the genetic differences between us.”

Other factors that influence fussy eaters come from the environment they live in, the researchers said, such as sitting down to eat as a family and the kinds of foods consumed by the people around them.

Nas and her colleagues analysed data from the UK Gemini study, which enrolled 2,400 sets of twins to explore how genetics and the environment affect childhood growth. As part of the study, parents completed questionnaires on their children’s eating habits at 16 months and again at three, five, seven and 13 years old.

To work out how much genetics contributes to fussy eating and how much is down to environmental factors, the researchers compared the eating habits of identical twins and non-identical twins. While identical twins share 100% of their genes, non-identical twins share only half.

Writing in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, the researchers describe how fussy eating habits were more similar among identical twins than non-identical twins, evidence that genetics largely underpinned differences in pickiness.

But the children’s environment also mattered. Experiences that twins shared, such as the kinds of food eaten at home, were important drivers of pickiness when they were toddlers. Between the ages of seven and 13, individual experiences such as having different friends explained about 25% of the variation in fussy eating levels.

Shared experiences, such as eating as a family, were most influential in toddlers, so offering more variety around that age might be most effective, the researchers said.

While genetics is clearly important in fussy eating, it should not leave parents feeling disempowered, the researchers add. As Nas puts it: “Genetics isn’t destiny.”

Dr Alison Fildes, a co-author of the study at the University of Leeds, said: “Although fussy eating has a strong genetic component and can extend beyond early childhood, this doesn’t mean it is fixed.

“Parents can continue to support their children to eat a wide variety of foods throughout childhood and into adolescence, but peers and friends might become a more important influence on children’s diets as they reach their teens.”

In 2022, Dr Nicola Pirastu at Human Technopole, an Italian research institute, led a study into the genetics of food preferences.

He found that genetics affecting taste and smell receptors were less important than variations in the brain which affected how people reacted to different flavours. “Although flavour is the first driver of food choices, genetic differences are more likely to determine how the brain responds to them,” he said.

Understanding more about the genetics of food choices could help scientists identify what deters some people from eating healthily and pave the way for modified healthy foods that are more appealing, Pirastu said. Another possibility, he added, is a new generation of drugs that shift people’s preferences towards healthier foods.

Scientists say a new blood test that analyses lipids could make it easier to identify children at risk of serious health conditions including type 2 diabetes, liver and heart disease.

Researchers at King’s College London said the test capitalised on a link between lipids and diseases affecting metabolism in children, and could serve as an early warning system for potentially life-threatening illnesses.

Using machines that test blood plasma in babies and that already exist in hospitals, doctors could spot early signs of disease in children quicker and help them access treatment, the researchers said.

The study’s principal author, Dr Cristina Legido-Quigley, said: “For decades, scientists have relied on a classification system for lipids that have split them into good and bad cholesterol, but now with a simple blood test we can assess a much broader range of lipid molecules that could serve as vital early warning signs for illness.”

The development had significant implications, said Legido-Quigley, a group leader in systems medicine at King’s and head of systems medicine at the Steno Diabetes Center Copenhagen.

“In the future, this has the potential to be an entirely new way to evaluate someone’s personal risk of disease and by studying how to change lipid molecules in the body, we could even prevent metabolic diseases like diabetes altogether.”

The team’s findings were published in the journal Nature Medicine.

The results challenge the idea that cholesterol is a leading cause of complications around obesity in children, identifying new lipid molecules which contribute to health risks such as blood pressure but are not only correlated with a child’s weight.

Lipids have traditionally been thought to be fatty acids in the body, either good or bad types of cholesterol or triglycerides. But the scientists now believe the picture is more complex.

Using a technique called mass spectrometry, they found that the types of different lipids present in the body number in the thousands, each with separate functions.

With a control sample of 1,300 children living with obesity, the team assessed lipids in their blood. Afterwards 200 of them were for a year put on the Holbaek model, a lifestyle intervention for people with obesity that is popular in Denmark.

Subsequent readings showed that among the intervention group, counts of lipids tied to diabetes risk, insulin resistance and blood pressure decreased, despite limited improvements in their BMI.

Dr Karolina Sulek, who performed analysis at Steno, said: “Early recognition of children at risk for these life-threatening diseases is crucial.

“The study provides strong evidence of the great need for obesity management and gives parents confidence to intervene in their children’s life more compassionately, helping them to lose weight.”

The next step for the researchers is to help understand how genetics affects lipids and what this means for metabolic diseases, as well as how these lipids can be changed to improve health.

Slovakia’s populist government has announced plans to drastically raise value-added tax (VAT) on books to help fix its public finances, drawing condemnation not only from booksellers and publishers but also far-right, pro-Russian propaganda groups seeking to circulate their ideas in print.

Announcing the new VAT rate this week, Slovakia’s finance minister, Ladislav Kamenický, claimed studies had shown that books were “primarily purchased by wealthier segments of the population” and could therefore be taxed at the new basic rate of 23% rather than the current rate of 10%.

The step is part of a general increase of the basic VAT rate announced by the coalition government headed by Robert Fico, aimed at addressing Slovakia’s excessive public deficit by raising €50m (£42m) in 2025. Under the proposal, basic food, medicine and textbooks would be exempt from the VAT rise or taxed at a lower rate than before.

The rate rises comes amid an increasingly aggressive stance by Fico’s government towards the culture sector, brought into the open by its dismissal last month of the directors of the country’s national gallery and national theatre.

If the tax changes get passed by parliament and come into effect in January, it would make Slovakia one of only two countries in Europe not to have reduced VAT rates for books – a measure whose intangible positive effects on the economy, education and democracy are mostly agreed to outweigh financial benefits.

Kamenický’s comments about the supposed affluence of bibliophiles have been greeted with derision in the central European country. On social media, Slovaks posted videos of themselves admiring the newly recognised financial assets on their bookshelves, to a soundtrack of Abba’s Money, Money, Money.

Juraj Heger, the chair of Slovakia’s Association of Publishers and Booksellers, questioned the finance minister’s claim that books were mostly bought by the well-off, saying recent surveys had shown only a marginal difference between the book-buying habits of high- and medium-income earners.

Higher VAT would also not help poorer book-buyers, he added, since it would probably result in higher book prices and mostly affect already struggling booksellers.

“People are very angry,” Heger told the Guardian. “The ministry of culture is destroying everything that has been built up over decades.”

“The book market in Slovakia is very small, making about €100m a year”, he added. “This decision will lead to people buying fewer books, so the government will only be able to raise very little money from this.”

Until now, Denmark has been a European outlier by levying books with as much as 25% of VAT, though the Scandinavian country compensates for the additional burden with promotional support and grant schemes for publishers.

All other countries in the EU make use of legislation that allows them to apply reduced VAT rates to book publishing. The average VAT on books in the EU is about 6%, and in some European countries – including the UK, Ireland, Norway and Slovakia’s neighbour, the Czech Republic – books are zero-rated for VAT purposes.

Latvia raised its VAT rate for books from 5% to the 21% standard rate at the start of 2009 but reversed the measure only eight months later, after lay-offs at publishing houses and a sharp decrease in sales.

Fico’s government has set a target of reducing Slovakia’s deficit from an estimated 6% to 4.7% of GDP next year. “Consolidation is, as the English say, ‘a must’,” the prime minister said on Tuesday.

The tax plans have earned Fico, an admirer of Vladimir Putin and Hungary’s illiberal leader, Viktor Orbán, criticism from the far right.

Roman Michelko, of the far-right Slovak National party (SNS), who chairs the parliament’s culture and media committee, compared the planned higher VAT on books to the policies of communist era Czechoslovakia.

The director of Torden, a publishing house specialising in anti-western, pro-Russian and conspiracy theory books, said the policy had revealed the “wretchedness and shallowness of the thinking of our government”.

Robert Merva, whose catalogue contains titles such as Putin’s Pilgrimage, Democracy is Total Nonsense and A Brief History of (Almost) Everything Paranormal, suggested the tax plan meant Fico’s nationalist government was in fact working “in the service of foreign interests”.

Airline meals hardly carry high expectations but this week a passenger faced more than just a disappointing supper after a mouse crawled out of their meal, forcing their flight to make an unscheduled landing.

The incident occurred during a Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) flight from Oslo to Málaga on Wednesday, forcing the plane to land in Copenhagen, the company said on Friday.

Airlines usually strictly prohibit rodents onboard because the animals can chew through electrical wiring, key to the operation of a plane.

“Believe it or not. A lady next to me … opened her food and a mouse jumped out,” wrote one passenger, Jarle Borrestad, on Facebook, along with a photograph showing him smiling next to two women, also smiling.

Øystein Schmidt, a spokesperson for SAS, said that “in line with our procedures, there was a change of aircraft” and the passengers were flown to Málaga, Spain, on another flight.

“This is something that happens extremely rarely,” he said. “We have established procedures for such situations, which also include a review with our suppliers to ensure this does not happen again.”

It was not the first time a loose rodent has caused a ruckus. In 2017, a British Airways flight at Heathrow airport bound for San Francisco failed to take off after a mouse was spotted onboard. After a four-hour delay, a replacement aircraft was found. It is thought to have cost BA about £250,000.

Unscheduled landings are not always due to a technical or safety concerns. Last year, a United Airlines service heading from Houston to Amsterdam was diverted to Chicago after an unruly business class passenger interrupted the flight because his first meal choice was reportedly unavailable. In 2017, a Qatar Airways plane was forced to land midflight after a woman discovered her husband was having an affair.