The Israeli military says it has launched airstrikes on hundreds of targets in southern Lebanon, as Hezbollah launched its deepest rocket attacks into Israel since the start of the Gaza war, fuelling fears of a wider conflict.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said on Saturday night it launched two wave of attacks – one attacking about 290 targets, and a second targeting 110 sites – across southern Lebanon as sirens warning of Hezbollah rocket attacks sounded in dozens of towns across northern Israel.

About 10 rockets are believed to crossed over from Lebanon, with most intercepted, the IDF said. Israel’s emergency medical services reported that a man was lightly wounded by shrapnel from a missile that was intercepted in a village in the lower Galilee.

Hezbollah posted on its Telegram channel early on Sunday morning that it had targeted the Israeli Ramat David airbase near Haifa with dozens of missiles in response to what it described as “repeated Israeli attacks on Lebanon”.

The airbase is the furthest target the Lebanese group has hit in Israel since the beginning of fighting in October, about 50km from the Lebanon-Israel border.

Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant delivered a speech at the Ramat David airbase on Wednesday, telling air force personnel that Israel’s war with Hezbollah had reached a “new phase”. He also praised the army’s Mossad intelligence agency for its “excellent achievements” in the region, just hours after a wave of attacks struck Lebanon, striking walkie-talkies commonly held by Hezbollah members. Wednesday’s attack, in addition to a previous operation targeting pagers, left 42 dead and more than 3,000 wounded. Israel is presumed to be behind the operation, though it has not officially claimed responsibility.

In July, Hezbollah released footage filmed by a drone over the city of Haifa that highlighted Ramat David airbase, as part of an almost 10-minute long video marking military infrastructure in the densely populated city in northern Israel.

On Saturday, Israel closed its northern airspace as it awaited Hezbollah retaliation for the assassination of Ibrahim Aqil, a veteran commander of the elite Radwan unit, along with more than a dozen other militants.

Three children and seven women were among 37 people killed by the Israeli strike on Beirut on Friday that targeted the top Hezbollah leader in a densely populated neighbourhood, Lebanese authorities have said.

US and UN officials have warned against further escalation, with airlines including Air France, Turkish Airlines and Aegean cancelling flights to Beirut, reflecting fears that a tumultuous week had pushed the region closer to full-blown war.

Israel has not visibly slowed its war in Gaza to focus on the north. On Saturday its forces bombed a school turned shelter, killing at least 22 and injuring 30 others, mostly women and children, the Gaza health ministry said. Israel’s military said the target was a Hamas base inside the school, without providing details or evidence.

Last week, however, Israel said it was expanding its strategic aims for the Gaza war to include returning 60,0000 evacuated residents of northern Israel to their homes, which are regularly targeted by Hezbollah. It then unleashed a series of unprecedented attacks on the group.

The US state department on Saturday urged Americans in Lebanon to leave. “Due to the unpredictable nature of ongoing conflict between Hezbollah and Israel and recent explosions throughout Lebanon, including Beirut, the US embassy urges US citizens to depart Lebanon while commercial options still remain available,” it said in an updated advisory. “At this time, commercial flights are available, but at reduced capacity. If the security situation worsens, commercial options to depart may become unavailable,” it added.

In late July, the US raised its travel advisory for Lebanon to its highest “do not travel” classification, after a strike on southern Beirut killed a Hezbollah commander.

Hezbollah began launching attacks in support of its ally Hamas after 7 October, and has indicated it will stop targeting Israel when the Gaza Strip offensive stops, unless Israel continues shelling Lebanon.

Months of missile, rocket and drone hits have killed at least 23 soldiers and 26 civilians, and in effect turned Israel’s border regions near Lebanon into a strategic buffer zone, too dangerous for ordinary life.

Inside Lebanon, more than 500 people have been killed by Israeli strikes, most of them fighters with Hezbollah and other armed groups, but also more than 100 civilians.

Israel has not visibly slowed its war in Gaza to focus on the north. On Saturday its forces bombed a school turned shelter, killing at least 22 and injuring 30 others, mostly women and children, the Gaza health ministry said. Israel’s military said the target was a Hamas base inside the school, without providing details or evidence.

With Agence France-Presse and Associated Press

Israeli forces raided the office of Al Jazeera in the occupied West Bank on Sunday and issued a 45-day closure order, the Qatari broadcaster said, with footage showing heavily armed and masked troops entering the premises in Ramallah.

“There is a court ruling for closing down Al Jazeera for 45 days,” an Israeli soldier told Al Jazeera’s West Bank bureau chief, Walid al-Omari, the network reported, citing the conversation which was broadcast live. “I ask you to take all the cameras and leave the office at this moment,” the soldier said.

Al-Omari reported that Israeli troops brought a truck to confiscate documents, devices and office property.

The broadcaster said the soldiers did not provide a reason for the closure order.

There was no immediate acknowledgement of the shutdown by Israeli forces. The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Associated Press.

Al Jazeera denounced the move as it continued broadcasting live from Amman in neighbouring Jordan.

The move is the latest Israeli action against Al Jazeera. Last week, Israel’s government announced it was revoking the press credentials of Al Jazeera journalists in the country, four months after banning the channel from operating inside Israel.

In a statement, the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate condemned the Israeli move, saying “this arbitrary military decision is considered a new violation against journalistic and media works, which has been exposing the occupation’s crimes against the Palestinian people.

“We affirm our full solidarity with Al Jazeera and place our headquarters and capabilities at the service of our colleagues working there”.

In Hamas-run Gaza, the government media office condemned the move in a statement released on Telegram, Al Jazeera reported, calling it a clear violation of international law.

“We call on all media outlets and journalists around the world to declare full solidarity with Al Jazeera,” it added.

The Israeli military has repeatedly accused journalists from the Qatari network of being “terrorist agents” in Gaza affiliated with Hamas or its ally, Islamic Jihad.

Al Jazeera denies the Israeli government’s accusations and claims that Israel systematically targets its employees in the Gaza Strip.

With Agence France-Presse, Associated Press and Reuters

The smell of burnt rubber hung heavy over the rescue workers as they dug, painstakingly ­removing rubble, their shadows long and movements harsh under the burning ­floodlights. Onlookers watched the progress in silence, waiting for any sign of life under the building levelled by four Israeli missiles in Dahieh, the ­southern suburbs of Beirut, just a few hours before on Friday afternoon.

Broken glass stained with blood had been swept to the side and the area cordoned off, members of Hezbollah and the Lebanese civil defence barking orders to make sure emergency vehicles could access the area. Men with freshly bandaged hands, the product of booby-trapped pagers a few days before, milled about as women sobbed.

“My son’s best friend, his mother, his father and his three siblings. They’re all under the rubble. The ­eldest kid is 19, the youngest is two,” Hassan, a 40-year-old resident of Dahieh, said while watching rescue efforts.

Everyone was waiting for someone, hoping they would be found but dreading that they would emerge lifeless. People began to run towards the rescue workers as word spread that someone was found. They were alive and the ambulance sped off towards the hospital, accompanied by an escort of young men on scooters, beeping and cheering as they went.

For nearly a year, the war with Israel had remained in the south. As Israeli warplanes pounded border villages and more than 100,000 residents fled northwards, politicians in Beirut called for de-escalation to avoid a war, despite the fact that it had already began. A bloody, relentless week of attacks, however, has made the war impossible to ignore.

Thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies exploded all over the ­country in a two-wave attack on Tuesday and Wednesday in a suspected Israeli operation, killing and wounding the Hezbollah members who ­carried them and nearby civilians.

On Friday, an Israeli airstrike ­levelled a residential building in Beirut. The Israeli military said the attack killed Ibrahim Aqil and 10 other leaders of the elite Hezbollah Radwan commando unit.

By the week’s end, 76 people were killed – including 12 women and ­children – and more than 3,000 were wounded, more than doubling the total number of casualties since the war began on 8 October last year.

The sudden, brutal nature of the attacks shattered whatever sense of safety Lebanese people felt.

“It was the first time that I felt that the war is around us, that we’re not safe any more. We don’t know where the next Israeli attack will be, I’m avoiding gatherings or unknown areas,” Amal Cherif, a 52-year-old activist and ­resident of central Beirut, said.

When Tuesday’s pager attacks happened, she heard ­screaming and ambulances – despite the fact that her neighbourhood is not Hezbollah-affiliated.

Human rights groups condemned the pager attacks for being indiscriminate, and UN experts called the attack a “terrifying” violation of international law. “Such attacks could constitute war crimes of murder, attacking civilians and launching indiscriminate attacks, in addition to violating the right to life,” UN human rights experts said in a statement.

Israeli minister of defence Yoav Gallant said shortly after Friday’s airstrike on Beirut that “the sequence of actions in the new phase will continue until our goal is achieved: the safe return of the residents of the north to their homes.” Earlier in the week, he announced that the Israeli military’s “centre of gravity” was shifting to confront Hezbollah in north Israel.

Israeli drones patrolled the skies over Beirut deep into the night on Friday, the whine of their engines reverberating throughout the ­capital for the first time since the war started.

In the south, residents refer to the Israeli MK drones as Um Kamal, comparing it to a nosy neighbour who is always snooping. In Gaza, they are referred to as “the wasp”, for their buzzing sounds. In Beirut, residents have developed neither the ­vocabulary nor the dark humour necessary to refer to the drones as anything but what they are, still amazed by their presence above their homes.

Cherif said she shut her windows on Friday to block out the sound, so that she could get some sleep.

In hospitals around Lebanon, ­hundreds of patients were adjusting to a new life, many of them now with permanent disabilities. The pager explosions resulted in many being blinded and losing a hand. The pagers had beeped twice, and then there was a pause, giving people enough time to bring them to their face before they exploded.

“Enucleation [removal of the eye] is a procedure that is rarely ­performed these days. One of our senior ­ophthalmologists was saying that he has done more enucleations in one day than he has done in his entire career,” Lebanon’s health minister, Firas Abiad, told the Observer. The CEO of LAU Medical Center-Rizk Hospital in Beirut, Sami Rizk, said that they would ask other countries to donate eye prostheses.

The series of attacks has prompted unity across Lebanon. Over the past year, the country has been divided over Hezbollah’s war with Israel, with some saying it was necessary to force a ceasefire in Gaza and others ­resenting Lebanon being dragged into the conflict.

It was Hezbollah that fired at Israel first on 8 October, in what it said was an act of “solidarity” with Hamas’s attack the day before.

Since then, the Lebanese group has maintained that it would not stop its attacks against north Israel until a ceasefire is achieved in Gaza. The fighting has killed more than 500 in Lebanon, more than 200 of whom are civilians, and destroyed entire villages along the Lebanon-Israel border.

After the pager explosions, criticisms of Hezbollah’s war against Israel stopped. Lines have formed outside hospitals as people come to donate blood. Officials put out a statement saying that kidney donations were not needed and that eye transplants were impossible, after a number of citizens offered their own.

“Israel is attacking us, it’s not any more against Hezbollah, it’s against civilians. Even if we are against Hezbollah, when Israel attacks Lebanon, people stand next to each other,” Cherif said.

The secretary general of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, thanked the citizens of Lebanon for their solidarity during a Thursday speech, and said the week’s attacks were a “declaration of war” against Lebanon. He vowed that the group would ­retaliate against Israel.

“It’s clear that solidarity is increasing day after day,” Kassam Kassir, an analyst close to Hezbollah, said. Whether that support for Hezbollah lasts or evaporates as the shock of the pager attacks fades will largely be determined by what form the group’s retaliation against Israel takes.

“The reality is Hezbollah is ­facing a major challenge: how can it respond to Israel without going to war? This is the central question,” Kassir said.

One year ago, Benjamin Netanyahu came to the UN with a vision of a “new Middle East” anchored by Israel’s growing ties with its Arab partners in the region. Now he is on the brink of launching a major escalation against Hezbollah, ignoring calls for restraint from his allies over the Gaza war and defying criticism that he is prevaricating in negotiations over a temporary ceasefire.

The Israeli PM remains scheduled to speak on Friday at the UN general assembly in an appearance that is sure to lead to walkouts and protests on the streets of midtown Manhattan.

He has delayed his arrival in the US by at least a day as tensions rise with Lebanon, after an elaborate operation to detonate thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah that may signal the beginning of a broader war in the region.

The trip to New York may offer him a chance to evaluate support for an escalation in Lebanon, or to let Joe Biden and other allies know that he had made his decision and would not be talked down from a broader war.

Netanyahu’s trip to the UN comes after a year of bloodshed in Gaza that has left more than 41,000 people dead and led the international criminal court (ICC) to consider issuing arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Hamas’s leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar. The ICC judges are regularly rumoured to be close to approving a warrant that could accuse Netanyahu of war crimes.

Among those killed during the Gaza conflict have been 200 UN humanitarian aid workers. Netanyahu and the Israel Defense Forces have made claims that staff from the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) had taken part in the 7 October Hamas-led attacks, and nine members of the organisation had their contracts terminated after an internal UN review.

António Guterres, the UN secretary general, has said that he and Netanyahu have not spoken since the beginning of the war, but that he was ready to meet him on the sidelines of the summit if the Israeli PM asked.

“I have not talked to him because he didn’t pick up my phone calls, but I have no reason not to speak with him,” Guterres said. He blasted the “lack of accountability” for the deaths of the humanitarian aid workers, most of whom have been killed in strikes that the UN has slammed as indiscriminate.

Asked earlier this month if Netanyahu would meet Guterres, Israel’s UN ambassador, Danny Danon, said that the Israeli PM’s schedule had not been finalised yet.

Netanyahu’s most recent trip to the US came in July, when he addressed a raucous joint session Congress, promising “total victory” in his war against Hamas and mocking demonstrators against his appearance in the US Capitol as “idiots”. On the streets outside near Union Station, protesters clashed with police and defaced marble statues with paint.

It remains to be seen whether Netanyahu is ready to take a step further towards the abyss. Following an airstrike in Beirut on Friday that killed a senior Hezbollah commander and at least 13 others in Beirut’s Dahiyeh area, Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant said that “even in Dahiyeh in Beirut – we will continue to pursue our enemy in order to protect our citizens”.

The new “series of operations in the new phase of the war will continue until we achieve our goal: ensuring the safe return of Israel’s northern communities to their homes,” he said.

Guterres had said that he viewed the booby-trapped pager attack against Hezbollah as a potential prelude to a military escalation by Israel in Lebanon and warned that the region was on the “brink of catastrophe”.

Whether Netanyahu is ready to escalate, including by launching a ground operation, remains unclear, and both Hezbollah and its benefactor Iran have promised retribution for recent strikes. But Netanyahu’s office on Friday announced that he would delay his arrival by a day due to the situation, and Danon later told reporters that Netanyahu’s arrival date would depend on events in Israel.

Netanyahu addressed the UN last year riding high on the recently concluded Abraham accords. The landmark agreement normalised relations between Israel and two Arab states, Bahrain and UAE, with expectations that Saudi Arabia may soon sign the accords as well.

“When the Palestinians see that most of the Arab world has reconciled itself to the Jewish state, they too will be more likely to abandon the fantasy of destroying Israel and finally embrace a path of genuine peace with it,” Netanyahu said, holding a crude map with the words “The New Middle East”.

But the bloodletting in Gaza following the attacks by Hamas have sent tensions soaring, and most recently Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said his country would not recognise Israel without a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.

And, if the ICC panel of judges makes a surprise decision this week to accuse Netanyahu of war crimes in Gaza, it will mark a further embarrassment as he goes from pariah to international fugitive.

Kamala Harris has accepted an invitation from CNN to participate in another debate with Donald Trump, on 23 October, her campaign said on Saturday.

“Donald Trump should have no problem agreeing to this debate. It is the same format and setup as the CNN debate he attended and said he won in June, when he praised CNN’s moderators, rules and ratings,” the Harris campaign chair, Jen O’Malley Dillon, said in a statement.

“I will gladly accept a second presidential debate on October 23,” Harris later posted on X. “I hope Donald Trump will join me.”

Trump debated Joe Biden in June when the US president was still running for re-election. Biden performed so badly that he ended up dropping out of the race in July, and Harris, his vice-president, ascended to the nomination.

Asked about Harris’s acceptance of the CNN invitation, a Trump spokesperson pointed to the former president’s prior statements that there would be no more debates.

Shortly afterwards, Trump spoke at a rally in Wilmington, North Carolina, and said that Harris only wants a rematch because she is losing.

“She’s done one debate, I’ve done two. It’s too late to do another, I’d love to in many ways but it’s too late, the voting is cast, the voters are out there, immediately – is everybody voting, please? Get out and vote,” Trump said.

The first in-person voting began in Minnesota, Virginia and South Dakota on Friday and some postal ballots were sent out a few days earlier.

Harris and Trump held their first presidential debate in Philadelphia on 10 September, with Harris, the Democratic nominee for the White House, widely deemed to have won – a judgment rejected by Trump.

The lead-up to that event was touch-and-go, scheduled originally when Biden had been at the top of the Democratic ticket, but Trump eventually acquiesced to appear, while the Harris campaign eventually agreed to the original rules of muted microphones when it was not the candidate’s turn to speak.

Two days after the debate, when Trump had said he wouldn’t do another, he cited Harris’s invitation for a rematch then as proof he’d won the first.

“When a prizefighter loses a fight, the first words out of his mouth are, ‘I WANT A REMATCH,’” he wrote.

This prompted the Harris campaign to taunt Trump as a chicken, and Saturday’s ostentatious acceptance of another debate invitation also seemed designed to needle her opponent.

The vice-presidential debate is on 1 October between Tim Walz, Harris’s running mate and the governor of Minnesota, and JD Vance, a US senator for Ohio.

Debate scheduling and platforming have become almost as contentious as the election campaign itself. The Harris and Trump campaigns repeatedly clashed over where, on what TV network, with which moderators and in what format they should debate, such as with muted or unmuted microphones, or whether with an audience or not.

After the debate hosted by ABC News earlier this month, Trump criticized the network’s moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, for what he claimed was a biased approach.

“They are the most dishonest, in my opinion, the most dishonest news organization,” he grumbled on Fox News.

But a post-debate YouGov poll found that registered voters who responded said, by double digits, that the moderators had been “fair and unbiased”.

While 43% said they had been fair, 29% said they had been biased in Harris’s favor and 4% said they had been biased in Trump’s favor. There was a big partisan split, with 55% of Republicans saying the moderators had been biased in Harris’s favor.

But Trump praised, in comparative terms, the debate he’d had with Biden in June, saying the cable network was “more honorable” than ABC.

CNN moderators did not live-fact-check the candidates, while ABC’s moderators did, including, most memorably, David Muir debunking as baseless the racist rightwing conspiracy theory repeated by Trump that the Haitian immigrant community in Springfield, Ohio, had been eating other residents’ pets.

Appearing on CNN on Saturday afternoon, Tim Ryan, a former Ohio representative and Democratic presidential candidate, who debated Vance when the two were in a race for the US Senate, said that Trump did not want to debate Harris again because “he is scared”.

He said of Trump and Vance: “Behind the beard and the tan and the hair there are two scared little boys.”

Meanwhile, Trump was not joined at his North Carolina rally by the Republican candidate for governor there, Mark Robinson, nor did he make reference to Robinson, who was plunged into scandal earlier in the week by a CNN report saying he had, years ago, referred to himself on a pornographic website as a “Black Nazi” and was in favor of slavery.

Earlier in the day, Walz was campaigning in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, about halfway between Philadelphia and Biden’s birthplace of Scranton, rallying at Freedom high school, where he alluded to Robinson, the current lieutenant governor.

Walz had drawn a parallel between northern Minnesota’s rich history of supplying iron ore to steel manufacturing in Pennsylvania, saying “it was our people who built the tanks that won world war two and freed the world from Nazi oppression”.

Then, without naming him, he appeared to segue to Robinson by saying: “And I don’t know if you have noticed, we have got folks that are running as Republicans for governor that are proud to refer to themselves as Nazis.”

The Harris-Walz campaign has begun running TV ads in North Carolina saying Trump and Robinson “are both wrong for North Carolina” and showing the former president praising the lieutenant governor as “outstanding” and “better than Martin Luther King”.

Such quotes are interspersed with statements Robinson has made opposing abortion, at one point saying the procedure is “about killing a child because you aren’t responsible enough to keep your skirt down”.

Cecilia Nowell in Oakland and Reuters contributed reporting.

The US presidential election remains on a knife-edge 45 days before voters go to the polls, despite Kamala Harris enjoying one of her most encouraging spells of opinion polling since becoming the Democrats’ nominee nearly two months ago.

During yet another momentous week that began with a suspected second assassination attempt against Donald Trump, the latest Guardian 10-day polling averages survey shows Harris increasing her lead to 2.6 points, 48.5% to 45.9%.

While still within error margins, that is an improvement of the 0.9% edge Harris held last week and a significant shift from the statistical dead heat of a fortnight ago before the candidates held their only scheduled televised debate in Philadelphia on 10 September.

Polling suggests voters, by large majorities, believe Harris won that encounter – when Trump, the Republican nominee and former president, effectively self-sabotaged by going on off-topic digressions about crowd sizes at his rallies and making universally debunked claims about Haitian immigrants eating pets.

A New York Times/Philadelphia Inquirer/Siena nationwide poll on Thursday showed the candidates tied at 47% – actually a slight improvement for Harris on the same survey taken before the debate, when Trump recorded a one-point lead.

Other national polling has been more positive for Harris. A Morning Consult poll – based on more than 11,000 respondents – gave her a six-point advantage, 51% to 45%, the biggest she had established since replacing Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket.

There are other underlying trends giving Harris reasons to be cheerful, albeit cautiously.

One is her buoyant performance in battleground states, the key arenas in determining the result of the 5 November election under America’s electoral college system.

The same New York Times/Siena poll that had the two candidates deadlocked nationally showed Harris with a four-point advantage, 50%-46%, in Pennsylvania, a swing state that many commentators identify as the most important of all in reaching the 270 electoral votes needed to capture the White House.

The survey is supported by a separate poll from Quinnipiac, which shows Harris with a six-point lead in the state, 51% to 45%

Moreover, the Quinnipiac poll gives Harris leads in two neighbouring battlegrounds, Michigan and Wisconsin, 5% and 1% respectively.

Capturing all three states – sometimes termed the “blue wall” by Democrats – would be enough to secure Harris a tiny electoral college victory without her needing to win any of the four southern Sun belt states (North Carolina, Georgia, Nevada and Arizona), where the two candidates are statistically tied.

Yet amid the optimism, there is a note of caution for the vice-president; Trump significantly over-performed pollsters’ predictions in the blue wall states in the last two elections, capturing all three in 2016 and losing each by around a single percentage point in 2020, when polls had put Biden much further ahead.

Nevertheless, pollsters detect a change from previous elections that is working in Harris’s favour – and which is whittling away the Republicans’ assumed advantage in the electoral college, where Trump won in 2016 despite receiving 2.7m fewer votes nationwide than Hillary Clinton, his opponent.

Nate Cohn, the New York Times’s chief polling analyst, called Harris’s lead in Pennsylvania while tying with Trump nationwide “a puzzle” but said it was consistent with most other surveys.

“Over the last month, a lot of these polls show Ms Harris doing relatively poorly nationwide, but doing well in the Northern battleground states,” he wrote.

“What’s clear is that recent results from higher-quality polls are very different from those of the last presidential election. If true, it would suggest that Mr Trump’s advantage in the Electoral College, relative to the popular vote, has declined significantly since 2020.”

Harris has one other apparent reason for self-congratulation; the deficit with Trump over which candidate is trusted on the economy has been closed.

The economy remains the single biggest issue in the eyes of most voters, surveys show – recalling the mantra “it’s the economy, stupid” coined by James Carville, the Democratic operative who helped chart Bill Clinton’s 1992 election victory.

Yet the large lead Trump held over Biden – amid persistent concerns over inflation and rising living costs – seems to have eroded since Harris was nominated, separate surveys show.

An Associated Press-Norc poll published on Friday showed 41% of voters trusted Harris as a steward of the economy, while 43% gave Trump the nod – a nominal gap given the ex-president’s attempts to tar his opponent with Biden’s unpopular economic record.

The results bore out an earlier Morning Consult study, which tied the candidates at 46% on economic trust, while an FT-Michigan Ross survey conducted after the debate even gave Harris a small lead.

Sofia Baig, an economist and author of Morning Consult’s study, said Harris had successfully evaded blame for Biden’s policies while winning over voters with her pledges to crack down on price gouging and prescription drug costs.

“While many voters are unsatisfied with the current economy, they say Vice President Kamala Harris is less responsible than President Biden,” she wrote. “Throughout this election cycle, voters consistently said they trusted former President Trump over Biden to handle the economy, but Harris has closed that gap.”

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has named a new government led by the prime minister, Michel Barnier, marked by a shift to the right 11 weeks after an inconclusive parliamentary election.

The first major task for Barnier, appointed just more than two weeks ago, will be to submit a 2025 budget plan addressing France’s financial situation, which the prime minister this week called “very serious”.

Barnier, a conservative, is best known internationally for leading the EU’s Brexit negotiations with the UK.

Most recently, he has had the difficult job of submitting a cabinet for Macron’s approval that has the best chance of surviving a no-confidence motion in parliament.

Opposition politicians from the left have already said they will challenge the cabinet, announced on Saturday evening, with a no-confidence motion.

In the July election, a leftwing bloc called the New Popular Front (NFP) won the most parliamentary seats of any political bloc, but not enough for an overall majority.

Macron argued that the left would be unable to muster enough support to form a government that would not immediately be brought down in parliament.

He turned instead to Barnier to lead a government drawing mostly on parliamentary support from Macron’s allies, as well as from the conservative republicans (LR) and the centrists groups.

Macron was counting too, on a neutral stance from the far right – but the leader of the National Rally (RN), Jordan Bardella, was quick to condemn the composition of the new government.

It marked “a return to Macronism” and so had “no future whatsoever”, he said on Saturday.

At the other end of the political spectrum, the leftwinger Jean-Luc Mélenchon called the new lineup “a government of the general election losers”.

France, he said, should “get rid” of the government “as soon as possible”.

Among the new faces in key cabinet posts are the foreign minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, a centrist, and the conservative Bruno Retailleau at the interior ministry, whose portfolio covers immigration.

The defence minister, Sébastien Lecornu, a close Macron ally, has stayed in post.

The difficult job of submitting a budget plan to parliament next month falls to the 33-year-old Antoine Armand, the new finance minister. He has previously served as head of parliament’s economic affairs commission.

The centrist and conservative parties will depend on others, and in particular the RN, to stay in power and get bills adopted by a very fractured parliament.

“The centrist government is de facto a minority administration,” Eurointelligence analysts said in a note. Its ministers “will not only have to agree amongst each other but also will need votes from opposition parties for its bills to pass in the assembly. This means offering even more concessions and manoeuvring.”

The RN gave tacit support to Barnier’s premiership, but reserved the right to back out at any point if its concerns over immigration, security and other issues were not met.

“I’m angry to see a government that looks set to recycle all the election losers,” Mathilde Panot, who leads the hard-left LFI group of lawmakers, told TF1 television.

Even before the announcement, thousands of people with left-leaning sympathies took to the streets in Paris, the southern port city of Marseille and elsewhere on Saturday to protest.

They were objecting to a cabinet they say does not reflect the outcome of the parliamentary election.

“I am here because this outcome does not correspond to how people voted,” said Violette Bourguignon, 21, demonstrating in Paris.

“I am worried and I’m angry. What is the point of having an election at all?” she said.

Reuters contributed to this report

• Volodymyr Zelenskyy has urged Joe Biden to allow Ukraine to carry out long-range strikes inside Russia with US-supplied weapons, and to earn “a place in history” by “strengthening Ukraine” before he leaves office. Speaking before a crucial trip to the US, including the UN, to shore up support for Ukraine in the war, Zelenskyy said he would present a “victory plan” to end the war. Zelenskyy on Sunday will visit the Pennsylvania ammunition factory that is producing one of the most critically needed munitions for his country’s fight. He is expected to go to the Scranton army ammunition plant to kick off a busy week in the US shoring up support for Ukraine, officials told the Associated Press. This week he also will address the UN general assembly’s annual gathering in New York and travel to Washington for talks with President Joe Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris.

• Zelenskyy also said on Saturday that the end of the war depended on the “resolve” of Kyiv’s western allies in providing needed weaponry and permission to use it. Speaking in his nightly video address, he issued further pleas to boost supplies of weaponry to fend off the slow advance of Russian forces in the Donetsk region. Kyiv also seeks permission to use western weapons against targets deep inside Russia to pre-empt Moscow’s air attacks on Ukraine’s infrastructure, including energy facilities. Russian president Vladimir Putin has warned that Russia would be “at war” with the United States and its Nato allies if they allow Ukraine to use the long-range weapons.

• Ukraine’s foreign minister said on Saturday that Russia is planning strikes on Ukrainian nuclear facilities before the winter, and urged the UN’s nuclear watchdog and allies to establish permanent monitoring missions at the country’s nuclear plants. There was no immediate comment from Moscow.

• Russia will take no part in any follow-up to the Swiss-organised “peace summit” held in June as the process amounts to “fraud”, foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said on Saturday. Russia was not invited to the June meeting and dismissed it as meaningless without Moscow’s participation. Zelenskyy has said he hopes to organise a follow-up meeting by the end of the year with Russia attending.

• Ukrainian officials said on Saturday their forces had hit two Russian munitions depots overnight, in attacks that illustrated its growing capability to strike targets deep inside Russia. A statement by Ukraine’s military general staff said “at least 2,000 tons” of weaponry, including missiles supplied by North Korea, were destroyed at Tikhoretsk in southern Russia and Oktyabrsky in the western region of Tver.

• In the western Tver region, authorities announced on Saturday the temporary closure of a major federal road after the Ukrainian attack near the city of Toropets, about 380km northwest of Moscow and 500km from the Ukrainian border. Russian authorities temporarily closed a 100km stretch of a highway and evacuated passengers from a rail station after a blaze caused a series of explosions. Unverified images circulating on Telegram on Saturday showed a large ball of flame rising into the night sky and dozens of smoke trails from detonations.

• Russian forces struck a multi-storey apartment building in Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, on Saturday evening, injuring at least 12 people and prompting an evacuation of some of its residents, mayor Ihor Terekhov said. Terekhov said the Russians had deployed a guided bomb.

• A 12-year-old boy and two older women were killed as Russian missiles struck Kryvyi Rih, Zelenskyy’s home town in central Ukraine, local governor Serhii Lysak said on Saturday. Lysak said the missiles hit “in the middle of the night, when the city slept”, wounding three more people, destroying two buildings and damaging another 20.

• Iran unveiled a new ballistic missile and an upgraded one-way attack drone at a military parade on Saturday, state media said, amid soaring regional tensions and allegations of arming Russia. Iran stands accused by western governments of supplying both drones and missiles to Russia for use in its war with Ukraine, a charge it has repeatedly denied.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has urged Joe Biden to allow Ukraine to carry out long-range strikes inside Russia with US-supplied weapons, and to earn “a place in history” by “strengthening Ukraine” before he leaves office.

Speaking before a crucial trip next week to Washington, where he will meet Biden and the US vice-president and presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, and address the UN, Zelenskyy said he would present a “victory plan” to end the war.

His vision for a “just peace” has not been made public. But in a media briefing with the Observer in Kyiv, Zelenskyy said it involved carrying out deep strikes with western missiles inside Russia – something London and Washington have so far refused.

The UK has indicated it is willing to allow Ukraine to use British Storm Shadow cruise missiles. But the White House remains sceptical. The UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, failed to resolve the issue when he held private talks last week with Biden in Washington.

Zelenskyy confirmed no green light had been given, despite months of high-level lobbying. “Neither the US nor UK has allowed us to use these weapons on the territory of Russia, against any targets and at any distance,” he said.

Storm Shadows, the French equivalent, Scalp, and the US Atacms system have “not been provided in the numbers we need”, Zelenskyy added. He suggested the reluctance of international partners could be explained by fear of “escalation” with Moscow – an analysis Kyiv does not share.

Asked how he might persuade Biden when they meet on Thursday, Zelenskyy cited the fact that the outgoing president had in the past “changed his opinions” after “difficult discussions”. Some US members of his entourage supported strikes, he said – which was “already an achievement”.

Zelenskyy added: “Biden can strengthen Ukraine and make important decisions for Ukraine to become stronger and to protect its independence while he is US president. I think it is a historical mission after all.”

As well as meeting Harris, Zelenskyy said he would “most likely” have a meeting with Donald Trump on Thursday or Friday. “Our teams are in contact. The main thing is to have time [together]. I won’t look into the future, but I think it will be important for both of us,” Zelenskyy said.

Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, has said a future Republican administration envisages a Moscow-friendly deal that would see Russia hang on to the territory it currently occupies. Ukraine would be forbidden from joining Nato, with the war frozen along a demarcation line.

Zelenskyy described Ukraine’s incursion last month into Russia’s Kursk oblast as a success, hinting that it could become part of future negotiations. He said the operation prevented Moscow from launching its own attack on Ukraine’s northern Sumy province. The “enemy” had been forced to redeploy 42,000 troops from other parts of the frontline, he said.

He acknowledged the situation in eastern Ukraine remained difficult. He said Kyiv needed long-range weapons to counter Russian attacks using airdropped guided bombs. These “destroyed everything”, he said. Russia “finished off” with artillery and then sent in infantry to capture Ukrainian positions.

The Kremlin, meanwhile, had already moved planes to other, more remote airfields, in anticipation that the White House would sign off on Atacms strikes. “We cannot simply talk about Atacms. Why? Because it’s too late,” Zelenskyy said, saying “serious decisions” were needed.

Zelenskyy made his remarks before a six-day trip to the US and a speech to the UN general assembly in New York. During his trip he will meet representatives from Congress and discuss his victory plan with Harris.

The proposal, ahead of a global peace summit in November organised by Ukraine, envisages further security guarantees. Zelenskyy said the “Kursk operation” also featured. He declined to give details. Other elements include more weapons and economic support.

In a tweet on Thursday, Biden described Zelenskyy warmly as “my friend”. “During his visit, I’ll reaffirm America’s commitment to supporting Ukraine as it defends its freedom and independence,” Biden wrote.

Last week, Vladimir Putin said missile strikes against Russia with US weapons would be tantamount to Nato joining the war. He threatened severe consequences. Ukrainian officials have dismissed his comments as the latest in a series of meaningless bluffs.

The Atacms system has a 190-mile (300km) range. Its ballistic missiles can carry cluster munitions. They are likely to be highly effective in destroying Russian bases and military runways, from where airstrikes are launched against Ukrainian towns and cities, defence experts say.

Storm Shadow missiles were developed together with France and rely on US guidance systems. They include Italian components. All four countries have to sign off on any change to the conditions attached to their use, even if they are not the direct suppliers themselves.

Ukraine’s own long-range drones have proved increasingly effective against Russian military targets. On Saturday, they hit an ammunition depot in Russia’s Krasnodar Krai region, causing a massive explosion. Another attack two days ago set fire to a weapons dump in the town of Toropets, in the Tver region.

In a ceremony Saturday afternoon, the US navy apologized for firing upon and torching the Alaska Native village of Kake in 1869.

Surrounded by tribal Chilkat weavings, historic photographs and other Lingít artwork in the Kake elementary and high school gymnasium, R Adm Mark B Sucato expressed the military’s regret, in the first of two apologies planned by the military for bombardments of Alaska Native communities in the late 1800s.

“This has been 155 years in the making,” said Joel Jackson, the president of the Organized Village of Kake, of the apology to the Lingít (often known as the Tlingit) people. “It’s becoming real because we never talked about it and now we are.”

The event also included remarks from other tribal leaders and elders, a blessing from the tribe and a navy chaplain, and performances by the local Native Ḵéex’ Ḵwáan Dancers and the navy band.

A second ceremony is planned for 26 October, the 142nd anniversary of the navy’s 1882 bombardment of the nearby village of Angoon.

The bombardments of Kake and Angoon occurred just a few years after the United States bought the territory of Alaska from Russia in 1867. During those early years, the US army and navy patrolled the region, including from a fort in Sitka where, in 1869, a sentry killed two Lingít men. To settle the ensuing dispute, an army general dispatched the USS Saginaw, a warship, to Kake to “seize a few of their chiefs as hostages till [the accused] are given up” and to “burn their villages”.

“They burned everything. All the shelters, all the food caches, the canoes,” Jackson told the Washington Post. Although no one was killed during the winter bombardment, he said the destruction of the community and its supplies and canoes led to many deaths.

Thirteen years later, the military bombarded a second village after another dispute – this time over the death of a Lingít medicine man. Although the elder’s death onboard a whaling ship was an accident, the tribe sought customary recompense of 200 blankets. Edgar Merriman, the naval commander of the department of Alaska at the time, denied the request and instead demanded 400 blankets from the tribe. When the Lingít only partly fulfilled the request, Merriman ordered US forces to bomb the settlement in Angoon.

Federal officials would later praise Merriman for the assault. “As long as the native tribes … do not feel the force of the government and are not punished for flagrant outrages, so much the more dangerous do they become,” William Morris, the region’s federal revenue collector, wrote in one letter in 1882.

Today, the US military recently deployed to a remote island in response to a spike in nearby Russian military activity.

The navy’s apologies this fall “will mean a lot”, said Garfield George, who as house master of Deishú Hít, or End of the Trail House, in Angoon is known as Kaaxooutch. He will help lead the ceremony there in October. Although the community of Angoon received a $90,000 settlement from the Department of the Interior in 1973, it has long sought a formal apology.

Jackson hopes the navy’s apology Saturday in Kake will encourage further healing of the intergenerational trauma caused by military violence. “A lot of our people don’t even talk about it. We need to start talking about it, because we need to start healing,” he said.

In a ceremony Saturday afternoon, the US navy apologized for firing upon and torching the Alaska Native village of Kake in 1869.

Surrounded by tribal Chilkat weavings, historic photographs and other Lingít artwork in the Kake elementary and high school gymnasium, R Adm Mark B Sucato expressed the military’s regret, in the first of two apologies planned by the military for bombardments of Alaska Native communities in the late 1800s.

“This has been 155 years in the making,” said Joel Jackson, the president of the Organized Village of Kake, of the apology to the Lingít (often known as the Tlingit) people. “It’s becoming real because we never talked about it and now we are.”

The event also included remarks from other tribal leaders and elders, a blessing from the tribe and a navy chaplain, and performances by the local Native Ḵéex’ Ḵwáan Dancers and the navy band.

A second ceremony is planned for 26 October, the 142nd anniversary of the navy’s 1882 bombardment of the nearby village of Angoon.

The bombardments of Kake and Angoon occurred just a few years after the United States bought the territory of Alaska from Russia in 1867. During those early years, the US army and navy patrolled the region, including from a fort in Sitka where, in 1869, a sentry killed two Lingít men. To settle the ensuing dispute, an army general dispatched the USS Saginaw, a warship, to Kake to “seize a few of their chiefs as hostages till [the accused] are given up” and to “burn their villages”.

“They burned everything. All the shelters, all the food caches, the canoes,” Jackson told the Washington Post. Although no one was killed during the winter bombardment, he said the destruction of the community and its supplies and canoes led to many deaths.

Thirteen years later, the military bombarded a second village after another dispute – this time over the death of a Lingít medicine man. Although the elder’s death onboard a whaling ship was an accident, the tribe sought customary recompense of 200 blankets. Edgar Merriman, the naval commander of the department of Alaska at the time, denied the request and instead demanded 400 blankets from the tribe. When the Lingít only partly fulfilled the request, Merriman ordered US forces to bomb the settlement in Angoon.

Federal officials would later praise Merriman for the assault. “As long as the native tribes … do not feel the force of the government and are not punished for flagrant outrages, so much the more dangerous do they become,” William Morris, the region’s federal revenue collector, wrote in one letter in 1882.

Today, the US military recently deployed to a remote island in response to a spike in nearby Russian military activity.

The navy’s apologies this fall “will mean a lot”, said Garfield George, who as house master of Deishú Hít, or End of the Trail House, in Angoon is known as Kaaxooutch. He will help lead the ceremony there in October. Although the community of Angoon received a $90,000 settlement from the Department of the Interior in 1973, it has long sought a formal apology.

Jackson hopes the navy’s apology Saturday in Kake will encourage further healing of the intergenerational trauma caused by military violence. “A lot of our people don’t even talk about it. We need to start talking about it, because we need to start healing,” he said.

One in 20 Australian adults have experienced reproductive coercion and abuse.

That is among the findings of the Australian Study of Health and Relationships (ASHR), released this week, the first time researchers in Australia have estimated the national prevalence of behaviour used to control a person’s reproductive autonomy.

Reproductive coercion and abuse (RCA) can include interference with contraception by a partner, forced contraception or sterilisation, and control of pregnancy outcomes by forced abortion or forced pregnancy.

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Questions about these experiences were added to the country’s largest and most comprehensive study of sexual and reproductive health, conducted once a decade.

Dr Allison Carter, the group leader of the Sexual Health and Reproductive Equity Research Group at the Kirby Institute, presented preliminary findings around RCA prevalence from the third ASHR this week at the International Union Against Sexually Transmitted Infections world congress in Sydney.

From analysing the survey data collected between 2022-2023 from a nationally representative sample of 14,540 people aged 16-69 years, the researchers found that, among women, 3.9% had experienced contraceptive interference, 2.7% had experienced forced sterilisation or contraception, 4.9% had experienced forced abortion and 1.9% forced pregnancy.

“In all likelihood, it’s probably an underestimation because we know people tend to under report experiences of violence, and also people might not recognise what’s occurring to them,” Carter told Guardian Australia.

“It might come in the form of emotional manipulation or more subtle insidious pressure to get pregnant and to keep a child when you may not want to.

“It might involve more overt threats to keep this child, otherwise ‘I’m going to leave the relationship’ – and if it’s a situation where a female partner has less social and economic power and are dependent on that relationship, they might feel intense pressure.”

It can also be overt or actual physical violence – for example, in the case of forcing a woman to choose a particular pregnancy outcome such as abortion, she said.

While RCA was primarily committed by partners, women did also commonly experience perpetration from their parents, with nearly one in five (19%) women who reported forced abortion saying it was perpetrated by their parents.

The prevalence of RCA rose drastically among socioeconomically marginalised men and women including people in contact with the justice system, people with a history of substance use, individuals with disability, those who experience violence, and gay and bisexual people.

For example, one in four women who had been in prison had experienced contraceptive interference (25.3%) and forced abortion (24.9%), while 15.2% of men living with a disability had experienced contraceptive interference.

The rate of men who reported partner interference with contraception was 8.4% – more than double the proportion of women – while 2.2% had experienced forced vasectomy.

However, Carter cautioned that to understand the data’s significance, researchers are still carrying out further qualitative research interviewing study participants to better understand people’s lived experience.

She also highlighted that when men experience partner interference with contraception, it is occurring through deception, for example a woman lying to a partner about using the pill. While that was not a healthy relationship dynamic, it could be different from the fear and control which characterises RCA among women, she said.

“A lot of the reasons behind women’s deception are rooted in women’s lesser social and economic status, and so if we want to talk about prevention, we really need to be talking about addressing disadvantage,” Carter said.

RCA has strong associations with intimate partner and sexual violence, although it can occur in isolation, making it trickier for healthcare professionals to pick up on “because there’s no other red flags”.

The findings also showed RCA was associated with a range of physical, mental and sexual reproductive health outcomes. “So it’s not just limited to reproductive health, but in effect it can affect all aspects of your life,” Carter said.

“Disagreements about whether or not to have a child are very common, and one person they want it and another may not – that’s normal. What’s important though is that people are able to navigate those disagreements in healthy way.”

Dr Kari Vallury, a research fellow at Griffith University with a focus on reproductive coercion and abuse, said having national prevalence data on the topic for the first time was “incredible”.

Vallury said it was also the first time ever in a national study anywhere in the world that “all four directions of RCA” have been measured – coerced or forced pregnancy or contraception, as well as pressure to end or continue pregnancy. “Historically forced abortion has been left out and it’s only measured contraceptive interference.”

Vallury said previously data has shown a 15% prevalence of RCA among pregnancy options counselling clients, “which you would expect to be high given the cohort but now we can really compare that and have a look at what’s happening in the whole community”.

The lawyer who helped victims sue the Metropolitan Police for failing to investigate John Worboys, the black cab rapist, is working with women allegedly attacked by Mohamed Al Fayed.

Phillippa Kaufmann KC has joined the legal team examining whether police had a duty to do more to bring Fayed to justice when allegations were made against him.

Since the BBC documentary Al Fayed: Predator at Harrods was shown last Thursday, more than 100 women have contacted law firms representing five women who say they were raped by Fayed while he owned Harrods, along with others who have made allegations of sexual misconduct.

There may also be a need for a public inquiry to understand whether some of the claims against Fayed were “swept under the carpet”, according to Emma Jones, a partner at the legal firm Leigh Day.

Fayed, who died last year aged 94, was accused of sexual harassment or sexual assault on several occasions as far back as 1995, so the legal team is examining whether or not police breached the Human Rights Act by failing to investigate him properly.

Vanity Fair magazine made allegations against Fayed in 1995, followed by ITV’s The Big Story in 1997 when four women claimed they were sexually harassed.

Then in 2009 the Crown Prosecution Service decided not to prosecute Fayed after claims he had sexually assaulted a 15-year-old girl in Harrods. A further investigation in 2015 also did not lead to charges.

“The test is not just what officers knew, but what a reasonable officer ought to have known,” Jones said. “Given the amount of times this has come to the fore, and given the seriousness of the allegations … one has to ask oneself, well, what should they have known? And that leads to [the question]: did they know it, and did it get swept under the carpet?”

Jones said that it would be helpful for their investigations to hear from women even if they did not want to pursue a case.

Dean Armstrong KC, a barrister representing some of the women involved, said that “well over 100, maybe as many as 150” had come forward so far. He said that it was “an enormous shame” that public figures only spoke about Fayed’s behaviour after his death.

Jack Straw, the former home secretary, rejected Fayed’s application for British citizenship in 1999, saying he had a “general defect in his character” and last week said the Egyptian businessman had been “a bully”. The former manager of Fulham football club’s women’s team, Gaute Haugenes, said they had “protected” the players because “we were aware he liked young, blonde girls”.

“Jack Straw came out this morning, I’ve seen a report, talking about why he wasn’t granted citizenship,” Armstrong said on Sky News yesterday. “We’ve had these matters coming out in the public domain from Fulham Football Club. It is an enormous shame for me, and particularly a much, much greater shame for all of those poor women who suffered at his hands, that these matters might have been said a bit earlier.

“Those people who didn’t speak up, particularly those in public office, I’m afraid, are deserving of criticism, because a lot of these women couldn’t speak up because they were threatened and they were in fear and they were isolated. But that wasn’t the case for a number of other more high-profile people who could have done.”

Armstrong added the Fayed case was “certainly within the province of a public inquiry”. “My opinion is it is hugely in the public interest when there is a system which is deployed in probably the most famous retail store in the country, if not the world, which appears to go unchecked for a number of years,” he said, referring to allegations that Fayed’s predatory behaviour included walking around Harrods with male colleagues to pick out female staff who he wanted to target.

“That retail store is then sold very close to when a prosecution has not been proceeded with and after the death, but more importantly, after the courage and the bravery of a number of women to speak out, a number of people in the public eye then decide to come out and effectively corroborate those matters,” he said.

Elon Musk fought the law. The law appears to have won.

X, Musk’s social media platform, has backed down in its fight with the Brazilian judiciary, after complying with court orders that had blocked users in the country from accessing X.

The platform bowed to one of the key demands made by Brazil’s supreme court by appointing a legal representative in the country. It also paid outstanding fines and took down user accounts that the court had ordered to be removed on the basis that they threatened the country’s democracy, the New York Times reported.

However, the battle is not quite over. The supreme court said X had not filed the proper documentation showing that it had appointed Rachel de Oliveira Conceicao as its Brazilian representative. It gave the company five days to present documents validating her appointment.

Musk has been at loggerheads with supreme court justice Alexandre de Moraes since April after he ordered the company to take down more than 100 social media accounts that had been questioning whether the far-right president Jair Bolsonaro had really lost the election in 2022.

By mid-August, Musk had closed down X’s offices in Brazil, leaving it without a legal representative in the country, a legal requirement for firms to operate there. Moraes responded by ordering Brazil’s mobile and internet service providers to block access to X. Musk had used his platform to attack Moraes, describing him as an “evil tyrant” among other things.

Last week X reappeared in Brazil after a software update that it said had been an “inadvertent and temporary service restoration to Brazilian users”. But Moraes said it had been “wilful, illegal and persistent”, and levied a R$5m fine (£680,000) on X, adding to R$18.3m (£2.5m) that had already been imposed.

Musk has objected to legal orders to remove some posts and accounts in Brazil and Australia, claiming he was a champion of free speech, although he has been less vocal about removing content in countries such as Turkey and India. Brazil’s population of 200 million people makes it an attractive market for social media companies.

Starlink, the satellite internet service provider owned by Musk, had also been in dispute with Brazilian authorities. Moraes had frozen the company’s assets because it refused to enforce the block on X, but on 4 September said that it would comply.

Italian authorities have confirmed a request for additional security around the wreck of the luxury yacht Bayesian, which sank in August killing seven, including British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch, after fears were raised that material in watertight safes onboard could be of interest to foreign governments.

Italian prosecutors fear that would-be thieves might try to reach the wreckage in order to loot expensive jewelry and other valuable objects onboard, including intelligence data, CNN reported, citing unnamed sources.

The authorities are reportedly concerned that two super-encrypted hard drives in the sunken yacht’s watertight safes could fall into the wrong hands.

The vessel sank during a violent storm off the coast of Sicily on 19 August, claiming the lives of seven of the 22 passengers and crew onboard, including Lynch, 59, and his 18-year-old daughter.

Italian authorities confirmed to the cable news outlet that the hard drives could be of interest to foreign governments, including Russia and China, and they had requested that the vessel be guarded closely with surface and underwater surveillance.

“A formal request has been accepted and implemented for additional security of the wreckage until it can be raised,” Francesco Venuto of the Sicilian civil protection agency told CNN.

The concerns focus on hard drives that Lynch reportedly kept with him. Survivors reportedly told Italian prosecutors that Lynch “did not trust [internet] cloud services” and kept his data with him.

Lynch was believed to have connections to British, American and other intelligence services and had sold Darktrace, a cybersecurity artificial intelligence company he founded, to US billionaire Orlando Bravo, co-founder and managing partner of Chicago-based Thoma Bravo, in a $5bn deal earlier this year.

The Cambridge-based company was co-founded in 2013 by Stephen Huxter, a high-ranking figure in MI5’s cyber defense team, who became a managing director at Darktrace.

Huxter hired Andrew France, a 30-year veteran of GCHQ, the British intelligence and security agency, as the company’s chief executive. Former MI5 head Jonathan Evans also sat on Darktrace’s board, along with Jim Penrose, a 17-year veteran of the US National Security Agency, among others in the security field, according to Politico.

Lynch’s previous company, Autonomy, which he sold to Hewlett-Packard in 2011, was also connected to UK and US government agencies and reportedly specialized in “advanced computer eavesdropping systems”.

The risk that Lynch’s hard drives holding highly classified information, including passcodes and other sensitive data, could fall into the hands of foreign actors was raised by an official involved in the salvage plans, who asked not to be named, according to CNN.

Divers have been searching the Bayesian with remote cameras before it is raised. They are expected to complete surveys of the wreck within the next week.

Italian prosecutors have opened up a criminal investigation into the sinking of the 184-foot yacht, which came as Lynch, family members, his lawyer and his banker were celebrating his acquittal in June on fraud charges related to Autonomy’s $11bn sale to Hewlett-Packard in 2011.

Hewlett-Packard recently said it planned to pursue a $4bn civil litigation against Lynch’s estate, saying the move was “in the best interest of shareholders”, in a 2022 UK civil court judgment over the acquisition.

The sinking of the Bayesian in a freak storm claimed the lives of Lynch, 59; his daughter, Hannah, 18; American attorney Chris Morvillo and his wife, Neda; British banker Jonathan Bloomer and his wife, Judy; and the yacht’s onboard chef, Recaldo Thomas.

Local prosecutor Ambrogio Cartosio told CNN that no personal effects, including computers, jewelry or Lynch’s hard drives, had yet been recovered from the vessel, though equipment related to the navigation system was removed to help determine why the yacht sank within minutes of the storm striking when it was designed to weather such a situation and other nearby vessels remained afloat.

Traffic came to a standstill on Saturday afternoon in Milan as Madonna arrived at Dolce & Gabbana fashion week show. Widely rumoured to be a front-row guest, the singer was the last to arrive at the brand’s HQ, prompting a spontaneous standing ovation from the 1,000-strong crowd.

A long-term friend of designers Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana and ambassador for their brand since the early 1990s, Madonna was dressed in a head-to-toe black lace look from the brand’s last collection and wore a gold crown atop a black Chantilly lace veil as she chatted with her front-row neighbours before the show began.

The show itself, called Italian Beauty, was a dedication to Madonna’s 1990 Blonde Ambition tour wardrobe, designed by Jean Paul Gaultier, and the titular theme.

Descending from a penthouse-style staircase, each model sported the conical bra bustier that Madonna wore during the tour and blond corkscrew-curl wigs reminiscent of the style she sported at the time and documented in the fly-on-the-wall documentary In Bed with Madonna. They were joined by pencil dresses with corset and suspender detailing; sheer lace overlays revealing more conical bras and big pants; and black and pinstripe tailoring that all featured in the music video for Vogue.

As the designers took their final bow, they made the unusual decision to walk the catwalk in search of their front-row muse who stood to receive kisses on her hands and more applause from the crowd.

It was not the first time that Dolce & Gabbana had dedicated a collection inspired by the platinum artist. In 2000, they presented their spring/summer 2001 collection entitled Madonna, Gli Anni Ottanta, preceded by the costumes they designed for her The Girlie Show tour in 1992.

“Madonna has always been our icon. It’s thanks to her that a lot of things in our lives changed,” the designers wrote in the show notes.

Jason Hughes, fashion and creative director of Wallpaper* magazine, said after the show: “Madonna has always engaged in her Italian American heritage long before she became Madonna the pop star and she has a long history with Dolce & Gabbana. They are a match made in heaven – think of their shared 1990s notoriety relating to religious iconography, sex appeal and female power. The Blonde Ambition era was Madonna at the height of her fame and power when she was the biggest superstar on the planet and in the newspapers every day. It’s hard when you’re working at that level to accept and understand how important it is what one has done, but now she can. This feels like her accepting how major it was.”

The Observer understands that Gaultier was not involved with the concept or realisation of the collection with the brand, and that the show was a homage to Madonna and the theme. Gaultier, who the Observer is in the process of trying to contact, continues to collaborate with Madonna.

Last June, it was reported that the designer was working on an animated feature directed by Benoît Philippon in which Madonna is to star, so one might assume that this collection has his blessing.