Israel has launched its heaviest air attack on Beirut in almost a year of conflict with the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, levelling a number of buildings in a southern suburb in an apparent attempt to kill Hezbollah’s leader and a key ally of Iran, Hassan Nasrallah.

Six loud explosions were heard across the Lebanese capital late on Friday afternoon, and vast plumes of smoke were visible from as far as Batroun, a city an hour’s drive away.

Several apartment blocks in the predominantly Shia neighbourhood of Haret Hreik were reduced to rubble, and footage from the scene showed huge slabs of concrete topped by piles of twisted metal and wreckage. Several craters were visible, into one of which a car had fallen.

The Lebanese health ministry said six people had died and 91 were injured, while some early estimates put the number of dead at 300. More casualties are expected as rescue workers clear rubble.

Video of the strikes suggested they were carried out with ground-penetrating munitions known as bunker busters. In some footage, a vertical jet of flame was visible as a bomb appeared to explode beneath the ground.

Israeli media reported that Nasrallah was the principle target and that the military was checking whether he had been hit. Other media outlets quoted Hezbollah sources saying he was “alive and well”.

The strikes came shortly after the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, told the UN general assembly in a bellicose speech marked by the walkout of dozens of diplomats that Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah would continue despite international efforts to secure a three-week ceasefire.

The Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian, condemned the attack as a “flagrant war crime.”

“The attacks perpetrated … by the Zionist regime in the Dahiya neighbourhood of Beirut constitute a flagrant war crime that has revealed once again the nature of this regime’s state terrorism,” he said in a statement carried by the official Irna news agency.

Targeting Nasrallah – even if he was not harmed – would mark a staggering escalation on the Israeli side. He represents Iran’s most important regional asset and has long been seen as linchpin in the so-called axis of resistance. The presence of Hezbollah’s large rocket arsenal on Israel’s northern border has long acted as a deterrent to an Israeli attack on Iran and its nuclear programme.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesperson, R Adm Daniel Hagari, said the strikes had hit the main Hezbollah headquarters, which he said was underground beneath residential buildings.

Hagari said the IDF was still assessing the result of the attack, which he described as “very precise”, and warned that Israel would attack other Hezbollah targets in the coming hours.

Israel’s Arabic-language military spokesperson Avichay Adraee posted a map showing three buildings in Dahiya in south Beirut and warned nearby residents to evacuate.

Shortly after midnight, fresh explosions were heard and smoke rose over the city as Israel said it was attacking the three sites. Hezbollah issued a statement denying there had been weapons in the civilian buildings targeted. Further Israeli strikes on the southern suburbs of Beirut were reported before 4am, after a similar warning from Adraee.

Early on Saturday the IDF also claimed to have killed Muhammad Ali Ismail, the commander of Hezbollah’s missile unit in southern Lebanon, and his deputy, Hossein Ahmed Ismail. The claims could not be independently verified.

The British embassy reiterated its warning to UK citizens, posting: “British nationals in Lebanon should leave now. You should take the next available flight.”

As night fell in Jerusalem, Netanyahu’s office said he had personally approved the strike allegedly targeting Nasrallah, issuing a photograph of Netanyahu with his military secretary and chief of staff on the phone in his New York hotel.

His office also announced that he had cut short his US visit and would return immediately to Israel.

Late on Friday night, Hezbollah launched fresh rocket salvoes against the north Israeli cities of Safed, Karmiel and Sa’ar, which it said were carried out “in response to Israeli attacks on cities, villages and civilians”.

Underlining the significance of the strike, Israeli media reported that the operation was watched as it unfolded by the defence minister, Yoav Gallant, in the command centre of the Israeli air forcein Tel Aviv, along with the Israeli chief of staff, Herzi Halevi, and other top commanders.

Although some Israeli media suggested that the US had been informed minutes before the attack, that was emphatically denied by US president Joe Biden who told reporters the US “no knowledge of or participation” in the strike.

The explosions were so powerful that they rattled windows and shook houses in settlements 18 miles north of Beirut.

Nearby witnesses quoted by the Lebanese daily L’Orient-Le Jour described seeing substantial fissures open in the ground. Ambulances were seen heading to the scene of the explosions, sirens wailing.

Not long before the attack, thousands of people had gathered in Dahiya for the funeral of three Hezbollah members, including a senior commander, killed in earlier strikes.

Lebanon’s prime minister, Najib Mikati, who is also in New York, was following developments as information arrived, according to a statement from his office.

The statement said Mikati was in touch with the commander of the Lebanese armed forces, Joseph Aoun, and had ordered “the full mobilisation” of emergency resources after reports of a large number of victims.

“This new aggression demonstrates that the Israeli enemy is mocking all the international appeals in favour of a ceasefire from the international community,” Mikati said.

Earlier in the day, Israeli airstrikes on Lebanon killed about 25 people, taking the death toll this week to more than 720, health authorities said.

The Israeli military said it had carried out dozens of strikes over the course of two hours across the south of Lebanon on Friday, including in the cities of Sidon and Nabatieh. It said it was targeting Hezbollah rocket launchers and infrastructure. It said Hezbollah fired a volley of rockets toward the northern Israeli city of Tiberias.

A year of conflict between Israel and Hezbollah has escalated sharply this week, raising fears of an even more destructive conflict. More than 90,000 people have been reported as newly displaced in Lebanon this week, according to the UN, adding to more than 111,000 already uprooted by the conflict.

Hezbollah began firing at Israel on 8 October last year as the Gaza war began, declaring solidarity with the Palestinians. Hezbollah has said it will cease fire only when Israel’s Gaza offensive ends.

On Friday, the Moody’s credit rating agency downgraded Israel’s credit rating to “Baa1” and maintained its rating outlook at “negative” amid the escalation of the conflict.

Additional reporting by Quique Kierszenbaum

Israel’s apparent attempt to assassinate Hezbollah’s leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah in a massive strike on an underground headquarters in Beirut’s southern suburbs marks the most alarming escalation in almost a year of war between the Shia militant organisation and Israel.

Immediately after a highly bellicose speech by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the UN general assembly – where he appeared to directly threaten Iran as well as promise to continue “degrading” Hezbollah – the first reports of a massive strike began to emerge.

Within less than an hour, Israeli journalists with connections to the country’s defence and security establishment were suggesting that Nasrallah was the target and that he had been in the area of the headquarters at the time of the strike.

That the strike was regarded as highly significant was quickly confirmed by a series of statements from Israel – including an image showing Netanyahu ordering the attack on the phone from his New York hotel room.

What is clearer than ever, after a series of Israeli escalations against Hezbollah this month – including targeted killings and the explosion of thousands of modified pagers and walkie-talkies supplied to the group – is that the long-understood ground rules governing the balance of deterrence between the two sides has been blown away.

For much of the early months of the conflict with Hezbollah, which began on 8 October– a day after Hamas’s attack from Gaza – it was understood that Israel would not assassinate the militant group’s most senior members. But in recent months those “red lines” have increasingly been rubbed away.

As the geographic scope of attacks on both sides has moved deeper into Lebanon and Israel, so Israeli operations have aimed at ever more senior Hezbollah commanders, beyond those directly involved in launching strikes on the ground in Lebanon’s south.

Indeed, since the beginning of the year, diplomats and knowledgeable analysts in the region have suggested that one aim of the discreet to-and-fro between Israel and Hezbollah through US special envoy Amos Hochstein and intermediaries for the group has focused on preserving the understanding that the most senior figures in the militant group would not be targeted.

On the Israeli side in the past fortnight, however, evidence has been building that a case was being made for a significant escalation.

Claims of unsuccessful Hezbollah plots aimed at senior Israeli figures were made by the country’s security agencies, while it was also suggested that the Israeli escalation was aimed at countering the militant group’s own plans to launch a large offensive.

All of which, it now seems clear, was a preamble for a long-prepared and multi-pronged effort to decapitate Hezbollah.

While it may take several days to understand the full import of the fallout from Friday’s strike, Netanyahu and his military chiefs have taken an enormous gamble, not simply regarding the situation in Israel’s north, where tens of thousands have been displaced by the fighting, but with the wider region and with the country’s relationships with its international partners.

Coming in the midst of US- and French-led international efforts to broker a three-week ceasefire with Hezbollah, the move marks an emphatic slap in the face for the Biden administration, which believed it had an assurance from Netanyahu that he backed the temporary truce.

Instead, it appears that Netanyahu and his military leadership were all the time secretly laying the ground for an attack timed to violently underline the rhetorical flourishes of the Israeli prime minister’s warnings to Hezbollah and Iran during his thinly attended speech on Friday at the UN.

Most significantly, the strikes represent a direct challenge to Tehran, for whom Nasrallah represents its most important strategic regional ally, whose tens of thousands of Iranian-supplied missiles aimed at Israel have long been seen as a key strategic foil preventing an Israeli attack on Iran itself.

Now all bets are off. Despite anonymous Israeli claims – later disavowed by the IDF – that it had destroyed up to 50% of Hezbollah’s missile arsenal of well over 100,000, that remains highly unlikely. And while Hezbollah’s command and control has been severely damaged, it is probable that it retains a significant capacity.

Other Iranian allies, including in Iraq, Syria and Yemen, have their own missiles and drones, which, while not as significant as Hezbollah’s, could be brought into play – and not necessarily only against Israel but against US targets.

Then there is the most important question: whether Iran can accept a strike against Nasrallah, or whether it too could be drawn into a widening conflict, and whether the strike against the Hezbollah leader is intended by Israel as setting the conditions for a strike against Iran.

Underlying that concern, Iran’s embassy in Beirut condemned Israel’s airstrike, saying the attacks “represent a serious escalation that changes the rules of the game” and that Israel would be “punished appropriately”.

Benjamin Netanyahu shrugged off global appeals for a ceasefire in a defiant speech to the United Nations that was delivered barely an hour before massive airstrikes targeting Hezbollah’s leader levelled several apartment blocks in Beirut.

Addressing the general assembly in New York, Israel’s prime minister presented his country as a champion of peace and prosperity for the Middle East, even as its security forces prepared an attack that spread terror in the streets of the Lebanese capital and heightened fears of an all-out regional war.

“Israel seeks peace. Israel yearns for peace. Israel has made peace and will make peace again,” he said, but made no mention of the ceasefire deals for Gaza and Lebanon that have been championed by the US.

Instead he threatened more attacks in a campaign against Hezbollah that began last week with exploding pagers, and this week expanded to airstrikes that have killed more than 700 people and displaced at least 90,000.

“We will continue degrading Hezbollah,” he told a half-empty hall. Many national delegations had walked out in protest when Netanyahu took the podium.

It was a clear retreat from plans for a 21-day ceasefire across the Lebanese border that had been backed by the US and France and drawn up in close collaboration with the Israeli government.

Soon after he finished speaking, huge explosions ripped through southern Beirut, reducing six buildings to rubble, reportedly in an attempt to assassinate Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, by taking out an underground bunker.

Netanyahu’s office said he would fly home immediately, breaking a usual rule against travel on the Jewish Sabbath. It released a photo of the prime minister ordering the strike, apparently from a landline in a makeshift command centre in New York.

World leaders gathered in New York for the UN general assembly this week repeatedly used their moment in the global spotlight to plead for a halt to the war in Gaza and across the Lebanese border.

Before Israel was given the podium on Friday morning, the Slovenian prime minister, Robert Golob, demanded: “Mr Netanyahu, stop this war now,” and Pakistan’s prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, described attacks in Gaza as “the systematic slaughter of innocent people”.

Netanyahu responded by denouncing the UN as an “antisemitic swamp”, and insisted that Israel was committed to military victory. “We are winning,” he said, adding that since the Hamas-led attacks on 7 October, Israel had shown that “if you strike us, we will strike you”.

Netanyahu said the campaign against Hezbollah would continue until Israelis could return to their homes in the north of the country, and the war in Gaza would stop only when Israel claimed “total victory” or Hamas laid down its arms.

The Biden administration clearly thought it had brokered the outline of an agreement to halt the conflict in Lebanon earlier this week, and was angry about Netanyahu’s last-minute decision to back away from that plan.

Washington is Israel’s most important ally, offering diplomatic protection in the UN as a permanent member of the security council and critical weapons for the military, but has struggled to leverage that support into influence over Netanyahu’s political decisions.

The US national security spokesperson, John Kirby, said pointedly that a statement about a 21-day pause “wasn’t just drawn up in a vacuum. It was done after careful consultation, not only with the countries that signed on to it, but Israel itself.”

Netanyahu said Israel was fighting an existential “seven-front” war against Hamas and its allies, from the Houthis in Yemen, to militias in Iraq and Syria, militants in the
occupied West Bank and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

“My country is at war, fighting for its life,” he said, adding that he had left Jerusalem reluctantly, to “set the record straight” in New York.

Nearly a year into a war that has reshaped politics in the region, his speech defiantly ignored those profound shifts.

He called for a “historic peace agreement” with Saudi Arabia, something that was on the table a year ago with strong backing from Washington. Now, though, Riyadh has ruled out normalisation without the recognition of a Palestinian state, and its delegation did not hear Netanyahu’s proposal because they had left the room.

He also urged global action to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. This has been a long-term US preoccupation, but frantic efforts to stave off a full-blown conventional conflict with Iran have forced nuclear concerns down the diplomatic agenda.

He ended with an awkward adaptation of two lines from the Welsh writer Dylan Thomas’ poem about confronting mortality, Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night, using them to insist that Israel would outlast its enemies.

“To paraphrase a great poet: Israel will not go gentle into that good night, we will never need to rage against the dying of the light, because the torch of Israel will forever shine bright,” Netanyahu said.

Donald Trump has met Volodymyr Zelenskyy in New York in a high-stakes meeting at which the Ukrainian leader hoped to repair ties with the former US president.

The two men met at Trump Tower on Friday amid a growing feud between Zelenskyy and Republicans that Ukraine fears could sabotage further US military aid if Trump wins in November.

“We have a very good relationship, and I also have a very good relationship, as you know, with President Putin,” Trump said as he stood next to Zelenskyy before the meeting. “And I think if we win, I think we’re going to get it resolved very quickly … I really think we’re going to get it … but, you know, it takes two to tango.”

Going into the meeting, Zelenskyy noted he and Trump last met in person five years ago. “I think we have common view that the war in Ukraine has to be stopped, and Putin can’t win, and Ukraine has to prevail,” the Ukrainian leader said. “And I want to discuss with you the details of our plan.”

That last meeting came before Trump was impeached for asking Zelenskyy in a 2019 phone call to investigate Joe Biden and his son in an attempt to influence the outcome of the 2020 US presidential election. He was acquitted in the Senate.

In his opening remarks, Trump thanked Zelenskyy for what he said was his support during that scandal. “One of the reasons we won it so easily is that when he [Zelenskyy] was asked … he could have grandstanded and played cute, and he didn’t do that,” Trump said. “He said President Trump did absolutely nothing wrong. He said it loud and clear, and the impeachment hoax died right there.”

Zelenskyy told reporters in October 2019 as Congress was launching its impeachment inquiry that there was “no blackmail” from Trump.

The sit-down – which lasted less than an hour – could be Zelenskyy’s last chance to head off a growing conflict with Trump, who has frequently made complimentary remarks about Vladimir Putin and has also at times said he would cut off aid to Ukraine in order to force Kyiv to negotiate a truce – under any terms – with Moscow.

“It has to end,” Trump said of the war in Ukraine. “At some point, it has to end. [Zelenskyy’s] gone through hell. This country has gone through hell like few countries have ever… Nobody’s ever seen anything like it.”

Zelenskyy later described the meeting as “very productive”. He wrote on X: “I presented our Victory Plan, and we thoroughly reviewed the situation in Ukraine and the consequences of the war for our people. Many details were discussed. We share the common view that the war in Ukraine must be stopped. Putin cannot win. Ukrainians must prevail.”

The meeting took place after Zelenskyy’s visit to the UN general assembly and the White House to meet Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. During their meeting, the vice-president indirectly attacked Trump’s policy on Ukraine by saying “some in my country” would pressure Ukraine to cede territory to negotiate a peace with Putin.

“These proposals are the same as those of Putin, and let us be clear, they are not proposals for peace,” Harris said. “Instead, they are proposals for surrender, which is dangerous and unacceptable.”

The feud between the two men reignited this week after Zelenskyy said in an interview he did not believe Trump knew how to end the war in Ukraine and that his running mate, JD Vance, was “too radical” for endorsing a peace deal that would result in Kyiv giving up large swaths of occupied land to Russia.

The Republican candidate has grown extremely critical of Zelenskyy on the campaign trail, attacking him in public speeches this week for “making little nasty aspersions toward your favourite president, me”.

“I watched this poor guy yesterday at the United Nations,” Trump had said of Zelenskyy in a campaign speech in North Carolina. “He just didn’t know what he was saying.”

He added: “Any deal – the worst deal – would’ve been better than what we have now. If they made a bad deal it would’ve been much better. They would’ve given up a little bit and everybody would be living and every building would be built and every tower would be aging for another 2,000 years … What deal can we make? It’s demolished. The people are dead. The country is in rubble.”

Before the meeting on Friday, Trump posted on the Truth Social social media platform what appeared to be a private message from Zelenskyy requesting a meeting with the former president. The message, which was sent by text, was transmitted through Denys Sienik, Ukraine’s deputy ambassador to Washington.

The decision to post the message online with little explanation will heighten concerns that any frank negotiations about the war and what aid the US government would be willing to provide could be made public at any time by Trump.

“Days ago, we requested a meeting with you, and I really want to hear your thoughts directly and firsthand,” the message read. “I believe it’s important for us to have a personal contact and to understand each other 100%. Let me know if you are in the city at that time – I would really like for our meeting to take place.” It was signed “Volodymyr”.

• China and Brazil on Friday pressed ahead with an effort to gather developing countries behind a plan to end Russia’s war in Ukraine, despite Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s dismissal of the initiative as serving Moscow’s interests. Seventeen countries attended a meeting on the sidelines of the UN general assembly chaired by China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, and Brazilian foreign policy adviser Celso Amorim. Wang told reporters they discussed the need to prevent escalation in the war, avoid the use of weapons of mass destruction and prevent attacks on nuclear power plants. Zelenskyy, in a speech to the assembly earlier this week, questioned why China and Brazil were proposing an alternative to his own peace formula. Proposing “alternatives, half-hearted settlement plans, so-called sets of principles” would only give Moscow the political space to continue the war, he said.

• US secretary of state Antony Blinken, speaking later, after a meeting with Wang, underscored strong US concerns about China’s support for Russia’s defence industrial base. Addressing reporters, he said that China, while saying it seeks an end to the Ukraine conflict, “is allowing its companies to take actions that are actually helping Putin continue the aggression. That doesn’t add up.”

• South Korea’s foreign minister said Russia was engaging in illegal arms trade with North Korea, reiterating statements by the US, Ukraine and independent analysts that Pyongyang is supplying rockets and missiles in return for economic and other military assistance from Moscow. Misuse of Russia’s right to veto as a permanent member of the UN security council is hindering the UN’s efforts to end war, foreign minister Cho Tae-yul said during the UN general assembly on Saturday.

• Donald Trump met Volodymyr Zelenskyy in New York in a high-stakes meeting at which the Ukrainian leader hoped to repair ties with the former US president. The two men met at Trump Tower on Friday amid a growing feud between Zelenskyy and Republicans that Ukraine fears could sabotage further US military aid if Trump wins in November.

• Trump told Zelesnkyy that if he won November’s presidential election he would get the Ukraine war “resolved very quickly”. “We have a very good relationship, and I also have a very good relationship, as you know, with President Putin,” Trump said as he stood next to Zelenskyy before the meeting. “And I think if we win, I think we’re going to get it resolved very quickly … I really think we’re going to get it … but, you know, it takes two to tango.”

• The sit-down – which lasted less than an hour – could be Zelenskyy’s last chance to head off a growing conflict with Trump, who has frequently made complimentary remarks about Vladimir Putin and has also at times said he would cut off aid to Ukraine in order to force Kyiv to negotiate a truce – under any terms – with Moscow.

• Zelenskyy later described the meeting as “very productive”. He wrote on X: “I presented our Victory Plan, and we thoroughly reviewed the situation in Ukraine and the consequences of the war for our people. Many details were discussed. We share the common view that the war in Ukraine must be stopped. Putin cannot win. Ukrainians must prevail.”

• Finland will place a key Nato base less than 200 kilometers (125 miles) from its border with Russia, “sending a message” to its eastern neighbour, the defence ministry said Friday. Finland became a Nato member last year, dropping decades of military non-alignment after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

• Russia said on Friday it had captured the village of Marynivka in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region, where its forces have been pushing towards the important logistics hub of Pokrovsk. Ukraine’s General Staff said nothing about Marynivka changing hands in an evening report, noting that the village was among nearly a dozen localities where Russian forces had “received a fierce rebuff”.

• Russia’s FSB security service is investigating three foreign journalists for reporting in parts of Russia’s Kursk region occupied by Ukrainian forces, bringing the total of such investigations to 12. The three, Kathryn Diss and Fletcher Yeung from Australia’s ABC News and Romanian journalist Mircea Barbu, are being investigated for illegally crossing the Russian border, state news agency Ria Novosti reported.

• Nine children deported to Russia since Moscow’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine returned home on Friday with the help of Qatar acting as an intermediary, Ukraine’s ombudsman said. Dmytro Lubinets, writing on the Telegram messaging app, said the children ranged in age from 13 to 17, with a 20-year-old man also included in the operation. Several suffered from disabilities and a number of them had been taken from an orphanage in southern Kherson region, first to the Russian-held town of Skadovsk and then to Russia itself, Lubinets said.

• A Moscow court on Friday began the trial of a 72-year-old American man accused of fighting as a mercenary in Ukraine, Russian news agencies reported. Moscow City Court is hearing a criminal case against the American “over participating as a mercenary in the armed conflict on the side of Ukraine,” Ria Novosti news agency said.

• A Russian missile attack on the central Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih struck a five-storey building housing the regional police department on Friday, killing at least three people and injuring six others, officials said. Three bodies – of a man and two women – were found under the rubble, the regional governor Serhiy Lysak said on the Telegram messaging app.

• A Russian drone may have breached the national airspace of Nato member Romania for “a very brief period of under three minutes” overnight during an attack on neighbouring Ukraine, the Romanian defence ministry said on Friday. Three people were killed in the attack, according to Ukrainan officials.

Helene left a dizzying path of destruction as it raged across the south-east United States on Friday, killing at least 40 people across four states, causing dangerous flooding and leaving millions without power.

The storm – which registered maximum sustained winds of 140mph – crashed ashore late on Thursday in north-western Florida as a potent category 4 hurricane. It weakened to a tropical storm and then to a depression as it moved across Georgia as well as the Carolinas on Friday afternoon, when residents whose communities experienced Helene’s peak effects more directly were only just beginning to fathom the recovery process ahead.

The storm sparked lethal damage across four states. At least 17 people died in South Carolina, including two firefighters killed when their vehicle was struck by a tree before sunrise, officials said.

Another 15 people were killed in Georgia, said Garrison Douglas, a spokesperson for the state’s governor, Brian Kemp.

Five people were killed in Florida’s Pinellas county, which includes the Tampa Bay area, with two of those deaths occurring by drowning. A number of the deaths involved trees falling on residences.

Among the dead were several children: a four-year-old girl who died in Claremont, North Carolina, in a car accident in heavy rain; and a seven-year-old boy and a four-year-old girl who died when a tree fell on their home in Washington county, Georgia.

Tornadoes hit some areas, including one in Nash county, North Carolina, that critically injured four people.

Authorities had predicted danger even as the storm weakened, as it continued to produce catastrophic flooding. Some areas received more than a foot of rain. Rescuers were racing on Friday to save people from the waters.

One dramatic scene in Tennessee reportedly involved more than 50 patients and staff at the state’s Unicoi county hospital, who were stranded on the roof while surrounded by rising floodwaters. Emergency vehicles were washed away as they attempted rescues, while helicopters that had initially been held back by high winds, were evacuating people on Friday afternoon. The patients and staff were eventually brought to safety.

Officials in several states warned people who were stuck to await rescue crews, as floodwater could contain live wires, sewage, sharp objects and other debris. Some areas had become only accessible by boat.

At several points on Friday afternoon, officials urged residents to evacuate over concerns that local dams would not sustain the pressure. In western North Carolina, near the border with Tennessee, Rutherford county emergency officials warned residents near the Lake Lure Dam just before noon to immediately evacuate to higher ground, saying: “Dam failure imminent.”

And on Friday afternoon, North Carolina’s Cocke county mayor, Rob Mathis, warned people in the vicinity to evacuate immediately after the Walters Dam in the community of Waterville suffered a catastrophic failure. In a post on Facebook, officials later assured that there had not been a catastrophic failure at the dam, adding that the false alarm had come from the emergency management agency.

Meanwhile, millions of people across the country were out of power. As of early Friday evening, about 1.1m households and businesses in Florida were without power, though later the number had fallen to about 708,000. South Carolina was reporting 1.2m power outages, Georgia had about 920,000, and North Carolina had approximately 870,000, according to poweroutage.us. Large swaths of Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia and Ohio were also out, and the Virginia governor said 241,000 customers in his state were out of power.

Helene made landfall at about 11.10pm in Florida’s sparsely populated Big Bend area, home to fishing villages and vacation hideaways where the state’s Panhandle and peninsula meet.

Social media site users watched in horror as video showed sheets of rain lashing Perry, Florida, near Helene’s landfall. Winds tore siding from buildings in almost complete darkness. One local news station recorded a home as it flipped over.

The National Hurricane Center (NHC) conducted a preliminary assessment of Helene’s storm surge in Florida, and it indicated that water levels reached more than 15ft above normal where the storm came ashore.

Drone video from the storm chaser Aaron Rigsby showed residences that collapsed and were damaged amid storm surge in the Florida community of Steinhatchee. Florida’s Tampa Bay took on about 10ft of storm surge and was among the state’s badly inundated communities.

The Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, urged residents to prepare themselves for the likelihood that Helene’s death toll would rise as communities complete damage assessments in the storm’s aftermath. But he also said the state’s rescue crews had ultimately kept that number as low as possible by performing “thousands of missions” overnight.

In Georgia, Brian Kemp, the governor, warned residents Helene had left “a very dangerous environment” in its wake. “One of our finest has lost his life trying to save others,” Kemp said.

Atlanta was drenched, leaving some neighborhoods so flooded that only car roofs could be seen poking out of the water. The city had been under a rare flash flood emergency warning.

A Georgia electrical utility group warned of “catastrophic” damage to the state’s utility infrastructure, with more than 100 high-voltage transmission lines damaged.

In Valdosta, Georgia, a city of 55,000 near the state’s border with Florida, Rhonda Bell and her husband spent a sleepless night in the downstairs bedroom of their century-old home. She told the Associated Press that an oak tree smashed through the roof of an upstairs bedroom and collapsed on to the living room below.

“I just felt the whole house shake,” said Bell, whose neighbors had roof shingles torn away and fence panels knocked down. “Thank God we’re both alive to tell about it.”

Beyond Florida and Georgia, up to 10in of rain fell in the North Carolina mountains.

“This is one of the worst storms in modern history for parts of … North Carolina,” the state’s governor, Roy Cooper, said. “Our hearts are heavy.”

A mudslide in the Appalachian mountains washed out a section of an interstate at the North Carolina-Tennessee state line. Meanwhile, occupants of homes hit by another mudslide in North Carolina had to wait more than four hours to be rescued, said Ryan Cole, the emergency services assistant director in Buncombe county. His 911 center received more than 3,300 calls in eight hours Friday.

Florida is no stranger to hurricanes, but authorities and residents had been warned Helene would be a disaster of epic proportions.

One sheriff’s office in the state, in Taylor county, asked residents who chose not to evacuate ahead of Helene to write their names, birthdays and other identifying information on their limbs in permanent marker. “So that you can be identified and [your] family notified,” the agency wrote in what was grim advice ahead of the storm.

“I’m going to stay right here at the house,” the state ferry boat operator Ken Wood, 58, told Reuters from coastal Dunedin in Florida, where he planned to ride out the storm with his 16-year-old cat Andy.

Afterwards, he told the agency: “I’ll never do that again, I swear. It was a harrowing experience. It roared all night like a train. It was unnerving. The house shook … next time, we leave.”

Helene on Wednesday had swamped parts of Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula. It was the ninth major hurricane – category 3 or higher – to make landfall along the US’s Gulf coast since 2017. Experts attribute such a high rate of powerful, destructive storms to the climate change crisis, which is spurred in part by the burning of fossil fuels.

“It’s as if something has changed,” the Texas meteorologist Matt Lanza said in a widely shared X post.

As for this Atlantic hurricane season, which began 1 June and does not officially end until 30 November, Helene was the eighth named storm. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) predicted this Atlantic hurricane season would be above average because of record high ocean temperatures.

Reuters and the Associated Press contributed reporting

The warnings about Hurricane Helene were dire and for the residents of Taylor county on the Gulf coast of Florida they were necessary.

“A mandatory evacuation for Taylor county residents has been ordered,” came the first message from local and state authorities.

The message became even more dire as Helene barreled toward landfall in Taylor county, pulling no punches on the possible consequences of staying behind to face the category 4 monster storm.

“If you or someone you know choose not to evacuate, please write your name, birthday and important information on your arm or leg in a permanent marker so that you can be identified and family notified,” was the blunt statement from local law enforcement.

Nonetheless, people did stay and hunker down, and as they emerged on Friday morning they had tales of survival of a terrifying night, a relief the storm was gone and fears for many of their fellow residents of this storm-ravaged coast and flooded interior.

Mark Viola, a local reporter in the town of Perry, heard the warnings but says he trusted that the Perry/Taylor county chamber of commerce building where he took refuge was strong enough to withstand the hurricane.

“I felt that was more for those who may have stayed at the coast and would be facing the storm surge,” he said.

Cynthia Ellis, who decided to ride out the hurricane at her home in Perry, had a different reaction to the Taylor county sheriff’s warning for residents who chose not to evacuate.

“I was terrified,” she said. “I felt an eerie and very scary feeling when I heard this.”

Katrina McLeod McNeil, who decided not to evacuate her home in Tallahassee, about 52 miles north-west of Taylor county, was already questioning her decision not to evacuate when she heard the warning for Taylor county residents on the local television news.

McNeil, who has family in Taylor county, said: “I can tell you if where we were was under a mandatory evacuation, we would not be here.”

McNeil knew the hurricane was going to hit the Big Bend area, but because there was some uncertainty about exactly where, she said: “I didn’t want to stay. My husband did, and I chose to stay with him. I’m not afraid. I just didn’t want to witness the effects of the storm.”

Like McNeil, Viola contemplated leaving but in the end it was his love for his pet that persuaded him to stay.

“My cat Koko doesn’t travel well, and he’s older, so I was leery about giving him medication to calm him and then taking him on a multi-hour trip to find a pet-friendly hotel,” he said. “It wasn’t a tough decision at the time, because we thought it would be cat[egory] 2, maybe a cat 3. If I’d known what we were going to get, I’d never have stayed.”

“My original plan was to stay home on with a cat 1 or 2 and go to my sister’s office at the chamber of commerce if it was a cat 3. If it was worse, I’d leave town. But I talked myself out of it when it seemed like was going to hit 50-70 miles west. The forecasts for the storm were all over the place and we didn’t know for sure we were in the bullseye until a few hours before landfall. Fortunately, the chamber office is a sturdy building, but the sounds were intense,” Viola added.

Ellis said she made up her mind to stay, but she said the decision was a tough one because the rest of her family was evacuating to various parts of Florida, Alabama and Mississippi. “Me and my fiance discussed the potential impact of the hurricane and decided to stay because our house is sturdy,” she said.

When the hurricane made landfall, Ellis said: “I was scared as hell because the roaring outside sounded like a train passing through. We huddled in the hallway and closet for protection and prayed for God to be with us.”

Power outages throughout the region followed shortly after the hurricane made landfall.

McNeil’s husband turned on the generator and began trying to help a neighbor who has a motorized hospital bed. “While trying to run an extension cord from the neighbor’s house, an armadillo came through a hole in their backyard fence and chased my husband,” she said. “He lost his phone and his glasses during the chase. We found the phone. Waiting for daybreak to find the glasses. God is so good. He spared us and is allowing us to assist others. I’m humbled and grateful.”

When asked about the damage outside her home, McNeil hesitated then responded: “I’m not looking outside.”

Viola, who lives in a mobile home, was thankful when he was finally able to leave the safety of the chamber building to check on his home.

“My house seems to have escaped damage miraculously,” he said. “I’ve got a yard to clean up, but the house is intact. Now that I know the house is OK, now to face who knows how long without power. But I’ll take that over the alternative.”

After being hit by three hurricanes – Idalia, Debby and Helene – in 13 months, Viola said the damage inside Perry wasn’t as bad as he expected. “Some places definitely got damage, but the wholesale loss of trees isn’t as bad as it was with Hurricane Idalia.”

However, he is extremely concerned about Taylor county’s coastal residents.

“I have that feeling of being happy for myself and Dad, and being scared for everyone who did take damage, especially for the people on the coast, where a lot of people lost everything,” he said.

More than 50 hospital patients and staff were airlifted from the roof of the building in Tennessee on Friday afternoon in a dramatic rescue operation after flash flooding overwhelmed the area.

An urgent evacuation was launched as the storm effects of Hurricane Helene were felt far and wide, with the state emergency agency and the national guard responding to the situation that quickly unfolded at Unicoi hospital in Erwin, Tennessee, about 100 miles outside Knoxville.

The hospital chain Ballad Health, which oversees Unicoi hospital, said afternoon they received notice of a need to evacuate the hospital just after 9.30am on Friday, due to “unusually high and rising water from the Nolichucky River”.

Eleven patients were at the hospital when the evacuation efforts started, but while the hospital deployed ambulances, “the flooding of the property happened so quickly the ambulances could not safely approach the hospital”, the company said.

Local authorities then decided to deploy boats to help evacuate people, hospital officials said, but “unfortunately, the water around the hospital, which had also begun intruding inside the hospital, became extremely dangerous and impassable and prevented the boats from safely being able to evacuate”.

And in the immediate hours, helicopters could not safely fly because of high winds.

By early afternoon, 54 people were stranded on the roof of the building awaiting rescue, while seven were in rescue boats, hospital officials said.

“The hospital has been engulfed by extremely dangerous and rapidly moving water,” the statement read, adding: “The situation at the hospital is very dangerous.”

The statement from hospital officials added: “We ask everyone to please pray for the people at Unicoi county hospital, the first responders on-scene, the military leaders who are actively working to help, and our state leaders.”

On social media, photos were being shared of the patients and hospital employees on the roof of the building, surrounded by water.

Erwin’s police chief, Regan Tilson, told the local news station WCYB on Friday that no one had been injured in the flooding. The station also reported that several patrol cruisers and ambulances had been lost to the flood waters.

At 2.36pm, Congresswoman Diana Harshbarger, who represents Tennessee’s first congressional district, said that helicopters had arrived and were evacuating the stranded people.

But by 4.17pm, Tennessee US senator Bill Hagerty had tweeted about the operation’s success. “Everyone has been rescued safely from the roof of Unicoi County Hospital in Erwin. More trouble on the horizon for East Tennessee communities. Please stay safe and thank you for your prayers!” he posted.

Donald Trump threatened on Friday to direct the justice department to pursue criminal charges against Google if he is elected president, claiming the company was unfairly displaying negative news articles about him but not his 2024 election opponent Kamala Harris.

The complaint – the latest threat on the campaign trail from Trump to wield the power of the presidency in response to enemies real or perceived – came in an abrupt post on Truth Social.

“It has been determined that Google has illegally used a system of only revealing and displaying bad stories about Donald J Trump, some made up for this purpose while, at the same time, only revealing good stories about Comrade Kamala Harris,” Trump said in the post.

“This is an ILLEGAL ACTIVITY, and hopefully the Justice Department will criminally prosecute them for this blatant Interference of Elections. If not, and subject to the Laws of our Country, I will request their prosecution, when I win the Election and become President of the United States.”

Trump did not address the possibility that there have been more negative stories about his campaign than Harris’s in recent weeks, and what prompted him to lash out at Google was not immediately clear.

Google has said it does not manipulate search results to benefit a particular party. “Both campaign websites consistently appear at the top of Search for relevant and common search queries,” the company said in a statement.

Still, conservatives have long complained that Google’s search results unfairly favor Democrats. The rightwing Media Research Center, which bills itself as a media watchdog for conservatives, has previously issued reports claiming Google helped Democrats.

The Trump campaign has also bitterly complained about the Harris campaign using the “sponsored” feature on Google search results to promote positive news coverage from outlets, including the Guardian, but with headlines rewritten by the campaign to favor Harris.

Trump’s post about the Google search results was the latest instance of him vowing to prosecute supposed opponents.

This month, Trump threatened in another Truth Social post to pursue criminal charges against any lawyers, donors, political operatives and a range of other people who he believes engaged in supposed election fraud against him if he wins the presidential election in November.

At a news conference on Thursday, Trump said former House speaker Nancy Pelosi should face criminal prosecution for not preventing the January 6 Capitol attack, which was caused by his own supporters rioting to stop the peaceful transfer of power after the 2020 election.

And at a campaign rally in Michigan on Friday, Trump called for an attorney general “in a Republican territory” to investigate Pelosi and her husband over reports that they had sold Visa stock before the justice department brought an antitrust lawsuit against the credit-card company.

Donald Trump threatened on Friday to direct the justice department to pursue criminal charges against Google if he is elected president, claiming the company was unfairly displaying negative news articles about him but not his 2024 election opponent Kamala Harris.

The complaint – the latest threat on the campaign trail from Trump to wield the power of the presidency in response to enemies real or perceived – came in an abrupt post on Truth Social.

“It has been determined that Google has illegally used a system of only revealing and displaying bad stories about Donald J Trump, some made up for this purpose while, at the same time, only revealing good stories about Comrade Kamala Harris,” Trump said in the post.

“This is an ILLEGAL ACTIVITY, and hopefully the Justice Department will criminally prosecute them for this blatant Interference of Elections. If not, and subject to the Laws of our Country, I will request their prosecution, when I win the Election and become President of the United States.”

Trump did not address the possibility that there have been more negative stories about his campaign than Harris’s in recent weeks, and what prompted him to lash out at Google was not immediately clear.

Google has said it does not manipulate search results to benefit a particular party. “Both campaign websites consistently appear at the top of Search for relevant and common search queries,” the company said in a statement.

Still, conservatives have long complained that Google’s search results unfairly favor Democrats. The rightwing Media Research Center, which bills itself as a media watchdog for conservatives, has previously issued reports claiming Google helped Democrats.

The Trump campaign has also bitterly complained about the Harris campaign using the “sponsored” feature on Google search results to promote positive news coverage from outlets, including the Guardian, but with headlines rewritten by the campaign to favor Harris.

Trump’s post about the Google search results was the latest instance of him vowing to prosecute supposed opponents.

This month, Trump threatened in another Truth Social post to pursue criminal charges against any lawyers, donors, political operatives and a range of other people who he believes engaged in supposed election fraud against him if he wins the presidential election in November.

At a news conference on Thursday, Trump said former House speaker Nancy Pelosi should face criminal prosecution for not preventing the January 6 Capitol attack, which was caused by his own supporters rioting to stop the peaceful transfer of power after the 2020 election.

And at a campaign rally in Michigan on Friday, Trump called for an attorney general “in a Republican territory” to investigate Pelosi and her husband over reports that they had sold Visa stock before the justice department brought an antitrust lawsuit against the credit-card company.

Kamala Harris accused Donald Trump of “playing political games” on immigration – his signature issue – as the vice-president sought to turn one of her biggest vulnerabilities into a political strength during a visit to the US-Mexico border on Friday.

Speaking in the Arizona border town of Douglas, Harris declared the US both a “sovereign nation” and a “country of immigrants” and said as president, she would strengthen controls at the southern border, while working “to fix our broken system of immigration”.

“I reject the false choice that suggests we must choose either between securing our border and creating a system that is orderly, safe and humane,” Harris said. “We can and we must do both.”

She hammered Trump for derailing a sweeping bipartisan package that would have overhauled the federal immigration system, while providing additional resources to help hire more border patrol agents.

“It should be in effect today, producing results, in real time right now,” Harris said, speaking on a stage framed by American flags and large blue posters that read “border security and stability”. “He prefers to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem.”

After that bill collapsed, the Biden administration announced new rules to temporarily halt asylum processing at the US southern border. Since then, arrests for border crossings between ports of entry have plummeted. In July, arrests dipped below levels not seen since Trump’s final months in office in 2020, though they ticked up slightly in August.

As president, Harris said, she would take “further action to keep the border closed”, including stiffening the punishments for those who cross between ports of entry. She emphasized her support for “humane” and “orderly” policies, reminding Arizonans of the measures Trump took during his first term to curb illegal immigration.

“He separated families, he ripped toddlers out of their mothers’ arms, put children in cages and tried to end protection of Dreamers,” she said in Douglas, a blue dot in the overwhelmingly red Cochise county.

Before her remarks, Harris walked a stretch of barrier constructed during the Obama administration. In the sweltering triple-degree heat, she received a briefing from customs and border protection officials on efforts to stop the flow of fentanyl across the border.

She also stopped by the Raul H Castro port of entry in Douglas, across from Agua Prieta, Mexico, which is slated to be expanded and modernized with grants from the bipartisan infrastructure bill signed into law by Joe Biden.

“They’ve got a tough job and they need, rightly, support to do their job,” Harris said afterward.

Speaking to supporters at a manufacturing plant in Walker, Michigan, Trump boasted that Harris was “getting killed on the border” and blamed the Biden administration’s border policies for fueling high levels of migration during the first three years of his presidency.

“It’s a crime what she did,” he said. “There’s no greater act of disloyalty than to extinguish the sovereignty of your own nation.”

In her remarks, Harris said she understood the unique challenges and needs facing border communities like the one in Douglas, having served as the attorney general of neighboring California. She recalled touring trafficking tunnels used by smugglers and touted her work prosecuting international gangs and criminal organizations that smuggle guns, drugs and people across the border.

Republicans would rather discuss her more recent assignment, as vice-president during a period of record migration when she was officially tasked with addressing the root causes of people coming north from Central America. On Friday, Republicans misleadingly accused her of being an absentee “border tsar” whose policies led to the situation at the border.

Voters in Arizona consistently rank immigration – Trump’s signature issue – as a top concern this election cycle, often second only to the economy. A sizeable share of voters trust Trump more on immigration and border security, but Harris’s campaign believes it has made progress softening Democrats’ deficit on an issue seen as one of their biggest electoral vulnerabilities.

The campaign has blanketed the airwaves with ads designed to blunt Trump’s attacks over her immigration record. On Friday, it launched a new ad in Arizona and other battleground states highlighting her pledge to hire thousands more border agents and stop fentanyl trafficking and human smuggling. “We need a leader with a real plan to fix the border,” a voiceover says.

Less than six weeks before election day, polls show a tight race in Arizona, one of seven battleground states that will likely decide the election and the only one that touches the southern border.

A Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll of swing states found Harris with a small lead in Arizona, while a New York Times/Siena College poll released on Monday found Trump opening a five-percentage point lead over Harris, marking a significant improvement from August when he trailed the vice-president by the same margin.

Biden won Arizona by just over 10,400 votes in 2020, becoming the first Democrat to win the south-west state since Bill Clinton in 1996.

Kris Mayes, the attorney general, who accompanied Harris throughout her visit on Friday, urged Arizonans not to sit the election out.

“Races in Arizona can be close, take it from me,” Mayes said. In 2022, the Democrat won her race by 280 votes.

Argentina’s poverty rate has soared to almost 53% in the first six months of Javier Milei’s presidency, offering the first hard evidence of how the far-right libertarian’s tough austerity measures are hitting the population.

The new poverty rate, reported by the government’s statistics agency on Thursday, is the highest level for two decades, when the country reeled from a catastrophic economic crisis, and means 3.4 million Argentinians have been pushed into poverty this year.

Since taking office in December, the self-described “anarcho-capitalist” – who campaigned with a chainsaw in hand to symbolise the cuts he would make – has slashed public spending in an effort to tame chronic inflation and eliminate the budget deficit.

His administration has frozen pensions, reduced aid to soup kitchens, cut welfare programmes and stopped all public works projects. Tens of thousands of public employees have been fired, reduced energy and transportation subsidies have pushed costs up, and purchasing power has eroded.

Kirsten Sehnbruch, an expert on Latin America at the London School of Economics and Political Science, said she had never seen such a large jump in poverty rates. “This new economic programme is not protecting the poor,” she said. “The jump is absolutely horrendous.”

Milei’s cuts, however, have been cheered by markets, investors and the International Monetary Fund, to which Argentina owes $43bn. Monthly inflation has also decreased from about 26% in December to about 4% in June, where it has remained, although annual inflation still remains one of the highest in the world, exceeding 230%.

María Claudia Albornoz, a community worker from Santa Fe, said the government had “provoked a situation of desperation”. “We are feeling it in the fridge, empty and unplugged. Money is really worth absolutely nothing. We have three jobs and it is not enough,” she said.

Also among those affected is 33-year-old Catalina, who works for the ministry of justice and was told last week that she will soon be losing her job.

“Last week 2,500 of us were told that we will be out of a job by the end of this year, except for a handful of ‘lucky ones’ who will be offered to continue working the same hours for half the money,” she said. “I have been looking for another job for months, but there is no work. I don’t know how I’m going to make it. It’s frightening.”

Christopher Sabatini, a senior fellow for Latin America at Chatham House, said that economic decline was inevitable when controlling inflation, and pointed to similar historic crises in Brazil and Bolivia, but questioned whether Milei’s changes will work.

“It is dangerous territory. The question is, will this belt-tightening have any benefit? What comes next? Can he actually control public sector spending? Can he shore up the currency? Without doing that, you’ve just created poverty,” he said.

While Milei’s popularity ratings have remained high, public support now appears to be waning. A survey published on Monday found a drop of almost 15% in September, the steepest fall during his nine-month administration. Recent polls have found that worries about inflation have been overtaken by fears of job loss and poverty.

“For a county that has historically prided itself on being a middle-class nation, this poverty rate is terribly painful,” Sabatini said.

Milei’s presidential spokesperson said the government had “inherited a disastrous situation” from previous left-leaning governments.

“They left us on the brink of being a country with essentially all of its inhabitants poor,” said Manuel Adorni. “Any level of poverty is horrendous. We are doing everything, everything so that this situation changes.”

Boris Johnson considered an “aquatic raid” on a Dutch warehouse to seize Covid vaccines during the height of the pandemic, he has revealed in his memoirs.

The former prime minister discussed plans with senior military officials in March 2021, according to an extract from his forthcoming book, Unleashed, published in the Daily Mail.

The AstraZeneca vaccine was, at the time, at the heart of a cross-Channel row over exports, and Johnson believed the EU was treating the UK “with malice”.

Johnson said that he “had commissioned some work on whether it might be technically feasible to launch an aquatic raid on a warehouse in Leiden, in the Netherlands, and to take that which was legally ours and which the UK desperately needed”.

The deputy chief of the defence staff, Lt Gen Doug Chalmers, told the prime minister the plan was “certainly feasible” and would involve using rigid inflatable boats to navigate Dutch canals.

“They would then rendezvous at the target; enter; secure the hostage goods, exfiltrate using an articulated lorry, and make their way to the Channel ports,” Johnson wrote.

However, Chalmers told Johnson it would be difficult to carry out the mission undetected, meaning the UK would “have to explain why we are effectively invading a longstanding Nato ally”.

Johnson concluded: “Of course, I knew he was right, and I secretly agreed with what they all thought, but did not want to say aloud: that the whole thing was nuts.”

Elsewhere in the published extracts, Johnson denied eating cake at what he described as the “feeblest event in the history of human festivity” held to celebrate his 56th birthday during the Covid lockdown.

He did not see or eat any cake at the event on 19 June 2020, he said, adding that it “never occurred” to him or the then chancellor, Rishi Sunak, that the Partygate birthday gathering was “in some way against the rules”.

He wrote: “Here is what actually happened that day. I stood briefly at my place in the Cabinet Room, where I have meetings throughout the day, while the chancellor and assorted members of staff said happy birthday.

“I saw no cake. I ate no blooming cake. If this was a party, it was the feeblest event in the history of human festivity. I had only just got over Covid. I did not sing. I did not dance.”

Downing Street previously admitted that staff “gathered briefly” in the Cabinet Room for what was reportedly a surprise get-together for Johnson organised by his now-wife, Carrie.

Johnson became the first prime minister to receive a criminal penalty while in office over Partygate, although an investigation by the former senior civil servant Sue Gray found that neither Johnson nor Sunak was aware of the event in advance.

In the extracts from his autobiography, Johnson also said he believed he “might have carked it” when he was in intensive care with Covid without the “skills and experience” of his nurses.

Johnson spent several days in intensive care with Covid in April 2020. He described not wanting to fall asleep on his first night in intensive care “partly in case I never woke up”.

Following his release from hospital, the then prime minister spent some time at Chequers with his now-wife Carrie, and he recalled joining in with the clap for the NHS on a Thursday evening.

“I clapped with deep emotion because my lungs were telling me that I had been through something really pretty nasty, and that if it hadn’t been for [his nurses] Jenny and Luis, fiddling with those oxygen tubes all night with all their skill and experience, I think I might have carked it,” he wrote.

On his admission to ICU, Johnson said he “started to doze, but didn’t want to sleep – partly in case I never woke up, or in case they decided to perform some stealthy tracheotomy without letting me know”.

A fall in US inflation expected to pave the way for further cuts in interest rates pushed stock markets to record highs on Friday.

Ending a week of gains that began when the Chinese authorities approved a huge economic stimulus package, the S&P 500 index of major US companies soared above 5,750 to register a near 100% gain on a year ago.

Europe’s benchmark Stoxx 600 index rose 0.5% to reach a record high, while the German Dax, France’s CAC 40 and Britain’s FTSE 100 all rose.

US annual inflation, measured by the Federal Reserve’s preferred index, fell by more than expected to 2.2% in August – the lowest level since February 2021 – fuelling expectations that the central bank may cut the cost of borrowing more aggressively than previously forecast at its next meeting in November.

The prospect of 0.5 percentage point reduction in the US rather than a more modest quarter-point cut came after figures showed inflation in France and Spain also fell by more than forecast, raising the likelihood of another interest rate cut by the European Central Bank before the end of the year.

Recent reports by the International Monetary Fund and the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) have shown global growth being held back by a sharp slowdown in the US and China.

Some analysts have predicted that without extra measures to boost borrowing and investment, there could be a recession in the US next year and a sharp drop in China from the 5% growth rate target set by premier Xi Jinping.

On Tuesday, China’s central bank cut borrowing rates for mortgage holders and allowed investors to borrow more heavily at cheap rates.

Later in the week, Chinese leaders vowed to arrest a slump in the housing market and boost growth with an increase in benefits for the poorest and extra funds to local authorities, allowing them to intervene to protect house price values.

Russ Mould, investment director at AJ Bell, said: “A veritable feast of economic stimulus measures has led investors to take a more optimistic view of the earnings potential for Chinese companies and foreign ones selling into the country.

“Lower borrowing costs, smaller deposits for buying homes and more capacity for banks to lend money – these lay the foundations for greater economic activity among businesses and consumers.”

James Knightley, chief international economist at ING, said the Fed would be under pressure to maintain the pace of cuts to interest rates after a series of indicators showed the economy was weakening.

“The latest Conference Board consumer confidence report suggests households are becoming much more concerned about job security, which implies intensifying headwinds for consumer spending for all income groups,” he said.

“In an environment where inflation is looking much better behaved, the market pressure for ongoing substantial Fed interest rate cuts will persist.”

US data next week could show the unemployment rate rising to 4.3% and the number of additional jobs created falling from an average of 180,000 over the last year to below 75,000.

Knightley said that with inflation low and unemployment rising, “we expect the calls for a second half-point rate cut to grow markedly”.

The ABC has rejected Russian claims two of its journalists acted illegally after they entered the Ukraine-occupied Kursk region.

Europe correspondent Kathryn Diss and camera operator Fletcher Yeung are accused of “illegally” crossing into Russia from Ukraine on 31 August.

The pair were escorted by a Ukrainian military unit to Sudzha, a Russian town in the Kursk region, which is now occupied by Ukraine, the ABC reported.

On Friday the Russian news agency Tass reported that the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor to the Soviet KGB, had “initiated and is investigating criminal cases” against Diss and Yeung, as well as Romanian journalist Barbu Mircea, for the crime of “Illegal crossing of Russia’s State Border”.

The crime is punishable by up to five years’ imprisonment, Tass reported.

An ABC spokesperson denied any wrongdoing, claiming that the pair entered Russia legally.

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“We reject Russia’s claim that the ABC’s reporters have done anything illegal,” a spokesperson said.

“They were reporting from occupied territory in a war zone and in full compliance with international law.

“Their reporting was done in the interests of keeping the public fully informed on a story of international importance.”

The journalists were being fully supported by the ABC, the spokesperson said.

Diss and Yeung’s visit was the first time the broadcaster had entered Russia since its invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and was the subject of a 4 September report showing Sudzha’s streets “littered with broken glass, twisted metal and crumbled bricks”.

“Crossing the border here doesn’t just carry the physical risk of being in a war zone; it also means that as individuals we’re unlikely to ever be able to return to Russia,” Diss and Yeung wrote in the piece.

“Moscow has issued red notices with Interpol for several other western journalists it charged with illegally crossing its border days after Ukraine’s invasion.”

The pair join journalists from Italian, German, American and Ukrainian news outlets who are the subject of ongoing investigations after making similar journeys into Kursk.

In August, the FSB began investigating Italian journalists Simone Traini and Stefania Battistini; CNN reporter Nick Paton Walsh; Nicholas Simon Connolly, a reporter for the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle; and Ukrainian correspondents Natalya Nagornaya, Olesya Borovik and Diana Butsko, Tass reported.

“In total, since 17 August 2024, criminal cases have been initiated against 12 foreign journalists for the illegal acts in question,” the FSB said.

Since 2022, Russia has banned more than 200 Australians from entering the country, denying entry “for an indefinite term” to a host of journalists and public figures “as part of the Russophobic campaign by the collective West”, authorities stated.

Among them are the ABC journalists Sarah Ferguson, Isabella Higgins, Emily Clark and Eric Campbell, who have all reported on the Ukraine war, the ABC reported.

Former prime ministers Tony Abbott and John Howard were added to the list in June.

California will formally apologize for slavery and its lingering effects on Black Americans in the state under a new law that the governor, Gavin Newsom, signed on Thursday.

The legislation was part of a package of reparations bills introduced this year that seek to offer compensation for decades of policies that drove racial disparities for African Americans. Newsom also approved laws to improve protections against hair discrimination for athletes and increase oversight over the banning of books in state prisons.

“The state of California accepts responsibility for the role we played in promoting, facilitating and permitting the institution of slavery, as well as its enduring legacy of persistent racial disparities,” the Democratic governor said in a statement. “Building on decades of work, California is now taking another important step forward in recognizing the grave injustices of the past – and making amends for the harms caused.”

California’s first constitution, passed in 1849, said that slavery would never “be tolerated in this State”. But it wasn’t accompanied by laws that explicitly made slavery a crime or that protected Black people’s freedom – creating legal ambiguity that was used to protect and empower enslavers. Then, in 1852, California passed a fugitive slave law, which allowed enslaved people who had escaped to be arrested and forced to return to the south with their enslavers.

Even though the idea of cash payments to the descendants of enslaved people remains unpopular, a UCLA study published last year shows that a majority of Californians favor some form of compensation to address the state’s long history of anti-Black racism.

Newsom signed the bills after vetoing a proposal on Wednesday that would have helped Black families reclaim or be compensated for property that was unjustly seized by the government through eminent domain. The bill by itself would not have been able to take full effect because lawmakers blocked another bill to create a reparations agency that would have reviewed claims.

Efforts to study reparations at the federal level have stalled in Congress for decades. Illinois and New York state passed laws in recent years creating reparations commissions. Local officials in Boston and New York City have voted to create taskforces studying reparations. Evanston, Illinois, launched a program to provide housing assistance to Black residents to help atone for past discrimination.

California has moved further along on the issue than any other state. In addition to the creation of the nation’s first state reparations taskforce, California has seen a wave of local reparations efforts. Bruce’s Beach, an oceanfront property seized from a Black family in the 1920s through eminent domain, was finally returned to the family in 2021. And Black residents of Palm Springs have been organizing to demand reparations from the city, which razed a Black and Latino neighborhood in the 1960s to make way for commercial development.

But state lawmakers did not introduce legislation this year to give widespread direct payments to African Americans, which frustrated some reparations advocates.

Newsom approved a $297.9bn budget in June that included up to $12m for reparations legislation that became law.

He already signed laws included in the reparations package aimed at improving outcomes for students of color in K-12 career education programs. Another proposal the Black caucus backed this year that would ban forced labor as a punishment for crime in the state constitution will be on the ballot in November.

State assembly member Isaac Bryan, a Democrat representing Culver City, called legislation he authored to increase oversight over books banned in state prisons “a first step” to fix a “shadowy” process in which the department of corrections and rehabilitation decides which books to ban.

The corrections department maintains a list of disapproved publications it bans after determining the content could pose a security threat, includes obscene material or otherwise violates department rules.

The new law authorizes the office of the inspector general, which oversees the state prison system, to review works on the list and evaluate the department’s reasoning for banning them. It requires the agency to notify the office of any changes made to the list, and directs the office to post the list on its website.

“We need transparency in this process,” Bryan said. “We need to know what books are banned, and we need a mechanism for removing books off of that list.”

In what some might see as an unlikely union, the Grammy-nominated singer and songwriter Lana Del Rey has married a swamp tour guide from Louisiana.

The Daily Mail obtained exclusive video and photos of the 39-year-old Del Rey’s wedding on Thursday to Jeremy Dufrene, 49, in Des Allemands, Louisiana, about a 45-minute drive south-west of New Orleans.

In the video and pictures posted by the Mail the pair are seen apparently getting married in an outdoor venue by the waterside in the small unincorporated community. Del Rey wore a graceful white dress while Dufrene donned a smart dark suit.

The New Orleans news outlet nola.com reported that Dufrene and the musician, nee Elizabeth Grant, had obtained a marriage license from Lafourche parish – which is the word Louisiana uses for county – three days before the nuptials.

The couple married near Airboat Tours by Arthur Matherne, the company for which Dufrene leads tours through swamps with creatures including alligators.

Dufrene and Del Rey were first romantically linked back in August when the couple was spotted holding hands at the Reading Festival in Britain, one of the country’s biggest music events.

But the pair are known to have been acquainted at least as far back as 2019, when Del Rey posted about visiting one of Dufrene’s wildlife tours. Del Rey returned to Louisiana in May earlier this year for another swamp tour, again tagging Dufrene on Instagram. And in June, she was again seen in the New Orleans area, causing waves among locals by visiting a 24-hr diner named the Tic-Toc Cafe that is not known among too many non-residents.

Del Rey is one of the world’s most famous singers, known for hits like Video Game and Summertime Sadness. Air Boat Tours by Arthur Matherne, meanwhile, has a five-star rating on Yelp from more than 240 reviews.