At least 44 people are confirmed dead and almost 4 million are without power on Saturday, after strong winds and torrential rain from Hurricane Helene wreaked unprecedented havoc across large swathes of the south-eastern United States.

Historic flooding continued over parts of the southern Appalachians on Saturday, as first responders worked to reach stranded communities in trying conditions while local authorities began to assess the scale of the damage and displacement.

Helene made landfall late on Thursday in Florida’s Big Bend region as a category 4 hurricane, pummeling the peninsula with winds of 140mph (225km/h). It weakened into a tropical storm, moving quickly through Georgia, the Carolinas and Tennessee, uprooting trees, blowing roofs off homes, sweeping away cars, testing dams and flooding rivers – leaving entire communities without escape as landslides and flooding struck.

A combination of strong winds, heavy rain, flooding and tornadoes that followed in the path of Helene have likely caused billions of dollars in damage, with entire downtowns, highways, and large numbers of homes and businesses ruined.

The deaths occurred in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia, and include firefighters, a woman and her one-month-old twins, and an 89-year-old woman whose house was struck by a falling tree.

Just over a million homes and businesses remained without power in South Carolina on Saturday, with more than 700,000 also in the dark across Georgia and North Carolina, according to the latest data from PowerOutage. Florida and Ohio are also badly affected, as well as tens of thousands of people in Indiana, Kentucky and Tennessee.

The threat of further deaths and destruction is ongoing but Helene has weakened to a post-tropical cyclone with the risk of additional heavy rainfall waning as it moves north, according to the National Hurricane Center.

Scores of dramatic water evacuations and rescues were carried out on Friday as unprecedented heavy rain strained dams and rivers.

In North Carolina, a lake featured in the movie Dirty Dancing overtopped a dam and surrounding neighborhoods were evacuated as a precaution. Parts of western North Carolina were largely cut off by landslides and flooding that forced the closure of major roads.

In rural Unicoi county in east Tennessee, dozens of patients and staff were rescued by helicopter from the roof of a hospital that was surrounded by water from a flooded river.

Meanwhile in Mexico, at least eight people were confirmed dead on Friday after Tropical Storm John made its second landfall and flooded the southern resort city of Acapulco – which still hasn’t recovered from Hurricane Otis last October.

John made landfall as a category 3 hurricane farther north in the state of Michoacán, weakening inland, and then gathering strength again over the ocean before making landfall in Acapulco. Local authorities pleaded for help from boat owners after a year’s worth of rain that pounded the coastal mountains triggered landslides and severe flooding in Acapulco and elsewhere.

Global heating, which is driven by burning fossil fuels, is supercharging tropical storms by generating conditions that enable rapid intensification, sometimes within hours, and bring a heightened risk of flooding.

Atlantic storms have become deadlier as the planet warms – and are disproportionately killing people of color in the US, according to one landmark study. About 20,000 excess deaths – the numbers of observed rather than expected deaths – occurred in the immediate aftermath of 179 named storms and hurricanes which struck the US mainland between 1988 and 2019.

The National Hurricane Center is currently monitoring two more storms that are moving through the Atlantic – Tropical Storm Joyce and Hurricane Issac, which is gathering strength.

Midway through Nikolai’s shift sorting onions alongside other political prisoners in a warehouse in western Belarus, a tall and bald foreigner entered the building.

“He arrived in a car with German license plates. Then he came over and greeted us warmly,” Nikolai*, recalled in an interview with the Observer.

The onion plantation, where Nikolai and dozens of other political detainees were working in February 2024, was owned by Jörg Dornau, a member of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in Saxony’s state parliament. Nikolai claims that the man he saw that day, touring the farm and speaking to workers, was Dornau himself.

Dornau, 54, a heavily built farmer with a bald pate, was revealed to be the owner of the onion farm located on Belarussian soil earlier this year when he was fined €20,862 for failing to declare his extra, non-parliamentary income with the Saxony parliament in which he has sat as an MP since 2019.

Despite the obvious moral questions around collaborating with a dictatorship, the matter might have moved little beyond the issue of the fine, except for the new allegations that have emerged claiming that he knowingly employed political prisoners there.

Reports that Dornau had struck a deal with a prison in Lida, a city in western Belarus, to employ prisoners jailed for political dissent were first reported last week by the independent Belarusian outlet Reform.news.

Dornau was approached by the Observer and asked for comment about the legal and ethical concerns surrounding the allegations, but did not respond.

Nikolai said there were around 30 prisoners working on the farm during his time there in February, many of whom, like him, had been jailed on political grounds. They sorted onions for roughly £4 a day on what he described as a strictly voluntary basis.

A few weeks earlier, Nikolai had been detained by the Belarusian security services for “liking” an old social media post from 2021 and was sentenced to 15 days in jail as part of the regime’s brutal crackdown on all forms of dissent.

Belarus was first rocked by mass pro-democracy protests during Aleksandr Lukashenko’s controversial re-election as president in August 2020 for a sixth term, which the opposition and the west condemned as fraudulent.

At that time, Belarusian authorities detained more than 35,000 people, many of whom were tortured in custody or left the country. Dornau is reported to have established Zybulka-Bel Ltd, the company that runs the farm, in October 2020 when nationwide pro-democracy protests were still sweeping the country.

Since then, the Lukashenko regime, backed by Vladimir Putin – whom Minsk in turn supports in the war in Ukraine – has intensified its repression of even the smallest acts of dissent, charging critics with “extremism” and “terrorism” for actions as minor as leaving critical comments on social media or following so-called “extremist” Telegram channels.

Human rights groups estimate that there are currently more than 1,400 political prisoners in Belarus, including Viasna’s founder, Nobel peace prize laureate Ales Bialiatski.

On the farm, Nikolai described the work as difficult, with long days and the harsh February cold.

“We had breakfast at 7am and worked until evening, with few breaks,” he recalled. However, he stressed that he had no complaints about the labour, saying he preferred it to being in jail.

“I went to work with a smile. It felt like complete freedom compared to being locked up.”

“And the onions tasted good,” he added.

The Observer could not independently verify Nikolai’s account, but an independent prison watchdog group reported receiving accounts from prisoners working at Dornau’s onion farm starting from early 2024.

“Around 30 people were brought in at once to work – from both the detention centre and the pre-trial detention facility. About 20 hired workers were also working for wages,” the watchdog told the Observer.

After his release from jail in Belarus, Nikolai, who had already been detained twice on political grounds and now faced the threat of a longer sentence, decided to flee the country.

AfD politicians have often been accused of acting as mouth pieces for the Kremlin, earning the party the lingering moniker “Putin-friendly”. Allegations have swirled for years that they have also benefited financially from their connections with Moscow.

Reports that an MP from the AfD may have financially benefited from employing political prisoners jailed for opposing Lukashenko will likely bring new scrutiny to the party’s ties with authoritarian regimes.

Other AfD politicians, including those in the Saxony parliament, which sits in the eastern city of Dresden and where he is a member, were also asked for a response but none of them replied.

A spokesperson for the Saxony AfD parliamentary group in Dresden said: “As a matter of principle, our group does not comment on anonymous allegations”.

The only response from the party so far has been from a member of the “wing” – the most radical element of the AfD to which Dornau also belongs. Hans-Thomas Tillschneider called for people to “show solidarity” towards Dornau.

Tillschneider, known as a Putin ally who has defended Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, said of the allegations: “If the Belarussian penal system allows for the possibility that prisoners are put to work, like they are in Germany, and such undertakings take place in the fields belonging to my colleague Dornau, then there is nothing wrong with that. Yuck, what a smear campaign!” he wrote on X.

Meanwhile, Dornau has continued to operate his company in Belarus. In addition to onions and other vegetables, the farm is reported to mainly produce melons, root plants, and tubers.

But the revelations may yet have legal repercussions for Dornau.

A lawyer linked to the Greens took to X to say that he had filed a criminal complaint against Dornau. “If the evidence from the Belarussian newspaper is confirmed, this is clearly a case of exploitation of people in difficult circumstances,” he wrote.

*Some names have been changed

To work with Maggie Smith, as I did in The Missionary and A Private Function, was to be in the presence of pure acting gold. Maggie was so skilful and intuitive. She could portray the maximum of emotion with the minimum of effort. Nothing was ever wasted with Maggie.

The slightest glance could contain so much information, the smallest gesture be loaded with such significance that you had to be absolutely on your toes to stay with her. The two films we made together were comedies, and Maggie’s impeccable comic timing was an absolute joy to watch and a privilege to be part of.

Her wit was sharp and always icily well-targeted. I remember having a meal with her and Alan Bennett at a rather smart Yorkshire restaurant during the filming of A Private Function, when I discovered a piece of glass in my mixed salad. No great fuss was made. To the manager, Maggie simply described it as “a very mixed salad”.

Maggie made it look so easy and yet I always felt that there was something else there. Something held back. An impatience with life. To be blessed with such an instinctive, effortless understanding of what acting was all about made her dismissive of anything she saw as dull and uninspired. She didn’t suffer fools.

She always maintained that the part of the process she liked most was the rehearsal. The working out of how to make the whole thing the best it could be. Once you’d got that right, then the rest of it was easy and, as she intimated, rather less fun.

I rate our work together as some of the happiest times of my life. I shall mourn her passing most sadly, but remember her most gladly.

As I read the various drafts of Julian Fellowes’ pilot script for Downton Abbey, it was not lost on me that his new invention of the dowager countess (as yet uncast) bore some similarity to Lady Trentham in Robert Altman’s film Gosford Park.

That movie was a precursor to Downton in many different ways. My original pitch to Fellowes had been to expand on the premise of Gosford and reconceive it as a weekly episodic show. When it looked as though ITV were actually going to greenlight the series, our attention turned to casting.

Almost the entire cast came in to audition before being offered the part, but there was no question of asking Maggie to come and meet or deliver some lines for us – that would have been impertinent and inappropriate.

The role of Violet Grantham was certainly not designed for Maggie – she had never done a long-running episodic TV series, so I had little prospect of being able to get her. But once on the page, it did become very clear that it was her, and we had to try our best to secure her. For reasons I cannot quite remember, she agreed.

I think, like me, she knew Fellowes was the best illustrator of this rarefied world and that they could do good work together. In the end, her contribution to Downton Abbey is immeasurable and the show would not have been the huge global hit it became without her.

At the read-through, she greeted me warmly, because this was not our first time at the rodeo. By complete coincidence, I had gone to school with her sons, Chris and Toby. Chris and I were contemporaries, Toby a couple of years younger. Chris and I started work together at the Chichester Festival theatre the day after we left school. We did our best to build sets for the then studio theatre – a marquee. Those sets all fell apart. But it was a start, and we loved it.

We loved her performance because she found the truth of the character and was never ashamed to deliver those barbed lines, in spite of how archaic or antediluvian they may have sounded. Of many aphorisms and “zingers”, everyone recalls the rather brilliant “What is a weekend”, yet she brought the house down with less-remembered bons mots such as her rejections of Lady Sybil’s claim that she was political: “No. She isn’t until she is married, then her husband will tell her what her opinions are.”

She wasn’t remotely like Violet – other than being a woman who was devoted to her family. But she understood Violet. When you work on a script, a character is merely words on a page and just an idea, a template for what it could be. Only once we saw the scenes she played to perfection could we see one of our greatest screen characters come to life.

A favourite scene? When the dowager arrives at the abbey on hearing the news of her granddaughter’s death. As always, she had the steely presence, but for once there was a chink in the armour as she put her arm on the wall to stabilise herself, knowing that she might in fact break at any moment.

She famously did not suffer fools. In an earlier film in the 1990s, I made the mistake of scheduling a very light first day without dialogue. On the second morning, she strolled past me, muttering entirely for my benefit: “All they’ve got me doing on this show is walking up and down bloody corridors.” She could be an intimidating presence for everyone, yet I can attest that the entire cast and crew of Downton, across six seasons and two movies, was honoured to work with this hugely consequential star of stage and screen.

She was particularly close to the actors who played the other members of the family. But I always detected the admiration for the other actors in the company she held in high esteem, such as Jim Carter and Phyllis Logan. Most of all, I remember her huge generosity and affection for the three young actors who played her granddaughters. She loved all her scenes with Michelle Dockery, Laura Carmichael and Jessica Brown Findlay, revelling in seeing them take flight at an earlier stage of their careers.

The last Downton film involved the death of the dowager countess and will now be particularly poignant for her Downton friends and family. I am so pleased we conceived of a proper ending for such a remarkable screen character. When she left the set for the final time, the cast and crew lined up outside the abbey and applauded her as she was swept away into her car, privileged to have witnessed this brilliant screen character brought to life by this supremely talented, yet private person.

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”.

Planning military incursions into the Netherlands, likening himself to ancient Greeks and comparing Keir Starmer to castrated bulls: the serialisation of Boris Johnson’s forthcoming memoir kicked off in characteristic fashion this weekend.

Excerpts from Unleashed, which will be released on 10 October, have been published in the Daily Mail on Friday and Saturday, and the Mail on Sunday is due to reveal more.

Here are six key takeaways:

1. His battle with Covid

After testing positive for coronavirus in the early days of the pandemic in 2020, it was “Athenian history” that came to the former prime minister’s mind.

“Pericles died of the plague,” Johnson recalls telling Michael Gove, referring to the plague of Athens in 430BC that killed up to one-third of the population. Upon hearing this, Johnson says his Cabinet Office minister’s “spectacles seemed to glitter at the thought, like the penguin in Wallace and Gromit”.

As the death toll across the UK neared 1,000, Johnson describes his declining health as he was “banjaxed” by the virus, which would eventually land him in intensive care at St Thomas’ hospital in April 2020. He reminisces about going from “bullish” and “rubicund” to having a face “the colour of mayonnaise” within days.

Even his dog, Dilyn, seemed to succumb to Covid, Johnson writes, while he recovered at Chequers, the 16th-century mansion in the Chiltern hills. “After a few hundred yards he would lie there all floppy, tongue lolling,” he says of his jack russell cross.

2. The Dutch canal raid

Johnson also remembers how, at the height of the pandemic in March 2021, he considered invading the Netherlands to seize vaccines.

He says he discussed taking the AstraZeneca vaccine, which was at the time the subject of a cross-Channel row over exports, with senior military officials. They plotted to “send one team on a commercial flight to Amsterdam, while another team would use the cover of darkness to cross the Channel in rigid inflatable boats and navigate up the canals,” he writes.

“I have to warn you, PM … that it will not be possible to do this undetected,” Johnson recalls being told by Lt Gen Doug Chalmers, the then deputy chief of the defence staff (military strategy and operational). “Well, PM,” Chalmers tells Johnson, “if we are detected we will have to explain why we are invading a longstanding Nato ally.”

Johnson writes: “I secretly agreed with what they all thought but did not want to say aloud: that the whole thing was nuts.”

3. Theresa May and Penny Mordaunt

Johnson speaks of his fond feelings for his predecessor, Theresa May, and looks back on his encounters with the former equalities minister Penny Mordaunt.

He describes how he would enjoy May’s “schoolmarmy self-righteousness” and how she would “roll her eyes” when he spoke. But it was her “long and pointy black” nostrils, says Johnson, that he fixated on most: “Like a Gerald Scarfe cartoon, and the way she would twist her nose, as if to show them off.”

As for Mordaunt, he draws parallels with her views on transgender rights, writing: “Was she still a Remainer, wrapped in Brexiteer clothes, or had she surgically altered her beliefs? Was she some kind of cross-dresser – and could she switch back? I started to worry.”

4. His Partygate regrets

In 2022, Johnson became the first prime minister to receive a criminal penalty while in office for a surprise get-together for Johnson’s birthday. Downing street previously admitted that staff “gathered briefly” in the cabinet room.

In his memoir, he denies eating cake at the “feeblest event in the history of human festivity”.

He writes: “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.”

A later investigation into Partygate was led by the former senior civil servant Sue Gray. Johnson remarks on how she is now Keir Starmer’s chief of staff and at the time was his“number one political foe”. He states he still believes all the “events were in accordance with the rules”.

In a shortlist of his “catastrophic mistakes” in the handling of the political scandal, Johnson lists among them, regret over “a ridiculous and unfair witch-hunt led by a senior civil servant, Sue Gray” and not realising “my old amigo Dom Cummings [was] behind it all”.

Gray’s investigation found that neither Johnson nor Sunak were aware of the event in advance.

5. Never mind the bullock, here’s Keir Starmer

Johnson does not pull his punches when describing Keir Starmer, saying that his “irritable face” during a Commons debate was “like a bullock having a thermometer unexpectedly shoved in its rectum”.

The line refers to a debate in June 2020, when the two leaders clashed at prime minister’s questions over the delay to the full reopening of schools. Johnson says Starmer was unable to say schools were safe as it would “go against his masters in the teaching unions”.

“A great ox has stood on his tongue,” he told the speaker.

6. His plea to Prince Harry

Johnson describes how he tried to stop “Megxit” – Prince Harry’s departure from the UK when he stepped back from being a working royal and moved to California via Vancouver with his wife, Meghan.

He collared the prince for a “manly pep talk” during a UK-Africa investment summit in January 2020. The meeting lasted 20 minutes, but Johnson concedes it was futile, as Harry left for Canada the next day.

Johnson recalls: “There was a ridiculous business when they made me try to persuade Harry to stay. Kind of manly pep talk. Totally hopeless.”

European scientists are preparing to launch a space mission that has been designed to create total eclipses of the sun on demand.

The robot spacecraft Proba-3 will be launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) in a few weeks in a mission which will involve flying a pair of satellites in close formation round the Earth. They will be linked by lasers and light sensors, with one probe blocking the view of the sun as seen from the other craft. The effect will be to create solar eclipses that will last for several hours.

Observing these eclipses will revolutionise the study of the sun and understanding of how it can cause disruptions to power lines, GPS satellites and other earthly technologies, says ESA. The agency believes the mission will also act as a pathfinder for other formation spaceflights that could transform studies of gravitational waves, exoplanets and black holes.

“This is an extraordinarily promising technology,” said solar physicist Francisco Diego of University College London. “It is also highly technically challenging. Getting it right will not be easy, but it will be highly rewarding.”

The mission, which has taken more than 10 years to plan, has involved developing a series of complex sensors that will keep the two satellites locked close together with an accuracy of less than a millimetre as they fly round the Earth 144 metres apart. In effect, the two probes will act as a single 144m-long observatory.

“When the two satellites are in exactly the right orbit, one will release a disk that will exactly the cover the sun as seen from the second satellite and so create eclipses that will last for up to six hours a day,” Proba-3’s project manager, Damien Galano, told the Observer.

On Earth, total solar eclipses occur when the moon passes in front of the sun, blocking out its blinding glare and leaving its fiery atmosphere – the corona – open to study by astronomers.

“Unfortunately, total solar eclipses happen on average every two years or so on Earth, and scientists often have to travel long distances and be at the mercy of the weather to study them – while observations can take place for only a few minutes,” added Diego. “That does not provide much time to make detailed observations.” Similarly, devices – called coronagraphs – that mimic eclipses and which are fitted to telescopes cannot observe the sun’s inner corona in detail.”

Scientists are particularly keen to study the sun’s inner corona because of its temperature. The sun’s surface is around 6,000C, while the temperature of its corona is about 1 million degrees. “That is a paradox,” said Andrei Zhukov, principal investigator for the corona experiment that will be flown on Proba-3. “You would expect it to get colder as it went further from the sun, but that is not the case.”

By allowing scientists to create solar eclipses that last for hours, Proba-3 should generate the data that will solve this mystery. “We will be able to study the inner corona at length and in detail, and generate information that will explain why it is so hot while the sun’s surface below it is relatively cool. That should give us a handle on understanding how the sun influences space weather,” added Diego.

This point was backed by Zhukov: “The sun is the source of disturbances to space weather, which can affect GPS navigation, power transmission and other technology. We need to understand how it does that.”

Improved understanding of the sun’s corona will also be crucial in future space missions. Occasionally an event known as a coronal mass ejection occurs, when the sun throws a huge plume of plasma into space. When this hits Earth’s upper atmosphere, it produces auroras and can occasionally disrupt power transmission.

“In general, we are protected by the atmosphere and the Van Allen radiation belts that surround the Earth,” said Diego. “However, in deep space there is no such protection from this radiation, and if we want to send men and women to the moon and Mars, we want to be able to understand and predict how the sun’s corona is going to behave and so prevent our astronauts from being harmed.”

Proba-3 should do more than revolutionise solar physics, however. As a pathfinder for the technology of flying probes in formation, it could form the core of a whole new approach to robot spaceflight – by using a few small satellites to mimic the operations of a single giant spacecraft, say astronomers.

“The techniques developed to operate Proba-3 could be exploited for many other astronomical missions, including groups of satellites that could study black holes, exoplanets, gravity waves and many other phenomena,” added Galano. “This whole approach to spaceflight has a great deal of promise.”

European scientists are preparing to launch a space mission that has been designed to create total eclipses of the sun on demand.

The robot spacecraft Proba-3 will be launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) in a few weeks in a mission which will involve flying a pair of satellites in close formation round the Earth. They will be linked by lasers and light sensors, with one probe blocking the view of the sun as seen from the other craft. The effect will be to create solar eclipses that will last for several hours.

Observing these eclipses will revolutionise the study of the sun and understanding of how it can cause disruptions to power lines, GPS satellites and other earthly technologies, says ESA. The agency believes the mission will also act as a pathfinder for other formation spaceflights that could transform studies of gravitational waves, exoplanets and black holes.

“This is an extraordinarily promising technology,” said solar physicist Francisco Diego of University College London. “It is also highly technically challenging. Getting it right will not be easy, but it will be highly rewarding.”

The mission, which has taken more than 10 years to plan, has involved developing a series of complex sensors that will keep the two satellites locked close together with an accuracy of less than a millimetre as they fly round the Earth 144 metres apart. In effect, the two probes will act as a single 144m-long observatory.

“When the two satellites are in exactly the right orbit, one will release a disk that will exactly the cover the sun as seen from the second satellite and so create eclipses that will last for up to six hours a day,” Proba-3’s project manager, Damien Galano, told the Observer.

On Earth, total solar eclipses occur when the moon passes in front of the sun, blocking out its blinding glare and leaving its fiery atmosphere – the corona – open to study by astronomers.

“Unfortunately, total solar eclipses happen on average every two years or so on Earth, and scientists often have to travel long distances and be at the mercy of the weather to study them – while observations can take place for only a few minutes,” added Diego. “That does not provide much time to make detailed observations.” Similarly, devices – called coronagraphs – that mimic eclipses and which are fitted to telescopes cannot observe the sun’s inner corona in detail.”

Scientists are particularly keen to study the sun’s inner corona because of its temperature. The sun’s surface is around 6,000C, while the temperature of its corona is about 1 million degrees. “That is a paradox,” said Andrei Zhukov, principal investigator for the corona experiment that will be flown on Proba-3. “You would expect it to get colder as it went further from the sun, but that is not the case.”

By allowing scientists to create solar eclipses that last for hours, Proba-3 should generate the data that will solve this mystery. “We will be able to study the inner corona at length and in detail, and generate information that will explain why it is so hot while the sun’s surface below it is relatively cool. That should give us a handle on understanding how the sun influences space weather,” added Diego.

This point was backed by Zhukov: “The sun is the source of disturbances to space weather, which can affect GPS navigation, power transmission and other technology. We need to understand how it does that.”

Improved understanding of the sun’s corona will also be crucial in future space missions. Occasionally an event known as a coronal mass ejection occurs, when the sun throws a huge plume of plasma into space. When this hits Earth’s upper atmosphere, it produces auroras and can occasionally disrupt power transmission.

“In general, we are protected by the atmosphere and the Van Allen radiation belts that surround the Earth,” said Diego. “However, in deep space there is no such protection from this radiation, and if we want to send men and women to the moon and Mars, we want to be able to understand and predict how the sun’s corona is going to behave and so prevent our astronauts from being harmed.”

Proba-3 should do more than revolutionise solar physics, however. As a pathfinder for the technology of flying probes in formation, it could form the core of a whole new approach to robot spaceflight – by using a few small satellites to mimic the operations of a single giant spacecraft, say astronomers.

“The techniques developed to operate Proba-3 could be exploited for many other astronomical missions, including groups of satellites that could study black holes, exoplanets, gravity waves and many other phenomena,” added Galano. “This whole approach to spaceflight has a great deal of promise.”

Seventeen people, including 15 women, have been killed in two mass shootings that took place close to each other in a rural town in South Africa, police said.

A search was under way for the suspects, the national police spokesperson, Brig Athlenda Mathe, said in a statement on Saturday. One other person was in critical condition in the hospital, she added.

The shootings took place on Friday night in Lusikisiki, in the Eastern Cape province. Video footage released by police showed the shootings occurred at two houses in a collection of rural houses on the outskirts of the town.

Twelve women and a man were killed in one house and three women and a man were killed in the other house, police said.

“A manhunt has been launched to apprehend those behind these heinous killings,” Mathe said. Police did not give any details on a possible motive.

South Africa has one of the highest murder rates in the world, and mass shootings have become increasingly common in recent years, sometimes targeting people in their homes.

Ten members of the same family, seven of them women and one a 13-year-old boy, were shot dead at their home in the neighbouring KwaZulu-Natal province last April.

South Africa’s murder rate is about 45 in every 100,000 people, compared with around 6.4 in every 100,000 in the US. Most European countries’ homicide rates are about 1 for every 100,000 people. South Africa, which has a population of about 62 million people, recorded more than 27,000 homicides in the 12 months from 1 March 2023, more than 70 a day.

Firearm laws are reasonably strict in South Africa, but authorities have often said the large number of illegal, unregistered guns in circulation is a significant problem.

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.”

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.

Cows may belch methane into the atmosphere at alarming rates, but new data shows they may play an important role in renewing farm soil.

Research by the Soil Association Exchange shows that farms with a mixture of arable crops and livestock have about a third more carbon stored within their soil than those with only arable crops, thanks to the animals’ manure.

This also has an effect on biodiversity: mixed arable and livestock farms support about 28 grassland plant species in every field, compared with 25 for arable-only and 22 for dairy-only.

Joseph Gridley, chief executive of SAE, which was set up by the Soil Association in 2021 to support and measure sustainable farming, said it was unlikely that carbon captured in soil would balance out the enormous amounts of methane created by cattle. Farm livestock around the world creates about 14% of human-induced climate emissions.

“It’s pretty unequivocal in the data that having livestock on your farm does mean you have more emissions – five or six times more emissions,” he said. “But if you integrate livestock into the system, on every metric on soil health, there’s an improvement, and on a lot of the biodiversity measures as well.”

Soils are degrading, but by how much exactly is unclear. In 2015, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation claimed that the world had only 60 harvests left, but researchers at Oxford University and Our World In Data said in 2021 that there was a complex picture, and that while there were 16% of soils with an expected lifespan of fewer than 100 years, a third were expected to last at least 5,000.

The Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has been investigating so-called methane blockers as a way to reduce emissions. Adding substances such as essential oils, probiotics and even seaweed to cattle feed can reduce the amount of burps and wind they generate.

Last month the Green Alliance charity said that feeding Bovaer, a methane blocker, to a third of the UK’s dairy cows would cut the country’s emissions by about 1%. Yet this is not happening, the campaign group warned, because farmers were unwilling to pay extra for something they did not benefit from. It said methane blockers should be subsidised, as other green farming schemes were.

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.