At least 64 people have been confirmed dead and almost 3.5 million were 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.

“It looks like a bomb went off,” said Georgia’s governor, Brian Kemp, after surveying the damage from the air on Saturday.

“To say this caught us off-guard would be an understatement,” said Quentin Miller, sheriff of Buncombe county, North Carolina, where part of Asheville is underwater and multiple cell towers remain down, hampering rescue and recovery efforts. Emergency services have declined to confirm the number of fatalities in the county until communication outages can be restored and next of kin informed.

In a statement also on Saturday, Joe Biden said that the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), Deanna Criswell, is travelling throughout the south-east to assess the damage alongside other state and local officials.

“I am deeply saddened by the loss of life and devastation caused by Hurricane Helene across the south-east … My administration is in constant contact with state and local officials to ensure communities have the support and resources they need,” he said. “We’re not going to walk away. We’re not going to give up.”

Kamala Harris, the vice-president and Democratic presidential candidate, released her own statement on Saturday. “My heart goes out to everyone impacted by the devastation unleashed by Hurricane Helene,” Harris said. “President Biden and I remain committed to ensuring that no community or state has to respond to this disaster alone. Federal personnel are on the ground to support families that have been impacted so that critical resources like food, water, and generators are available.”

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.

Jonathan Porter, chief meteorologist at AccuWeather, estimated the damage from the storm to cost between $95bn and $110bn, potentially making this one of the most expensive storms in modern US history.

According to a tally by the Associated Press, Helene has so far caused at least 64 deaths 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. Scores of people including multiple children remain in hospital with serious injuries.

“I’ve never seen so many people homeless as what I have right now,” said Janalea England, of Steinhatchee, Florida, a small river town in the state’s rural Big Bend region. England has turned her commercial fish market into a storm donation site for friends and neighbors, many of whom couldn’t get insurance on their homes.

By midday on Saturday, just over a million homes and businesses remained without power in South Carolina, with 750,000 also in the dark across Georgia and 600,000 in North Carolina, according to PowerOutage. Florida, Virginia, Ohio and Kentucky are also badly affected, as well as tens of thousands of people in Indiana, West Virginia and Tennessee.

The threat of further deaths and destruction is ongoing but Helene had weakened to a post-tropical cyclone with the risk of additional heavy rainfall waning as it moves across the Tennessee valley, 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.

The rain unleashed the worst flooding in a century in North Carolina, where the governor, Roy Cooper, described it as “catastrophic” and search-and-rescue teams from 19 states and the federal government came to help. One community, Spruce Pine, was doused with more than 2ft (0.6 meters) of rain from Tuesday through Saturday.

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.

After touring the damage by helicopter, a stunned US representative, Diana Harshbarger, said: “Who would have thought a hurricane would do this much damage in east Tennessee?”

Meanwhile in Mexico, at least 22 people were confirmed dead on Saturday 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 first 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

Donald Trump spoke on Saturday in the battleground state of Wisconsin, escalating his anti-immigrant rhetoric and taking his personal insults against Kamala Harris up a notch.

Trump’s speech in the small community of Prairie du Chien, where a Venezuelan in the US illegally was detained in September for allegedly sexually assaulting a woman and attacking her daughter, was unusually devoted almost entirely to undocumented immigrants. He wrongfully claimed that immigrants in the US are violent criminals, referring to them as “stone-cold killers”, “monsters” and “vile animals”.

The Republican presidential candidate was flanked by posters of immigrants in the US illegally who have been arrested for murder and other violent crimes, and banners saying “End Migrant Crime” and “Deport Illegals Now”.

Trump is locked in a close race with Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate and vice-president, before the 5 November election. Immigration at the southern border are one of the top issues for voters, according to opinion polls.

Trump attacked Harris, who on Friday visited the US-Mexico border for the first time in her 2024 presidential campaign, calling her “mentally impaired” and “mentally disabled”.

The former president blamed Harris and Joe Biden for allowing undocumented immigrants into the US, accusing some immigrants of wanting to “rape, pillage, thieve, plunder and kill the people of the United States of America”.

At one point Trump admitted: “This is a dark speech.”

“There’s no greater act of disloyalty than to extinguish the sovereignty of your own nation right through your border, no matter what lies she tells,” he said.

“Kamala Harris can never be forgiven for her erasing our border, and she must never be allowed to become president of the United States and Wisconsin,” he added.

A video intending to attack Kamala Harris was shown in the middle of Trump’s remarks.

It was a compilation of Harris’s comments about immigration policy.

“She is a disaster, and she’s not going to ever do anything for the border,” he said after the video. “She’s incompetent and a bad person.”

“She’s a Marxist,” he added.

JD Vance continued the attacks on Harris in a speech in Newton, Pennsylvania, taking the former president’s lead and making sure to continue the anti-immigrant claims.

“The problem with Kamala Harris is that she’s got no substance,” Trump’s running mate said. “The problem with Kamala Harris is that she’s got no plan. And the problem with Kamala Harris is that she has been the vice-president for three-and-a-half years and has failed this country.”

Vance claimed without proof that Harris played a role in worsening the economy by exacerbating inflation, then went on to link the country’s economic woes to immigration, blaming Harris for what he describes as an “invasion” amid a lack of border control.

Vance claimed that the presence of immigrants in the US is contributing to rising housing costs.

Some 7 million immigrants have been arrested crossing the US-Mexico border illegally during Biden’s administration, according to government data, a record high number that has fueled criticism of Harris and Biden from Trump and fellow Republicans.

In her visit to the border on Friday, Harris outlined her plans to fix “our broken immigration system” while accusing Trump of “fanning the flames of fear and division” over the impact of immigrants on American life.

Harris also called for tighter asylum restrictions and vowed to make a “top priority” of stopping fentanyl from entering the US.

Before wrapping up his speech, Trump called to the stage the mother of Rachel Morin, a 37-year-old Maryland mother of five who was killed last year. After Rachel’s death, a native of El Salvador was arrested. Trump has used this case to support his remarks against immigrants from Central America living in the US.

Studies generally find there is no evidence immigrants commit crimes at a higher rate than native-born Americans and critics say Trump’s rhetoric reinforces racist tropes.

Trump’s opponents accuse him of cynically exploiting grieving families to fuel his narrative that foreign-born, often Hispanic, arrivals are part of an invading army.

But some of the families of the victims have welcomed Trump’s focus on the issue of violent crime and the death toll of teenagers caused by the opioid drug fentanyl, much of which crosses into the US over the southern border.

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.

Russia’s top diplomat warned on Saturday against “trying to fight to victory with a nuclear power”, delivering a UN general assembly speech packed with condemnations of what Russia sees as western machinations in Ukraine and elsewhere – including inside the United Nations itself.

Three days after Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, aired a shift in his country’s nuclear doctrine, his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, accused the west of using Ukraine – which Russia invaded in February 2022 – as a tool to try “to defeat” Moscow strategically, and “preparing Europe for it to also throw itself into this suicidal escapade”.

“I’m not going to talk here about the senselessness and the danger of the very idea of trying to fight to victory with a nuclear power, which is what Russia is,” he said.

The specter of nuclear threats and confrontation has hung over the war in Ukraine since its start. Shortly before the invasion, Putin reminded the world that his country was “one of the most powerful nuclear states”, and he put its nuclear forces on high alert shortly thereafter. His nuclear rhetoric has ramped up and toned down at various points since.

On Wednesday, Putin said that if attacked by any country supported by a nuclear-armed nation, Russia will consider that a joint attack.

He didn’t specify whether that would bring a nuclear response, but he stressed that Russia could use nuclear weapons in response to a conventional assault that posed a “critical threat to our sovereignty”.

The United States and the European Union called his statements “irresponsible”.

The new posture was seen as a message to the US and other western countries as Ukraine seeks their go-ahead to strike Russia with longer-range weapons. The Biden administration this week announced an additional $2.7bn in military aid for Ukraine, but it doesn’t include the type of long-range arms that Zelenskyy is seeking, nor a green light to use such weapons to strike deep into Russia.

There was no immediate response to Lavrov’s address from the US, which had a junior diplomat taking notes in its assembly seat as he spoke.

More than two-and-a-half years into the fighting, Russia is making slow but continuing gains in Ukraine’s east. Ukraine has repeatedly struck Russian territory with missiles and drones and embarrassed Moscow with an audacious incursion by troops in a border region last month.

The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has pushed what he calls a peace formula to end the war. Provisions include expelling all Russian forces from Ukraine, ensuring accountability for war crimes, freeing prisoners of war and deportees, and more.

Lavrov dismissed Zelenskyy’s formula as a “doomed ultimatum”.

Meanwhile, Brazil and China have been floating a peace plan that entails holding a peace conference with both Ukraine and Russia and not expanding the battlefield or otherwise escalating fighting. Chinese and Brazilian diplomats have been promoting the plan during the assembly and attracted a dozen other nations, mostly in Africa or Latin America, to join a group of “friends for peace” in Ukraine.

Lavrov said at a news conference on Saturday that Russia was ready to provide assistance and advice to the group, adding: “It’s important for their proposals to be underpinned by the realities and not just be taken from some abstract conversations.”

He said resolving the conflict hinges on fixing its “root causes” – what Moscow contends is the Kyiv government’s repression of Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine, and Nato’s expansion in eastern Europe over the years, which Russia sees as a threat to its security.

• At least ten people were killed in two consecutive Russian attacks on a hospital in Sumy. Initial shelling had killed one and damaged several floors of the building, but Russian forces struck again during the evacuation of the hospital’s patients, authorities said. At least 22 were reported injured in the attacks. Danielle Bell, head of the UN human rights monitoring mission in Ukraine, said “loitering munitions” – or suicide drones – hit the Saint Panteleimon clinical hospital in two attacks 45 minutes apart. “Most of the fatalities occurred during the second strike, which hit as first responders arrived at the site and patients attempted to evacuate,” she said. Sumy city is located 32 km (20 miles) from the Russian border.

• Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, one day after his meeting with Donald Trump in New York, condemned the Sumy attack. “Everyone in the world who speaks about this war must pay attention to what Russia is targeting,” Zelenskyy wrote on X. “They are waging war on hospitals, civilian objects, and people’s lives. Only strength can force Russia into peace. Peace through strength is the only right way.”

• In addition to the ten killed on Saturday, at least seven other civilians were killed throughout Ukraine in the previous 24 hours, authorities said. Four were killed in Kryvyi Rih after a Russian missile struck a five-storey police administration building on Friday – authorities completed rescue efforts there on Saturday. Of the four killed in Kryvyi Rih, three were police officers. Meanwhile, other missile and airstrikes on residential areas of the Kherson, Donetsk and Odesa oblasts left dozens more injured.

• Russia’s top diplomat warned on Saturday against “trying to fight to victory with a nuclear power”, delivering a UN general assembly speech packed with condemnations of what Russia sees as western machinations in Ukraine and elsewhere – including inside the United Nations itself. Three days after Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, aired a shift in his country’s nuclear doctrine, his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, accused the west of using Ukraine as a tool to try “to defeat” Moscow strategically.

• China’s foreign minister warned fellow leaders on Saturday against an “expansion of the battlefield” in the war and said the Beijing government remained committed to shuttle diplomacy and efforts to push the conflict toward its end. China, along with Brazil, has proposed new talks involving Kyiv and Moscow and this week gathered Global South countries behind that plan. Zelenskyy dismissed China and Brazil’s efforts, questioning why they were proposing an alternative to his own peace formula.

• Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in an interview with Fox News aired on Saturday, said he had received “very direct information” from Donald Trump that the former US president would support Ukraine in the war against Russia if he is reelected in the November presidential election. Zelenskyy said: “I don’t know what will be after elections and who will be the president … But I’ve got from Donald Trump very direct information that he will be on our side, that he will support Ukraine.”

• Two Russian attacks in Ukraine’s northeastern Kharkiv region killed four people on Saturday including a supreme court judge who was delivering aid to local residents in a civilian car, Ukrainian officials said. Regional governor Oleh Syniehubov said an air attack killed three people and injured at least three others in the village of Slatyne, which lies about 25 km (15 miles) north of the city of Kharkiv – the regional capital.

• Russia is prepared to go to court over the Nord Stream pipeline explosions, with a foreign ministry spokesperson saying on Saturday that Russia has filed “pre-trial claims” against Denmark, Germany, Sweden and Switzerland. Maria Zakharova accused the west of attempting to “sweep the matter under the carpet”, maintaining that the explosions that ruptured the multi-billion dollar pipeline in September 2022 – seven months after Russia invaded Ukraine – were “an egregious act of international terrorism”.

• Nato members Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland will seek EU funding to build a network of bunkers, barriers, distribution lines and military warehouses along their borders with Russia and Belarus, Estonia’s officials have said. The three Baltic countries initially announced the plan for a “Baltic Defence Line” in January. In May, Poland announced a similar project called the “Eastern Shield” with the purpose of strengthening its borders with the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad and Belarus.

• North Korea, which has been accused of illegally supplying weapons to Russia, said on Sunday that US military aid worth $8bn to Ukraine was “an incredible mistake” and playing with fire against nuclear superpower Russia. “The United States and the west should not dismiss or underestimate Russia’s serious warning,” Kim Yo Jong, the powerful sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, said in a statement published by state news agency KCNA. Vladimir Putin has warned he could use nuclear weapons if Russia were to be hit with missiles. North Korea has shipped at least 16,500 containers of weapons to Russia since September last year and Russia has fired missiles from those shipments against Ukraine, the US has said.

Pope Francis has been sharply criticised by one of Belgium’s Catholic universities over his stance on the role of women in society, in a strongly worded press release issued just moments after the pontiff spoke at the college.

Professors and students at UCLouvain, where the 87-year-old pontiff had made a speech on Saturday afternoon, said they wanted to express their “incomprehension and disapproval” about the pope’s views.

“UCLouvain deplores the conservative positions expressed by Pope Francis on the role of women in society,” said the statement, in extraordinary language from a Catholic university about a pope.

Francis went to the university on Saturday to celebrate its upcoming 600th anniversary as part of a weekend trip he is making to Belgium. His speech largely called for global action on climate change, but he also responded to a letter to him from students and professors that had asked about the Catholic church’s teaching on women.

In the letter, which was read out loud to him, the students questioned him on the Church’s historical part in entrenching female subservience, the unfair division of labour and even disproportionate female poverty.

“Throughout the history of the Church, women have been made invisible,” the letter read. “What place, then, for women in the Church?”

Francis replied by saying the Church was female, noting that the Italian word for it, “chiesa”, is a feminine noun.

“A woman within the People of God is a daughter, a sister, a mother,” he said, adding “womanhood speaks to us of fruitful welcome, nurturing and life-giving dedication”.

He did not give any details about potential plans for reform.

The university statement called the pope’s position on women’s roles in society “deterministic and reductive”.

“We are really shocked,” said Valentine Hendrix, a 22-year-old student. “He reduces us to a role of childbearer, mother, wife, everything we want to emancipate ourselves from.”

Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, a climatologist at UCLouvain university, said Francis had “failed to rise to the occasion.”

“To reply that the Church is a woman is really missing the point of the question – about the Church’s respect for women and their role in the institution and in society,” he said.

Earlier the pope visited the tomb of Belgium’s King Baudouin who in 1990 famously refused to sign a law lifting penalties against abortion, citing personal convictions.

Francis described the legislation – passed after the king temporarily renounced his functions to avoid having to endorse it – as “a murderous law”.

Francis has faced criticism during events throughout his trip to Belgium. The country’s king and prime minister called on the pope to take more concrete actions to help survivors of abuse by Catholic clergy, and a rector at a different Catholic university asked him to reconsider the Catholic church’s ban on ordaining women as priests.

UCLouvain is a French-speaking university in Belgium. It has 38,000 students studying across 20 faculties.

The Catholic church has an all-male clergy. Francis has created two commissions to consider whether women could serve as deacons, who, like priests, are ordained, but cannot celebrate Mass, but has not moved forward on the issue.

However, during his 11 years as pontiff, Francis has also changed the Vatican’s primary governing document to allow women to lead departments, and has also allowed women to vote at major global meetings of bishops, known as synods, for the first time.

The pope’s three-day Belgium visit has been dominated by the Church’s dark legacy of child sexual abuse, and saw him meet on Friday with 17 victims.

The group shared their stories and expressed their expectations to the pope, who “took note” of their requests, according to the Vatican.

Belgium has been rocked by decades of abuse scandals and cover-ups and a hard-hitting documentary last year put the issue back on front pages, prompting new victims to come forward.

In an open letter this month, some had demanded the pontiff address paedophilia and set up a process for financial reparations.

On Saturday morning, during a gathering with clergy and pastoral workers at the vast Basilica of the Sacred Heart in Brussels, Francis was pressed on the issue for a second day running.

Replying to a question by a representative of an organisation helping abuse victims, the pontiff acknowledged the “atrocious suffering and wounds” caused by the Church.

“There is a need for a great deal of mercy to keep us from hardening our hearts before the suffering of victims, so that we can help them feel our closeness,” Francis said.

Reuters and Agence France-Presse contributed to this report

Pope Francis has been sharply criticised by one of Belgium’s Catholic universities over his stance on the role of women in society, in a strongly worded press release issued just moments after the pontiff spoke at the college.

Professors and students at UCLouvain, where the 87-year-old pontiff had made a speech on Saturday afternoon, said they wanted to express their “incomprehension and disapproval” about the pope’s views.

“UCLouvain deplores the conservative positions expressed by Pope Francis on the role of women in society,” said the statement, in extraordinary language from a Catholic university about a pope.

Francis went to the university on Saturday to celebrate its upcoming 600th anniversary as part of a weekend trip he is making to Belgium. His speech largely called for global action on climate change, but he also responded to a letter to him from students and professors that had asked about the Catholic church’s teaching on women.

In the letter, which was read out loud to him, the students questioned him on the Church’s historical part in entrenching female subservience, the unfair division of labour and even disproportionate female poverty.

“Throughout the history of the Church, women have been made invisible,” the letter read. “What place, then, for women in the Church?”

Francis replied by saying the Church was female, noting that the Italian word for it, “chiesa”, is a feminine noun.

“A woman within the People of God is a daughter, a sister, a mother,” he said, adding “womanhood speaks to us of fruitful welcome, nurturing and life-giving dedication”.

He did not give any details about potential plans for reform.

The university statement called the pope’s position on women’s roles in society “deterministic and reductive”.

“We are really shocked,” said Valentine Hendrix, a 22-year-old student. “He reduces us to a role of childbearer, mother, wife, everything we want to emancipate ourselves from.”

Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, a climatologist at UCLouvain university, said Francis had “failed to rise to the occasion.”

“To reply that the Church is a woman is really missing the point of the question – about the Church’s respect for women and their role in the institution and in society,” he said.

Earlier the pope visited the tomb of Belgium’s King Baudouin who in 1990 famously refused to sign a law lifting penalties against abortion, citing personal convictions.

Francis described the legislation – passed after the king temporarily renounced his functions to avoid having to endorse it – as “a murderous law”.

Francis has faced criticism during events throughout his trip to Belgium. The country’s king and prime minister called on the pope to take more concrete actions to help survivors of abuse by Catholic clergy, and a rector at a different Catholic university asked him to reconsider the Catholic church’s ban on ordaining women as priests.

UCLouvain is a French-speaking university in Belgium. It has 38,000 students studying across 20 faculties.

The Catholic church has an all-male clergy. Francis has created two commissions to consider whether women could serve as deacons, who, like priests, are ordained, but cannot celebrate Mass, but has not moved forward on the issue.

However, during his 11 years as pontiff, Francis has also changed the Vatican’s primary governing document to allow women to lead departments, and has also allowed women to vote at major global meetings of bishops, known as synods, for the first time.

The pope’s three-day Belgium visit has been dominated by the Church’s dark legacy of child sexual abuse, and saw him meet on Friday with 17 victims.

The group shared their stories and expressed their expectations to the pope, who “took note” of their requests, according to the Vatican.

Belgium has been rocked by decades of abuse scandals and cover-ups and a hard-hitting documentary last year put the issue back on front pages, prompting new victims to come forward.

In an open letter this month, some had demanded the pontiff address paedophilia and set up a process for financial reparations.

On Saturday morning, during a gathering with clergy and pastoral workers at the vast Basilica of the Sacred Heart in Brussels, Francis was pressed on the issue for a second day running.

Replying to a question by a representative of an organisation helping abuse victims, the pontiff acknowledged the “atrocious suffering and wounds” caused by the Church.

“There is a need for a great deal of mercy to keep us from hardening our hearts before the suffering of victims, so that we can help them feel our closeness,” Francis said.

Reuters and Agence France-Presse contributed to this report

Nine people are confirmed drowned and at least 48 are missing after a boat carrying migrants capsized off Spain’s Canary Islands overnight, rescue services said on Saturday, the latest in a series of such disasters off the west coast of Africa.

Sea rescue teams said in a statement they had answered a distress call off El Hierro, one of the islands in the Atlantic archipelago, shortly after midnight. They managed to save 27 of the 84 people on board.

Anselmo Pestana, head of the Canary Islands prefecture, said survivors had told their rescuers that the boat had set off from Nuadibu in Mauritania, nearly 500 miles (about 800km) away.

They also suggested that there might have been as many as 90 people on board. Four of those rescued were minors, he added.

Pestana was speaking from the port of La Estaca on El Hierro island.

The most critical part of the operation was when the rescue vessels approached the boat in distress, he told journalists, because it was vital that those on board the stricken craft stay calm.

They had to follow the instructions of the rescue crews to ensure their vessel stayed balanced and did not capsize, he added.

He said the migrants had gone two days without food or water, which may have contributed to the panic and the boat capsizing, he said.

Five ships, three helicopters and one plane had taken part in the search and rescue operation, he added.

This disaster follows the death of 39 migrants in early September when their boat sank off Senegal while attempting a similar crossing to the Canaries, from where migrants hope to reach mainland Europe.

Thousands of migrants have died in recent years setting off into the Atlantic to reach Europe onboard overcrowded and often dilapidated boats.

The latest tragedy “again underlines the dangerousness of the Atlantic route”, Canaries regional president Fernando Clavijo wrote on X.

“We need Spain and the EU to act decisively in the face of a structural humanitarian tragedy” as lives are lost “metres from Europe’s southern border”, he added.

In late August, Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, visited Mauritania and the Gambia to sign cooperation agreements to crack down on people smugglers while expanding legal means of immigration.

As of 15 August, 22,304 migrants have reached the Canaries since the start of the year, up from 9,864 in the same period the previous year.

Almost 40,000 migrants entered the Canaries in 2023, a record on course to be broken this year, as easier navigation conditions from September tend to lead to a spike in crossing attempts.

The Atlantic route is particularly deadly, with many of the crowded and poorly equipped boats unable to cope with the strong ocean currents. Some boats set off from African beaches as far as 620 miles (1,000km) from the Canaries.

The International Organization for Migration, a UN agency, estimates that 4,857 people have died on this route since 2014.

Many aid organisations say that figure is a massive underestimate. Caminando Fronteras, a Spanish NGO that aids migrants, says 18,680 have died trying to reach Europe.

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.

Residents in south-western Mexico on Saturday evacuated from homes flooded by the remnants of Hurricane John that ravaged the Pacific coastline for a week, bringing deadly floods and landslides that left 22 people reported dead.

In Guerrero, the worst-hit state and one of Mexico’s poorest, 18 people were killed, according to local media, many due to mudslides that crushed houses. To the south, local media reported three deaths in Oaxaca, and a young boy died in a river to the north in Michoacán state.

John rapidly strengthened into a major hurricane on Monday before tearing into Guerrero. It dissipated, then reformed offshore and for the rest of the week skimmed the coastline north, bringing torrential rain and floods.

John began dissipating on Friday and is no longer considered an active storm.

Evelyn Salgado, the Guerrero state governor, shared images on X of emergency responders in the major resort city of Acapulco carrying out rescue operations by boat, jet ski and helicopter, and residents wading through roads flooded up to waist height.

Salgado said access to the airport had been re-established on Saturday morning.

Residents with small children who evacuated from flooded neighborhoods on dinghies and surfboards asked authorities for support as the city, still recovering from a devastating 2023 storm, faced a second disaster in less than a year.

Last October, Hurricane Otis struck Acapulco as a category 5 storm that rapidly intensified off the coast, leaving more than 50 people dead and causing billions of dollars in damages. But John’s rainfall nearly tripled the rain generated from Otis.

“A lot of water has come down,” resident Jazmin Barrera told UnoTV. “We haven’t seen the sun since Monday. I think this time around has been more devastating.”

Heavy rainfall and thunderstorms are forecast across Guerrero and parts of Oaxaca later on Saturday, but authorities in Acapulco said the floodwaters were starting to fall back.

“Shelters and kitchens have been set up and food supplies are being distributed,” Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the Mexican president, said on X. “Fortunately, the water is now receding and aid to the victims will continue.”

Meteorologists say warmer ocean temperatures are giving more fuel to hurricanes, allowing them to become stronger faster and leaving coastal communities less time to brace for their blow.

Flooding and landslides caused by continuous rainfall have killed at least 101 people in Nepal while 64 people are missing, officials have said.

Rain began pouring down on Friday night and continued into Saturday, with low-lying neighbourhoods in Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu, inundated by surging floodwaters.

“The death toll has reached 101, and 64 people are missing,” police spokesperson Dan Bahadur Karki told AFP early on Sunday.

“There is likely to be an increase in the death toll as our search and rescue mission proceeds in the affected areas,” he added.

The Kathmandu valley recorded 240 millimetres (9.4 inches) of rain in the 24 hours to Saturday morning, the country’s weather bureau told the Kathmandu Post newspaper.

It was the highest rainfall recorded in the capital since at least 1970, the report said.

At least 34 of the dead were in Kathmandu, according to home ministry spokesperson Rishiram Tiwari on Saturday.

He said all divisions of security forces in the country including the army have been ordered to help in the rescue efforts.

Several roads were blocked by landslides triggered by the rainfall. Three highways, including the key Prithvi highway, connecting Kathmandu to the rest of the country, have been blocked by landslides, and heavy equipment is being used to try to open the routes, said Tiwari.

The government had issued flood warnings across the country warning of massive rainfall.

Buses were banned from travelling at night on highways and cars were discouraged. Security forces were ordered to high alert.

Home minister Ramesh Lekhak told reporters that officials are still collecting information on the effects of the flooding.

“The government’s priority right now is to rescue the people and help those who have been affected,” Lekhak said.

Many houses were flooded in Kathmandu and residents forced to move to top floors. A huge area on the southern side of the city was mostly flooded and an army helicopter was used to pick up four people who were unable to leave their houses.

Most of Kathmandu was without power and internet for a period of time.

The monsoon season that brings heavy rainfall began in June and usually ends by mid-September.

Associated Press and Agence France-Press contributed to this report