A series of explosions were heard over Beirut’s southern suburbs early on Saturday after the Israeli military demanded evacuations for some areas while Hezbollah said it was engaged in continued clashes with Israeli troops in the Lebanon border area.

Israel said on Friday it had targeted the intelligence headquarters of Hezbollah in Beirut and was assessing the damage after a series of strikes on senior figures in the militant group that Iran’s supreme leader condemned as counterproductive.

Media affiliated with Hamas, meanwhile, reported on Saturday that a leader of its armed wing was killed with three family members in an Israeli strike on a Palestinian refugee camp in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli. It named the al-Qassam Brigades leader as Saeed Atallah. Israel did not immediately comment on the strike.

In Beirut’s southern suburbs, a blast was heard and smoke seen early on Saturday, Reuters witnesses said, as the Israeli military issued three warnings for residents of the area to immediately evacuate. The first alert warned residents in a building in the Burj al-Barajneh neighbourhood and the second in a building in Choueifat district, while the third alert mentioned buildings in Haret Hreik as well as Burj al-Barajneh.

Iran-backed Hezbollah said the Israeli army was trying to infiltrate the southern Lebanese town of Odaisseh where clashes continued.

Israel has been weighing options in its response to Iran’s ballistic missile attack on Tuesday, which Iran had carried out in response to Israeli military action in Lebanon. Oil prices have risen on the possibility of an Israeli attack on Iran’s oil facilities.

The air attack on Beirut, part of a wider assault that has driven more than 1.2 million Lebanese from their homes, was reported to have targeted the potential successor to the leader of Iran-backed Hezbollah, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, killed by Israel a week ago. Hashem Safieddine’s fate was unclear immediately afterwards.

The US president, Joe Biden, said on Friday that if he were in Israel’s shoes he would think about alternatives to striking Iranian oilfields, adding that he thought Israel had not yet concluded how to respond to Iran.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, told a crowd in Tehran that Iran and its regional allies would not back down. Israel’s adversaries in the region should “double your efforts and capabilities … and resist the aggressive enemy”, Khamenei said in a rare appearance leading Friday prayers, at which he mentioned Nasrallah and called Iran’s attack on Israel legal and legitimate.

The semi-official Iranian news agency SNN quoted Revolutionary Guards deputy commander Ali Fadavi as saying on Friday that if Israel attacked, Iran would target Israeli energy and gas installations.

Lebanon’s government says more than 2,000 people have been killed there in the past year, with most in the past two weeks. A UN spokesperson, Stephane Dujarric, called the toll on civilians “totally unacceptable”.

The Israeli military said about 70 projectiles were launched from Lebanon into Israeli territory on Friday evening and were either intercepted or fell in open land.

The US state department said an American was killed in Lebanon this week and Washington was working to understand the circumstances. Kamel Ahmad Jawad, from Michigan, was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Tuesday, according to his daughter, a friend and the US congresswoman representing his district.

Hezbollah said early on Saturday it was engaged in clashes with Israeli troops in the Lebanon border area, after earlier saying it forced Israeli soldiers to retreat there.

“Israeli enemy soldiers renewed an attempt to advance towards the vicinity of the municipality in the village of Adaysseh” and Hezbollah fighters confronted the attempt “and clashes are continuing”, the group said. Its fighters had forced Israeli troops to “retreat” in the same area, it said earlier.

Hezbollah also said it targeted troops in south Lebanon’s Yarun area with a “rocket salvo”, as well as soldiers in two points across the border with rockets.

Hezbollah and Israel have been exchanging near-daily cross-border fire for almost a year, with the group saying it is acting in support of Palestinian ally Hamas over the Gaza war. Israel, saying it is targeting Hezbollah in order to make Israel’s northern area safe for the return of displaced people, has intensified its bombardment and this week announced its troops had started ground raids into parts of southern Lebanon.

With Reuters and Agence France-Presse

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has vowed that Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza will re-emerge strongly with new leaders, as an Israeli airstrike cut Lebanon’s main route to Syria.

In a rare public sermon in front of tens of thousands in Tehran on Friday, Khamenei defended the “legal and legitimate” ballistic missile attack on Israel this week that Iran has said was in retaliation for the deaths of the Hezbollah secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah, and the Hamas political leader, Ismail Haniyeh.

Iran fired more than 180 missiles at Israel on Tuesday, hitting a number of Israeli bases and causing the region to brace for Israel’s imminent anticipated response against Tehran.

As evening fell on Friday in the region, the media in Yemen reported a new round of airstrikes, including on the capital, Sana’a, and near the airport at the port of Hodeidah, and Israeli strikes continued in Gaza and Lebanon.

Four more strikes hit the Seiyana area in Sana’a and two strikes hit Dhamar province, according to Houthi reports. The Houthi media office also reported three air raids in Bayda province, southeast of Sana’a.

The US military confirmed it had carried out strikes on 15 targets in areas of Yemen controlled by the Houthi rebels. The Guardian understands there was no UK involvement in Friday’s airstrikes, despite earlier reports.

The northern regions of Israel, which is now prosecuting its almost year-long war on several fronts, were targeted by Hezbollah rockets almost continuously throughout Friday.

Just days before the first anniversary of Hamas’s surprise attack on southern Israeli communities on 7 October, which sparked the conflict, there appeared minimal prospect of an end to the escalating violence that has displaced well over 2 million people and killed tens of thousands.

Khamenei, speaking predominantly in Arabic but also in Farsi, urged Muslims from “Afghanistan to Yemen, and from Iran to Gaza” to be ready to take action, and praised those who had died doing so.

It was the first time the 85-year-old had led Friday prayers since the US killed the Revolutionary Guards leader Qassem Suleimani in Baghdad in January 2020.

The Iranian leadership aimed to show, through the size of the crowd attending the Grand Mosque, that ordinary Iranians supported the decision to attack Israel over the killings of its two allies and the Revolutionary Guards brigadier general Abbas Nilforoushan.

Despite Khamenei’s appeal for Muslim unity, the speech made little effort to build unity with moderate Arab leaders. Instead, he praised the Hamas attack on 7 October last year in which 1,200 people were killed and that triggered the Gaza war, describing it as a “legitimate act”, and insisted the root of the region’s problems lay solely in foreign interference and the actions of Israel.

He did little to prepare Iranians for an imminent Israeli attack or for what Iran would do in response. He said: “We need not procrastinate nor rush, but to do what is logical and correct.”

In Lebanon, which has borne the most intense Israeli assaults in the past fortnight – including airstrikes, assassinations and a large southern ground incursion – Israeli forces carried out a series of airstrikes overnight. Southern suburbs of Beirut were hit and the main border crossing between Lebanon and Syria, used by for tens of thousands of people fleeing Israeli bombardment, was cut off.

The suburban blasts sent plumes of smoke and flames into the night sky and shook buildings miles away in the capital. The Israeli military did not comment on its intended target, and there was no information available yet on casualties. Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency reported there were more than 10 consecutive airstrikes in the area.

Four hospitals – three in southern Lebanon and one in southern Beirut – announced they were suspending services amid the ongoing Israeli bombardment. Late on Friday Israel ordered residents in the capital’s southern suburbs to evacuate immediately ahead of more expected airstrikes.

The government in Beirut released figures showing more than 2,000 people had been killed in Lebanon in nearly a year of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah. Responding to the figures, the spokesperson for António Guterres, the UN secretary general, condemned the “totally unacceptable” loss of civilian life in Lebanon.

Another flight has been chartered by the UK government to leave Beirut, the Foreign Office said as it urged any remaining British nationals wanting to return home to register their presence immediately. It will leave Beirut on Sunday 6 October.

The Israel Defense Forces said Hezbollah had launched about 100 rockets into Israel on Friday. The IDF has claimed to have killed more than 250 Hezbollah fighters since ground operations began earlier this week.

Hezbollah said it targeted Israeli troops in southern Lebanon on Friday.

It said in a statement that fighters had targeted “an Israeli enemy troop force during its advance” towards an area west of the border village of Yarun “with artillery shells and a rocket salvo”, and it claimed responsibility for a series of attacks on Israeli soldiers across the border earlier in the day.

The Guardian was unable to verify either Israeli or Hezbollah statements over the casualties they claimed to have inflicted.

The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, this week made what he called a direct appeal to ordinary Iranians to rise up and overthrow their leadership. He said that if the regime truly cared about their future it would stop wasting billions of dollars on futile wars across the Middle East and spend more on public services.

He laced his appeal with a warning that there was nowhere in the Middle East that Israel could not reach.

The aim of the Iranian officials, by contrast, was to underline that Iranians feel inextricably intertwined with resistance to Israel in Gaza and Lebanon, and are even willing to sacrifice their lives if a war breaks out.

At a meeting on Thursday in Doha, Gulf state leaders insisted they would not support a US attack on Iran but would remain neutral.

Linking the fate of Iran so closely with the Palestinian resistance carries risks given Iran’s economy remains racked by 31% inflation, low growth and reduced living standards. Iranian defence spending is about 2.9% of GDP.

Israel is likely to mount a large-scale airstrike against Iran’s oil industry and possibly a symbolic attack on a military target related to its nuclear programme, former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak has predicted.

Barak said there was no doubt there would be an Israeli military response to Iran’s assault on Tuesday with over 180 ballistic missiles, most of which were intercepted, but some landed on and around densely populated areas and Israeli military bases.

“Israel has a compelling need, even an imperative, to respond. I think that no sovereign nation on Earth could fail to respond,” Barak said in an interview.

The former prime minister, who also served as defence minister, foreign minister and army chief of staff, said the model for the Israeli response could be seen in Sunday’s reprisal airstrikes against Houthi-controlled oil facilities, power plants and docks in the Yemeni port of Hodeidah, a day after Houthi fired missiles aimed at Israel’s international airport outside Tel Aviv.

“I think we might see something like that. It might be a massive attack, and it could be repeated more than once,” he told the Guardian. Joe Biden said on Thursday there had been discussions in Washington about a possible Israeli attack on Iran’s oil sector, but it not give any details or make clear whether the US would support such an assault.

Barak, now aged 82, said there had also been suggestions in Israel that it should make use of this opportunity, in reprisal for the Iranian attack, to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, but he argued it would not significantly set back the Iranian programme.

When Barak served as defence minister from 2007 to 2013, under both Ehud Olmert and Benjamin Netanyahu, he was among Israel’s most vociferous advocates for bombing the Iranian nuclear facilities, trying and failing to convince presidents George Bush and then Barack Obama, to contribute US military might to the campaign.

On Wednesday, Biden followed Obama in voicing his opposition to any Israeli strikes against Iranian nuclear sites. And Barak himself now accepts the Iran nuclear programme is too far advanced for any bombing campaign to set it back significantly.

“There are some commentators and even some people within the defence establishment who raised the question: Why the hell not hit the nuclear military programme?” Barak said. “A little bit more than a decade ago, I was probably the most hawkish person in Israeli leadership arguing that it was worth considering very seriously, because there was an actual capability to delay them by several years.

“That’s not the case right now, because Iran is a de facto threshold country,” he argued. “They do not have yet a weapon – it may take them a year to have one, and even half a decade to have a small arsenal. Practically speaking, you cannot easily delay them in any significant manner.”

Under a 2015 multilateral nuclear agreement, Tehran accepted tight restrictions on its uranium enrichment and other elements of its programme in exchange for sanctions relief, but that agreement has steadily fallen apart since the US withdrawal under Donald Trump in 2018.

Iran now has a stockpile of enriched uranium that is 30 times higher than the agreed 2015 limit, and it is enriching uranium to up to 60% purity, which in terms of the additional processing required, is very close to 90% weapons grade fissile material. Under the 2015 agreement, Iran’s “breakout time” – the period it would need to produce a nuclear bomb – was at least a year. Now it is a few weeks.

Barak believes there is pressure within the Netanyahu government for at least some symbolic strike against the Iranian programme, even though the former prime minister sees such a gesture as futile.

“You can cause certain damage, but even this might be perceived by some of the planners as worth the risk because the alternative is to sit idly by and do nothing,” Barak said. “So probably there will be even an attempt to hit certain nuclear-related targets.”

While Barak believes that a significant Israeli military response to Tuesday night’s Iranian military attack is now unavoidable and justifiable, he argues the drift to a regional war could have been averted much earlier, if Netanyahu had been open to a US-promoted plan to rally Arab support for a postwar Palestinian government in Gaza to replace Hamas. Instead, Israel’s incumbent prime minister opposed any political “day after” solution that recognised Palestinian sovereignty.

“I think that a strong response is inevitable. That doesn’t mean it was written in heaven a year ago that it’s going to happen,” Barak said. “There were probably several opportunities to limit this conflict before it turned into something like a full-scale Middle East clash. For reasons that cannot be explained under any strategic thought, Netanyahu rejected any kind of discussion of what we call ‘the day after’.

“I do not put the blame for the whole event on Netanyahu. This is basically the fault of Hamas and Hezbollah and Iran behind them,” Barak said. “But having said that, we have a responsibility to take action under a certain innate logic that understands the situation, the opportunity, and the constraints. There is an old Roman saying: ‘If you don’t know which port you want to reach, no wind will take you there.’”

• An employee at the Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in southern Ukraine has been killed in a car bomb attack that Ukrainian military intelligence said punished a “war criminal”. Russia’s investigative committee, which probes serious crimes, said Andrei Korotkiy died after a bomb planted under his car went off near his house in the city of Enerhodar, where the plant is located, on Friday morning. Korotkiy worked in the plant’s security department, the committee said, adding a criminal case was opened into his death. Ukrainian military intelligence published a video of his car exploding and in a statement called Korotkiy a “war criminal” and collaborator, accusing him of repressing Ukrainians and of handing Russia a list of the plant’s employees and then pointing out people with pro-Ukrainian views. Authorities at the plant – Europe’s largest, with six nuclear reactors – condemned Ukrainian authorities for orchestrating the killing.

• Ukraine said it hit an oil depot in Russia’s Voronezh border region in a drone attack that reportedly caused a huge blaze. A source in the SBU security service told Agence France-Presse a depot with 20 fuel and lubricant tanks was hit in the drone attack overnight to Friday. “The enemy’s air defences were active but unsuccessful,” the source said, adding there were reports of a “massive fire”. Russian emergency services reported a fire was raging over 2,000 sq metres (21,500 sq ft) in a warehouse storing hydrocarbon products in the Voronezh region. The Voronezh regional governor earlier confirmed a Ukrainian drone strike.

• Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Friday he had visited the northern Sumy region, from where Ukraine launched a major incursion into Russia’s neighbouring Kursk region. “It is crucial to understand that the Kursk operation is a really strategic thing, something that adds motivation to our partners, motivation to be with Ukraine, be more decisive and put pressure on Russia,” the Ukrainian president said. Shown visiting Ukrainian troops alongside his top army commander, Gen Oleksandr Syrskyi, Zelenskyy thanked the military and said the incursion “greatly helped” Kyiv to secure the latest military support packages from the west. Almost two months into the surprise operation, Kyiv’s troops control swathes of Russian border territory, though the pace of the advance has slowed and Moscow’s forces have begun to counterattack.

• Romania recovered fragments of a Russian drone from a canal in the Danube Delta near the Ukrainian border, the defence ministry said on Friday. Romania shares a 650km (400-mile) border with Ukraine and has had Russian drone fragments fall on its territory repeatedly over the past year.

• Ukrainian investigators alleged on Friday they had found stacks of cash totalling almost $6m during a raid of the home of a state official suspected of helping men dodge mobilisation. The raid was part of an investigation into an illegal scheme to register would-be draft dodgers as disabled. The State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) swooped on the home of an official in charge of the regional medical commission in the western Khmelnitsky region and her son, a manager in Ukraine’s state pension fund. Separately, in the eastern Kharkiv region, Ukraine’s SBU security service said it had detained 13 people over a similar scheme.

• Belarus on Friday sentenced 12 people to prison terms of up to 25 years on terrorism charges over the 2023 sabotage of a Russian military plane that was claimed by pro-Ukraine activists. In February last year, a group of opponents of President Alexander Lukashenko’s regime said they had destroyed a Russian army spy plane at a base outside Minsk. Russia did not comment on the operation and Minsk initially denied it but later called it an act of terrorism and blamed Ukrainian security services. Belarus prosecutors said on Friday that Minsk city court sentenced 12 people accused of involvement in the “terrorist attack” at Machulishchy airbase to prison terms from two years and three months to 25 years. Only five of the group are in Belarus.

• Russia on Friday sentenced a Crimean man to 14 years in a penal colony on treason charges after it accused him of aiding the Ukrainian military. Russian media said the FSB security service had accused Igor Kopyl, 47 – a resident of Sevastopol, the Crimean port where Russia’s Black Sea fleet is based – of assisting Kyiv’s armed forces and preparing a “terrorist” attack. The FSB said Kopyl was a former member of the Ukrainian navy and had been recruited by Kyiv in 2022.

• Ukrainian feminist activists on Friday staged a topless protest outside the embassy of Iran, which Kyiv and the west say is arming Russia. Ukraine’s Femen group is a feminist art collective that has for years staged demonstrations in Ukraine and abroad. Agence France-Presse reported seeing two activists take their shirts off near the Iranian embassy building in Kyiv, chanting and displaying anti-Iran and anti-Russia slogans written on their bodies.

Joe Biden had terse words at the White House on Friday for Benjamin Netanyahu, saying he didn’t know whether the Israeli prime minister was holding up a peace deal in the Middle East – where Israel is at war with Hamas in Gaza and on a military offensive against Hezbollah in Lebanon – in order to influence the outcome of the 2024 US presidential election.

“No administration has helped Israel more than I have. None. None, none. And I think Bibi should remember that,” Biden said, using Netanyahu’s nickname. He added: “And whether he’s trying to influence the election, I don’t know – but I’m not counting on that.”

The US president made a surprise and rare appearance in the west wing briefing room and answered reporters’ questions there for the first time in his presidency.

He was responding to comments made by one of his allies, Chris Murphy, a Democratic US senator of Connecticut, who said on CNN this week that he was concerned Netanyahu had little interest in a peace deal in part because of American politics.

The two leaders have long managed a complicated relationship, but they are running out of space to maneuver as their views on the Israel-Gaza war diverge and their political futures hang in the balance.

Biden has pushed for months for a ceasefire agreement in Gaza – and the president and his aides boosted the idea repeatedly that they were close to success – but a ceasefire has not materialized. Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, has engaged in shuttle diplomacy to Israel and to peace talks via intermediaries, but to no avail and, in some cases, Netanyahu has publicly resisted the prospect while US and Israeli officials continue to talk in private about eking out a deal.

Meanwhile, Israel has recently pressed forward on two fronts, pursuing a ground incursion into Lebanon against Hezbollah and conducting strikes in Gaza. And it has vowed to retaliate for Iran’s ballistic missile attack this week, as the region braced for further escalation.

Biden said there had been no decision yet on what type of response there would be toward Iran, though there has been talk about Israel striking Iran’s oilfields: “I think if I were in their shoes, I’d be thinking about other alternatives than striking oilfields.”

Biden pushed back against the idea that he was seeking a meeting with Netanyahu to discuss the response to Iran. He wasn’t, he said.

“I’m assuming when they make a decision on how they’re going to respond, we will then have a discussion,” he said.

Netanyahu has grown increasingly resistant to Biden’s efforts. Biden has in turn publicly held up delivery of heavy bombs to Israel and increasingly voiced concerns over an all-out war in the Middle East and yet has never acquiesced to political calls at home or internationally for a halt on US arms sales to Israel.

“I don’t believe there’s going to be an all-out war,” Biden said on Thursday evening. “I think we can avoid it. But there’s a lot to do yet.”

Biden has remained consistent in his support for Israel in the aftermath of the 7 October Hamas attacks in Israel. Since then, with few exceptions, Biden has supported ongoing and enhanced US arms transfers to Israel while merely cautioning the Israelis to be careful to avoid civilian casualties.

Biden has also ordered the US military to step up its profile in the region to protect Israel from attacks by Hamas, Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen and Iran itself. In April, and again earlier this week, the US was a leading player in shooting down missiles fired by Iran into Israel.

On Thursday, Biden said the US was “discussing” with Israel the possibility of Israeli strikes on Iran’s oil infrastructure.

His off-the-cuff remark, which immediately sent oil prices soaring, did not make clear whether his administration was holding internal discussions or talking directly to Israel, nor did he clarify what his attitude was to such an attack.

Asked to clarify those comments, Biden told reporters on Friday: “Look, the Israelis have not concluded what they’re going to do in terms of a strike. That’s under discussion.”

Kamala Harris also has not taken a different stance on arms sales but has spoken more assertively for months to demand an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and has decried civilian killings in Israel’s war in the Palestinian territory.

The Associated Press contributed reporting

Donald Trump’s social media post that showed a purported endorsement for the presidency from the JP Morgan chief executive, Jamie Dimon, among the most influential investment bankers on Wall Street, is false, a representative confirmed on Friday.

The Truth Social post – what appears to be a screenshot of a tweet with a siren emoji and text claiming Dimon had endorsed Trump, with a photo of Dimon – appeared at 1.56pm ET on Friday, as Trump was flying to Augusta, Georgia, for a campaign event.

But Dimon has not endorsed Trump or made any endorsements in the 2024 presidential race, according to a JPMorgan Chase spokesperson. And Dimon has not contributed any money to the Trump campaign or to Trump’s Democratic rival, Kamala Harris.

The instant denial from the bank has not led Trump to take down the post, which has more than 3,500 reposts and more than 11,000 likes, even as he distanced himself from the claim when he was confronted about it after he landed in Augusta.

“I don’t know anything about it,” Trump said. When a reporter noted he had posted it on his social media platform, Trump suggested one of his aides had posted the claim.

When the reporter pressed him to comment, Trump replied: “I don’t know – was it him or no?” And when a reporter told him a spokesperson for the bank had confirmed it was false, Trump evaded responsibility: “Well, then, somebody is using his name.”

The post was the latest in a series of false claims Trump has advanced in recent weeks, which have become increasingly brazen with fewer than four weeks until the November election and have occurred at a higher clip.

At least part of the reason for the uptick in falsehoods is Trump’s obsession with news and posts about himself, and his impulse to repost anything politically positive for him without regard as to its veracity.

But the fake Dimon claim stands apart because of his significance to Trump, who has long admired Dimon’s success and would covet the peer recognition at a time when he has struggled with celebrity endorsements compared with Harris, who has received backing from the likes of Taylor Swift.

The Trump campaign had hoped that Dimon might speak at the Republican national convention in July, according to people familiar with the matter, but he did not end up accepting the invitation.

Dimon is particularly noteworthy in corporate finance for his tenure at JP Morgan, which became the largest bank in the United States after he led the acquisition of the troubled banks Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual during the 2008 financial crisis.

As a result, Trump was pleased when Dimon offered some compliments about the Trump administration’s economic policies during an interview with CNBC at the World Economic Summit in Davos, Switzerland.

“Take a step back, be honest. He was kind of right about Nato, kind of right on immigration,” Dimon said in January. “He grew the economy quite well. Trade tax reform worked. He was right about some of China.”

Trump and his allies widely shared Dimon’s comments. This year, Trump suggested he would consider appointing Dimon his treasury secretary if he won the election, but later retracted the offer.

The chief operating officer of Truth Social’s parent company has resigned, and the company must hand over almost 800,000 shares to one of its investors as part of a court ruling, according to a regulatory filing.

Andrew Northwall, the former COO, resigned from Trump Media & Technology Group Corp late last month, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission filing, adding that the company plans to “transition his duties internally”.

No further details were provided about the resignation. He joined the company in December 2021, according to his LinkedIn page.

The SEC filing also disclosed that a Delaware court ruled last month that 785,825 shares of Trump Media must be released to Arc Global Investments II. Both parties have been feuding over how many shares Arc was owed after Trump Media combined with Digital World Acquisition Corp. The court said that ARC and Trump Media have the option to file an appeal within 30 days after its final order.

Trump Media runs the social media platform Truth Social, which Trump created after he was banned from Twitter and Facebook following the Capitol riot on 6 January 2021. Based in Sarasota, Florida, the company has been losing money and struggling to raise revenue. It lost nearly $58.2m last year while generating only $4.1m in revenue, according to regulatory filings.

Shares of Trump Media have been considered a meme stock by some market experts, which is a nickname given to stocks that get caught up in buzz online and shoot way beyond what traditional analysis says they are worth. The stock has fluctuated for several months, with trading largely driven by individual investors who are typically considered less sophisticated than day traders.

Late last month Trump Media’s stock fell to its lowest level ever on the first trading day that its biggest shareholder, Donald Trump, was free to sell his stake in the company behind the Truth Social platform.

Trump Media, whose shares are commonly called TMTG, started trading publicly in March. When the company made its debut on the Nasdaq in March, the shares hit a high of $79.38.

Shares of Trump Media & Technology rose slightly to $16.20 before the market open on Friday.

Naomi Campbell has admitted she failed in her duties as a trustee at the Fashion for Relief charity she founded – but has insisted she never engaged in financial misconduct or used the charity for personal gain during its chaotic nine-year existence.

Campbell was last week banned from running a charity for five years after a scathing report found she and her two fellow trustees were culpable for multiple incidents of serious misconduct and financial mismanagement.

Fashion for Relief raised nearly £4.8m from fashion show fundraisers over five years to 2020 but gave just 10% of the £4.6m proceeds to partner charities in the form of grants, the Charity Commission inquiry found.

It revealed that the charity – which was set up to raise money for good causes around the world – spent tens of thousands of pounds on luxury hotel rooms, spa treatments, personal security and cigarettes for Campbell at a Fashion for Relief charity fashion event.

A spokesperson for Campbell said she “acknowledges and accepts her accountability” as a Fashion for Relief trustee. While she admitted she “may not have been as actively engaged in the charity’s day-to-day operations as she should have been”, she said she had “never engaged in any form of financial misconduct”.

A statement issued on behalf of Campbell on Friday said: “For over three decades, [Campbell] has dedicated herself tirelessly to charitable causes, always with the sole intention of helping others and never for personal gain. Naomi has never received payment for her involvement with Fashion for Relief, nor has she billed any personal expenses to the organisation.”

The statement also addresses a Guardian report that revealed Fashion for Relief was the subject of a “serious incident report” filed to the commission by Unicef UK after the global children’s charity was incorrectly named as a fundraising partner at a Fashion for Relief London fashion week charity event in September 2019.

Campbell’s spokesperson said Fashion for Relief had been involved in “ongoing meetings and discussions” about a fundraising collaboration with Unicef prior to the event, and had prepared promotional materials in anticipation. Press articles and social media referred to Fashion for Relief partnering with Unicef before and after the event.

The spokesperson said: “At the last minute, the collaboration did not go ahead. All efforts were made to remove the Unicef brand from event materials. Unicef was not included in the event invitation or website, and Naomi’s speech made no mention of Unicef.”

Campbell’s team considers the use of the Unicef brand on promotional materials an honest mistake made in good faith. A spokesperson said that, after the 2019 event, Fashion for Relief had discussions with Unicef UK about a potential future fundraising collaboration but this did not go ahead because of the Covid pandemic.

Unicef said it had nothing to add to a statement it made earlier this week in which it said it had never held any official partnership with Fashion for Relief and never received any funds from the 2019 event.

Unicef UK filed the serious incident report in 2022 after it became aware its brand had been used in association with the event. Charities are required to tell the commission when they experience “adverse events” that they consider result in harm to beneficiaries, financial loss, or damage to their reputation.

Save the Children and The Mayor’s Fund for London have said they were owed money after partnering with Fashion for Relief on fundraising events. They later received £200,000 and £50,000 respectively when Fashion for Relief was wound up by commission managers in 2023.

The serious incident report was considered by the commission during its two-and-a-half-year inquiry into Fashion for Relief. The inquiry report details extraordinary examples of chaotic management and poor record-keeping at the charity over a number of years, together with multiple breaches of trustees’ legal duties.

These include unsanctioned consultancy and expenses payments of £290,000 over two years to a Fashion for Relief trustee, Bianka Hellmich. The payments, authorised retrospectively by Campbell, were made in breach of their legal duties as trustees. Hellmich, who last week received a nine-year trustee ban, repaid the money after the commission intervened.

Naomi Campbell has admitted she failed in her duties as a trustee at the Fashion for Relief charity she founded – but has insisted she never engaged in financial misconduct or used the charity for personal gain during its chaotic nine-year existence.

Campbell was last week banned from running a charity for five years after a scathing report found she and her two fellow trustees were culpable for multiple incidents of serious misconduct and financial mismanagement.

Fashion for Relief raised nearly £4.8m from fashion show fundraisers over five years to 2020 but gave just 10% of the £4.6m proceeds to partner charities in the form of grants, the Charity Commission inquiry found.

It revealed that the charity – which was set up to raise money for good causes around the world – spent tens of thousands of pounds on luxury hotel rooms, spa treatments, personal security and cigarettes for Campbell at a Fashion for Relief charity fashion event.

A spokesperson for Campbell said she “acknowledges and accepts her accountability” as a Fashion for Relief trustee. While she admitted she “may not have been as actively engaged in the charity’s day-to-day operations as she should have been”, she said she had “never engaged in any form of financial misconduct”.

A statement issued on behalf of Campbell on Friday said: “For over three decades, [Campbell] has dedicated herself tirelessly to charitable causes, always with the sole intention of helping others and never for personal gain. Naomi has never received payment for her involvement with Fashion for Relief, nor has she billed any personal expenses to the organisation.”

The statement also addresses a Guardian report that revealed Fashion for Relief was the subject of a “serious incident report” filed to the commission by Unicef UK after the global children’s charity was incorrectly named as a fundraising partner at a Fashion for Relief London fashion week charity event in September 2019.

Campbell’s spokesperson said Fashion for Relief had been involved in “ongoing meetings and discussions” about a fundraising collaboration with Unicef prior to the event, and had prepared promotional materials in anticipation. Press articles and social media referred to Fashion for Relief partnering with Unicef before and after the event.

The spokesperson said: “At the last minute, the collaboration did not go ahead. All efforts were made to remove the Unicef brand from event materials. Unicef was not included in the event invitation or website, and Naomi’s speech made no mention of Unicef.”

Campbell’s team considers the use of the Unicef brand on promotional materials an honest mistake made in good faith. A spokesperson said that, after the 2019 event, Fashion for Relief had discussions with Unicef UK about a potential future fundraising collaboration but this did not go ahead because of the Covid pandemic.

Unicef said it had nothing to add to a statement it made earlier this week in which it said it had never held any official partnership with Fashion for Relief and never received any funds from the 2019 event.

Unicef UK filed the serious incident report in 2022 after it became aware its brand had been used in association with the event. Charities are required to tell the commission when they experience “adverse events” that they consider result in harm to beneficiaries, financial loss, or damage to their reputation.

Save the Children and The Mayor’s Fund for London have said they were owed money after partnering with Fashion for Relief on fundraising events. They later received £200,000 and £50,000 respectively when Fashion for Relief was wound up by commission managers in 2023.

The serious incident report was considered by the commission during its two-and-a-half-year inquiry into Fashion for Relief. The inquiry report details extraordinary examples of chaotic management and poor record-keeping at the charity over a number of years, together with multiple breaches of trustees’ legal duties.

These include unsanctioned consultancy and expenses payments of £290,000 over two years to a Fashion for Relief trustee, Bianka Hellmich. The payments, authorised retrospectively by Campbell, were made in breach of their legal duties as trustees. Hellmich, who last week received a nine-year trustee ban, repaid the money after the commission intervened.

Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary, shot down criticism by Elon Musk on the government’s handling of Hurricane Helene relief efforts, accusing the SpaceX CEO of spreading misinformation.

Musk accused the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) of blocking his satellite internet company, Starlink, from delivering to parts of North Carolina decimated by the hurricane, a claim both Fema and Buttigieg said was false.

“No one is shutting down the airspace and FAA doesn’t block legitimate rescue and recovery flights. If you’re encountering a problem give me a call,” Buttigieg wrote. Musk replied that he had seen hundreds of such reports and would phone.

Musk had spent several hours on Friday raging on X against Fema over what he called “belligerent government incompetence”. Posting texts allegedly received from “a SpaceX engineer on the ground”, he accused the federal agency of blockading the disaster area and preventing private helicopters from delivering Starlink terminals, which connect to satellite internet service, and other supplies.

Musk wrote, “SpaceX engineers are trying to deliver Starlink terminals & supplies to devastated areas in North Carolina right now and @FEMA is both failing to help AND won’t let others help. This is unconscionable!!”

When reached for comment on Musk’s allegations, Fema issued a statement similar to Buttigieg’s: “The claims about FEMA confiscating or taking commodities, supplies or resources in North Carolina, Tennessee, or any state impacted by Helene are false.

“FEMA has helped provide Starlink terminals to the state of North Carolina, including to the Eastern Band of Cherokee Nation and critical lifeline locations as determined by the state. These units are supporting state and local municipalities, Urban Search and Rescue and disaster coordination. Starlink units have been sent to multiple states in support of Hurricane Helene response efforts,” said Jaclyn Rothenberg, Fema director of public affairs.

Still, Donald Trump amplified Musk’s claims on his app Truth Social. Musk said he would join the former president at a rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday.

False information has swirled in the communications blackout that has followed Hurricane Helene’s devastation. Phone and power lines were down across the south. Trump falsely accused Joe Biden of failing to call Georgia’s governor after the storm, when Biden had phoned Brian Kemp.

Musk has a history of inserting himself into rescue operations. In 2018, he offered to deliver a small submersible to Thailand to assist with the rescue of a boys’ soccer team, which divers on the scene called a “PR stunt”. In response, Musk called the head rescuer a “pedo guy”, eliciting a defamation suit that Musk later won.

Ministers are reportedly planning to ban vaping in playgrounds, hospital grounds and near schools in an attempt to prevent children from taking up the habit.

Wes Streeting, the health secretary, is considering restricting the use of e-cigarettes outdoors in England with Chris Whitty, the country’s chief medical officer for England, said to favour the move.

Vaping restrictions will be included in the tobacco and vapes bill due to be presented to parliament in the coming weeks. Whitty is understood to have argued for including pub gardens in the ban but no final decision has been made, the Times reported.

Ministers are not expected to include outdoor hospitality after the backlash in August over proposals to ban smoking in pub gardens to reduce the number of preventable deaths linked to tobacco use.

A study published earlier this week found that 1 million people in England now vape despite having never been regular smokers previously, a seven-fold increase in just three years.

Rates of e-cigarette use among adults who had never regularly had cigarettes were stable until 2021, when one in 200 – about 133,000 people – were vapers. However, the proportion increased sharply to one in 28 in 2024 – 1,006,000 people – according to the study published in the Lancet Public Health journal.

Separate figures from the Office for National Statistics showed 5.1 million people aged 16 or over in Britain – about one in 10 – use e-cigarettes. Vaping rates were highest among those aged 16 to 24, at 15.8%, the ONS found.

Prof Nick Hopkinson, a respiratory physician and chair of Action on Smoking and Health, said: “Vaping has helped millions of adults quit smoking and is much less harmful than smoking. However, it is not risk-free and high levels of use among young people and growing use among never-smokers is a concern.”

Prof Sanjay Agrawal, the Royal College of Physicians’ special adviser on tobacco, said “urgent action” was required to tackle the rise in vaping among young people and those who had never smoked.

He said: “While e-cigarettes remain a valuable tool for helping smokers quit, it is essential that their use doesn’t create new public health risks, particularly among children.”

A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: “We do not comment on leaks. Whilst vapes can be an effective tool to help adult smokers quit, children should never vape.

“The tobacco and vapes bill will bring about definitive and positive change to stop future generations from becoming hooked on nicotine and stop vapes and other nicotine products from being deliberately branded to target children.”

Doctors are hailing “amazing” trial results that show a new drug combination stopped lung cancer advancing for more than 40% longer than the standard treatment.

Lung cancer is the world’s leading cause of cancer death, accounting for about 1.8 million deaths every year. Survival rates in those with advanced forms of the disease, where tumours have spread, are particularly poor.

Patients diagnosed with advanced forms of lung cancer who took the combination of amivantamab and lazertinib were still alive with no progression in their disease after 23.7 months on average, according to data from the global study. Average progression-free survival in patients using the standard drug, osimertinib, was 16.6 months, the trial found.

Experts said the breakthrough came amid a “golden age” of cancer research where a greater understanding of what spurs on specific tumours is informing better ways to beat the disease.

Prof Martin Forster, a medical oncologist at University College hospital and the trial’s chief investigator in the UK, said: “Better understanding of the biology that drives lung cancers has guided the development of these targeted therapies.

“It’s amazing to see this new combination shows longer cancer control than osimertinib, which was itself a breakthrough treatment only a few years ago.”

In the phase 3 trial, 1,074 patients were recruited between 2020 and 2022 from countries including the UK, US, Australia, France, Brazil, India and China. Each had an advanced form of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), the most common form of the disease.

In the UK arm of the trial, patients were recruited from University College London NHS trust, the Christie in Manchester, Chelsea and Westminster hospital in London, Nottingham university hospitals NHS trust, the Royal Marsden NHS trust, and the Edinburgh Cancer Centre at Western general hospital.

Everyone in the trial also had a mutation of the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) gene, found in as many as a quarter of global lung cancer cases, and about 40% of cases in Asia.

An EGFR mutation is more common in women than men, and in people who have never smoked or have been light smokers.

Patients in the trial were randomly assigned to receive either the drug combination of amivantamab and lazertinib; the standard treatment for this group of patients, osimertinib; or lazertinib.

Amivantamab is a monoclonal antibody while Lazertinib is a tyrosine kinase inhibitor. Both drugs target cancer cells to halt their advance.

Prof Raffaele Califano, a consultant in medical oncology and the trial’s principal investigator at the Christie, said: “By combining these two drugs, which stop the cancer from growing in different ways, we see a significant improvement in progression-free survival rates compared to the drug we currently use.

“Survival rates for lung cancer are still very low compared with other types of the disease and so to see such positive results is a welcome development.”

In August, the drug combination was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in the US. Doctors involved in the trial hope the treatment might also be available on the NHS in future.

“The more treatment options we have, the more hope we bring to patients and families,” said Califano. “We are hopeful that this option will be endorsed by Nice [the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence] and reimbursed for use in the NHS.”

Most of the patients experienced some side-effects. The most common types reported in the trial, which was funded by Janssen, were a rash, an infection or a blood clot.

Doctors involved with the trial said the drug combination formed part of an emerging area of treatment called precision medicine.

Advances in precision medicine have led to new treatments tailored to specific characteristics of individuals, such as a person’s genetic makeup, or the genetic profile of a patient’s tumour.

Forster said: “This precision approach is improving outcomes for many more of our patients, as new drugs are being developed to exploit vulnerabilities being identified in increasing numbers of lung cancers.”

Paula Chadwick, the chief executive of the Roy Castle Lung Cancer Foundation, said: “Hope is rocket fuel for people with lung cancer. Each new breakthrough keeps that hope burning, even if it doesn’t directly benefit an individual.

“While this potential new treatment would only be available to a select group of people within the lung cancer community, it demonstrates the ongoing progress in our fight against the disease, improving treatment options, transforming care and, ultimately, helping people live well with lung cancer for longer.”

Anna Kinsella, a research information manager at Cancer Research UK, described the results as “good news”, with those on the drug combination “able to have more time with their loved ones”.

“We are in a golden age of cancer research where a greater understanding of what drives specific cancers is informing new and better ways to beat the disease,” Kinsella added. “Research like this helps more people to live longer, better lives, free from the fear of cancer.”

Doctors are hailing “amazing” trial results that show a new drug combination stopped lung cancer advancing for more than 40% longer than the standard treatment.

Lung cancer is the world’s leading cause of cancer death, accounting for about 1.8 million deaths every year. Survival rates in those with advanced forms of the disease, where tumours have spread, are particularly poor.

Patients diagnosed with advanced forms of lung cancer who took the combination of amivantamab and lazertinib were still alive with no progression in their disease after 23.7 months on average, according to data from the global study. Average progression-free survival in patients using the standard drug, osimertinib, was 16.6 months, the trial found.

Experts said the breakthrough came amid a “golden age” of cancer research where a greater understanding of what spurs on specific tumours is informing better ways to beat the disease.

Prof Martin Forster, a medical oncologist at University College hospital and the trial’s chief investigator in the UK, said: “Better understanding of the biology that drives lung cancers has guided the development of these targeted therapies.

“It’s amazing to see this new combination shows longer cancer control than osimertinib, which was itself a breakthrough treatment only a few years ago.”

In the phase 3 trial, 1,074 patients were recruited between 2020 and 2022 from countries including the UK, US, Australia, France, Brazil, India and China. Each had an advanced form of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), the most common form of the disease.

In the UK arm of the trial, patients were recruited from University College London NHS trust, the Christie in Manchester, Chelsea and Westminster hospital in London, Nottingham university hospitals NHS trust, the Royal Marsden NHS trust, and the Edinburgh Cancer Centre at Western general hospital.

Everyone in the trial also had a mutation of the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) gene, found in as many as a quarter of global lung cancer cases, and about 40% of cases in Asia.

An EGFR mutation is more common in women than men, and in people who have never smoked or have been light smokers.

Patients in the trial were randomly assigned to receive either the drug combination of amivantamab and lazertinib; the standard treatment for this group of patients, osimertinib; or lazertinib.

Amivantamab is a monoclonal antibody while Lazertinib is a tyrosine kinase inhibitor. Both drugs target cancer cells to halt their advance.

Prof Raffaele Califano, a consultant in medical oncology and the trial’s principal investigator at the Christie, said: “By combining these two drugs, which stop the cancer from growing in different ways, we see a significant improvement in progression-free survival rates compared to the drug we currently use.

“Survival rates for lung cancer are still very low compared with other types of the disease and so to see such positive results is a welcome development.”

In August, the drug combination was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in the US. Doctors involved in the trial hope the treatment might also be available on the NHS in future.

“The more treatment options we have, the more hope we bring to patients and families,” said Califano. “We are hopeful that this option will be endorsed by Nice [the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence] and reimbursed for use in the NHS.”

Most of the patients experienced some side-effects. The most common types reported in the trial, which was funded by Janssen, were a rash, an infection or a blood clot.

Doctors involved with the trial said the drug combination formed part of an emerging area of treatment called precision medicine.

Advances in precision medicine have led to new treatments tailored to specific characteristics of individuals, such as a person’s genetic makeup, or the genetic profile of a patient’s tumour.

Forster said: “This precision approach is improving outcomes for many more of our patients, as new drugs are being developed to exploit vulnerabilities being identified in increasing numbers of lung cancers.”

Paula Chadwick, the chief executive of the Roy Castle Lung Cancer Foundation, said: “Hope is rocket fuel for people with lung cancer. Each new breakthrough keeps that hope burning, even if it doesn’t directly benefit an individual.

“While this potential new treatment would only be available to a select group of people within the lung cancer community, it demonstrates the ongoing progress in our fight against the disease, improving treatment options, transforming care and, ultimately, helping people live well with lung cancer for longer.”

Anna Kinsella, a research information manager at Cancer Research UK, described the results as “good news”, with those on the drug combination “able to have more time with their loved ones”.

“We are in a golden age of cancer research where a greater understanding of what drives specific cancers is informing new and better ways to beat the disease,” Kinsella added. “Research like this helps more people to live longer, better lives, free from the fear of cancer.”

Scotland Yard is facing claims that corrupt police officers helped Mohamed Al Fayed in persecuting members of his staff, including a young woman who allegedly rebuffed the Harrods owner’s sexual advances.

One detective constable, who is accused of regularly taking cash bribes to carry out Fayed’s wishes, was secretly given a mobile phone from Harrods to facilitate his illicit work, according to a former security chief at the luxury department store.

Separately, a senior commander in the Met was alleged to have received large Harrods hampers “whenever he had been a particularly great help”, and Fayed was described as “ingenious” in his use of the police to access confidential records on the Police National Computer.

One alleged victim of the corruption is said to have been a young nanny to Fayed’s children, Hermina da Silva, who was was dismissed in 1994 after apparently rejecting the billionaire’s advances. She was arrested on trumped up allegations of theft after threatening a sexual harassment case but was later released without charge.

“It’s amazing what they will do for just a few readies,” John Macnamara, Fayed’s long-time security chief and an ex-detective, was said to have remarked about the police at the time of Da Silva’s arrest.

A Met police spokesman said: “We are carrying out full reviews of all existing allegations reported to us about Al Fayed to ensure there are no new lines of enquiry based on new information which has emerged. This includes liaising with the Directorate of Professional Standards where appropriate.”

The allegations of police corruption are contained in 52-page written statement drafted in 1997 by Bob Loftus, who worked under Macnamara at Harrods, as part of Vanity Fair’s defence to a libel action pursued by Fayed against the magazine.

The case was settled out of court but a draft copy of Loftus’s statement seen by the Guardian was retained by Vanity Fair’s then British editor, Henry Porter, who claimed to this newspaper that some Met police officers had been “important enablers and it could be said that they were a factor in allowing him to continue his abuse years after we settled in 1997”.

Loftus, 83, who worked for Fayed as the director of security at Harrods between 1987 and 1996, was unable to comment due to ill health, but Eamon Coyle, 70, who was Loftus’s deputy, said he recognised the allegations contained in the statement to be true.

Coyle said: “I knew that there was a tame policeman. He was under the direct control of Macnamara. He was on tap. He was on the payroll.”

He added that it was generally understood Macnamara had significant influence in Scotland Yard at commander level.

“There were some commanders he was regularly in contact with and I assume, when solutions were found for various issues, that he had tapped them up to assist,” Coyle said. “Bob had confided that in me, because we were quite shocked, you know, that should occur. You know, it was just part and parcel of the services that he provided to Fayed.”

A BBC documentary aired last month, based on an investigation by the producer Keaton Stone, carried the testimony of five women who allege they were raped by Fayed.

The Met has since said they are investigating a number of new allegations of sexual crimes in addition to reviewing the case of 19 women who had already come forward between 2005 and Fayed’s death in 2023, at the age of 94.

Scotland Yard has said that although it was not possible to bring criminal proceedings against someone who had died, “we must ensure we fully explore whether any other individuals could be pursued for any criminal offences”.

Porter said the allegations contained in Loftus’s statement suggested the conduct of former police officers should be included in the review of potential criminality related to Fayed, who sold Harrods to the Qatar Investment Authority for £1.5bn in 2010.

According to Loftus’s statement, he was instructed in the middle of 1994 to “find an attractive young Portuguese girl who could work as a cleaner” at Fayed’s home in Oxted, Surrey.

Da Silva “proved to be acceptable” to Fayed and “quickly became a nanny because the children liked her” but she was dismissed in August that year.

Loftus writes: “She made a fuss. Macnamara told me that Mohamed Al Fayed wanted the problem sorted out. He said that, ‘We’ve done a moody, she is going to be nicked’.

“I understood this to mean that a false allegation would be made that she had committed a criminal offence and this would be a set-up to stop her from claiming that Fayed had sexually harassed her.”

Loftus claimed Macnamara told him he had arranged for a detective constable from a London police station to organise the arrest.

He wrote: “He was a policeman who had been bribed in the past to trump up charges against a bodyguard who had fallen foul of Mohamed Al Fayed. Macnamara told me: ‘It’s amazing what they will do for just a few readies’. Hermina was accused of stealing property from [Fayed’s brother’s property in] Park Lane.”

Da Silva was subsequently released without charge and given a £12,000 pay-off from Harrods.

Loftus further alleged that the police officer had been given a mobile phone but that Macnamara had said they needed to be careful because the officer was getting “greedy”.

Loftus said he recalled being told by a colleague at Harrods at Christmas time that year that the officer had turned up “looking for a bung”.

He wrote: “I understood this to mean one of the white envelopes full of cash that Mohamed Al Fayed was in the habit of giving his employees.

“I told him to make sure [he] was sorted out but to be careful and keep a record … On another occasion [he] had come into Harrods and was given a suit.”

Loftus claimed Macnamara often sought out confidential information from the police.

He wrote: “Fayed’s use of the police is ingenious. There are tight controls in place to ensure that unauthorised checks on the Police National Computer are not made explicitly… Mr Macnamara would get around this by networking and having a number of contacts all over the country.”

Loftus added that he was personally pressured by Macnamara to “use my personal contact with a senior CID [central investigation department] officer at Chelsea police station to cause an investigation to be made in order to discredit” a senior executive at Harrods who had angered Fayed.

Macnamara was alleged to have been liberal in giving out hampers to police officers, with those in the most senior ranks enjoying greater largesse.

Loftus wrote: “Macnamara would arrange that a number of chief superintendents would send their car round to receive their hamper.”

One commander was said to be a particularly “great receiver of hospitality” and would receive the gifts “whenever he had been a particularly great help to Harrods”.

A Harrods spokesperson said: “We want to offer our assistance with any new or existing inquiries the Metropolitan police receive in relation to accusations regarding the actions of Fayed. Harrods is in direct communication with the Metropolitan police to ensure we are offering our assistance with any of their relevant inquiries.”

More than 100 people are still missing after smugglers apparently forced migrants to leave their boats and swim in the Red Sea off the coast of Djibouti, the International Organization for Migration has said.

Forty-eight people have so far been confirmed dead after the incident on Monday, which involved two boats that had left Yemen for Djibouti with a total of 310 people onboard, said Frantz Celestin, a regional director at the UN agency. “Unfortunately, we have yet to account for about 108 of the migrants,” he said.

A search and rescue mission is ongoing, led by the Djiboutian coastguard and other Djiboutian authorities.

The incident happened 150 metres from a beach in the administrative district of Khor Angar, in the country’s north-west. One boat was carrying 100 people, of whom 99 survived, while the other had 210.

It is not clear why the smugglers forced the passengers out of the vessels. Celestin said they were probably “spooked” by the coastguard or they wanted to go back to pick up more people.

The route between the Horn of Africa and Arab peninsula is one of the busiest migration paths in the world. Each year hundreds of thousands of people, mostly Ethiopians and Somalis, use it to reach Gulf countries, mainly Saudi Arabia. Some have been forced out of their communities by conflict and natural disasters, and others move to seek work and other economic opportunities. “They’re looking at addressing their aspirations,” Celestin said.

The eastern route accounts for most of the migratory movement from the Horn of Africa. The other main ones are the northern route to north Africa and Europe, and the southern route to southern Africa.

The eastern route differs from the others because it is more likely to involve temporary movement patterns, for example people migrating to Saudi Arabia to work for a short period of time and then coming back, said Ayla Bonfiglio, the regional head for eastern and southern Africa at the Mixed Migration Centre, a research organisation.

The route is also one of the most dangerous globally, with some people dying from walking long distances in searing heat and others from the capsizing of boats that smugglers have crammed them on to in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.

Monday’s tragedy was the second deadliest on the eastern route sea crossing and it made this year the deadliest for migrant sea crossings on the migration corridor, the IOM said. In June, 196 people died on the path.

“The deaths and the tragedies that we see along this route are devastating,” Bonfiglio said.

Celestin said there were probably a lot more such incidents that were not reported. “The smugglers don’t have an incentive to report such things,” he said.

Sky News has pulled out of an interview with Boris Johnson after its political editor was told she could not make an audio recording or transcript of the talk.

The former prime minister had promised to “reveal what really happened during my time as [London] mayor, foreign secretary and PM” during the conversation next week as he promotes his memoir Unleashed. Johnson’s interview with the BBC was dropped earlier this week after the presenter Laura Kuenssberg mistakenly sent him her briefing notes.

In a post on X on Friday, Beth Rigby said: “I was looking forward to interviewing Boris Johnson at Cheltenham but regrettably I can’t go ahead with the event because I am not allowed [to] make an audio recording or transcript of the interview.

“As a journalist in conversation with a former PM at a public event, I can only proceed if we do it on the record. I’m sorry to have to pull out.”

On Wednesday, Kuenssberg said she had sent Johnson the notes for her interview “in a message meant for my team”, and cancelled the discussion with the former Conservative party leader.

The BBC’s former political editor said the error was “embarrassing and disappointing”, and meant it was “not right for the interview to go ahead”.

In an interview with ITV News broadcast on Friday night, Johnson said he regretted apologising over his government’s lockdown parties in Downing Street in 2020. In his memoir, he wrote that he made a “mistake” issuing “pathetic” and “grovelling” apologies over partygate, which he said “made it look as though we were far more culpable than we were”.

Tom Bradby, who presents ITV News at Ten, asked Johnson: “You basically say: ‘It wasn’t a big deal. I regret apologising.’ Is that really your position? Did you regret apologising to the queen?”

Johnson refused to answer and replied: “I don’t discuss my conversations with the queen.”

He added: “What I was trying to say there was, I think that the blanket apology – the sort of apology I issued right at the beginning – I think the trouble with it was that afterwards, all the accusations that then rained down on officials who’d been working very hard in No 10 and elsewhere were thought to be true.

“And by apologising I had sort of inadvertently validated the entire corpus and it wasn’t fair on those people.”

The memoir also claimed that Gavin Williamson blocked a £400m deal to bring the British-Iranian prisoner Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe home from Iran five years before she was released, on the basis the money could be used by Hezbollah.

Johnson said that in 2017 he reached an agreement for the dual national’s release in return for money owed by Britain to Tehran since the 1970s. The Treasury and the Foreign Office approved, but No 10 insisted the decision needed to be signed off by all relevant departments, including the Ministry of Defence, which at the time was headed by Williamson.

Argentina’s rightwing populist president, Javier Milei, has been accused of plagiarising a chunk of his recent speech to the United Nations general assembly from the political drama The West Wing.

“It seems like fiction, but it isn’t,” the left-leaning Buenos Aires newspaper Página 12 reported on Friday, claiming Milei had “copied, word for word, a monologue” by the television show’s fictional president, Josiah “Jed” Bartlet.

Suspicions over Milei’s address surfaced this week when the political columnist Carlos Pagni flagged the “extraordinary” similarities between part of the president’s speech and words uttered by Martin Sheen’s Bartlet 21 years earlier. “Didn’t anyone else notice?” Pagni wrote in the newspaper La Nación, before transcribing the words of both men.

Addressing world leaders on 24 September, Argentina’s shaggy-haired libertarian leader said: “We believe in defending everyone’s lives. We believe in defending everyone’s property. We believe in freedom of speech for everybody. We believe in freedom to worship for everybody. We believe in freedom of trade for everybody … And because in these times what happens in one country quickly has an impact in others, we believe all people should live free from tyranny and oppression, whether in the form of political oppression, economic slavery or religious fanaticism. This fundamental idea must not be mere words – it has to be supported by deeds: diplomatically, economically and materially.”

During episode 15 of season four of the Washington-set drama, Bartlet tells his staff: “We’re for freedom of speech everywhere. We’re for freedom to worship everywhere. We’re for freedom to learn … for everybody. And because in our time, you can build a bomb in your country and bring it to my country, what goes on in your country is very much my business. And so we are for freedom from tyranny, everywhere, whether in the guise of political oppression … or economic slavery … or religious fanaticism … That most fundamental idea cannot be met with merely our support. It has to be met with our strength: diplomatically, economically, materially.”

The likeness between the two speeches raised Argentinian eyebrows and was attributed by one newspaper to the West Wing obsession of Milei’s chief strategist, Santiago Caputo. “Fanatical about the screenwriter [and creator of the series] Aaron Sorkin, Caputo has watched the whole of The West Wing between seven and nine times,” La Nación reported this year.

Many observers emphasised the irony of Milei – a volatile rightwinger with ties to Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Jair Bolsonaro and Viktor Orbán – cribbing from a fictional Democratic president known for his even-keeled administration and progressive politics.

But politicians of all stripes appear to have sought inspiration from the Emmy-winning series. The former British prime minister Theresa May faced similar accusations during the Conservative party’s 2017 conference, although Downing Street said there was “no question of plagiarism” and denied that The West Wing was among May’s favourite US shows.

In 2020, a West Wing-watching reporter in Australia noticed that a speech given by the Labor politician Will Fowles had a distinct whiff of Bartlet. “There were a couple of phrases that jumped out at me as being very familiar … [and] sure enough when I put them side by side I realised that what I thought I had heard is what I had heard,” the journalist, James Talia, later recalled. He told Newsweek that Fowles had admitted being “a very big West Wing fan” and to paying “an unconscious homage” to Sorkin, whom he considered “one of the greatest political speechwriters we have ever seen”.

Bartlet is also not the only fictional US president to have had his words pirated. At the height of the coronavirus pandemic, the Argentinian politician Alejandro Torres was filmed trying to lift voters’ spirits with the words of Thomas J Whitmore, the fictional president played by Bill Pullman in the 1996 alien invasion film Independence Day.

In 2017, the Mexican politician Miguel Ángel Covarrubias was accused of poaching lines from Frank Underwood, the machiavellian president played by Kevin Spacey in the Netflix series House of Cards. Covarrubias denied plagiarism and claimed it was a deliberate tactic to provoke interest.

Five years earlier it was President Andrew Shepherd, played by Michael Douglas in the 1995 romantic comedy The American President, whose words were misappropriated by a real-life politician. “D’oh!,” Australia’s Anthony Albanese, then a cabinet minister, tweeted in embarrassment after being called out for lifting Shepherd’s lines.