At least 30 people have been killed by Israeli strikes throughout the day in northern Gaza’s Jabalia town and refugee camp, Gaza’s civil defence agency has said, a week after Israel launched an offensive there which it claims is aimed at stopping Hamas regrouping.

The agency’s spokesperson, Mahmud Bassal, said a strike that occurred before 9.40pm local time killed 12 people including women and children, while 14 were missing and likely trapped under the rubble.

Before that incident, Ahmad al-Kahlut – director of the agency in northern Gaza – said 18 people had been killed by several strikes, including hits on eight schools in the camp that were serving as shelters for displaced people.

In total, the day’s strikes left at least 110 injured, according to figures provided by Bassal and Kahlut. The Israeli military did not respond to questions posed by the news agency AFP about the strikes on schools in Jabalia, the largest of Gaza’s historic refugee camps.

Medics earlier told Reuters that at least 54 Palestinians were killed across the Gaza Strip on Friday.

The Israeli military claims it has killed dozens of militants in Jabalia, without providing any evidence. Photos published from the area by news wires have shown many children among the dead. It is not possible to independently verify death tolls from the camp as Israel does not allow foreign journalists in.

The charity Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), meanwhile, said thousands of people remained trapped in the camp while one staff member said people trying to leave – Israel has issued widespread evacuation orders for northern Gaza – are being shot.

“Nobody is allowed to get in or out; anyone who tries is getting shot,” MSF project coordinator Sarah Vuylsteke said on X. Five MSF staff were trapped in Jabalia, she said.

“I don’t know what to do; at any moment we could die. People are starving. I am afraid to stay, and I am also afraid to leave,” she quoted Haydar, an MSF driver, as saying.

At least 15 of the fatalities in Jabalia since dawn on Friday were due to Israeli strikes targeting various areas, including a school sheltering displaced individuals, the official Palestinian news agency Wafa said, citing medical sources.

Gaza’s civil defence agency said dozens were wounded by Israeli quadcopter drone fire at the same school.

There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military, which has previously claimed Gaza’s militants use such shelters for cover. Hamas has denied this.

The Israeli military has sent troops into the nearby towns of Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahiya as well as Jabalia. Hamas has said it will keep fighting Israeli forces.

Palestinian health officials have reported at least 130 deaths in the operation so far, while the military has told residents to evacuate areas where the UN estimates more than 400,000 people are trapped. Rescue workers have reportedly struggled to reach bodies and injured people due to Israeli fire.

Journalists have also been killed and wounded in the renewed Israeli offensive in northern Gaza, which has also targeted hospitals, with the broadcaster Al Jazeera this week again accusing Israel of deliberately targeting them after two of its journalists were critically injured. Israel denies deliberately targeting journalists.

Al Jazeera reporter Anas Al-Sharif on Friday said in a post on X that the health of his colleague Fadi Al Wahidi, who was shot in the neck by an Israeli sniper and paralysed on Wednesday, was deteriorating and called for assistance in evacuating him from the territory.

Posting footage from the aftermath of the Israeli attacks on Jabalia on X, he added: “Without exaggeration, these are the most difficult days of the Israeli war on Gaza.”

UN officials have expressed concern that the ongoing Israeli offensive and evacuation orders in northern Gaza could disrupt the second phase of its polio vaccination campaign set to begin next week.

Healthcare officials have reported that dozens of facilities in Gaza are under evacuation orders from the Israeli military, complicating humanitarian efforts amid the conflict.

Aid groups carried out an initial round of vaccinations last month after a baby was partially paralysed by the type 2 polio virus in August, in the first such case in the territory in 25 years.

Reuters and Agence France-Presse contributed to this report

An Israeli airstrike has killed two Lebanese soldiers and wounded three others, hours after the Israeli military fired on the headquarters of a UN peacekeeping mission in Lebanon for the second time in as many days.

The two incidents on Friday prompted further concern over Israel’s escalating campaign, amid waves of heavy airstrikes across Lebanon. Lebanon’s army has not been involved in the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, and it withdrew its forces from the border between the countries when Israel launched its invasion last month.

The Lebanese army said its soldiers died in an Israeli airstrike near a military checkpoint in the southern Bint Jbeil province. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said that it had been targeting Hezbollah positions and was “unaware of any Lebanese army facilities found in the area of the strike”.

That airstrike came soon after two Sri Lankan members of the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (Unifil) were injured when the IDF opened fire near the peacekeeper’s base in Naqoura. The Israeli army said that its soldiers had targeted what they believed to be a threat 50 metres from the base, adding that it would continue to “examine the circumstances of the incident”.

Late on Friday night, Hezbollah warned Israelis to stay away from army sites in residential areas in the north of the country, saying Israel “uses the homes of settlers in some settlements”, and has military bases “inside settlement neighbourhoods.

“We warn the settlers from being near these military gatherings in order to preserve their lives.”

The shelling of UN positions has come as the conflict, which began a year ago in Gaza, continues to spread. Overnight Israeli airstrikes on central Beirut killed 22 people when they hit a densely populated residential neighbourhood of apartment blocks and small shops in the heart of the Lebanese capital.

Gaza’s civil defence agency said on Friday that at least 30 people were killed by Israeli strikes throughout the day in northern Gaza’s Jabaliya town and refugee camp.

At least 12 people were killed, including women and children, by a strike that occurred before 9.40pm local time (7.40pm BST), according to the agency. Before that incident, the director of the agency said 18 people had been killed by several Israeli strikes, including hits on eight schools in Jabaliya camp that were serving as shelters for displaced people.

The health ministry in Gaza said on Friday that at least 42,126 Palestinians had been killed by the Israeli military in the territory since the war, 61 of them in the most recent 24-hour period. The conflict was triggered on 7 October by a Hamas raid into southern Israel, in which its militants killed 1,200 Israelis and took 250 hostage.

The Unifil statement issued on Friday pointed out that the UN security council had sent peacekeepers to Lebanon in 2006 as part of arrangements that ended the last Israel-Hezbollah war, and the multilateral force had been exposed to “very serious risks”.

Two Indonesian Unifil peacekeepers were lightly wounded on Thursday when they were thrown from an observation tower that was hit by an Israeli tank round, and two other Unifil outposts had come under fire.

Joe Biden, the US president, said he was asking Israel to not hit UN peacekeepers, and the UN secretary general, António Guterres, told Israel that attacks on the peacekeeping force were intolerable.

Lt Col Nadav Shoshani, an IDF spokesperson, said on Friday the force was looking into the cases of UN peacekeepers being “inadvertently hurt during IDF combat”.

“The IDF expresses deep concern over incidents of this kind and is currently conducting a thorough review at the highest levels of command,” he said.

Unifil’s spokesperson, Andrea Tenenti, said the attacks on the UN bases had impaired the peacekeepers’ ability to monitor the conflict in southern Lebanon and ground incursions by IDF units.

“We have not been able to monitor the area as much as we want to because, for the safety and security of our troops, it’s important to stay inside the bases,” he told CNN in India.

He said 350,000 of the 500,000 people who live in southern Lebanon had fled their homes since the fighting started.

“We’re trying to do whatever we can to assist and to provide humanitarian assistance,” Tenenti said. “But the security concerns are very high.”

Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the UN relief organisation for Palestinian refugees across the region (Unrwa), said people in Gaza had become accustomed to being moved about “like pinballs” by IDF operations. He feared that the people of southern Lebanon were facing the same plight.

“One of the fears is that we replicate a situation similar to the one we have seen until now in Gaza,” he said.

The Israeli shelling of UN positions marks the culmination of a downward spiral of Israel’s relations with the international body. The Israeli foreign minister, Israel Katz, declared Guterres persona non grata earlier this month, accusing him of “lending support to terrorists” after the secretary general’s calls for a ceasefire in Gaza.

Speaking at an Asian summit in Laos on Friday, Guterres said the spread of the Middle East conflict would have dramatic effects on the world.

“I have never seen in my time as secretary general any example of death and destruction as dramatic as what we are witnessing here,” he said. “We are seeing escalation after escalation, a regionalisation of the conflict that is becoming a threat to global peace and security.”

The incidents at Unifil positions drew outrage from countries that contribute soldiers to serve as peacekeepers.

Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, condemned the attacks and called on the international community to stop selling weapons to Israel. The French foreign ministry summoned Israel’s ambassador over an incident in which Israeli troops opened fire at three positions held by UN peacekeepers.

Human Rights Watch called for the UN to set up a formal inquiry into Israeli attacks on Unifil peacekeepers, pointing out they could violate the laws of war.

A US-made munition was used in a strike on central Beirut that killed 22 people and wounded 117, according to an analysis of shrapnel found by the Guardian at the scene of the attack.

The strike on Thursday night hit an apartment complex in the densely populated neighbourhood of Basta, levelling the apartment building and destroying cars and the interiors of nearby residences.

It was the deadliest strike on Lebanon’s capital city since fighting between Hezbollah and Israel started a year ago.

A first responder on the scene said rescue crews had worked overnight to find survivors and recover the dead from under rubble. They said the building had more people living there than usual as residents had recently welcomed people displaced from Israeli bombing in south Lebanon and the southern suburbs of Beirut. That elevated the number of people wounded and killed in the airstrike.

The building was one of two hit in central Beirut on Thursday night, targeting the senior Hezbollah figure Wafiq Safa, the head of the group’s liaison and coordination unit and responsible for working with Lebanese security agencies. According to Reuters, Safa survived the assassination attempt.

The Guardian found remnants of a US-manufactured joint direct attack munition (Jdam) in the rubble of the collapsed apartment building on Friday afternoon. Jdams are guidance kits built by the US aerospace company Boeing that attach to large “dumb bombs” ranging up to 2,000lbs (900kg), converting them into GPS-guided bombs.

The weapons remnant was verified by the crisis, conflict and arms division of Human Rights Watch and a former US military bomb technician.

“The bolt pattern, its position and the shape of the of the remnant are consistent with the tail fin of a US-made, Jdam, guidance kit for Mk80 series air-dropped munitions,” said Richard Weir, a senior researcher in Human Rights Watch’s crisis, conflict and arms division, after viewing a photograph of the fragment. The Mk80 series encompasses three classes of bomb, the smallest of which is 500lbs and the largest is 2,000lbs.

“The use of these weapons in densely populated areas, like this one, places civilians and civilian objects in the immediate area at grave risk of immediate and lasting harm,” Weir said.

US weapons have been key to Israel’s war in Gaza and Lebanon, with Jdams specifically being one of Israel’s most requested munitions from the US. A previous investigation by the Guardian found that a Jdam was used in an attack that killed seven healthcare workers, deemed a violation of international law by Human Rights Watch.

Thursday’s attack marks the first time that a US-made munition is confirmed to have been used in an attack on central Beirut since 2006.

The US has come under heavy criticism for its continued military aid to Israel, which amounted to $17.9bn last year. In September, more than a dozen rights organisations signed a joint letter to the US president, Joe Biden, calling on him to suspend arms transfers to Israel, citing the use of US munitions in attacks in Gaza against civilians. Israel is currently fighting a case in the international court of justice filed by South Africa, which accuses Israel of perpetrating “genocidal acts” in its war on Gaza.

In Lebanon, people have been left reeling by the intensity of Israel’s aerial campaign in the country, which started on 23 September.

People living in the apartment that was struck who survived still seemed to be in a state of shock on Friday afternoon. A husband and wife stepped gingerly over rubble to reach what used to be their apartment, picking up clothes strewn across the ground and placing them in a plastic bag filled with what few belongings they could salvage.

Ali, a 30-year-old man who lives on a nearby street, was standing at the site of the strike on Friday afternoon, carrying a picture of his uncle who was killed the night before and reciting a prayer under his breath as he thumbed prayer beads. His uncle was from Mays al-Jabal, a town on the Israel-Lebanon frontier, and had recently fled to stay with his relatives in Beirut.

“This strike is painful not just for him and his loved ones, but to everyone that he helped and served. This place was supposed to be safe,” Ali said.

Basta is a working-class, largely Sunni Muslim, neighbourhood famed for its antiques and traditional architecture. In peak season, tourists are often seen walking through the area and its marketplace, where antiquities and furniture are sold.

More than 2,100 people have been killed and more than 10,212 wounded in Lebanon since Hezbollah fired rockets at Israel on 8 October 2023 “in solidarity” with Hamas’s attack the day before. The majority were killed since 23 September this year, when Israel announced a new phase in its war with Hezbollah, which it called Operation Northern Arrows.

The year since the 7 October attack has demonstrated just how densely intertwined US presidential politics is with the trajectory of events in the Middle East. Each exerts a gravitational pull on the other, often in ways that are damaging for both.

Foreign policy rarely matters much in US presidential elections, but this year could be an exception. In a contest likely to be decided by small margins in a handful of states, the fallout from the conflicts in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, with a potential war with Iran looming, could have a significant impact on Kamala Harris’s prospects.

On the other side of the coin, the outcome of the election on 5 November will affect the Middle East in unpredictable but potentially momentous ways. Despite the clear limits on Washington’s ability to control Israel, its closest partner, the US remains by far the most influential external power in the region.

Joe Biden’s steadfast support for Israel in the face of mass civilian casualties in Gaza, and Benjamin Netanyahu’s clear defiance of US-led efforts to establish ceasefires in Gaza and Lebanon, have alienated many progressive Democrats.

Kamala Harris has not distanced herself in any significant way from Biden’s Middle East policy and now faces a particularly tough fight in Michigan, home to a sizable Arab American community. Losing that state would considerably complicate Harris’s path to the presidency.

The spread of war and the outbreak of open conflict between Israel and Iran is likely to affect the presidential campaign far beyond Michigan, combining doubts over the Biden-Harris team’s foreign policy competence with the threat of an oil price rise at the worst possible time for Harris. It could be this election’s fatal “October surprise”.

“You’re seeing Americans being evacuated from Beirut now and it really helps the overall Trump narrative of ‘the world’s a messier place with these weaklings’,” said Daniel Levy, the head of the US/Middle East Project policy institute.

Just as the Middle East can sway US politics more than any other foreign part of the world, US politics exerts a clear and constant influence on the Middle East. Demonstrative support for Israel has become a shibboleth for both Republican and Democratic presidential candidates, almost irrespective of Israel’s actions.

Dana Allin, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, pointed out that Israel’s untouchability in the US political arena had developed over time.

“This was not the way presidents spoke in the Richard Nixon era. There is irony in this fealty insofar as the respective goals and worldviews of the two allies have never been further apart,” Allin argued.

Netanyahu has vigorously enforced the American taboo against using its leverage over Israel. He has done so by mobilising the power of pro-Israel sentiment in the US against any president who has tried to rein him in.

When Barack Obama announced there should be a stop to the building of settlements in the West Bank, Netanyahu called his bluff and ignored him. When Biden put a hold on the delivery of US-made 2,000lb bombs which were being used to flatten residential areas in Gaza, the Israeli prime minister declared it “unconscionable”, and later accepted a Republican invitation to address Congress and met Trump.

In Biden, he was assailing a US president with more of a personal attachment to the Israeli cause than any of his predecessors, who had flown to Israel days after the 7 October attack and literally hugged Netanyahu on the airport tarmac. The Israeli prime minister still turned on Biden at the first sign of doubt.

Netanyahu’s message has been clear: any hesitation in the provision of weapons or diplomatic support will incur a heavy political cost. The US leader held responsible will be portrayed as a traitor to Israel.

The result of this tactic has been a deep reluctance on the part of successive presidents to use US leverage, as Israel’s biggest arms supplier by far, to curb the excesses of the Netanyahu coalition in any meaningful way, in Gaza, the West Bank or Lebanon.

Without that leverage, a succession of US ceasefire initiatives this year have come to nothing, shrugged off by Netanyahu in ways that were sometimes deeply humiliating to the US as a superpower and supposedly dominant partner in the relationship.

“Netanyahu has spent a long part of his career turning America into a partisan issue, trying to convince Israelis that the fortunes of Israel are bound up with Republican leaders,” Dahlia Scheindlin, a Tel Aviv-based political analyst, said.

It is unclear whether a Harris administration would steer a significantly different course to Biden’s. On one hand, Harris does not have the same personal history with Israel as Biden and, if she wins in November, would be freer to experiment with a change in policy.

On the other hand, winning the election in the face of widespread Democratic discontent over the Middle East could convince Harris that the progressive threat over the issue could be discounted.

“One scenario is that Kamala Harris wins and continues Joe Biden’s policies, which is kind of: we want to do the right thing, but we’re basically going to let Israel do what it wants,” Scheindlin said. “Or she could get a little tougher, in line with a more progressive wing of the Democratic party, and say: ‘We’re going to start applying American law on the export of our weapons,’ which I doubt, honestly.”

It seems almost certain that Netanyahu’s decision-making is influenced by anticipation of a Trump restoration in the White House, and he is not alone. The Saudi monarchy may also be waiting for Trump’s return before signing a diplomatic normalisation agreement with Israel, though the current hostilities make such a deal unlikely in the near term.

With Trump back in the White House, Netanyahu would not have to deal with US resistance to greater Israeli control, even annexation, of the West Bank. In 2019, the Trump administration recognised Israeli sovereignty over the annexed Golan Heights. Trump’s former ambassador to Israel David Friedman has been auditioning for a role in a second term with a new book, One Jewish State, arguing that Israel should swallow the West Bank whole.

“With Trump in the White House, annexation becomes a much more active possibility,” Khaled Elgindy, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, said. “It is an administration that is going to be even less concerned with Palestinian lives than the current one. They’re not even going to pay lip service to humanitarian assistance.”

There is less certainty over whether a newly elected president Trump would help Netanyahu achieve his longstanding strategic goal: recruiting the US for a decisive attack on Iran’s nuclear programme.

Middle East policy in Trump’s first term was built around hostility to Iran. In his last weeks in office, Trump gave the green light to the assassination of the Revolutionary Guards commander Qassem Suleimani. On the other hand, Trump called off a missile strike on Iran in June 2019 because he thought the likely civilian casualties were disproportionate for a response to the shooting down of a US drone. And one of the points of consistency in Trump foreign policy is his aversion to US involvement in foreign wars.

Netanyahu may be hoping for a Trump win in November, but the consequent support from Washington is likely to be more transactional and less sentimental than Biden’s. Ram Ben-Barak, a former Israeli intelligence chief, worries that in the long term, a Trump-Netanyahu combination could end up poisoning the fundamental relationship between their two countries.

“What makes our relationship with America is sharing the same values,” Ben-Barak said. “The moment you have an Israeli prime minister with no values, as we have today, and a US president without values like Trump, I’m not sure this bond will continue.”

An international arrest warrant has been issued against the former Australia rugby captain Rocky Elsom who was sentenced in his absence to five years in prison by a French court for misuse of corporate assets, a lawyer in the case told AFP.

Charges were brought after Elsom’s spell as president of French club Narbonne between 2015 and 2016.

Elsom, who played 75 times for the Wallabies, was also found guilty of forgery and ordered to pay back €705,000 (A$1.1m), the lawyer Patrick Tabet told AFP.

Elsom, who was president of the club in 2015-16, was also accused of having paid €79,000 to a former coach when “nothing could justify it” and of hiring for about €7,200 a month an individual living in Australia who “never came to Narbonne” and “did not perform any service” for the club, the lawyer said.

The president of the court handed down a sentence higher than the prosecutor’s request of two years in prison.

Narbonne, champions of France in 1936 and 1979, were placed in liquidation and relegated in 2018, after years of financial difficulties.

Donald Trump intensified his politics of nativism and xenophobia on Friday by announcing a sweeping plan to deport Venezuelans he claimed have “infected” a once-peaceful city in Colorado.

The Republican presidential nominee held a campaign rally in Aurora on a stage adorned with posters displaying mugshots of people in prison-orange uniforms with descriptions including “illegal immigrant gang members from Venezuela”.

Trump told the crowd: “I’m announcing today that, upon taking office, we will have an ‘Operation Aurora’ at the federal level to expedite the removals of these savage gangs.” He pledged to invoke the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law that allows the president to deport any non-citizen from a country that the US is at war with.

“We will send elite squads of Ice [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], border patrol and federal law enforcement officers to hunt down, arrest and deport every last illegal alien gang member until there is not a single one left in this country,” he continued as the crowd roared approval.

If they return to the US, Trump said, they will serve an automatic 10 years in prison without parole. “I’m hereby calling for the death penalty for any migrant that kills an American citizen or a law enforcement officer. With your vote, we will achieve complete and total victory over these sadistic monsters. It’s going to go very quickly,” he said.

The rally represented a detour for Trump, since Colorado is not a battleground state and looks certain to vote for his Democratic rival, Kamala Harris. But recent events offered him an opportunity to exploit a swirl of local rumours to push his anti-immigrant message.

Aurora, a city of about 340,000 people near Denver, hit headlines in August when a video circulated showing armed men walking through an apartment building housing Venezuelan immigrants. Trump amplified the story and falsely portrayed the city as overrun by members of the Venezeulan gang Tren de Aragua, or TDA.

Authorities say the incident happened in a single block and the area is again safe, noting that the local crime rate is actually declining. Aurora’s Republican mayor, Mike Coffman, called Trump’s claims “grossly exaggerated” and insisted: “The narrative is not accurate by any stretch of the imagination.”

TDA traces its origins back more than a decade to a notorious prison. In July, the Biden administration issued a sanction against the gang, placing it alongside MS-13 from El Salvador and the mafia-styled Camorra from Italy on a list of transnational criminal organisations, and offering $12m in rewards for the arrests of three leaders.

At Friday’s rally, Trump played a series of news clips, accompanied by dramatic music, describing TDA’s crimes and the murder of US citizens by undocumented immigrants, as well as some seemingly evasive answers by Harris, the vice-president, whom Trump branded a “criminal” and the “worst border tsar” in the country’s history.

“My message today is very simple,” he said. “No person who has inflicted the violence and terror that Kamala Harris has inflicted on this community can ever be allowed to become president of the United States.”

The former president promised that 5 November, when the election is held, will be “liberation day”, prompting chants of “USA! USA!” from the crowd.

“I will rescue Aurora and every town that has been invaded and conquered. These towns have been conquered and we will put these vicious and bloodthirsty criminals in jail or kick them out of our country and we will be very, very effective in doing it. It’s going to happen very, very fast. Gonna get them the hell out of our country,” he said.

Trump added later: “We’re talking a lot about Venezuela, because Aurora is really infected by Venezuela, but they’re coming from all countries.”

The remark recalled past dehumanising language in which Trump claimed undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country” and, earlier this week, suggested that those suspected in homicide cases “have bad genes”.

In similar fashion on Friday, Stephen Miller, a former top aide who is expected to take a senior role in the White House if Trump wins, pointed to the posters on stage as he addressed the crowd before Trump’s appearance.

“Look at all these photos around me,” Miller said. “Are these the kids you grew up with? Are these the neighbors you were raised with? Are these the neighbors that you want in your city?” The crowd roared “no” in reply.

The ex-president has long made immigration his signature issue and promised to stage the biggest deportation operation in US history if he returns to the White House. In recent months, he has targeted specific smaller communities that have seen significant arrivals of immigrants, with tensions flaring locally over resources and some longtime residents expressing misgivings about sudden demographic changes.

More than 40,000 immigrants have arrived in the Denver metro area over the past two years, including many Venezuelan families fleeing poverty and violence. But Colorado’s Democratic leaders accuse Trump and other Republicans of overstating problems in Aurora.

Representative Jason Crow told the Associated Press: “What is occurring is minimal and isolated. And to be clear, it’s never acceptable, right? We never say any level is acceptable. But it’s not a surge. It’s not a change. There is no takeover of any part of this city, of any apartment complex. It has not happened. It is a lie.”

Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, also have spread falsehoods about a community in Springfield, Ohio, where they said Haitian immigrants had been stealing and eating pets. The disinformation campaign led to bomb threats, school closures and forced evacuations.

Trump has said he would revoke the temporary protected status that allows Haitians to stay in the US because of widespread poverty and violence in their home nation.

Democrats have condemned Trump for tanking a border security bill negotiated in the Senate by both parties because it could have neutralised immigration as an issue. Harris told a Univision town hall in Nevada on Thursday: “He would prefer to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem.”

Donald Trump’s team has asked for officials to provide him with a dramatic array of military protections as the presidential campaign wraps, including travel in military aircraft and vehicles, according to reports.

Trump’s campaign has also requested ramped-up flight restrictions around his residences and rallies, and “ballistic glass pre-positioned in seven battleground states” for his team’s use, the Washington Post reported, citing internal emails and sources familiar with the requests. The New York Times first reported on these requests.

The demands were both “extraordinary and unprecedented”, the Post noted, as not a single recent presidential nominee has been shuttled in military aircraft before an election. A source told the Times that these sorts of high-level, classified military resources are used solely for sitting presidents.

Trump’s asks followed intelligence provided to his campaign staff that Iran is seeking to assassinate him and after his team expressed worry about drones and missiles targeting him. Trump was shot during a failed assassination attempt in Pennsylvania on 13 July, and a man was arrested in an alleged assassination attempt on 15 September; neither gunman is believed to have had Iranian ties.

Susie Wiles, Trump’s campaign manager, reportedly emailed Secret Service head Ronald L Rowe Jr in recent days, expressing displeasure with the agency’s handling of safety. Wiles claimed in a missive that Trump had had to cancel a campaign rally at the last minute due to a “lack of personnel”, resulting in him being placed in a small room with journalists.

Wiles claimed that campaign planning efforts were being stifled over threats, and said that Trump intended to host many additional events as the race nears its end. She further said that officials had not managed to give thorough enough plans to keep Trump safe.

Michael Waltz, a Florida Republican representative and Trump supporter, also wrote to the Secret Service requesting military aircraft for Trump, or ramped-up safeguards for his private airplane, the Post said.

Asked about reports that Trump’s campaign had requested additional safety measures such as military assets, the Secret Service said in a statement that Trump was receiving “the highest levels of protection”.

“Assistance from the Department of Defense is regularly provided for the former president’s protection, to include explosive ordnance disposal, canine units and airlift transportation,” said Anthony Guglielmi, a Secret Service spokesperson.

Guglielmi also said the Secret Service was placing short-term flight restrictions “over the former president’s residence and when he travels”, and “additionally, the former president is receiving the highest level of technical security assets which include unmanned aerial vehicles, counter unmanned aerial surveillance systems, ballistics and other advanced technology systems”.

Kamala Harris, Trump’s presidential rival, is provided protection from the US marines as vice-president. She travels on Air Force Two, which is a military plane.

The Trump campaign has already begun taking increased precautions with traveling. This has included sometimes splitting his motorcade, and placing him in airplanes that do not bear his name.

Sources told the Post that some of Trump’s counselors believe, despite a dearth of evidence, that the two attempts on his life were Iran-backed.

A Pakistani man was charged in August with allegedly wanting to hire assassins to kill an unidentified US politician. The man has ties to Iran, per reports.

US intelligence officials said in September that Iranian hackers stole information from Trump’s campaign and sent it to media outlets, as well as Joe Biden’s one-time campaign. Documents unsealed in September alleged that three Iranian nationals had participated in a broad, multiyear hacking effort against Trump that also targeted one of his lawyers, one-time CIA members and an ex-US ambassador, the Post said.

Additional campaign officials have been apprised that they too were targeted by Iranian hackers, per the newspaper. Trump’s campaign did not immediately respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.

When asked about the reports during a White House press conference on Friday, Biden said that he had told his administration to provide Trump “all that he needs”.

“I’ve told the department to give him every single thing he needs,” the president said. Biden also said that when it comes to security, Trump should be treated “as [if] he were a sitting president”.

“Give all that he needs, if it fits within that category, that’s fine,” Biden said. “But if it doesn’t, he shouldn’t.”

Biden did offer a humorous quip when asked about Trump’s requests. “As long as he doesn’t ask for F-15s,” Biden said – before following up with: “No, I’m being facetious.”

A comet that was last visible when Neanderthals walked the Earth could be spotted with the naked eye this weekend, scientists have said.

Comet A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) has been called the “comet of the century” because of how bright and visible it could be, according to the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS). Astronomers said it would last have been visible from our planet about 80,000 years ago, and was only discovered in January 2023.

Stargazers in the southern hemisphere have already glimpsed Comet A3 but it can now also be seen in the northern hemisphere, the society said. Between 12 and 30 October, people may be able to see the comet using binoculars or even with the naked eye. Its closest pass will be on Saturday, at a distance of about 44m miles.

To see the comet, stargazers have been told to look to the west just after sunset, which is 6.13pm in London. The comet’s tail, thought to be about 18m miles long, will be a prominent feature.

In a video on the society’s website, the deputy director Dr Robert Massey said taking photos of the comet may be possible, particularly if using a digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) camera.

According to RAS, the comet comes from the Oort Cloud – a giant spherical shell that surrounds our solar system and contains billions of objects including comets.

Dozens of attackers armed with guns, rockets and hand grenades have stormed a cluster of private coalmines in south-western Pakistan on Friday, shooting some miners in their sleep and others after lining them up, killing at least 21, police have said.

The attack by about 40 armed men days before Pakistan hosts a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation grouping is the worst in weeks in the restive, mineral-rich province of Balochistan bordering Afghanistan and Iran.

“The armed terrorists remained for around one-and-a-half hours in the mining area,” regional police official Asif Shafi said. “They fired rockets and hurled grenades at the mines and miners’ quarters.”

The attackers also set fire to machinery on-site, said a senior government official in the district, Kaleemullah Kakar. Seven more people had been wounded, he said.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack on the small mines of the Junaid Coal Co in the Duki area. Among the dead were four Afghan nationals, while another four were injured.

Afghanistan’s ministry of foreign affairs strongly condemned the attack in a statement, and assigned its Quetta consulate to facilitate the transfer of the bodies.

Businesses and shops were shut in Duki as hundreds of people gathered along with the bodies of the dead in a protest to demand the arrest of the attackers, police said.

“We were receiving threats from the militants for some time but there was no information about the attack,” said mine owner Khairullah Nasar, who is also the chair of the district council.

The attackers burnt down all 10 mines, along with the equipment and machinery within, he added.

A decades-long insurgency in Balochistan – Pakistan’s poorest province – by separatist militant groups has led to frequent attacks against the government, army and Chinese interests in the region to press demands for a share in mineral-rich regional resources. Several attacks have targeted migrant workers, including some from Afghanistan, employed by smaller, privately operated mines.

The attacks have risen in recent months, said the provincial governor, Jafar Khan Mandokhel, who called the miners’ killing an inhuman act.

“On one side you talked about your independence and your rights and on the other hand you are killing innocent labourers,” he told a news conference, referring to the separatist militant groups. “We condemn it strongly and we will take all-out action against it.

The government was “determined to root out all forms of terrorism”, the prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, said in a statement.

The provincial government had ordered an investigation and a case had been “registered against unknown assailants under the terrorism law”, said a government official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Besides the separatists, the region is also home to Islamist militants, who have resurged since 2022 after revoking a ceasefire with the government. Two Chinese nationals working for a power plant were killed this week in a blast in the southern city of Karachi, for which the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) – one of several insurgent groups battling the government – claimed responsibility.

The BLA was also behind Balochistan’s most widespread violence in years in August, which targeted police stations, railway lines and highways, killing more than 70 people. Armed men who stormed the residence of labourers from the eastern province of Punjab last month killed seven.

On Friday, crossfire between police and attackers killed two suspected militants involved in a 2021 attack on dam project workers that killed 13, including nine Chinese nationals.

With Agence France-Presse

Dozens of attackers armed with guns, rockets and hand grenades have stormed a cluster of private coalmines in south-western Pakistan on Friday, shooting some miners in their sleep and others after lining them up, killing at least 21, police have said.

The attack by about 40 armed men days before Pakistan hosts a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation grouping is the worst in weeks in the restive, mineral-rich province of Balochistan bordering Afghanistan and Iran.

“The armed terrorists remained for around one-and-a-half hours in the mining area,” regional police official Asif Shafi said. “They fired rockets and hurled grenades at the mines and miners’ quarters.”

The attackers also set fire to machinery on-site, said a senior government official in the district, Kaleemullah Kakar. Seven more people had been wounded, he said.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack on the small mines of the Junaid Coal Co in the Duki area. Among the dead were four Afghan nationals, while another four were injured.

Afghanistan’s ministry of foreign affairs strongly condemned the attack in a statement, and assigned its Quetta consulate to facilitate the transfer of the bodies.

Businesses and shops were shut in Duki as hundreds of people gathered along with the bodies of the dead in a protest to demand the arrest of the attackers, police said.

“We were receiving threats from the militants for some time but there was no information about the attack,” said mine owner Khairullah Nasar, who is also the chair of the district council.

The attackers burnt down all 10 mines, along with the equipment and machinery within, he added.

A decades-long insurgency in Balochistan – Pakistan’s poorest province – by separatist militant groups has led to frequent attacks against the government, army and Chinese interests in the region to press demands for a share in mineral-rich regional resources. Several attacks have targeted migrant workers, including some from Afghanistan, employed by smaller, privately operated mines.

The attacks have risen in recent months, said the provincial governor, Jafar Khan Mandokhel, who called the miners’ killing an inhuman act.

“On one side you talked about your independence and your rights and on the other hand you are killing innocent labourers,” he told a news conference, referring to the separatist militant groups. “We condemn it strongly and we will take all-out action against it.

The government was “determined to root out all forms of terrorism”, the prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, said in a statement.

The provincial government had ordered an investigation and a case had been “registered against unknown assailants under the terrorism law”, said a government official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Besides the separatists, the region is also home to Islamist militants, who have resurged since 2022 after revoking a ceasefire with the government. Two Chinese nationals working for a power plant were killed this week in a blast in the southern city of Karachi, for which the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) – one of several insurgent groups battling the government – claimed responsibility.

The BLA was also behind Balochistan’s most widespread violence in years in August, which targeted police stations, railway lines and highways, killing more than 70 people. Armed men who stormed the residence of labourers from the eastern province of Punjab last month killed seven.

On Friday, crossfire between police and attackers killed two suspected militants involved in a 2021 attack on dam project workers that killed 13, including nine Chinese nationals.

With Agence France-Presse

• Volodymyr Zelenskyy has asked Pope Francis during a meeting at the Vatican for help in securing the release of Ukrainians held captive by Russia. The Ukrainian president, on a whirlwind tour of European capitals to discuss his proposed “victory plan” for the war with Russia, said he had also invited the Vatican to take part in a conference on the prisoners of war, due to be held in Canada later this month. “We are counting on the Holy See’s assistance in helping to bring back Ukrainians who have been taken captive by Russia,” Zelenskyy said on social media, adding this was the main topic of his talks with the pope on Friday. A Vatican readout provided no details about the pope’s talks with Zelenskyy but said a subsequent meeting between the Ukrainian leader and the Vatican’s chief diplomat had included discussions “dedicated to the state of the war … as well as the ways in which it could be brought to an end”.

• Zelenskyy voiced hope that the war with Russia would end next year, speaking in Berlin during a visit to ask for sustained military support. Talking to the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, the Ukrainian leader thanked Germany for its backing and said it was “very important for us that this assistance does not decrease next year”. He said he would present Scholz with his plan for winning the war, voicing hope that the conflict would end “no later than next year, 2025”. Scholz pledged Germany and European Union partners would send more defence equipment this year, and German aid worth €4bn ($4.4bn) in 2025, vowing that “we will not let up in our support for Ukraine”.

• A Russian court has ordered the arrest in absentia of a CNN journalist, Nick Paton Walsh, for reporting from Ukrainian-held territory in Russia’s Kursk region. Moscow has launched several criminal proceedings against western journalists who produced reports from the Kursk region after Kyiv’s surprise August incursion, charging them with illegally crossing the border. The Leninsky court in the city of Kursk ordered Paton Walsh’s arrest, demanding his extradition to Russia. The British journalist has previously reported for Channel 4 News and for the Guardian in Moscow.

• Russia said on Friday its forces had captured the frontline villages of Zhelanne Druge and Ostrivske in eastern Ukraine, the latest in a string of territorial gains for Moscow. Ostrivske lies on the eastern banks of the Kurakhove reservoir in an area where Russia is concentrating its offensive activity, according to the Ukrainian military. The Russian defence ministry said last week that it had captured Zhelanne Druge and it was not immediately clear why it repeated that claim.

• Ukraine said it was investigating the death in Russian captivity of a Ukrainian journalist whose first-hand reports provided a glimpse into life under Russian occupation early in Moscow’s invasion. Viktoria Roshchyna, 27, disappeared in August 2023 after embarking on a reporting trip to occupied eastern Ukraine and Russia acknowledged in April that she was being held. Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman, Dmytro Lubinets, confirmed her death on Thursday in what he condemned as illegal detention. Andriy Yusov, a spokesperson for Ukraine’s military intelligence, told the public broadcaster Suspilne that Roshchyna had been on a list of prisoners to be exchanged and that “everything necessary had been done” for the swap. The Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office said it had updated its war crime investigation into her disappearance to include murder.

• A woman who worked for a Russian tank factory has been convicted of treason and sentenced to 12-and-a-half years in a penal colony for selling military information to Ukraine. Video published by the Sverdlovsk regional court in the Urals region showed a judge on Friday passing sentence on Viktoria Mukhametova, who displayed no emotion. Her husband, Danil Mukhametov, is being tried separately on similar charges. Russian media said the couple both worked at Uralvagonzavod, a major tank producer.

• Russia sentenced two men in a region near Moscow to 16 years each for setting railways on fire allegedly on the orders of Ukrainian security services. The Ria Novosti news agency reported that the two “young people” – giving only their surnames, Zavalnov and Golodyuk – in the Kaluga region south of Moscow were found guilty of “terrorism” and sentenced in a military court for setting fire to operating equipment on the side of railway tracks.

• Finnish officials said police suspected a Russian citizen of committing war crimes in Ukraine in 2014 and he was expected to face charges before the end of the month. Vojislav Torden – a commander of the Russian far-right, neo-Nazi paramilitary Rusich group – was detained at Helsinki airport in July 2023. Finland’s national bureau of investigation said on Friday it had completed a investigation into several offences dating back to 2014 and suspected Torden of several war crimes, including an “aggravated war crime”.

Dramatic pictures have emerged of the first floods in the Sahara in half a century.

Two days of rainfall in September exceeded yearly averages in several areas of south-east Morocco and caused a deluge, officials of the country’s meteorology agency said in early October. In Tagounite, a village about 450km(280 miles) south of the capital, Rabat, more than 100mm (3.9 inches) was recorded in a 24-hour period.

Satellite imagery from Nasa showed Lake Iriqui, a lake bed between Zagora and Tata that had been dry for 50 years, being filled up.

“It’s been 30 to 50 years since we’ve had this much rain in such a short space of time,’ Houssine Youabeb, an official of Morocco’s meteorology agency told the Associated Press.

Such rains, which meteorologists call an extratropical storm, may change the weather conditions in the region in the coming months and years. As the air holds more moisture, it promotes evaporation and provokes more storms, Youabeb said.

The flooding in Morocco killed 18 people last month, with the impact stretching to regions that had been affected by an earthquake last year. There were also reports of dammed reservoirs in the south-east region refilling at record rates throughout September.

The Sahara, which at 9.4m sq km (3.6m sq miles) is the world’s largest hot desert, stretches across a dozen countries in north, central and west Africa. Recurring drought has been a problem in many of these countries as extreme weather events are on the rise due to global heating. That has led to predictions from scientists that similar storms could happen in the Sahara in the future.

Celeste Saulo, the secretary general of the World Meteorological Organization, told reporters on Monday that water cycles across the world were changing with increasing frequency.

“As a result of rising temperatures, the hydrological cycle has accelerated. It has also become more erratic and unpredictable, and we are facing growing problems of either too much or too little water,” she said.

Boeing is cutting 17,000 jobs “to align with our financial reality” as the beleaguered aerospace giant grapples with a sweeping strike and the persisting fallout from its latest safety crisis.

The American firm also announced plans to delay the first delivery of its 777X commercial jetliner by a year, and braced investors for “substantial” new losses in its struggling defense business.

Kelly Ortberg, its new chief executive, declared that “tough decisions” and “structural changes” were required. “We need to be clear-eyed about the work we face,” he wrote in a memo to staff on Friday, “and realistic about the time it will take to achieve key milestones on the path to recovery.”

About 33,000 Boeing workers in Washington and Oregon went on strike a month ago, halting production of the company’s 737 Max, 767 and 777 jets amid a standoff over pay. Negotiations remain at an acrimonious stalemate.

It comes amid a dire year for Boeing. January’s cabin panel blowout during a flight of a brand new Max jet sparked a fresh crisis surrounding the safety and quality of its planes.

The high-profile mission of its Starliner spacecraft, which landed back on Earth last month without the two astronauts it carried to the International Space Station, has also raised questions about Boeing’s troubled space business.

Boeing “must … reset our workforce levels to align with our financial reality”, Ortberg told the company’s staff. “Over the coming months, we are planning to reduce the size of our total workforce by roughly 10%,” he said. “These reductions will include executives, managers and employees.”

He promised staff “more tailored information” next week about what this will mean of their department.

Shares in Boeing fell 1.6% during after-hours trading, after the news was disclosed.

“As we move through this process, we will maintain our steadfast focus on safety, quality and delivering for our customers,” said Ortberg.

“We know these decisions will cause difficulty for you, your families and our team, and I sincerely wish we could avoid taking them. However, the state of our business and our future recovery require tough actions.”

A woman who murdered her parents and lived with their bodies for four years has been jailed for life with a minimum term of 36 years.

Virginia McCullough, 36, poisoned her father, John McCullough, 70, with prescription medication that she crushed and put into his alcoholic drinks, the prosecutor Lisa Wilding KC told Chelmsford crown court. She then murdered her mother, Lois McCullough, 71, the following day.

The barrister said McCullough “beat her mother with a hammer and stabbed her multiple times in the chest with a kitchen knife bought for the purpose”.

Both murders took place in June 2019 at the couple’s home in Great Baddow, Essex, where the defendant continued to live with her parents’ dead bodies for the next four years.

McCullough “built a makeshift tomb” for her father, who had worked as a university lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University, Wilding told Chelmsford crown court.

The “rectangular tomb” was found in a room that had been Mr McCullough’s bedroom and study, and was “composed with masonry blocks stacked together”. It was “covered with multiple blankets, and a number of pictures and paintings over the top”, Wilding said.

“She concealed the body of her mother, wrapped in a sleeping bag, within a wardrobe in her mother’s bedroom on the top floor of the property,” the barrister said.

The murders were uncovered after her parents’ GPs raised concerns over missed appointments and police forced entry to the home on 15 September 2023. For years McCullough told lies about their whereabouts, frequently telling doctors and relatives her parents were unwell, on holiday or away on lengthy trips.

Bodycam footage of the arrest showed police forcing entry to the property before confronting McCullough in a hallway, where she confessed to her crimes.

In reference to the arrest, she told officers: “I did know that this would kind of come eventually. It’s proper that I serve my punishment.”

She added: “Cheer up, at least you caught the bad guy.”

McCullough gave a detailed account, to officers in custody after her arrest, of how she had killed her parents.

When telling officers where the murder weapon was, she said the knife used to stab her mother was underneath the stairs and “will still have blood on it, it’s rusted, but it will still have blood traces on it”.

She also told police she had to “build up gumption” to kill her mother as “I knew I had to get it done”.

Det Supt Rob Kirby, of Essex police, said: “Virginia McCullough murdered her parents in cold blood,” adding she was an “intelligent manipulator” who lied about “almost every aspect of her life”.

Wilding said the defendant “had been thinking about killing her parents since March 2019 and had been planning for it” and that she had not been employed for many years.

Statements were read on behalf of McCullough’s siblings, who have been granted anonymity by the judge.

One said they had been left “devastated and bereft” at the deaths of their parents.

“To me this situation is quite literally a living nightmare from which I will never wake up,” they wrote. “The haunting thoughts of [whether] my parents suffered, if they were taunted.”

Another said they felt “sick to my core” every day.

“We have been cruelly robbed of more loving memories and bonds with our mum and dad for years to come,” they added.

“How dare Virginia rob us of that life? “So many lies have been told to cover the horrific truth that she had murdered our loving mum and dad.”

The prosecutor said the defendant “engaged in online gambling” and spent £21,193 in transactions related to gambling between 1 June 2018 and 14 September 2023.

Wilding said McCullough “made arrangements to ensure that she continued to enjoy the benefit of the pensions” that continued to be paid in her parents’ names after their deaths. The prosecutor said McCullough “benefited from” £59,664.01 from the state pension and £76,334.58 from McCullough’s teacher’s pension between 18 June 2019 and 15 September 2023.

Wilding said money appeared to have been “frittered away and the investigation has not revealed any expenditure on expensive, luxury or extravagant items”.

Richard Butcher, Lois McCullough’s brother, said in a victim impact statement that his niece was “very dangerous” and that the details of what had happened had “undermined my faith in humanity”.

The judge, Mr Justice Johnson, said McCullough’s actions were a “gross violation of the trust that should exist between parents and their children”.

He said he was sure the offences involved a “substantial degree of both pre-meditation and planning” as McCullough had accumulated “a large amount of prescription drugs” and bought a knife in May 2019 as well as “implements to crush and separate tablets”.

“These were considered acts of aggression following months of thought and planning,” the judge said.

Sentencing McCullough, he said: “I’m sure a substantial motive for each of the murders was to stop your parents discovering you had been stealing from them and lying to them and to take money that was intended for them.”

Police officers in Portland, Oregon, stopped a car Tuesday night when they noticed a bag inside that said “Definitely not a bag full of drugs”. It, in fact, was – full of drugs: 79 blue fentanyl pills, three fake oxycodone tablets and 230g of methamphetamine, to be exact.

Officers pulled over a man and a woman who were driving a stolen car near the intersection of SE 162nd Avenue and Division, according to the Portland police bureau. Inside the car, officers noticed that the Ford Taurus’s ignition had been visibly tampered with – and spotted baggies of drugs.

“The driver and passenger were both arrested,” said Portland police public information officer Sergeant Kevin Allen. “Inside the vehicle was a substantial number of packaged drugs including methamphetamine and blue fentanyl pills, multiple scales, money and a loaded firearm.”

Many of the baggies of drugs had been stored in a brown canvas bag reading “Definitely not a bag full of drugs”. A photo of the officers’ bust – including the bag – garnered media attention on X.

The suspects – Reginald Reynolds, 35, and Mia Baggenstos, 37 – are both facing charges of drug possession and possession of a stolen vehicle.

Reynolds has been charged with delivery of methamphetamine, unlawful possession of methamphetamine, unauthorized use of a vehicle and possession of a stolen vehicle, and possession of a controlled substance in the first degree. Baggenstos faces nearly the same charges – except possession of a controlled substance in the second degree.

In 2020, Oregon made history when it decriminalized the possession of small amounts of hard drugs (much smaller than the amounts officers found Tuesday), in an effort to redirect city funding from criminalization and toward treatment of substance-use disorders. The measure passed with high levels of public support that faltered as overdose and homelessness rates rose in the state during the Covid-19 pandemic – when fentanyl also became widely available and affordable housing less so.

In September, the state recriminalized drug possession under a Democratic-controlled legislature.