Donald Trump has provoked an angry backlash from Democrats after calling for the US armed forces to be turned against his political adversaries when voters go to the polls at next month’s presidential election.

In comments that added further fuel to fears of an authoritarian crackdown if he recaptures the White House, the Republican nominee said the military or national guard should be deployed against opponents that he called “the enemy within” when the election takes place on 5 November.

He singled out the California congressman, Adam Schiff, who was the lead prosecutor in the ex-president’s first impeachment trial, as posing a bigger threat to a free and fair election than foreign terrorists or illegal immigrants, his usual prime target for abuse.

Trump’s comments, to Fox News in response to a question on possible election “chaos”, triggered an angry reaction from Kamala Harris’s campaign, which likened them to previous remarks that he would be a dictator “on day one” of a second presidency and his suggestions that the US constitution should be terminated to overturn the 2020 election result, which he falsely claims was stolen by Joe Biden.

Trump and the vice-president are locked in a tight contest as election day looms. Most national polls put Harris narrowly ahead, but in the crucial swing states which will decide the election, the contest appears much tighter and offers Trump numerous paths to a potential victory.

After initially saying election chaos would not come from his side, Trump launched a vituperative attack on his opponents when the interviewer, Maria Bartiromo, raised the possibility of outside agitators or immigrants who had committed crimes.

“I think the bigger problem are the people from within. We have some very bad people. We have some sick people,” he said on Fox’s Sunday Morning Futures programme.

“It should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by the national guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”

At a rally in Pennsylvania on Monday night, Harris slammed Donald Trump for his comments and showed a clip of the former president making the remarks.

“A second Trump term would be a huge risk for America, and dangerous. Donald Trump is increasingly unstable and unhinged,” Harris told the crowd after playing the clip.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian and expert on fascism at New York University, told NBC that Trump was flagging up what he planned to do as president, which she compared to the “‘strongman’ ruling templates of Viktor Orbán, Narendra Modi and Vladimir Putin, the leaders of Hungary, India and Russia respectively.

“He’s actually rehearsing, in a sense, what he would be doing as head of state, which is what Orbán does, Modi is doing, Putin has long done,” she said.

Trump turned his fire on Schiff, who is a candidate for the US Senate in next month’s poll. He said: “The thing that’s tougher to handle are these lunatics that we have inside, like Adam Schiff.”

It was his second attack in two days on Schiff, who earned Trump’s enmity when he was the ranking Democrat on the House of Representatives’ intelligence committee during his presidency, when he said there was evidence of collusion between Trump and Russia during the 2016. The House later voted, under Republican leadership, to censure Schiff over his comments.

At a rally in Coachella, California – a state he has virtually no chance of winning – on Saturday, Trump mocked Schiff’s physical characteristics and labelled him a bigger threat than foreign adversaries, including the Chinese president Xi Jinping.

“He [Xi] is somebody that we can handle,” Trump said. “The worst people are the enemies from within, the sleaze bags, the guy that you’re going to elect to the Senate, shifty Adam Schiff. He’s a major low-life.”

He claimed, without providing evidence, that Schiff was engaged in mass voter fraud. “They send millions and million of ballots all over the place,” he said. “[In] California, you don’t have anything like a voting booth. They take ballots and they just send them all over the place. They come back and they say, oh, somebody won by 5m votes.”

Schiff responded on Twitter/X by accusing Trump of inciting violence in the same manner as he was widely accused of doing on 6 January 2021, when a mob attacked the US Capitol in an effort to stop certification of Biden’s election win.

“Today, Trump threatened to deploy the military against the ‘enemies from within.’ The same thing he has called me,” Schiff wrote.

“Just as he incited a mob to attack the Capitol, he again stokes violence against those who oppose him.”

Harris’s campaign issued a more extensive condemnation. “Donald Trump is suggesting that his fellow Americans are worse ‘enemies’ than foreign adversaries, and he is saying he would use the military against them,” campaign spokesperson Ian Sams said.

“Taken with his vow to be a dictator on ‘day one’, calls for the ‘termination’ of the constitution, and plans to surround himself with sycophants who will give him unchecked, unprecedented power if he returns to office, this should alarm every American who cares about their freedom and security.

“What Donald Trump is promising is dangerous, and returning him to office is simply a risk Americans cannot afford.”

While Trump, being out of power, will be in no position to deploy troops on election day, his call for military power to quell political opposition is familiar, recalling his demand that soldiers be deployed in the streets of Washington DC in 2020 to disperse thousands of demonstrators protesting the death of George Floyd.

Gen Mark Milley, the then chairperson of the joint chiefs of staff, reportedly came close to resigning over the demand.

Milley, who has since fallen foul of Trump, is quoted in a new book by Bob Woodward – the journalist who, along with Carl Bernstein, helped to expose the Watergate scandal of the 1970s – as calling the ex-president “a total fascist” and has voiced fears that he could be recalled to service and court-martialled if he returns to office.

Kamala Harris will do a sit-down interview with the broadcaster Fox News on Wednesday, the news channel announced on Monday, in the most dramatic moment yet in a recent media blitz by the Democratic presidential nominee.

The interview with Fox News’s chief political anchor, Bret Baier, comes as Democrats have increased their presence on Fox News, part of an outreach to undecided voters and after CBS News’s 60 Minutes became embroiled in a controversy when rightwing critics have said they edited an interview to make Harris appear more succinct.

In a press release, Fox said the interview with the vice-president would take place on Wednesday 16 October and hit the airwaves on Special Report with Bret Baier and be broadcast at 6.00pm.

Harris’s appearance comes after weeks of criticism that she was avoiding all but the softest of sit-downs, including with Oprah Winfrey, ABC’s morning talk-in The View, with the former shock jock Howard Stern and with Late Night’s Stephen Colbert.

Harris has also appeared on the podcast Call Me Daddy. Meanwhile, Donald Trump is reported to be going on Joe Rogan’s Full Send before election day.

The Fox announcement comes after the Time magazine owner, Marc Benioff, complained on Sunday that Harris had denied multiple interview requests. Benioff said the denial was “unlike every other presidential candidate”, including Biden and Trump.

“We believe in transparency and publish each interview in full,” Benioff wrote on X. Why isn’t the Vice President engaging with the public on the same level?”

Harris’s sit-down with Fox News will be her first formal interview with the network – but not the first for Democratic campaign surrogates. With at least three times the viewership of CNN and MSNBC, candidates looking for votes often make Fox a pragmatic choice.

Nielsen Media Research shows Fox News is the highest-rated network in all swing states. According to a recent YouGov poll – 54% of Republicans, 22% of Democrats and 28% of independent voters had watched the cable station in the past month.

Jessica Loker, vice-president of politics at the network, told Bloomberg that the network saw ratings go up when Democrats are on. Baier told Axios: “If you build it, they will come.”

It’s also well-worn path for Democrats in this election cycle. The Transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, has been on the network so often he introduced himself at the Democratic party convention in August with: “I’m Pete Buttigieg and you might recognize me from Fox News.”

Buttigieg said he was proud to go on the outlet to speak on behalf of the Democrats because their arguments and facts might not otherwise be aired to a Fox audience.

So too have the Democratic governors Gavin Newsom, Josh Shapiro, Wes Moore and Gretchen Whitmer, and the senators Amy Klobuchar, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, John Fetterman and Chris Coons also dropped in on the network.

Harris appearance points to an effort to escape Democrats’ ideologically aligned media bubbles in the effort for votes.

“We have so many hyper-close elections in swing states that even if you only get a point or two that you take away from Republicans and put in your column can be the 10,000 votes that give you that swing state,” the University of Virginia political analyst Larry Sabato told the Guardian last month.

Kamala Harris has said a second Trump term would be “a huge risk for America”, in a renewed effort to paint her Republican opponent as a threat to democracy, after the former president threatened to use US armed forces against those he has branded “the enemy within”.

At her own campaign rally in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, the US vice-president showed a montage of clips of Trump, including the former president saying “those people are more dangerous – the enemy from within – than Russia.”

At a speech in Coachella in California on Saturday, Trump referred to Democratic opponents as “the enemy within”, saying they posed a bigger threat to the US than the country’s foreign foes, and targeted Adam Schiff, a Democratic congressman who is running for the US Senate.

In an interview on Fox News the following day, he repeated the phrase to describe those he claimed were planning to create “chaos” on the day of the presidential election. He said the military should be deployed against them.

“A second Trump term would be a huge risk for America, and dangerous. Donald Trump is increasingly unstable and unhinged,” Harris told the crowd in Erie, Pennsylvania, after playing the clip.

She went on to say that Trump poses a danger because he believes those who do not agree with him are the enemy.

At the same time, Harris’s campaign released a new campaign advert, titled The Enemy Within, featuring some of Trump’s recent ominous comments about his adversaries and warnings from two former members of his presidential administration about the danger he would pose if elected.

The 30-second video, complete with footage of Trump walking in front of a row of helmeted riot officers and showing troops on the street during his presidency, tries to concentrate voters’ minds with contributions from Olivia Troye, a one-time national security adviser to Mike Pence, and Kevin Carroll, a former senior counsel in the Department of Homeland Security.

“I do remember the day that he suggested that we shoot people on the streets,” Troye says in the ad, which is accompanied with a dramatic musical soundtrack.

Carroll adds: “A second term will be worse. There will be no stopping his worst instincts. Unchecked power to no guardrails. If we elect Trump again, we’re in terrible danger.”

Harris, who has embarked on a late-campaign round of high-profile interviews after being accused for weeks of avoiding the media, is seeking to highlight the increasingly authoritarian tone Trump has been striking at his rallies.

Trump’s use of extreme language has coincided with an increase in his vitriol to describe Harris, who he last week described as “mentally impaired”. He called her “retarded” while addressing Republican fundraisers in September, the New York Times reported.

Harris’s campaign is also trying to draw attention to what it says a dearth of mainstream interviews given by Trump, who instead has chosen to make himself available to sympathetic interviewers, such as the rightwing radio host Hugh Hewitt.

“As of today, it has been **one month** since Trump’s been interviewed by a mainstream media outlet, as he has backed out of 60 Minutes and refuses to debate again,” Harris campaign spokesperson Ian Sams posted on Twitter/X.

By contrast, Harris is due to be interviewed on Wednesday by Bret Baier on Fox News, an outlet that is usually a go-to platform for Trump but unfriendly terrain for Democrats.

Kamala Harris has revealed a plan to give Black men more economic opportunities, as anxiety mounts among her supporters that some in the Black community are less enthused by the Democratic presidential ticket than in recent elections, and may sit this one out – or support Donald Trump.

The vice-president’s plan includes forgivable business loans for Black entrepreneurs, creating more apprenticeships, and studying sickle cell and other diseases that disproportionately affect African American men. It also includes ensuring that Black men have more access to shaping a national cannabis industry and to invest in cryptocurrency.

Harris presented the so-called “opportunity agenda for Black men” on Monday, before speaking in the north-west corner of Erie, Pennsylvania, the country’s largest battleground state. It will be Harris’s 10th visit to Pennsylvania this election season.

Political support among Black men for the Harris-Walz campaign has been wavering somewhat. Last week, Barack Obama suggested that some Black men “aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president”.

The former president’s comments were later condemned by the Florida Republican representative Byron Donalds and Texas’s Wesley Hunt, members of Black Men for Trump, which posted a letter accusing Obama of being “insulting” and “demeaning”.

“President Obama’s recent call for Black men to support Kamala Harris based solely on her skin color, rather than her policies, is deeply insulting,” the letter states. “Black Americans are not a monolith, and we don’t owe our votes to any candidate just because they ‘look like us’.”

Over the weekend, the former president Bill Clinton was drafted in to speak to worshippers at a Zion Baptist church in Albany, Georgia, in support of Harris.

“Uniting people and building, being repairers of the breach, as Isaiah says, those are the things that work,” Clinton said. “Blaming, dividing, demeaning – they get you a bunch of votes at election time, but they don’t work.”

A poll in the New York Times placed Harris slightly behind Joe Biden among Black likely voters and showed one in five Black men support Trump. Despite alarm at the poll, the figures still show strong Black support for Democrats – but while the president won 87% of the Black vote in 2020, Harris’s numbers are lower. Seventy-eight per cent of Black voters in key battleground states polled in September said they would support the Democrat.

Raphael Warnock, a Democratic senator from Georgia, warned against overestimating the shift. “Black men are not going to vote for Donald Trump in any significant numbers,” he told CNN on Sunday. “There will be some. We’re not a monolith.”

Warnock predicted Black voters would remember that Trump had personally taken out a full-page ad in the New York Times in 1989 calling for the state to bring back the death penalty and to strengthen policing after the brutal beating and rape of a female jogger in Central Park.

The so-called “Central Park Five” – five Black teenagers – were falsely accused of the crime and imprisoned for several years, before finally being exonerated in 2002. “Donald Trump has shown no deal of concern about what they went through, no deal, no bit of contrition about it,” Warnock added.

But the South Carolina representative Jim Clyburn, who helped secure Biden’s Democratic nomination in 2020, told the network he is “concerned about the Black men staying home or voting for Trump”.

“Black men, like everybody else, want to know exactly what I can expect from a Harris administration. And I have been very direct with them. And I have also contrasted that with what they can expect from a Trump administration,” Clyburn said.

Democrats have previously been accused of taking the Black vote for granted. In 2020, Biden was forced to apologize for telling the popular radio host Charlamagne Tha God that if African Americans “have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t Black”.

Trump has sought to capitalize on wavering Black male support for Democrats who may sympathize with his “America First” policies around employment and immigration.

As well as Harris’s new policy outreach to Black men, she is also reaching out to Hispanic men who might also be cool to her candidacy, via an “Hombres con Harris” outreach featuring ad buys and Hispanic celebrity events in battleground states.

Three weeks out from polling day, there is some Democratic concern that Harris’s support among men broadly needs attention. Polls have found that there is roughly a 60-40 split between men and women, with men favoring Republicans and women Democrats.

A Pew Research Center study released last year asked Americans how important it is to them that a woman be elected president in their lifetime. It found that only 18% of US adults said this is extremely or very important to them, with some 64% saying it was not too important or not at all, or that the president’s gender did not matter.

Canadian police accused Indian diplomats and consular staff of “clandestine” and “criminal” activities in the country on Monday night, hours after senior diplomats were expelled from both countries in an escalating geopolitical row.

Speaking to reporters at a hastily organised press conference, the head of the Royal Canadian Mounted police (RCMP) said the force had evidence of “agents” acting on behalf of the Indian government engaging in extortion, intimidation, coercion and harassment.

Commissioner Mike Duheme told reporters: “Investigations have revealed that Indian diplomats and consular officials based in Canada leveraged their official positions to engage in clandestine activities, such as collecting information for the government of India, either directly or through their proxies; and other individuals who acted voluntarily or through coercion.”

The revelations from the RCMP are the first official glimpse from police into the scope and depth of India’s alleged activities in Canada, which have rocked the country’s politics ever since the prime minister, Justin Trudeau, accused India of assassinating the prominent Sikh leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar in the province of British Columbia last year.

Trudeau said on Monday night: “We will never tolerate the involvement of a foreign government threatening and killing Canadian citizens on Canadian soil. India has made a monumental mistake in choosing to use their diplomats and organised crime to attack Canadians.”

The government now has “clear and compelling evidence that agents of the government of India have engaged in, and continue to engage in, activities that pose a significant threat to public safety,” he added.

These activities involved clandestine information gathering techniques, coercive behaviour, targeting South Asian Canadians and involvement in over a dozen threatening and violent acts, including murder, he said.

Canada’s foreign minister, Mélanie Joly, said the RCMP had gathered “ample, clear and concrete evidence which identified six individuals as persons of interest in the Nijjar case”.

She said India was asked to waive diplomatic and consular immunity and cooperate in the investigation but refused to cooperate.

“Regrettably, as India did not agree, and given the ongoing public safety concerns for Canadians, Canada served notices of expulsion to these individuals,” Joly said.

She asked that India’s government support the ongoing investigation “as it remains in both our countries’ interest to get to the bottom of this”.

In recent months, activists have accused India of a carefully orchestrated campaign of “transnational terrorism” that targets Sikhs.

Duheme did not indicate how many killings Indian officials had been linked to in Canada, but said the “breadth and depth of criminal activity” was a threat to the safety of Canadians.

Senior Canadian national security and intelligence officials presented their Indian counterparts with their findings over the weekend, including evidence that allegedly implicated India’s high commissioner, Sanjay Kumar Verma, in the killing of Nijjar, a source familiar with the investigation said.

Assistant Commissioner Brigitte Gauvin told reporters the actions of Indian diplomats were “a contravention of the Vienna convention on diplomatic relations, but also it goes against Canada’s values as a society”.

In a statement earlier on Monday, India’s foreign ministry said it had no faith in the Canadian government’s ability to assure the security of its top diplomats and had “decided to withdraw the high commissioner and other targeted diplomats and officials”.

However, Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper and the Associated Press quoted unnamed Canadian officials alleging that it was Canada that had expelled the Indian diplomats first, after evidence implicated Verma and six top diplomats in the assassination of Nijjar.

Nijjar, a Canadian Sikh, was gunned down outside a gurdwara in the city of Surrey in June last year.

He had been a vocal advocate for the Khalistan movement, which advocates for an independent homeland for Sikhs and is banned in India. The Indian government had accused Nijjar of involvement in Khalistani terrorism.

In the aftermath of Nijjar’s killing, Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, took the unusual step of publicly announcing there were “credible allegations” that the Indian government was involved in Nijjar’s assassination. India denied the charges, calling them “absurd”.

On Monday, India’s foreign ministry strongly rejected the allegations against its diplomats and said they were “ludicrous and deserve to be treated with contempt”. They later announced that six top Canadian diplomats would be expelled from New Delhi in within five days.

Contrary to the RCMP’s statements, the Indian ministry spokesperson claimed Canada had not shared any further evidence about Indian state involvement in the fatal shooting since Trudeau had made the allegations in September 2023.

“This leaves little doubt that on the pretext of an investigation, there is a deliberate strategy of smearing India for political gains,” the Indian ministry said.

Nijjar’s murder prompted officials and activists to accuse the Modi government of carrying out a campaign of transnational killings against those it considered to be threats to the state.

The accusations were further fuelled last November after US agencies said they had thwarted an assassination attempt by an Indian government official to murder Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a firebrand Sikh separatist and dual citizen of the US and Canada.

Other prominent Sikh Khalistani activists in the US, Canada and the UK also said they had also been given warnings of threats to their lives. According to intelligence officials who spoke to the Guardian this year, India had also ordered the assassination of dozens of individuals in Pakistan, including Sikhs, as part of a wider strategy to eliminate terrorists living on foreign soil.

Last year, the White House said it took the allegations of India’s involvement in attempted killings on US soil “with utmost seriousness” and confirmed it had been raised at the highest levels of the Indian government.

The Indian government set up its own investigation into Pannun’s killing. According to the US state department, Indian officials are due to visit Washington DC this week as part of the inquiry. However, the post about the visit was removed hours later.

More than 20 people have been killed in an Israeli airstrike on a Christian town in northern Lebanon, prompting Hezbollah to fire rockets at Tel Aviv, as Israel’s multifront war continues to escalate.

It was also a particularly bloody 24 hours in the Gaza Strip. Four people were killed in an Israeli bombing of a hospital courtyard in central Gaza, another strike on a nearby school used as a shelter killed at least 20 people, and a drone strike killed five children playing on the street in al-Shati camp in Gaza City, according to local health authorities.

Rights groups say Israel is seeking to forcibly expel the remaining population of northern Gaza in a ferocious renewed campaign on the besieged Palestinian territory. The Israeli military said it was looking into the reports of civilian casualties in the three incidents on Sunday and Monday.

The bombing in Lebanon on Monday afternoon that struck Aitou, a Maronite village near the northern city of Tripoli, hit a small apartment building, killing 21 people according to the Lebanese Red Cross.

Footage from the scene broadcast by Lebanese TV channels showed a heavily damaged building, destroyed cars, and dead and injured people lying on the street as people dug through the rubble.

Aitou is far from Hezbollah’s power centres in Beirut and the south and east of the country. The village’s mayor, Joseph Trad, told Reuters the building had been rented to families displaced by the war.

The strike was one of several over the past two weeks targeting areas thought to be “safe”, including the bombing of a displacement centre in the southern town of Wardaniyeh last week. Israel is also facing international criticism for at least three violations that have injured five members of the UN peacekeeping mission in Lebanon.

On Monday, Italy, the UK, France and Germany released a joint statement condemning Israel for repeatedly attacking UN peacekeepers. “These attacks must stop immediately,” they said, adding deliberate attacks were against international law.

The UN security council expressed strong concern about the attacks. In a statement adopted by consensus, the 15-member council urged all parties – without naming them – to respect the safety and security of the personnel and premises of the UN peacekeeping mission, known as Unifil. “UN peacekeepers and UN premises must never be the target of an attack,” said the council, reiterating its support for Unifil and the operation’s importance for regional stability.

The security council also called for the full implementation of its resolution 1701, which was adopted in 2006 with the aim of keeping peace on the border between Lebanon and Israel.

Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday evening that accusations Israeli troops had deliberately harmed peacekeepers were “completely false”, as he repeated a call for them to withdraw from combat zones close to the border.

He said Hezbollah used Unifil positions as cover for attacks that have killed Israelis, including on Sunday, when a drone attack on a military base killed four soldiers.

“Israel has every right to defend itself against Hezbollah and will continue to do so,” Netanyahu said, adding that he regretted any harm to Unifil personnel but the best way to ensure their safety was “to heed Israel’s request and to temporarily get out of harm’s way”.

The UN’s peacekeeping chief, Jean-Pierre Lacroix, said later that peacekeepers would stay in all positions in Lebanon.

“The decision was made that Unifil would currently stay in all its positions in spite of the calls that were made by the Israel Defense Forces [IDF] to vacate the positions that are in the vicinity of the blue line,” he said.

Five peacekeepers have been wounded in attacks that struck their positions since Israel began a ground campaign against the Hezbollah militant group, with most blamed on Israeli forces. The EU foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, said: “Their work is very important. It’s completely unacceptable attacking United Nations troops.”

There was no immediate comment from the IDF or Hezbollah on the Aitou strike or its target. The IDF said it had targeted the head of the powerful Lebanese militia’s anti-tank unit, Muhammad Kamel Naim, in a strike on Monday in the southern city of Nabatieh.

On Monday evening, Hezbollah appeared to respond to the Aitou attack by firing a salvo of at least three rockets at Israel’s commercial and diplomatic centre, Tel Aviv. Air raid sirens were triggered across vast swathes of central and northern Israel, but the attack was intercepted by Israel’s air defence systems.

On Sunday Hezbollah inflicted the deadliest attack so far on Israel during the two-week-old war, a drone strike on a military base near Binyamina that killed four soldiers and severely wounded another seven. Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, vowed “a forceful response” to the attack during a phone call with his US counterpart, Lloyd Austin, on Monday.

In Gaza, four people were killed in an Israeli strike on the courtyard of al-Aqsa hospital in Deir al-Balah in the centre of the territory early on Monday. The bombing triggered a large fire, leaving 25 people with severe burns.

The hospital was already struggling to cope with treating the wounded from a strike on Sunday night on a school turned shelter in the nearby Nuseirat refugee camp that killed at least 20 people. Five children in al-Shati camp in Gaza City were also killed on Sunday in a drone strike, Gaza’s civil defence agency said.

Later on Monday, the IDF said a soldier had been killed in combat in southern Gaza.

The renewed aerial attacks come amid Israel’s latest campaign in Jabaliya, a district of Gaza City, now in its second week. An estimated 400,000 people are trapped by the fighting and Israel has not allowed any food to enter the north since the start of the month, leading the UN World Food Programme to once again raise the alarm of imminent famine.

The entirety of northern Gaza is now under Israeli evacuation orders. Among those who have remained in the north are disabled or elderly people and their families, who say it is too dangerous and difficult to move.

Israel has not allowed anyone from above what is now known as the Netzarim corridor bisecting the strip to return home; those clinging on in the north fear that if they leave, they will face the same fate.

On Monday, the Israeli-Palestinian rights groups B’Tselem, Gisha, Yesh Din and Physicians for Human Rights called on the international community to prevent Israel from carrying out the “generals’ plan”, described as a “starve or surrender” strategy that could amount to war crimes.

In a statement, the rights groups said there were “alarming signs” that Israel was beginning to implement the plan in Jabaliya, and warned that states “have an obligation to prevent the crimes of starvation and forcible transfer”.

The IDF says it has not received such orders. However, citing “senior defence officials”, the Israeli daily Haaretz reported on Sunday that the Israeli government had given up on stalled ceasefire and hostage release talks in the year-old war, and the political leadership was instead “pushing for the gradual annexation of large parts of Gaza”.

As Israel’s conflict with Hezbollah and Iran has escalated, it has begun to show a degree of vulnerability. A Hezbollah drone evaded Israel’s much vaunted air defences on Sunday and struck a military canteen when it was busy with soldiers eating dinner. Four were killed and 58 wounded, seven seriously, at a location 40 miles south of the Lebanese border.

The drone that hit the canteen of the Golani base near Binyamina appears to have been part of a synchronised attack that allowed it to elude the country’s well organised air defences. Three drones flew from Lebanon over the Mediterranean, and though they were all initially spotted, and two shot down, the other was able to reach its target.

Why the third drone got away, eluding fighter jets, helicopters and the Iron Dome defence system, is a subject of urgent inquiry by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Hezbollah has been refining its attack strategy, and timing the drone attack with rockets helped complicate the picture for the defenders.

Drones may fly more slowly than missiles, but the Iranian-designed carbon-fibre models used by Hezbollah are hard to see and difficult for radar to pick up, a task made more complicated because they are flown deliberately low. Manoeuvrable, this drone, said to be Sayyad 107, resisted GPS guidance jamming, possibly because it used Russian or Chinese alternatives.

It is not the first time in recent days that a drone has got through. A retirement home in Herzliya was struck by a drone on Friday during the Yom Kippur holiday – one of two that crossed the border from Lebanon. The other was shot down successfully by a fighter jet, but the second struck the building a few miles north of Tel Aviv.

Israel’s air force said on Monday it intercepted more than 80% of incoming drones – 221 out of 1,200 that have been fired at the country during the war so far have got through. But an increase in the number of attacks and the growing sophistication of what remain relatively cheap to produce weapons will increase the risk of Israeli casualties as the fighting continues. However, the number of civilian and military casualties caused by Israeli attacks in Lebanon and Gaza remains far greater.

In the past 24 hours, 18 people were reported killed in strikes hitting the northern Lebanese town Aitou on Monday, while 22 people – including 15 children – were killed on Sunday in an attack on a school in central Gaza. But such is the asymmetry of the conflict that repeated successful strikes on Israel will raise questions about the completeness of the country’s air defences.

Though Iran’s large-scale ballistic missile attack on Israel at the beginning of the month was of a different order of magnitude, it too appears to have been more damaging than was initially acknowledged. It was judged at first by the number of casualties it caused – only one person, a Palestinian in the West Bank, was believed to have been killed. But the impact on buildings was greater than initially acknowledged.

Israel’s tax authority said on Sunday it had received 2,200 damage claims relating to civilian buildings following the 1 October attack, and a further 300 for vehicles and contents, taking the total damage estimate to 150m to 200m shekels (£31m to £41m). In Hod Hasharon, north-east of Tel Aviv, more than 1,000 homes were damaged, some impacted by a shockwave from a missile that smashed into an open area nearby.

Against such a backdrop, and with Israel expected to retaliate against Iran soon, it is not surprising that the US announced it would deploy one of its seven specialised Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (Thaad) systems in Israel, and a crew of nearly 100 US troops. Thaad is designed to defend against ballistic missiles, and will line up alongside Israel’s Arrow 2 and 3 and David’s Sling long and medium range defence systems.

Bringing Thaad to bear suggests the US believes that whatever Israel is planning to do will invite a fresh response from Iran, and that it could test existing air defences seriously. With Hezbollah also appearing to be causing problems of a different order for Israel’s air defences with its drone attacks, the overall situation is at risk of becoming more dangerous and fraught as the conflict turns into its second year.

Officials from the US’s main humanitarian agency attend daily meetings on an Israeli military base that also hosts a notorious prison for Palestinian detainees where torture reportedly runs rampant, the Guardian has learned.

According to three officials with the US Agency for International Development (USAid), Israel’s humanitarian relief hub began operating at the desert military base Sde Teiman on 29 July, with a regular US presence. USAid is tasked with facilitating urgently needed humanitarian assistance to Gaza.

Sde Teiman was set up as a temporary holding facility for detainees from Gaza after last year’s 7 October attack and the ensuing war. Human rights groups and released detainees say the thousands of of Palestinians who have been through the facility have been subjected to severe abuse and torture.

In July, Israel consolidated the various mechanisms approving aid operations in Gaza into one body, the Joint Coordination Board. The JCB sits at Sde Teiman and coordinates logistics with the US, the United Nations and a number of international NGOs.

The Guardian viewed an internal USAid document that referred to “the present JCB location on Sde Teiman IDF base”, located outside of Be’er Sheva in southern Israel. In the document, the base’s name links to its Wikipedia entry, which features photos of blindfolded Palestinian prisoners and details their mistreatment.

The sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told the Guardian that two USAid officials travel to Sde Teiman daily for JCB meetings with Israeli and UN officials.

“I can’t sleep at night knowing that it’s going on,” one US official told the Guardian. “It’s another form of psychological torture to make someone work there.”

The IDF confirmed the location of the JCB but did not respond to questions about the prison.

It is not clear whether USAid officials have seen the part of the base where Palestinian prisoners reside. The IDF division that oversees the entry of humanitarian aid works out of “a handful of makeshift trailers” on the base, Jewish Insider has reported.

“USAid is working closely to ensure more effective dialogue between humanitarian partners and the Israeli government to improve the safety, efficiency, and effectiveness of humanitarian movements into and throughout Gaza,” a USAid spokesperson wrote by email. “Due to security considerations, we do not comment on the specific locations of our staff.”

Human rights groups, whistleblowers and prisoners released from Sde Teiman have described severe violence meted out by Israeli soldiers in the facility, including rape, beatings, electrocutions and force feedings. An Israeli doctor who worked at the camp reported prisoners “routinely” had limbs amputated as a result of prolonged handcuffing.

In May, the New York Times reported that 4,000 Palestinians had been through the prison since 7 October. At least 35 died, either at the site or nearby hospitals.

“The situation there is more horrific than anything we’ve heard about Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo,” Khaled Mahajneh, a lawyer who visited Sde Teiman, told +972 Magazine.

In a lawsuit surrounding the conditions in Sde Teiman, the Israeli government reported to the country’s high court of justice that 24 prisoners remain there and that conditions were set to improve with the opening of a new wing.

“We have no indication that the living conditions in the camp have indeed been improved, as our lawyers have still not had access to the camp to assess that,” Tal Steiner, executive director of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, told the Guardian.

The Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem reports that Sde Teiman is part of a network of detention facilities where torture has become widespread in the last year.

Israel is investigating 10 IDF soldiers and reservists who were posted at the prison for sexual violence, after one prisoner was hospitalized in critical condition. The investigations sparked violent far-right attacks on two military bases in support of the soldiers under investigation. State department spokesperson Matt Miller called the allegations of sexual abuse “horrific” and said those involved “ought to be held accountable”.

Israel previously coordinated humanitarian operations out of site 61 on Hatzor airbase near Ashdod, north of Gaza. Weeks before the operation moved to Sde Teiman, Samantha Power, the USAid administrator, visited site 61. “I think what’s happening in this room is incredibly important,” she said.

Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (Cogat), which oversees the JCB, holds daily meetings at the Sde Teiman base with USAid and UN representatives, the American officials told the Guardian. “It’s a very big base,” a Cogat spokesperson said.

The sources say that the relocation of the humanitarian operations center to Sde Teiman has been a closely guarded secret, and that USAid documents and internal correspondence list the location as Be’er Sheva.

An Israeli military factsheet confirms the consolidation of the JCB at the end of July without naming its location. “Members meet every morning to discuss the day’s planned activities in detail,” the factsheet says. “These efforts underscore Israel’s commitment to work in close collaboration with humanitarian actors and constantly improve existing mechanisms so that humanitarian teams can operate effectively, and that aid reaches those in need.”

But the officials who spoke with the Guardian said that the Israeli military has undermined coordination with the UN and humanitarian organizations over the past year, and the relocation of the JCB to Sde Teiman reflected that. “It seems like trolling,” one of them told the Guardian.

Power, the administrator of USAid, established herself two decades ago one of America’s most prominent advocates for a foreign policy that centers human rights. But over the past year, she has come under fire from her own staff for not getting Israel to allow more aid into Gaza.

USAid staff have coordinated dissent memos on private group chats, held vigils for slain aid workers outside of the Washington office, and confronted USAid leadership in meetings. Seventy-six staffers sent a letter in March to the leadership of the agency’s Bureau for Resilience, Environment, and Food Security criticizing USAid’s “silence on the suffering of Gaza”.

In a separate open letter from January, 128 USAid officials wrote to the agency’s global health leader Atul Gawande seeking “greater advocacy for the protection of civilian life and to salvage the little that remains of the health care system in Gaza”.

Gawande responded by saying he and USAid leadership are “pressing for Israel to restore water, food, fuel, communications, and electricity in Gaza and to adhere to international humanitarian law”. But USAid staffers question the efficacy of their efforts without a sustained ceasefire.

Power has been actively involved in the US’s response to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. On 6 September, she and Israeli Maj Gen Ghassan Alian, the head of Cogat, “discussed immediate actions that can be taken to improve the operation of the Joint Coordination Board”, according to a USAid statement.

Prague city councillors have banned night-time pub crawls organised by travel agencies because the city wanted to target “more cultured” tourists.

The Czech capital of 1.3 million people has for a long time been a popular destination for noisy stag parties and pub crawlers, largely from Britain.

Prague deputy mayor Zdenek Hrib told reporters on Monday that organised night-time pub crawls would now be banned.

“It will not be possible to have guided tours between 10pm and 6am,” he added.

Jiri Pospisil, another deputy mayor, said Prague city hall was “seeking a more cultured, wealthier tourist … not one who comes for a short time only to get drunk”.

Foreign beer lovers have for years helped the Czech Republic keep its position as the world’s thirstiest nation.

In 2023, a world-leading 128 litres of beer was drunk per head of population in the Czech Republic, despite a steady decline since the Covid pandemic hit in 2020.

Beer is still cheaper than water in some restaurants and many pubs in the Unesco-listed historic centre offer the acclaimed local lager for less than €3 a pint.

Vaclav Starek, the head of the Czech Association of Hotels and Restaurants, hailed the city hall’s decision.

“Trips to the centre in search of beer have been a problem for local people and for other tourists too,” he told AFP. “I don’t think this will hurt our sales. Nobody will be banned from going to a pub but these nightly organised pub crawls … are nothing we would need.”

Prague is not the first European capital to start trying to discourage a certain type of tourist from visiting.

Amsterdam last year launched a campaign of “stay away” adverts aimed at young British men that are triggered when people in Britain enter terms into search engines such as “stag party Amsterdam”, “cheap hotel Amsterdam” and “pub crawl Amsterdam”.

The ads describe the risks and consequences of excessive alcohol and drug taking: fines, a criminal record, hospitalisation and permanent health damage.

Another campaign launched this year sought to discourage visitors with an online quiz; anyone who answers yes to the questions “Would you like to explore the city with a drink or a spliff/joint in your hand?” or “Would you like a guided tour among sex workers’ windows?” is met with the response, “That is going to be a hassle. It is forbidden.”

Other European cities have also introduced measures to deter mass tourism, including Venice, which has limited tour group sizes and banned loudspeakers, and Barcelona, which has said it will ban apartment rentals to tourists by 2028.

Agence France-Presse contributed to this report

Prague city councillors have banned night-time pub crawls organised by travel agencies because the city wanted to target “more cultured” tourists.

The Czech capital of 1.3 million people has for a long time been a popular destination for noisy stag parties and pub crawlers, largely from Britain.

Prague deputy mayor Zdenek Hrib told reporters on Monday that organised night-time pub crawls would now be banned.

“It will not be possible to have guided tours between 10pm and 6am,” he added.

Jiri Pospisil, another deputy mayor, said Prague city hall was “seeking a more cultured, wealthier tourist … not one who comes for a short time only to get drunk”.

Foreign beer lovers have for years helped the Czech Republic keep its position as the world’s thirstiest nation.

In 2023, a world-leading 128 litres of beer was drunk per head of population in the Czech Republic, despite a steady decline since the Covid pandemic hit in 2020.

Beer is still cheaper than water in some restaurants and many pubs in the Unesco-listed historic centre offer the acclaimed local lager for less than €3 a pint.

Vaclav Starek, the head of the Czech Association of Hotels and Restaurants, hailed the city hall’s decision.

“Trips to the centre in search of beer have been a problem for local people and for other tourists too,” he told AFP. “I don’t think this will hurt our sales. Nobody will be banned from going to a pub but these nightly organised pub crawls … are nothing we would need.”

Prague is not the first European capital to start trying to discourage a certain type of tourist from visiting.

Amsterdam last year launched a campaign of “stay away” adverts aimed at young British men that are triggered when people in Britain enter terms into search engines such as “stag party Amsterdam”, “cheap hotel Amsterdam” and “pub crawl Amsterdam”.

The ads describe the risks and consequences of excessive alcohol and drug taking: fines, a criminal record, hospitalisation and permanent health damage.

Another campaign launched this year sought to discourage visitors with an online quiz; anyone who answers yes to the questions “Would you like to explore the city with a drink or a spliff/joint in your hand?” or “Would you like a guided tour among sex workers’ windows?” is met with the response, “That is going to be a hassle. It is forbidden.”

Other European cities have also introduced measures to deter mass tourism, including Venice, which has limited tour group sizes and banned loudspeakers, and Barcelona, which has said it will ban apartment rentals to tourists by 2028.

Agence France-Presse contributed to this report

An estimated 500 elite Afghan soldiers who fought alongside the British are expected to become eligible to come to the UK after a previous decision rejecting their applications was overturned.

Fresh information has been discovered in about a quarter of the 2,000 rejected cases proving that the at-risk veterans were paid and employed by the UK government in Afghanistan, despite previous claims that no such evidence existed. A review had been launched by the Conservatives in February.

Luke Pollard, the minister for the armed forces, told the Commons on Monday that the emergency reassessment reflected “the problems that have dogged the Afghan resettlement scheme under the previous government”.

Pollard said there had been 2,000 cases in which there had been “an inconsistent approach” to decision taking. Of the cases that had been reviewed under Labour, the minister said “we are expecting an overturn rate of approximately 25%”.

Some of the Afghans have been in hiding from the Taliban, who have been in charge of Afghanistan since the western withdrawal in summer 2021, while a couple of hundred fled to Pakistan where they are at risk of deportation. Six are said to have been murdered for having collaborated with the British.

They include members of the elite Afghan 333 and 444 units, known as the Triples, who fought alongside and worked closely with British forces, including the SAS, during more than a decade of UK military involvement in Afghanistan.

The SAS also had a veto on whether Afghan veterans could come to the UK, but defence sources indicated this was not the reason for the cases being overturned – rather, it was the belated discovery of fresh financial records.

Pollard said: “Officials have now confirmed that there is evidence of payments from the UK government to members of Afghan specialist units, including ‘CF triple three’ and ‘ATF triple four’, and that for some individuals this demonstrates a direct employment relationship.”

There had been concern over a conflict of interest, because a public inquiry is examining allegations that the SAS carried out 80 unlawful, summary killings in Helmand province between 2010 and 2013. Afghan veterans may in theory be able to give evidence that contradicts the SAS position.

In February the then minister for the armed forces, the Conservative James Heappey, said “we do not hold comprehensive employment or payment records” for members of the Afghan special forces. He said they had reported directly to the former government of Afghanistan.

Pollard, his Labour successor, said he had seen “no evidence” suggesting there was a deliberate effort to prevent eligible Afghans from coming to the UK. Conservative ministers had acted “in good faith”, Pollard said, and he placed the blame on problems with information flows between government departments. “I am clear that this sort of systems failure is not good enough,” he added.

The unexpectedly rapid takeover by the Taliban after the US-led withdrawal led to the UK announcing several schemes to allow Afghans who had helped the British to come to the UK. Since the withdrawal, 12,874 Afghans have been granted indefinite leave to remain in the UK – including about 400 members of the triples.

In opposition, Labour had campaigned for the Conservative government to reassess cases involving the Afghan veterans. Pollard told MPs that “it should not have taken this long” to start overruling decisions, and that the review announced in February should have been completed before the July general election.

Doctors are hailing a “remarkable” new treatment regime for cervical cancer that reduces the risk of dying by 40%, in the biggest advance against the disease in 25 years.

Cervical cancer is the fourth most common cancer in women globally, with about 660,000 new cases and 350,000 deaths every year, according to the World Health Organization. In the UK, there are about 3,200 cases and 800 deaths each year.

Many of those affected are in their 30s, and despite improvements in care, the cancer returns in as many as 30% of cases.

The new treatment plan was tested in patients recruited over 10 years from the UK, Mexico, India, Italy and Brazil. It involves a short course of chemotherapy before patients undergo chemoradiation, the standard treatment for cervical cancer involving a combination of chemotherapy and radiotherapy.

In research led by University College London, it has been reported that the results of the phase-three clinical trial showed a 40% reduction in the risk of death from the disease and a 35% reduction in the risk of cancer coming back within at least five years. Their findings have been published in the Lancet.

Dr Mary McCormack, the lead investigator of the trial at UCL, told the Guardian the discovery was the most significant breakthrough in treating cervical cancer since the end of the last century. “This is the biggest gain in survival since the adoption of chemoradiation in 1999,” she said.

“Every improvement in survival for a cancer patient is important, especially when the treatment is well-tolerated and given for a relatively short time, allowing women to get back to their normal lives relatively quickly.”

Researchers at UCL and University College London hospital (UCLH) completed a long-term follow-up of patients who were given the short course of chemotherapy before chemoradiation.

The Interlace trial, funded by Cancer Research UK and UCL Cancer Trials Centre, looked at whether a short course of induction chemotherapy prior to chemoradiation could cut relapses and deaths among patients with locally advanced cervical cancer that had not spread to other organs.

The trial recruited 500 women who were randomly allocated to receive either the new treatment regime or the standard chemoradiation treatment. None of the patients’ tumours had spread to other organs.

In the study, one group received the new regime of six weeks of carboplatin and paclitaxel chemotherapy. This was followed by standard radiotherapy plus weekly cisplatin and brachytherapy chemotherapy, known as chemoradiation. The control group received only the usual chemoradiation.

After five years, 80% of those who received a short course of chemotherapy first were alive and for 72% their cancer had not returned nor spread. In the standard treatment group, 72% were alive and 64% had not had their cancer return or spread.

Separately, UCL said the trial found a 40% reduction in the risk of death and a 35% reduction in the risk of cancer returning, when comparing the two groups using a different metric.

Abbie Halls, a client service manager from London who was diagnosed with cervical cancer when she was 27, is one of the women who received the new treatment regime. “I’ve been cancer-free for over nine years now and I’m not sure if I’d be here without the treatment that I received,” said the 37-year-old. “I’m happy that I could play a part in advancing the research, which I hope is going to save the lives of many more women in years to come.”

The results prompted calls for the regime to be implemented across the UK and internationally. McCormack said: “A short course of induction chemotherapy prior to standard chemoradiation treatment greatly boosts overall survival and reduces the risk of relapse in patients with locally advanced cervical cancer.

“This approach is a straightforward way to make a positive difference, using existing drugs that are cheap and already approved for use in patients. It has already been adopted by some cancer centres and there’s no reason that this shouldn’t be offered to all patients undergoing chemoradiation for this cancer.”

Dr Iain Foulkes, the executive director of research and innovation at Cancer Research UK, said: “The simple act of adding induction chemotherapy to the start of chemoradiation treatment for cervical cancer has delivered remarkable results. A growing body of evidence is showing that additional chemotherapy before other treatments, like surgery and radiotherapy, can improve the chances of successful treatment for patients. Not only can it reduce the chances of cancer coming back, it can also be delivered quickly, using drugs already available worldwide.”

The disgraced entertainment mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs was hit with six new lawsuits on Monday that accused the rap impresario of raping women, sexually assaulting men and molesting a 16-year-old boy.

The plaintiffs in the lawsuits, filed anonymously in federal court under New York’s Gender Motivated Violence Act, were identified only as two women – Jane Does – and four men, John Does.

The accusers are part of what their attorney says is a group of more than 100 alleged victims who are in the process of suing Combs in the wake of his arrest last month on racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking charges.

Combs, who has pleaded not guilty and was denied bail, is currently awaiting trial in May.

One of the plaintiffs in the current wave of lawsuits is a man living in North Carolina who alleges Combs sexually assaulted him when he was 16 at one of the Bad Boy entrepreneur’s “white parties” in Long Island’s Hamptons in 1998.

The John Doe alleges that during a conversation about making it in the record business Combs abruptly ordered the teen to drop his pants. Combs explained to him that it was a rite of passage to becoming a music star, at one point asking: “Don’t you want to break into the business?” the lawsuit states.

The plaintiffs said he complied with Comb out of fear, anxiety and power imbalance he felt. He released only later what had happened was a sexual assault.

Another man alleges he was assaulted by Combs in the stockroom at Macy’s flagship store in Herald Square. In that incident, the plaintiff alleges, he was hit on the head, possibly with a pistol and then sexually attacked. Afterwards, Combs allegedly threatened the man: “Shut up, or I’ll kill you,” the filing claims.

One of the Jane Does said she was a 19-year-old college freshman in Brooklyn when she was invited to a photo shoot in 2004 promoting Da Band, a group that Combs’s label had signed. She claims Combs invited her and a friend to his hotel “for a more exclusive party” where they were locked in a room.

“You know what you are here for,” the security guard said, according to the lawsuit. Combs allegedly pushed drinks and cocaine on the women before the sexual attacks took place. At one point Combs allegedly told them to comply “or else he would have them both killed”.

Another man alleges he was hired to work as a guard at Combs’s East Hampton home during another of the rapper’s white parties in 2006. He alleges Combs spiked his drinks with the date rape drug GHB and sexually assaulted him.

In a statement late on Monday, attorneys for Combs said “the press conference and 1-800 number that preceded today’s barrage of filings were clear attempts to garner publicity. Mr. Combs and his legal team have full confidence in the facts, their legal defenses, and the integrity of the judicial process. In court, the truth will prevail: that Mr. Combs has never sexually assaulted anyone – adult or minor, man or woman.”

The disgraced entertainment mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs was hit with six new lawsuits on Monday that accused the rap impresario of raping women, sexually assaulting men and molesting a 16-year-old boy.

The plaintiffs in the lawsuits, filed anonymously in federal court under New York’s Gender Motivated Violence Act, were identified only as two women – Jane Does – and four men, John Does.

The accusers are part of what their attorney says is a group of more than 100 alleged victims who are in the process of suing Combs in the wake of his arrest last month on racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking charges.

Combs, who has pleaded not guilty and was denied bail, is currently awaiting trial in May.

One of the plaintiffs in the current wave of lawsuits is a man living in North Carolina who alleges Combs sexually assaulted him when he was 16 at one of the Bad Boy entrepreneur’s “white parties” in Long Island’s Hamptons in 1998.

The John Doe alleges that during a conversation about making it in the record business Combs abruptly ordered the teen to drop his pants. Combs explained to him that it was a rite of passage to becoming a music star, at one point asking: “Don’t you want to break into the business?” the lawsuit states.

The plaintiffs said he complied with Comb out of fear, anxiety and power imbalance he felt. He released only later what had happened was a sexual assault.

Another man alleges he was assaulted by Combs in the stockroom at Macy’s flagship store in Herald Square. In that incident, the plaintiff alleges, he was hit on the head, possibly with a pistol and then sexually attacked. Afterwards, Combs allegedly threatened the man: “Shut up, or I’ll kill you,” the filing claims.

One of the Jane Does said she was a 19-year-old college freshman in Brooklyn when she was invited to a photo shoot in 2004 promoting Da Band, a group that Combs’s label had signed. She claims Combs invited her and a friend to his hotel “for a more exclusive party” where they were locked in a room.

“You know what you are here for,” the security guard said, according to the lawsuit. Combs allegedly pushed drinks and cocaine on the women before the sexual attacks took place. At one point Combs allegedly told them to comply “or else he would have them both killed”.

Another man alleges he was hired to work as a guard at Combs’s East Hampton home during another of the rapper’s white parties in 2006. He alleges Combs spiked his drinks with the date rape drug GHB and sexually assaulted him.

In a statement late on Monday, attorneys for Combs said “the press conference and 1-800 number that preceded today’s barrage of filings were clear attempts to garner publicity. Mr. Combs and his legal team have full confidence in the facts, their legal defenses, and the integrity of the judicial process. In court, the truth will prevail: that Mr. Combs has never sexually assaulted anyone – adult or minor, man or woman.”

Only about one-third of Europe’s surface water is in good health or better, a report has found, despite an EU target first set for 2015 to bring all bodies of water up to good quality.

About 37% of Europe’s surface waters qualified as having at least a good ecological status and 29% a good chemical status in 2021, according to data from 19 member countries compiled by the European Environment Agency (EEA). The original deadline for the EU target has been extended to 2027 but data suggests this is on track to be missed by a wide margin.

“The health of Europe’s waters is not good,” said Leena Ylä-Mononen, the EEA’s executive director. “Our waters face an unprecedented set of challenges that threatens Europe’s water security.”

The report found that farms had the biggest effect on Europe’s surface water and groundwater, drawing out too much water and pumping in too many pollutants, along with the impact of coal-fired power plants that spew out toxic particles.

Parts of western and central Europe such as Germany and the Netherlands had a particularly high share of water bodies in poor health, the report found.

It highlighted the “catastrophic” die-off of fish in the Oder River in 2022 that was mainly caused by pollution from salt mines and nutrients from urban wastewater.

The EU introduced sweeping rules on water management almost 25 years ago that sent member countries racing to improve the quality of their bodies of water. But efforts over the last decade “have rarely translated into improved status overall”, the EEA found, in the most thorough assessment of the continent’s waterways to date.

The report found that Europe’s groundwater was in better health than its surface water, with 91% rated as having at least a good quantitative status and 77% achieving a good chemical status. On both metrics, groundwater quality had improved by just one percentage point since 2015.

The EEA said solutions to the poor state of Europe’s water included reducing demand, releasing fewer harmful substances, and restoring rivers and wetlands. The scientists pointed to the floods that ravaged central Europe last month as examples of weather events that have made action more urgent.

“Having a healthy aquatic ecosystem helps mitigate the impacts we’re seeing of climate change,” said Trine Christiansen, a co-author of the report. “The better the [water] situation we have, the more capable we are of handling these more extreme events.”

The EEA partly attributed the lack of improvement in the chemical status of surface water to pollutants with long lifespans such as mercury and brominated flame retardants.

Prof Dietrich Borchardt, a water scientist from the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research who was not involved in the report, said he welcomed the inclusion of nature restoration and climate change in the assessment but wished it had explicitly considered climate projections.

He said: “I would also have liked to have seen a more detailed examination of why the water situation in Europe has hardly improved for two decades – and what the key factors are for not only maintaining the status quo but also achieving substantial improvements.”

The lobby group Water Europe called on Monday for €255bn (£213bn) in water investments by 2030 to protect Europe’s economy and ensure environmental sustainability. It warned that water scarcity, which affects one in three Europeans, also threatened key industries such as the production of semiconductors, datacentres, renewable hydrogen, and electric vehicle batteries.

A 26-year-old British man has died after falling from a Spanish bridge while attempting to create social media content, according to local authorities.

The man, who has yet to be named by police, fell while climbing the Castilla-La Mancha Bridge in the central city of Talavera de la Reina, the local mayor’s office said in a statement on Sunday.

Macarena Muñoz, the city’s councillor for citizen safety, said the man was accompanied by a 24-year-old British national and the pair had travelled to the structure to “create content” for social media, Sky News reported.

Muñoz added: “We have been able to find out, they had come to Talavera to climb the bridge and create content for social networks, which has resulted in this unfortunate and sad outcome.”

She said climbing the bridge was “totally prohibited” and “cannot be done under any circumstances”, which the council had “reiterated on many occasions”.

A spokesperson for the UK Foreign Office said: “We are supporting the family of a British man who has died in Spain, and are in contact with the local authorities.”

The Castilla-La Mancha, the tallest cable-stayed bridge in Spain since its opening in 2011, stands over the Tagus River.

The 192-metre-high (630ft) structure consists of a main concrete pylon with multiple cables coming from the centre in a triangular shape.

A woman who wanted to smuggle turtles across a lake and into Canada by hiding the creatures using socks in a duffle bag has pleaded guilty to a smuggling charge.

Wan Yee Ng was arrested in June in Vermont as she was about to enter an inflatable kayak with the bag of 29 eastern box turtles and paddle across Lake Wallace to the border with Canada, according to an affidavit filed in federal court.

Eastern box turtles are a protected species and have vivid, orange and yellow markings atop a dark brown shell, They are sold on the black market in China for $1,000, the Associated Press reported.

Ng pleaded guilty to a single count of attempting to smuggle eastern box turtles and faces up to 10 years in prison and as much as a $250,000 fine.

On 26 June, as Ng prepared to enter the kayak in Vermont, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police notified border patrol agents that two other individuals had launched an inflatable watercraft on the Canadian side of the lake. The two turned out to be Ng’s husband and another person.

Lake Wallace is an international body of water that has been used for human and narcotic smuggling.

The federal government has arrested a number of people over the last year for allegedly trying to smuggle the turtles to China.

In March, a grand jury indicted a man from Hong Kong who had allegedly mislabeled packages containing 40 protected turtles as containing almonds and chocolate cookies, an affidavit states.

The Turtle Survival Alliance, a conservation organization, describes the turtle as “vulnerable” because of habitat destruction and fragmentation; road and railroad mortality; disease transmission; and collection for personal use and the illegal pet trade.

The World Conker Championships is investigating cheating allegations after the men’s winner was found to have a steel chestnut in his pocket.

David Jakins won the annual title in Southwick, Northamptonshire, on Sunday for the first time after competing since 1977.

But the 82-year-old was found to have a metal replica in his pocket when he was searched by organisers after his victory.

The retired engineer has denied using the metal variety in the tournament.

Jakins was responsible for drilling and inserting strings into other competitors’ chestnuts as the competition’s top judge, known as the “King Conker”.

Alastair Johnson-Ferguson, who lost in the men’s final against Jakins, said he suspected “foul play”, the Telegraph reported.

The 23-year-old said: “My conker disintegrated in one hit, and that just doesn’t happen … I’m suspicious of foul play and have expressed my surprise to organisers.”

Kelci Banschbach, 34, from Indianapolis, defeated the men’s champion in the grand final to become the first American to win the competition. More than 200 people took part.

Jakins said: “I was found with the steel conker in my pocket, but I only carry [it] around with me for humour value and I did not use it during the event.

“Yes, I did help prepare the conkers before the tournament. But this isn’t cheating or a fix, and I didn’t mark the strings.”

St John Burkett, a spokesperson for the World Conker Championships, said the cheating claims were being investigated.

“Allegations of foul play have been received that somehow King Conker swapped his real conker for the metal one later found in his pocket.

“Players select conkers from a sack before each round.

“There are also suggestions that King Conker had marked the strings of harder nuts. We can confirm he was involved in drilling and lacing the nuts before the event.

“We are investigating.”

More than 2,000 conkers had been prepared prior to the event.