A woman has alleged that Doug Emhoff slapped her during an argument when they were a couple in 2012, before he married Kamala Harris, and the accusation has prompted a spokesperson for the second gentleman to issue a denial.

The woman has not publicly identified herself. She first spoke to the Daily Mail anonymously and then again after Emhoff’s denial, on the condition that her name was not disclosed. The tabloid described her as a successful lawyer in New York and published pictures of the then couple, but with her face blurred out.

She alleges that Emhoff struck her so hard while they were attending the Cannes film festival in France in 2012 that the force of the slap spun her around.

The allegations were described as “untrue” by a spokesperson for Emhoff, speaking to Semafor, as reported by CNN, who added that “any suggestion that he would or has ever hit a woman is false”.

The Daily Mail has cited three unnamed friends of the woman backing up her account and she has now accused Emhoff of hypocrisy. The woman had not given interviews herself until this week, when she spoke with the Daily Mail.

The woman also criticized what she saw as Emhoff’s burnishing of his reputation as a “perfect” spouse and a feminist, standing alongside Harris, the Democratic party nominee for president who will be the first female president of the US if she wins against Donald Trump next month.

“He’s being held out to be the antithesis of who he actually is. And that is utterly shocking,” she told the Mail.

Meanwhile, Trump’s election campaign has been pointing to the allegations against Emhoff as it fights back against damage to the Republican nominee’s reputation from a civil verdict against him that he sexually abused writer E Jean Carroll and serial allegations from dozens of women that he has sexually assaulted them, all of which he has denied.

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A woman has alleged that Doug Emhoff slapped her during an argument when they were a couple in 2012, before he married Kamala Harris, and the accusation has prompted a spokesperson for the second gentleman to issue a denial.

The woman has not publicly identified herself. She first spoke to the Daily Mail anonymously and then again after Emhoff’s denial, on the condition that her name was not disclosed. The tabloid described her as a successful lawyer in New York and published pictures of the then couple, but with her face blurred out.

She alleges that Emhoff struck her so hard while they were attending the Cannes film festival in France in 2012 that the force of the slap spun her around.

The allegations were described as “untrue” by a spokesperson for Emhoff, speaking to Semafor, as reported by CNN, who added that “any suggestion that he would or has ever hit a woman is false”.

The Daily Mail has cited three unnamed friends of the woman backing up her account and she has now accused Emhoff of hypocrisy. The woman had not given interviews herself until this week, when she spoke with the Daily Mail.

The woman also criticized what she saw as Emhoff’s burnishing of his reputation as a “perfect” spouse and a feminist, standing alongside Harris, the Democratic party nominee for president who will be the first female president of the US if she wins against Donald Trump next month.

“He’s being held out to be the antithesis of who he actually is. And that is utterly shocking,” she told the Mail.

Meanwhile, Trump’s election campaign has been pointing to the allegations against Emhoff as it fights back against damage to the Republican nominee’s reputation from a civil verdict against him that he sexually abused writer E Jean Carroll and serial allegations from dozens of women that he has sexually assaulted them, all of which he has denied.

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The former model Stacey Williams said she thought Donald Trump groped her to show off to her then boyfriend, the late financier and sexual abuser Jeffrey Epstein, when the couple dropped by to visit him in Trump Tower in New York in 1993.

In her first detailed, on-camera interview since discussing assault allegations with the Guardian, Williams late on Thursday told CNN that she recalled the former president and Epstein smiled at each other as the property mogul was feeling her up, which gave her the impression the entire incident was a “coordinated” game between the two men.

Her account comes just weeks before the presidential election, in which Trump and the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, are essentially tied, according to polls. Trump has denied Williams’s accounts.

“The second he was in front of me, he pulled me into him and his hands were just on me and didn’t come off,” Williams told CNN, echoing her account to the Guardian.

“Then the hands started moving on the side of my breasts, on my hips, back down to my butt, back up, sort of – they were just on me the whole time, and I froze,” she said.

Williams briefly dated Epstein in the 1990s. At the time, she told the Guardian, she and Epstein were walking through Manhattan when he suggested they visit Trump at his Trump Tower complex on Fifth Avenue.

The two were good friends, she said. Trump later distanced himself from Epstein after the financier was convicted of being a sex offender in Florida, several years before he was arrested in New York on federal sex offenses in 2019 and killed himself while in custody awaiting trial.

She added, as she did in her recounting to the Guardian, that she believed now that the incident was planned by Epstein and Trump all along. When they encountered Trump, she alleges he immediately grabbed and groped her, right in front of her boyfriend.

“This context made no sense because the hands were on me and he and Jeffrey just kept talking and looking at each other and smiling,” she said. Later, when thecouple left, she said Epstein berated her for allowing Trump to touch her, and that the whole incident left her confused and sick.

“I just had this really sickening feeling that it was coordinated, I was rolled in there like a piece of meat in some kind of weird twisted game,” she told CNN. “I felt a wave of shame,” she said, and took the memory of the incident, “put it in a little box inside of me, turned the key, locked it.”

Williams told the Guardian this week in an exclusive first interview that she got the sense, at the time, that Trump and Epstein were “really, really good friends”. Williams also shared an undated postcard that she said Trump later sent her, with a view of Palm Beach, Florida, home to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago mansion.

“Your home away from home,” the postcard read. “Love, Donald”.

Trump’s campaign, responding to CNN, said Williams’s allegations were a “fake story [that] was contrived by Kamala Harris’ campaign,” to distract from a second incident, in which Doug Emhoff is accused of slapping a former girlfriend. A campaign spokesperson for Harris, the US vice-president, earlier this month denied the allegation against her husband.

Williams’s account will add to a long list of women who have accused Trump of sexual assault, ranging from the writer E Jean Carroll, who was eventually vindicated by a civil jury that found Trump liable for sexual abuse, to his ex-wife, Ivana Trump, who accused the former president of raping her, in a divorce deposition.

Williams said she gained the courage to come forward about the incident following the release of a recent documentary about the magazine Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issues, called Beyond the Gaze.

“I can’t control when a documentary comes out, I can’t control its premiering two weeks before the election,” Williams told CNN. Although Williams had alluded to the incident in social media comments, she had never told her story in detail until this week.

“It takes a lot of guts, and you have to really prepare yourself for that onslaught, and I’m ready now,” she said. “Just bring it.”

• Information and support for anyone affected by sexual abuse issues is available from the following organisations. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 500 2222. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html

Three journalists from the Hezbollah-affiliated TV stations Al Mayadeen and Al-Manar were killed and several others wounded in an Israeli airstrike on their press station in Hasbaya, southern Lebanon, early on Friday morning.

The strikes hit a group of small chalets that 18 journalists from at least seven different media outlets – including Al Jazeera, Sky News Arabia and TRT – were staying in while covering the Israel-Hezbollah war in south Lebanon. Several cars with “Press” signs on them were parked in front of the site.

Wissam Qassem, a camera operator with Al-Manar, and Al Mayadeen’s Ghassan Najjar, a correspondent, and Mohammad Reda, a technician, were killed in the strike. Al-Manar is a Hezbollah media outlet and Al Mayadeen is a pro-Hezbollah outlet, but rights groups have said political affiliation does not make journalists a legitimate target. Journalists are considered civilians under international humanitarian law and deliberately targeting them is a war crime.

The killings were condemned by Lebanon’s minister of information, Ziad Makary, who called the attack a war crime. Israel has killed 12 journalists in Lebanon – six of whom were on duty – since fighting began on 8 October 2023, including the Reuters photographer Issam Abdallah. Investigations by six international human rights organisations and media outlets concluded that Abdallah was killed by an Israeli tank in an “apparently deliberate” strike.

Friday’s strike hit the group of journalists at about 3.30am local time (0130 BST). “The airstrike happened while we were sleeping. I don’t remember hearing the sound of the explosion, I heard the sound of the rocket. I came out and found the chalet had fallen on the [journalists],” said Darine El Helwe, a senior correspondent with Sky News Arabia who was present at the time of the strike.

The group of journalists had been using Hasbaya as a base for the past month, sleeping there and then going south during the day to cover the war. Hasbaya is not affiliated with Hezbollah and had largely been spared by Israeli strikes over the past year. The journalists relocated there after their previous residence in the south became unsafe due to intensifying Israeli bombing.

El Helwe said the strike would probably have a chilling effect on journalists, many of whom had previously operated in south-east Lebanon under the assumption that it was safe from Israeli strikes.

She said: “It was the only region that still would transmit pictures of airstrikes, targeting and skirmishes. I guess Israel doesn’t want these pictures to come out any more. If they wanted to target a team from the journalists, they could have targeted them on the road because they know the cars. But to target us at night while we’re sleeping?”

The strikes specifically hit the chalet in which the Al Mayadeen and Al-Manar journalists were residing. On Wednesday, an Israeli airstrike struck Al Mayadeen’s office in the southern suburbs of Beirut, which had already been evacuated. Two of its journalists were killed a year earlier in an Israeli airstrike while reporting in south Lebanon.

At least 125 journalists have been killed in Israel’s war in Gaza over the past year, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. On Wednesday Israel accused six journalists working for Al Jazeera in Gaza of being members of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The network described the allegations as “baseless” and called for the international community to intervene to protect the lives of the six journalists named by Israel.

Jordan’s foreign minister has called for pressure on Israel to end what he called the “ethnic cleansing” in Gaza, as he met the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, in London.

Blinken, who is still hoping Gaza peace talks can be revived, stopped over in the UK to brief leaders from Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan after he had been unable to meet them on his recent tour of the Middle East.

Deploring the humanitarian situation in northern Gaza, Jordan’s Ayman Safadi told Blinken: “We do see ethnic cleansing taking place, and that has got to stop.”

He added: “We really stand at the brink of regional war now. The only path to save the region from that is for Israel to stop the aggressions on Gaza, on Lebanon, stop unilateral measures, illegal measures, in the West Bank, that is also pushing the situation to an abyss.”

On 13 October Blinken wrote jointly with the US defence secretary, Lloyd Austin, to Israel urging it to increase the number of aid trucks entering Gaza to 350 a day within 30 days, but since then on no day has the number of trucks exceeded 114.

Although Blinken claimed to have seen an improvement in the amount of aid during his trip to the Middle East, Arab diplomatic sources said the figures were nowhere near the level the Biden administration previously said in its letter would be requiredif Israel was not to face punishment including the potential stopping of US weapons transfers.

Separately, in talks with Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister, Najib Mikati, Blinken said: “We have a sense of real urgency in getting to a diplomatic resolution and the full implementation of UN security council resolution 1701, such that there can be real security along the border between Israel and Lebanon.”

Resolution 1701, approved in 2006 after an earlier war, calls for the disarmament of non-state groups in Lebanon – including Hezbollah, which in effect runs its own armed militia – and for a full Israeli withdrawal from the country.

Blinken said it was important so “people at both sides of the border can have the confidence to be able to return to their homes”.

His remarks stopped short of a call for an immediate ceasefire, the position adopted by the French, since the US believes that if Hezbollah can be weakened further the political deadlock that prevents the formation of a full government can be broken.

One precondition for a full implementation of 1701 is strengthening the official Lebanese armed forces. On Thursday at a conference in Paris, the international community promised to pay €200m (£165m) to strengthen the Lebanese army, in particular by recruiting soldiers. A further €800m was raised to help the humanitarian crisis.

Mikati said his government’s priority was reaching “a ceasefire and deterring the Israeli aggression”. He said there were more than 1.4 million people displaced from the areas being attacked by Israel. “Israel is also violating international law by attacking civilians, journalists and medical staff,” he said.

He added: “What is required is a real commitment from Israel to a ceasefire, because the previous experience regarding the American-French call, supported by the Arabs and the international community, for a ceasefire affected everyone’s credibility.”

Mikati was referring to a proposal for an initial 21-day truce agreed at the UN general assembly in the false belief that it had the support of the Israelis.

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man who is now central to Donald Trump’s election campaign, has been in regular contact with Vladimir Putin for the past two years, according to a report in the US.

The Wall Street Journal, citing several in-post and former US, European and Russian officials, reported that the conversations between the two men ranged from the personal to the geopolitical and included a request from the Russian leader not to activate his Starlink ​​satellite internet service over Taiwan as a favour to the Chinese leader and Putin ally, Xi Jinping.

The implications of a secret channel of communication between Musk and Putin are enormous for western security. The Tesla tycoon is a key player in the US space programme and has a high-level security clearance. His company SpaceX launches US national security satellites, his Starlink satellite communications system is critical to the war in Ukraine, and he runs one of the world’s biggest and most influential social media platforms, X, which has provided a vehicle for Russian disinformation campaigns.

Furthermore, if Trump is elected on 5 November, Musk could play an important part in a new US administration. He has poured his own money into the campaign and made multiple personal appearances at rallies. Trump has suggested Musk could head a government commission on efficiency if he wins.

“This is a story about oligarch capture of the US,” said Fiona Hill, who was the senior director for European and Russian affairs in the Trump White House. She compared the situation in the US now to the heyday of oligarchs in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union.

“If people like Musk get Trump re-elected, they’ll expect all kinds of regulatory gifts in their favour,” said Hill, who is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, the chancellor of Durham University and a defence adviser to the UK government.

She added: “He is in a position to command government contracts, potentially with a government position, and there are loads of militaries around the world dependent on his systems, not least Ukraine.”

Earlier this month, the journalist Bob Woodard reported in his new book that Trump himself has had as many as seven private phone calls with Putin since leaving office. Trump has said he will not comment on the reporting but that if he had spoken with Putin it would have been “a smart thing”.

The Wall Street Journal report said the extent of Musk’s contacts with Putin was a closely held secret and even some officials in the Biden White House had been unaware of them.

Musk had not commented on the report by Friday afternoon. The Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, claimed the only communication the Kremlin had had with Musk was over a single telephone call in which he and Putin discussed “space as well as current and future technologies”.

Peskov insisted that neither Putin nor other Kremlin officials were holding regular conversations with Musk.

However, the Journal report said that the conversations with top Russian officials ran from 2022 into this year and included Sergei Kiriyenko, Putin’s first deputy chief of staff. Kiriyenko was accused by the US justice department last month of creating 30 internet domains, some on X, to spread Russian disinformation intended to erode support for Ukraine and influence the US presidential election.

In October 2022, Musk tweeted a “Ukraine-Russia peace” plan that largely reflected Moscow’s positions.

Ian Bremmer, a political scientist who runs the US consulting firm Eurasia Group, said Musk had told him he had spoken directly with Putin and Kremlin officials about Ukraine. Musk denied Bremmer’s claim, but Hill, who attended the same elite conference in Aspen, Colorado as Musk a month before, said it was true.

She said: “He did tell Ian Bremmer that he was talking to Putin and he told many other people that he was. He was just basically channelling the kind of things that Putin had told him.”

A UK-founded anti-hate speech campaign group dragged into the Labour US election interference row has vowed to carry on its work after Elon Musk’s latest declaration of “war” against the organisation.

The Center for Countering Digital Hate returned to the crosshairs of the world’s richest person this week after Musk alleged that it was violating laws against foreign interference in US elections.

CCDH’s founder and CEO, Imran Ahmed, said: “Our work is centred on stopping the spread of hate and disinformation. We are not going to stop working. We are tirelessly going to continue to work towards that mission through our advocacy and our research.”

The basis of Musk’s claims was a report claiming strong links between CCDH, the Labour Together thinktank – once led by Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney – and the Labour party.

Musk published a link to the report on X, the social media platform he owns, and described CCDH, which campaigns against online hate speech, as a “criminal organization”, adding that he was “going after” CCDH and its donors. Musk has already failed this year with an attempt to sue CCDH.

In another post he added: “This is war.”

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign filed a complaint against the Labour party this week accusing it of interfering in the election by sending members to campaign for his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris. Starmer said party officials volunteering to help the Harris campaign before the US presidential election on 5 November were “doing it in their spare time”.

The complaint also refers to McSweeney and Matthew Doyle, Downing Street’s director of communications, attending the Democratic convention in Chicago and meeting the Harris campaign team.

Referring to a previous lawsuit brought by X against CCDH, which a judge dismissed as an attempt to punish the organisation for exercising its right to free speech, Ahmed said: “Elon Musk has a pattern of attacking non-profit, non-partisan organisations that point out hate speech and disinformation running rampant on his platform. He did it to CCDH. This is not the first time we’ve been targeted by Elon Musk – he tried to intimidate us through a baseless lawsuit that was quickly thrown out of court.”

Ahmed, a former Labour party aide, now runs CCDH from Washington. He acknowledged that McSweeney helped him found CCDH by providing a shell company to house the organisation – making McSweeney a founding director – and they remain friends.

However, Ahmed said McSweeney had no operational role at CCDH and that its board members include the former Conservative MP Damian Collins.

“Morgan McSweeney will always be a really dear friend of mine. But then again so is Damian Collins,” said Ahmed, adding that he had worked closely with successive Conservative governments on the UK’s online safety act.

Musk’s latest salvo against CCDH followed the publication of a report into the organisation from the Disinformation Chronicle newsletter, which published excerpts from what it claims to be internal documents at CCDH showing that “Kill Musk’s Twitter” has been declared a strategic priority at the organisation.

Ahmed said he would not comment “directly on proprietary information” but said the phrase had been used as “shorthand” for tackling X’s business model under Musk, who rebranded the platform from Twitter last year.

“We have used internally the concept of ‘Kill Musk’s Twitter’ as shorthand for taking on the business model that Musk brought to Twitter when he turned it into X, which says that social media companies should be able to spread hate without accountability, responsibility or transparency. Everything that we’ve done since then shows that’s precisely our strategy.”

He added: “One of the challenges of dealing with conspiracy theorists is that the battlefield is asymmetric. I operate in the world of facts, demonstrable truth. He operates in the realm of fantasy, the latest conspiracy theories.”

Ahmed worked for Labour as an aide to Angela Eagle MP, the current immigration minister, who was then a member of Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet. Eagle quit the shadow cabinet after the Brexit vote and challenged Corbyn for the leadership, a campaign run by Ahmed, but the campaign was unsuccessful.

Ahmed launched CCDH in 2018 to combat leftwing antisemitism and in response to the murder of Labour MP Jo Cox by Thomas Mair, a far-right extremist .

X has been approached for comment.

A man from Northern Ireland who abused at least 70 children online and drove one to suicide has been sentenced to life in jail with a minimum term of 20 years in a “horrific” case that a judge said had caused “catastrophic damage” to young girls all over the world.

Alexander McCartney, 26, admitted 185 charges including manslaughter, blackmail, inciting a child to engage in sexual activity and producing and distributing indecent images of children.

He was told he would spend at least 20 years in jail after a number of sentences that he will serve concurrently were taken into account.

In one of the biggest investigations into “catfishing”, or sexual extortion, in the world, police found victims aged between 10 and 16 in the UK, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. Prosecutors said McCartney had targeted about 3,500 children.

He posed as a young girl to befriend other girls on Snapchat before blackmailing them, and is believed to be the UK’s worst catfishing offender.

Sitting at Belfast crown court, the judge, Justice O’Hara, said: “In my judgment, it is truly difficult to think of a sexual deviant who poses a greater risk than this defendant. There has not been a case such as the present where the defendant has used social media on an industrial scale to inflict such terrible and catastrophic damage on young girls, up to and including the death of a 12-year-old girl.

“The defendant was remorseless. He ignored multiple opportunities to stop, he ignored multiple pleas for mercy. He lied and lied and then lied again.”

McCartney was sentenced to life in prison on the counts of manslaughter and of causing girls under 13 to engage in sexual activity including penetration.

He was given a number of other sentences ranging from 10 years in each count for 45 counts of various degrees of seriousness that caused sexual activity in underage girls, six years in each count for 29 counts of possessing indecent images, and 10 years in each count for 58 counts of blackmail.

Before handing down the sentence, the judge told families of the victims he would spare them repetition of the “sadism” and the “harrowing nature” of some of the details of McCartney’s crimes.

“This is a quite horrific case. Submissions were made on [McCartney’s] behalf about various mitigating factors … Those mitigating factors are few in number and limited in nature,” O’Hara said.

Sentencing was scheduled at the unusual time of 2pm to allow victims’ families in the US and elsewhere to attend the hearing virtually.

O’Hara said the impact of McCartney’s “depravity” on his victims included “depression, anxiety, stress, shame, embarrassment, loss of confidence, difficulty in trusting others”.

He said: “For many of them, their childhoods have been stolen. Some have attempted to commit suicide. Others report self-harm and suicidal thoughts. Whatever remorse the defendant now seeks to persuade me of, he was absolutely empty of remorse at the time.”

One of the victims, 12-year-old Cimarron Thomas, from West Virginia in the US, killed herself in May 2018 after McCartney threatened to share intimate images with her father.

After retrieving electronic devices from McCartney’s home, investigators discovered three years later that the girl died by suicide three minutes after the blackmail conversation.

The court heard that Cimarron had become deeply distressed and told McCartney she would go to the police and take her own life. But he said he did not care and gave her a countdown for when he would share the pictures.

Her body was found by her nine-year-old sister, and 18 months later her father, Ben Thomas, a US army veteran, also died by suicide, never knowing what had led his daughter to take her own life.

In an impact statement, her grandparents said: “Our lives will never be the same. We didn’t get to see her graduate, walk down the aisle or have children. We have been robbed of those memories. Our lives have changed for ever.”

In another exchange, McCartney told a girl he would send people to her home to rape her if she did not comply with his sextortion demands.

O’Hara told of McCartney’s callous and cold response to several victims who told him they would kill themselves or harm themselves. To one, he said: “Good luck and goodbye.” To another who had said her mother had cancer, he said: “I don’t give a shit.”

As time went on “there was an escalation in the seriousness” and “depravity” of his conduct, O’Hara said.

Operating out of his bedroom in his family home outside Newry, the computer science student posed as a young girl on Snapchat, befriending girls who were gay or exploring their sexuality.

The judge told the court: “His choice of victim was particularly calculating and sinister because the fact that they were exploring homosexuality added an additional layer of security to his actions.”

Once McCartney had secured a picture from his victims, he would then reveal the “catfish” and blackmail them into taking part in sex acts. In some instances, he demanded his victims involve younger siblings, including victims of between three and five years old, O’Hara told the court.

McCartney was arrested several times between 2016 and 2019 but continued to offend despite bail conditions until he was remanded into custody.

At a pre-sentence hearing last week, a prosecuting barrister said McCartney had degraded and humiliated his victims and that the harm caused to them was “unquantifiable”.

When McCartney first came to the police’s attention in 2016, they found eight computer towers, four laptops, eight tablets and nine mobile phones. Indecent images of children were found on four other devices.

Catherine Kierans, the acting head of the serious crime unit at the Public Prosecution Service in Northern Ireland, said the case was “one of the most distressing and prolific cases of child sexual abuse” they had ever seen.

She said McCartney had targeted 3,500 children, many of whom had sought help on social media.

A man from Northern Ireland who abused at least 70 children online and drove one to suicide has been sentenced to life in jail with a minimum term of 20 years in a “horrific” case that a judge said had caused “catastrophic damage” to young girls all over the world.

Alexander McCartney, 26, admitted 185 charges including manslaughter, blackmail, inciting a child to engage in sexual activity and producing and distributing indecent images of children.

He was told he would spend at least 20 years in jail after a number of sentences that he will serve concurrently were taken into account.

In one of the biggest investigations into “catfishing”, or sexual extortion, in the world, police found victims aged between 10 and 16 in the UK, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. Prosecutors said McCartney had targeted about 3,500 children.

He posed as a young girl to befriend other girls on Snapchat before blackmailing them, and is believed to be the UK’s worst catfishing offender.

Sitting at Belfast crown court, the judge, Justice O’Hara, said: “In my judgment, it is truly difficult to think of a sexual deviant who poses a greater risk than this defendant. There has not been a case such as the present where the defendant has used social media on an industrial scale to inflict such terrible and catastrophic damage on young girls, up to and including the death of a 12-year-old girl.

“The defendant was remorseless. He ignored multiple opportunities to stop, he ignored multiple pleas for mercy. He lied and lied and then lied again.”

McCartney was sentenced to life in prison on the counts of manslaughter and of causing girls under 13 to engage in sexual activity including penetration.

He was given a number of other sentences ranging from 10 years in each count for 45 counts of various degrees of seriousness that caused sexual activity in underage girls, six years in each count for 29 counts of possessing indecent images, and 10 years in each count for 58 counts of blackmail.

Before handing down the sentence, the judge told families of the victims he would spare them repetition of the “sadism” and the “harrowing nature” of some of the details of McCartney’s crimes.

“This is a quite horrific case. Submissions were made on [McCartney’s] behalf about various mitigating factors … Those mitigating factors are few in number and limited in nature,” O’Hara said.

Sentencing was scheduled at the unusual time of 2pm to allow victims’ families in the US and elsewhere to attend the hearing virtually.

O’Hara said the impact of McCartney’s “depravity” on his victims included “depression, anxiety, stress, shame, embarrassment, loss of confidence, difficulty in trusting others”.

He said: “For many of them, their childhoods have been stolen. Some have attempted to commit suicide. Others report self-harm and suicidal thoughts. Whatever remorse the defendant now seeks to persuade me of, he was absolutely empty of remorse at the time.”

One of the victims, 12-year-old Cimarron Thomas, from West Virginia in the US, killed herself in May 2018 after McCartney threatened to share intimate images with her father.

After retrieving electronic devices from McCartney’s home, investigators discovered three years later that the girl died by suicide three minutes after the blackmail conversation.

The court heard that Cimarron had become deeply distressed and told McCartney she would go to the police and take her own life. But he said he did not care and gave her a countdown for when he would share the pictures.

Her body was found by her nine-year-old sister, and 18 months later her father, Ben Thomas, a US army veteran, also died by suicide, never knowing what had led his daughter to take her own life.

In an impact statement, her grandparents said: “Our lives will never be the same. We didn’t get to see her graduate, walk down the aisle or have children. We have been robbed of those memories. Our lives have changed for ever.”

In another exchange, McCartney told a girl he would send people to her home to rape her if she did not comply with his sextortion demands.

O’Hara told of McCartney’s callous and cold response to several victims who told him they would kill themselves or harm themselves. To one, he said: “Good luck and goodbye.” To another who had said her mother had cancer, he said: “I don’t give a shit.”

As time went on “there was an escalation in the seriousness” and “depravity” of his conduct, O’Hara said.

Operating out of his bedroom in his family home outside Newry, the computer science student posed as a young girl on Snapchat, befriending girls who were gay or exploring their sexuality.

The judge told the court: “His choice of victim was particularly calculating and sinister because the fact that they were exploring homosexuality added an additional layer of security to his actions.”

Once McCartney had secured a picture from his victims, he would then reveal the “catfish” and blackmail them into taking part in sex acts. In some instances, he demanded his victims involve younger siblings, including victims of between three and five years old, O’Hara told the court.

McCartney was arrested several times between 2016 and 2019 but continued to offend despite bail conditions until he was remanded into custody.

At a pre-sentence hearing last week, a prosecuting barrister said McCartney had degraded and humiliated his victims and that the harm caused to them was “unquantifiable”.

When McCartney first came to the police’s attention in 2016, they found eight computer towers, four laptops, eight tablets and nine mobile phones. Indecent images of children were found on four other devices.

Catherine Kierans, the acting head of the serious crime unit at the Public Prosecution Service in Northern Ireland, said the case was “one of the most distressing and prolific cases of child sexual abuse” they had ever seen.

She said McCartney had targeted 3,500 children, many of whom had sought help on social media.

Mike Jeffries, the former longtime chief executive of Abercrombie & Fitch, will be arraigned on Friday after being charged with running an international sex trafficking and prostitution scheme while leading the clothing retailer.

Jeffries, 80, who led Abercrombie from 1992 to 2014, is expected to enter his plea to 16 criminal charges before a federal judge in Central Islip, New York, in that state’s Suffolk county.

His employee James Jacobson, will also enter a plea. Jeffries’ partner Matthew Smith, a dual US-British citizen, was ordered detained and will plead later. Both face the same charges as Jeffries.

Prosecutors said the alleged scheme ran from 2008 to 2015.

They said Jacobson acted as a recruiter, paid men to have sex with him then chose who would be paid to travel to Manhattan, the Hamptons and several countries around the world to have sex with Jeffries and Smith.

Victims were led to believe that their efforts could lead to modeling jobs, but the scheme’s true purpose was to fulfill Jeffries’ and Smith’s sexual desires without tarnishing Jeffries’ reputation, prosecutors said.

According to the indictment, victims were forced to consume alcohol, Viagra and muscle relaxants; use sex toys; and perform sex acts against their will. They were also required to sign nondisclosure agreements, the indictment said. Dozens of men were victims, including 15 identified in the indictment, prosecutors said.

Each defendant faces 15 years to life in prison if convicted of sex trafficking and up to 20 years in prison if convicted of interstate prostitution.

The charges echo accusations in a 2023 BBC investigation and private litigation on behalf of Jeffries’ accusers.

Abercrombie has also been sued, but has denied knowing about Jeffries’ alleged misconduct. The New Albany, Ohio-based company was not charged in the criminal case.

Jeffries built Abercrombie into a popular clothing brand focused on teen shoppers, using splashy, sexually charged marketing that included ads with semi-nude models.
He resigned amid falling sales and criticism he was losing his touch in keeping up with customers’ changing tastes.

Shyne, the rapper and former Sean “Diddy” Combs protege, says he “was absolutely set up to be the fall guy” for a 1999 New York nightclub shooting in which the pair were implicated – and for which only he was imprisoned.

“One of the most difficult parts of it was watching everyone [else] succeed,” the lyricist, whose legal name is Moses Barrow, says in an upcoming Hulu documentary about his life and career in music as well as politics.

Barrow’s comments – contained in a recent trailer for The Honorable Shyne, premiering on 18 November – are intriguing due to the scrutiny surrounding Combs following the September arrest of the Bad Boy Records’ founder on federal sex trafficking and racketeering charges.

In the trailer for the film, Barrow recounts how “signing to Bad Boy” made him a millionaire. But some of the success that he earned through his acclaimed debut album was significantly blunted after he was convicted – and Combs was acquitted – in what at the time was one of the biggest criminal trials to ensnare famed figures of the hip-hop industry.

The trial centered on a shooting at a Manhattan nightclub that wounded three people while Barrow was there with Combs. Barrow said: “We’re hanging out, and I think we’re getting ready to leave,” when the shooting erupted.

Combs, the singer Jennifer Lopez – his girlfriend at the time – and Barrow were all arrested after the violence. The charges against Lopez – who fled the club with Combs and his bodyguard– were dropped.

Combs, meanwhile, was acquitted of allegations that he took an illicit gun into the club and sought to bribe his driver to falsely assume the blame for the weapon.

“I had nothing to do with a shooting in this club,” Combs says in a clip featured in the documentary trailer, which was directed by the film-maker Marcus A Clarke and produced by the studio Andscape.

Barrow, now 45, was found guilty of assault amid other charges, and received a 10-year prison sentence. He was also deported to his native Belize.

“I was absolutely set up to be the fall guy,” Barrow says on the trailer.

Barrow currently leads the opposition party in Belize’s house of representatives. “There’s a time to pivot,” he acknowledges in the film. “There’s a time to transition. And that’s how I got into politics.”

In one of his last public appearances, Combs brought Barrow out to perform with him during a charity concert held in London in November 2023. Days later, singer Cassie Ventura sued Combs – her ex-boyfriend – for damages while accusing him of rape and severe physical abuse during their 10-year relationship that ended in 2018.

Combs – whose stage monikers include Puff Daddy and P Diddy – then paid an undisclosed sum to settle Ventura’s claims out of court within one day of Ventura’s lawsuit being filed. But a wave of lawsuits from other people aiming similar allegations at Combs has followed.

In March, federal authorities conducting a sex-trafficking investigation raided Combs’s properties in Los Angeles and Miami. CNN in May then obtained and published hotel security camera video showing Combs battering Ventura in 2016, contradicting the three-time Grammy winner’s vehement denials that he had done anything wrong.

Finally, in September, authorities arrested him on charges that he would force sex-trafficking victims to engage in group sex acts with associates of his while he recorded video and masturbated to the encounters. Those so-called “freak offs” were so physically exhausting for Combs and his victims – who, among other things, were purportedly coerced into ingesting drugs – that all “typically received IV fluids to recover”, criminal court documents have alleged.

Combs, 54, has pleaded not guilty to the charges against him and is awaiting the outcome of the case while being held in federal custody with no bail set.

Lopez – a two-time Grammy nominee – has conspicuously avoided commenting on Combs. Barrow, on the other hand, shared his thoughts on Combs shortly after his arrest was announced.

He told journalists who approached him while he carried out his duties for Belize’s government and asked him for his reaction that he gained no sense of schadenfreude from Combs’s arrest. But that day he said he had never forgotten how differently things shook out for him and Combs in the aftermath of the nightclub shooting that has long linked them.

“Let us not forget what the cold, facts are,” Barrow said of Combs. “This is someone who destroyed my life.”

The far-right leader Tommy Robinson has been charged under the Terrorism Act and is being held in custody before a planned march of his supporters amid fears of a repeat of violence that erupted when he was imprisoned in 2018.

Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, handed himself on Friday afternoon in to Folkestone police station where he was charged with failing to provide the PIN to his mobile phone under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act. He was bailed to appear in court next month, Kent police said. He was then remanded in custody under a high court direction, the force said.

In July Robinson allegedly refused to give police access to his mobile phone when he was stopped under the Terrorism Act at the Channel tunnel. He had been bailed subject to returning to Folkestone police station.

He is also due to appear at Woolwich crown court on Monday on separate charges of contempt of court for repeating libellous allegations against a Syrian refugee. Robinson’s supporters, who now control his X account, told his 1 million followers on the platform that he is being held on remand until Monday’s court appearance.

The Metropolitan police has said it expects a “busy day” on Saturday as Robinson’s supporters plan to march from Victoria to Whitehall under the banner “Uniting the Kingdom”, while a counter Stand Up to Racism protest is also planned. In addition the United Friends and Families Campaign is planning a protest in Trafalgar Square against the acquittal this week of the firearms officer who shot dead Chris Kaba.

The anti-fascist campaign Hope Not Hate, predicted the planned far-right demonstration on Saturday will morph into a protest demanding Robinson’s freedom. It also fears a repeat of June 2018 when five police officers were injured during clashes with Robinson’s supporters.

Speaking at a briefing before Robinson’s charge had been confirmed Joe Mulhall, its director of research, said: “If we look at what happened in 2018 when he was previously imprisoned it actually galvanised the Free Tommy movement, which saw the largest demonstrations we’d seen in a very long time outside parliament. And they were very, very angry and confrontational. There were scenes of people throwing bottles at Downing Street and the like. I think Lennon is anticipating that will happen again. His whole thing is that he’s a martyr going down for free speech.”

Before arriving at Folkestone police station in a black Nissan Elgrand, Robinson was asked on X by a journalist about the claim that he expected to be regarded as a free speech martyr. Robinson responded by posting a screengrab of the questions and calling the journalist a “fake news wanker” and adding: “Write whatever you want no 1 gives a fuck any more. We are the media.”

Hope Not Hate said it expected the demonstration to be larger than a demonstration of Robinson’s supports in July when about 30,000 people gathered to protest against immigration.

Nick Lowles, its chief executive, said: “I think it’s going to be a lot angrier, regardless of whether Lennon is there or not. This one is very much aimed at the prime minister, the police, and this sense of injustice around the riots. My understanding is the police are quite concerned about the public order element.

“The chatter in the football hooligan WhatsApp groups is that they are coming in quite big numbers. And given that many of the people who will be there have a kind of liking for violence or disorder, I can understand why the police are worried.”

The Met said there would be “significant policing presence” in central London on Saturday to ensure the two rival demonstrations are kept apart. It has also imposed conditions under the Public Order Act about timings and locations of the rival demonstrations “to prevent serious disruption or disorder”.

Deputy assistant commissioner Rachel Williams, who is leading the operation, said: “We are well prepared for what is set to be a busy day in the centre of London.

“Our role is to ensure that those attending the various events can do so safely and that they can exercise their right to lawful protest. We will have significant resources in place to respond to any incidents, to deal decisively with any offences, and to keep disruption to other members of the public and businesses to a minimum.

“We know that when groups with opposing views come together it can lead to conflict and disorder and a key part of our role is ensuring that does not happen.”

The actor Helen Mirren has lamented that Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain did not live long enough to be able to experience the excitement of tracking his location on his phone.

Speaking to the Evening Standard proprietor Evgeny Lebedev on his Brave New World podcast, Mirren, 79, said she considered herself lucky to have lived long enough to witness dramatic technological advances.

“I always say it’s so sad that Kurt Cobain died when he did,” she said, “because he never saw GPS, as it’s the most wonderful thing to watch my little blue spot walking down the street. I just find it completely magical and unbelievable.”

The actor has frequently referenced Cobain in the past when discussing the interface of technology and ageing. In 2014, she told Oprah Winfrey, “Look at Kurt Cobain – he hardly even saw a computer! The digital stuff that’s going on is so exciting. I’m just so curious about what happens next.”

The following year, she told Cosmopolitan, “I was thinking about Kurt Cobain the other day and he died without knowing the internet, and I’m totally blown away by that.”

And, in 2016, she told the Daily Mail, “If I’d died at 27, the age that Kurt Cobain died in 1994, I’d never have even known there was an internet! Incredible things are happening all the time and I can’t wait to see what comes next.”

However, the sentiments Mirren expressed this week to Lebedev – whose podcast focuses on “longevity, neuroscience, biohacking, and psychedelics” – were less cheerful. “From this point on,” Mirren predicted, “however long humanity survives, it will be a world of technology. And I’m so grateful that I was of a generation that knew the world before technology. And you know we will die out eventually.”

Ageing in the public eye, reflected Mirren, is “kind of OK” but “it’s not brilliant”. She continued: “But it wasn’t that brilliant to be 25 either. So it’s not a question of seeking youth at all. It’s a question of living the life you have as fully and positively and enjoyably and confusingly and everything that it was when you were younger. It’s just called life.”

A year before Cobain died, Nirvana recorded their Unplugged in New York set for MTV, which further popularised the band beyond their core grunge fanbase. A now-iconic photo from the early 1990s shows Cobain grinning broadly while talking on a brick-like mobile phone, suggesting he might well have been enthusiastic about Google Maps.

A tiny house featuring erotic frescoes is the latest discovery in the ruins of the ancient Roman city of Pompeii. Experts say the exquisitely decorated abode, called the House of Phaedra after the mythological queen of Athens, sheds light on the changing architectural styles in the first century AD but is also further proof that the residents of Pompeii had an appetite for sensual art.

The vividly coloured wall paintings include one depicting a sexual encounter between a satyr and a nymph on a bed and one of a scantily clad Phaedra and her stepson Hippolytus, whom, according to Greek legend, she accused of rape after he spurned her advances. Another fresco features gods presumed to be Venus and Adonis.

Despite its small size, the dwelling “strikes us for the high level of its wall decorations”, Pompeii archaeological park said in a statement, adding that the frescoes were comparable to those found in more opulent homes.

Unlike other homes in the ancient city, which was destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD79, the house was not built around the traditional atrium, a central courtyard with a pool used for collecting rainwater that was typical of Roman architecture from the sixth century BC.

Racy scenes were present in homes across all sections of society and public spaces in Pompeii, and were not looked upon as scandalous or embarrassing.

One of the most striking frescoes unearthed features a huge phallus. The image was found in an ornate house known as the House of the Vettii, which was owned by two men freed from slavery and which was discovered in a largely preserved state during excavations in the late 19th century.

The fresco was found on a wall in the entrance of the home and features Priapus, the god of fertility and abundance, with a large penis balancing on a scale next to a bag filled with money, thought to have symbolised the wealth accumulated by the men. It was not unusual for freed slaves to thrive in Pompeii.

Art depicting homoerotic scenes has also been discovered, including a statue found in the House of the Gold Bracelet, one of Pompeii’s richest homes, representing a young man who would have served his master during banquets, as well as sexually.