A US government communications regulator has claimed that Vice-President Kamala Harris’s surprise appearance on Saturday Night Live violates “equal time” rules that govern political programming.

Brendan Carr, a commissioner with the federal communications commission (FCC), claimed on the social platform X that Harris’s appearance on the show “is a clear and blatant effort to evade the FCC’s Equal Time rule”.

Carr made the claim in response to an Associated Press alert to Harris being on the show that night.

“The purpose of the rule is to avoid exactly this type of biased and partisan conduct – a licensed broadcaster using the public airwaves to exert its influence for one candidate on the eve of an election. Unless the broadcaster offered Equal Time to other qualifying campaigns,” Carr, a Trump appointee, added.

Harris joined comedian Maya Rudolph at the start of the show in a sketch that skewered Donald Trump for his recent rally speeches, including wearing an orange and yellow safety jacket, a riff on the ongoing garbage controversy, and pretending to fellate a broken microphone.

Harris began her “mirror image” sketch opposite Rudolph, the SNL cast member selected to impersonate her, on the other side of a mirror.

“I’m just here to remind you, you got this, because you can do something your opponent can’t do – you can open doors,” Harris told Rudolph, seemingly referring to a video from earlier in the week in which Trump had struggled to reach the handle of a garbage truck he briefly rode in to a Wisconsin rally.

That came after a comedian at a Trump rally in New York made a joke about Puerto Rico being a “floating island of garbage” that was widely deemed racist. Trump disavowed the comedian but did not apologize.

On a video call to Latino voters, President Biden appeared to call Trump supporters garbage. The White House later denied he had and released a transcript with “supporters” altered to “supporter’s”, changing the meaning. White House stenographers appealed against the alteration.

“The American people want to stop the chaos,” Rudolph said in the SNL sketch, with Harris adding, “And end the drama-la.”

“With a cool new step mom-ala. Get back in our pajama-las. And watch a rom-com-ala,” Rudolph said, with the two later touting their “belief in the promise of America”.

Lorne Michaels, the executive producer of SNL, which is celebrating its 50th season NBC, told the Hollywood Reporter in September that neither Harris or Trump would themselves appear on the show.

“You can’t bring the actual people who are running on because of election laws and the equal time provisions,” Michaels told the outlet.

“You can’t have the main candidates without having all the candidates, and there are lots of minor candidates that are only on the ballot in, like, three states and that becomes really complicated.”

In the interview, Michaels said Republicans were easier to characterize than Democrats who have been offended by certain skits.

“It’s not personal in the sense of an attack, it’s just, you did say that and you did do that, so were you thinking it would be rude for us to comment on it? That’s what we do, and we’re going to do it again,” he said.

The Trump campaign complained about Harris’s appearance, saying Harris “has nothing substantive to offer the American people, so that’s why she’s living out her warped fantasy cosplaying with her elitist friends on Saturday Night Leftists as her campaign spirals down the drain into obscurity”, spokesperson Steven Cheung told Fox News Digital.

Some viewers also noted that Harris’s “mirror image” comedy sketch was conceptually identical to a sketch Trump featured in with ex-SNL comedian Jimmy Fallon on Fallon’s the Tonight Show in 2015. “I knew that SNL sketch with Kamala Harris looked familiar…” radio host Ari Hoffman said in an Instagram post linking to the Fallon-Trump skit.

A US government communications regulator has claimed that Vice-President Kamala Harris’s surprise appearance on Saturday Night Live violates “equal time” rules that govern political programming.

Brendan Carr, a commissioner with the federal communications commission (FCC), claimed on the social platform X that Harris’s appearance on the show “is a clear and blatant effort to evade the FCC’s Equal Time rule”.

Carr made the claim in response to an Associated Press alert to Harris being on the show that night.

“The purpose of the rule is to avoid exactly this type of biased and partisan conduct – a licensed broadcaster using the public airwaves to exert its influence for one candidate on the eve of an election. Unless the broadcaster offered Equal Time to other qualifying campaigns,” Carr, a Trump appointee, added.

Harris joined comedian Maya Rudolph at the start of the show in a sketch that skewered Donald Trump for his recent rally speeches, including wearing an orange and yellow safety jacket, a riff on the ongoing garbage controversy, and pretending to fellate a broken microphone.

Harris began her “mirror image” sketch opposite Rudolph, the SNL cast member selected to impersonate her, on the other side of a mirror.

“I’m just here to remind you, you got this, because you can do something your opponent can’t do – you can open doors,” Harris told Rudolph, seemingly referring to a video from earlier in the week in which Trump had struggled to reach the handle of a garbage truck he briefly rode in to a Wisconsin rally.

That came after a comedian at a Trump rally in New York made a joke about Puerto Rico being a “floating island of garbage” that was widely deemed racist. Trump disavowed the comedian but did not apologize.

On a video call to Latino voters, President Biden appeared to call Trump supporters garbage. The White House later denied he had and released a transcript with “supporters” altered to “supporter’s”, changing the meaning. White House stenographers appealed against the alteration.

“The American people want to stop the chaos,” Rudolph said in the SNL sketch, with Harris adding, “And end the drama-la.”

“With a cool new step mom-ala. Get back in our pajama-las. And watch a rom-com-ala,” Rudolph said, with the two later touting their “belief in the promise of America”.

Lorne Michaels, the executive producer of SNL, which is celebrating its 50th season NBC, told the Hollywood Reporter in September that neither Harris or Trump would themselves appear on the show.

“You can’t bring the actual people who are running on because of election laws and the equal time provisions,” Michaels told the outlet.

“You can’t have the main candidates without having all the candidates, and there are lots of minor candidates that are only on the ballot in, like, three states and that becomes really complicated.”

In the interview, Michaels said Republicans were easier to characterize than Democrats who have been offended by certain skits.

“It’s not personal in the sense of an attack, it’s just, you did say that and you did do that, so were you thinking it would be rude for us to comment on it? That’s what we do, and we’re going to do it again,” he said.

The Trump campaign complained about Harris’s appearance, saying Harris “has nothing substantive to offer the American people, so that’s why she’s living out her warped fantasy cosplaying with her elitist friends on Saturday Night Leftists as her campaign spirals down the drain into obscurity”, spokesperson Steven Cheung told Fox News Digital.

Some viewers also noted that Harris’s “mirror image” comedy sketch was conceptually identical to a sketch Trump featured in with ex-SNL comedian Jimmy Fallon on Fallon’s the Tonight Show in 2015. “I knew that SNL sketch with Kamala Harris looked familiar…” radio host Ari Hoffman said in an Instagram post linking to the Fallon-Trump skit.

Hundreds of people have heckled Spain’s King Felipe and Queen Letizia, as well as the prime minister and the regional leader of Valencia – throwing mud and shouting “murderers” – as the group attempted an official visit to one of the municipalities hardest hit by the deadly floods.

The scenes playing out in Paiporta on Sunday laid bare the mounting sense of abandonment among the devastated areas and the lingering anger over why an alert urging residents not to leave home on Tuesday was sent after the flood waters began surging.

Much of the fury appeared to be directed at the elected officials, as calls rang out for the resignation of Pedro Sánchez, the country’s prime minister, and Carlos Mazón, Valencia’s regional leader.

Sánchez was swiftly evacuated as bodyguards used umbrellas to protect the group from the barrage of mud. “What were they expecting?” one furious local asked the newspaper El País. “People are very angry. Pedro Sánchez should have been here on day one with a shovel.”

The king insisted on continuing the visit, at one point meeting a man who wept on his shoulder. He was also confronted by a young man who told him that “you’ve abandoned us”, asking why residents had been left on their own to grapple with the aftermath of the deadly floods. “You’re four days too late,” he told the king.

The man also challenged the king on why the civil protection service, which is overseen by the regional government, had sent the alert hours after the state-run weather agency had warned of deteriorating conditions. “They knew it, they knew it, and yet they did nothing,” he shouted at the monarch. “It’s a disgrace.”

Spain’s royal palace later said that the king’s plans to visit a second hard-hit town in the region had been postponed.

The public rage came as the death toll from the floods climbed to 217. As the meteorological agency on Sunday again issued a red alert, forecasting further heavy rain in the area, mayors from the affected municipalities pleaded with officials to send help.

“We’re very angry and we’re devastated,” said Guillermo Luján, the mayor of Aldaia. “We have a town in ruins. We need to start over and I’m begging for help. Please help us.”

The town’s 33,000 residents were among many in the region grappling with the aftermath of the ferocious floods that rank as the deadliest in Spain’s modern history. The number of people missing remains unknown.

Luján said his town was in desperate need of heavy machinery to clear out the vehicles and debris piled up along the streets.

The municipality had yet to confirm the extent of the devastation, leaving Luján bracing for the worst. Aldaia has one of the region’s most visited shopping centres, with a vast underground car park that on Tuesday filled with water in a matter of minutes.

“Right now, the upper part of the centre is devastated and the lower level is a terrifying unknown,” Luján told broadcaster RTVE. “We don’t know what we’re going to find. We want to be cautious, but we’ll see. It might be heartbreaking.”

In Paiporta, the mayor, Maribel Albalat, described the situation as desperate. Days after the town’s ravine overflowed, unleashing a deluge of water that wreaked havoc on the 29,000 inhabitants, parts of the town remain inaccessible, she said. “It’s impossible because there are bodies, there are vehicles with bodies and these have to be removed,” she told the news agency Europa Press. “Everything is very difficult.”

Albalat said the number of deaths had climbed to 70 in the small town and was expected to climb in the coming days, as access was secured to underground garages. On Tuesday, in the absence of any sign that this storm would be different from any other, many residents had gone down to their garages to move their cars to higher ground.

In flooded towns such as Alfafar and Sedaví, mayors described feeling abandoned by officials as residents scrambled to shovel mud from their homes and clear streets. In some areas, residents were still trying to secure electricity supply or stable phone service.

On Friday, the catastrophic images emanating from these municipalities coalesced into a show of solidarity, as thousands of volunteers from lesser-affected areas trekked to the hardest-hit areas carrying shovels, brooms and food supplies. On Saturday, thousands more turned up at Valencia’s City of Arts and Sciences, which had been hastily converted into the nerve centre of the clean-up operation.

The mayor of Chiva, where on Tuesday nearly a year’s worth of rain fell in eight hours, said the situation was a “rollercoaster” for the 17,000 residents.

“You see sadness, which is logical given that we’ve lost our town,” Amparo Fort told reporters. “But on the other hand, it’s heartening to see the response that we’ve had from everyone … there is a real, human wave of volunteers, particularly young people.”

Sánchez said 10,000 troops and police would be deployed to help with what he described as “the worst flood our continent has seen so far this century”.

He acknowledged that help had been slow in reaching where it was most needed. “I’m aware that the response we’re mounting isn’t enough. I know that,” he said. “And I know there are severe problems and shortages and that there are still collapsed services and towns buried by the mud where people are desperately looking for their relatives, and people who can’t get into their homes, and houses that have been buried or destroyed by mud. I know we have to do better and give it our all.”

Scientists say the human-driven climate crisis is increasing the length, frequency and intensity of extreme weather events. The warming of the Mediterranean, which increases water evaporation, plays a key role in making torrential rains more severe, experts have also said.

A polio vaccination centre and the car of UN aid official involved in this weekend’s vaccination campaign came under fire despite a promised “humanitarian pause” in Israeli bombardment, the UN has said.

Catherine Russell, the executive director of the UN child support and protection agency Unicef, said: “At least three children were reportedly injured by another attack in the proximity of a vaccination clinic in Sheikh Radwan, while a polio vaccination campaign was under way.”

She added that the personal car of a Unicef employee working on the polio vaccine campaign “came under fire by what we believe to be a quadcopter”.

“The car was damaged. Fortunately, the staff member was not injured. But she has been left deeply shaken,” Russell wrote. She added that in the previous 48-hour period, more than 50 children had reportedly been killed in the Jabaliya refugee camp, a focus of Israeli military operations over the past month.

“The attacks on Jabaliya, the vaccination clinic and the Unicef staff member are yet further examples of the grave consequences of the indiscriminate strikes on civilians in the Gaza Strip,” Russell said.

“Taken alongside the horrific level of child deaths in north Gaza from other attacks, these most recent events combine to write yet another dark chapter in one of the darkest periods of this terrible war.”

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) denied responsibility for the reported attack on Sheikh Radwan, which is in northern Gaza to the west of the Jabaliya camp.

The weekend’s inoculation campaign was intended to give more than 100,000 Palestinian children under the age of 10 a second dose of polio vaccine, made necessary by an outbreak of the virus reported in July. It had been postponed in late October because of Israeli bombardment.

This weekend, the IDF agreed to suspend its strikes to allow the vaccinations to go ahead in northern Gaza except in the besieged areas in the northern governorate, Beit Hanoun, Beit Lahiya and Jabaliya.

Approximately 15,000 children under-10 are estimated to be in the excluded area and therefore will not receive the inoculation, threatening the effectiveness of the vaccination campaign, which requires at least 90% of all children in every district to be vaccinated to be sure of stopping the spread of the polio virus.

The head of the Gaza health ministry, Munir al-Boursh, told the Associated Press that the Sheikh Radwan clinic in Gaza City had been hit by a quadcopter drone early on Saturday afternoon, minutes after a UN delegation had left the building.

On Israel’s northern front, the army said Hezbollah had fired about 60 rockets across the Lebanese border on Sunday, some aimed at the occupied Golan Heights, others at the western Galilee area.

The IDF said most of the projectiles were intercepted and those that got through Israeli defences fell in open areas, causing no casualties on this occasion.

The IDF, meanwhile, issued evacuation warnings to Lebanese residents in some areas of the ancient city of Baalbek and said that buildings being used by Hezbollah militants would be targeted imminently.

The Israeli military abducted who it said was a senior Hezbollah official in an unprecedented operation on Saturday morning during which Israeli commandos landed on the shores of Batroun, northern Lebanon, captured the alleged official and escaped via speedboat.

In a statement, an Israeli military official said its forces captured a “senior operative of Hezbollah” and transferred him to its territory to be investigated by military intelligence. The media outlet Axios cited Israeli sources as saying the captured man – Imad Amhaz – was responsible for Hezbollah’s naval operations.

Lebanon’s caretaker minister of transport, Ali Hamie, said that Amhaz was a civilian boat captain, while Hezbollah did not comment on allegations that he belonged to the organisation. Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister, Najib Mikati, said Lebanon would be submitting a complaint to the UN security council, and that he had asked Lebanon’s military and the UN’s peacekeeping mission to investigate the incident.

The Israeli naval raid was a first of its kind, with Israeli soldiers landing in north Lebanon – an area unaffiliated with Hezbollah and almost 100 miles from the Lebanon-Israel border.

“An unidentified military force carried out a landing operation on the beach of Batroun, and moved … to a chalet near the beach, where it kidnapped the citizen Imad Amhaz and … left by speedboats to the open sea,” Lebanon’s National News Agency reported.

Surveillance footage of the incident showed a man with his hands pinned behind his back being led by a column of soldiers.

“The IDF [Israel Defense Forces] will continue to act wherever necessary to protect the state of Israel and its citizens,” an Israeli military official said in a statement.

The Lebanese transport minister, Ali Hamieh, said that the abduction of the Amhaz could be a violation of UN resolution 1701, which is supposed to govern security dynamics between Israel and Lebanon after the 2006 war.

“The kidnapping of Amhaz took place 100 metres from his place of residence. If it is proven that the kidnapping took place via a naval landing, where is the implementation of resolution 1701?” Hamieh said.

Fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, which started on 8 October 2023 after the militant group launched rockets at Israel “in solidarity” with Hamas’s attack a day prior, has generally spared north Lebanon.

Israeli troops have been conducting ground raids into south Lebanon since 30 September, but within a few kilometres of the border. Previous Israeli operations against Hezbollah in non-border areas have been conducted via aerial bombing.

Israeli warplanes continued their aerial campaign across the country on Saturday afternoon, killing one and injuring 15 others in a rare daytime bombing of Beirut’s southern suburbs, which occurred without warning. Israel also struck Lebanon’s Bekaa valley, the focal point of much of its bombing over the past week.

Hezbollah fired rockets and drones on Saturday, with a rocket injuring 19 people in Tayibe in central Israel.

Fighting between Israel and Hezbollah has killed 2,968 people and wounded more than 13,300 over the past year, the vast majority of whom were killed and injured during the past five weeks.

The European Union gave generous farming subsidies to the companies of more than a dozen billionaires between 2018 and 2021, the Guardian can reveal, including companies owned by the former Czech prime minister Andrej Babiš and the British businessman Sir James Dyson.

Billionaires were “ultimate beneficiaries” linked to €3.3bn (£2.76bn) of EU farming handouts over the four-year period even as thousands of small farms were closed down, according to the analysis of official but opaque data from EU member states.

The 17 “ultimate beneficiaries” who featured on the 2022 Forbes rich list include Babiš, the former Czech prime minister who was acquitted in February of fraud involving farming subsidies; Dyson, the British vacuum cleaner tycoon who argued that Britain should leave the EU and whose company received payments before Brexit; and Guangchang Guo, a Chinese investor who owns Wolverhampton Wanderers football club.

Other billionaire beneficiaries of EU taxpayer funds include Clemens Tönnies, the German meat magnate who admitted he “was wrong” about Vladimir Putin in 2022; Anders Holch Povlsen, the Danish rewilding enthusiast and UK private landowner; and Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, the Danish toymaker and former CEO of Lego.

“It’s madness,” said Benoît Biteau, a French organic farmer and MEP for the Greens in the last European parliament. “The vast majority of farmers are struggling to make a living.”

The EU gives one-third of its entire budget to farmers through its common agricultural policy (Cap), which hands out money based on the area of land a farmer owns rather than whether they need the support.

But strict privacy rules, weak transparency requirements and complex chains of company ownership mean little scrutiny has been possible of who gets the money. In a study commissioned by the European parliament’s budgetary control committee in 2021, researchers from the Centre for European Policy Studies (Ceps) found that it is “currently de facto impossible” to identify the largest ultimate beneficiaries of EU funding with full confidence.

To make a best estimate, the researchers linked data on farm subsidy recipients from each member state with a commercial database of companies. Working backwards from the recipients, they identified people who owned at least 25% of a company at each step of the ownership chain to work out the “ultimate beneficiaries”.

In some cases, the researchers were unable to trace the money because it went to regional bodies who redistributed the cash.

The analysis looked at the final natural person at the end of a chain of companies, said Damir Gojsic, a financial markets researcher who co-wrote the Ceps report and updated the analysis for the Guardian. “Ideally, you would focus on millionaires, but there isn’t a list of millionaires out there.”

Gojsic found 17 billionaires had received EU farming handouts through companies they owned wholly or in part over the four-year period. The total sum of money linked to the billionaires was €3.3bn but the chain of companies was too complex and imprecise to weight the amounts by their ownership stake, he said.

Scientists have criticised “perverse incentives” in the Cap that push farmers to destroy nature. They estimate that 50%-80% of EU farming subsidies go toward animal agriculture rather than foods that would be better for the health of people and the planet.

“We need a rapid food transition for a healthier future and subsidies are the biggest economic lever for change,” said Paul Behrens, a global change researcher at Leiden University, who was not involved in the study.

He said: “The inequality in the Cap is extreme and this work highlights again just how much the richest land-owners continue to get richer from subsidies. Although transparency in the Cap has improved over time, the amount of detective work needed to uncover how the public’s tax money is spent is astonishing.”

Most of the 17 billionaires did not respond to requests for comment. A handful declined to comment.

Dyson wrote a letter to the Guardian last year arguing he has “never supported the basis of the Cap”. A spokesperson for Dyson Farming said the family had invested £140m into sustainably improving its farms and farmland, in addition to the cost of land, which “dwarfs any subsidy payments” received by Dyson Farming Ltd. They said: “Its companies have also contributed many hundreds of millions of pounds in EU taxes and tariffs.

“The farms now employ more than 250 people and use agri-technology and innovation to support UK food security. In 2023 alone, Dyson Farming sustainably produced 40,000 tonnes of wheat, 12,000 tonnes of potatoes and 750 tonnes of out-of-season British strawberries, which avoid the air miles and carbon impact of fruit imported from overseas.”

Thomas Dosch, the head of public affairs at Tönnies, said the company supported a “reorientation” of European agricultural policy so that farmers who worked in environmentally friendly ways were compensated for the associated loss of income. “No subsidies should be paid for quantity of products or as area premiums per hectare,” he said.

Another option would be to sanction environmentally harmful behaviour by imposing high costs, he added. “However, if this were to lead to much higher food prices and perhaps even to food shortages, I believe this would be politically unacceptable.”

When Coen van den Bighelaar first spoke to school friends about taking over their parents’ dairy farms, he was the only one of the four to voice serious doubts. Fresh out of university, he was making more money in a comfortable office than his father did toiling for twice as long in the field.

But six years later, Bighelaar has followed in his parents’ footsteps, while his friends’ enthusiasm has waned. One quit farming to take a job in logistics. Another opened a daycare centre to supplement the income from selling milk. A third is thinking about buying land and moving to Canada.

“It’s really hard,” says Bighelaar, a fourth-generation dairy farmer in the Netherlands who feels a mix of hope and fear about the future. “A lot of young farmers quit because they don’t see any perspective.”

Thousands of small and medium-sized farms in Europe shut up shop each year, unable to survive from selling food at the dirt-cheap prices that big competitors offer. The brutal economic situation has inflicted misery on farmers who struggle to turn a profit and forced some to give up or look for additional streams of revenue.

Małgorzata Maj, who runs a guest house on her parents’ 20-hectare sheep farm in south-west Poland, says most of her income now comes from tourists. The profit margins on sheep are so small that “we wouldn’t be able to survive” without guests, she says.

The average income on European farms is rising but so, too, is the earnings gap between the biggest and smallest farms, a Guardian analysis of pay data found. Agricultural economists say the death of small farms is being driven by economies of scale and leaps in technology that big farms are more able to embrace. They can spread capital costs such as large tractors and milking robots over more crops and animals, allowing them to sell at prices that small farms cannot match.

“We would need to have hundreds of hectares of land and breed thousands of sheep to be able to get a proper income,” says Maj, who remembers the stress her parents experienced trying to support a family of seven from farming. “As kids, we didn’t realise how difficult it is.”

Small farmers who try to expand or modernise also face hurdles. They say they struggle to get loans that would let them make the investments needed to compete with industrial farms.

“Banks usually don’t like to give credit to farmers,” says Carlos Franco, a blueberry farmer near Lisbon. “If you have a pig they can give you a sausage – but the opposite is not possible. It’s very difficult for people to begin without assets to give as collateral.”

Franco, who comes from the city but has fond memories of his grandfather’s farm in the country, says he started his own farm eight years ago and expects to break even this year for the first time. If he had been able to secure a big loan from the beginning, he says, he could have bought an automated pumping system that would have helped him hit that point in half the time.

Big farms have more capital, and tend to be less reliant on a single product than small farmers, says Franco. “They don’t put all their eggs in the same basket.”

The income crisis among small farmers helped fuel violent protests at the start of the year that farming lobbies used to rail against rules to protect nature and cut pollution. Environmental campaigners argue that big farms exploited public sympathy for small farmers to reject green measures the rest of the sector could afford.

Some small farmers see both sides. Bighelaar, who works on his parents’ 60-hectare dairy farm, says the investments needed to comply with environmental rules are, indeed, expensive – and thus more palatable on a big farm than a small one. If he had to invest €100,000 in technology to reduce nitrogen pollution, he says, it would be easier to stomach if he could spread the costs over 200 cows rather than the 125 he has.

“For small farms and middle-size farms, it’s way harder to join in this transition,” says Bighelaar. “We want to join … but it’s not possible for us because our size is too small.”

Stakeholders from across the food supply chain agreed in September on the need to reform the EU’s farm subsidy scheme, which hands out more money to bigger farms. They proposed solutions such as supporting farmers based on their needs and creating a just transition fund to help them reduce their environmental footprint.

Some farmers say they have taken steps toward sustainable practices without costly loans and investments. Airi Kylvet, an organic beef farmer in Estonia, says she has invested in her knowledge of cows and land rather than in expensive machinery – but that the administrative burden is still a huge source of stress. “There are a million officials who control us and deal with only one sector of the system. But the farmer has to know it all.”

“If you want to be a successful farmer you have to be really wise,” she says. “There are a lot of farmers who are good at farming but not good at dealing with all this bureaucracy.”

But even as small farmers voice fears about environmental rules becoming more onerous, they also worry about extreme weather growing more violent. Maj was hit by the heavy rain that devastated central Europe last month, destroying half a hectare of her land. Franco says the “incredibly hot” weather that has scorched Europe in recent years has made his blueberry plants rot and burn. Studies show both weather extremes were made worse by pollutants heating the planet, about a quarter of which come from food systems.

Despite all the stresses, Franco says, he takes pleasure in seeing plants bloom and bees buzz when he works in the fresh farm air. “In Portugal, we say: agriculture is a way of becoming poor but happy.”

Amnesty International has called on authorities in Iran to “immediately and unconditionally” release a female student who was arrested after stripping to her underwear in what the organisation described as a public protest against harassment relating to the country’s strict dress code.

The incident took place after the woman, who has not been identified, reportedly had a confrontation with members of the Basij paramilitary force who ripped her headscarf and tore at her clothes inside Tehran’s prestigious Islamic Azad University.

Videos posted to social media appear to show the woman removing her clothes and walking out on to the street in her underwear. A second video appears to show the woman being bundled into a car by men in plainclothes.

The student media outlet Amir Kabir newsletter said the woman had been harassed by a Basij member for not wearing a headscarf. Under Iran’s mandatory dress code, women must wear a headscarf and loose-fitting clothes in public.

The media outlet also alleged that she was beaten during the arrest and on Saturday said that information about the woman’s condition and whereabouts was unavailable.

Amnesty International Iran called for an “independent and impartial” investigation into the allegations of abuse.

“Iran’s authorities must immediately and unconditionally release the university student who was violently arrested after she removed her clothes in protest against abusive enforcement of compulsory veiling by security officials,” it said on social media.

“Pending her release, authorities must protect her from torture and other ill-treatment and ensure access to family and lawyer.”

Iran’s conservative Fars news agency confirmed the incident, saying that the student had worn “inappropriate clothes” and had “stripped” after being told by security guards to comply with the dress code.

In a report that cited “witnesses”, it said that security guards had spoken “calmly” with the student and denied reports that their actions had been aggressive in any way.

The incident comes more than two years after Iran was rocked by nationwide protests after the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, an Iranian Kurdish woman who had been arrested for an alleged breach of the dress code. The protests, during which some women defied authorities to cast off their headscarves, were later violently curbed by authorities.

With contributions from Agence France-Presse and Reuters

Amnesty International has called on authorities in Iran to “immediately and unconditionally” release a female student who was arrested after stripping to her underwear in what the organisation described as a public protest against harassment relating to the country’s strict dress code.

The incident took place after the woman, who has not been identified, reportedly had a confrontation with members of the Basij paramilitary force who ripped her headscarf and tore at her clothes inside Tehran’s prestigious Islamic Azad University.

Videos posted to social media appear to show the woman removing her clothes and walking out on to the street in her underwear. A second video appears to show the woman being bundled into a car by men in plainclothes.

The student media outlet Amir Kabir newsletter said the woman had been harassed by a Basij member for not wearing a headscarf. Under Iran’s mandatory dress code, women must wear a headscarf and loose-fitting clothes in public.

The media outlet also alleged that she was beaten during the arrest and on Saturday said that information about the woman’s condition and whereabouts was unavailable.

Amnesty International Iran called for an “independent and impartial” investigation into the allegations of abuse.

“Iran’s authorities must immediately and unconditionally release the university student who was violently arrested after she removed her clothes in protest against abusive enforcement of compulsory veiling by security officials,” it said on social media.

“Pending her release, authorities must protect her from torture and other ill-treatment and ensure access to family and lawyer.”

Iran’s conservative Fars news agency confirmed the incident, saying that the student had worn “inappropriate clothes” and had “stripped” after being told by security guards to comply with the dress code.

In a report that cited “witnesses”, it said that security guards had spoken “calmly” with the student and denied reports that their actions had been aggressive in any way.

The incident comes more than two years after Iran was rocked by nationwide protests after the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, an Iranian Kurdish woman who had been arrested for an alleged breach of the dress code. The protests, during which some women defied authorities to cast off their headscarves, were later violently curbed by authorities.

With contributions from Agence France-Presse and Reuters

Moldovans are going to the polls for a second-round vote to choose between the incumbent pro-EU president, Maia Sandu, and a Russia-friendly challenger.

Despite securing 42% of the vote in the first round, Sandu faces a tough challenge in Sunday’s runoff against an opposition bloc led by Alexandr Stoianoglo of the Socialist party, which aligns with Moscow.

The election in this small nation of under 3 million people in south-eastern Europe follows a referendum in which a slim majority voted in favour of pursuing membership of the EU.

Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, Moldova has gravitated between pro-western and pro-Russian courses. But under Sandu, a former World Bank adviser, the impoverished country has accelerated its push to escape Moscow’s orbit amid its war in neighbouring Ukraine.

The results of the referendum and first round of the election were marred by allegations of a Moscow-backed vote-buying scheme. Sandu and her allies have accused Russia and its proxies of leading a large-scale campaign involving vote-buying and misinformation to sway the election.

They accuse the fugitive Moldovan businessman Ilan Shor, a vocal opponent of EU membership, of running a destabilising campaign from Moscow.

“Moldova has faced an unprecedented assault on our country’s freedom and democracy, both today and in recent months,” Sandu told supporters in the capital of Chișinău after the election results were announced.

Before the vote, her team said it had “mobilised every available resource” to counter what they describe as “a sprawling Kremlin-backed vote-buying scheme”.

“Moldova has had a monumental task before it – just two weeks to stop a sprawling Kremlin-backed vote-buying scheme that proved effective in the twin vote on 20 October,” Olga Roşca, a foreign policy adviser to Sandu, told the Observer.

“Protecting the integrity of tomorrow’s runoff has required urgent, decisive action. Authorities, working around the clock, have been executing a twofold strategy: dismantling the network and deterring would-be participants,” Roşca added.

“Every available resource has been mobilized—from law enforcement to public service announcements in trolleybuses and supermarkets,” the advisor said.

The tight results of the EU referendum have weakened Sandu’s standing, placing her in direct opposition to former prosecutor general Stoianoglo, who exceeded expectations with 26% of the vote on the Party of Socialists’ ticket.

In the presidential debate, Sandu accused Stoianoglo of being a “Trojan horse” candidate for outside interests bent on seizing control of Moldova.

Stoianoglo has denied working on behalf of Russia. In an earlier interview with the Observer, he claimed that he was in favour of joining the EU, but boycotted the vote, calling it a “parody.”

He has also declined to criticise the Kremlin for its invasion of Ukraine and called for improved relations with Moscow. “The level of Russian interference in Moldova is highly exaggerated,” he said, adding that he would seek a “reset of relations” with Moscow.

While Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shocked many in Chișinău, just a few hours’ drive from Ukraine’s Black Sea port city of Odesa, the Kremlin’s shadow still looms large. Moscow has 1,500 troops stationed in Transnistria, a region run by pro-Russian separatists who broke away from Moldova’s government in a brief war in the 1990s.

The vote comes after Saturday’s parliamentary election in Georgia, another ex-Soviet country trying to join the EU, where a ruling party viewed by most countries as increasingly Moscow-friendly and anti-liberal won an vote that was marred by reports of voting violations and fraud.

It was a killing that started with a lie. In October 2020, an Islamist terrorist tracked down and decapitated professor Samuel Paty as he left school on the last day before half-term holidays.

In the days preceding his murder, Paty, 47, who taught geography and history, had been the subject of an intense campaign of online harassment sparked when a 13-year-old student claimed he had discriminated against his Muslim pupils during a class on moral and civic education.

The girl told her father Paty had instructed Muslim students to leave the classroom at the Bois-d’Aulne secondary school at Conflans-Sainte-Honorine in the Paris suburbs while he showed students caricatures of the prophet Muhammad from the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo.

In truth, the girl was not in Paty’s class that day and had made up the story to cover the fact she had been suspended from school for bad behaviour.

Paty had used the images as part of an ethics class to discuss free speech laws in France and the question of “dilemmas”. He posed the question “to be or not to be Charlie?”, referring to the #JeSuisCharlie hashtag used to express support for the paper after a terrorist attack on its offices in January 2015 that killed 12 people.

But Paty had not ordered any children to leave the room – instead he had told them they could turn away if they thought they would be offended by the images.

The teenager could not have known that the story she told her father would spark a chain of events that would lead an 18-year-old Chechen, Abdoullakh Anzorov, to travel 100km (62 miles) from his home in Normandy to kill the teacher after her furious father posted the lie on social media.

On Monday, the father, Brahim Chnina, will be one of eight adults – seven men and a woman – on trial in connection with the murder. Chnina is accused of association with a terrorist organisation after allegedly launching a social media campaign against Paty, including publishing videos online attacking Paty and designating him as a target by giving precise information about his identity and place of work. Prosecutors say Chnina was in contact with Anzorov nine times before the killing. He has denied the charge.

Abdelhakim Sefrioui, founder of the pro-Hamas Sheikh Yassine collective in France, which was dissolved by the government after the murder, is accused of participating in the preparation of a video presenting “false and distorted information intended to arouse hatred” towards Paty. In the video, Sefrioui described Paty as a “thug”.

During questioning, he told police he would never have posted the video had he imagined there was “one billionth of a chance” of provoking the teacher’s killing. Instead, he said he and Chnina were calling for disciplinary sanctions against Paty.

His lawyers describe the charge against him as an “intellectual and judicial aberration”, arguing there is no proof of contact between him and Anzorov.

Six others are charged with association with a criminal terrorist group and risk up to 30 years in jail if convicted. Two of Anzorov’s friends have been charged with complicity in Paty’s murder, the most serious charge carrying a 30-year prison sentence.

Chnina’s daughter, whose story sparked the tragedy, and five other former students aged between 13 and 15 at the time of the killing, were tried last year. Chnina’s daughter received an 18-month suspended sentence for making “slanderous and false accusations”.

The five other teenagers were found guilty of criminal conspiracy with intent to cause violence. The girl, who had been suspended from school because of repeatedly failing to attend lessons, was reported to have told police she lied because she wanted to avoid disappointing her father.

“She would not have dared to confess to her father the real reasons for her exclusion shortly before the tragedy, which was in fact linked to her bad behaviour,” Le Parisien reported.

Chnina subsequently shared a video on Facebook in which he denounced Paty and called for him to be sacked from the secondary school. A second video posted on social media accused Paty of “discrimination”. Chnina complained to the school and the police, claiming Paty was guilty of “diffusing a pornographic image” and was “Islamophobic”. The issue snowballed on social media; 10 days later, Paty was dead.

One of the convicted teenagers, had given Anzorov a description of Paty, pointed out the route he took on leaving the school and recruited other students to keep an eye out for the teacher.

Anzorov, 18, a radicalised Islamist who had arrived in France aged six with his Chechen parents and had been granted asylum, was shot dead by police after the incident.

The town of Conflans-Saint-Honore is a civil party in the case. Laurent Brosse, the local mayor, said: “ For the vast majority of us, across all generations, the murder resonates as an attack on freedom, an attack on each and every one of us, on our society as a whole, on the values of our Republic, on our fundamental rights.”

Brosse said: “Samuel Paty embodied the values of our Republic. Through his teaching, he sought to awaken the critical spirit of his pupils. He showed them the importance of debating ideas, mutual respect and tolerance.”

The school will be named the Samuel Paty School from next year.

An Iranian-American journalist who once worked for a US government-funded broadcaster is believed to have been detained by Iran for months, authorities have said, further raising the stakes as Tehran threatens to retaliate over an Israeli attack on the country.

The imprisonment of Reza Valizadeh, which was acknowledged to the Associated Press by the US Department of State, came as Iran marked the 45th anniversary on Sunday of the US embassy takeover and hostage crisis. It also followed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, threatening both Israel and the US the day before with “a crushing response” as long-range B-52 bombers reached the Middle East in an attempt to deter Tehran.

Valizadeh had worked for Radio Farda, an outlet under Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty overseen by the US Agency for Global Media. In February, he posted on X that his family members had been detained in an effort to make him return to Iran.

In August, Valizadeh apparently posted two messages suggesting he had returned to Iran despite Radio Farda being viewed by Iran’s theocracy as a hostile outlet.

“I arrived in Tehran on March 6, 2024. Before that, I had unfinished negotiations with the [Revolutionary Guards] intelligence department,” the message read in part. “Eventually I came back to my country after 13 years without any security guarantee, even a verbal one.”

Valizadeh added that the name of a man who he claimed belonged to Iran’s intelligence ministry. The AP could not verify whether the person worked for the ministry.

Rumours have been circulating for weeks that Valizadeh had been detained. The Human Rights Activists News Agency, which monitors cases in Iran, said he had been detained on arrivalin the country earlier this year, but was later released.

Valizadeh was then rearrested and sent to Evin prison, where he now faces a case in Iran’s revolutionary court, which routinely holds closed-door hearings in which secret evidence is routinely used against defendants, the agency reported. Valizadeh had faced arrest in 2007 as well, it said.

The US Department of State told AP that it was “aware of reports that this dual US-Iranian citizen has been arrested in Iran” when asked about Valizadeh.

“We are working with our Swiss partners who serve as the protecting power for the United States in Iran to gather more information about this case,” the department said. “Iran routinely imprisons US citizens and other countries’ citizens unjustly for political purposes. This practice is cruel and contrary to international law.”

Iran has not acknowledged detaining Valizadeh. Iran’s mission to the United Nations did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Voice of America, another US government-funded media outlet overseen by the Agency for Global Media, first reported the state department was acknowledging Valizadeh’s detention in Iran.

Since the 1979 US embassy crisis, in which dozens of hostages were released after 444 days in captivity, Iran has used prisoners with western ties as bargaining chips in negotiations with the world. In September 2023, five Americans detained for years in Iran were freed in exchange for five Iranians in US custody and for $6bn (£4.6bn) in frozen Iranian assets to be released by South Korea.

Valizadeh is the first American known to be detained by Iran in the time since.

Meanwhile, Iranian state television broadcast footage on Sunday of different cities across the country marking the anniversary of the embassy takeover.

Gen Hossein Salami, the head of the Revolutionary Guards, also spoke in Tehran, where he repeated a pledge made the day before by Khamenei. “The resistance front and Iran will equip itself with whatever necessary to confront and defeat the enemy,” he said, referring to the militant groups such as Hamas and Lebanon’s Hezbollah backed by Tehran.

In Tehran, thousands gathered at the gate of the former US embassy chanted “Death to America” and “Death to Israel”. Some burned flags of the US and Israel along with effigies of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

They also carried images of killed leading figures of Iran’s allied militant groups including the Lebanese Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and the Palestinian Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. The crowd in the state-organised rallies chanted they were ready to defend the Palestinians.

It is a distinct language that has survived against the odds for centuries in a tiny pocket of central Sweden, where just 2,500 people speak it today. And yet, despite bearing little resemblance to Swedish, Elfdalian is considered to be only a dialect of the country’s dominant language.

Now researchers say they have uncovered groundbreaking information about the roots of Elfdalian that they hope could bolster its standing and help it acquire official recognition as a minority language.

Elfdalian is traditionally spoken in a small part of the region of Dalarna, known as Älvdalen in Swedish and Övdaln in Elfdalian. But using linguistic and archeological data, including runes, Elfdalian experts have tracked the language back to the last phase of ancient Nordic – spoken across Scandinavia between the sixth and eighth centuries.

They believe it was imported to hunter-gatherers in the Swedish region of Dalarna from farmers based in the region of Uppland, which became an international base for trade, who started adopting the language. At the time, the hunter-gatherers of Dalarna spoke a language referred to by linguists as “paleo north Scandinavian”.

Yair Sapir, the co-author of a new book on Elfdalian grammar, the first to be published in English, said: “There is research that compares the distance between Elfdalian vocabulary and it shows the distance is as large [between Swedish and Elfdalian] as between Swedish and Icelandic. So there is higher mutual intelligibility between speakers of Swedish, Norwegian and Danish than between Swedish and Elfdalian.”

Until around 1400, as a trade and transit area, the region was influenced linguistically and culturally from Norway and other parts of Sweden. But when the Kalmar Union was established and trade patterns dramatically changed, innovations in the language suddenly stopped.

It was not until about 1900, with the arrival of schools, industrialisation and urbanisation, bringing with it a strong Swedish influence, that the language started to change again. This, in effect, said Sapir, made it “a medieval language that survived up to modern times”.

Before then there were multiple highly specific dialects that varied between villages and sometimes even within villages. “People did not move so much, there was not so much mobility and the units were quite self-reliant. They didn’t need to have so much contact with the outside world.”

While runes had became obsolete in most of Sweden as early as the 14th century, there is evidence of runes being used in Älvdalen as late as 1909, making it the last place in the world where they were used.

The legacy of Sweden’s empire, which during the 17th and 18th centuries ruled over much of the Baltics, is visible in attitudes to Swedish minority languages and dialects today, he said, citing the principles of nationalism and Göticism, which connected the idea of being a strong nation state with a strong uniform language.

Bible translations show, he added, that in the 17th-century Swedish empire there was more tolerance towards non-Nordic languages than towards Nordic languages within the empire. While the Bible was translated to Finnish and Estonian, copies in Danish in their former Danish territories were confiscated. Translating the Bible into Elfdalian and other dialects would have been out of the question.

As a result of such attitudes, there has historically been shame around speaking the language, but in recent years there has been a sense of pride. Efforts by speakers to preserve and revitalise the language have resulted in more people learning the language, standardisation, more teaching in schools, research and Elfdalian children’s literature.

About half of the former parish of Älvdalen’s approximately 5,000 residents speak the language and many others have knowledge of it, meaning it is often heard in the local supermarket, he added.

“The linguistic landscape has also changed in the last 20 years or so, you see many more signs in Elfdalian in Älvdalen. You can also see that the feelings of shame have been replaced with feelings of pride.”

But as the influence of Swedish on the language grows even stronger, weakening the structure of the language and replacing Elfdalian words, greater protection is needed. “Sometimes it’s difficult to know if a word is Swedish or Elfdalian because they are related to each other.”

Bringing back some of the linguistic features of the pre-1900 version, known as Late Classical Elfdalian, is helping native speakers to reclaim the language and allow new speakers in, argue Sapir and his co-author Olof Lundgren in their book A Grammar of Elfdalian. But it would benefit even more from official recognition as a language, they write.

“If Elfdalian is recognised as a minority or regional language in Sweden, the number of speakers is likely to increase, and likewise the general level of Elfdalian language skills.”