The Russian security council deputy head, Dmitry Medvedev, has described the editors of the Times newspaper in Britain as “legitimate military targets” in response to the newspaper’s coverage of the assassination of a Russian general.

Medvedev’s vitriolic comments on Wednesday followed a Times editorial in which the newspaper described the assassination of Lt Gen Igor Kirillov as “a legitimate act of defence” by Ukraine, which has claimed responsibility for the killing.

Kirillov, head of the military’s chemical, biological and radiological weapons unit, was killed along with his assistant when a device attached to an escooter exploded as the two men left a building in a residential area in south-east Moscow on Tuesday morning. Kirillov is the most senior Russian military official to be killed in an assassination away from the frontlines since the start of the Kremlin’s offensive in Ukraine nearly three years ago.

“Those who carry out crimes against Russia … always have accomplices. They too are now legitimate military targets. This category could also include the miserable jackals from The Times who cowardly hid behind their editorial. That means the entire leadership of the publication,” Medvedev, who served as Russia’s president between 2008 and 2012, wrote on his Telegram channel.

In a thinly veiled threat, the hawkish former president added that journalists at the Times should “be careful” as “anything goes in London”.

Responding to Medvedev’s post, the UK foreign secretary, David Lammy, wrote on X that his “gangster threat against Times journalists smacks of desperation”.

“Our newspapers represent the best of British values: freedom, democracy and independent thinking,” Lammy wrote alongside a picture of himself reading the Times.

Asked about Medvedev’s comments, the UK prime minister’s official spokesperson said they were “simply the latest in a series of desperate rhetoric coming from Putin’s government.”

The spokesperson added: “Unlike in Russia, a free press is a cornerstone of our democracy and we take any threats made by Russia incredibly seriously.”

Medvedev, who cast himself as a liberal reformer promising modernisation and democratisation upon becoming president in 2008, has reinvented himself as one of Russia’s most vocal pro-war figures.

He is now best known for his fiery anti-western tirades on Telegram, which some observers see as a desperate attempt to maintain political relevance.

Still, Medvedev remains a prominent Putin confidant and recently travelled to Beijing for talks with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, one of Russia’s key allies.

In the same post on Wednesday, Medvedev also threatened Nato officials assisting Ukraine.

“There’s a whole legion of them. There’s not even enough space to list them, but all these individuals can and should be considered legitimate military targets for the Russian state. And for all Russian patriots for that matter,” he wrote.

Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Moscow has banned dozens of British journalists, media representatives and senior UK politicians from entering the country.

• Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he had held a new discussion with his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, on the latter’s proposal to deploy troops in Ukraine as a means to help achieve a stable peace. “We share a common vision: reliable guarantees are essential for a peace that can truly be achieved,” said Ukraine’s president, who was in Brussels on Wednesday for meetings with Nato’s chief and European leaders. “We continued working on President Macron’s initiative regarding the presence of forces in Ukraine that could contribute to stabilising the path to peace.” Macron’s office said France was making reinforced support for Ukraine its “absolute priority” and would continue giving Ukraine “the means to defend itself and to make Russia’s war of aggression fail”. Macron would maintain a “tight dialogue with Ukraine and its international partners to work for a return to a fair and lasting peace”. Zelenskyy is also due to take part in an EU summit in the Belgian capital on Thursday.

• Asked how Britain would respond if Zelenskyy asked for British troops to be sent to Ukraine, the UK foreign minister, David Lammy, told Sky News he saw no sign Russia’s president was ready to negotiate. “The discussion is about equipping Ukraine for the days ahead. That is why we meet at this very sombre moment to ensure that Ukraine gets through the winter and gets into 2025. I know there’s lots of speculation, but the truth is Putin is not a man that you can negotiate with when he is causing such mayhem on European soil at this moment in time.”

• Nato’s secretary general, Mark Rutte, expressed frustration that European leaders were playing into the hands of Vladimir Putin by talking publicly about when peace talks might start and whether European peacekeepers would be involved. The focus, Rutte said, must be “to do everything now to make sure that when it comes to air defence, when it comes to other weapons systems, that we make sure that we provide whatever we can … I think we would be very wise to put some lid on this [pre-empting a peace process] and focus on the business at hand, and the business at hand is to make sure that Ukraine has what it needs to prevent Putin from winning.”

• Russia’s investigative committee said it had detained an Uzbek citizen who investigators blamed for placing the bomb that killed Lt Gen Igor Kirillov. The Kremlin-controlled news agency Tass reported claims by the Russian domestic spy agency, the FSB, that the 29-year-old had been recruited by Ukrainian special services and promised $100,000 and travel to the EU. The man was arrested in the village of Chernoye in the Balashikha district of Moscow, the state-controlled news agency Ria reported, citing the interior ministry. The Russian foreign ministry said it would raise the assassination of Kirillov at the UN security council on Friday.

• Britain on Thursday unveiled £225m (US$286m) in new military aid to Ukraine for next year including drones, boats and air defence systems. The UK’s defence secretary, John Healey, visited Kyiv on Wednesday for talks with his Ukrainian counterpart, Rustem Umerov.

• North Korea demonstrated this year that it could produce ballistic missiles and supply them to Russia for use against Ukraine in a matter of months, the head of a research organisation that traces weapons used in the war said on Wednesday. Jonah Leff told the UN security council that researchers on the ground examined remnants of four missiles from North Korea recovered in Ukraine in July and August, including one that had marks indicating it was produced in 2024. “This is the first public evidence of missiles having been produced in North Korea and then used in Ukraine within a matter of months, not years,” he said.

• The World Bank approved $2.05bn in funding for Ukraine that includes the first grant from a $20bn US loan fund for Kyiv that is backed by income from frozen Russian sovereign assets. The package also includes World Bank financing of $1.05bn enhanced with loan guarantees from a trust fund supported by Japan and Britain, the bank said. About $50bn in financing for Ukraine is being raised from Russian assets frozen overseas.

• Keir Starmer’s office said he used a call with Donald Trump to restate that international allies must stand together in support of Ukraine. “The prime minister reiterated the need for allies to stand together with Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression and to ensure Ukraine is in the strongest possible position.”

• Ukraine has dismissed a Russian allegation that its drones repeatedly dropped white phosphorus in September as “false and nonsensical”, saying that Kyiv was fully compliant with its international arms control obligations. “We are confident that by making such false accusations, Moscow seeks to shift blame for its own actions and deceive foreign audiences,” foreign ministry spokesperson Heorhii Tykhyi told Reuters.

• The US issued fresh sanctions on Wednesday on several Russia-based entities over their involvement in the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, the state department said. They included Russia-based marine services and water transport entities, the state-owned maritime rescue service and more than a dozen vessels, as well as Nord Stream 2 AG, the operator of the project, and a Russia-based insurer of companies involved in the project.

• The Ukrainian air force said on Wednesday that Russia launched 81 drones to attack Ukraine overnight of which 30 “imitator drones” did not reach their targets and 51 were shot down.

The mass rape trial that has sent shockwaves through France and horrified the world is expected to end on Thursday with the conviction of Dominique Pelicot, who has admitted drugging his ex-wife, Gisèle, and inviting strangers into their bedroom to rape her.

Pelicot, a 72-year-old retired electrician and estate agent, is expected to be given the maximum 20-year jail term the public prosecutor has demanded at the three and a half-month trial in Avignon.

Fifty other men accused alongside him, most of whom deny the charges, face sentences ranging from 10 to 18 years for those accused of aggravated rape and four years for one accused of sexual aggression. One man is on the run and being tried in his absence.

They were invited to address the court for the last time on Monday. A dozen apologised to Gisèle Pelicot, while a handful insisted they ”had not intended” to rape and were therefore not rapists. Others said they had nothing to add.

Dominique Pelicot used his final words from behind the glass dock to salute the “courage” of his ex-wife who he said had faced the “innuendo of complicity”. This followed suggestions early in the trial that she had been a willing participant in her own abuse, suspicions rapidly dismissed by videos he made of the rapes that were shown during the hearing.

“The videos were very well filmed. No one could say you didn’t know what was happening in them,” her lawyer, Stéphane Babonneau, said. “She would never consider letting these men into her house, let alone do what they did.”

Gisèle Pelicot discovered her “caring, attentive, perfect” husband of 50 years had been abusing her and inviting other men to do the same after his arrest for filming up the skirts of female customers at a local supermarket in September 2020. When he was taken into custody two months later, police revealed the extent of the drugging and abuse, which lasted almost a decade, and showed her some of the photographs he had taken of her while she was unconscious.

In an unusual move, Gisèle Pelicot waived her anonymity and insisted the trial be open to the press and public. The videos, which the president of the court described as an “attack on human dignity”, should be shown in open court, she said.

During the trial, which opened in September, the court has heard that Dominique Pelicot recruited most of the accused men from an online chatroom called A Son Insu, which translates as Without their Knowledge. They came from within a radius of 30 miles (50km) of the Pelicot’s home in the Provençal town of Mazan, whose most notorious resident until now had been the Marquis de Sade.

The 50 accused are those whom French police identified and traced from Pelicot’s videos. At least 20 more are believed to be still at large.

Over the weeks, Gisèle Pelicot, 73, a grandmother whose insistence that “shame must change sides” has become a global feminist slogan, has grown in confidence and stature, boosted by the overwhelming support she has received from the crowds of women who have turned out to cheer her in and out of the courthouse. Women have arrived each day at dawn and waited for hours in rain, cold and bitter Mistral winds for a seat in the hearing.

“We thought we knew ­everything men were capable of inflicting on women, but never imagined a ­husband drugging his wife and offering her up to dozens of predators for 10 years,” one said.

Antoine Camus, a lawyer who also represented Gisèle Pelicot, questioned how the men he described as a “kaleidoscope of French society” could have so little empathy that they treated her as “less than nothing”. “The question isn’t why you went there, but why you stayed?” he said in court.

French and Spanish feminist groups are expected at the courthouse for the verdicts. Among other demands, they are calling for a change in society’s treatment of rape victims before, during and after the legal process.

“How can it not change things?” Camus has asked.

The world’s largest hornet, an invasive breed nicknamed the “murder hornet” for its dangerous sting and ability to slaughter a hive of honeybees in as little as 90 minutes, has been declared eradicated in the US, five years after being spotted for the first time in Washington state near the Canadian border.

The Washington and US Departments of Agriculture announced the eradication on Wednesday, saying there had been no detections of the northern giant hornet in Washington since 2021.

The news represented an enormous success and was achieved in part by residents agreeing to place traps on their properties and reporting sightings, as well as researchers capturing a live hornet, attaching a tiny radio tracking tag to it with dental floss, and following it through a forest to a nest in an alder tree. Scientists destroyed the nest just as a number of queens were beginning to emerge, officials said.

“I’ve gotta tell you, as an entomologist I’ve been doing this for over 25 years now, and it is a rare day when the humans actually get to win one against the insects,” Sven Spichiger, pest program manager of the Washington state department of agriculture, told a virtual news conference.

The hornets, which can be 2 inches (5 cm) long and were formerly called Asian giant hornets, gained attention in 2013, when they killed 42 people in China and seriously injured 1,675.

Northern giant hornets pose significant threats to pollinators and native insects. They can wipe out a honeybee hive in just 90 minutes, decapitating the bees and then defending the hive as their own, taking the brood to feed their own young.

The hornets were first detected in North America in British Columbia, Canada, in August 2019 and confirmed in Washington state in December 2019, when a Whatcom County resident reported a specimen. A beekeeper also reported hives being attacked and turned over specimens in the summer of 2020. The hornets could have traveled to North America in plant pots or shipping containers, experts said.

DNA evidence suggested the populations found in British Columbia and Washington were not related and appeared to originate from different countries. There also have been no confirmed reports in British Columbia since 2021, and the nonprofit Invasive Species Centre in Canada has said the hornet is also considered eradicated there.

The hornet can sting through most beekeeper suits, deliver nearly seven times the amount of venom as a honeybee, and sting multiple times. At one point the Washington agriculture department ordered special reinforced suits from China.

Washington is the only state that has had confirmed reports of northern giant hornets. Trappers found four nests in 2020 and 2021.

Spichiger said Washington will remain on the lookout, despite reporting the eradication. He noted that entomologists will continue to monitor traps in Kitsap County, where a resident reported an unconfirmed sighting in October but where trapping efforts and public outreach have come up empty.

“We will continue to be vigilant,” Spichiger said.

The world’s largest hornet, an invasive breed nicknamed the “murder hornet” for its dangerous sting and ability to slaughter a hive of honeybees in as little as 90 minutes, has been declared eradicated in the US, five years after being spotted for the first time in Washington state near the Canadian border.

The Washington and US Departments of Agriculture announced the eradication on Wednesday, saying there had been no detections of the northern giant hornet in Washington since 2021.

The news represented an enormous success and was achieved in part by residents agreeing to place traps on their properties and reporting sightings, as well as researchers capturing a live hornet, attaching a tiny radio tracking tag to it with dental floss, and following it through a forest to a nest in an alder tree. Scientists destroyed the nest just as a number of queens were beginning to emerge, officials said.

“I’ve gotta tell you, as an entomologist I’ve been doing this for over 25 years now, and it is a rare day when the humans actually get to win one against the insects,” Sven Spichiger, pest program manager of the Washington state department of agriculture, told a virtual news conference.

The hornets, which can be 2 inches (5 cm) long and were formerly called Asian giant hornets, gained attention in 2013, when they killed 42 people in China and seriously injured 1,675.

Northern giant hornets pose significant threats to pollinators and native insects. They can wipe out a honeybee hive in just 90 minutes, decapitating the bees and then defending the hive as their own, taking the brood to feed their own young.

The hornets were first detected in North America in British Columbia, Canada, in August 2019 and confirmed in Washington state in December 2019, when a Whatcom County resident reported a specimen. A beekeeper also reported hives being attacked and turned over specimens in the summer of 2020. The hornets could have traveled to North America in plant pots or shipping containers, experts said.

DNA evidence suggested the populations found in British Columbia and Washington were not related and appeared to originate from different countries. There also have been no confirmed reports in British Columbia since 2021, and the nonprofit Invasive Species Centre in Canada has said the hornet is also considered eradicated there.

The hornet can sting through most beekeeper suits, deliver nearly seven times the amount of venom as a honeybee, and sting multiple times. At one point the Washington agriculture department ordered special reinforced suits from China.

Washington is the only state that has had confirmed reports of northern giant hornets. Trappers found four nests in 2020 and 2021.

Spichiger said Washington will remain on the lookout, despite reporting the eradication. He noted that entomologists will continue to monitor traps in Kitsap County, where a resident reported an unconfirmed sighting in October but where trapping efforts and public outreach have come up empty.

“We will continue to be vigilant,” Spichiger said.

The US Federal Reserve cut interest rates on Wednesday, but suggested it would make fewer rate cuts than expected in 2025 amid questions over its fight to bring down inflation across the world’s largest economy.

Jerome Powell, the Fed chair, said inflation had been “stubborn”, but insisted the central bank believed its rate hikes would continue to erode the pace of price rises.

Wall Street fell sharply, with the S&P 500 closing down almost 3% as investors digested the announcement. The tech-focused Nasdaq composite dropped 3.6%.

Policymakers at the central bank lowered the benchmark federal funds rate by a quarter of a percentage point to a range of between 4.25% and 4.5% in its last rate decision before Donald Trump assumes the presidency in January.

While inflation has fallen dramatically since peaking at its highest rate in a generation two summers ago, it remains higher than the Fed would like – and has increased in recent months.

The wider US economy remains robust, with employers adding an estimated 227,000 jobs in November. But the stickiness of price growth has raised concern over the progress of efforts to bring it down to normal, pre-pandemic levels.

Nevertheless, Powell said he remained optimistic about the US economy. “I think it’s pretty clear we have avoided a recession. I think growth this year has been solid,” Powell told a news conference. “The US economy has been remarkable.”

Americans’ frustration over a surge in prices in recent years has been cited as a key factor behind the election victory of Donald Trump, who repeatedly pledged on the campaign trail to bring them down.

But even the president-elect has since conceded that this pledge – which drew skepticism from many economists – will be no mean feat.

Asked by Time magazine if his presidency would be a failure if prices do not fall, Trump replied: “I don’t think so. Look, they got them up. I’d like to bring them down. It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up. You know, it’s very hard. But I think that they will.”

Trump’s return to the White House puts the Fed on a potentially rocky path. He has repeatedly criticized decisions by the central bank, and his allies have even raised the prospect of curtailing its independence.

Powell, who has endured a strained relationship with the president-elect after his appointment during his first administration, stated last month that he would not resign if asked by Trump to leave the role.

Vanuatu’s public health system risks being overwhelmed amid mounting waterborne disease, aid agencies have said, as a lack of clean water and patchy telecommunications service complicated rescue operations after Tuesday’s powerful 7.3 magnitude earthquake.

The government’s disaster management office said early on Wednesday that 14 deaths had been confirmed, but hours later said nine had been verified by the main hospital. The number was expected to increase because people remained trapped in fallen buildings, a spokesperson said. About 200 people have been treated for injuries.

Much of Vanuatu remains without water after two large reservoirs serving the capital, Port Vila, were totally decimated by the earthquake, the National Disaster Management Office said. Landslides and aftershocks exacerbated the damage to water infrastructure and increased the risk of disease, aid agencies said.

Frantic rescue efforts were continuing around flattened buildings in Port Vila on Thursday after the quake hit on Tuesday afternoon with dozens working in dust and heat with little water to seek those yelling for help inside.

The capital’s main medical facility, Vila Central hospital, was badly damaged and patients were moved to a military camp. Clement Chipokolo, Vanuatu country director at the Christian relief agency World Vision, said health care services, already strained before the quake, were overwhelmed.

Chipokolo said the search and rescue focus would soon shift to humanitarian needs, with Vanuatu needing medical personnel and supplies, as well as urgent needs for water, sanitation and food.

Unicef was recording a rise in diarrhoea among children, said the chief of the Vanuatu office, Eric Durpaire. Officials told residents of areas where water had been restored to boil it. “We already saw this morning an increase of children with diarrhoea cases, meaning they have started to drink contaminated water because the water supply has been broken,” Durpaire said.

Resident Milroy Cainton said people were joining large queues to buy water in stores, but could purchase only two or four bottles at a time. “People are not really concerned about electricity, they’re just concerned about water,” he said.

Australian and New Zealand rescue and medical teams have reached Vanuatu, authorities said on Thursday.

Australian foreign minister Penny Wong said about 150 Australian citizens had returned home overnight on the two aircraft that delivered assistance.

She said Australia would help Vanuatu restore operations at the international airport in Port Vila, which has been closed to commercial airlines because of damage.

A Royal New Zealand air force Hercules arrived in Port Vila with rescue equipment and medics on Thursday, and would assist with the evacuation of New Zealanders, said New Zealand officials. An earlier flight carrying rescue teams had to divert to New Caledonia after a fault was found with the ageing plane.

Other countries have also offered support, with a US military aircraft expected to arrive on Thursday, while France sent a military helicopter with satellite communications and military engineers.

Vanuatu’s national disaster management office said in a report the number of deaths and injuries was expected to increase, as search and rescue work continues.

Two Chinese nationals were among the confirmed dead.

France’s ambassador Jean-Baptiste Jeangène Vilmer on Thursday also confirmed the death of a French national, Vincent Goiset, a Vanuatu resident who was killed under the rubble of a collapsed building in the city centre.

French and Australian rescue teams are searching for survivors at a collapsed building, where eight to 15 people are buried, with some confirmed dead, he wrote.

A near-total telecommunications collapse meant people struggled to confirm their relatives’ safety. Some providers began to reestablish phone service but connections were patchy. Internet service had not been restored because the submarine cable supplying it was damaged, the operator said.

The earthquake hit at a depth of 57 kilometres (35 miles) and was centred 30 kilometres (19 miles) west of the capital of Vanuatu, a group of 80 islands home to about 330,000 people. A tsunami warning was called off less than two hours after the quake, but dozens of large aftershocks continued to rattle the country.

At least 10 buildings sustained major damage, many in a busy downtown area full of lunchtime shoppers when the quake hit.

Officials said on Wednesday night that Port Vila appeared to be the worst-hit area, but some nearby villages and offshore islands had experienced landslides. Three bridges were “at high risk of collapse” in heavy rain, the government said.

A building housing a number of diplomatic missions in Port Vila – including those of the United States, Britain, France and New Zealand – was destroyed, with a section of the building cleaving off and flattening the first floor. Windows were buckled and walls crumbled.

The US state department said its embassy staff were safe, but the building was no longer functional. The office opened in July as part of a push by the US to expand its Pacific presence to counter China’s influence in the region.

Damage to the seaport and airport is likely to hamper aid efforts and economic recovery in a country dependent on agricultural exports and tourism. The airport was closed to commercial flights for a further 72 hours from Wednesday.

But the runway was deemed functional for humanitarian flights by French engineers who arrived by helicopter.

Vanuatu’s position on a subduction zone – where the Indo-Australian tectonic plate moves beneath the Pacific Plate – means earthquakes of greater than magnitude 6 are not uncommon, and the country’s buildings are intended to withstand quake damage.

With Associated Press and Reuters

A controversial study that promoted hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug, as a treatment for Covid-19 has officially been withdrawn.

On Tuesday, Elsevier, a Dutch academic publishing company which owns the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents, issued the retraction of the March 2020 study, saying “concerns have been raised regarding this article, the substance of which relate to the articles’ adherence to Elsevier’s publishing ethics policies and the appropriate conduct of research involving human participants”.

Elsevier added that concerns had also been raised by “three of the authors themselves regarding the article’s methodology and conclusions”.

An investigation by Elsevier’s research integrity and publishing ethics team, as well as the journal’s co-owner, the International Society of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, found multiple issues within the study, according to a lengthy retraction notice.

Among those include the journal being unable to confirm whether any of the patients involved in the study were acquired before ethical approval had been obtained. The journal has also not been able to establish whether there was equipoise between the study patients and the control patients. According to the Association of Healthcare Journalists, equipoise is the “genuine uncertainty within the expert medical community – not necessarily on the part of the individual investigator – about the preferred treatment.”

The retraction notice also said that the journal has not been able to establish whether the subjects in this study should have provided informed consent to receive azithromycin as part of the study. According to the original study, the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid would increase if used with azithromycin, an antibiotic. It went on to add that there is “reasonable cause to conclude that azithromycin was not considered standard care at the time of the study”.

Since the study’s publication, three of its authors, Johan Courjon, Valérie Giordanengo and Stéphane Honoré, have contacted the journal to express their concerns “regarding the presentation and interpretation of results” and stated that they “no longer wish to see their names associated with the article”. Meanwhile, several other authors disagree with the retraction and dispute the grounds for it, the retraction notice said.

According to Nature, the study is the highest-cited paper on Covid-19 to be retracted, as well as the second-most-cited retracted paper overall.

In March 2020, the US Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency use authorization that allowed for the stockpiling of hydroxychloroquine, as well as its distribution and use for certain hospitalized patients with Covid-19.

Then US president Donald Trump also touted hydroxychloroquine as a miracle drug for Covid-19, at one point claiming that he was taking the drug prophylactically. Earlier this year, a study published in the peer-reviewed Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy journal found that people who took hydroxychloroquine were 11% more likely to die from Covid.

Following the study’s retraction, the French Society of Pharmacology and Therapeutics issued a statement, saying that the study “constitutes a clear example of scientific misconduct, marked by data manipulation and bias in the interpretation of results, aimed at falsely presenting hydroxychloroquine as effective”.

“This highly controversial study was the cornerstone of a global scandal. The promotion of its results led to the overprescription of hydroxychloroquine to millions of patients, resulting in unnecessary risk-taking for millions of people and potentially thousands of avoidable deaths … One of the fundamental principles of medicine – primum non nocere (‘first, do no harm’) – has been sacrificed here, with dramatic consequences,” it added.

A controversial study that promoted hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug, as a treatment for Covid-19 has officially been withdrawn.

On Tuesday, Elsevier, a Dutch academic publishing company which owns the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents, issued the retraction of the March 2020 study, saying “concerns have been raised regarding this article, the substance of which relate to the articles’ adherence to Elsevier’s publishing ethics policies and the appropriate conduct of research involving human participants”.

Elsevier added that concerns had also been raised by “three of the authors themselves regarding the article’s methodology and conclusions”.

An investigation by Elsevier’s research integrity and publishing ethics team, as well as the journal’s co-owner, the International Society of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, found multiple issues within the study, according to a lengthy retraction notice.

Among those include the journal being unable to confirm whether any of the patients involved in the study were acquired before ethical approval had been obtained. The journal has also not been able to establish whether there was equipoise between the study patients and the control patients. According to the Association of Healthcare Journalists, equipoise is the “genuine uncertainty within the expert medical community – not necessarily on the part of the individual investigator – about the preferred treatment.”

The retraction notice also said that the journal has not been able to establish whether the subjects in this study should have provided informed consent to receive azithromycin as part of the study. According to the original study, the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid would increase if used with azithromycin, an antibiotic. It went on to add that there is “reasonable cause to conclude that azithromycin was not considered standard care at the time of the study”.

Since the study’s publication, three of its authors, Johan Courjon, Valérie Giordanengo and Stéphane Honoré, have contacted the journal to express their concerns “regarding the presentation and interpretation of results” and stated that they “no longer wish to see their names associated with the article”. Meanwhile, several other authors disagree with the retraction and dispute the grounds for it, the retraction notice said.

According to Nature, the study is the highest-cited paper on Covid-19 to be retracted, as well as the second-most-cited retracted paper overall.

In March 2020, the US Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency use authorization that allowed for the stockpiling of hydroxychloroquine, as well as its distribution and use for certain hospitalized patients with Covid-19.

Then US president Donald Trump also touted hydroxychloroquine as a miracle drug for Covid-19, at one point claiming that he was taking the drug prophylactically. Earlier this year, a study published in the peer-reviewed Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy journal found that people who took hydroxychloroquine were 11% more likely to die from Covid.

Following the study’s retraction, the French Society of Pharmacology and Therapeutics issued a statement, saying that the study “constitutes a clear example of scientific misconduct, marked by data manipulation and bias in the interpretation of results, aimed at falsely presenting hydroxychloroquine as effective”.

“This highly controversial study was the cornerstone of a global scandal. The promotion of its results led to the overprescription of hydroxychloroquine to millions of patients, resulting in unnecessary risk-taking for millions of people and potentially thousands of avoidable deaths … One of the fundamental principles of medicine – primum non nocere (‘first, do no harm’) – has been sacrificed here, with dramatic consequences,” it added.

Two teenage girls have been sentenced for a series of antisemitic attacks in London, including one that left a woman unconscious.

The 14- and 15-year-olds, who cannot be named because of their age, targeted members of the Jewish community in Stamford Hill in four separate incidents over half an hour in December 2023, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said.

The CPS said the pair appeared at Stratford magistrates court on Wednesday where they were handed a youth rehabilitation order for 18 months.

They were also ordered to undertake a rehabilitation activity requirement for 30 and 45 hours, and placed under curfew with an electronic tag for three months.

The CPS said it successfully applied for a tougher sentence to be handed down to reflect that most of the attacks were “motivated by hate”.

Prosecutors said that, in the first incident, the teenagers demanded money from a woman on St Ann’s Road. One of them tried to hit the victim but missed, and the woman managed to escape.

Ten minutes later the pair demanded money from a 12-year-old girl near Holmdale Terrace, but let her go after they realised she had none.

Within five minutes, they started to harass a group of four 11-year-old girls, using antisemitic language and asking them for money. The defendants followed one of the girls after they ran away, grabbing hold of her arm and taking her lunch bag from her, according to the CPS.

In the final incident, which happened half an hour after the first, the girls attacked a woman on Rostrevor Avenue. The defendants approached the victim and asked if she had money in her pocket. When the woman tried to walk away from them, she was struck in the back.

The CPS said they grabbed the victim’s phone before slapping her, pulling her wig off, throwing her to the ground and kicking her. The woman briefly lost consciousness and sustained “significant bruising”.

The girls were both found guilty of attempted robbery, religiously aggravated harassment and actual bodily harm after trial, with one of the defendants also being found guilty of attempted theft.

Jagjeet Saund, from the CPS, said: “The evidence in this case proved that the two teenagers targeted most of the victims because they were Jewish.

“Key witness testimony proved that the defendants were mocking them, using antisemitic language, making it plainly obvious that these attacks were hate crimes. By highlighting this pattern of offending, we have successfully applied to the court to increase the sentence passed down on the defendants today.

“At the sentence hearing today, we used a community impact statement from a Jewish community leader to further demonstrate the wider impact this display of hatred can have on the local community, causing trauma and fear across society.

“There is no place for such intolerance and hatred, and the Crown Prosecution Service will continue to work closely with the police to ensure those who spread hate, prejudice and hostility are prosecuted.”

Keir Starmer must strengthen the rules around political donations to protect the electoral system from foreign interference, the Electoral Commission has said, amid rising concerns about Elon Musk’s plans to donate millions of pounds to Reform UK.

Vijay Rangarajan, chief executive of the elections watchdog, said that linking donations to political parties to the UK profits of companies owned by foreigners was one of the urgent changes needed to retain the trust of voters.

The move, which the Guardian understands is being considered by the government, could cap the amount that Musk, the world’s richest man, could donate through the British arm of his social media company X (formerly Twitter).

Twitter UK’s latest publicly available accounts show pre-tax profits of £8.5m in 2022, on a turnover of £205m, substantially lower than the $100m (£80m) that Musk was initially said to be willing to donate.

After a meeting with Musk this week at Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s Florida estate, Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, said the multi-billionaire was giving “serious thought” to bankrolling the party.

The prospect has been met with alarm inside the Labour government, with sources suggesting that it would “not be within the spirit” of the existing party funding rules and that it underlined the need for the legislation to be tightened up.

Electoral law in the UK currently stipulates that all donations and loans to political parties worth more than £500 should come from “permissible donors” registered in the UK. These include voters on the electoral register or companies registered in the UK.

The watchdog also wants political parties to be legally bound to make enhanced checks on donations to assess their risk, and to ensure those who donate to “unincorporated associations” are permissible donors.

“It’s crucial that UK voters have trust in the financing of our political system, so they need to see how parties and campaigners are financed and how they spend that money at elections,” Rangarajan told the Guardian.

“Our current laws include checks on the permissibility of donations and are intended to provide transparency over the source of political donations. But the system needs strengthening, and we have been calling for changes to the law since 2013, to protect the electoral system from foreign interference.

“We recommend three key changes: limit company donations to the money that they have made in the UK; legally require parties to conduct know-your-donor checks on donations to assess and manage their risks; and ensure those who donate to unincorporated associations are permissible donors. We are discussing these proposals with the government.”

Labour pledged in its manifesto to protect democracy from the threat of foreign interference by strengthening rules around donations. The Guardian understands that officials have already begun detailed discussions with the watchdog over drafting and implementation of the plans.

“Now is the moment to close the loophole,” said one source. “Any donation from Musk would be a significant risk politically because it would open up Reform UK to the charge of being financed by foreign money.”

As a US citizen, Musk cannot legally make a personal political donation to a British political party. But in an interview after the meeting Farage said: “He wants to help us, he’s not opposed to the idea of giving us money, provided we can do it legally through UK companies.”

Reform UK has said it wants to “professionalise” the party as it attempts to grow its support after winning five seats at the general election. This could include setting up offices in constituencies across the country, an internal research operation and spending millions on political advertising.

The prime minister’s spokesperson said: “The rules around donations are already clear and work is ongoing to reinforce the existing safeguards in that space … we’ll set out more details on that in due course.”

Tightening the rules would require primary legislation and ministers are not expected to bring forward a bill to deliver on their manifesto pledge until the end of next year at the earliest, with the changes not introduced until 2026.

Some officials are concerned that pressing ahead with the Electoral Commission’s recommendations any sooner could look like a politically motivated attempt to prevent Reform UK from building up a war chest before the next election.

But Labour backbenchers are pressing the government to act. Joe Powell, the MP for Kensington and Bayswater, said on BlueSky: “I am utterly staggered by Reform UK’s shameless plans to subvert UK election law.

“A Reform MP explained to me this morning just how they’ll do it. This is about more than any specific individual – it’s about hostile foreign actors trying to undermine our democracy.”

Labour figures are also concerned about the photograph of Reform UK’s treasurer, Nick Candy, a multimillionaire property magnate, posing alongside Musk and Farage at the Mar-a-Lago meeting.

They fear that wealthy rightwingers could be encouraged to donate to Reform UK in anticipation of a similar meeting with a senior member of the Trump administration, particularly if they run a business that could be hit by tariffs.

The Commission on Standards in Public Life, which advises the PM on ethical issues, has also previously recommended that donations be linked to UK profits in its review on regulating election finance.

Lord Khan of Burnley, an elections minister, told peers this month: “We are considering changes that will help protect our system from foreign interference, such as tighter controls on donations.

“For example, the Electoral Commission has pointed to a need to consider the rules on company donations. Details of these proposals will be brought forward in due course.”

On a nearly deserted street in northern Spain, the images appeared to show a man hunched over the back of a red Rover car, gingerly loading a bulky white sack into the boot.

A passing Google Maps camera car happened to snap the suspicious moment as it unfolded in the hamlet of Tajueco in October. Two months later, police have cited the image – which continues to appear on Google Maps – and others snapped by the camera car as clues that helped lead to the arrests of two people after the disappearance of a man last year.

The case traces back to November 2023, when a Cuban national living in Spain was reported missing by a relative, according to newspaper El País. The man had been living in the northern Spanish municipality of Soria, where he had turned up hoping to track down a woman believed to be his partner.

A relative of the Cuban man told police he became suspicious after receiving a series of texts from the man’s phone, telling the relative he had met another woman, was leaving Spain and would be getting rid of the phone, police said in a statement. “This made the complainant suspect that the messages had not been sent by the missing person and led him to report it to police.”

The investigation soon homed in on the Cuban man’s former partner and another man to whom she was believed to be romantically linked. Last month, police arrested the couple, alleging their involvement in the death and disappearance of the Cuban national. Weeks later a torso believed to be that of the missing man was found in the cemetery of a nearby hamlet.

Police declined to provide more details, saying only that the investigation was continuing.

They were swift, however, to highlight the role that Google Maps had played in capturing the harrowing images seemingly connected to the murder. “One of the clues that investigators used to solve the crime, though not conclusive, were the images detected during an investigation of a mapping application,” police said, saying that these images had helped to “detect a vehicle that may have been used in the course of the crime”.

On Wednesday El País canvassed neighbours of Tajueco, which has a population of 56, where several people said they had seen the images captured by Google Maps, but had given them little importance.

“We would have never imagined he was doing anything and we didn’t think anything of it,” said one resident, while another noted that “we didn’t think that in the photo of the boot there would be a body.”

A New York man has pleaded guilty to running a undeclared police station for the Chinese government in lower Manhattan, more than a year after the US justice department unveiled efforts aimed at disrupting Beijing’s efforts to locate and suppress Chinese American pro-democracy activists.

Chen Jinping, 60, pleaded guilty on Wednesday to conspiring to act as an agent of the government of the People’s Republic of China, in connection with opening and operating an overseas police station for the PRC’s ministry of public security, or MPS.

Chen, who pleaded guilty for acting as an illegal agent, faces five years in prison when he is sentenced next year.

US attorney Breon Peace said Chen was part of a “transnational repression scheme to establish a secret police station in the middle of New York City on behalf of the national police force of the People’s Republic of China”.

Peace added that US prosecutors had made it a priority “to counteract the malign activities of foreign governments that violate our nation’s sovereignty by targeting local diaspora communities in the United States”.

FBI assistant director in charge James Dennehy said that Chen admitted to his role in establishing the illegal police station that had been opened “to further the nefarious and repressive aims of the PRC in direct violation of American sovereignty”.

Jinping and co-defendant “Harry” Lu Jianwang, 62, both US citizens, had been arrested and charged in April last year with illegally acting as foreign agents. Lu has pleaded not guilty to the charges and is awaiting trial.

US officials said that while the secret police station did perform some basic services, such as helping Chinese citizens renew their Chinese driving licenses, it also served a more “sinister” function, including to help the Chinese government locate a pro-democracy activist of Chinese descent living in California.

The arrests came after the justice department charged more than a half-dozen people in 2020 with working on behalf of the Chinese government in a pressure campaign aimed at coercing a New Jersey man wanted by Beijing into returning to China.

In September, the US charged Linda Sun, a former aide of New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, with secretly acting as an agent of the Chinese government. US officials have warned for years of Chinese determination to influence American policy and cultivate relationships with political figures, but also act to pressure US-Chinese nationals domestically.

According to US prosecutors, the two men charged in connection with the illegal police station did so under the direction and control of the MPS.

The police station – which closed in the fall of 2022 – occupied an entire floor in an office building in Manhattan’s Chinatown. The FBI raided the police station in October 2022, and confiscated Chen’s and Lu’s phones. An analysis of the device later found that communications between the defendants and an MPS official appeared to have been deleted.