Hamas has freed six hostages in the latest exchange with Israel, as heightened tensions between the two sides cast doubt over their fragile ceasefire deal.

The six included three Israeli men seized from the Nova music festival and another abducted while visiting his family in southern Israel when militants stormed across the border in the 7 October attacks that triggered Israel’s 16-month campaign in the Gaza Strip.

Two of the hostages had been held by Hamas for about a decade after they each entered Gaza on their own.

Five of the captives were handed over in staged ceremonies that the Red Cross and Israel have previously condemned, with masked and armed Hamas fighters bringing them out in front of hundreds of Palestinians before transferring them to Red Cross vehicles.

The six hostages are the last living ones to be released under the first phase of the ceasefire deal.

In Nuseirat, in central Gaza, Omer Wenkert, Omer Shem Tov, and Eliya Cohen were made to pose alongside Hamas fighters on the stage. A beaming Shem Tov kissed two militants on the head and blew kisses to the crowd. Hamas has come under heavy criticism for the displays, with Israel, the UN and the Red Cross saying they are cruel and do not respect the dignity of the hostages.

Watching the release, Cohen’s family and friends in Israel chanted “Eliya, Eliya, Eliya!” and cheered when they saw him for the first time. Shem Tov’s grandmother exclaimed in joy as he saw him, crying: “Omer, my joy, my life.”

The Israeli military said the final hostage, Hisham al-Sayed, 37, was released later on Saturday. The Bedouin Israeli crossed on his own into Gaza in 2015 and had been held ever since. His family told Israeli media that Sayed had previously been diagnosed with schizophrenia.

The new releases, to be followed by the freeing of hundreds of Palestinians imprisoned by Israel, went ahead after tensions mounted over the latest dispute, which was triggered this week when Hamas initially handed over the wrong body in place of that of Shiri Bibas, an Israeli mother of two young boys abducted by the militants.

The remains that Hamas transferred with her sons’ bodies on Thursday were later determined to be those of an unidentified Palestinian woman. In response, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, vowed revenge for “a cruel and malicious violation”, while Hamas suggested it had been a mistake.

On Friday night, the Palestinian Mujahideen Brigades, the small militant group believed to have been holding Bibas and her sons, handed over a second body. The family of Bibas said Israeli forensic authorities had confirmed the remains were hers.

“For 16 months we sought certainty, and now that it’s here, it brings no comfort, though we hope it marks the beginning of closure,” the family said.

The ceasefire deal has paused the war but is nearing the end of its first phase. Negotiations over a second phase, in which Hamas would release dozens more hostages in exchange for a lasting ceasefire and an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, are likely to be even more difficult.

Hamas has freed six hostages in the latest exchange with Israel, as heightened tensions between the two sides cast doubt over their fragile ceasefire deal.

The six included three Israeli men seized from the Nova music festival and another abducted while visiting his family in southern Israel when militants stormed across the border in the 7 October attacks that triggered Israel’s 16-month campaign in the Gaza Strip.

Two of the hostages had been held by Hamas for about a decade after they each entered Gaza on their own.

Five of the captives were handed over in staged ceremonies that the Red Cross and Israel have previously condemned, with masked and armed Hamas fighters bringing them out in front of hundreds of Palestinians before transferring them to Red Cross vehicles.

The six hostages are the last living ones to be released under the first phase of the ceasefire deal.

In Nuseirat, in central Gaza, Omer Wenkert, Omer Shem Tov, and Eliya Cohen were made to pose alongside Hamas fighters on the stage. A beaming Shem Tov kissed two militants on the head and blew kisses to the crowd. Hamas has come under heavy criticism for the displays, with Israel, the UN and the Red Cross saying they are cruel and do not respect the dignity of the hostages.

Watching the release, Cohen’s family and friends in Israel chanted “Eliya, Eliya, Eliya!” and cheered when they saw him for the first time. Shem Tov’s grandmother exclaimed in joy as he saw him, crying: “Omer, my joy, my life.”

The Israeli military said the final hostage, Hisham al-Sayed, 37, was released later on Saturday. The Bedouin Israeli crossed on his own into Gaza in 2015 and had been held ever since. His family told Israeli media that Sayed had previously been diagnosed with schizophrenia.

The new releases, to be followed by the freeing of hundreds of Palestinians imprisoned by Israel, went ahead after tensions mounted over the latest dispute, which was triggered this week when Hamas initially handed over the wrong body in place of that of Shiri Bibas, an Israeli mother of two young boys abducted by the militants.

The remains that Hamas transferred with her sons’ bodies on Thursday were later determined to be those of an unidentified Palestinian woman. In response, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, vowed revenge for “a cruel and malicious violation”, while Hamas suggested it had been a mistake.

On Friday night, the Palestinian Mujahideen Brigades, the small militant group believed to have been holding Bibas and her sons, handed over a second body. The family of Bibas said Israeli forensic authorities had confirmed the remains were hers.

“For 16 months we sought certainty, and now that it’s here, it brings no comfort, though we hope it marks the beginning of closure,” the family said.

The ceasefire deal has paused the war but is nearing the end of its first phase. Negotiations over a second phase, in which Hamas would release dozens more hostages in exchange for a lasting ceasefire and an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, are likely to be even more difficult.

Preparations for a face-to-face meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are under way, Russia’s deputy foreign minister has said.

The event would mark a dramatic shift away from western isolation of Moscow, which has been in place since Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine.

Speaking to Russian state media, Sergei Ryabkov said a possible Putin-Trump summit could involve broad talks on global issues, not just Ukraine.

“The question is about starting to move towards normalising relations between our countries, finding ways to resolve the most acute and potentially very, very dangerous situations, of which there are many, Ukraine among them,” he said.

But he said efforts to organise such a meeting were at an early stage, and that making it happen would require “the most intensive preparatory work”.

Ryabkov added that US and Russian envoys could meet “within the next two weeks” to pave the way for further talks between senior officials.

Russian and US representatives agreed on Tuesday to start working toward ending the war in Ukraine and improving their diplomatic and economic ties, according to the two countries’ top diplomats, at a high-level meeting in Saudi Arabia that marked an extraordinary about-face in US foreign policy under Trump.

After the meeting, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, told the Associated Press that the two sides agreed broadly to pursue three goals: to restore staffing at their respective embassies in Washington and Moscow; to create a high-level team to support Ukraine peace talks; and to explore closer relations and economic cooperation.

He stressed, however, that the talks, which were attended by his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, and other senior Russian and US officials, marked the beginning of a conversation, and more work needed to be done. Lavrov, for his part, said the meeting was “very useful”.

No Ukrainian officials were present at the meeting. The country is slowly but steadily losing ground against more numerous Russian troops, nearly three years after Moscow launched an all-out invasion of its smaller neighbour.

The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said his country would not accept any outcome of the talks, since Kyiv didn’t take part, and he postponed his own trip to Saudi Arabia, which had been scheduled for last Wednesday. European allies have also expressed concerns that they are being sidelined.

Donald Trump’s second presidential administration shut down a national database that tracked misconduct by federal police, a resource that policing reform advocates hailed as essential to prevent officers with misconduct records from being able to move undetected between agencies.

The National Law Enforcement Accountability Database (NLEAD), which stored police records documenting misconduct, is now unavailable, the Washington Post first reported.

The US justice department also confirmed the database’s elimination in a statement issued online.

“User agencies can no longer query or add data to the NLEAD,” the statement read. “The US Department of Justice is decommissioning the NLEAD in accordance with federal standards.”

A weblink that hosted the database is no longer active.

The police misconduct database, the first of its kind, was not publicly available. Law enforcement agencies could use the NLEAD to check if an officer applying for a law enforcement position had committed misconduct, such as excessive force.

Several experts celebrated the NLEAD when Joe Biden first created it by an executive order issued in 2023, the third year of his presidency.

“Law enforcement agencies will no longer be able to turn a blind eye to the records of misconduct in officer hiring and offending officers will not be able to distance themselves from their misdeeds,” the Legal Defense Fund president and director-counsel, Janai Nelson, said of the database at the time.

But Trump has since rescinded Biden’s executive order as part of an ongoing effort to slash federal agencies down. Trump himself initially proposed the database after the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, months before Biden defeated him in the presidential election that November.

In an emailed statement to the Washington Post, the White House confirmed the database’s deletion.

“President Trump believes in an appropriate balance of accountability without compromising law enforcement’s ability to do its job of fighting crime and keeping communities safe,” read the statement. “But the Biden executive order creating this database was full of woke, anti-police concepts that make communities less safe like a call for ‘equitable’ policing and addressing ‘systemic racism in our criminal justice system.’ President Trump rescinded the order creating this database on Day 1 because he is committed to giving our brave men and women of law enforcement the tools they need to stop crime.”

News of the NLEAD’s erasure comes as police misconduct is far from rooted out in American law enforcement. For instance, in Hanceville, Alabama, an entire department was recently put on leave amid a grand jury investigation that found a “rampant culture of corruption”.

The 18-person grand jury called for the Hanceville police department, which only has eight officers, to be abolished.

A probe into that police department came amid the death of 49-year-old Christopher Michael Willingham, a Hanceville dispatcher. Willingham was discovered dead at work from a toxic combination of drugs.

The department also “failed to account for, preserve and maintain evidence and in doing so has failed crime victims and the public at large”, the grand jury ruled.

Donald Trump abruptly fired the air force general CQ Brown Jr as chair of the joint chiefs of staff on Friday, sidelining a history-making Black fighter pilot and respected officer as part of a campaign to purge the military of leaders who support diversity and equity in the ranks.

The ouster of the second Black general to serve as chair of the joint chiefs comes three months after Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, outlined a plan for ridding the US military of diversity, equity and inclusion efforts during a podcast interview.

“First of all, you’ve got to fire the chairman of the joint chiefs,” Hegseth said during a November interview on the Shawn Ryan Show. “Any general that was involved, general, admiral, or whatever, that was involved in any of that DEI woke shit has got to go.”

Although Hegseth had been meeting regularly with Brown since the former Fox News host took over the top Pentagon job last month, he had openly questioned whether Brown had been named chair because he was Black. “Was it because of his skin color? Or his skill? We’ll never know, but always doubt – which on its face seems unfair to CQ. But since he has made the race card one of his biggest calling cards, it doesn’t really much matter,” Hegseth wrote in one of his books.

Brown had been praised, including by Time, for breaking racial barriers in the military and for his “warfighter” credentials. When he was sworn in as the air force chief of staff in 2020, during the first Trump administration, Brown acknowledged previous US military service members who had been denied advancement because of their race, Time reported. “It is due to their trials and tribulations in breaking barriers that I can address you today as the air force chief of staff,” Brown said.

In 2020, Trump himself had celebrated Brown’s confirmation on social media “as the USA’s first-ever African American military service chief” and noted that he had appointed him to that role. Brown’s experience as the former commander of Pacific air forces also meant he was “highly qualified to deter China and reassure allies in the Indo-Pacific”, Time noted that year.

“Under President Trump, we are putting in place new leadership that will focus our military on its core mission of deterring, fighting and winning wars,” Hegseth said in a statement after Brown’s firing, calling Brown a “thoughtful adviser”.

In a post on his social media platform Friday evening, Trump announced he would replace Brown with retired Lt Gen Dan “Razin” Caine, a retired military leader Trump said had been “passed over for promotion by Sleepy Joe Biden”.

Trump has repeatedly said that Caine impressed him during his first administration by assuring him that the Islamic State could be defeated very rapidly.

“Many so-called military ‘geniuses’ said it would take years to defeat Isis. General Caine, on the other hand, said it could be done quickly, and he delivered,” Trump posted on Truth Social on Friday.

At CPAC in 2019, Trump previously recounted a conversation in which he recalled asking Caine how fast the Islamic State could be defeated, and claimed that Caine had told him: “Sir, we can have it totally finished in one week,” a story that fact-checkers said at the time “didn’t add up”.

Caine, who is white, previously served as the associate director for military affairs at the Central Intelligence Agency, and had played a direct role in the air defense of Washington DC during the 11 September attacks. Caine recently became a venture partner at Shield Capital, a venture capital firm, which touted his experience as an entrepreneur who “co-founded and successfully exited multiple aerospace, defense, and healthcare companies”.

Trump’s announcements set off a period of upheaval at the Pentagon, which is already bracing for firings of civilian staff, a dramatic overhaul of its budget and a shift in US military deployments under Trump’s new America First foreign policy.

Trump also wrote that he would soon swap out five other high-level positions in an unprecedented shake-up of the leadership of the US military.

In a statement shortly after Trump’s Truth Social post, Hegseth clarified which five positions Trump appeared to be looking to fill, saying that he was “requesting nominations for the positions of Chief of Naval Operations and Air Force Vice Chief of Staff”, firing Adm Lisa Franchetti and Gen James Slife, who currently hold those positions.

“We are also requesting nominations for the Judge Advocates General for the Army, Navy and Air Force,” Hegseth added.

Caine’s military service includes combat roles in Iraq, special operations postings and positions inside some of the Pentagon’s most classified special access programs. However, it does not include key assignments that were identified in law as prerequisites for the job, with an exemption for the president to waive them if necessary in times of national interest.

The 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act states that to be qualified, a chair must have served previously as either the vice-chair, as a combatant commander or a service chief – but that requirement could be waived if the “president determines such action is necessary in the national interest”.

Associated Press and Reuters contributed reporting

Donald Trump’s shocking and mendacious attack this week on the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, as a “dictator” while cozying up to the Russian president and indicating that traditional US security support for Europe is waning may have alarmed US allies abroad but has prompted a more starkly divided response among Americans at home.

Reflecting the country’s deeply partisan attitude to the new president and his “America first” foreign policy doctrine, polling suggests that Republicans are much more likely to oppose additional help for war-torn Ukraine. A Pew Research Center survey earlier this month found that 47% of Republicans but just 14% of Democrats thought the US was providing too much support to Ukraine – views that have changed dramatically since the war began three years ago, when just 7% of all American adults (9% of Republicans and 5% of Democrats) said the US was providing too much support to Ukraine.

Many voters on the left say Trump’s comments make them fearful that the president’s stance toward Ukraine could further embolden the Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, and jeopardize national security.

“It is an outrageous denial of the truth and shows his allegiance to Russia and to Putin especially,” said Carla Bayles, a voter from Washington state who supported Kamala Harris in last year’s presidential election. “We are alienating our allies and getting us closer to a world war.”

Other Harris voters feel the same, though many say they aren’t surprised given Trump during the campaign expressed minimal support for Ukraine, dubiously claiming that the war would not have begun if he had been president in 2022. But Trump attacking a US ally and implicitly blaming Ukraine for Russia’s invasion, suggesting that Kyiv could have “made a deal” to avert war, have them watching in horror.

“I’m disgusted by Trump’s foreign policy,” said Dawna Williams-Landis, a Harris voter from North Carolina. “He has discarded 200 years of intentional diplomacy that would have built peace by negotiation and freedom.”

Some Americans went so far as to compare Trump to historical world leaders who shrank in the face of fascism, such as Neville Chamberlain, the former UK prime minister who adopted an ultimately disastrous approach of appeasement toward Adolf Hitler.

“I can’t figure out whether Trump is Neville Chamberlain at Munich, or Vidkun Quisling in Norway,” said David Cohen, a Harris voter from Connecticut. “Either way, his approach is bad for Europe, the US and democracies.”

Among Republicans, Trump himself maintains nearly unanimous support with a 93% approval rating, but his denunciation of Zelenskyy could still leave him vulnerable to criticism, even among his most loyal supporters. The Gallup poll showed that 80% of Republicans approve of Trump’s approach to the situation in Ukraine, marking one of his weakest policy areas with fellow members of his party.

Judy Kim, a registered Republican voter in California who nevertheless supported Harris in the election, accused Trump of attempting to create a dictatorship and aligning himself with authoritarian leaders like Putin.

“Isolationism has never worked,” Kim said. “The American people support Nato and Ukraine. We should encourage ties with our democratic allies in Europe and the world, not with dictators like Putin.”

Another Trump voter from California who chose to remain anonymous said she did not support the president’s embrace of Putin and feared he would drive the US to the brink of calamity.

“It has put the US and the world in a very dangerous situation,” the voter said. “I did not vote for his stance towards Europe.”

But some of Trump’s supporters celebrated his approach to Ukraine and foreign policy more broadly, insisting US allies had previously relied too much on the country’s financial assistance.

Peter Jorgenson, a Trump voter from Pennsylvania, described the president’s handling of foreign policy as a “win-win” for the US, adding, “I think it is a clear message that the handouts, finance-wise, are over, and everyone should be alert to their own security.”

It remains unclear whether Trump’s attacks on Ukraine will have a negative effect on his standing with the US electorate. A Gallup poll conducted earlier this month, before Trump unleashed his attack against Zelenskyy, found that Trump’s approval rating stood at 45%, virtually unchanged from last month.

Zelenskyy himself remains broadly popular with Americans, with 47% expressing a positive opinion and 28% a negative one, according to a YouGov/Economist poll conducted this week – though again, Democrats skewed much more favorable than Republicans, who were evenly split.

In at least one case Trump’s approach to Putin has already cost him a vote: a man from Florida who spoke on condition of anonymity and said he supported Trump in 2016 and 2020 – but not 2024, precisely because he feared the president was alienating allies at a time when the US needs them most.

“Trump has some sort of infatuation with Putin,” the voter said. “He doesn’t seem to understand that Putin will lie, cheat and do anything to control Russia and win internationally at any cost. Putin wants to rule all of Europe and wouldn’t stop there.”

When two gendarmes knocked on her door in 2019, Marie had no idea that she was about to find herself at the dark heart of one of the world’s biggest child abuse cases.

The French mother of three, now 38, was shocked when the officers told her she had been the victim of Joël Le Scouarnec, a surgeon and an alleged serial paedophile accused of raping and sexually abusing hundreds of children.

She recalled asking them: “Was I touched?”

“No, madame. Raped,” they replied.

“I couldn’t think they were talking about me. It’s like cancer, you think it only happens to other people,” she said. “And how could I have forgotten that?”

Faced with the blank in Marie’s memory, the police showed her handwritten notes in Le Scouarnec’s “black books” from 1996, when she was 10 years old and he removed her appendix.

“There was my family name, my first name, age, the address of my parents, everything he did and how he felt. It was disgusting. The word ‘raped’ was hard enough, but here were these obscene phrases of what happened.”

Le Scouarnec, now 74, will appear in court on Monday accused of the rape or sexual abuse of 299 patients – 158 male and 141 female and the majority under the age of 15 – while they were under anaesthetic or recovering from operations between 1989 and 2014. The average age of his alleged victims was 11.

The surgeon, who entitled one document “my paedophile letters”, denies penetration with his penis. Under French law, rape is an act of sexual penetration by any body part or object.

During the four-month trial, local health and hospital authorities will also face difficult questions over why the surgeon, employed in a dozen public and private medical establishments across Brittany and western France, was allowed to continue practising for almost a decade after a conviction for accessing online child abuse images.

“There was an omertà. People knew but said nothing. If there hadn’t been this silence, then he’d have been banned from seeing children in 2004 and there would have been far fewer victims,” Mauricette Vinet, whose grandson Mathis was one of Le Scouarnec’s patients, told the Observer.

Mathis was 10 when he was admitted to hospital with appendicitis in June 2007. In 2019 he also received a visit from the police who told him what they had found in Le Scouarnec’s notebooks. Two years later, aged 22, he died of an overdose.

Mauricette and her husband, Roland Vinet, believe the alleged abuse was the deep-rooted cause of their grandson’s chaotic life and drug addiction. “When the police told him what they knew, it was hell for him. The sky fell on his head,” she said. “We tried to support him, but he refused to talk about it. It killed him.”

The trial comes as France is still reeling from the Mazan hearing last autumn that saw 51 men convicted of raping or sexually assaulting Gisèle Pelicot, including her husband, Dominique, who had drugged her and invited strangers to abuse her.

Francesca Satta, the lawyer representing Marie, the Vinet family and other alleged victims, has described Le Scouarnec as “extremely perverse” and a “monster” who used his workplace as a “hunting ground”. Satta believes there could be as many as 400 victims. At least 12 cases were dropped because the allegations were out of time for prosecution.

Satta said the investigation had opened a “Pandora’s box” for those treated by Le Scouarnec, most of whom are today in their 30s and 40s and only now learning about the alleged abuse. It was not they who went to the police, but the police who came to them. “It has caused real distress. Many of the victims were five to 10 years old at the time, many were anaesthetised and incapable of knowing what happened. Most had absolutely no idea. In any case, they were children who wouldn’t have recognised the difference between a medical act and sexual abuse. And he was a doctor. They and their parents trusted him,” Satta said.

The children may not recall what happened to them, but Le Scouarnec’s meticulously handwritten notes will form the basis of the prosecution’s case. Stéphane Kellenberger, the Lorient public prosecutor, said: “At the time, the victims were asleep and sedated. They were not in a position to perceive the facts or to report them. I also note that Mr Le Scouarnec emphasised the stealth of his actions and the strategies he used to conceal them.”

Amélie Lévêque, 43, only discovered she featured in Le Scouarnec’s notebooks after reading an article in her local newspaper about the surgeon in 2019 and contacting her GP, who checked her medical records and discovered he had removed her appendix in 1991. During a consultation with a psychotherapist, she said the suppressed memories resurfaced. “In a few seconds I was back to being nine years old again in the recovery room at the clinic. Everything came back: the feelings, the smells, the cold, the heat, the rape. All of it,” Lévêque told La Montagne newspaper.

Le Scouarnec, born in Paris, qualified as a surgeon at the medical faculty at Nantes in 1983, married his wife Marie-France, a health worker, and moved to Loches, southeast of the city of Tours. In 1994, he was hired by the private Sacré-Coeur clinic at Vannes in Brittany. For 10 years the surgeon, specialising in digestive surgery, worked at a dozen hospital across the west of France. In 2004 he moved to the public hospital at Lorient and then Quimperlé.

That year FBI agents investigating an international network circulating child sexual abuse images alerted French intelligence services that Le Scouarnec’s bank card had been used to access a dark web Russian child sexual abuse site. He was arrested, convicted for possession of child sexual abuse images in 2005 and given a four-month suspended sentence. His employers were alerted, but facing a shortage of surgeons and recruitment difficulties, did not suspend him.

In 2006 a concerned colleague reported Le Scouarnec to the L’Ordre des Médecins, the professional body for doctors, which requested his criminal record. The ministry of health was informed, but no action was taken. In 2008, Le Scouarnec was hired by the Jonzac hospital in the Charente-Maritime where he informed the director of his previous conviction. Again, no action was taken and he continued to practise.

Frédéric Benoist, lawyer for the child protection association La Voix de l’Enfant (Child’s Voice), a civil party in the case, told the Observer there had been a “chain of structural failures” in the country’s justice and health systems that had allowed Le Scouarnec to continue.

When the surgeon was convicted in 2005 for accessing child abuse images the court failed to order him to undergo psychological treatment and the health authorities failed to understand the seriousness of his crime. “If these institutions had acted properly, they could have stopped Le Scouarnec long before. But each professional at the heart of these institutions, be they legal or medical, did nothing and because of their inaction he was able to continue for 30 years,” Benoist said.

The extent of France’s latest sexual scandal has raised the question of why those aware of Le Scouarnec’s paedophile conviction and alleged abuse – including members of his own family and colleagues – either failed to speak out or were ignored when they voiced concerns.

The scale of Le Scouarnec’s alleged abuse was uncovered in April 2017 when his neighbour’s six-year-old daughter told her parents “the man with a crown of white hair” had exposed himself and sexually touched her through a broken garden fence.

They went to police who, a week later, searched his home and found hard disks containing more than 300,000 photos and videos featuring child sexual abuse under a mattress as well as notebooks recording details of the alleged abuse of child patients. Officers also discovered a collection of dolls, some life-sized, under the floorboards.

In one note, Le Scouarnec is alleged to have written: “I am a paedophile and I always will be.”

In December 2020 Le Scouarnec was sentenced to 15 years for the sexual abuse of four girls: his six-year-old neighbour, a four-year-old patient, and two of his own nieces who were just four years old when the abuse started.

At the time of this conviction, police were already investigating the further 299 counts of alleged rape and sexual abuse on young patients to be heard during the trial opening this week .

Le Scouarnec’s lawyer, Thibaut Kurzawa, told French journalists: “He is waiting to be judged, to express himself, to say what he has to say to each of his victims. From the beginning he’s been ready to confront reality, to accept his responsibility.”

In his book Piégés (Trapped), the journalist Hugo Lemonier trawled Le Scouarnec’s notebooks, linking entries to victims’ statements to police. Lemonier also spoke to the surgeon’s colleagues and victims.

In 70% of cases, the surgeon acted in the morning, during a visit to the rooms; some acts were carried out under the pretext of medical examinations; others, a minority, in the operating theatre when patients were unconscious. Most had no memory of the abuse, Lemonier found.

“They were often alone at the time of the visit, a few instants were enough. There were no obstacles, nobody asked him any questions,” Lemonier writes, adding that Le Scouarnec’s profession made him “untouchable”. “Nobody was able to stop him because nobody imagined he was a predator.”

When 26-year-old Ben* boarded a flight in Uzbekistan in June, he was looking forward to more than just a summer job picking fruit and vegetables on a British farm.

“I wanted to see new places, cities I’ve never seen before,” he said. “I wanted to make friends, exchange ideas and make new memories.”

But Ben found the owners of the Scottish farm he worked on demanding and unresponsive to worker concerns. When the time came for him to receive his pay, Ben says he was not paid for all the work he carried out.

“I was surprised because the employer just pays you what they want, even if that is [different from] your contract,” he said. “They come up with various excuses.”

Ben is one of dozens of migrant workers who say they have not been paid after their employer linked their wages to the amount of crops they picked rather than the hours they worked. About 45,000 workers came from overseas to work temporarily in UK agriculture last year on the seasonal worker visa, a scheme introduced in 2019 to address Brexit-related labour shortages.

The Worker Support Centre (WSC), a Scotland-based NGO which supports seasonal workers across the UK, said that of the 99 workers who contacted them with pay issues last year, more than half reported non-payment due to the measurement of product picked, resulting in large chunks of time – such as that spent moving between workstations or in team meetings – being unaccounted for and unpaid.

The WSC, along with the TUC, Anti-Slavery International and others, has now written to the Low Pay Commission asking for them to call for an HMRC investigation into the issue. Philippa Stroud, chair of the Low Pay Commission, said she was concerned by the WSC’s evidence.

“You work in the fields during harvest season, and it’s no secret that not all fields are located around the farm,” Ben told the Observer. “Some fields [take] hours to reach – but the employer doesn’t pay for that time.”

While all seasonal workers must be paid at least the national living wage in England, or the agricultural minimum wage in Scotland, the WSC said the use of targets – and the dense and complicated payslips that are consequently produced – made it difficult for workers to decipher hourly pay. Many believed when they accepted the job that they would be paid an hourly rate and were only informed of picking targets when they arrived, they said. Some who kept detailed logs of hours worked found that the amount on their payslips did not correspond to their time working.

The WSC analysed 38 payslips from 18 workers on 11 farms across Scotland and England. Only two included payments for in-work travel, and only one for breaks. The majority – 34 – did not include any payment for team meetings or time spent receiving instructions and equipment at the start of each day.

Payslips seen by the Observer show long and complex lists of products itemised by type and weight, with payment apparently calculated based on the quantity picked of each.

“From our analysis, it does not look like these workers were paid for the whole time they spent at work,” Valeria Ragni, WSC operations manager, said.

Ragni said that in some cases even the employers told the WSC they were struggling to understand the payslips. “Some payslips are so confusing they make it impossible for workers to enforce their rights. We need payslips to clearly document the hours and times worked, and to indicate employers’ methods for calculating them, so workers can accurately assess whether they’re being paid for the work they have done.”

The scale of the issue is likely to be far greater, Ragni said, because seasonal workers are often afraid to raise concerns due to their insecure status.

TUC general secretary Paul Nowak said: “Everyone should be paid fairly for the job they do. It’s time to crack down on bad bosses exploiting and underpaying seasonal migrant workers below the legal national minimum-wage level.”

Stroud said she wanted to understand more about seasonal workers’ experiences. “A variety of evidence suggests migrant workers are more vulnerable to underpayment and less likely to report when it happens,” she said.

A government spokesperson said it would work closely with scheme operators “who have responsibility for ensuring the welfare of migrant workers”. They added: “We will always take decisive action where we believe abusive practices are taking place.”

*Name has been changed

When 26-year-old Ben* boarded a flight in Uzbekistan in June, he was looking forward to more than just a summer job picking fruit and vegetables on a British farm.

“I wanted to see new places, cities I’ve never seen before,” he said. “I wanted to make friends, exchange ideas and make new memories.”

But Ben found the owners of the Scottish farm he worked on demanding and unresponsive to worker concerns. When the time came for him to receive his pay, Ben says he was not paid for all the work he carried out.

“I was surprised because the employer just pays you what they want, even if that is [different from] your contract,” he said. “They come up with various excuses.”

Ben is one of dozens of migrant workers who say they have not been paid after their employer linked their wages to the amount of crops they picked rather than the hours they worked. About 45,000 workers came from overseas to work temporarily in UK agriculture last year on the seasonal worker visa, a scheme introduced in 2019 to address Brexit-related labour shortages.

The Worker Support Centre (WSC), a Scotland-based NGO which supports seasonal workers across the UK, said that of the 99 workers who contacted them with pay issues last year, more than half reported non-payment due to the measurement of product picked, resulting in large chunks of time – such as that spent moving between workstations or in team meetings – being unaccounted for and unpaid.

The WSC, along with the TUC, Anti-Slavery International and others, has now written to the Low Pay Commission asking for them to call for an HMRC investigation into the issue. Philippa Stroud, chair of the Low Pay Commission, said she was concerned by the WSC’s evidence.

“You work in the fields during harvest season, and it’s no secret that not all fields are located around the farm,” Ben told the Observer. “Some fields [take] hours to reach – but the employer doesn’t pay for that time.”

While all seasonal workers must be paid at least the national living wage in England, or the agricultural minimum wage in Scotland, the WSC said the use of targets – and the dense and complicated payslips that are consequently produced – made it difficult for workers to decipher hourly pay. Many believed when they accepted the job that they would be paid an hourly rate and were only informed of picking targets when they arrived, they said. Some who kept detailed logs of hours worked found that the amount on their payslips did not correspond to their time working.

The WSC analysed 38 payslips from 18 workers on 11 farms across Scotland and England. Only two included payments for in-work travel, and only one for breaks. The majority – 34 – did not include any payment for team meetings or time spent receiving instructions and equipment at the start of each day.

Payslips seen by the Observer show long and complex lists of products itemised by type and weight, with payment apparently calculated based on the quantity picked of each.

“From our analysis, it does not look like these workers were paid for the whole time they spent at work,” Valeria Ragni, WSC operations manager, said.

Ragni said that in some cases even the employers told the WSC they were struggling to understand the payslips. “Some payslips are so confusing they make it impossible for workers to enforce their rights. We need payslips to clearly document the hours and times worked, and to indicate employers’ methods for calculating them, so workers can accurately assess whether they’re being paid for the work they have done.”

The scale of the issue is likely to be far greater, Ragni said, because seasonal workers are often afraid to raise concerns due to their insecure status.

TUC general secretary Paul Nowak said: “Everyone should be paid fairly for the job they do. It’s time to crack down on bad bosses exploiting and underpaying seasonal migrant workers below the legal national minimum-wage level.”

Stroud said she wanted to understand more about seasonal workers’ experiences. “A variety of evidence suggests migrant workers are more vulnerable to underpayment and less likely to report when it happens,” she said.

A government spokesperson said it would work closely with scheme operators “who have responsibility for ensuring the welfare of migrant workers”. They added: “We will always take decisive action where we believe abusive practices are taking place.”

*Name has been changed

Authorities in a city in the Brazilian Amazon have declared a state of emergency after huge sinkholes opened up, threatening hundreds of homes.

Several buildings in Buriticupu, in Maranhão state, have already been destroyed, and about 1,200 people of a population of 55,000 risk losing their homes into a widening abyss.

“In the space of the last few months, the dimensions have expanded exponentially, approaching substantially closer to the residences,” an emergency decree issued by the city government earlier this month said about the sinkholes.

The recent sinkholes are an escalation of a problem that residents of Buriticupu have been watching unfold for the last 30 years, as rains slowly erode soils made vulnerable by their sandy nature, plus a combination of poorly planned building work and deforestation.

The large soil erosions are known in Brazil as “voçoroca”, a word of Indigenous origins that means “to tear the earth” and is the equivalent of sinkholes.

The problem becomes worse in periods of heavy rain such as the current one, says Marcelino Farias, a geographer and professor at the Federal University of Maranhao.

Antonia dos Anjos, who has lived in Buriticupu for 22 years, fears more sinkholes will soon appear. “There’s this danger right in front of us, and nobody knows where this hole has been opening up underneath,” the 65-year-old said.

Buriticupu secretary of public works, and an engineer, Lucas Conceiçao said the municipality clearly does not have the capacity to find solutions for the complex sinkhole situation.

“These problems range from the erosion processes to the removal of people who are in the risk area,” he said.

China’s navy has reportedly conducted a second live-fire exercise in international waters, a day after a similar drill forced multiple airlines to change flight paths between Australia and New Zealand.

New Zealand navy personnel advised live rounds were fired from a Chinese warship in international waters near the island nation on Saturday.

“Reporting from the New Zealand Defence Force that the Chinese naval Task Group has advised of a second window for live firing activity, on Saturday afternoon,” a spokesperson for the defence minister, Judith Collins, said in a statement seen by Reuters.

• Sign up for Guardian Australia’s breaking news email

China’s naval taskforce had given radio notice of its intent to conduct firing, and the NZ prime minister, Christopher Luxon, said the group had acted under international law.

Anthony Albanese earlier bristled at suggestions he should get Beijing on the phone after China’s military carried out a live-fire exercise off the Australian coast on Friday.

The prime minister said senior Defence officials continued to monitor three Chinese warships after they were spotted moving south in international waters about 280km off Sydney on Thursday.

The foreign minister, Penny Wong, met with her Chinese counterpart and demanded to know why the vessels only offered limited notice before the firing was carried out.

In a post on X late on Friday night Australian eastern time, Wong said she met with China’s foreign affairs minister, Wang Yi, on the sidelines of the G20 foreign ministers’ meeting in South Africa that day.

“Calm and consistent dialogue with China enables us to progress our interests and advocate on issues that matter to Australians,” Wong said.

China’s actions are believed to have complied with international law and the Australian Defence Force has advised there was no imminent threat to its assets or those of NZ.

Analysts believed the sailing was an attempt by Beijing to project power and send a message to Canberra about China’s capability.

Albanese was asked on Saturday if he would call president Xi Jinping in light of the incident but instead defended China’s right to carry out the exercise as it had not breached international law.

“It’s important to not suggest that wasn’t the case,” he said.

“What we have done is to make appropriate representation through diplomatic channels, including foreign minister to foreign minister.

“They could have given more notice but Australia has a presence from time to time in the South China Sea [and] this activity took place outside of our exclusive economic zone. Notification did occur.”

Australia has coordinated its response with NZ but has not spoken with Anzus ally the United States since the incident.

The opposition defence spokesperson, Andrew Hastie, suggested China’s actions amounted to “gunboat diplomacy”.

“This is Chinese warships imposing themselves on our commercial airspace and that’s why I come back to that question for the PM – where’s his limit?” he told ABC Radio.

“Why is he being weak about this? Why isn’t he picking up the phone and making representations on behalf of the Australian people and our national interests?”

The defence minister, Richard Marles, earlier said Australia had not received satisfactory answers when it queried the incident.

“They notified a live firing exercise but with very short notice, which meant that was very disconcerting for planes that were in the air,” he told Channel Seven.

Australian officials said it was customary to give 24 to 48 hours notice of live fire activity.

Qantas, Emirates and Air New Zealand modified flight paths between Australia and NZ after receiving reports of live firing in international waters.

A Defence spokesperson said China advised via a radio broadcast on a civilian channel that it would carry out its drill.

“[China] did not inform Defence of its intent to conduct a live fire activity and has not provided any further information,” a statement read.

The live-fire exercise follows a run-in with the Chinese military last week when a fighter jet fired flares in front of an RAAF surveillance aircraft during a patrol over the South China Sea.

The government lodged a complaint with Beijing over the near-miss.

With Stephanie Convery and Reuters

A biological mechanism that makes plant roots more attractive to soil microbes has been discovered by scientists in the UK. The breakthrough – by researchers at the John Innes Centre in Norwich, Norfolk – opens the door to the creation of crops requiring reduced amounts of nitrate and phosphate fertilisers, they say.

“We can now think of developing a new type of environmentally friendly farming with crops that require less artificial fertiliser,” said Dr Myriam Charpentier, whose group carried out the research.

Excess use of fertilisers has become a major ecological problem in recent years and has been linked to soil degradation, while run-offs from fields are causing major pollution in rivers where algae blooms spread across the water, and kill fish and other aquatic life.

However, the research has uncovered a route that could lead to the development of crops that could reduce this problem by helping them scavenge nutrients from the soil more effectively – by gaining a little help from soil microbes. The basis of this approach is a process known as endosymbiosis, in which one organism exists within another in a mutually beneficial relationship.

This activity helps some plants to scavenge nutrients from nutrient-poor soil using the assistance of microbes in natural settings. However, in agricultural settings, where fertilisers are used to boost yields, these disrupt the natural interaction between crops and microbes.

The team led by Charpentier has announced that it has discovered a mutation in the legume Medicago truncatula which enhances partnerships with bacteria and fungi that supply the roots with nitrogen and phosphorus. This process improves the plant’s take-up of nutrients.

Crucially, the team – whose research was recently published in Nature – showed the same gene mutation in wheat enhances similar partnerships in field conditions. This opens the door to the creation of wheat varieties that can exploit soil microbes to provide nutrients and so reduce the need to use large amounts of artificial inorganic fertilisers.

“This discovery is created in a wheat variety that is non-GM,” Charpentier added. This means that plant breeders can use traditional breeding methods to develop varieties that possess the trait.

The discovery is causing excitement because it opens the door to the use of endosymbiotic agents as natural alternatives to inorganic fertilisers for major crops. The team’s finding offered “great potential for advancing sustainable agriculture”, Charpentier told the Observer.

A woman used online dating apps to lure at least four older men to meet her in person, drugged them with sedatives and stole hundreds of thousands of dollars in a “sinister” romance scheme, FBI officials in Las Vegas said on Friday.

Three of the men died, authorities said, and she has been charged in one of their deaths.

Aurora Phelps, 43, who is in custody in Mexico, faces 21 counts including wire fraud, identity theft and one count of kidnapping resulting in death, Sue Fahami, the acting US attorney for the district of Nevada, said at a news conference.

“This is a romance scam on steroids,” said Spencer Evans, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Las Vegas division. One of the four victims – who were all targeted in 2021 and 2022 – awoke from a coma after Phelps gave him prescription sedatives over the course of a week, Evans added.

In one instance, Phelps is alleged to have kidnapped a victim by heavily sedating him and taking him across the US-Mexico border in a wheelchair – and then to a Mexico City hotel room, where he was later found dead.

After incapacitating her victims, Evans said, Phelps stole their cars, withdrew money from their bank accounts, used their credit cards to purchase luxury items and gold, and even tried to access social security and retirement accounts.

According to the indictment, Phelps met one man in July 2021, went on lunch dates with him, ordered lunch to his house that November and slipped him a prescription drug.

While he was “mostly unconscious” for about five days, Phelps gained access to his accounts and stole his iPhone, iPads, driver’s license and bank cards, according to the indictment. She also allegedly accessed his E-Trade account and sold Apple stock worth about $3.3m, though she was unable to withdraw that money.

Authorities believe Phelps used popular dating apps including Tinder, Hinge and Bumble to find her targets. The men were lonely and looking for companionship and went on multiple dates with Phelps before she stealthily gave them sedatives, according to Evans.

“It’s folks that are out looking for love that ran into something far more sinister,” Evans said.

Phelps, a dual citizen of Mexico and the US, had been on the FBI’s radar for a couple of years, according to Evans. He declined to comment on her criminal history.

Phelps does not have a US-based attorney who could speak on her behalf, a spokesperson for the justice department said. The Associated Press left messages seeking comment with Mexico’s foreign affairs ministry and attorney general’s office.

Several of the victims’ relatives called authorities when they were unable to contact their loved ones, Evans said.

One woman was unable to reach her father the day after he went on a date with Phelps in Guadalajara, Mexico, in May 2022, according to court records. The next day, Mexican police found him dead on the bathroom floor of his home. Phelps then used an account belonging to the victim to buy a gold coin, along with other transactions, the indictment alleges.

The FBI is aware of more alleged victims in the US and Mexico, Evans said – and is making information about the case public, including suspected aliases, in hopes of identifying others who “fell victim to her scams and whose trust in her may have cost them their life”.

The FBI is also working with the justice department and Mexican authorities to secure her extradition.

If convicted on every charge, which include seven counts of wire fraud, three counts of mail fraud, six counts of bank fraud, three counts of identity theft and one count of kidnapping, Phelps faces a maximum sentence of life in prison, Fahami said.

To uncover the location of one long-lost pharaoh’s tomb is a career-defining moment for an archaeologist. But to find a second is the stuff of dreams.

Last week British archaeologist Piers Litherland announced the find of the century – the first discovery of a rock-cut pharaoh’s tomb in Egypt since Tutankhamun’s in 1922.

His team found the pharaoh Thutmose II’s tomb underneath a waterfall in the Theban mountains in Luxor, about 3km west of the Valley of the Kings. It contained almost nothing but debris, and the team believe it was flooded and emptied within six years of the pharaoh’s death in 1479BC.

Now Litherland has told the Observer he believes he has identified the location of a second tomb belonging to Thutmose II. And this one, he suspects, will contain the young pharaoh’s mummified body and grave goods.

Archeologists believe this second tomb has been hiding in plain sight for 3,500 years, secretly buried beneath 23 metres of limestone flakes, rubble, ash and mud plaster and made to look like part of the mountain.

“There are 23 metres of a pile of man-made layers sitting above a point in the landscape where we believe – and we have other confirmatory evidence – there is a monument concealed beneath,” he said. “The best candidate for what is hidden underneath this enormously expensive, in terms of effort, pile is the second tomb of Thutmose II.”

While searching close to the first tomb for clues about where its contents were taken after the flood, Litherland found a posthumous inscription buried in a pit with a cow sacrifice. This inscription indicates the contents may have been moved by the king’s wife and half-sister Hatshepsut – one of Egypt’s greatest pharaohs and one of the few women to rule in her own right – to an as-yet undiscovered second tomb nearby.

Last week the New Kingdom Research Foundation, a British independent academic body, and the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities revealed that a project led by Litherland had found the first tomb in 2022, after more than a decade of work.

For about a year, he and his team of Egyptian archaeologists – “discoveries like this are not made by individuals”, he says – have been investigating ways to get access to the second tomb by excavating the 3,500-year-old human-made layers of rock and plaster that surround it.

At the top of layers of thick limestone plaster, limestone flakes “the size of a dining room table”, tufa (a flaky limestone which forms a cement) and rubble, is a layer of mud plaster with ash on top, Litherland said. “Among that ash, we found the remains of beer jars and chisel ends used by workmen who made tombs. So there’s no doubt these layers are man-made.”

At that point, any tomb underneath the layers would have been well covered. But a further step was taken “and that is what is slowing everything down” on the dig, said Litherland. The ancient Egyptians then “levered away large portions of the cliff and made them come crashing down on top”. These large rocks – some of which are the size of a car – were then “cemented in place using limestone plaster”.

Now Litherland’s team is trying to detach those rocks and the limestone plaster by hand: “We’ve tried to tunnel into it, we’ve tried to shave away the sides, but there are overhanging rocks, so it’s too dangerous,” Litherland said.

He, his foreman, Mohamed Sayed Ahmed, and his archeological director, Mohsen Kamel, took the difficult decision to remove the entire structure – which stands out from the cliff – three weeks ago, and are about halfway there. “We should be able to take the whole thing down in about another month,” Litherland said.

He speculates that both tombs were constructed by the 18th dynasty architect Ineni, who wrote in his biography that he had “excavated the high tomb of His Majesty, no one seeing, no one hearing”, and was facing “a very serious problem” after the first tomb flooded. “If [Ineni] was being regarded as a failure for not delivering what he was supposed to deliver – a secure resting place for a king who, on his death, became a god – he may have been in a bit of a panic, trying to make sure that whatever happened this time, the tomb was not going to be flooded.”

All kings from the 18th dynasty were buried under waterfalls. By covering the tomb with layers of plaster and limestone flakes, Ineni protected it from water while simultaneously sealing and concealing the site from robbers. “Ineni says in his biographies that he did a lot of clever things to hide the locations of tombs, including covering the tombs with layers of mud plaster, which he says has never been done before. This has not been remarked on ever, to my knowledge.”

It is a strategy that appears to have worked. While grave goods from the ransacked tombs of pharaohs from the 18th, 19th and 20th dynasties are commonplace in museums, “there are no burial goods of any sort relating to the burial of Thutmose II in any museum or private collection”, Litherland said.

The body of a 30-year-old, found in 1881 in Deir el-Bahari and previously identified as Thutmose II, is too old to belong to the pharaoh, Litherland said. “He is described in Ineni’s biography as coming to the throne ‘the falcon in the nest’ – so he was a young boy.” Some Egyptologists believe he reigned for just three to four years and died shortly after fathering Thutmose III.

For Litherland, who became fascinated with ancient Egypt as a young boy, the thought of finding Thutmose II’s final resting place is breathtaking. “You dream about such things. But like winning the lottery, you never believe it will happen to you.”