Donald Trump sidestepped a direct question at Tuesday evening’s presidential debate on whether he wanted Ukraine to win in its war against Russia, underlining concerns that a second Trump administration could suspend military support for Kyiv.

Asked directly by ABC’s David Muir on whether or not he wants Ukraine to win the war, he did not answer the question and said simply: “I want the war to stop.” He focused on the war’s human toll by saying that people were being killed “by the millions,” a number that hasn’t been confirmed by any country or international organisation.

He went on to say that if elected he would negotiate a deal even before becoming president and suggested the United States was “playing with World War three.”

Kamala Harris quickly pounced on his remarks, saying that if Trump had been president during the invasion, then “Putin would be sitting in Kyiv with his eyes on the rest of Europe”, and that in such a scenario the Russian president would move on to Poland.

“Why don’t you tell the 800,000 Polish Americans right here in Pennsylvania how quickly you would give up for the sake of favour and what you think is a friendship with what is known to be a dictator who would eat you for lunch.”

Trump’s remarks will renew concerns in Kyiv that he will cut off military and economic aid toward the country if he is reelected at a crucial moment in the war, when Kyiv is desperate for troops, financial support and for military hardware, much of it supplied by the United States and its Nato allies.

Trump advisers had already suggested that they’re working on a peace deal that Ukraine would be compelled to accept before Trump took power next January if he wins in the November elections. He confirmed that on Tuesday evening, calling Russia’s invasion a “war that’s dying to be settled. I will get it settled before I even become president.”

Since the beginning of the invasion, Trump has been skeptical of providing military arms to Ukraine, inspiring his party to block crucial military funding to the country for months earlier this year.

Polling has shown that a majority of voters from both parties support Ukraine in the war, but Trump’s lack of support for Kyiv had influenced many in his party to pull back on their support for Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

Harris argued that Trump’s peace plan was simply a decision to capitulate to Moscow. “I believe the reason that Donald Trump says this war would be over within 24 hours is because he would just give it up,” she said. “And that’s not who we are as Americans.”

The UK has taken new steps to clamp down on Russia’s shadow fleet exporting oil and funding Moscow’s war machine, with the Foreign Office announcing sanctions on 10 ships that it believes to be at heart of the operation.

Russia has a large fleet of often unseaworthy and ageing tankers that transport Russian gas and oil products around the globe. Oil exports are Vladimir Putin’s most critical revenue source for funding the war in Ukraine, accounting for about a quarter of the Russian budget in 2023.

Speaking on his way to Kyiv to meet Ukrainian leaders, the UK foreign secretary, David Lammy, said: “Putin’s war machine is funded by a dark and illicit economic system that this government is committed to destabilising.

“Today’s sanctions further undermine Russia’s ability to trade in oil via its shadow fleet. Alongside our partners, we will continue to send a stark message to Russia that the international community stands with Ukraine and we will not tolerate this illicit fleet.

“Russia has been forced to spend over $8bn amassing this shadow fleet. But with sanctioned tankers loitering and unable to load oil, we are determined to make Putin’s investment an expensive misstep for the Kremlin. Our action will help to counter Russian attempts to undermine and dodge economic sanctions.”

The ships targeted are all described as “high-volume offenders” – vessels operating around the clock to transport as much Russian oil as possible. These ships will now be barred from entering UK ports and will be refused access to the UK ship register.

Just three of the vessels targeted, Nikolay Zuyev, NS Asia and Zaliv Aniva, have collectively carried more than $5bn worth of Russian oil since Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022.

The large and recently developed shadow fleet has become the biggest loophole in western efforts to prevent Russia continuing to fund its war through oil exports.

In an effort to stop the revenue, but also prevent the price of oil skyrocketing, the G7 agreed to block insurance to any ship that sold oil at above a cap of $60 a barrel. The shadow fleet has grown to circumvent the G7 policy, but analysts have said a relatively small number of ships are at the heart of the operation.

The UK claims that previous sanctions against individual shadow ships have left vessels materially disrupted, with the vast majority of them idling outside ports, and unable to carry on their trade in Russian oil.

The latest announcement brings the total number of shadow fleet ships targeted to 25 and follows the UK’s “call to action” in July to bring a halt to the trade.

So far, sanctions have deprived Russia of more than $400bn worth of assets and revenues since February 2022. That is the equivalent of four more years of funding for the invasion. The UK has targeted more than 2,000 individuals and entities under its Russia sanctions regime.

The specified ships will be prohibited from entering a port in the UK, may be given a movement or a port entry direction, can be detained, and will be refused permission to register on the UK ship register.

Antony Blinken and David Lammy’s joint trip to Kyiv, to be followed by Keir Starmer’s trip to Washington DC to see Joe Biden on Friday, has inevitably lifted expectations that Ukraine will shortly be given permission to fire Anglo-French Storm Shadow and US Atacms missiles, which have a range of 190 miles plus, into Russia.

There are no shortage of risks. Allowing Ukraine to fire western-made weapons deep into Russia could have a dramatic political impact on the course of a war mired in a grim, attritional slog that appears to be favouring Moscow, whose forces are bearing down on the strategic town of Pokrovsk.

Blinken and Lammy provided a potential justification for the missile escalation on Tuesday, censuring Iran for supplying a first batch of short-range, high-speed Fath-360 ballistic missiles to Russia, a step up from the slower Shahed drones it has given Moscow until now. Russia was likely to use the missiles “within weeks”, Blinken warned.

The Fath-360 missiles have a range of about 75 miles, according to the US. They could be used to strike Ukrainian cities close to the frontline such as Kharkiv or Zaporizhzhia, Sloviansk and Kramatorsk in the Donbas, and even theoretically Kyiv, and allow Russian to use its own stock of longer-range cruise and ballistic missiles to attack targets elsewhere in Ukraine, as it has done throughout the war.

The missile war in Ukraine may appear unceasing, but it follows its own logic of inventories, with Russia’s goal being to exhaust Ukraine’s air defences. Kyiv has already run out of short-range Buk and S-300 systems, which left its power stations defenceless earlier this year. Ukrainian sources estimate that about two-thirds of its energy generation has been destroyed, and it will not be possible to repair more than a fraction before what is likely to be the country’s hardest winter since Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion.

A similar strategy will be in the Kremlin’s mind when it comes to higher-value air defence systems, notably the US-made Patriots. Biden announced the donation of four Patriot systems at the Nato summit in July, but a limiting factor is the number of interceptor missiles that can be manufactured. This year Lockheed Martin, which makes the most capable PAC-3 MSE interceptors, expects to manufacture 550.

Ukrainian sources are concerned that the number of offensive missiles the Russians can fire could exceed the world’s ability to manufacture interceptors, even if Kyiv has other air defences such as Samp/T and Nasams. One estimate circulating in Kyiv is that Russia can make 1,200 missiles a year, though reliable numbers are impossible to come by. Other figures are lower: an estimate from the Rusi thinktank puts it at 420 Kh-101 cruise missiles plus a handful of high-speed ballistics.

The key point is that as long as the Kremlin believes it can win, or can retain the initiative, in an attritional war, it has no incentive to consider negotiations. Even allowing for the surprise incursion into Russia’s Kursk province, it is Kyiv that is struggling. Experts hope that Ukraine can hold on to Pokrovsk, the gateway to the Donbas, for the rest of this year, but Russia holds a force advantage estimated at four or five to one – and soldier numbers are the one area where the west cannot help.

What infuriates Ukraine is that it cannot hit back at military targets inside Russia with powerful missiles because the west, led by the White House, has not allowed Storm Shadow and Atacms to be used there. However, the signals of the last few days are that the prohibition is not absolute. Bill Burns, the CIA chief, said on Saturday he was sure Biden “will consider other ways” that Ukraine could be helped as the war heads towards its third winter.

The complication is that it is hard to imagine the US, the UK or the other countries involved in the manufacture of Storm Shadow, France and Italy, simply giving Ukraine a free hand in where it might bomb inside Russia. It would not be hard to work out if either weapon had been used, and a miscalculation by Kyiv, perhaps killing a lot of civilians, would have wider consequences. Nor are there large stocks of either weapon, prompting scepticism in the US that they could turn the tide.

An effective use of long-range missiles might come only as part of a wider military plan, if Ukraine has one. At the end of August, Andriy Yermak, the chief of staff to Voldoymyr Zelenskiy, visited Washington, where it was reported that he would present a list of targets that Ukraine believed could be effectively bombed. The complication is that such discussions appear to bring the US and the UK closer to the heart of Ukrainian planning on how it wants to attack Russia.

Ukrainian insiders have also talked about using the threat of long-range missiles against Russia to try to force an end to the war, through a “demonstration strike” that would make clear to the Kremlin that it is possible to threaten the heartlands around Moscow. It is not obvious if Moscow would react so benignly, however, which may be why Burns, starkly, said the west should not be intimidated by Russian threats of nuclear escalation, raising the possibility that Putin may do just that.

Zelenskiy argued at a meeting of western defence ministers in Germany last week that being able to strike into its enemy’s territory would help ensure “Russia is motivated to seek peace”. But the calibration has to be careful. Time may be short for Ukraine, given that a US election looms in less than two months, and on Tuesday, one of the candidates, Donald Trump, would not say if he wanted Ukraine to win.

Missile diplomacy may not have been so significant since the time of the cold war.

Joe Biden has described the Israel Defense Force’s fatal shooting of the Turkish American protester Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi as “totally unacceptable” in his first extensive comments on her death.

In a statement on Wednesday, Biden said that Israel had “acknowledged responsibility” for Eygi’s death, but he stopped short of backing the demands put out by Eygi’s family and other human rights advocates for an independent inquiry into the fatal shooting of the American activist at a protest in the West Bank town of Beita last week.

“I am outraged and deeply saddened by the death of Aysenur Eygi,” Biden said in the statement. “Israel has acknowledged its responsibility for Aysenur’s death, and a preliminary investigation has indicated that it was the result of a tragic error resulting from an unnecessary escalation.”

“The US government has had full access to Israel’s preliminary investigation, and expects continued access as the investigation continues, so that we can have confidence in the result,” he continued. “There must be full accountability. And Israel must do more to ensure that incidents like this never happen again.”

In response, Hamid Ali, Eygi’s partner, said that Biden had not directly contacted the family and renewed calls for an independent inquiry in the case. “The White House has not spoken with us,” he said in the statement. “For four days, we have waited for President Biden to pick up the phone and do the right thing: to call us, offer his condolences and let us know that he is ordering an independent investigation of the killing of Ayşenur.”

The Israel Defense Forces said that the results of an initial inquiry showed that it was “highly likely that [Eygi] was hit indirectly and unintentionally by IDF fire which was not aimed at her, but aimed at the key instigator of the riot”.

In response, the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, had said that he would speak with senior Israeli officials and demand that the Israeli security forces “make some fundamental changes to the way they operate in the West Bank, including changes to their rules of engagement”.

Biden did not offer further specific information on what changes the US would demand from Israeli security forces. Previous deaths of American citizens in the region, including the shooting death of the Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in Gaza in 2022, have also gone unprosecuted.

Kamala Harris also called the shooting that led to Eygi’s death “unacceptable and raises legitimate questions about the conduct of IDF personnel in the West Bank. Israel must do more to ensure that incidents like this never happen again.”

Biden, in brief comments to the press, suggested that Eygi had been killed by a bullet that had ricocheted off the ground as Israeli forces fired at protesters who the IDF claimed had turned violent.

But family members of Eygi, citing media reports and other research, have said they do not believe the shooting was an accident.

“She was fatally shot in the head by a bullet that came from an Israeli sniper positioned 200 meters away,” Ali said in his statement. “This was no accident and her killers must be held accountable.”

When Cindy and Craig Corrie heard about the death of Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, the American-Turkish woman killed at a protest in the occupied West Bank last week, it reopened a 21-year-old wound. “You feel the ripping apart again of your own family when you know that’s happening to another family. There’s a hole there that’s never going to be filled for each of these families,” Craig Corrie said.

In 2003, their daughter Rachel was crushed to death by an Israeli army bulldozer during a protest in Rafah against the demolitions of homes in Gaza. This week, the couple have joined a chorus of human rights advocates calling for an independent investigation into Eygi’s death, saying that they feared her case would go unpunished like their daughter’s.

“It’s very personal,” said Craig, whose daughter – like Eygi – was an idealistic, politically engaged young college graduate from Washington state and a member of the International Solidarity Movement, a pro-Palestinian organisation. “This one, you know, is very close, and there’s so many similarities.”

The couple have lobbied for decades to demand justice in Rachel’s case, in which the Israeli military exonerated itself and the US failed to launch its own investigation. In 2015, the Israeli supreme court ruled against the Corries in a lawsuit that sought to hold Israel liable.

Ticking off the names of activists and journalists who have died in Gaza and the West Bank since the early 2000s, the couple argued that each unpunished killing made the next one more likely.

“If you talk about things changing, I think they’re changing for the worse,” said Craig Corrie. “In our family, our motive for doing the work we’ve done … was to try to keep this from happening to another person and [we see] the failure of that to happen.”

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said on Tuesday that an initial inquiry into Eygi’s death had concluded it was “highly likely” that she was “hit indirectly and unintentionally by IDF fire”, indicating that the Israeli government accepted that its soldiers killed her but would be unlikely to prosecute anyone for her death.

Eygi’s family have pressed Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, for an independent investigation “into the unlawful killing of a US citizen and to ensure full accountability for the guilty parties”.

In response to the IDF’s initial findings, Blinken on Tuesday issued some of his sharpest remarks to date, calling Eygi’s killing “unprovoked and unjustified” and saying that “no one should be shot and killed for attending a protest”.

“In our judgment, Israeli security forces need to make some fundamental changes in the way that they operate in the West Bank, including changes to their rules of engagement,” he said. “It’s not acceptable, it has to change … And we’ll be making that clear to the senior most members of the Israeli government.”

Yet the state department has also indicated that it is not planning to lead an individual inquiry into the death. Biden has not called for an independent inquiry either despite the White House saying it was “deeply disturbed” by the killing. In a statement on Tuesday, the president said: “There must be full accountability. And Israel must do more to ensure that incidents like this never happen again.”

Cindy Corrie said Blinken had been promised changes to the IDF’s rules of engagement as far back as 2011, in an exchange of letters with the former Israeli ambassador to the US Michael Oren.

“If Blinken is saying today that the rules of IDF engagement need to change, yes obviously they do, but when it comes to protesters he was already directly promised changes by Oren/the Netanyahu government back in 2011,” she wrote in an email. “Seems relevant.”

Human rights activists argue that the US government has systematically failed to push the Israeli government to accept culpability in the deaths of activists and journalists, and has impeded or ignored investigations launched by international organisations such as the international criminal court or the United Nations.

“If you’re the US, you know that there’s going to be no accountability from the Israeli side,” said Bill Van Esveld, the acting Israel/Palestine associate director for Human Rights Watch. “So the reason [the US] is not pursuing it in cases where there’s clear, credible evidence from credible sources of unlawful use of force, lethal force … the only explanation for that is political.”

Sarah Leah Whitson, of Democracy for the Arab World Now, a non-profit advocacy group, said: “The penalty for unlawfully and unjustly shooting protesters dead isn’t future changes, right? The appropriate remedy is prosecution for those guilty, for those responsible for doing this.”

Even over high-profile killings, little has been done. Shireen Abu Akleh, a prominent Palestinian-American journalist who worked for Al Jazeera, was covering a raid on the Jenin refugee camp in 2022 when she was shot in the head by Israeli forces. A year after the killing and after the Israeli army had admitted there was a “high possibility” she was killed by an Israeli soldier, the IDF’s chief spokesperson, R Adm Daniel Hagari, went on television to say: “We are very sorry of the death of Shireen Abu Akleh.”

But no one was ever prosecuted for her death. A state department inquiry was inconclusive, saying the gunfire was likely to have come from IDF positions but it found “no reason to believe that this was intentional”. And in the case of two dozen journalists killed by Israeli military fire between 2000 and 2022, the Committee to Protect Journalists said that “despite numerous IDF probes, no one has ever been charged or held responsible for these deaths”.

ADD As a rule in cases ENDADD involving the deaths of foreigners or Palestinians, the Israeli military has investigated itself. Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights organisation that monitors violence in the region, said that between 2017 and 2021, 1,260 legal complaints were made against the IDF, leading to a total of 248 criminal investigations, and just 11 indictments. In total, just 0.87% of incidents led to a prosecution, according to the group.

Corrie’s family praised the personal support they had received from top US officials and local representatives, including Blinken, who had encouraged the family to travel to Gaza and raise awareness of the case.

In 2015, they met the then undersecretary Blinken at the state department, who asked them: “What do you want me to do?” Once again, the family was left to find its own way forward to find justice in the case.

“And I remember he was engaged and personally helpful,” Craig added. “But frankly, if he can’t engage his institution, if they can’t do things, he’s not helping it.”

The coach of the young Thai footballers who captured the world’s attention when they spent nearly three weeks trapped in a cave has found himself in another watery predicament – stuck on his roof by flash floods.

Ekkapol Chantawong said he was drawing on his 2018 experience with the Wild Boars team to get through the situation at his home in the northern Thai district of Mae Sai.

Days of torrential rain brought by Typhoon Yagi have triggered deadly flash floods and landslides in northern Thailand, Vietnam, Laos and Myanmar.

The flood waters rose suddenly in Ekkapol’s village on Tuesday morning, leaving him and his family no time to escape, he said. The waters kept rising, forcing him on to the roof of his house, where he spent Tuesday night with his girlfriend and her aunt.

“I was scared but I told myself I have to be calm. Wait and assess the situation,” he said.

The waters have receded, allowing Ekkapol to reach the ground floor, but they were still unable leave because the current outside was still too strong, he said.

Ekkapol and his Wild Boars team spent nearly three weeks trapped by flash floods in the Tham Luang cave complex, emerging to global acclaim after an international rescue operation.

He said the cave experience had taught him useful lessons. “I do not think it is different. First we have to focus and start solving the problem we are facing,” he said. “I do not feel more pressure with this stranding. I see more of a way out.”

Asked if he could imagine a third such experience, Ekkapol laughed: “It’s hard to say. We can’t say what will be, but I hope I don’t have to go up on the roof again tonight.”

A 35-year-old runner collapsed and died on Sunday after completing a half-marathon at Disneyland in Anaheim, California, during a heatwave, only a day after expressing his concern about the searing temperatures in a video posted to TikTok.

Bobby Graves, who went by Caleb on his popular TikTok page, clutched his chest as he crossed the finish line of the Disneyland Halloween half-marathon around 7am, and was then caught by a race volunteer as he collapsed, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Fire and rescue personnel gave lifesaving measures and transported Graves to hospital, according to Sgt Matt Sutter of Anaheim police. “Unfortunately, they worked on him for about an hour, and he was pronounced deceased at the hospital.”

Graves had earlier expressed reservations about outdoor temperatures before running the race, which was held as an extreme heatwave blasted California.

“Disneyland half-marathon – the Halloween half-marathon – is tomorrow and I’m marginally worried now,” he said in a video posted on Saturday on his TikTok account.

“I went outside today around two, which is probably the hottest part of the day, and it was 90-something degrees.”

At another point in the video Graves told his 18,000 followers: “I have some susceptibility, I don’t know if it’s temporary or long term, to heat.

“Because I was outside for like 20 minutes, walking my dog, and it was hot, but I felt fine … and then like 10 minutes after I got back in, I just passed out.”

Before the competition started, Graves urged participants to stay safe, cautioning: “Remember it will be hot!

“Stay hydrated and listen to your body,” Graves wrote in the caption. “Good luck to all the runners!”

A spokesperson for Disneyland Resort told KTLA that the venue was “deeply saddened by this tragic loss, and our hearts are with Caleb’s family and loved ones during this difficult time”.

Anaheim police said authorities were not aware of any other injuries during the race and that the run was held early in the morning, not in “the full heat of the day”, according to People magazine. Temperatures ranged from 72F (22C) to a high of 107F (41C) in Anaheim on Sunday, though the exact temperature during the race was not immediately clear.

Extreme temperatures have injured dozens at outdoor events in the US this year. More than 100 people underwent treatment for heat-related illness at a Colorado airshow in August.

In June, an Ocala, Florida, music festival saw dozens hospitalized, and some 450 were treated on site for a variety of conditions including heat-related symptoms.

Many authorities have described heat-related illness as the most significant weather-related public health threat, as the US reeled from searing temperatures this summer.

Data suggest that many US residents can identify the symptoms of heat illnesses, but few know where nearby cooling centers that could provide life-saving relief from heat are located.

More than 130 Afghan women have gathered in Albania at an All Afghan Women summit, in an attempt to develop a united voice representing the women and girls of Afghanistan in the fight against the ongoing assault on human rights by the Taliban.

Some women who attempted to reach the summit from inside Afghanistan were prevented from travelling, pulled off flights in Pakistan or stopped at borders. Other women have travelled from countries including Iran, Canada, the UK and the US where they are living as refugees.

The summit, which has been two years in the making, is being hosted by the Albanian government in Tirana after multiple other governments across the region refused, said the organisers.

Fawzia Koofi, the women’s activist and former Afghan MP, whose organisation Women for Afghanistan arranged the summit, said: “In these three days, the women of Afghanistan from all backgrounds come together to unite their efforts on scenarios to change the current status quo at a time when women in Afghanistan say they are being completely erased from the public sphere.

“We aim to achieve consensus and strategise on how to make the Taliban accountable for the human rights violations they are perpetrating and how to improve the economic situation for women inside the country.”

The summit comes a few weeks after the Taliban published new “vice and virtue” laws that banned women’s voices being heard in public and made it mandatory for women to completely cover their bodies outside the home.

“Us being here together is an act of defiance. We will not be silenced,” said Seema Ghani, a former minister under the government of Hamid Karzai and now a women’s rights activist who has remained in Afghanistan to carry out humanitarian work. “Women and girls inside Afghanistan are living lives that are dominated by fear, every day. Just leaving the house is an ordeal.”

“The world is moving on but we are here, all of us together, to try to make sure that we are not forgotten. We are not all here to agree with each other, but we are here to talk, debate and hopefully end with a united voice,” said Ghani.

At the end of the three-day summit, the organisers hope to publish a set of demands or guidelines for the international community that sets out how Afghan women want to respond to the systematic attack on their rights and freedom by the Taliban.

In the three years since the Taliban have taken control of Afghanistan, women have been barred from most forms of paid employment, prevented from walking in public parks and shut out of the criminal justice system, and girls have been stopped from going to secondary school or university. The Taliban have also resumed the stoning of women for crimes such as adultery.

A campaign for the Taliban’s treatment of women to be recognised as “gender apartheid” and a crime against humanity under international law was launched last year in an attempt to hold the group to account.

More than 130 Afghan women have gathered in Albania at an All Afghan Women summit, in an attempt to develop a united voice representing the women and girls of Afghanistan in the fight against the ongoing assault on human rights by the Taliban.

Some women who attempted to reach the summit from inside Afghanistan were prevented from travelling, pulled off flights in Pakistan or stopped at borders. Other women have travelled from countries including Iran, Canada, the UK and the US where they are living as refugees.

The summit, which has been two years in the making, is being hosted by the Albanian government in Tirana after multiple other governments across the region refused, said the organisers.

Fawzia Koofi, the women’s activist and former Afghan MP, whose organisation Women for Afghanistan arranged the summit, said: “In these three days, the women of Afghanistan from all backgrounds come together to unite their efforts on scenarios to change the current status quo at a time when women in Afghanistan say they are being completely erased from the public sphere.

“We aim to achieve consensus and strategise on how to make the Taliban accountable for the human rights violations they are perpetrating and how to improve the economic situation for women inside the country.”

The summit comes a few weeks after the Taliban published new “vice and virtue” laws that banned women’s voices being heard in public and made it mandatory for women to completely cover their bodies outside the home.

“Us being here together is an act of defiance. We will not be silenced,” said Seema Ghani, a former minister under the government of Hamid Karzai and now a women’s rights activist who has remained in Afghanistan to carry out humanitarian work. “Women and girls inside Afghanistan are living lives that are dominated by fear, every day. Just leaving the house is an ordeal.”

“The world is moving on but we are here, all of us together, to try to make sure that we are not forgotten. We are not all here to agree with each other, but we are here to talk, debate and hopefully end with a united voice,” said Ghani.

At the end of the three-day summit, the organisers hope to publish a set of demands or guidelines for the international community that sets out how Afghan women want to respond to the systematic attack on their rights and freedom by the Taliban.

In the three years since the Taliban have taken control of Afghanistan, women have been barred from most forms of paid employment, prevented from walking in public parks and shut out of the criminal justice system, and girls have been stopped from going to secondary school or university. The Taliban have also resumed the stoning of women for crimes such as adultery.

A campaign for the Taliban’s treatment of women to be recognised as “gender apartheid” and a crime against humanity under international law was launched last year in an attempt to hold the group to account.

A major Canadian literary award has dropped the name of its sponsor, Scotiabank, from its title following months of protests over the bank’s investments in an Israeli weapons manufacturer.

The Giller prize – formerly known as the Scotiabank Giller prize – will keep the bank as its main sponsor despite the rebrand.

A Scotiabank asset management subsidiary has shares in Elbit Systems, which supplies military equipment including artillery, munitions and electronic warfare systems to Israel’s defence ministry. A drone developed by the company, Hermes 450, was reportedly used to carry out missile strikes that killed seven aid workers in central Gaza on last April.

“The decision to remove [Scotiabank’s] name was made so that the focus would be on these exceptional authors and their achievements, and to give the stage to Canada’s best storytellers of today and tomorrow”, Elana Rabinovitch, executive director of the Giller Foundation, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

In November 2023, the Giller prize’s ceremony was twice interrupted by protests against Scotiabank and Elbit Systems. More than 2,000 writers and publishers then signed an open letter calling on charges against the protesters to be dropped.

The prize’s 2023 winner, Sarah Bernstein, withdrew from a Giller Book Club appearance after organisers told her that audience questions about Gaza or the protest could be edited out.

More than 30 authors whose books would have been eligible for the 2024 Giller prize have withdrawn their work from consideration, signing a statement published in July. The 2024 longlist was announced last week, and includes This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud and Held by Anne Michaels, which have both also been longlisted for the Booker prize.

Over the past year, Scotiabank’s 1832 Asset Management has reduced its stake in Elbit Systems, though it denies the protests had an influence. In mid-2023, the asset manager was Elbit Systems’ third largest shareholder with a 5.04% stake; as of mid-August, it is the seventh largest, owning 1.44%, according to Bloomberg.

In a US Securities and Exchange Commission filing released in August, the fund reported owning 641,673 shares in Elbit Systems, valued at $113m (£86m), down from 1,130,200 shares valued at $237m (£181m) in May. “Scotiabank cannot interfere in the independent investment decisions of its portfolio managers who are fiduciaries that are duty-bound to make decisions in good faith in the best interest of the funds they manage,” said a spokesperson.

China will train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers so as to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction”, its minister for public security has said.

“We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” minister Wang Xiaohong told an annual global security forum.

Wang Xiaohong made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organisations such as Interpol.

The forum is part of ongoing efforts by China’s ruling Communist party to position itself as a global security leader. In 2022 China’s leader, Xi Jinping, launched the Global Security Initiative (GSI), which centres China as a facilitator to “improve global security governance … and promote durable peace”.

Some human rights groups have raised concerns that recent training programs for African police officers introduce Communist party-style authoritarian tactics, and are heavily focused on protecting Chinese commercial interests in those countries – often connected to China’s state-run foreign investment program, the belt and road initiative.

Public reports of Monday’s speech did not provide details on the officers or countries to receive the training, or where the training would occur.

Beijing has linked the GSI to its brokering of agreements between Iran and Saudi Arabia, and the development of its peace proposal for the Ukraine war. It is seen by analysts as a vehicle to reshape the current US-dominated world order.

The GSI concept appears to include a run of bilateral security and policing agreements made with developing nations in recent years, particularly in Africa and the Indo-Pacific.

Last year, Beijing said the GSI sought to encourage greater cooperation between tertiary-level military and police academies, and was “willing to provide other developing countries with 5,000 training opportunities in the next five years to train professionals for addressing global security issues”.

Monday’s announcement suggests that number is increasing, with Wang noting that China has already trained 2,700 foreign law enforcement officers in the past year.

Last week after a China-Africa forum, Beijing announced it will train 1,000 more police enforcement officers for the African continent “and jointly ensure the safety of cooperation projects and personnel”. It was not immediately clear if those 1,000 officers are included in the 3,000 cited by Wang on Monday.

On Tuesday, Wang addressed the China-central Asia summit on public security and met senior officials from the five attendant nations. He said they had agreed to strengthen ties including efforts to “deepen law enforcement and security cooperation”, and to “focus on the vision of universal security and enhance the ability of joint operations against terrorism and transnational crime”.

In July, the president of Timor Leste, Jose Ramos Horta, visited Beijing and signed a new partnership agreement with Xi, including to “enhance exchanges at all levels between the military and police forces, strengthen cooperation in such areas as personnel training, equipment technology, the conduct of joint exercises and training, police affairs and law enforcement”.

In 2022 an agreement with the Solomon Islands to boost cooperation with China on “law enforcement and security matters” sparked alarm among the US and other western allies, including other Pacific nations. In the wake of the Solomons agreement the then foreign minister Wang Yi attempted to create a regional agreement with around a dozen Pacific nations but was rebuffed.

Agence France-Presse contributed to this report.

As least 13 people have been injured in three major southern California wildfires that broke out this week during a scorching heatwave. Firefighters battling the blazes were among the injured.

The Bridge fire in the Angeles national forest, located north of Glendora, exploded from about 4,000 acres (1,600 hectares) on Tuesday to 34,000 acres (14,000 hectares) that evening, according to the Los Angeles Times.

In Orange county, firefighters did battle with a fast-spreading fire ignited on Monday that has since sprawled to more than 19,000 acres (7,700 hectares). This blaze, called the Airport fire, was caused by a spark from heavy equipment that was used by public workers, according to officials.

The fire had spread into the mountainous region of adjacent Riverside county with no containment. Two firefighters endured heat-related injuries and a resident suffered from smoke inhalation.

Approximately 65,000 homes and buildings were threatened by a wildfire raging in the San Bernardino national forest nearby. The Line fire charred more than 27,000 acres (11,000 acres) by Tuesday evening, consuming expanses of brush and remained a mere 14% contained on Tuesday night, according to reports.

Authorities arrested a 34-year-old man for suspected arson in relation to the Line fire. He is believed to have set the fire on Thursday, the Los Angeles Times quoted police as saying.

The three sprawling fires, which spurred doomsday-like smoke plumes around the greater Los Angeles area, came as other areas of the US west battled powerful infernos, such as near Reno, Nevada, which prompted about 20,000 people to evacuate.

Sherri Fankhauser, along with her husband and her daughter, watched helicopters drop water on a fiery hillside that was just several hundred yards from their Trabuco Canyon home on Tuesday.

The Fankhausers did not flee despite their street being subject to a mandatory evacuation order since Monday, though a neighbor helped Fankhauser’s 89-year-old mother-in-law evacuate. The flames petered out overnight but grew once more on Tuesday morning.

“You can see fire coming over the ridge now,” Fankhauser said. “It’s getting a little scarier now.”

Southern California has reeled from a record-breaking heatwave since late last week, with temperatures soaring well above 100F (38C) and creating conditions for unchecked wildfires. An excessive heat warning for the Los Angeles area ended on Tuesday night, and firefighters hoped to win an advantage as cooler weather reaches the state later this week.

Across the west, authorities in states battling wildfires took steps to protect residents. The Nevada governor issued an emergency declaration while fire managers in Idaho braced for warm, dry and windy conditions as the Boulder and the Lava fires burned in western Idaho. Several fires spurred evacuation warnings in central Oregon.

The Australian Olympic hockey player Tom Craig has been banned for 12 months, with six months suspended, after he was arrested in Paris for buying cocaine during the Games.

Hockey Australia (HA) said Craig’s ban started on Monday and followed an investigation by its integrity unit into his arrest last month.

“Six months of this suspension will be served fully, with the remaining six months fully suspended, contingent upon meeting conduct and behavioural requirements,” HA said. Additionally, Craig is required to complete mandatory training and education programmes.

Though banned from competition, HA said Craig would remain eligible for selection for the 2025 national squad, which is expected to be announced at the end of the year. Craig apologised to his family and teammates after being released from police custody in Paris with a warning and promptly moved out of the athletes’ village.

The 29-year-old has played more than 100 games for Australia and was a member of the team that won silver at the Tokyo Olympics.

A fugitive penguin in Japan has been found safe and sound two weeks after escaping into the sea and paddling for miles in what her keeper called a miracle.

Pen-chan, a female Cape penguin born and raised in captivity, who had never swum in the open sea before or fended for herself, absconded from an event in the central Aichi region on 25 August.

Her keeper, Ryosuke Imai, said a team began scouring the area immediately but a powerful typhoon that brought record rains across Japan hampered the search.

Given Pen-chan’s lack of preparation for life in the wild, the team thought she would not get very far or survive for longer than a week.

But on 8 September, Imai received information that the bird had been spotted happily bobbing in the water at a beach 30 miles (45km) away.

“I thought she would look exhausted, but she was swimming as usual,” Imai said after the animal was recaptured. “It was beyond my surprise … It’s a miracle.”

He said Pen-chan, who is six years old, must have been eating fish and crabs that she caught herself.

“I think she got there by stopping at various places for a break, but it’s still unbelievable,” he said. “She lost a little weight but she is doing great.”