An Israeli airstrike on a central Gaza school being used as a shelter for displaced Palestinians has killed 14 people, the Hamas-run territory’s civil defence agency has said, with the UN reporting that six of its staff were among the dead.

The UN Palestinian refugee agency, Unrwa, said the attack was the highest death toll among its staff in a single incident. Two airstrikes hit the school and its surroundings in Nuseirat, it said.

“Among those killed was the manager of the Unrwa shelter and other team members providing assistance to displaced people,” the UN agency said on X.

Earlier, Israel’s military said its air force had “conducted a precise strike on terrorists who were operating inside a Hamas command-and-control centre” on the school grounds, without elaborating on the outcome or the identities of those targeted.

The Hamas government media office said about 5,000 displaced people were sheltering at the school when it was hit on Wednesday.

Unrwa said in its statement: “This school has been hit five times since the war began. It is home to about 12,000 displaced people, mainly women and children.”

UN secretary-general António Guterres said late on Wednesday that “what’s happening in Gaza is totally unacceptable.”

“Six of our @UNRWA colleagues are among those killed,” Guterres said in a post on X.

Philippe Lazzarini, the head of Unrwa, posted that the staff who died had been providing support to families who had sought refuge in the school, and that at least 220 of his agency’s staff had been killed in Gaza since the start of the war

“Humanitarian staff, premises and operations have been blatantly and unabatedly disregarded since the beginning of the war,” he added.

Israeli forces have struck several such schools in recent months, saying Palestinian militants were operating there and hiding among displaced civilians – claims denied by Hamas.

Wednesday’s strike on the al-Jaouni school in the Nuseirat refugee camp injured at least 18 others, local health officials told the Associated Press.

An IDF spokesperson said that prior to the attack “a series of measures were taken to reduce the likelihood of civilian casualties, including the use of precision weapons, the use of aerial imagery, and additional intelligence.”

The Israeli military says it takes steps to reduce the risk of harm to civilians and that at least a third of the Palestinian fatalities in Gaza are militants. It accuses Hamas of using Palestinian civilians as human shields, which Hamas denies.

Earlier on Wednesday, a strike hit a home near the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, killing 11 people, including six brothers and sisters ranging from 21 months to 21 years old, according to the European hospital, which received the casualties.

The war in Gaza is now into its 11th month, with more than 41,000 Palestinians killed according to the territory’s health ministry and international efforts to mediate a ceasefire between Israel and the Hamas militant group repeatedly stalled. The war was triggered on 7 October when Hamas attacked Israel, killing 1,200 people and taking about 250 hostages.

Hamas said on Wednesday that its negotiators had reiterated its readiness to implement an “immediate” ceasefire with Israel in Gaza based on a previous US proposal without new conditions from any party.

The group said in a statement that their negotiation team, led by senior official Khalil al-Hayya, had met mediators in Doha to discuss the latest developments in Gaza.

CIA director William Burns, who is also the chief US negotiator on Gaza, said on Saturday that a more detailed ceasefire proposal would be made in the next several days.

The previous proposal put forward by president Joe Biden in June laid out a three-phase ceasefire in return for the release of Israeli hostages. However lingering issues, including control of the Philadelphi corridor, a narrow stretch of land on Gaza’s border with Egypt, remain.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has defied protests at home and criticism from Biden by vowing that Israel would not relinquish control over the strategic corridor.

In Gaza, a strike late on Tuesday on a home in the urban Jabaliya refugee camp in the north of the territory killed nine people, including six women and children, according to the Health Ministry and the civil defence.

Israel’s military meanwhile reported the deaths of two soldiers late on Tuesday when an army helicopter crashed in the area of Gaza’s southern city of Rafah. The military announced on Wednesday that the helicopter had crashed while landing and that another eight soldiers were injured.

The aircraft had been on a “life-saving operation” to evacuate a wounded soldier when it crashed, Maj Gen Tomer Bar said in a statement.

“An investigative committee has been appointed to investigate the details of the crash,” he said, and called it an “operational accident”.

With Reuters, the Associated Press and Agence France-Presse

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.

“President Biden is still calling her killing an accident based only on the Israeli military’s story,” Eygi’s family said in a statement after Biden and Harris’ remarks. “This is not only insensitive and false, it is complicity in the Israeli military’s agenda to take Palestinian land and whitewash the killing of an American.

“Let us be clear: an American citizen was killed by a foreign military in a targeted attack. The appropriate action is for President Biden and Vice-President Harris to speak with the family directly, and order an independent, transparent investigation into the killing of Ayşenur, a volunteer for peace.”

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.

“President Biden is still calling her killing an accident based only on the Israeli military’s story,” Eygi’s family said in a statement after Biden and Harris’ remarks. “This is not only insensitive and false, it is complicity in the Israeli military’s agenda to take Palestinian land and whitewash the killing of an American.

“Let us be clear: an American citizen was killed by a foreign military in a targeted attack. The appropriate action is for President Biden and Vice-President Harris to speak with the family directly, and order an independent, transparent investigation into the killing of Ayşenur, a volunteer for peace.”

The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, gave his strongest hint yet that the White House is about to lift its restrictions on Ukraine using long-range weapons supplied by the west on key military targets inside Russia, with a decision understood to have already been made in private.

Speaking in Kyiv alongside the UK foreign secretary, David Lammy, Blinken said the US had “from day one” been willing to adapt its policy as the situation on the battlefield in Ukraine changed. “We will continue to do this,” he emphasised.

Blinken said he and Lammy would report back to their “bosses” – Joe Biden and Keir Starmer – after their talks on Wednesday with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

The foreign secretary suggested Iran’s dispatch of ballistic missiles to Moscow – revealed this week – had changed strategic thinking in London and Washington. It was a “significant and dangerous escalation”, he said.

He added: “The escalator here is Putin. Putin has escalated with the shipment of missiles from Iran. We see a new axis of Russia, Iran and North Korea.” Lammy urged China “not to throw in its lot” with what he called “a group of renegades”.

British government sources indicated that a decision had already been made to allow Ukraine to use Storm Shadow cruise missiles on targets inside Russia, although it is not expected to be publicly announced on Friday when Starmer meets Biden in Washington DC.

The two leaders are planning to discuss the war in Ukraine, and how it could be ended, as part of a wide-ranging foreign policy discussion, though they will avoid an intense focus on any individual weapons system, as the aim of the conversation is strategic.

No press conference is scheduled during what is expected to be a short visit, Starmer’s second to the US as prime minister, after which there may be further conversations over the weekend to update key European allies on the discussions.

Wednesday’s joint visit to Kyiv by Blinken and Lammy to meet Zelenskiy would not be taking place had there been no positive decision regarding Storm Shadow, the sources added.

But it would be considered unnecessarily provocative to make a public announcement about long-range missiles in Kyiv. It is also likely there will still be restrictions around Ukraine’s use of the missiles, which have a range of at least 190 miles, to avoid reckless or unnecessary attacks.

Speaking in Kyiv, Lammy said he would not reveal details of private discussions that might hand Putin an advantage. He denounced the Russian leader’s “sinister” invasion of Ukraine and accused him personally of “arrogance and greed”.

“This is imperialism. This is fascism,” he said.

Ukraine has been lobbying for months for permission to hit airfields, missile launchers and command and control centres deep inside Russian territory. Speaking to the Guardian in May, Zelenskiy said Biden’s equivocation and incremental approach had cost lives. It allowed the Kremlin to “hunt” Ukrainians, he complained.

Zelenskiy urged the president to overcome his perennial worries about nuclear escalation. The US should “believe in us more”, he stressed, saying of Russia: “We have to respond. They don’t understand anything but force.”

Blinken and Lammy arrived in Kyiv on an overnight train from Poland. They had come to reiterate “ironclad support for Ukraine”, Lammy posted on X. “We must stand up to Vladimir Putin’s imperialism. Our collective security depends on it.” Russia’s attacks on civilians were “horrific, barbaric, unbelievable”, he commented.

The trip came 24 hours after Blinken confirmed in London that Tehran had shipped new deadly ballistic missiles to Russia. In Kyiv, Blinken said he was delivering a strong message that Britain and the US were committed to Ukraine’s “success” and “victory”.

Speaking at a joint press conference, Lammy described the UK’s backing for Ukraine as an enduring “hundred-year partnership”. He said the government was providing a new package of military assistance including Brimstone missiles and AS-90 self-propelled guns.

“We recognise what is at stake: not just the liberty of Ukraine but the security of Europe and the west,” Lammy declared.

There was growing anticipation in Kyiv that the US and UK would finally lift their objections to long-range strikes. “Hoping to hear a long-awaited decision to allow us to hit Russia with Atacms,” the MP Kira Rudik said. “Fingers crossed,” Andriy Zagorodnyuk, Ukraine’s former defence minister, remarked.

Asked if long-range weapons would make a difference, at a time when Russian troops were gaining towns and villages in the eastern Donbas region, he replied simply: “It is a big deal.”

Ukrainian officials had previously expressed frustration that the new Labour government in the UK had not been more robust on the issue, and had waited for the White House to amend its red lines. The US state department has reportedly been open to Kyiv’s request, with the Pentagon and some in the US intelligence community sceptical.

In May the US allowed weapons such as Himars artillery to be used within Russia’s border regions for the first time. This followed a Kremlin offensive into the Kharkiv region and the Ukrainian city of Vovchansk.

This week senior Democrats and Republicans in Washington urged the White House to go further. In a letter, a group of senators called on Biden “to immediately end” his administration’s “limitations” on the use of long-range missiles provided by the US and its Nato allies.

Without this, Kyiv would “struggle to achieve victory” and suffer “death, loss and hardship” as Russia capitalised on the policy and continued to pound Ukraine, it said. “We need to remove the handcuffs and give Ukraine every advantage,” the Republican senator Roger Wicker said.

The senators argued “sophisticated” western weapons would make a difference and force Russia to defend its “rear”. They said delays by the White House in the provision of Abrams tanks, F-16s and other US weapons were “regrettable”.

Speaking in Germany last week, the US defence secretary, Lloyd Austin, said long-range strikes would not turn the tide of the war in Ukraine’s favour. He said that Russia had already moved its glide bombs back beyond the range of the US Atacms long-range systems.

Austin said Kyiv had developed capabilities to hit targets beyond the reach of Anglo-French Storm Shadow missiles. Ukraine has used domestically produced long-range drones to strike Moscow and beyond.

Its operations have been increasingly successful. On Monday a drone attack shut three of Moscow’s airports. Another strike earlier this month damaged an oil refinery on the outskirts of the capital. There were reports on Wednesday that drones had targeted an airbase in Murmansk, in Russia’s Arctic circle, 1,100 miles (1,800km) from Ukrainian lines.

Matthew Savill, the director of military sciences at the defence thinktank Rusi in London, said Ukraine had not briefed allies in advance about its surprise incursion in August into Russia’s Kursk region. “It changed the debate about escalation and the use inside Russia of long-range weapons,” he said.

He cautioned that it would be “very, very hard to knock out” Russian airbases, which were “mostly lots of concrete” and “hundreds of kilometres” beyond the frontline. Atacms missiles with cluster bomblets would be more effective than non-cluster-armed Storm Shadows, he suggested.

In Moscow, the deputy foreign minister Sergey Ryabkov said Russia would destroy any new Atacms deliveries, the state news agency Tass reported.

• Russian forces have begun a significant counter-offensive against Ukrainian troops in Russia’s Kursk region, according to pro-Moscow war bloggers and a senior Russian commander. Pro-Ukrainian observers also reported heavy fighting in part of the occupied area and the possible Russian recapture of villages. Russian forces were said to have taken several villages on the west of the sliver of Russia that Ukraine has carved out, pushing Ukrainian forces to the east of the Malaya Loknya river south of Snagost. Russia’s defence ministry said it had defeated Ukrainian units at a number of villages. There was no independent confirmation or immediate comment from Ukraine.

• The Institute for the Study of War said on Thursday morning that it would be “premature to draw conclusions” about the counterattacks at this stage. The thinktank reported: “Russian forces began counterattacks along the western edge of the Ukrainian salient in Kursk oblast and reportedly seized several settlements north-east and south of Korenevo on September 10 and 11.”

• The ISW continued: “The size, scale, and potential prospects of the September 11 Russian counterattacks in Kursk oblast are unclear and the situation remains fluid as of this report … Ukrainian forces reportedly began new attacks against the Russian counterattack west of Snagost and throughout the Ukrainian salient in Kursk oblast.” Maj Gen Apti Alaudinov, who commands Chechnya’s Akhmat special forces fighting in Kursk, said Russian troops had gone on the offensive and taken back control of about 10 settlements in Kursk.

• A Russian SU-35 fighter jet crashed in the Black Sea on Wednesday after firing missiles towards Ukrainian targets, reports said. There was no confirmation but both Russian and Ukrainian-aligned information channels posted about a crash and a Russian search operation afterwards, with varying, unconfirmed accounts of how it might have been shot down.

• Ukraine’s foreign minister, Andriy Sybiga, on Wednesday urged Kyiv’s allies on its western borders to shoot down Russian drones and missiles flying over its western regions. “There have already been numerous instances of Russian aircraft violating the airspace of neighbouring countries and Nato countries,” said Sybiga. Allies should “explore the possibility of shooting down missiles over the territory of Ukraine”.

• It came after the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, gave his strongest hint yet that the White House is about to lift its restrictions on Ukraine using long-range weapons supplied by the west on key military targets inside Russia. A decision is understood to have already been made in private. Blinken and the British foreign secretary, David Lammy, met with Volodymyr Zelenskiy, the Ukrainian president, in Kyiv on Wednesday.

• British government sources indicated that a decision had already been made to allow Ukraine to use Storm Shadow cruise missiles on targets inside Russia, although it is not expected to be publicly announced on Friday when Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, meets Joe Biden in Washington DC.

• The Kyiv meeting 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, the Guardian’s defence editor Dan Sabbagh reports. Blinken and Lammy provided a potential justification, censuring Iran for sending short-range, high-speed Fath-360 ballistic missiles to Russia.

• The UK Foreign Office has announced sanctions on 10 ships it believes are at the heart of Russia’s shadow oil export fleet. Russia has a large fleet of often unseaworthy and ageing tankers that transport Russian gas and oil products around the globe. Oil exports are Russian President Vladimir Putin’s most critical revenue source for funding the war in Ukraine, accounting for about a quarter of the Russian budget in 2023.

An estimated 67.1 million people watched the presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, a 31% increase from the June debate between Trump and President Joe Biden that eventually led to the president dropping out of the 2024 race.

The debate was run by ABC News but shown on 17 different networks, the Nielsen company said. The Trump-Biden debate in June was seen by 51.3 million people.

Tuesday’s count was short of the record viewership for a presidential debate, when 84 million people saw Trump’s and Hillary Clinton’s first face-off in 2016. The first debate between Biden and Trump in 2020 reached 73.1 million people.

There was a marked increase in younger and middle-aged viewers, with 53% more adults aged 18-49 tuning in to see Harris debate Trump than watched Biden do the same, according to Nielsen data.

Of the viewers who watched on cable networks, the highest number of viewers were on Fox News, with 9.1 million people tuning in on the channel known for its positive coverage of Trump.

Harris was widely seen to have won the debate. A CNN flash poll of debate watchers showed 63% to 37% that Harris had performed better. Prior to the debate, those voters were split 50-50 on who would win. Of the Harris-supporting viewers polled by CNN, 96% said she had done a better job, while 69% of Trump supporting viewers said so.

Trump’s campaign publicly claimed victory, but some of his aides privately conceded it was unlikely that he persuaded any undecided voters to break for him, people familiar with the matter told the Guardian.

The viewership puts the debate roughly between the Seinfeld (76.3 million) and Friends (52.5 million) series finales.

Minutes after it ended, Taylor swift endorsed the Harris-Walz ticket to her 283 million Instagram followers in a post that included a link to the government voter registration website Vote.gov. The site saw almost 338,000 new visitors in the hours that followed, a General Services Administration spokesperson told MSNBC.

Swift’s endorsement is likely to be most influential among Americans under 35, since about 30% of that group say they are more likely to vote for someone Swift supports, according to polling conducted for Newsweek. The polling found that 18% of voters say they are “more likely” or “significantly more likely” to vote for a Swift-backed candidate, while 17% say they are less likely.

No other debates are currently scheduled between the two presidential candidates, although the Harris campaign have asked for one, and the Fox News Channel has publicly offered alternatives. CBS will host a vice-presidential debate between Tim Walz and JD Vance on 1 October.

Tuesday’s debate stakes were high to begin with, not only because of the impending election itself but because the last presidential debate set off a series of events that resulted in Biden’s withdrawal from the race.

While CNN chose not to correct any misstatements by the candidates during Trump’s debate with Biden in June, ABC instead challenged statements that Trump made about abortion, immigration, the 2020 election and violent crime.

Donald Trump can be seen as a Russian asset, though not in the traditional sense of an active agent or a recruited resource, an ex-FBI deputy director who worked under the former US president said.

Asked on a podcast if he thought it possible Trump was a Russian asset, Andrew McCabe, who Trump fired as FBI deputy director in 2018, said: “I do, I do.”

He added: “I don’t know that I would characterize it as [an] active, recruited, knowing asset in the way that people in the intelligence community think of that term. But I do think that Donald Trump has given us many reasons to question his approach to the Russia problem in the United States, and I think his approach to interacting with Vladimir Putin, be it phone calls, face-to-face meetings, the things that he has said in public about Putin, all raise significant questions.”

McCabe was speaking to the One Decision podcast, co-hosted by Sir Richard Dearlove, a former head of MI6, the British intelligence service.

The conversation, in which McCabe also questioned Trump’s attitude to supporting Ukraine and Nato in the face of Russian aggression, was recorded before the debate in Philadelphia on Tuesday, in which Trump made more controversial comments.

Claiming Russia would not have invaded Ukraine had he been president, Trump would not say a Ukrainian victory was in US interests.

“I think it’s in the US’s best interest to get this war finished and just get it done,” he said. “Negotiate a deal.”

Claiming to have good relationships with Putin and Volodymyr Zelinskiy, the Ukrainian president, Trump falsely said his opponent, Kamala Harris, failed to avert war through personal talks.

The vice-president countered that she had helped “preserve the ability of Zelenskiy and the Ukrainians to fight for their independence. Otherwise, Putin would be sitting in Kyiv with his eyes on the rest of Europe, starting with Poland.”

In one of the most memorable lines of the night, Harris added: “And why don’t you tell the 800,000 Polish Americans right here in Pennsylvania how quickly you would give up for the sake of favor and what you think is a friendship with what is known to be a dictator who would eat you for lunch.”

The candidates were not asked about recent indictments in which the Department of Justice said pro-Trump influencers were paid to advance pro-Russia talking points.

McCabe was part of FBI leadership, briefly as acting director, during investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 election and links between Trump and Moscow. Trump fired McCabe in March 2018, two days before he was due to retire. McCabe was then the subject of a criminal investigation, for allegedly lying about a media leak. The investigation was dropped in 2020. In October 2021, McCabe settled a lawsuit against the justice department. Having written The Threat, a bestselling memoir, he is now an academic and commentator.

Speaking to One Decision, McCabe said: “You have to have some very serious questions about, why is it that Donald Trump … has this fawning sort of admiration for Vladimir Putin in a way that no other American president, Republican or Democrat, ever has.

“It may just be from a fundamental misunderstanding of this problem set that’s always a problem. That’s always a possibility. And I guess the other end of that spectrum would be that there is some kind of relationship or a desire for a relationship of some sort, be it economic or business oriented, what have you.

“I think those are possibilities. None of them have been proven. But as an intelligence officer, those are the things that you think about.”

Saying he had “very serious concerns” about the prospect of a second Trump term, McCabe said he would always be concerned about Russia’s ability to interfere in US affairs.

He said: “Their desire to kind of wreak havoc or mischief in our political system is something that’s been going on for years, decades and decades and decades.

“Their interest in just simply sowing chaos and division and polarization. If they can do that, it’s a win. If they can actually hurt a candidate they don’t like, or help one that they do like, that’s an even bigger win.”

The father of an 11-year-old boy who was killed last year when a minivan driven by an immigrant from Haiti collided with his school bus has asked Donald Trump and JD Vance to stop using his son’s name for “political gain”.

During a city commission meeting on Tuesday in Springfield, Ohio, Nathan Clark, the father of Aiden Clark, addressed the forum alongside his wife, Danielle. Speaking at the meeting, Clark said: “I wish that my son, Aiden Clark, was killed by a 60-year-old white man. I bet you never thought anyone would say something so blunt, but if that guy killed my 11-year-old son, the incessant group of hate-spewing people would leave us alone,” the Springfield News-Sun reports.

Clark went on to list politicians including Trump and Vance, who he said have been using his son’s name for “political gain”.

“Bernie Moreno [the Ohio Republican senate candidate], Chip Roy [the Texas Republican representative], JD Vance and Donald Trump … have spoken my son’s name and used his death for political gain. This needs to stop now. They can vomit all the hate they want about illegal immigrants, the border crisis and even untrue claims about fluffy pets being ravaged and eaten by community members. However, they are not allowed, nor have they ever been allowed, to mention Aiden Clark from Springfield, Ohio,” said Clark.

“I will listen to them one more time to hear their apologies. To clear the air, my son, Aiden Clark, was not murdered. He was accidentally killed by an immigrant from Haiti. This tragedy has been all over this community, the state and even the nation. But don’t spin this towards hate,” he continued.

Clark went on to say: “Did you know that one of the worst feelings in the world is to not be able to protect your child? Even worse, we can’t protect his memory when he’s gone. Please stop the hate.”

Clark’s comments come after the Trump campaign and Vance mentioned Aiden Clark’s death earlier this week amid hateful and baseless rumors surrounding the Haitian immigrant community in Springfield.

In a post on X on Tuesday, Vance alluded to Clark’s death by saying a “child was murdered by a Haitian migrant” on X. In the same post, Vance also repeated the falsehoods surrounding Haitian immigrants eating local pets – a rumor brought up again by Trump during Tuesday’s debate with Kamala Harris.

Meanwhile, the Trump War Room, an X account used by the Trump campaign, also mentioned Aiden Clark, accusing Harris of refusing to say his name.

Aiden Clark died last August when the school bus he was riding in collided with a minivan driven by 36-year old Hermanio Joseph, a Haitian father of four children. More than 20 other students were injured in the collision and Joseph was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter and vehicular homicide. In May, Joseph was sentenced to nine to 13.5 years in prison.

In a statement to NBC on Clark’s remarks, a spokesperson for Vance said that people should hold Harris “and her open border policies accountable for the deaths of their children”, adding: “The Clark family is in senator Vance’s prayers.”

The Guardian’s Julius Constantine Motal contributed reporting

All of humanity could share a prosperous, equitable future but the space for development is rapidly shrinking under pressure from a wealthy minority of ultra-consumers, a groundbreaking study has shown.

Growing environmental degradation and climate instability have pushed the Earth beyond a series of safe planetary boundaries, say the authors from the Earth Commission, but it still remains possible to carve out a “safe and just space” that would enable everyone to thrive.

That utopian outcome would depend on a radical transformation of global politics, economics and society to ensure a fairer distribution of resources, a rapid phase-out of fossil fuels and the widespread adoption of low-carbon, sustainable technologies and lifestyles, it said.

This would probably mean that limits have to be placed on excess consumption and that taxes have to be used to address inequality and raise revenue for investment in technology and infrastructure.

The scale of the required change will alarm many governments, acknowledged one of the lead authors. “It won’t be immediately welcomed. To some extent, it is frightening, but it shows that there is still a space for people and other species,” said Joyeeta Gupta, a former co-chair of the Earth Commission and a professor of environment and development in the global south at the University of Amsterdam.

The paper is a 62-page “thought experiment” by an international team of 65 natural and social scientists that seeks to map out how the world’s 7.9 billion people could remain within safe planetary boundaries while accessing necessary levels of food, water, energy, shelter and transport. It then projects how this may change by 2050, when the population is likely to be 9.7 billion people.

Published in the Lancet Planetary Health journal on Wednesday, the paper first sets a justice “floor” of basic daily living standards – defined as 2,500 calories of food, 100 litres of water, and 0.7kWh of electricity, along with a living area of 15 sq metres and annual transportation of 4,500km (2,800 miles). Then they calculated how much space there was between this and a safety “ceiling” – which was defined by planetary boundaries – that estimated how much humanity can push the climate, ecosystems, nutrients and phosphorus and water sources without destabilising the Earth’s systems.

The results showed that under the current highly unequal, fossil-fuel intensive social and environmental conditions, it is now impossible for all humans to live healthy lives within this “safe and just corridor”. That is underscored by previous studies that show that seven of the eight planetary boundaries have already been breached.

The poor are disproportionately affected. The paper identifies the locations around the world where populations are most vulnerable to harm from climate breakdown, biodiversity loss, pollution and water shortages. This includes India, where approximately 1 billion people are living on degraded land; Indonesia, where 194 million people are exposed to unsafe levels of nitrogen; and Brazil, where 79 million people are exposed to unsafe and unjust levels of air pollution. In China, India and Pakistan, more than 200 million people are also being exposed to dangerously high wet-bulb temperatures with global climate heating of between 1C and 2C above preindustrial levels.

This could be avoided. The study says a safe and just space is still theoretically possible today by reducing the resource use of the top 15% of biggest emitters and rapid adoption of renewable energy and other sustainable technologies.

The longer changes are delayed, the tougher the challenge in the years ahead, particularly with regard to climate. “If significant changes aren’t made now, by 2050 there will be no safe and just space left. That means that, even if everyone on the planet only had access to the resources necessary for a basic standard of living in 2050, the Earth will still be outside the climate boundary,” the report warns.

“The ceiling is so low and floor so high you cannot even crawl through that space,” said Johan Rockström, co-chair of the Earth Commission and director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. He said this “shocking” result should be used as a stimulus for urgent remedial action.

Greater equity is a vital component of the paper’s proposed solutions. “Limiting what is possible for some people allows the opening up of possibilities for others,” the report says. It notes that individuals in economic systems that prioritise public health, equality and democracy tend to have lower consumption levels. By limiting demand, it estimates that emissions could be reduced by 40-80% and have largely positive efforts on human wellbeing.

How to achieve these goals is addressed, with measures including progressive and enforceable taxation, graduated resource pricing, land-use planning, green technologies, and subsidies for sustainable products.

The paper stresses the best chance for change in the near term is at city and business level, which tend to be more nimble than national governments and less beholden to vested corporate interests. But in the longer term, they mention the UN secretary general’s calls for a global solidarity pact and reform of the UN into a more effective Earth governance regulatory body that would quantify the minimum rights of access to resources and develop safe and just guidelines.

The authors said the current global situation of worsening inequality and rising nationalist politics may not seem conducive to achieving the just and safe plan laid out, but governments can change and so can public opinion – particularly at a time of intensifying climate stress.

“That is why this science is important to remind everyone that you should take justice seriously, because otherwise it will hit back in terms of social instability, migration and conflict. If you are a patriot who wants to reduce migration flows, then you had better take global justice seriously,” Rockström said. “Justice is an integral part of safety – and safety is an integral part of justice.”

All of humanity could share a prosperous, equitable future but the space for development is rapidly shrinking under pressure from a wealthy minority of ultra-consumers, a groundbreaking study has shown.

Growing environmental degradation and climate instability have pushed the Earth beyond a series of safe planetary boundaries, say the authors from the Earth Commission, but it still remains possible to carve out a “safe and just space” that would enable everyone to thrive.

That utopian outcome would depend on a radical transformation of global politics, economics and society to ensure a fairer distribution of resources, a rapid phase-out of fossil fuels and the widespread adoption of low-carbon, sustainable technologies and lifestyles, it said.

This would probably mean that limits have to be placed on excess consumption and that taxes have to be used to address inequality and raise revenue for investment in technology and infrastructure.

The scale of the required change will alarm many governments, acknowledged one of the lead authors. “It won’t be immediately welcomed. To some extent, it is frightening, but it shows that there is still a space for people and other species,” said Joyeeta Gupta, a former co-chair of the Earth Commission and a professor of environment and development in the global south at the University of Amsterdam.

The paper is a 62-page “thought experiment” by an international team of 65 natural and social scientists that seeks to map out how the world’s 7.9 billion people could remain within safe planetary boundaries while accessing necessary levels of food, water, energy, shelter and transport. It then projects how this may change by 2050, when the population is likely to be 9.7 billion people.

Published in the Lancet Planetary Health journal on Wednesday, the paper first sets a justice “floor” of basic daily living standards – defined as 2,500 calories of food, 100 litres of water, and 0.7kWh of electricity, along with a living area of 15 sq metres and annual transportation of 4,500km (2,800 miles). Then they calculated how much space there was between this and a safety “ceiling” – which was defined by planetary boundaries – that estimated how much humanity can push the climate, ecosystems, nutrients and phosphorus and water sources without destabilising the Earth’s systems.

The results showed that under the current highly unequal, fossil-fuel intensive social and environmental conditions, it is now impossible for all humans to live healthy lives within this “safe and just corridor”. That is underscored by previous studies that show that seven of the eight planetary boundaries have already been breached.

The poor are disproportionately affected. The paper identifies the locations around the world where populations are most vulnerable to harm from climate breakdown, biodiversity loss, pollution and water shortages. This includes India, where approximately 1 billion people are living on degraded land; Indonesia, where 194 million people are exposed to unsafe levels of nitrogen; and Brazil, where 79 million people are exposed to unsafe and unjust levels of air pollution. In China, India and Pakistan, more than 200 million people are also being exposed to dangerously high wet-bulb temperatures with global climate heating of between 1C and 2C above preindustrial levels.

This could be avoided. The study says a safe and just space is still theoretically possible today by reducing the resource use of the top 15% of biggest emitters and rapid adoption of renewable energy and other sustainable technologies.

The longer changes are delayed, the tougher the challenge in the years ahead, particularly with regard to climate. “If significant changes aren’t made now, by 2050 there will be no safe and just space left. That means that, even if everyone on the planet only had access to the resources necessary for a basic standard of living in 2050, the Earth will still be outside the climate boundary,” the report warns.

“The ceiling is so low and floor so high you cannot even crawl through that space,” said Johan Rockström, co-chair of the Earth Commission and director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. He said this “shocking” result should be used as a stimulus for urgent remedial action.

Greater equity is a vital component of the paper’s proposed solutions. “Limiting what is possible for some people allows the opening up of possibilities for others,” the report says. It notes that individuals in economic systems that prioritise public health, equality and democracy tend to have lower consumption levels. By limiting demand, it estimates that emissions could be reduced by 40-80% and have largely positive efforts on human wellbeing.

How to achieve these goals is addressed, with measures including progressive and enforceable taxation, graduated resource pricing, land-use planning, green technologies, and subsidies for sustainable products.

The paper stresses the best chance for change in the near term is at city and business level, which tend to be more nimble than national governments and less beholden to vested corporate interests. But in the longer term, they mention the UN secretary general’s calls for a global solidarity pact and reform of the UN into a more effective Earth governance regulatory body that would quantify the minimum rights of access to resources and develop safe and just guidelines.

The authors said the current global situation of worsening inequality and rising nationalist politics may not seem conducive to achieving the just and safe plan laid out, but governments can change and so can public opinion – particularly at a time of intensifying climate stress.

“That is why this science is important to remind everyone that you should take justice seriously, because otherwise it will hit back in terms of social instability, migration and conflict. If you are a patriot who wants to reduce migration flows, then you had better take global justice seriously,” Rockström said. “Justice is an integral part of safety – and safety is an integral part of justice.”

A medical expert has criticised the opening remarks of the judge chairing the public inquiry into the deaths and collapses of babies at the Countess of Chester Hospital for which the nurse Lucy Letby was convicted of murder and attempted murder.

Dr Michael Hall, a retired consultant neonatologist and visiting professor in neonatal medicine who advised Letby’s legal defence team, has written to the inquiry maintaining his opinion that she did not receive a fair trial and that “important elements” of the medical evidence presented by the prosecution were “flawed or misleading”.

Lady Justice Thirlwall, when she opened proceedings at the inquiry in Liverpool on Tuesday, rejected questions that had been raised by a range of experts about Letby’s convictions, and suggested that the people commenting were not fully informed.

“In the months since the court of appeal judgment [which in May refused Letby leave to appeal], there has been a huge of outpouring of comment from a variety of quarters on the validity of the convictions,” Thirlwall said. “So far as I’m aware, it has come entirely from people who were not at the trial.

“All of this noise has caused additional enormous stress for the parents [of the babies], who have suffered far too much. It’s not for me to set about reviewing the convictions. The court of appeal has done that with a very clear result. The convictions stand.”

Some of the lawyers representing the families of babies who died or collapsed at the Countess of Chester’s neonatal unit in 2015-16, where Letby worked, have also criticised the questioning of the convictions, and said it was increasing their distress.

Letby, 34, was sentenced to 15 whole-life orders after she was convicted across two trials of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder seven others.

The Thirlwall inquiry, set up by the previous government after Letby was first convicted in August 2023, will examine whether Letby could have been stopped sooner, and how the hospital management responded to consultants who raised concerns about her.

In Hall’s letter to the inquiry, which the Guardian has seen, he objects to Thirlwall’s opening remarks, in particular her characterisation that those questioning the verdicts were not at the trial. This was “incorrect”, he said, explaining that he had attended the trial throughout, in person or by video link, except for two or three half-days, for which he read the transcripts of the hearings.

“I also provided medical reports, as an expert witness in neonatology for the defence, on all 17 babies who were the subjects of the trial.

“It is my opinion that important elements of the evidence presented by a number of the prosecution expert witnesses was flawed or misleading. Further, it is my opinion that, because my evidence, and possibly that of other expert witnesses, was not called by the defence, Lucy Letby did not receive a fair trial.”

Hall has in recent months increasingly made his arguments publicly, including expressing concerns to the Guardian and writing a letter published by the British Medical Journal in July, questioning elements of the evidence and the court of appeal’s reasoning.

Lady Justice Thirlwall and the inquiry team declined to comment. The inquiry continues.

The trial of a French man who recruited dozens of strangers to rape his drugged wife has heard how another man living in the same area copied the tactics to drug and rape his own wife.

Dominique Pélicot, 71, is on trial in the southern city of Avignon for repeatedly raping, and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape, his heavily sedated wife in her own bed over a period of a decade in the southern village of Mazan. Fifty other men aged between 26 and 74 are also on trial for their alleged involvement.

The court proceedings are open to the public at the request of Pélicot’s ex-wife, Gisèle, 71, who has said she made the request to raise awareness of the use of drugs to commit sexual abuse.

On Wednesday, the court of five professional judges heard how another man on trial, named as Jean-Pierre, was an alleged “disciple” of Dominique Pélicot. He was not on trial for raping Gisèle Pélicot, but rather for using the same method to rape his own wife and enlisting Pélicot to rape her too.

Jean-Pierre, 63, a former lorry driver for an agricultural cooperative, is alleged to had contact with Pélicot in a chatroom and allegedly used the same technique to drug his own wife with sedatives in order to rape her, with Pélicot’s involvement. Pélicot is alleged to have provided sedatives to drug the man’s wife and travelled to rape her himself.

Twelve rapes of Jean-Pierre’s wife are alleged to have taken place between 2015 and 2020. Jean-Pierre has told the court that he has admitted the charges.

Police investigators said Jean-Pierre told them he met Pélicot in a chatroom entitled “Against her knowledge” on a website that has since been closed. He told investigators that he had asked Pélicot to come to his home when his wife was drugged, the lead investigator, Stéphan Gal, told the court.

“Each time that [Pélicot] travelled [there], he provided him with the medication for the next time,” Gal said. Pélicot’s lawyer told the court that Pélicot said he gave Jean-Pierre the medication four times.

Jean-Pierre’s wife is not a civil party to the case as she “has five children and wanted to protect them”, Gal told the court, saying it was “staggering” given the images that she was shown by police of what had happened to her.

Jean-Pierre’s 32-year-old son from a first marriage said: “The charges are very serious and I think he’s conscious of that.” The son said his father should speak out in court. He said he felt it was a “certainty” that Jean-Pierre was manipulated by Pélicot. “I have the firm conviction that had he not met this person, there would never have been any of this,” he said.

The court heard how Jean-Pierre’s childhood was marked by extreme poverty and violence and sexual abuse within the family. “I was raised by pigs in the woods,” Jean-Pierre would tell his children.

Eighteen of the 51 accused are in custody, including Pélicot and Jean-Pierre, while 32 other defendants are attending the trial as free men. The last one, still at large, will be judged in absentia. Most could face up to 20 years in jail if found guilty of aggravated rape.

The trial is expected to run until December.

Ralph the raccoon is very demure, very mindful; the prairie dogs are poppin’; the bats are brat and Stilton the goat, in his mind at least, is the GOAT (that’s obviously Greatest Of All Time, sheesh).

We know all this because a new social media video for Northumberland zoo has, virally, gone supersonic.

More than 6 million people have viewed a video on TikTok featuring a couple in their 60s guiding people through the zoo using the language of generation Z.

Part of its charm lies in the deadpan delivery of Linda and Brian Bradley. It looks as if there may well be someone, off screen, aiming a loaded pistol at them.

“That’s me!” joked Maxine Bradley, who directed her parents. “It took a long time. It was: ‘You two, please concentrate!’”

The conceit of “getting your gen Z employee to write your marketing script” is the latest TikTok trend to take off.

Popular videos of recent weeks include a tour of Fyfield Manor, a B&B in a beautiful 880-year-old (“no cap”) building in Oxfordshire, by its owner Christine Brown, who tells us in a cut-glass English accent that “the medieval dining room has so much rizz” and that the “Georgian panelled room” understood the assignment.

There’s also Beamish Museum in County Durham – “Pockly Old Hall is always serving” – and Kenyon Hall Farm in Warrington: “the vibes in the farm shop, immaculate”.

Maxine Bradley was directly inspired to make her video after seeing one for Edinburgh zoo, narrated by its chief executive, David Field.

“I thought, ‘This is awesome … can we do this?’ Personally, I don’t like TikTok and social media does my head in, but another member of staff who’s super into trends saw it too and we both said, ‘We have to do this.’”

The big problem soon became clear: that both Bradley and her colleague are millennials with little grasp of gen Z (people born between the late 1990s and early 2010s) lingo. “Lucy had gone on the internet and found all these definitions and I was like, ‘What is this? This is not real.’”

A script eventually came together and they enlisted another colleague, from gen Z. “She understood it. She was able to say, ‘You can’t use that, it’s too old … Yes, this is on trend.’ She was teaching my dad what you’re supposed to do and how you’re supposed to do it.

“I couldn’t believe my parents were so up for it, but yes, it was a frustrating process filming it. The one-minute video took two hours … My dad just wasn’t paying attention. Neither of them knew what they were saying. I still don’t, to be honest with you.”

Northumberland zoo, a family-run, not-for-profit organisation near Morpeth, has steadily grown since getting its licence in 2015. Its inhabitants include snow leopards, Asian short-clawed otters, capybaras, owls, lemurs, meerkats, wallabies, and it is a mix of the deadly serious and the out-and-out bananas.

The zoo, for example, is playing an important role in the conservation of critically endangered Livingstone’s fruit bats, which come from two tiny islands between Madagascar and the African mainland. It is the only place in the UK with a population.

It is also probably the only place in the world where the guinea pigs live in a wild west-themed village, which includes a jailhouse, an inn and a blacksmith and is a YouTube hit.

It’s mad and fun but, Bradley hopes, also helps teach people how to keep guinea pigs as pets. “We explain what’s an appropriate diet, what is an appropriate space. Too many people keep guinea pigs in tiny spaces, which is really sad.”

Innovating is important to the zoo, which is the reason Ralph the racoon is also available to do birthday wishes or pep talks on the greeting video site Cameo.

Why Ralph? “Raccoons can be difficult; they are one of the only animals in the world which will seek revenge,” said Bradley. “But Ralph is our nicest raccoon. People love him.”

Ralph the raccoon is very demure, very mindful; the prairie dogs are poppin’; the bats are brat and Stilton the goat, in his mind at least, is the GOAT (that’s obviously Greatest Of All Time, sheesh).

We know all this because a new social media video for Northumberland zoo has, virally, gone supersonic.

More than 6 million people have viewed a video on TikTok featuring a couple in their 60s guiding people through the zoo using the language of generation Z.

Part of its charm lies in the deadpan delivery of Linda and Brian Bradley. It looks as if there may well be someone, off screen, aiming a loaded pistol at them.

“That’s me!” joked Maxine Bradley, who directed her parents. “It took a long time. It was: ‘You two, please concentrate!’”

The conceit of “getting your gen Z employee to write your marketing script” is the latest TikTok trend to take off.

Popular videos of recent weeks include a tour of Fyfield Manor, a B&B in a beautiful 880-year-old (“no cap”) building in Oxfordshire, by its owner Christine Brown, who tells us in a cut-glass English accent that “the medieval dining room has so much rizz” and that the “Georgian panelled room” understood the assignment.

There’s also Beamish Museum in County Durham – “Pockly Old Hall is always serving” – and Kenyon Hall Farm in Warrington: “the vibes in the farm shop, immaculate”.

Maxine Bradley was directly inspired to make her video after seeing one for Edinburgh zoo, narrated by its chief executive, David Field.

“I thought, ‘This is awesome … can we do this?’ Personally, I don’t like TikTok and social media does my head in, but another member of staff who’s super into trends saw it too and we both said, ‘We have to do this.’”

The big problem soon became clear: that both Bradley and her colleague are millennials with little grasp of gen Z (people born between the late 1990s and early 2010s) lingo. “Lucy had gone on the internet and found all these definitions and I was like, ‘What is this? This is not real.’”

A script eventually came together and they enlisted another colleague, from gen Z. “She understood it. She was able to say, ‘You can’t use that, it’s too old … Yes, this is on trend.’ She was teaching my dad what you’re supposed to do and how you’re supposed to do it.

“I couldn’t believe my parents were so up for it, but yes, it was a frustrating process filming it. The one-minute video took two hours … My dad just wasn’t paying attention. Neither of them knew what they were saying. I still don’t, to be honest with you.”

Northumberland zoo, a family-run, not-for-profit organisation near Morpeth, has steadily grown since getting its licence in 2015. Its inhabitants include snow leopards, Asian short-clawed otters, capybaras, owls, lemurs, meerkats, wallabies, and it is a mix of the deadly serious and the out-and-out bananas.

The zoo, for example, is playing an important role in the conservation of critically endangered Livingstone’s fruit bats, which come from two tiny islands between Madagascar and the African mainland. It is the only place in the UK with a population.

It is also probably the only place in the world where the guinea pigs live in a wild west-themed village, which includes a jailhouse, an inn and a blacksmith and is a YouTube hit.

It’s mad and fun but, Bradley hopes, also helps teach people how to keep guinea pigs as pets. “We explain what’s an appropriate diet, what is an appropriate space. Too many people keep guinea pigs in tiny spaces, which is really sad.”

Innovating is important to the zoo, which is the reason Ralph the racoon is also available to do birthday wishes or pep talks on the greeting video site Cameo.

Why Ralph? “Raccoons can be difficult; they are one of the only animals in the world which will seek revenge,” said Bradley. “But Ralph is our nicest raccoon. People love him.”

Alberto Fujimori, Peru’s former strongman leader throughout the 1990s and the country’s most divisive leader, has died aged 86, just 10 months after he was granted a pardon and freed from jail.

The ex-president died at the home of his daughter and political heiress Keiko Fujimori in the Peruvian capital Lima on Wednesday evening.

“After a long battle with cancer, our father, Alberto Fujimori, has just left to meet the Lord. We ask those who loved him to accompany us with a prayer for the eternal rest of his soul,” his daughter Keiko posted on X, adding her name and those of her three siblings; Hiro and Sachie and Kenji.

Fujimori, who governed Peru from 1990 to 2000, remains a highly divisive figure in Peru. The former agronomist of Japanese heritage inspired unquestioning loyalty from his followers – despite being jailed for corruption and human rights crimes – and opprobrium from his detractors for his iron-fisted decade in power.

His autocratic leadership in the 1990s left an enduring legacy which continues to shape politics in Peru to this day, as his daughter Keiko – a three-time presidential candidate – leads a right-wing populist political movement.

His supporters credit him with stamping out the Maoist Shining Path movement and putting the economy back on track after rampant hyperinflation. Many others believe he ruled as an iron-fisted dictator during his decade in power, which was marked by widespread human rights abuses and rampant corruption.

“Alberto Fujimori should be remembered as Peru’s best ever president and most Peruvians recognise it,” said Jackeline Quispe Mendoza, a supporter who attended a vigil outside the family home on Wednesday night.

“He defeated the Shining Path in the 1990s and the cruel and bloodthirsty terrorist Abimael [Guzmán].”

In 2009, Fujimori was convicted of kidnapping and murder and sentenced to 25 years in what was described as a landmark ruling for human rights cases in Latin America.

He was released from prison in December 2023 after Peru’s constitutional court ruled he should be granted a humanitarian pardon, even though the inter-American court of human rights asked the Peruvian state to “refrain from executing the order”.

Fujimori, a former university professor, burst on to the political scene in 1990 as an “outsider” presidential candidate, winning a surprise victory against writer and Nobel prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa.

Despite his government’s violent repression, he remained relatively popular even after dissolving Congress in April 1992.

But after a rigged election in 2000 and videos that emerged showing Fujimori’s spymaster Vladimiro Montesinos bribing lawmakers with stacks of cash, Peruvians tired of his government’s rampant corruption.

Soon after – on an official trip to Asia – Fujimori fled to Japan, his parent’s homeland, and resigned by fax, just as he was about to start a third term in 2000.

In 2005, after five years in Japan, he attempted to make a political comeback and was arrested in Chile from where he was extradited in 2007 to face trial in Peru.

For many Peruvians, it was a reckoning long overdue. Carlos Rivera, a human rights lawyer at the Legal Defense Institute and a prosecutor in Fujimori’s trial, said the former leader will be remembered for his “crimes against humanity”.

In 2009, Fujimori was convicted of ordering two massacres carried out by the army death squad Grupo Colina.

“He died refusing to acknowledge the grave crimes he committed during his ten-year reign, from grave human rights violations to massive corruption,” Jo-Marie Burt, professor of political science at George Mason University, told the Guardian.

“Some may laud him for his economic stabilisation policies or for ending the Shining Path insurgency. But the harm he wrought to civic life, the cynicism he embedded in the political system, his cavalier justification of murder to achieve his ends – is the dark legacy that Peru has yet to fully grapple [with].”

The wife of a California prisoner will receive $5.6m after being sexually violated during a strip-search when she tried to visit her husband in prison, her attorneys said Monday.

After traveling four hours to see her husband at a correctional facility in Tehachapi, California, on 6 September 2019, Christina Cardenas was subject to a strip-search by prison officials, drug and pregnancy tests, X-ray and CT scans at a hospital, and another strip-search by a male doctor who sexually violated her, a lawsuit said.

“My motivation in pursuing this lawsuit was to ensure that others do not have to endure the same egregious offenses that I experienced,” Cardenas said.

Of the $5.6m settlement, the California corrections department will pay $3.6m and the rest will be paid by the other defendants, which include two correctional officers, a doctor and the Adventist Health Tehachapi Valley hospital.

Prison officials conducted their searches on the basis of a warrant that said a strip-search could only be conducted if an X-ray found any foreign objects that could be contraband in Cardenas’s body, her attorneys said. However, neither the X-ray nor the CT scan found any evidence of such.

She was also put in handcuffs in a “humiliating perp walk” while being taken to and from the hospital, and denied water or use of a bathroom during the majority of the search process. She was told she had to pay for the hospital’s services and later received invoices for a combined total of more than $5,000. Despite no contraband being found in any of her belongings or her body, Cardenas was denied her visit with her husband.

One of the prison officials, according to Cardenas, asked her: “Why do you visit, Christina? You don’t have to visit. It’s a choice, and this is part of visiting.”

“We believe the unknown officer’s statement was a form of intimidation used to dismiss Christina’s right to visit her lawful husband during the course of his incarceration,” Gloria Allred, Cardenas’s attorney, said.

Cardenas also had to undergo a strip-search during a previous visit to marry her husband, and continued to experience difficulties during her visits to him, though not to the same extent as the September 2019 incident. Her husband remains in custody.

The settlement also requires the California corrections department to distribute a policy memorandum to employees that better protects the rights of visitors who have to undergo strip-searches. This includes ensuring the search warrant is read and understood by the visitor, that the visitor receives a copy of the warrant, that the scope of the warrant is read and understood by everyone involved, and the scope of the warrant is not exceeded.

Cardenas is not alone in what she experienced from correctional officers, Allred said, and hopes this case will help protect the rights of spouses and family members who visit their loved ones in prison.

California prisons have faced a continuing problem of sexual abuse and misconduct, with the US justice department announcing it had opened an investigation into allegations that correctional officers systematically sexually abused incarcerated women at two state-run California prisons.

Earlier this year, the federal Bureau of Prisons announced it would close a women’s prison in northern California known as the “rape club” after an Associated Press investigation exposed rampant sexual abuse by correctional officers.

A man who says life’s too short to resist buying a home that might fall off a cliff in a few years has taken ownership of a house with a beautiful view that’s just 25ft (7.6 metres) from a sandy, crumbling cliff.

David Moot paid $395,000 for the house on Cape Cod on the Massachusetts coast and said he intends to enjoy it while it lasts.

The 59-year-old interior painter and designer purchased the sprawling three-bedroom house overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.

Reported on by several outlets including Bloomberg and the Boston Globe, Moot’s purchase is one of many that homeowners have been making in recent years as they seek discounted deals on waterfront properties facing imminent submersion due to rising sea levels and eroding coastlines as a result of the climate crisis.

According to Bloomberg, Moot’s purchase of the home was 67% less than the seller’s $1.195m asking price in 2022. Speaking about his purchase of the home, which rests a mere 25ft from a sandy slope, Moot told the outlet: “Life’s too short, and I just said to myself, ‘Let’s just see what happens.’”

“It’s going to eventually fall into the ocean, and it may or may not be in my lifetime,” he added.

Stephen Leatherman, a professor and director of the laboratory for coastal research at Florida International University, said: “Along the east coast of the United States, 80% to 90% of the beaches are eroding so it’s only just limited areas where the beach is fairly stable, at least for now.”

Leatherman, who previously lived on Cape Cod, continued: “The average [rate of erosion] has been a little over 2ft a year but that’s just an overall average. And Cape Cod … is more like … about 3ft or more a year, so any rate, it does catch up with you.

“You buy a house this summer because that’s where people go to the beach and at that time of the year, the beach is nice and wide. In the winter, the beach actually narrows if there are winter storms, and that’s when a lot of houses get in trouble.

“This house may look good right now … because the beach is wide. Wait till that beach narrows up and the waves are hitting the edge of that bluff just below the house. It’s a perception problem too, in terms of people understanding this erosion problem,” Leatherman added.

Brian Yellen, a Massachusetts state geologist, also pointed to the coastal bluffs along the east coast where many homes lie.

“Coastlines in places that used to be glaciated, like the eastern US and Canada, as well as much of northern Europe have long reaches of coastal bluffs made up of glacial soils, as opposed to bedrock cliffs,” Yellen said, adding: “While less susceptible to coastal flooding and inundation, as bluffs tend to be high up, these coastlines are particularly susceptible to shoreline retreat, imperiling structures built at the edge of bluffs.”

In an interview with the Boston Globe, Moot said that prior to his purchase of his home in December, he consulted experts and studied projections for the erosion rates surrounding the property. He also researched ways to slow coastal erosion, including planting beach grass that could stabilize sand, as well as potentially shifting the house’s front part to the back.

In addition to planting beach grass and moving houses, there are other methods to slow down coastal erosion and its impacts. Alison Bowden, director of conservation science and strategy at the Nature Conservancy, pointed out nature-based restorative approaches, such as “some combination of natural media like oyster shell and native vegetation plantings, and sand or stone, sometimes seeded with live shellfish”.

“These installations are designed to protect property and prevent erosion while improving habitat, water quality and ecological condition in a way that appears natural and is consistent with the character of coastal communities and uses of the shore,” Bowden added.

While it remains unclear how long Moot will be able to have his home for, he has expressed interest in allowing others, including individuals who are terminally ill, to appreciate the ocean views it offers.

“This is such a wonderful dream for me that has come true that I would love to be able to share it,” Moot told the Boston Globe.

An art theft that gripped Canadians has been solved: a famed portrait of a scowling Winston Churchill that was stolen from an Ottawa hotel has been found in Italy and the thief nabbed, police have said.

The “Roaring Lion” picture of the late British prime minister had been given to the Fairmont Chateau Laurier hotel in Ottawa by the late Armenian-born Canadian photographer Yousuf Karsh.

It was taken by Karsh after the wartime leader addressed the Canadian parliament in 1941, becoming a symbol of British defiance in the second world war.

In August 2022, hotel staff noticed the photograph, hanging in a reading room next to the main lobby, had been replaced with a forgery.

Two years on, Ottawa police say they have, with the help of public tips and forensic sleuthing, found the culprit – a 43-year-old man living 370km (230 miles) west of Ottawa – and the stolen portrait in Genoa, Italy.

“The portrait was sold through an auction house in London to a buyer in Italy, both of whom were unaware that the piece was stolen,” police said in a statement.

The suspect was arrested in April and charged with theft, forgery, and trafficking in stolen goods.

“We are thrilled about the iconic Roaring Lion portrait returning to its rightful home at the Fairmont Chateau Laurier,” hotel general manager Genevieve Dumas told AFP.

“This portrait … is not only an irreplaceable work of art but also a significant piece of our hotel’s history,” she said.

The artwork is to be returned in the coming weeks to the hotel, which plans to once again put it on display for guests.

Karsh and his wife, after fleeing the Armenian genocide and settling in Canada, lived at the hotel for 18 years. He also had a studio there until 1992.

His other portrait subjects included Martin Luther King Jr, Ernest Hemingway and Queen Elizabeth II.

According to historical accounts, Karsh plucked a cigar from Churchill’s mouth just before taking his portrait, which made the British premier grimace.

The image is arguably the most iconic of Churchill and widely circulated, even appearing on the British five pound note.

Maintenance staff had been the first to notice portrait’s disappearance.

As speculation swirled over the heist, former hotel guests shared their snaps of the portrait over the years, helping to narrow down the date when it likely went missing from 25 December 2021 to 6 January 2022. The hotel, which had hosted Karsh’s first exhibition in 1936, also confirmed with the photographer’s estate that a signature on the print left behind by the thief was a fake.