Hezbollah has vowed to retaliate against Israel after pagers used by its members exploded across Lebanon simultaneously, killing at least nine people and wounding almost 3,000 in a dramatic and unprecedented attack at a time of heightened tensions in the Middle East.

There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military on the blasts, which came just hours after Israel announced it was broadening its aims in the war sparked by the Hamas attacks on 7 October to include its fight against Hezbollah along the border with Lebanon.

Lebanon’s health minister, Firass Abiad, said the blasts on Tuesday killed a 10-year-old girl, among others. He told a press conference: “About 2,750 people were injured … more than 200 of them critically,” with injuries mostly reported to the face, hands and stomach.

The apparent sabotage attack followed months of targeted assassinations by Israel against senior Hezbollah leaders. It came as US officials try to de-escalate tensions between the two sides and remain concerned that Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, could order a ground invasion of Lebanon. It threatens to derail efforts by the US to prevent Iran, which backs the Lebanese Shia militia, from retaliating against Israel for the July bombing in Tehran that killed the Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh.

The blasts appeared to exploit the low-tech pagers that Hezbollah has adopted in order to prevent the targeted assassinations of its members, who could be tracked by mobile phone signals. Those wounded in the attack include Iran’s ambassador to Beirut, Mojtaba Amani, according to reports.

It also ratcheted up tensions between Israel and Hezbollah, interrupting an uneasy calm which had prevailed over the last three weeks when both parties had appeared to step back from the brink of a regional war after a limited Hezbollah response in late August to Israel’s assassination of its top military commander, Fuad Shukur, in Beirut.

Lebanon’s information minister called the explosions an act of “Israeli aggression”.

Hezbollah said two of its fighters were among the dead and threatened a “just punishment” for Israel. Later media reports said the son of the Hezbollah MP Ali Ammar also died in the explosions.

Hezbollah fighters in Syria were also injured in the attack, with several being treated in hospitals in Damascus, according to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards-affiliated Saberin News reported that some guards in Syria had also been killed.

The US state department spokesperson, Matthew Miller, said it was “too early to say” how it would affect Gaza ceasefire talks. He told a briefing the US was not involved and did not know who was responsible. Hamas described the attack as an “escalation” that would lead to Israel’s defeat.

Israeli media reports on Tuesday evening said Netanyahu, the defence minister, Yoav Gallant, and other security chiefs had been huddling at the defence ministry headquarters at the Kirya base in Tel Aviv after the blasts. The Israeli military said senior commanders had held a situational assessment “focusing on readiness in both offence and defence in all arenas” but there was no change in instructions to civilians.

The Israel Defense Forces’ home front command told local authorities there was a possibility of an escalation after the incident.

A Hezbollah source said they believed the attack was in response to an alleged assassination attempt by the Shia militia on a former top Israeli defence official, revealed on Tuesday by the Israeli Shin Bet security agency.

It accused Hezbollah of attempting to kill a former security official using a claymore anti-personnel mine that could be detonated remotely, publishing photos of a dismantled bomb and wiring wrapped in tape that it claimed showed the attack was prevented in its “final stages”. Hezbollah has not commented on the alleged assassination attempt.

The attack was the third time Beirut had been targeted since the beginning of hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah on 8 October. The Lebanese militia had launched rockets at Israel the day before, “in solidarity” with Hamas’s attack on southern Israel, which began the current Gaza war.

Hospitals across Lebanon were overwhelmed with an influx of patients, and a field hospital was set up in the southern city of Tyre to accommodate the wounded. The sound of ambulance sirens was constant in Lebanon’s capital city more than three hours after the initial attack.

Videos of patients, including children, with mangled hands, gaping wounds in their sides and bandaged heads circulated on Lebanese social media. A doctor in Beirut’s Geitawi hospital said the emergency room was tending “several critical patients”.

A senior security source said pagers all over the country exploded, primarily wounding members of Hezbollah. They added that security agencies would investigate how the sophisticated attack was carried out, but that forces were currently occupied ensuring wounded people could reach hospitals.

A Hezbollah official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters the detonation of the pagers was the “biggest security breach” the group had been subjected to in nearly a year of war with Israel.

Lebanon’s health ministry put hospitals across the country on “maximum alert” and instructed citizens to distance themselves from wireless communication devices.

Hezbollah maintains its own communication network separate from the rest of Lebanon. Suspicions that Israel has managed to penetrate the group’s telecommunications have been held since October, as several Hezbollah commanders have been assassinated in targeted strikes.

Yossi Melman, a co-author of Spies Against Armageddon and other books on Israeli intelligence, said: “This absolutely has all the hallmarks of a Mossad operation. Somebody has planted minor explosives or malware inside the pagers. I understand they were recently supplied as well.”

Melman said he understood that “a lot of people in Hezbollah carried these pagers, not just top echelon commanders”. They were used by the Lebanese group because they feared their mobile phones were being monitored by Israeli intelligence to surveil their communications and to pinpoint missile attacks.

The exercise showed, he said, that “[the] Mossad is able to penetrate and infiltrate Hezbollah time and time again” but he questioned whether there was any strategic gain to the coordinated explosions. “It won’t change the situation on the ground, and I don’t see any advance in it.”

The incident came as the Israeli prime minister was holding a series of high-level security consultations with the heads of the security forces amid rising tensions with Hezbollah, according to Israeli media reports.

The consultations were called a few hours after Israel, during an overnight meeting of the security cabinet on Tuesday, approved the decision to expand its war goals to include the return of tens of thousands of Israelis evacuated from towns along the northern frontier that have been badly damaged by rockets fired by Hezbollah – a move that suggests a large-scale military operation against the Lebanese militant group is likely.

Hezbollah officials have said in the past that the group would stand down if a Gaza ceasefire was reached, while Israel says it cannot allow militants to remain in the border area in southern Lebanon.

The violence has killed hundreds – mostly fighters – in Lebanon, and dozens of civilians and soldiers on the Israeli side. The fighting has also forced tens of thousands of people on both sides to flee their homes.

In recent days, according to media reports in the country, Netanyahu has been allegedly considering dismissing Gallant as defence minister. The move would be the biggest leadership shake-up in the country since the 7 October attacks, and could pave the way to an all-out conflict against Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Gallant is believed to have consistently opposed a big military operation in Lebanon while the fighting is continuing against Hamas in Gaza, West Bank violence and military activities are escalating, and Israel is fighting off Houthi missile attacks and dealing with Iran’s nuclear ambitions and threats.

Additional reporting by Dan Sabbagh

It may not have been acknowledged by Israel but the extraordinary, coordinated attack on Hezbollah, blowing up thousands of pagers used by members of the Lebanese group, is almost certainly a Mossad operation. The Israeli intelligence service has been engaged in the assassinations of Hamas and Hezbollah leaders for decades but, if its involvement is confirmed, this represents a significant escalation.

Reports continue to come in but, with at least nine dead and about 3,000 wounded in dozens, if not hundreds, of coordinated explosions, the episode demonstrates a ruthless and indiscriminate desire to target Hezbollah. The group had been using pagers as an alternative to mobile phones, which can be tracked and used to pinpoint deadly missile strikes on its commanders.

It is unclear how the explosions were caused and, although there is inevitable speculation about hacking, it is most likely they were the result of sabotaged devices. Initial reports said the pagers that exploded were a new model manufactured by a company whose supply chain may have been compromised by the perpetrators of the attack.

Yossi Melman, a co-author of Spies Against Armageddon and other books on Israeli intelligence, emphasised that it appeared the exploding pagers had been “recently supplied”, and added: “We know that Mossad is able to penetrate and infiltrate Hezbollah time and time again,” he added. But he questioned the strategic wisdom of the attack, in which a 10-year-old girl died.

“It enhances the chance of an escalation of the border crisis into a war,” Melman warned, and argued it was “more of a sign of panic” because, while he said it showed an extraordinary ability to strike at the heart of Hezbollah, it was neither very targeted, nor would it would change the wider strategic picture. “I don’t see any advance in it,” he concluded.

At the very least, Melman argued, some sort of response from Hezbollah was likely. Earlier on Tuesday it had emerged that the Iran-aligned Lebanese group, who have been engaged in a violent tit-for-tat with Israel for months, had, according to Israel’s Shin Bet domestic security service, planned to kill a former Israeli security official by remotely detonating an explosive device from Lebanon.

That could suggest the pager attack was a grim warning of the “anything you can do, we can do better” variety. But it would also be far from the first time Israel has engaged in an assassination or other spectacular attack and the results have backfired – or the situation not developed as intended.

A sabotaged mobile phone was used as long ago as January 1996 to blow up Yahya Ayyash, then Hamas’s chief bomb maker, in Gaza City. Ayyash, known as “The Engineer”, was considered responsible for introducing the strategy of carrying out suicide attacks on Israeli passenger buses – but his killing prompted a fresh wave of bus bombings and did little to calm the crisis at the time.

Khaled Meshal, another Hamas leader, survived an assassination attempt in 1997. Meshal, then Hamas’s political leader, had poison injected in his ear in an operation authorised by Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, while in Jordan. Meshal survived, and some of the Israeli agents responsible were arrested – prompting Jordan’s King Hussein to break off a peace accord and threaten to hang the plotters unless an antidote was supplied. An embarrassed Israel was forced to do so.

Five hours after arriving in Dubai in February 2010, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a Hamas leader responsible for weapons procurement, was killed in his hotel room by a team of 11 assassins who used fake European passports to conceal their identities. Hamas accused Israel of being behind the plot, some aspects of which could be seen in CCTV footage released by the Dubai authorities. Some of the agents changed their disguises in a deadly operation that, for all its elaborateness, was detected.

Since the start of Israel’s latest war with Hamas, there have been many more attempts to take out leaders of the Palestinian militant group. Ismail Haniyeh, then the group’s political leader, was killed by a “short range projectile” in Tehran in August – prompting warnings from Iran it would respond with direct military action against Israel.

Though Iran has refrained from an attack, the war between Israel and Hamas is close to entering its second year, and tensions with Hezbollah in the north have arguably never been higher.

Pagers used by hundreds of members of the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah exploded simultaneously in Lebanon and Syria on Tuesday, killing at least nine people and wounding thousands in a dramatic and unprecedented attack at a time of heightened tensions in the Middle East.

Here’s what we know so far:

• At least nine people were killed in the attack in Lebanon, officials said. Among those killed was an 10-year-old girl, according to Lebanon’s health minister, Firass Abiad. The latest casualty figures by officials include about 2,750 wounded. Those wounded in the attack include Iran’s ambassador to Beirut, Mojtaba Amani.

• Hezbollah fighters in Syria were also injured in the attack, with several reportedly being treated in hospitals in Damascus. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards-affiliated Saberin News reported that some guards in Syria had also been killed.

• A Hezbollah official said the detonation of the pagers was the biggest security breach for the group in nearly a year of conflict with Israel. The blasts appeared to exploit the low-tech pagers that Hezbollah has adopted in order to prevent the targeted assassinations of its members. The pagers were reportedly a new brand.

• Hezbollah has vowed to retaliate against Israel. The group said two of its fighters were among the dead and threatened a “just punishment”. “We hold the Israeli enemy fully responsible for this criminal aggression that also targeted civilians,” a statement said. The son of the Hezbollah MP Ali Ammar reportedly also died in the explosions, as did two sons of other prominent Hezbollah figures.

• There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military on the blasts. The attack took place just hours after Israel announced it was broadening the aims of the war sparked by the 7 October Hamas attacks to include its fight against Hezbollah.

• The attack followed months of targeted assassinations by Israel against senior Hezbollah leaders.

• Lebanon’s health ministry put hospitals across the country on “maximum alert” and instructed citizens to distance themselves from wireless communication devices. Hezbollah maintains its own communication network separate from the rest of Lebanon.

• It also comes as US officials try to de-escalate tensions between the two sides, and could derail US efforts to prevent Iran from retaliating against Israel for the July bombing in Tehran that killed the Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh.

• The US government said it “was not aware of this incident in advance”. The state department spokesperson, Matthew Miller, told a briefing that Washington was not involved and did not know who was responsible. He added it was “too early to say” how it would affect Gaza ceasefire talks.

Gaza’s health ministry has identified 34,344 Palestinians killed by Israeli attacks in the territory, publishing a list of names, ages, gender and ID numbers that cover more than 80% of Palestinians killed in the war so far.

The remaining 7,613 people included in its death toll, which is now above 41,000, are Palestinians whose bodies have been received by hospitals and morgues, but whose identities have not yet been confirmed.

The identified people include 169 babies born after the Hamas attacks of 7 October that began the war, and a man born in 1922 who had survived more than a century of war and upheaval.

The document runs to 649 pages, with the dead listed largely by age. Gaza’s population is youthful, and the register underlines the high toll of Israeli attacks on Palestinian children.

More than 100 pages are filled with the names of victims under 10 years old, and the first adult names do not appear until page 215.

Israeli officials question the death toll given by the authorities in Gaza, arguing that because Hamas controls the government there, Gaza’s health officials cannot provide reliable figures.

However, doctors and civil servants in the territory have a credible record from past wars. After several conflicts between 2009 and 2021, United Nations investigators drew up their own lists of the dead and found they closely matched ones from Gaza.

“Unfortunately, we have the sad experience of coordinating with the ministry of health on casualty figures every few years,” Farhan Haq, a spokesperson for the UN secretary general, has said. “Their figures have proven to be generally accurate.”

Palestinian authorities have been regularly updating the lists of those confirmed dead. This latest release adds more than 2,000 names.

It does not distinguish between civilians and fighters, but a majority of the 34,344 dead can be identified as civilians based on age and gender alone. It includes 11,355 children, 2,955 people aged 60 or older, and 6,297 women. There are also many civilian men of fighting age who have been killed.

Israel claims it has killed 17,000 militants, without providing evidence. It does not provide an estimate of civilians killed in Gaza.

The official death toll provided by health authorities does not tell the full story of Palestinian losses, because it excludes people buried under the rubble of collapsed buildings, and those not directly killed by bombs or bullets.

About 10,000 people killed by airstrikes are thought to remain entombed in collapsed buildings, because there has been little heavy equipment or fuel to dig through steel and concrete ruins to look for them, according to health officials.

Hunger, lack of shelter and medication, the rapid spread of infectious diseases and the collapse of the healthcare system has claimed many other lives. Palestinian authorities plan to count those dead when the fighting stops, Dr Marwan al-Hams, the director of field hospitals at the ministry of health, has said.

Sean “Diddy” Combs was denied bail and ordered to jail on Tuesday as he faces charges of sex trafficking and racketeering that were included in a federal indictment unsealed on the same day, alleging that he also engaged in kidnapping, forced labor, bribery and other crimes.

Combs, 54, appeared in court in New York and pleaded not guilty, after he was arrested in connection with the charges late on Monday in Manhattan. His apprehension came roughly six months after federal authorities conducting a sex-trafficking investigation raided his homes in Los Angeles and Miami.

Federal judge Robyn Tarnofsky heard lengthy arguments from prosecutors and Combs’s lawyers and decided the defendant should remain in federal detention.

Combs took a long sip of water from a bottle after bail was denied and was led out of court without being handcuffed, as he looked towards relatives in the public gallery.

“Mr Combs is a fighter. He’s going to fight this to the end. He’s innocent,” his lawyer, Marc Agnifilo, said after court, pledging to appeal the bail decision.

The three-count, 14-page indictment alleges racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking by force, fraud or coercion, and transportation to engage in prostitution.

The document contains remarkably graphic details, including that Combs would force sex-trafficking victims to engage in group sex acts with associates of his that he referred to as “freak offs” – sometimes for days at a time – while he recorded video of the encounters and masturbated to them. The encounters were so physically exhausting for him and his victims – whom he would force to ingest drugs – that all “typically received IV fluids to recover”, the indictment said.

“For decades, SEAN COMBS, a/k/a ‘Puff Daddy,’ a/k/a ‘P Diddy,’ a/k/a ‘Diddy,’ a/k/a ‘PD,’ a/k/a ‘Love,’ the defendant, abused, threatened, and coerced women and others around him to fulfill his sexual desires, protect his reputation, and conceal his conduct,” the indictment reads.

Combs’s alleged criminal conspiracy, the indictment says, “relied on employees, resources, and influence of the multi-faceted business empire that he led and controlled – creating a criminal enterprise whose members and associates engaged in, and attempted to engage in, among other crimes, sex trafficking, forced labor, kidnapping, arson, bribery, and obstruction of justice”.

It is unclear whether the arson allegation may refer to singer Casandra Ventura’s lawsuit – in which she stated that Combs purportedly threatened to blow up the rapper Kid Cudi’s car in 2012 after the latter man briefly dated her.

Cudi’s car allegedly exploded in the driveway of his residence. A statement that he provided to the New York Times later said the allegations in Ventura’s lawsuit were “all true”.

The indictment said Combs tasked his employees with providing everything from lubricant to drugs for the alleged “freak offs”.

“Freak Offs occurred regularly, sometimes lasted multiple days, and often involved multiple commercial sex workers,” the complaint says. Combs would direct the sex acts at the center of the freaks offs while he also “distributed a variety of controlled substances to victims, in part to keep the victims obedient and compliant”.

His supervisors, security, hotel staff and assistants would allegedly stock up on drugs and lubricant, procure baby oil, extra linens and specialized lighting, and book hotel rooms and travel arrangements.

When investigators raided Combs’s homes in Miami and Los Angeles in March, they seized drugs, more than 1,000 bottles of baby oil and lubricant and three AR-15 rifles.

Contained in the complaint are apparent references to Ventura, Combs’s former girlfriend who made allegations of sexual abuse last year that Combs quickly settled out of court. He was recorded beating her in the hallway of a Los Angeles hotel in 2016, video of which surfaced only earlier this year.

The indictment suggests Combs “attempted to bribe [a hotel] staff member to ensure silence” after that assault, which the indictment describes without naming Ventura.

The government adds that – from at least 2009 – Combs “assaulted women by, among other things, striking, punching, dragging, throwing objects at, and kicking them”.

Combs appeared in Manhattan federal court wearing a black T-shirt and gray sweatpants and looked toward his sons in the public gallery.

His lawyers tried unsuccessfully to keep him out of jail, requesting his release to home detention and travel restrictions as well as a $50m bond secured on the basis of his home in Miami. They said in a motion that Combs would turn over his passport and that he was attempting to sell his private jet. They said that “conditions at Metropolitan detention center in Brooklyn are not fit for pre-trial detention”.

Prosecutors said Combs repeatedly engaged in violence towards his employees and others – and that Combs’s allies set fire to a vehicle by slicing open its convertible top and dropping a Molotov cocktail inside.

They argued that Combs was “a serious flight risk” and that his net worth was close to $1bn, including more than $1m in personal cash on hand as of last December.

Combs “has the money, manpower and tools” to flee without detection, they wrote, adding Combs’s “disposition to violence cannot be reasonably prevented through bail conditions”.

Prosecutor Damian Williams, the US attorney, said: “Combs led and participated in a racketeering conspiracy that used the business empire he controlled to carry out criminal activity, including sex trafficking, forced labor, kidnapping, arson, bribery and the obstruction of justice.”

Since last year, Combs has been sued by people who say he subjected them to physical or sexual abuse and has denied many of those allegations.

Combs has become a hip-hop industry pariah.

The flood of allegations against him began in November, when Ventura filed a lawsuit saying he had beaten and raped her for years. She accused Combs of coercing her and others into unwanted sex in drug-fueled settings.

Combs settled the suit in a single day.

Nonetheless, the settlement did not prevent CNN from airing hotel security footage in May that showed Combs punching and kicking Cassie and throwing her on a floor eight years earlier.

After the video aired, Combs apologized, saying: “I was disgusted when I did it.” His apology contradicted years of denials that he was abusive.

Douglas Wigdor, a lawyer for Cassie, said in a statement on Tuesday: “Neither Ms Ventura nor I have any comment.”

Combs and his attorneys, however, denied similar allegations made by others in a series of pending lawsuits: a woman has alleged Combs raped her two decades ago when she was 17; a music producer alleged Combs forced him to have sex with prostitutes; and another woman, April Lampros, alleged Combs subjected her to “terrifying sexual encounters” starting when she was a college student in 1994.

More recently, the singer Dawn Richard – who formed part of the Combs-founded girl group Danity Kane – filed a lawsuit alleging sexual assault and inhumane treatment. And Combs’s legal team has also moved to overturn a $100m judgment awarded by default to an incarcerated man in Michigan after the plaintiff’s allegations were not contested in court by the music mogul.

A false claim circulating on social media that Kamala Harris was involved in an alleged hit-and-run in San Francisco in 2011 is the work of a covert Russian disinformation operation, according to new research by Microsoft.

Researchers found that the group created a video, paid an actor to appear as the alleged victim, and spread the claim through a fake website for a nonexistent San Francisco news outlet named KBSF-TV. The Russian group responsible, which Microsoft dubs Storm-1516, is described as a Kremlin-aligned troll farm.

Microsoft said the discovery was a sign of Russia ramping up its foreign influence efforts ahead of the 5 November presidential election, Microsoft said. A spokesperson for the Russian embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment from Reuters.

“Russian influence operations initially struggled to pivot operations aimed at the Democratic campaign following president Biden’s departure from the US 2024 presidential race,” a blog published on Tuesday by Microsoft said.

“In late August, however, elements of prolific Russian actor Storm-1516 began producing content implicating vice-president Harris and governor Walz in outlandish fake conspiracy theories,” Microsoft said, referring to Harris’ running mate, Tim Walz.

Storm-1516 is known for producing misleading videos featuring on-screen or voice actors who impersonate whistleblowers or journalists that share false, scandalous information, experts say.

A website for KBSF-TV was created shortly before publishing its first related article about the alleged driving incident, according to online registration records. The false claim – that the Democratic presidential candidate left a 13-year-old girl paralysed in a hit-and-run – circulated on social media platforms, including X, formerly known as Twitter using the hashtag #HitAndRunKamala.

In total, it is estimated the video has been viewed more than 2.7m times.

“Many entities within the pro-Russian ecosystem advanced the video and its claims,” said Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center.

Earlier this month the US justice department filed money-laundering charges against two employees of Russian state media network RT for what officials said was a scheme to hire an American company to produce online content to influence the election.

US officials say Russia’s goal is to exacerbate US political divisions and weaken public support for American military aid to Ukraine. Harris says if elected she will continue supporting Ukraine in its defence against Russia’s invasion.

On Tuesday, Kamala Harris was interviewed by a panel of three National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) members, during which the vice-president talked about the anti-immigrant sentiment toward Haitians in Springfield, Ohio; Israel’s war in Gaza; domestic economic issues; gun violence; and reproductive rights. The conversation was one of the few interviews Harris has done since becoming the Democratic nominee, and it served as an opportunity for her to reaffirm policies.

When asked about “where [she] sees the line in terms of aggression and defense” in regards to the war, she said that she supported the Biden administration’s one-time pause on the delivery of 2,000lb bombs to Israel as “leverage” that they “have had and used”, but that achieving a deal was the real means to ending the war.

“We have to agree that not only must we end this war, but we have to have a goal of a two-state solution because there must be stability and peace in that region,” she said, “inasmuch as our goal must be to ensure that Israelis have security and Palestinians in equal measure have security, self determination, dignity”.

When asked what mechanisms the US has to support Palestinian self-determination, and whether or not it was even possible, as Israel’s ally, to support such a goal, Harris responded saying that she believed that it was. She described meetings with Israeli and Arab leaders to “talk about how we can construct a day-after scenario”.

She said that her “goals” are that there be no reoccupation of Gaza, no changing of the territorial lines in Gaza and “an ability to have security in the region for all concerned in a way that we create stability”.

Harris was also asked about the false and racist tropes that Donald Trump and JD Vance have espoused about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, which has resulted in bomb threats and lockdowns in the city.

“It’s a crying shame. I mean, my heart breaks for this community,” Harris said. “There were children, elementary school children, [for whom] it was school photo day. Do you remember what that’s like, going to school on picture day? Dressed up in their best, got all ready, knew what they were going to wear the night before. And had to be evacuated. Children. Children.”

Harris described “a whole community put in fear”, and harkened back to her career as a prosecutor, during which she said she learned the importance of power.

“When you have these positions, when you have that kind of microphone in front of you, you really ought to learn how much your words have meaning,” she said. “I learned at a very young stage in my career that the meaning of my words could impact whether someone was free or in prison … When you are bestowed with a microphone that is that big, there is a profound responsibility that comes with that.”

Harris said elected officials, particularly the president, have been bestowed with public trust.

“I know that people are deeply troubled by what is happening to that community in Springfield, Ohio, and it’s gotta stop,” she said. “We’ve gotta say that you cannot be entrusted with standing behind the seal of the president of the United States of America engaging in that hateful rhetoric that, as usual, is designed to divide us as a country.”

The conversation shifted to young Black male voters who, according to polling, are considering voting for Trump as they see him as better for the economy.

“What is your message to young Black male voters who feel left out of this economy, and how can your economic policies materially change their lives?” one journalist asked.

“I think it’s very important to not operate from the assumption that Black men are in anybody’s pocket,” Harris replied. “Black men are like any other voting group – you gotta earn the vote. So I am working to earn the vote, and not assuming I’m going to have it because I am Black, but because the policies and perspectives I have understand what we must do to recognize the needs for all communities.”

In regards to economic opportunity for Black men, Harris acknowledged that many Black male entrepreneurs lack the relationships and capital necessary to see their ideas come to fruition. As vice-president, she said, she has worked to increase access to funding for small businesses. In what she called her “opportunity economy”, Harris said she would extend small-business tax deductions to $50,000. She also said that she would work to alleviate the consequences of medical debt for Black voters.

“One in four Black families or individuals is more likely to carry medical debt than others, so part of my perspective, and as vice-president, part of the work that we have done, is to say that we’re going to eliminate medical debt from being on your credit score,” she said.

On HB40, a bill that would create a commission to examine US slavery, Harris said that she would not make an executive order, and that she would leave such a decision to Congress, but that “we need to speak truth about the generational impact of our history in terms of the generational impact of slavery, the generational impact of redlining, of Jim Crow. These are facts that have had impact.”

Harris again highlighted her “opportunity economy”, which she said would help address “explicitly the obstacles that historically and presently exist”, including student loan debt, medical debt, bias in home appraisals and Black maternal mortality. Though she said she didn’t minimize the importance of executive orders, Harris said Congress’s ability to substantially and publicly handle the conversation around US history was vital.

Last month during its annual conference, NABJ hosted Trump for a live panel conversation, where the ex-president insulted the organization and its members and made false claims about Harris’s racial identity.

JD Vance defended his comments about Haitian immigrants eating pets during a Tuesday rally, saying that “the media has a responsibility to fact-check” stories – not him.

The rally in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, came two days after the Ohio senator told CNN host Dana Bash it was OK “to create stories” to draw attention to issues his constituents care about, regarding inflammatory and unfounded claims that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, had eaten residents’ pets.

The comments, in which he appeared to say that politicians can brazenly lie, drew immediate rebuke. But during his rally, Vance defended them and claimed that numerous constituents had told him “they’d seen something in Springfield”.

“On top of it, if there are certain people who refuse to listen to them, who refuse to take their concerns seriously,” he said, “that’s when it’s my job as United States senator to listen to my constituents.”

Vance took questions from reporters but knocked the press repeatedly, a line of attack that brought the crowd to their feet.

“When I said – and the media always does this, they’re very dishonest – when I say that I created a story, I’m talking about the media story, by focusing the press’s intention on what’s going on in Springfield,” said Vance.

During his speech to a crowd of several hundred people, Vance spoke at length about immigration, invoking a crime committed by an undocumented person in the town of Prairie du Chien that Republicans in the state have already seized on to bolster Republican claims about immigrants committing violent crimes. In fact, research shows immigrants do not commit crimes at a higher rate than people born in the US.

“Every community is a border state,” said Vance. “The problems that Kamala Harris has imported through that American southern border have now gone nationwide.”

He also blamed the vice-president for the recent apparent assassination attempt at Mar-a-Lago.

“The American media, the Democrats, the Kamala Harris campaign, they’ve gotta cut this crap out or they’re gonna get somebody killed,” said Vance, alleging that Democrats, who have highlighted Trump’s authoritarian rhetoric and attempts to overturn the 2020 election, are to blame for the two apparent assassination attempts that Trump has faced so far during his 2024 campaign.

Vance described a chaotic, dark, and violent vision of the US under a Harris presidency.

“We are closer, in this moment, to a nuclear war, or a third world war, than at any time in our country’s history and we have the chaos and incompetence of Kamala Harris to thank for it,” the Republican vice-presidential nominee said during a campaign event in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.

Vance’s message, especially on immigration, was well-received by the crowd.

“You don’t know who’s coming across that border. You don’t know the violence or the background of those people,” said Victoria Bischel, who owns a farm and a real estate business and appreciated Vance’s comments. “I believe in immigration. I believe in legal immigration […] I don’t hop over the fence to Saudi Arabia and decide that I want to live there.”

Arizona’s top elections official said on Tuesday that a newly identified error in the state’s voter registration process needs to be swiftly resolved, as early ballots are set to go out to some voters as soon as this week.

Election staff in the Maricopa county recorder’s office identified an issue last week, which concerns voters with old driver’s licenses who may never have provided documentary proof of citizenship but were coded as having provided it and therefore were able to vote full ballots. The state has a bifurcated system in which voters who do not provide documentary proof of citizenship cannot vote in local or state elections, only federal ones.

Because of the state’s very close elections and status as a swing state, the issue affecting nearly 100,000 voters will probably be the subject of intense scrutiny and litigation in the coming weeks. Arizona has more than 4.1 million registered voters.

Governor Katie Hobbs directed the motor vehicles division to fix the coding error, which the secretary of state, Adrian Fontes, said was already resolved going forward.

It is not clear if any of these voters have unlawfully cast a ballot or if they have already provided proof of citizenship. People who register to vote check a box on registration forms, under penalty of perjury, declaring they are citizens.

“We have no reason to believe that there are any significant numbers of individuals remaining on this list who are not eligible to vote in Arizona,” Fontes said in a press conference on Tuesday. “We cannot confirm that at this moment, but we don’t have any reason to believe that.”

The error, reported by Votebeat on Tuesday, relates to several quirks of Arizona governance.

Since 1996, Arizona residents have been required to show proof of citizenship to get a regular driver’s license. And since 2004, they have been required to show proof of citizenship to vote in state and local elections.

State driver’s licenses also do not expire until a driver is age 65, meaning some residents will have a valid license for decades before needing renewal. These factors play into the error.

The issue has split the Republican recorder in the state’s largest county, Maricopa, and the Democratic secretary of state. Recorder Stephen Richer is arguing that these voters should only be able to cast a federal-only ballot, while Fontes says the state should keep the status quo of allowing them to vote full ballots given how soon the election is. Fontes directed counties to allow these residents to cast full ballots this year.

Arizona is home to a strong election denial movement, and the issue is likely to play into these narratives. Republicans have for months been stoking fears about non-citizens voting in the November election in Arizona and nationwide, despite a lack of evidence that non-citizens are voting in any meaningful numbers.

Richer wrote on X that his office would be suing Fontes’s office over this, saying because they disagree, the courts will provide “a clear answer”. Richer’s office identified the issue, which affects all counties in the state. The lawsuit was filed on Tuesday afternoon, and in it, the recorder’s office said it had discovered the issue by identifying a non-citizen who was erroneously registered to vote, though the person had not cast a ballot in the past.

“All of these people have attested under penalty of law that they are U.S. citizens. And, in all likelihood, they [are] almost all U.S. Citizens,” Richer wrote on X, adding that they had not provided proof.

The group in question contains approximately 98,000 voters. Fontes said the “plurality” of these residents are Republican and between ages 45 and 60, receiving driver’s licenses before 1996.

“If you are on this list, rest assured you will be contacted soon by Arizona elections officials,” Fontes said. But, he added, elections offices first want the courts to weigh in before reaching out to voters “willy-nilly”.

As described by Votebeat, the problem relates to people who “first obtained their Arizona driver’s license before October 1996 and then were issued a duplicate replacement before registering to vote sometime after 2004”.

Elections officials would look at voter registration forms to see when licenses were updated to see if the dates meant people had submitted the required proof of citizenship. For dates after October 1996, officials assumed paperwork was in order. But, unbeknown to elections officials, the motor vehicles division’s system would update the license issuance date when people replaced or updated their licenses, making it look like the license was newer and would have included proof of citizenship.

The error has occurred, seemingly unnoticed, since 2005, the lawsuit says.

The adoptive mother of ballerina Michaela Mabinty DePrince, who died suddenly at age 29 last week, died less than 24 hours later of an unrelated illness. Elaine DePrince died on 11 September during “a routine procedure in preparation for a surgery”, according to a statement from family spokesperson Jess Volinski. She was 77.

“The last few days have been even more difficult than most people realize because the family has also been dealing with the death of Michaela’s adoptive mother Elaine DePrince,” Volinski wrote in a statement on Facebook.

Michaela’s death, on 10 September, was announced on 13 September. No cause has been revealed. A day later, the family revealed that Elaine, who adopted Michaela at the age of four from Sierra Leone, died without knowledge of her daughter’s death the day prior.

“As unbelievable as it may seem, the two deaths were completely unrelated,” said Volinski. “The only way we can make sense of the senseless is that Elaine, who had already lost three children many years ago, was by the grace of God spared the pain of experiencing the loss of a fourth child.”

Elaine and her husband Charles, who died in 2020, adopted three boys with hemophilia in the 1980s, according to the New York Times; all three contracted and died of HIV in the 1990s, as did many other people with hemophilia. Inspired by one of their adopted sons, Michael, the DePrinces flew to Sierra Leone in 1999 to adopt a girl orphaned by the civil war. Michaela DePrince, born Mabinty Bangura, lost her parents to the war and shared a bed at an orphanage with another girl, also named Mabinty.

“I got a call from the adoption agency,” Elaine told NBC News in 2017. “They said, ‘Which Mabinty are you adopting? We have two of them.’” When Elaine was told that Michaela had been turned down by several families because of the skin condition vitiligo, she decided to adopt both, renamed Michaela Mabinty DePrince and Mia Mabinty DePrince.

Inspired by a picture of a ballerina at a very young age, Michaela went on to study ballet after moving to Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and later Vermont. She studied at the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School at American Ballet Theatre in New York, appeared in the award-winning documentary First Position and performed in Beyoncé’s 2016 visual album Lemonade. At 17, she joined the Dance Theatre of Harlem as the youngest member of the company, and went on to perform with the Dutch National Ballet and the Boston Ballet.

“What the family is going through right now is truly unimaginably painful,” said Volinski in the family statement. “Grieving two family members who died within a 24-hour period is tragic and devastating. We continue to ask for privacy and appreciate you directing anyone sharing incorrect information and speculation to this post.”

Elaine DePrince was a mother to 11 children and worked as a special education teacher. She is survived by her children Mia, Amie, Jaye, Mariel, Bee, Erik and Adam.

The adoptive mother of ballerina Michaela Mabinty DePrince, who died suddenly at age 29 last week, died less than 24 hours later of an unrelated illness. Elaine DePrince died on 11 September during “a routine procedure in preparation for a surgery”, according to a statement from family spokesperson Jess Volinski. She was 77.

“The last few days have been even more difficult than most people realize because the family has also been dealing with the death of Michaela’s adoptive mother Elaine DePrince,” Volinski wrote in a statement on Facebook.

Michaela’s death, on 10 September, was announced on 13 September. No cause has been revealed. A day later, the family revealed that Elaine, who adopted Michaela at the age of four from Sierra Leone, died without knowledge of her daughter’s death the day prior.

“As unbelievable as it may seem, the two deaths were completely unrelated,” said Volinski. “The only way we can make sense of the senseless is that Elaine, who had already lost three children many years ago, was by the grace of God spared the pain of experiencing the loss of a fourth child.”

Elaine and her husband Charles, who died in 2020, adopted three boys with hemophilia in the 1980s, according to the New York Times; all three contracted and died of HIV in the 1990s, as did many other people with hemophilia. Inspired by one of their adopted sons, Michael, the DePrinces flew to Sierra Leone in 1999 to adopt a girl orphaned by the civil war. Michaela DePrince, born Mabinty Bangura, lost her parents to the war and shared a bed at an orphanage with another girl, also named Mabinty.

“I got a call from the adoption agency,” Elaine told NBC News in 2017. “They said, ‘Which Mabinty are you adopting? We have two of them.’” When Elaine was told that Michaela had been turned down by several families because of the skin condition vitiligo, she decided to adopt both, renamed Michaela Mabinty DePrince and Mia Mabinty DePrince.

Inspired by a picture of a ballerina at a very young age, Michaela went on to study ballet after moving to Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and later Vermont. She studied at the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School at American Ballet Theatre in New York, appeared in the award-winning documentary First Position and performed in Beyoncé’s 2016 visual album Lemonade. At 17, she joined the Dance Theatre of Harlem as the youngest member of the company, and went on to perform with the Dutch National Ballet and the Boston Ballet.

“What the family is going through right now is truly unimaginably painful,” said Volinski in the family statement. “Grieving two family members who died within a 24-hour period is tragic and devastating. We continue to ask for privacy and appreciate you directing anyone sharing incorrect information and speculation to this post.”

Elaine DePrince was a mother to 11 children and worked as a special education teacher. She is survived by her children Mia, Amie, Jaye, Mariel, Bee, Erik and Adam.

The first picture of the Titan submersible following its deadly June 2023 implosion was revealed on Monday by the US Coast Guard as authorities opened a public hearing into the deaths of five people onboard.

The accident’s victims were killed when intense ocean pressure caused the Titan to collapse in on itself off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada. They were the British explorer Hamish Harding; the British Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman; Stockton Rush, the chief executive officer of OceanGate, the American company that owned the Titan; and the French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet.

Monday’s hearing revealed new details about the implosion of the Titan and its parent company.

The newly released image provided most of the public its first glimpse of the Titan’s broken tail cone on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. Fragments of the vessel are also visible on the ocean floor – debris that recovery crews found in the wake of the implosion.

The Marine Board of Investigation said the Titan’s detached tail cone and other debris provided “conclusive evidence” that the vessel experienced a “catastrophic implosion”, CNN reported.

Text messages sent from the Titan’s crew to the Polar Prince, a nearby support ship, also gave new insight into the accident.

At one point during its ill-fated trip, the Titan was asked by the Polar Prince if the former could still see the latter on its informational display. The crew responded “all good here” as the vessel descended further.

In a final message, Titan’s crew texted “dropped two wts”, CNN reported, meaning that the submersible had shed two measures of weight in hopes of returning to the ocean’s surface.

OceanGate, the company that developed the Titan, has faced endured scrutiny as witnesses have come forward saying they had concerns about the vessel’s construction before its doomed final trip.

Tony Nissen, the former engineering director for OceanGate, said that he felt rushed to get the Titan into the water, testifying that he “100%” experienced pressure from higher-ups to do so.

Tym Catterson, who worked as a contractor for OceanGate, testified on Monday that he was not comfortable traveling in the Titan because of his questions regarding the vessel’s carbon fiber and titanium construction, ABC News reported.

“I don’t believe that the composites are the correct material for a pressure vessel that’s experiencing external compression,” he said, adding that he had “doubts”.

Catterson also said that he relayed his worries to several OceanGate employees.

The hearing began on Monday and is expected to continue for two weeks. It is meant to “uncover the facts surrounding” the Titan’s fatal implosion, said Jason Neubauer, the chair of the Marine Board of Investigation. It will also investigate any potential “misconduct or negligence by … mariners” credentialed to navigate by the US.

Those traveling on the Titan were killed after descending into the deep north Atlantic to view the Titanic, the British passenger liner that was once described as “practically unsinkable” but sank in 1912 after striking an iceberg, killing more than 1,500 people.

The world is spending at least $2.6tn (£2tn) a year on subsidies that drive global heating and destroy nature, according to new analysis.

Governments continue to provide billions of dollars in tax breaks, subsidies and other spending that directly work against the goals of the 2015 Paris climate agreement and the 2022 Kunming-Montreal agreement to halt biodiversity loss, the research from the organisation Earth Track found, with countries providing direct support for deforestation, water pollution and fossil fuel consumption.

Examples include state support for large fishing vessels that drive overfishing, and government policies that subsidise petrol, synthetic fertilisers and monoculture crop production.

The report found that the annual total of environmentally harmful subsidies has increased by more than $800bn – or $500bn when adjusted for inflation – since the authors last published an analysis in 2022. The increase was driven by the consequences of the war in Ukraine, which caused fossil fuel subsidies to increase sharply.

Christiana Figueres, who was UN climate change head during the Paris agreement negotiations, said environmentally harmful subsidies were an existential issue and governments urgently needed to provide policy coherence on the environment.

“Two years on from the signing of the landmark biodiversity plan, we continue to finance our own extinction, putting people and our resilience at huge risk. Estimates are higher than previously thought – with at least $2.6tn now funding the destruction of nature, endangering the chances of meeting our nature and climate goals,” she said.

The report’s authors, who are leading experts on subsidies, said a significant proportion of the $2.6tn – which is equivalent to about 2.5% of global GDP – could be repurposed for policies that benefit people and nature. Nearly all the world’s governments pledged to do this as part of the UN Kunming-Montreal biodiversity agreement at Cop15 in December 2022.

Doug Koplow and Ronald Steenblik said their calculation was probably an underestimate due to poor quality data. Many governments are unaware of the true extent of environmentally harmful subsidies, despite promising to identify them by 2025, they said, although Brazil, the Netherlands and the EU are among those working to better understand their scale.

Koplow said: “Environmentally harmful subsidies are subsidies that governments give in many different forms – not just cash – that have the result of accelerating natural resource extraction, damage to natural habitats and pollution.”

Less than two years ago, at Cop15, governments pledged to repurpose at least $500m of the subsidies a year by 2030. Governments will meet again at Cop16 in Colombia next month, for their first meeting since the promise was made. The report’s authors urged them to make good on their commitment.

“The issue with a lot of these subsidies is that they’re very poorly targeted,” said Steenblik. “We’ve seen places like Nigeria where they’ve tried to reform subsidies, [and] there’s a huge backlash because the general public sees it as the only benefit they’re getting out of the government. They [were] spending more on fuel subsidies than education or health,” he said.

Heat pumps and insulation are examples of subsidies that would help people and the environment.

Eva Zabey, the CEO of Business for Nature, said action on environmentally harmful subsidies was critical to the success of this decade’s UN biodiversity agreement.

“It’s about systems transformation underpinned by valuing nature in decision-making. We’ve got this vicious cycle: the more people are dependent on these subsidies, the more the subsidies will remain and we won’t be transitioning away,” she said.

• Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow the biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield on X for all the latest news and features.

The bestselling writer John Grisham has joined scores of bipartisan politicians, lawyers, scientists and doctors in sounding the alarm that Texas is about to execute an innocent man convicted of a crime that never happened.

Grisham, whose legal thrillers have been turned into such Hollywood blockbusters as The Firm and The Pelican Brief, spoke out on Tuesday about the case of Robert Roberson, 57. Roberson has been on death row in Texas for more than 20 years for violently shaking to death his two-year-old daughter, Nikki.

Roberson is scheduled for execution on 17 October. Should his death by lethal injection go ahead he would be the first person in the US executed on the basis of “shaken baby syndrome” – a medical hypothesis from the 1970s that has been widely debunked as a form of junk science.

“What’s amazing about Robert’s case is that there was no crime,” Grisham told reporters. “In most death conviction cases, you’ve got a murder and somebody did it, but in Robert’s case there was no crime and yet we’re about to kill somebody for it in Texas. It’s so infuriating.”

Grisham’s comments came as Roberson’s lawyers filed a 62-page clemency petition with the Texas board of pardons and paroles calling for a commutation of his death sentence. The petition is a last chance for the prisoner, who is now at the mercy of the courts or Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, to whom the board reports.

As his execution date on 17 October approaches, Roberson’s options are closing down. Last week the Texas court of criminal appeals denied his appeal.

The petition sets out boldly for Roberson’s innocence, stating that this is a case not of the wrong man having been condemned, but one in which the crime for which he was accused never even happened. It says: “No offense occurred … Mr Roberson is actually innocent of the offense for which he was convicted and sentenced to death based on pseudo-science that has since been discredited.”

Grisham said he was keen to get involved in the campaign to save Roberson’s life because “I just have a real anger at these cases. I can’t let them go, I think about them all the time. Especially a case like Roberts where we are a month away, the clock is ticking, and yet we have clear scientific proof that he didn’t kill Nikki.”

The author began life working as a lawyer in criminal cases in a small town in Mississippi. He wrote his first novel, A Time to Kill, in 1989 and went on to have a stream of bestsellers.

In 2006 he wrote his first non-fiction book, the Innocent Man, about Ron Williamson who was wrongly convicted of rape and murder and put on death row in Oklahoma until he was exonerated in 1999. From there, Grisham joined the board of the Innocence Project and Centurion Ministries which have helped to exonerate at least 200 people from death row in the US over the past half-century.

His next book, Framed, which comes out two days before Roberson’s scheduled execution, is a non-fiction work that narrates 10 true stories of people who were wrongly found guilty by a system distorted by racism, corruption and flawed testimony. “I’m up to my ears in wrongful convictions,” he said.

Grisham is not the only public figure to back Roberson in his final countdown to death. More than 30 prominent scientists and doctors, a cross-party group of 84 Texas legislators, 70 lawyers who have represented clients wrongly accused of child abuse, and a range of autism advocacy groups lent their support on Tuesday to this last-ditch effort to reprieve the prisoner.

The clemency petition argues that Roberson’s conviction was based on three serious mistakes. When Nikki was rushed to hospital in February 2002 in a comatose state, medical personnel concluded that she had been violently shaken without looking at her actual medical record.

On the back of that initial error, law enforcement officials and doctors failed to investigate further. As a result, they missed critical symptoms, including that the girl was ill with a fever of 104.5F (40.3C) shortly before she fell unconscious, had undiagnosed pneumonia, and had been given medical drugs that have since been deemed life-threatening for children – all of which could explain her dire state.

The third mistake, the petition argues, is that detectives and medical staff who came into contact with Roberson, unaware that he was autistic, interpreted his non-expressive demeanor as the posture of a callous killer and not as a product of his condition.

Brian Wharton, the lead detective in the case who testified against Roberson at trial, now believes that the entire prosecution that he spearheaded was based on a fallacy. Last year he told the Guardian: “There was no crime scene, no forensic evidence. It was just three words: shaken baby syndrome. Without them, he would be a free man today.”

Shaken baby syndrome, or SBS for short, is a child abuse theory that emerged in the early 1970s. It was hailed as an explanation for why some children presented with severe, and sometimes fatal, illness with signs of internal head trauma but little or no sign of external injury.

An early proponent of the theory was a British pediatric neurosurgeon, Norman Guthkelch, who in 1971 posited that violent shaking of the child could be a possible cause. The concept spread rapidly until it had the status of received knowledge.

Since then, however, leading scientists have questioned the reliability of SBS, both as a medical diagnosis and as a forensic methodology used in criminal cases. More than 80 alternative non-violent causes of the symptoms have been identified, including short falls and illness – both of which were evident in Nikki’s case.

Doubts have grown about the syndrome to the extent that many authorities now consider it unreliable, including Guthkelch himself who has expressed alarm about how the theory had been used to prosecute thousands of parents for child abuse. Concern has spread across the criminal justice system and 32 individuals convicted on the basis of SBS have been exonerated since 1993, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.

Grisham likened Roberson’s case to that of Cameron Todd Willingham who was executed by Texas in 2004 for murdering his three young children. Willingham was accused of setting fire to the family home on the basis of forensic arson theories that were found to have been junk science.

“Twenty years ago Texas executed a guy for a crime that never occurred,” Grisham said. “Now here we are 20 years later and we’re down to another execution where there was no crime and where the science has been debunked. Texas is about to execute another innocent man.”

The bestselling writer John Grisham has joined scores of bipartisan politicians, lawyers, scientists and doctors in sounding the alarm that Texas is about to execute an innocent man convicted of a crime that never happened.

Grisham, whose legal thrillers have been turned into such Hollywood blockbusters as The Firm and The Pelican Brief, spoke out on Tuesday about the case of Robert Roberson, 57. Roberson has been on death row in Texas for more than 20 years for violently shaking to death his two-year-old daughter, Nikki.

Roberson is scheduled for execution on 17 October. Should his death by lethal injection go ahead he would be the first person in the US executed on the basis of “shaken baby syndrome” – a medical hypothesis from the 1970s that has been widely debunked as a form of junk science.

“What’s amazing about Robert’s case is that there was no crime,” Grisham told reporters. “In most death conviction cases, you’ve got a murder and somebody did it, but in Robert’s case there was no crime and yet we’re about to kill somebody for it in Texas. It’s so infuriating.”

Grisham’s comments came as Roberson’s lawyers filed a 62-page clemency petition with the Texas board of pardons and paroles calling for a commutation of his death sentence. The petition is a last chance for the prisoner, who is now at the mercy of the courts or Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, to whom the board reports.

As his execution date on 17 October approaches, Roberson’s options are closing down. Last week the Texas court of criminal appeals denied his appeal.

The petition sets out boldly for Roberson’s innocence, stating that this is a case not of the wrong man having been condemned, but one in which the crime for which he was accused never even happened. It says: “No offense occurred … Mr Roberson is actually innocent of the offense for which he was convicted and sentenced to death based on pseudo-science that has since been discredited.”

Grisham said he was keen to get involved in the campaign to save Roberson’s life because “I just have a real anger at these cases. I can’t let them go, I think about them all the time. Especially a case like Roberts where we are a month away, the clock is ticking, and yet we have clear scientific proof that he didn’t kill Nikki.”

The author began life working as a lawyer in criminal cases in a small town in Mississippi. He wrote his first novel, A Time to Kill, in 1989 and went on to have a stream of bestsellers.

In 2006 he wrote his first non-fiction book, the Innocent Man, about Ron Williamson who was wrongly convicted of rape and murder and put on death row in Oklahoma until he was exonerated in 1999. From there, Grisham joined the board of the Innocence Project and Centurion Ministries which have helped to exonerate at least 200 people from death row in the US over the past half-century.

His next book, Framed, which comes out two days before Roberson’s scheduled execution, is a non-fiction work that narrates 10 true stories of people who were wrongly found guilty by a system distorted by racism, corruption and flawed testimony. “I’m up to my ears in wrongful convictions,” he said.

Grisham is not the only public figure to back Roberson in his final countdown to death. More than 30 prominent scientists and doctors, a cross-party group of 84 Texas legislators, 70 lawyers who have represented clients wrongly accused of child abuse, and a range of autism advocacy groups lent their support on Tuesday to this last-ditch effort to reprieve the prisoner.

The clemency petition argues that Roberson’s conviction was based on three serious mistakes. When Nikki was rushed to hospital in February 2002 in a comatose state, medical personnel concluded that she had been violently shaken without looking at her actual medical record.

On the back of that initial error, law enforcement officials and doctors failed to investigate further. As a result, they missed critical symptoms, including that the girl was ill with a fever of 104.5F (40.3C) shortly before she fell unconscious, had undiagnosed pneumonia, and had been given medical drugs that have since been deemed life-threatening for children – all of which could explain her dire state.

The third mistake, the petition argues, is that detectives and medical staff who came into contact with Roberson, unaware that he was autistic, interpreted his non-expressive demeanor as the posture of a callous killer and not as a product of his condition.

Brian Wharton, the lead detective in the case who testified against Roberson at trial, now believes that the entire prosecution that he spearheaded was based on a fallacy. Last year he told the Guardian: “There was no crime scene, no forensic evidence. It was just three words: shaken baby syndrome. Without them, he would be a free man today.”

Shaken baby syndrome, or SBS for short, is a child abuse theory that emerged in the early 1970s. It was hailed as an explanation for why some children presented with severe, and sometimes fatal, illness with signs of internal head trauma but little or no sign of external injury.

An early proponent of the theory was a British pediatric neurosurgeon, Norman Guthkelch, who in 1971 posited that violent shaking of the child could be a possible cause. The concept spread rapidly until it had the status of received knowledge.

Since then, however, leading scientists have questioned the reliability of SBS, both as a medical diagnosis and as a forensic methodology used in criminal cases. More than 80 alternative non-violent causes of the symptoms have been identified, including short falls and illness – both of which were evident in Nikki’s case.

Doubts have grown about the syndrome to the extent that many authorities now consider it unreliable, including Guthkelch himself who has expressed alarm about how the theory had been used to prosecute thousands of parents for child abuse. Concern has spread across the criminal justice system and 32 individuals convicted on the basis of SBS have been exonerated since 1993, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.

Grisham likened Roberson’s case to that of Cameron Todd Willingham who was executed by Texas in 2004 for murdering his three young children. Willingham was accused of setting fire to the family home on the basis of forensic arson theories that were found to have been junk science.

“Twenty years ago Texas executed a guy for a crime that never occurred,” Grisham said. “Now here we are 20 years later and we’re down to another execution where there was no crime and where the science has been debunked. Texas is about to execute another innocent man.”

• US secretary of state Antony Blinken was briefed during his trip to Kyiv on elements of a Ukrainian plan to push Russia to end the war, US state department spokesperson Matthew Miller said on Tuesday. Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy is expected to present the plan on the sidelines of the UN general assembly meeting in New York next week. Earlier on Tuesday, the US ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, said Washington had seen the plan. “We think it lays out a strategy and a plan that can work,” she said.

• Russian forces captured the Ukrainian town of Ukrainsk in the eastern Donetsk region on Tuesday, Russian state-run RIA news agency and pro-Russian war bloggers reported, as they advanced westwards in a bid to take the whole of the Donbas. Russian troops raised their flag on a mine ventilation shaft on the outskirts of the town, which had a population of over 10,000 people before the war, RIA reported, citing an unidentified source in the Russian military. The General Staff of Ukraine’s military, in a late evening report, said nothing about Ukrainsk changing hands, referring to it as one of several localities under Russian attack. It said 34 assaults had been recorded near the town of Pokrovsk. Reuters was unable to immediately verify battlefield claims from either side due to reporting restrictions in the war zone.

• A false claim circulating on social media that Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris left a 13-year-old girl paralysed after an alleged hit-and-run in San Francisco in 2011 is the work of a covert Russian disinformation operation, according to new research by Microsoft. Researchers found that the operation created a video, paid an actor to appear as the alleged victim, and spread the claim through a fake website for a non-existent San Francisco news outlet named “KBSF-TV”. The Russian group responsible, which Microsoft calls Storm-1516, is described as a Kremlin-aligned troll farm.

• Facebook owner Meta said on Monday it was banning RT, Rossiya Segodnya and other Russian state media networks from its platforms, claiming the outlets had used deceptive tactics to carry out covert influence operations online.
  The ban, strongly criticised by the Kremlin, marks a sharp escalation in measures by the world’s biggest social media company against Russian state media, after years of more limited steps such as blocking the outlets from running ads and reducing the reach of their posts.

• Russian forces heavily shelled an area of Ukraine’s south-eastern Zaporizhzhia region late on Tuesday, killing two people and injuring five, regional governor Ivan Fedorov said. Fedorov, writing on Telegram, said rescue teams were searching under rubble in the town of Komishuvakha, southeast of the regional centre of Zaporizhzhia.

• Ukrainian heavyweight boxing Olympic champion Oleksandr Usyk has been released after detention by law enforcement officers at Poland’s Krakow airport, Zelenskiy said on Wednesday. “I was outraged by this attitude towards our citizen and champion,” Zelenskiy said on the Telegram messaging app.
  “Our champion was released and no one is detaining him any more.” It was not immediately clear why the 37-year-old Usyk was detained. The WBC, WBO and WBA champion, who won gold at the 2012 London Olympics, has been a national hero aiding Kyiv’s war efforts. “Friends, everything is fine,” Usyk said in an Instagram post. “There was a misunderstanding that was quickly resolved. Thank you to everyone who was concerned.” Usyk’s charity fund, Usyk Foundation, aids Kyiv’s forces in the war that Russia launched with a full-scale invasion against Ukraine in 2022. It buys ambulances and delivers humanitarian aid to the front line.

The Princess of Wales has been listed in the official record of royal events for the first time since her cancer treatment ended.

Catherine was featured in the Court Circular after holding a meeting at Windsor Castle about an issue that aides in the past have described as her life’s work – the early years development of children.

She was joined on Tuesday by her household team and staff from the Royal Foundation Centre for Early Childhood, the organisation she established to promote the issue and conduct research. It is only the third time she has been mentioned in the official record of royal engagements since her health scare began at the start of the year.

The Court Circular stated: “The Princess of Wales, joint patron, the Royal Foundation of the Prince and Princess of Wales, this afternoon held an early years meeting at Windsor Castle.”

The meeting is likely to have discussed the princess’s Shaping Us campaign, which was launched last year by the centre with the aim of raising the profile of the formative years of a child’s life.

Catherine recently announced the completion of her chemotherapy treatment in video with her family, and said her focus was “doing what I can to stay cancer-free”.

The princess had been receiving chemotherapy for an undisclosed form of cancer since February, with King Charles beginning his cancer care earlier that month following his diagnosis after treatment for an enlarged prostate.

While receiving treatment, Catherine had been undertaking some work behind the scenes, meeting her staff and representatives from the centre but these were not officially recorded.

She attended the King’s birthday parade, also known as trooping the colour, in June and the following month presented the winning trophy in the men’s Wimbledon final to Carlos Alcaraz, with both events featured in the Court Circular.

The Prince of Wales was also named in the official record for Tuesday, after he visited 22 Special Air Service regiment in Credenhill, Herefordshire.

Seven people have been killed and more than 50 injured in wildfires ravaging central and northern Portugal, authorities have said, after three firefighters died on Tuesday when their vehicle was trapped in flames.

Portugal’s civil protection service said 54 wildfires were burning nationwide, mainly in the north, with 5,300 firefighters mobilised. France, Greece, Italy and Spain sent eight water-bombing planes through the EU’s mutual assistance mechanism.

More than 1,000 firefighters battled through Monday night to control four separate blazes near the towns of Nelas and Aveiro, south of Porto, with TV footage showing residents frantically pouring buckets of water on rapidly advancing flames.

In Aveiro alone, the blazes have consumed more than 10,000 hectares (24,710 acres) of forest and scrubland in the last two days, the agency said – roughly the same area that has been burnt by fires so far this year across the country.

The national civil protection commander, Andre Fernandes, said the three firefighters – two women and a man – had been killed near Nelas. Four people, including a man retrieving tools from his shed, were reported dead on Monday.

Fernandes said late on Monday that the fires, which have forced the closure of two railway lines and several motorways, including part of the main road between Lisbon and Porto, could consume a further 20,000 hectares.

The weather conditions on Monday brought the highest risk of fire in northern Portugal since 2001, experts said. Fernandes said the situation was “very complex” and that Tuesday would be “very difficult”.

Portugal’s prime minister, Luís Montenegro, who cancelled his Tuesday engagements in response to the fires, also said the country faced “some very difficult times over the next few days”. An extreme fire warning has been extended until Thursday night.

After a wet start to the year Portugal and Spain have recorded fewer wildfires than last year, but temperatures were above 30C across Portugal over the weekend amid exceptionally low humidity and strong winds, which have fanned the flames.

The government increased fire-prevention funding by a factor of 10 and doubled its firefighting budget after deadly blazes in 2017 claimed 64 lives.

Scientists have said human-caused climate breakdown is supercharging extreme weather across the world, driving more frequent and more deadly disasters, from floods – as seen this week in central Europe – to heatwaves, droughts and wildfires.

Human-caused climate breakdown is making heatwaves more likely and more intense, with some – such as the extreme heatwave in western Canada and the US in 2021 – all but impossible without global heating.

Reuters and Agence France-Presse contributed reporting

Rebels in Indonesia’s West Papua region have proposed terms for the release of the New Zealand pilot Phillip Mehrtens a year and seven months after he was detained.

It comes hours after the West Papua National Liberation Army (TPNPB) released a statement saying the Indonesian army bombed its headquarters in Alguru, which is where Mehrtens is being kept. The statement also said Mehrtens “survived the attack”.

Mehrtens, a former Jetstar pilot, was taken hostage by the TPNPB in February 2023 as a bargaining chip for its push for independence from Indonesia. It came after he landed a small commercial passenger plane at Paro airport in Nduga, the centre of the growing Papuan insurgency.

In February, a year to the day since Mehrtens was taken hostage, the army announced Mehrtens would be freed “to protect humanity and ensure human rights”, but it had not confirmed when he would be released.

On Tuesday, the army released a statement outlining the terms of his release, detailing a number of conditions “to be followed” by the Indonesian government, including allowing “open access” for media to be involved in the release process.

It also called for the Indonesian government to suspend military operations during Mehrten’s release, and for the New Zealand government to “provide space” for Mehrtens to convey “what he felt” during his year and seven months with the TPNPB.

“This is a humanitarian mission that must be supported by all parties,” the army said.

The terms were planned for release on Monday, according to a spokesperson, but were delayed to Tuesday due to the Indonesian military operation.

The terms proposed that Mehrtens should be escorted from Ndugama by New Zealand police and army to Sentani airport in Jayapura, on a plane arranged by the New Zealand government or an Air Niugini aircraft chartered by the army.

It also said a number of others should be present, including one UN representative, two senior and international journalists as “witnesses”, and two human rights figures from Indonesia.

The army proposed he would then catch another plane which would pass through Papua New Guinea. A press conference would be held at Jacksons international airport in Port Moresby.

The statement said the process should be facilitated by members of the New Zealand government and the Indonesian government, and bodies including the Human Rights Monitor and PNG Council of Churches.

Andreas Harsono, who covers Indonesia for Human Rights Watch, said the proposal was “realistic”, despite Indonesia’s ongoing restriction of reporters and human rights monitors into the region.

“The top priority should be to release this man who has a wife and kids,” Harsono said.

Mehrtens’ kidnapping has renewed attention on the long-running and deadly conflict that has raged in West Papua, which makes up the western half of Papua New Guinea, since Indonesia took control of the former Dutch colony in 1969.

West Papua National Liberation Army is the armed wing of the Free West Papua Movement, which has continued to demand a fair vote on self-determination.

Peaceful acts of civil disobedience by Indigenous West Papuans, such as raising the banned “Morning Star” flag, are met with police and military brutality and long jail sentences.

In 2022, UN human rights experts called for urgent and unrestricted humanitarian access to the region because of serious concerns about “shocking abuses against Indigenous Papuans, including child killings, disappearances, torture and mass displacement of people”.

In December last year, the army filmed a video of Mehrtens, in which he tells his family he loves them and is being treated well by his captors.

“I’m OK, they are treating me well, I’m trying to stay positive,” Mehrtens said in the video message directed to his family.

“I love you both lots and miss you both lots and hope to be able to talk with you soon.”

A spokesperson for the New Zealand ministry of foreign affairs said it was aware of the document.

“Our focus remains on securing a peaceful resolution and Phillip’s safe release. We continue to work closely with all parties to achieve this and will not be discussing the details publicly.”