Hezbollah has said it has entered an “open-ended battle of reckoning” with Israel after launching a series of rocket attacks on the north of the country as world powers implored both sides to step back from the brink of all-out war.

In a significant escalation of the conflict, Israeli warplanes carried out their most intense bombardment in almost a year across southern Lebanon, while Hezbollah responded with its deepest rocket attacks into Israel since the start of the Gaza war.

The events prompted the UN secretary general, António Guterres, to warn of the risk “of transforming Lebanon [into] another Gaza”.

During a funeral for a top commander killed along with 44 other people in an Israeli strike on Beirut’s southern suburbs on Friday, Hezbollah’s deputy secretary-general, Naim Qassem, said on Sunday that an “open-ended battle of reckoning has started”. “Threats will not stop us,” he said. “We are ready to face all military possibilities.”

As Israeli warplanes pounded border villages and more than 100,000 residents fled northwards, politicians in Beirut called for de-escalation to avoid a war as authorities said four people had been killed and nine injured over the weekend. But the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was also trenchant in his rhetoric.

“In the last few days, we have inflicted on Hezbollah a sequence of blows that it did not imagine. If Hezbollah did not understand the message, I promise you it will understand the message,” he said.

“No country can tolerate shooting at its residents, shooting at its cities, and we, the state of Israel, will not tolerate it either … We will do everything necessary to restore security.”

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said early on Sunday that hundreds of rockets had been fired into Israel from Lebanon, with some landing near the northern city of Haifa. They said rockets had been fired “toward civilian areas”, pointing to a possible escalation after previous barrages had mainly been aimed at military targets.

Six people were reported to have been injured.

The UN’s special coordinator for Lebanon, Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, said in a statement on X: “With the region on the brink of an imminent catastrophe, it cannot be overstated enough: there is NO military solution that will make either side safer.”

As she wrote, the Israeli health ministry urged hospitals in northern Israel to transfer their operations to facilities with extra protection from rocket and missile fire. Rambam hospital in Haifa would transfer patients to its secure underground facility, the ministry said.

Dr Noam Yehudai of the Tzafon Medical Center, said staff were preparing the sheltered areas to receive patients. “We are discharging patients whose medical condition allows for safe discharge to their homes, cancelling all elective surgeries until further notice, while urgent and oncological surgeries continue as scheduled,” he said.

Sarah Kiperwas from Krayot said: “I heard a big blast around 6.30am. From our balcony, I could see flames and then they told us that someone got hurt. I am 68 years old and I have lived in this neighbourhood all my life. This is the fourth time in my life that my city has been hit. This time I believe it will be harder than the others. Hezbollah had been there for almost a year waiting to make our lives impossible. But we are ready to fight and finish it.

“No one in the world would stand by if the enemy continues to bomb us.”

In Lebanon, a relentless week of attacks has made the conflict impossible to ignore. Three children and seven women were among those killed by the Israeli strike on Beirut on Friday that targeted the top Hezbollah leader Ibrahim Aqil, Lebanese authorities have said.

His assassination followed a wave of attacks earlier in the week in which walkie-talkies and pagers commonly used by Hezbollah members exploded, killing 42 people and wounding more than 3,000. Israel is presumed to have been behind the operation, though it has not officially claimed responsibility.

The sudden, brutal nature of the attacks shattered whatever sense of safety Lebanese people had felt. “It was the first time that I felt that the war is around us, that we’re not safe any more. We don’t know where the next Israeli attack will be. I’m avoiding gatherings or unknown areas,” said Amal Cherif, a 52-year-old activist and ­resident of central Beirut.

The fighting between the IDF and Hezbollah militants is taking place in parallel to the unrelenting conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.

Seven people were killed on Sunday when an Israeli airstrike hit a school in western Gaza City that had been housing hundreds of displaced people, Palestinian health officials said.

Eleven months into the war, the death toll among Palestinians has passed 41,000, according to health authorities in the territory. Most of the dead are civilians and the figure amounts to nearly 2% of Gaza’s pre-war population, or one in 50 people. The conflict was triggered by Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel, in which 1,200 people were killed and about 250 taken hostage.

World powers moved at the weekend to call for a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah. The White House national security spokesperson, John Kirby, said escalating the conflict was not in Israel’s best interest.

Washington was saying this “directly to our Israeli counterparts” and believed “there can be time and space for a diplomatic solution here and that’s what we’re working on”, he told ABC.

The EU called for an “urgent ceasefire” and “renewed intense diplomatic mediation efforts”, a message echoed by the UK foreign secretary, David Lammy, who noted the “worrying escalation”.

Addressing the Labour party’s annual conference, Lammy said a ceasefire would facilitate “a political settlement, so that Israelis and Lebanese civilians can return to their homes and live in peace and security”.

Guterres, however, said the language used by both sides indicated a lack of desire to explore peace. “It is for me clear that both sides are not interested in a ceasefire. And that is a tragedy, because this is a war that must stop,” he told CNN.

Seven people have been killed after an Israeli airstrike hit a school housing displaced people in western Gaza City, Palestinian health officials said, amid fears that Gaza’s worsening humanitarian crisis might be forgotten as tensions boil between Hezbollah and Israel.

The strike hit Kafr Qasem school in Beach camp on Sunday morning, officials in Gaza said. Among those killed was Majed Saleh, the director of the Hamas-run public works and housing ministry, they added.

Israel’s military said the strike had targeted Hamas fighters and that it had used aerial surveillance and taken other steps to limit the risk to civilians.

Gaza’s schools closed after the 7 October attack on Israel by Hamas, and most have been transformed into shelters. About 90% of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million has been displaced, often multiple times.

Six other Palestinians were killed in separate airstrikes in central and southern parts of Gaza, the medics said.

“All focus of the news and media is on Lebanon. Gaza is forgotten,” Nezar Zaqout, who is living in a tent camp in Muwasi in southern Gaza, told the Associated Press.

“Every day we heard that there was hope for negotiations, or new news that they were trying to solve the issue of the displaced … but we have become completely forgotten.”

Saadi Abu Mustafa told AP he feared that the escalation in fighting and the focus on Lebanon would “affect us negatively”. Hezbollah has said it is confronting Israel in support of its ally Hamas in Gaza, and Hamas praised Hezbollah on Sunday after the Lebanese group launched overnight rocket strikes at northern Israel.

Reports persist of Israeli bombardment from the air and land causing civilian casualties, displacement, and destruction of homes and other civilian infrastructure in the Gaza Strip.

Last Friday, Israeli forces killed at least 14 Palestinians in tank fire and airstrikes on northern and central areas of the Gaza Strip, medics said, as tanks advanced further into north-west Rafah, near the border with Egypt.

The Israeli military says forces operating in Rafah have killed hundreds of militants, located tunnels and explosives and destroyed military infrastructure.

According to Gaza’s health ministry, 70% of stockpiled medications and 83% of health supplies have been used up, forcing hospitals and healthcare facilities to suspend services.

Eleven months into the Gaza war, the death toll among Palestinians has passed 41,000, according to health authorities in the territory. Most of the dead are civilians and the total is nearly 2% of Gaza’s prewar population. The conflict was triggered by Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel, in which 1,200 people died and about 250 were taken hostage.

So serious were the exchanges of fire between Israel and Hezbollah this weekend, it is hard to be sure that the two sides have not already crossed the threshold of “all-out” war.

Israel’s air force said it had struck 290 targets in southern Lebanon on Saturday, killing at least three. Hezbollah responded by launching 150 missiles, rockets and drones into Israel overnight, the deepest attack since violent hostilities broke out when the Iran-aligned group began launching rocket attacks in support of Hamas after 7 October.

Missiles reached the suburbs of Israel’s northern city of Haifa, and while casualties were modest – rescue teams treated a number of wounded – residential buildings were hit in Kiryat Bialik. Thousands of civilians were forced to seek shelter.

Hezbollah said it had used short-range Fadi 1 and 2 missiles for the first time, weapons said to have a range of 50 and 65 miles respectively. They were aimed, the militant group said, at Israel’s Ramat David airbase, 15 miles south-east of Haifa, though their impact on military operations appears slight.

Though the number of missiles fired was said to be small, and mostly intercepted, images of the damage to homes suggest that some nevertheless breached Israel’s much-vaunted air defences – a troubling sign.

It has been five long days since the extraordinary plot to blow up pagers and then walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah, killing 42 and wounding more than 3,000, an attack for which Israel is widely believed to have been responsible. On Friday, an Israeli airstrike killed the veteran Hezbollah leader Ibrahim Aqil in Beirut and 37 others.

The growing intensity of the Israeli attacks appears to suggest that Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is willing to accept whatever Hezbollah does in response. “If Hezbollah didn’t get the message, I promise you – it will get the message,” the prime minister said on Sunday after the latest exchanges.

It is dangerous thinking to rely on the belief that Israel will decisively come out on top if the fighting escalates. But it also comes as Israel’s leaders have decided that months of tit-for-tat responses to Hezbollah attacks across the northern border have not brought about peace. About 65,000 Israeli civilians remain displaced from their homes (similar numbers are also displaced from southern Lebanon) as Hezbollah attacks have continued on a daily basis.

An escalation of some sort from Hezbollah in response to the pager plot and the Beirut strike was inevitable, and was always likely to see the group reach into its arsenal of anywhere between 120,000 and 200,000 unguided missiles and rockets. On Sunday, Naim Qassem, Hezbollah’s deputy secretary-general, said that the group had entered a new phase in its struggle with Israel – ominously described by him as an “open-ended battle of reckoning”.

If the rhetoric is anything to go by, neither side appears willing to back down, raising the question of where the higher tempo of cross-border bombing will lead. A Hezbollah missile that causes a significant number of civilian casualties in Israel, whether deliberately or through a miscalculation, would probably prompt an even more intense Israeli response, and risks more civilian casualties in Lebanon in return.

The hope is that both sides want to avoid an even more deadly ground war, though such is the environment that even that cannot be certain. Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, said on Sunday that when Aqil was killed, he and other leaders from Hezbollah’s elite Radwan unit were discussing a surprise cross-border attack into Israel – “the same horrific, horrendous attack that we had on 7 October by Hamas”.

Though the Israel Defense Forces has been engaged in nearly a year of constant fighting against Hamas in Gaza, the conflict is not as intense as it once was. Last week Israel redeployed its 98th Division from Gaza to the north, and the country’s leaders may yet reach the conclusion the only way to halt the missile and rocket attacks is to enter southern Lebanon, though that is fraught with risk.

Even allowing for the exploding pager attack, Hezbollah is estimated to have between 30,000 and 50,000 fighters available and a similar number in reserve. It is a larger and more capable military force than Hamas, which is still fighting on despite nearly a year of bombardment in response to the assault of 7 October.

Israeli forces raided the office of Al Jazeera in the occupied West Bank on Sunday and issued a 45-day closure order, the Qatari broadcaster said, with footage showing heavily armed and masked troops entering the premises in Ramallah.

“There is a court ruling for closing down Al Jazeera for 45 days,” an Israeli soldier told Al Jazeera’s West Bank bureau chief, Walid al-Omari, the network reported, citing the conversation which was broadcast live. “I ask you to take all the cameras and leave the office at this moment,” the soldier said.

Al-Omari reported that Israeli troops brought a truck to confiscate documents, devices and office property.

The broadcaster said the soldiers did not provide a reason for the closure order.

Al Jazeera denounced the raid as “a criminal act” and said in a statement it held the Israeli government responsible for the safety of its journalists.

The network added that it would take legal action to protect its rights and promised to continue its coverage. “Al Jazeera rejects the draconian actions, and the unfounded allegations presented by Israeli authorities to justify these illegal raids,” it said.

The Israeli communications minister, Shlomo Karhi, confirmed the closure in a statement that called Al Jazeera “the mouthpiece” of Gaza’s Hamas and Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah. “We will continue to fight in the enemy channels and ensure the safety of our heroic fighters,” he said.

The move is the latest Israeli action against Al Jazeera. Last week, Israel’s government announced it was revoking the press credentials of Al Jazeera journalists in the country, four months after banning the channel from operating inside Israel.

In a statement, the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate condemned the Israeli move, saying “this arbitrary military decision is considered a new violation against journalistic and media works, which has been exposing the occupation’s crimes against the Palestinian people.

“We affirm our full solidarity with Al Jazeera and place our headquarters and capabilities at the service of our colleagues working there”.

In Hamas-run Gaza, the government media office condemned the move in a statement released on Telegram, Al Jazeera reported, calling it a clear violation of international law.

“We call on all media outlets and journalists around the world to declare full solidarity with Al Jazeera,” it added.

The Israeli military has repeatedly accused journalists from the Qatari network of being “terrorist agents” in Gaza affiliated with Hamas or its ally, Islamic Jihad.

Al Jazeera denies the Israeli government’s accusations and claims that Israel systematically targets its employees in the Gaza Strip.

With Agence France-Presse, Associated Press and Reuters

A man who was abducted as a six-year-old while playing in a California park in 1951 has been found more than seven decades later thanks to the help of an online ancestry test, old photos and newspaper clippings.

The Bay Area News Group reported on Friday that Luis Armando Albino’s niece in Oakland – with assistance from police, the FBI and the justice department – located her uncle living on the US east coast.

Albino, a father and grandfather, is a retired firefighter and Marine Corps veteran who served in Vietnam, according to his niece, 63-year-old Alida Alequin. She found Albino and reunited him with his California family in June.

On 21 February 1951 a woman lured the six-year-old Albino from the park in West Oakland, where he had been playing with his older brother, and promised him in Spanish that she would buy him candy.

Instead, the woman kidnapped the Puerto Rico-born boy, flying him to the east coast, where he ended up with a couple who raised him as if he were their own son, the news group reported. Officials and family members didn’t say where on the east coast he lives.

For more than 70 years, Albino remained missing but he was always in the hearts of his family and his photo hung at relatives’ houses, his niece said. His mother died in 2005 but never gave up hope that her son was alive.

Oakland police acknowledged that Alequin’s efforts “played an integral role in finding her uncle” and that “the outcome of this story is what we strive for”.

In an interview with the news group, she said her uncle “hugged me and said ‘Thank you for finding me’ and gave me a kiss on the cheek”.

Oakland Tribune articles from the time reported that police, soldiers from a local army base, the Coast Guard and other city employees joined a huge search for the missing boy. San Francisco Bay and other waterways were also searched, according to the articles. His brother, Roger Albino, was interrogated several times by investigators but stood by his story about a woman with a bandana around her head taking his brother.

The first notion that her uncle might be still alive came in 2020 when, “just for fun”, Alequin said, she took an online DNA test. It showed a 22% match with a man who eventually turned out to be her uncle. A further search at the time yielded no answers or any response from him, she said.

Early this year, she and her daughters began searching again. On a visit to the Oakland public library she looked at microfilm of Tribune articles – including one that had a picture of Luis and Roger – which convinced her that she was on the right track. She went to Oakland police the same day.

Investigators eventually agreed the new lead was substantial, and a new missing persons case was opened. Oakland police said last week that the missing persons case was closed, but they and the FBI considered the kidnapping investigation to still be open.

Luis was located on the east coast and provided a DNA sample, as did his sister, Alequin’s mother.

On 20 June, investigators went to her mother’s home, Alequin said, and told them both that her uncle had been found.

“We didn’t start crying until after the investigators left,” Alequin said. “I grabbed my mom’s hands and said, ‘We found him.’ I was ecstatic.”

On 24 June, with the assistance of the FBI, Luis came to Oakland with members of his family and met with Alequin, her mother and other relatives. The next day Alequin drove her mother and her newfound uncle to Roger’s home in Stanislaus County, California.

“They grabbed each other and had a really tight, long hug. They sat down and just talked,” she said, discussing the day of the kidnapping, their military service and more.

Luis returned to the east coast but came back again in July for a three-week visit. It was the last time he saw Roger, who died in August.

Alequin said her uncle did not want to talk to the media.

“I was always determined to find him, and who knows, with my story out there, it could help other families going through the same thing,” Alequin said. “I would say: don’t give up.”

On 7 February 2023, Phillip Mehrtens’ life took an unexpected and harrowing turn.

The experienced New Zealand pilot landed his tiny commercial plane at Paro airfield, a runway in the isolated highlands of Indonesia’s West Papua region. It was to be a short in and out: drop off his five passengers, pick up a group of 15 construction workers and fly back south.

But soon after landing, the Susi Air plane was stormed. A group of independence fighters grabbed Mehrtens and his passengers then set the plane alight.

All five passengers, including a young child, were released because they were Indigenous Papuans. Mehrtens was not so fortunate.

The pilot, who was living in Bali with his Indonesian wife and child, was likely aware of the risks of flying into the largely inaccessible Nduga regency, the centre of the growing Papuan insurgency. But he could not have predicted that for the next 19 months the remote highlands would become his prison and he would become a bargaining chip in West Papua’s protracted battle for independence from Indonesia.

Shortly after the ambush, rebel spokesperson Sebby Sambom put out a statement saying the West Papua Liberation Army (TPN-PB) – the military wing of the Free Papua Organisation (OPM) – had seized Mehrtens because New Zealand, along with Australia and the United States, cooperates militarily with Indonesia.

“We will never release the pilot we are holding hostage unless Indonesia recognises and frees Papua from Indonesian colonialism,” Sambom said.

As the weeks turned into months, concern about Mehrtens’ safety grew.

His location was kept secret and little was divulged about the conditions he was living in. Updates from his captors were scant, offering only that his welfare was “top priority” and that he was healthy and well fed.

Clues to his wellbeing and whereabouts came via intermittent photos and videos of him standing in the mountains, surrounded by Papuan fighters brandishing rifles. The imagery was released alongside TPN-PB’s demands for the region’s independence.

Harsh conditions and death threats

“It would have been tough going,” says Damien Kingsbury, emeritus professor at Melbourne’s Deakin University and a specialist in West Papuan politics.

“He would have lived as his captors lived – essentially on the move. By and large they would have been staking out harsh conditions in the mountains,” he says. “In the highlands, it gets quite cold.”

In May 2023, the situation escalated when the rebels threatened to kill Mehrtens if their demands for independence talks were not met within two months.

In response, New Zealand authorities said they were doing everything they could to secure a peaceful resolution and Mehrtens’ safe release, but the details of those delicate talks were closely guarded.

Then, in February, exactly a year after his capture, the TPN-PB said it would free the pilot to protect humanity and safeguard human rights. Seven months later, it laid out its conditions for this release – “to be followed” by the Indonesian government, including allowing “open access” for media.

The rebels’ about-face was likely due to a number of factors, Kingsbury says.

“It took some time for it to become clear to the TPN-PB … that there wasn’t going to be any long-term benefit from keeping him – the best they could hope for was to be seen as having an humanitarian side and gaining some publicity for their cause.”

It is also likely Mehrtens became “humanised” to his captors over the lengthy period, he says, adding that is a “fairly conventional social dynamic” in hostage situations.

“Mehrtens was given the opportunity to establish a relationship, they kept him alive, he speaks Indonesian … he became a person for them.”

On Saturday, after 594 days in captivity, the rebels honoured their plan and Mehrtens became a free man.

Messages of hope

In front of clicking cameras, a thin, unshaven Mehrtens sobbed as he video-called his family. Later, dressed in a dark grey wind jacket, he thanked those who had helped secure his release.

“Today I have been freed. I am very happy that shortly I will be able to go home and meet my family,” Mehrtens told a news conference in the mining town of Timika.

In a statement, his family said the period of Mehrtens’ captivity had been “very difficult” and they were “extremely grateful and relieved” he had been released. They thanked New Zealand and Indonesian authorities for prioritising peaceful negotiations in order to keep him safe.

“As challenging as this has been, it would have been inordinately harder if we were not aware of how hard everyone was working and what actions were being taken,” they said.

They thanked General Egianus Kogoya, a regional commander in the Free Papua Movement, and his army for keeping Mehrtens in good health, and allowing him to get several messages to the family during his captivity.

“Those messages filled our souls and gave us hope and that we would eventually see Phil again.”

Mehrtens had been through “a long and arduous ordeal”, the family said, and requested privacy so he could adjust to life after captivity.

Mehrtens arrived in Jakarta’s air force base Halim Perdanakusumah just before midnight on Saturday and was greeted by Indonesian officials and New Zealand diplomats.

He then had a private reunion with his family and, after nearly 600 days, spent his first night sleeping in a bed. His health was in “remarkably good shape”, said Winston Peters, New Zealand’s foreign affairs minister.

Peters said the negotiations had been “nerve-racking”. “It was always a concern of ours that we might not succeed. The hardest thing in an environment with no trust is to establish trust.”

Desperation in West Papua

The case has drawn renewed attention to a long-running and increasingly deadly conflict in resource-rich Papua which has unfolded since it was brought under Indonesian rule in the 1960s, in a vote widely seen as a sham that was overseen by the United Nations.

The area where Mehrtens was held remains an extremely dangerous place for West Papuans. TPN-PB regularly launch attacks and engage in skirmishes with Indonesian security forces, and the Indonesian military has been accused of brutality, including torture and murder of civilians.

There is also a much larger, peaceful civil movement for independence in the region – which stems from Indonesia’s violent repression of West Papuans. However, 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”.

Meanwhile, Indonesia tightly controls access for foreign journalists and human rights monitors.

Andreas Harsono, who covers Indonesia for Human Rights Watch, says there is a lot of information still missing about how the release process played out, but he believes – at this stage – the recent negotiations were peaceful.

He says Indonesia media is reporting that Mehrtens will meet with President Joko Widodo and possibly the minister of defence and president-elect, Prabowo Subianto.

“If that is true, that means Jokowi or Prabawo – or both – were involved in restraining the Indonesian military from entering the Nduga area,” Harsono said.

The New Zealand side has played a big role in urging Indonesia not to use force, Harsono said, while adding that the hostage situation has increased Indonesia’s militarisation of the region and escalated suffering for West Papuans.

A big-wave specialist says he is lucky to be alive after escaping relatively unscathed from a massive wipeout at a notoriously dangerous surf spot in Tasmania.

Mikey Brennan was surfing at Shipstern Bluff, a remote slabbing wave that can only be accessed by a 30km jetski ride or a two-hour hike, when he was gobbled up by the giant waves off the Tasmanian Peninsula coastline.

The 38-year-old, who is no stranger to the location known as “Shippies” – or big wipeouts – was towed on to the wave by a jetski before he lost control and disappeared from view as the wave crashed over him.

“I’m amazed I’m still alive,” Brennan told the Mercury.

Brennan, who suffered bruised ribs and a minor concussion, was thankful for the safety protocols in place after he was pulled from the water on to a jetski.

“I kind of remember the wave, like coming into the wave and then hitting the big step, which just felt so big, like one of those monumental kind of moments,” he said. “I just sort of went down real hard. I just couldn’t control it to kind of stick that landing.”

He said he had little recollection of the moment he went under and was confused when he resurfaced and was rescued, before being taken to Royal Hobart hospital for scans.

“I pretty much just had bruised ribs. I didn’t break anything,” he said. “They put me through a CT scan and checked all that out, and then I was with the trauma team and they checked me all out. I just have had a massive headache, a minor concussion, so I am pretty lucky.”

It is not the first time Brennan has diced with death in the water – in 2010 he broke his back while surfing another dangerous Tasmanian wave at Governor Island.

“To be honest [the Shipstern wipeout] was the closest to death because even when I broke my back on the east coast at Governor I was conscious for the whole time. It was equally as dangerous, but like this was just being knocked out and going unconscious. I really can’t quite explain it.”

Despite his experience, Brennan vowed he would get back in the water. “I love the ocean,” he said. “I was pushing it. I knew that I was pushing it against my fear and I guess you have to be willing to go into that place, and that’s what I did.”

A big-wave specialist says he is lucky to be alive after escaping relatively unscathed from a massive wipeout at a notoriously dangerous surf spot in Tasmania.

Mikey Brennan was surfing at Shipstern Bluff, a remote slabbing wave that can only be accessed by a 30km jetski ride or a two-hour hike, when he was gobbled up by the giant waves off the Tasmanian Peninsula coastline.

The 38-year-old, who is no stranger to the location known as “Shippies” – or big wipeouts – was towed on to the wave by a jetski before he lost control and disappeared from view as the wave crashed over him.

“I’m amazed I’m still alive,” Brennan told the Mercury.

Brennan, who suffered bruised ribs and a minor concussion, was thankful for the safety protocols in place after he was pulled from the water on to a jetski.

“I kind of remember the wave, like coming into the wave and then hitting the big step, which just felt so big, like one of those monumental kind of moments,” he said. “I just sort of went down real hard. I just couldn’t control it to kind of stick that landing.”

He said he had little recollection of the moment he went under and was confused when he resurfaced and was rescued, before being taken to Royal Hobart hospital for scans.

“I pretty much just had bruised ribs. I didn’t break anything,” he said. “They put me through a CT scan and checked all that out, and then I was with the trauma team and they checked me all out. I just have had a massive headache, a minor concussion, so I am pretty lucky.”

It is not the first time Brennan has diced with death in the water – in 2010 he broke his back while surfing another dangerous Tasmanian wave at Governor Island.

“To be honest [the Shipstern wipeout] was the closest to death because even when I broke my back on the east coast at Governor I was conscious for the whole time. It was equally as dangerous, but like this was just being knocked out and going unconscious. I really can’t quite explain it.”

Despite his experience, Brennan vowed he would get back in the water. “I love the ocean,” he said. “I was pushing it. I knew that I was pushing it against my fear and I guess you have to be willing to go into that place, and that’s what I did.”

At least six people have died and 10 others are missing after heavy rain triggered flooding and landslides along a peninsula in Japan that is still recovering from a deadly earthquake at the start of the year.

Public broadcaster NHK and other outlets said on Monday that six people had been confirmed dead, while the Kyodo news agency said more than 100 communities had been cut off by blocked roads after almost two dozen rivers burst their banks.

Two of the deaths occurred near a landslide-hit tunnel in the city of Wajima, Ishikawa prefecture, which was undergoing repairs after being damaged in the New Year’s Day earthquake.

Elsewhere in Ishikawa, two people were missing after being swept away and eight others were unaccounted for, Kyodo added.

Rainfall in Wajima and the nearby city of Suzu reached twice the levels for September in an average year. Japan’s meteorological agency has downgraded its “special warnings” for the area to “warnings”, but advised residents to remain vigilant.

The prime minister, Fumio Kishida, has instructed officials to monitor the damage and cooperate with local authorities as the region was still in the process of recovering from January’s earthquake when the rain, caused by an extratropical depression, arrived.

Heavy rain pounded Ishikawa from Saturday, with more than 540 millimetres (21 inches) recorded in the city of Wajima over 72 hours, the heaviest continuous rain since comparative data became available.

The region is still reeling from a magnitude-7.5 quake at the start of the year, which toppled buildings, triggered tsunami waves and sparked a major fire.

Flood waters inundated emergency housing built for those who had lost their homes in the New Year’s Day quake, which killed at least 374 people, according to Ishikawa government figures.

On Monday, 4,000 households were left without power after the rain, according to the Hokuriku Electric Power Company.

Akemi Yamashita, a 54-year-old Wajima resident, said she had been driving on Saturday when “within only 30 minutes or so, water gushed into the street and quickly rose to half the height of my car”.

“I was talking to other residents of Wajima yesterday, and they said, ‘it’s so heart-breaking to live in this city’. I got teary when I heard that,” she said, describing the earthquake and floods as “like something from a movie”.

In Wajima on Sunday, splintered branches and a huge uprooted tree piled up at a bridge over a river where the raging brown waters almost reached ground level.

Military personnel were sent to the Ishikawa region to join rescue workers over the weekend, as tens of thousands of residents were urged to evacuate.

Scientists say human-driven climate change is intensifying the risk posed by heavy rains because a warmer atmosphere holds more water.

The areas under the emergency warning saw “heavy rain of unprecedented levels”, JMA forecaster Satoshi Sugimoto said on Saturday, adding: “It is a situation in which you have to secure your safety immediately”.

With Agence France-Presse

Just over a week ago, it was the pop superstar Taylor Swift. Now Donald Trump is taking aim at Oprah Winfrey over her support of Kamala Harris.

Whether or not attacking some of the most popular and powerful entertainment figures in US history will prove a solid campaign strategy is yet to be proven, but the former president has not held back.

In a rant on Truth Social, Trump said he “couldn’t help but think this isn’t the real Oprah”.

“This isn’t a person that wants millions of people, from prisons and mental institutions, and terrorists, drug dealers, and human traffickers from all over the world pouring into our country,” he wrote.

In the post, Trump noted that the TV show host Winfrey had invited him and his family on to her talkshow the final week of the show’s finale.

“It was my honor, with my family, to do it,” he wrote.

The episode with his family actually aired in February, three months before the series finale in May 2011. At the time, Winfrey’s show billed it as the first Trump family interview with his wife, Melania, who he had married six years earlier.

Winfrey hosted a livestreamed interview with Kamala Harris on 19 September that served as a virtual rally with other celebrity guests, including Tracee Ellis Ross, Julia Roberts, Meryl Streep, Chris Rock and Ben Stiller.

“There’s a real feeling of optimism and hope making a comeback … for this new day that is no longer on the horizon but is here,” Winfrey said during the event, which had 400 in-person attendees and 200,000 live viewers.

The live stream gave Harris a viral and somewhat controversial clip when Winfrey said she was surprised that the Democratic nominee was a gun owner.

“If somebody breaks into my house, they’re getting shot,” Harris said, laughing. She immediately brushed off the comment, saying: “Sorry. Probably shouldn’t have said that. But my staff will deal with that later.”

Winfrey is just the latest in a slate of high-profile celebrities Trump has slammed in recent months.

When George Clooney became the first major celebrity to voice concern over Joe Biden’s age, Trump called Clooney “a fake movie actor who should get out of politics”.

Then in September, after the first presidential debate between Harris and Trump, Taylor Swift endorsed Harris. Trump went on to say on his social media site: “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT.”

Russia was left badly isolated at a high-profile UN summit in New York when it made a surprise move to derail an ambitious pact designed to revive the UN – and failed.

Russia’s move to defer adoption of the agreement on the grounds that it supposedly represented western interests was rejected on Sunday by 143 votes to seven with 15 abstentions.

The Russian delegation said that if the planned vote endorsing the high-profile “pact for the future” were not deferred pending further talks, it would seek to move an amendment asserting the key issues addressed in the pact are the subject of domestic jurisdiction in which the UN should not seek to intervene.

But the overwhelming UN general assembly vote threw out Russia’s call for deferment and its amendment.

The Russian move, at the outset of the two-day “summit for the future”, looked diplomatically clumsy, if perhaps designed for domestic consumption. It angered speakers from the African Union (AU) and Mexico, underlining that Moscow had only limited support, notably from Belarus, Venezuela, Syria and Iran.

The AU, led by the Republic of Congo, called for the Russian amendment to be rejected.

The pact is seen by many in the global south as both a well-intended and necessary collective effort at UN renewal as well as a personal legacy for a relatively popular UN secretary general António Guterres.

But the controversy underlined the extent to which ideological divisions have damaged multilateral cooperation at the UN, the very issue that the pact was seeking to address.

Russia objected to 25 provisions in the draft pact, including asserting the primacy of national jurisdiction and rejecting language on universal access to sexual and reproductive health rights, as well as gender empowerment more broadly.

With the Russian move crushed, Guterres told the summit that the pact’s aim was “to bring multilateralism back from the brink at a time when the world [is] heading off the rails”. Twenty-first-century challenges – from debt in developing countries to the climate crisis – required 21st-century solutions.

Graham Gordon, head of global advocacy at Christian Aid, said of the pact: “The key point of the document, given its inherent limits, is that it does provide pointers of what should be achieved in other forums including the IMF, at Cop and at the G20. The key test will be in 12 months in assessing how much momentum this provides. It is a striking document in its admission of how multilateralism is currently failing.”

Guterres had advocated for a Summit for the Future more than two years ago as an attempt to persuade world leaders in the wake of the global Covid outbreak that cooperation and multilateralism had to be revived.

The pact, spanning 26 pages and 56 recommendations, says it is offering a new beginning for multilateralism and repeatedly asserts the primacy of international law. But the lack of new specifics has weakened its impact.

The document covers reform and expansion of the UN security council to make the body more representative of the 21st century, a UN role in governing artificial intelligence, the phasing out of fossil fuels in energy systems, reform of multilateral financial institutions, a recommitment to full nuclear disarmament and modernising UN peacekeeping so it evolves into war prevention.

Concrete ideas include a biennial UN summit on the global economy, an emergency platform for managing pandemics, food insecurity and environmental disasters, and a new UN oversight body of experts advising on the risks posed by AI for all economies.

A major sticking point was western opposition to the UN playing a role in making international financial institutions more representative. A UN-led push to include a reference to a $500bn (£375bn) stimulus to put the sustainable development goals back on track was also rejected.

Russia was left badly isolated at a high-profile UN summit in New York when it made a surprise move to derail an ambitious pact designed to revive the UN – and failed.

Russia’s move to defer adoption of the agreement on the grounds that it supposedly represented western interests was rejected on Sunday by 143 votes to seven with 15 abstentions.

The Russian delegation said that if the planned vote endorsing the high-profile “pact for the future” were not deferred pending further talks, it would seek to move an amendment asserting the key issues addressed in the pact are the subject of domestic jurisdiction in which the UN should not seek to intervene.

But the overwhelming UN general assembly vote threw out Russia’s call for deferment and its amendment.

The Russian move, at the outset of the two-day “summit for the future”, looked diplomatically clumsy, if perhaps designed for domestic consumption. It angered speakers from the African Union (AU) and Mexico, underlining that Moscow had only limited support, notably from Belarus, Venezuela, Syria and Iran.

The AU, led by the Republic of Congo, called for the Russian amendment to be rejected.

The pact is seen by many in the global south as both a well-intended and necessary collective effort at UN renewal as well as a personal legacy for a relatively popular UN secretary general António Guterres.

But the controversy underlined the extent to which ideological divisions have damaged multilateral cooperation at the UN, the very issue that the pact was seeking to address.

Russia objected to 25 provisions in the draft pact, including asserting the primacy of national jurisdiction and rejecting language on universal access to sexual and reproductive health rights, as well as gender empowerment more broadly.

With the Russian move crushed, Guterres told the summit that the pact’s aim was “to bring multilateralism back from the brink at a time when the world [is] heading off the rails”. Twenty-first-century challenges – from debt in developing countries to the climate crisis – required 21st-century solutions.

Graham Gordon, head of global advocacy at Christian Aid, said of the pact: “The key point of the document, given its inherent limits, is that it does provide pointers of what should be achieved in other forums including the IMF, at Cop and at the G20. The key test will be in 12 months in assessing how much momentum this provides. It is a striking document in its admission of how multilateralism is currently failing.”

Guterres had advocated for a Summit for the Future more than two years ago as an attempt to persuade world leaders in the wake of the global Covid outbreak that cooperation and multilateralism had to be revived.

The pact, spanning 26 pages and 56 recommendations, says it is offering a new beginning for multilateralism and repeatedly asserts the primacy of international law. But the lack of new specifics has weakened its impact.

The document covers reform and expansion of the UN security council to make the body more representative of the 21st century, a UN role in governing artificial intelligence, the phasing out of fossil fuels in energy systems, reform of multilateral financial institutions, a recommitment to full nuclear disarmament and modernising UN peacekeeping so it evolves into war prevention.

Concrete ideas include a biennial UN summit on the global economy, an emergency platform for managing pandemics, food insecurity and environmental disasters, and a new UN oversight body of experts advising on the risks posed by AI for all economies.

A major sticking point was western opposition to the UN playing a role in making international financial institutions more representative. A UN-led push to include a reference to a $500bn (£375bn) stimulus to put the sustainable development goals back on track was also rejected.

The far-right Alternative für Deutschland party has narrowly missed out on victory in an election in the German state of Brandenburg, according to initial results, three weeks after making historic gains in two other regions.

In what had been widely interpreted as a referendum on the federal government of Olaf Scholz ahead of next autumn’s general election, his Social Democratic party (SPD) appeared at the 11th hour to have clawed back its lead over the anti-immigrant populists who had been on course for months to seize victory in the state for the first time.

The SPD won 30.9% to the AfD’s 29.2%, according to provisional official results by the state electoral commissioner, with both parties making gains of 5 to 6 points on their performance last time. The fledgling leftist conservative Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), a pro-Kremlin party which has called for military aid to Ukraine to be halted, secured 12%, making it a likely contender in a new administration.

With much considered to be at stake in the election, turnout was high at 74%.

The SPD’s Dietmar Woidke, who has led Brandenburg for 11 years, had upped the ante in the run-up to Sunday’s poll by pledging to resign if the AfD beat his party, in what was viewed as a high-stakes gamble based on his own popularity as “father of the state”.

The AfD, which has been classified as a rightwing extremist organisation in Brandenburg by domestic intelligence agencies, had also called for Scholz to resign under the same circumstances.

Woidke even excluded Scholz from his election campaign – despite the fact he and his wife live in the state capital, Potsdam – fearing the negative impact of his presence. The SPD has ruled the state since reunification in 1990.

All eyes had been on Brandenburg, which is population-wise one of Germany’s smallest states, after strong showings for the AfD earlier this month in Thuringia, where they came top with about 33%, and in Saxony, where they came a narrow second behind the conservative CDU with 27.5%.

At the Brandenburg SPD’s election gathering at the Old Post, a restaurant near the state parliament in Potsdam, there were jubilant cries as the initial results came in, after weeks of a highly strung campaign. Taking to the floor shortly after 6pm local time, Woidke told supporters he was cautiously relieved, “considering the starting position we were in”.

“We said we’d take on this battle and we said our goal at the outset was to ensure our land didn’t get a big brown stamp on it,” he said, in reference to the colour associated with the far-right. But he urged SPD members to “put on the euphoria brakes” until the final result became clear.

At the party’s headquarters, the Willy Brandt house in Berlin, its general secretary, Kevin Kühnert, said it was too early for “feelings of relief … it’ll take several hours to get the full results, which is why I’m holding back”.

Speaking in New York where he is attending UN meetings, Scholz reacted briefly to the election result, saying the mood at party headquarters, where he had spoken on the phone with party members, had been “good, naturally”.

Some members referred to Woidke’s “tremendous comeback” and said it would set the tone ahead of next autumn’s federal election, at the same time as expressing their frustration that he had given the national party a wide berth. There are broader concerns that the Woidke win will be seen as a result of him having excluded – rather than praised – Scholz.

At the AfD’s election gathering in Marquardt, north of Potsdam, Hans-Christoph Berndt, its main candidate, classified as rightwing extremist by domestic intelligence, claimed his party was the “real victor”.

It appeared to have secured every third vote in the state “despite a campaign of agitation and slander” against the AfD, he said, calling the result a “consolidation of support”. On Telegram channels, supporters spoke of a “close race” and said the “firewall” established by the mainstream parties who had refused to coalesce with it would be hard to maintain as it continued to grow in strength.

Several hundred anti-AfD protesters were gathered outside the venue, held back by riot police.

The AfD had been running almost neck and neck with the SPD in the state, a belt of urban and rural communities that surrounds the capital, Berlin, and had led in the polls in the previous 12 months. The SPD had narrowed the gap in recent days.

The conservative CDU secured just 12%, its worst result in the state’s history. The Greens came in on 4.1%, just below the 5% threshold to automatically make it into state parliament.

The Free Democratic party, which like the Greens partners in the increasingly fractious three-way federal government, received less than 1%. The leftwing Die Linke, on 3%, will not enter parliament for the first time since its founding in 2007.

There was jubilation, however, in the BSW camp. Many of its members broke away from Die Linke to form a new party in January. Its lead candidate, Robert Crumbach, who had been a member of the SPD for several decades before joining the BSW, thanked supporters and said he was “speechless”. “We had the aim to get double figures and that’s what we’ve achieved,” he said.

• Volodymyr Zelenskyy arrived in the US on Sunday for a crucial visit to present Kyiv’s plan to end two-and-a-half years of war with Russia. The Ukrainian president will present his proposals – which he calls a “victory plan” – to President Joe Biden, as well as presidential hopefuls Kamala Harris and Donald Trump and will also attend sessions at the UN general assembly. The visit comes after a summer of intense fighting, with Moscow advancing fast in eastern Ukraine and Kyiv holding on to swathes of Russia’s Kursk region. It also comes as Kyiv has for weeks pressed the west to allow it to use delivered long-range weapons to strike targets deep inside Russia – so far to no avail.

• The Ukrainian president urged his partners to help achieve “a shared victory for a truly just peace”, in a post on X with his nightly video address. “This fall will determine the future of this war,” Zelenskyy said in the address, delivered from a plane. Ukrainian media later reported he landed in New York. He is also due to visit Washington later in the week.

• Zelenskyy kicked off his trip with a visit to a Pennsylvania ammunition factory that is producing one of the most critically needed munitions for Ukraine. Representative Matt Cartwright, a Democrat who was among those who met with Zelenskyy at the Scranton army ammunition plant, said the president had a simple message: “Thank you. And we need more.” The Scranton plant is one of the few facilities in the country to manufacture 155mm artillery shells and has increased production over the past year. Ukraine has already received more than 3m of them from the US.

• The UK foreign secretary, David Lammy, indicated that delicate negotiations with the White House to allow Ukraine to use Storm Shadow missiles inside Russia are ongoing, arguing it was a time for “nerve and guts”. The apparent encouragement to Biden comes just over a week after Lammy and the prime minister, Keir Starmer, visited the US president in the White House but failed to resolve the sticking point between two countries. Speaking at a fringe event at the Labour party conference in Liverpool on Sunday, Lammy said it was “a critical time for nerve and guts and patience and for fortitude on behalf of allies who stand with Ukraine”.

• Fake news websites registered in the UK and made to resemble trusted British outlets are allegedly spreading disinformation about western companies operating in Ukraine. The suspected Russian propaganda operation has prompted calls by parliamentarians for a change in the law to force UK-registered news websites to reveal their ownership, as happens in the EU. While the sites – londoninsider.co.uk and talk-finance.co.uk – are in English and have been registered in the UK, their output has been picked up and disseminated in Ukraine, where the UK’s media has a reputation for reliability and trustworthiness. The use of the sites has been highlighted by a US firm, Sarn, which is working in Ukraine in the energy and military hardware sectors. It said articles on the two sites had falsely accused it of arms trafficking, judicial fraud and embezzlement.

• Russia launched new strikes in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv which hit high-rise apartment buildings, leaving at least 21 wounded in a second consecutive night-time attack, authorities said. The bombs fell on Saturday night on the district of Shevchenkivsky, north of the centre of Kharkiv, which is the second-largest Ukrainian city, local governor Oleh Syniehubov said.

• A firefighter was killed by a Ukrainian drone in Russia-controlled Luhansk region in eastern Ukraine, the Russian emergencies ministry said on Sunday. The drone’s explosives detonated when Vyacheslav Glazunov, 33, was extinguishing a fire in the Novoaidar district triggered by fallen drones, the ministry said on Telegram. Another two firefighters were injured, it added.

The competition regulator is suing Coles and Woolworths over allegations they misled shoppers by offering “illusory” discounts on hundreds of common supermarket products.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) chair, Gina Cass-Gottlieb, said on Monday the regulator would seek a “a significant penalty” after the major retailers allegedly profited from the sale of tens of millions of products sold through promotions the regulator claimed breached consumer law.

“Many consumers rely on discounts to help their grocery budgets stretch further, particularly during this time of cost of living pressures,” Cass-Gottlieb said.

“It is critical that Australian consumers are able to rely on the accuracy of pricing and discount claims.”

Coles told shareholders on Monday it intends to defend the proceedings, while Woolworths said it would review the claims.

The major retailers are accused of inflating the prices of groceries for a short period, before placing them in their “Prices Dropped” or “Down Down” promotions.

The promotional prices were misleading, according to the regulator, because they were higher than or the same as the product’s regular long-term price before the temporary price spike.

“We allege that each of Woolworths and Coles breached the Australian consumer law by making misleading claims about discounts, when the discounts were, in fact, illusory,” Cass-Gottlieb said.

“We also allege that in many cases both Woolworths and Coles had already planned to later place the products on a ‘Prices Dropped’ or ‘Down Down’ promotion before the price spike, and implemented the temporary price spike for the purpose of establishing a higher ‘was’ price.”

The ACCC alleges the conduct involved 266 products for Woolworths and 245 products at Coles, affecting everything from chocolate biscuits to instant coffee and tissues.

The regulator provided an example of the alleged conduct by Woolworths, using its pricing of a 370g Oreo family pack.

Woolworths offered the product for $3.50 from January 2021 to November 2022 in its “Prices Dropped” promotion.

The Oreo pack price was increased to $5 for 22 days, and then returned to the ‘Prices Dropped’ promotion for $4.50.

Shoppers were told this was a discount from the $5 “was” price, when it was actually 29% higher than its long-term regular price of $3.50.

Fallout

Shares in Coles and Woolworths both fell more than 3.5% in early trading on Monday as investors reacted to news of the court actions.

Coles said in a statement the claims, which it intends to defend, relate to a period when the supermarket was receiving a large number of price increases from suppliers.

“Coles sought to strike an appropriate balance between managing the impact of cost price increases on retail prices and offering value to customers through the recommencement of promotional activity as soon as possible after the establishment of the new non-promotional price.”

Woolworths said it would “carefully review the claims”.

“Our customers are telling us they want us to work even harder to deliver meaningful value to them and it’s important they can trust the value they see when shopping our stores,” Woolworths said.

The ACCC has started separate proceedings against the supermarket chains in the federal court.

Cass-Gottlieb told media on Monday that the penalty had to be significant.

“That penalty has to be high enough to be not a cost of doing business for such major companies to deter them from this conduct in the future and deter all retailers from this manner of conduct,” she said.

The ACCC is also seeking community service orders that Woolworths and Coles each fund a registered charity to deliver meals to Australians in need.

Cass-Gottlieb said the regulator was first alerted to the promotional conduct by consumers, which sparked an in-depth investigation.

Abba’s Björn Ulvaeus has married his partner in a ceremony officiated by the TV presenter Sandi Toksvig.

The 79-year-old Swedish singer, who has been married twice before, met Christina Sas in Nuremberg, Germany, in 2021 in connection with the release of Abba’s latest album Voyage.

A post to his Instagram page said: “Today on the 21st of September 2024, Björn Ulvaeus married Christina Sas from Herning, Denmark. They met in Nurnberg in 2021 in connection with the release of Abba’s last album Voyage and started dating in the spring of 2022.

“The wedding took place in Copenhagen in the presence of close friends and family. Sandi Toksvig, Anne Linnet and Kaya Brüel generously performed and made the evening extra special.”

Ulvaeus posted photos from the day, one of which shows former Great British Bake Off host Toksvig dressed in a red robe. The presenter is standing next to Ulvaeus, wearing a suit, and his wife, wearing a muted green wrap dress.

Representatives for Ulvaeus confirmed to the PA news agency that Toksvig had held the ceremony.

Ulvaeus is known for being one-quarter of Swedish pop group Abba, who this year celebrated 50 years since they won the Eurovision song contest with Waterloo.

The group originally comprised two couples – Ulvaeus and Agnetha Fältskog, and Benny Andersson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad. Fältskog and Ulvaeus, who married in 1971, divorced in 1980, while Andersson and Lyngstad divorced in 1981 – a year before the band split.

The quartet did not reform to perform at Eurovision this year despite the event being held in Sweden after Loreen won the competition in 2023 with her hit single Tattoo. Ulvaeus was also previously married to Lena Kallersjö.