At least 492 people have been killed and 1,645 injured, Lebanon’s health ministry has said, after a wave of Israeli airstrikes on alleged Hezbollah targets that left the country with its highest daily death toll since the end of the 1975-90 civil war.

Tens of thousands of people fled from south Lebanese towns and villages along the main road towards the capital, Beirut, in Israel’s most intense barrage in nearly a year of cross-border clashes, as sirens were also heard in the northern Israeli city of Haifa. The Lebanese health ministry said 35 children and 58 women were among those killed.

Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, said the military was changing the “security balance” along its northern border. “I promised we would change the security balance, the balance of power in the north – and that is exactly what we are doing,” the Israeli prime minister told a security meeting on Monday.

The Israel Defense Forces chief of staff, Lt Gen Herzi Halevi, said the Israeli military was preparing for the “next phases” in Lebanon, saying he would elaborate later. “Essentially, we are targeting combat infrastructure that Hezbollah has been building for the past 20 years. This is very significant,” he said.

The IDF said it had hit more than 1,300 Hezbollah targets in the previous 24 hours, in its biggest attack on the militant group since the Gaza war began last October, when Hezbollah began strikes in Israel in support of Hamas. Israel also carried out airstrikes in the Beqaa valley and its second airstrike on Beirut in a week, with what it said was a “limited” airstrike in the southern suburb of Dahieh. Israeli media reported that the target of the strike was Ali Karaki, Hezbollah’s number three military commander, although the group said he was in a safe location and unharmed by the attack.

About 35 rockets were meanwhile fired from Lebanon towards the Safed area of Israel, the Israel Defense Forces said, with some coming down in open areas close to the community of Ami’ad.

The US president, Joe Biden, who on Tuesday addresses the main debate of the United Nations general assembly in New York, said he was working to calm the situation. “I’ve been briefed on the latest developments in Israel and Lebanon. My team is in constant contact with their counterparts, and we’re working to de-escalate,” he said as he held talks with the UAE president, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, at the White House.

Earlier in the day, the IDF had warned Lebanese people in Beirut and other areas via a phone call to evacuate their residences and distance themselves from any buildings holding Hezbollah weapons.

“The actions will continue until we achieve our goal to return the northern [Israel] residents safely to their homes,” the Israeli defence minister, Yoav Gallant, said in a video published by his office, setting the stage for a long conflict as Hezbollah has vowed to fight on until there is a ceasefire in Gaza. “These are days in which the Israeli public will have to show composure.”

Roads leading out of south Lebanon were jammed with traffic as people fled the relentless bombing, with areas that have served as safe zones for displaced people since last year suddenly in the crosshairs of the Israeli military.

“The airstrikes have reached us, on the outskirts of [Tyre]. There was a strike just 100 metres behind the [displacement] centre, there were three of them,” said Bilal Kashmar, a coordinator in a displacement centre in the southern city. He showed a video of a plume of smoke rising just across the street from the shelter that houses hundreds of families.

“The displaced have stopped coming to us, those that want to flee are leaving the south entirely,” Kashmar said.

Tyre has hosted thousands of individuals displaced by fighting, as the city had largely been spared from airstrikes until now. Before Monday’s fighting, more than 110,000 people had been displaced from south Lebanon.

“The airstrikes aren’t stopping, airstrike on airstrike. People are scared,” said Hassan Dabouk, the head of Tyre’s union of municipalities.

Videos of collapsed buildings and of bombs falling from the sky and the resulting explosions shaking the hands of those filming circulated on social media as people tried to track the extent of Israel’s campaign. In one video, a driver films as smoke fills the air on the road ahead of them after a strike. “Stop, stop, stop!” one of the passengers yells as the video cuts.

“An important thing to note is that the roads are not safe,” Dabouk said. “There is bombing from where we are [in Tyre] all the way to Saida. One needs to think before they leave in this situation.”

People with family and friends leaving the south made public appeals for any empty apartments or rooms that could host their loved ones. Spontaneous initiatives to provide housing emerged, with individuals marshalling calls for available rooms, and hostels offering discounted rates for displaced people.

“We are collecting numbers right now from people that have connections in safe areas, in Druze and Christian areas,” said Faten Jebai, a journalist from south Lebanon. Jebai has urged those without a place to reach out to her, as she and other volunteers work to connect displaced people with those who will open up their homes or rent at low prices.

“More than 80 members of my family are now leaving the south, so I am searching for them but also for my friends and friends of the family,” Jebai added.

The UN peacekeeping body in Lebanon (Unifil) asked its civilian staff to relocate from south Lebanon northwards, as a “precautionary measure” as fighting in south Lebanon escalated on Monday. UN peacekeepers and critical staff will remain in the south.

It issued a statement expressing “grave concern for the safety of civilians in southern Lebanon amidst the most intense Israeli bombing campaign since last October” and urging de-escalation.

“Any further escalation of this dangerous situation could have far-reaching and devastating consequences, not only for those living on both sides of the blue line, but also for the broader region,” the statement read.

Since the beginning of the war between Hamas and Israel, the Israeli military and Hezbollah have engaged in a limited conflict of attrition.

However, escalating strikes and counterstrikes have raised fears of an all-out conflict. Last week, walkie-talkies and pagers bought by Hezbollah for its members exploded, killing 42 people and wounding more than 3,000, and on Friday an Israeli strike on a Beirut suburb killed a top Hezbollah military commander and more than a dozen fighters, as well as dozens of civilians including children.

On Sunday, Hezbollah launched about 150 rockets, missiles and drones into northern Israel in retaliation for Friday’s strike.

Hezbollah has vowed to continue its strikes in solidarity with the Palestinians and Hamas, a fellow Iran-backed militant group, while Israel says it is committed to returning Israelis to the border region who were evacuated when the rocket strikes began.

Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, has accused Israel of fanning the flames of war in the Middle East and said he hoped Iran could avoid being dragged into acting in a way “not worthy” of it, as he spoke to the media on his first official visit to the US.

The reformist, who took office in July after winning an election on a ticket of better relations with the west, said during a roundtable with journalists as he attended the UN general assembly in New York that no one benefited from war and that anyone who said otherwise was deluding themselves.

“We know more than anyone else that if a larger war were to erupt in the Middle East, it will not benefit anyone throughout the world. It is Israel that seeks to create this wider conflict,” he said.

Tensions soared immediately after his inauguration as the visiting political chief of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, was assassinated in an operation in Tehran that was widely attributed to Israel.

Pezeshkian said he was repeatedly told to hold back a response to the killing because Israel was within a week or two of signing a peace agreement, but that peace remained elusive.

“We tried not to respond but unfortunately that elusive week never came,” he said adding that he believed Iran had been lied to. “There is no winner in warfare, everyone loses in war and conflict. We are only deluding ourselves if we think someone will be victorious in a regional war.”

He also said: “Every day Israel is committing more atrocities and killing more and more people – old, young, men, women, children, hospitals, other facilities.”

Western diplomats are still assessing Pezeshkian after two months in office dominated by conflict in the region.

He did not spell out how much damage had been done to the Iran-backed Lebanese militants Hezbollah in Israel’s most recent wave of attacks and did not reply directly when asked if Iran would now respond more directly to Israel.

“We always keep hearing, well, Hezbollah fired a rocket. If Hezbollah didn’t even do that minimum, who would defend them?” he said. “Curiously enough, we keep being labelled as the perpetrator of insecurity. But look at the situation for where it is.”

He denied that Iran had not shown its own deterrence power, arguing that in its response to Israel’s destruction of the Iranian consulate in Damascus, which killed at least 11 people including a senior commander in the al-Quds force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, Iranian forces had penetrated Israel’s Iron Dome air defences and shown that it could have killed civilians.

Speaking on the record for an hour to a group of almost exclusively US reporters, Pezeshkian became most animated as he accused western politicians and media of double standards in demanding human rights while at the same time remaining silent over the horrors in Gaza. “Where else in the world where countries that on the surface are committed to human rights allow these killings?” he asked.

He said Iran was willing to reopen talks on the nuclear deal that broke down more than a year ago, insisting the religious fatwa against Iran possessing nuclear weapons remained, and it was part of the Islamic Republic’s military doctrine.

He was sitting alongside the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, who earlier said on Telegram that Tehran was focused on initiating a new round of nuclear negotiations.

“We are prepared, and if the other parties are also prepared, we can have another beginning of the talks during this trip,” Pezeshkian said.

He noted that he had been among a group of MPs who had vehemently defended the Iran nuclear deal with the west, including providing the UN nuclear weapons inspectorate with unfettered access to Iran’s nuclear programme. “We are still ready to sign up to the framework we agreed to,” he said, adding that the US withdrawal from the deal initiated by Donald Trump in 2018 was “illegal, unfair, unjust and not right”.

Pezeshkian denied Iran was running a series of proxy militia groups hostile to Israel, saying the west aimed to present Iran with an “inhumane face”. The Houthis in Yemen “cannot be subjected to our will”, he said. “How can we ask them to abstain from reacting to these crimes?”

He said he was seeking talks with the west about the war in Ukraine and said that during his presidency no short-range missiles had been sent from Iran to Russia for use in Ukraine, a formulation that leaves out the US intelligence claim that a contract to send missiles was probably signed last summer by his predecessor, Ebrahim Raisi.

Pezeshkian said Iran did not support what he described as Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, and he said the borders of countries should be respected.

He scoffed at suggestions that Iran was funding anti-Israeli demonstrations, describing the allegation as absurd and pointing out that Iran was having a hard time covering its own payroll.

Benjamin Netanyahu is considering a plan to force Palestinian civilians out of northern Gaza and put Hamas militants who remain in the area under siege in order to force the release of hostages.

The plan, published by retired military commanders and floated by some parliament members this month, calls for the area to be declared “a closed military zone” after civilians have been told to leave.

The Likud MP Avichai Boaron said the plan was ‘‘currently being evaluated by the government”.

“According to the plan, the IDF will evacuate all the civilians who are in the north of Gaza, from the border to the Gaza River,” Boaron told the Guardian. ‘‘And after they will evacuate, the IDF will assume that only the terrorists will remain. When the civilians population has left, you can find and kill all the terrorists without harming the civilians.”

The Israeli national broadcaster, Kan, quoted the Israeli prime minister as saying the blueprint “makes sense” and that it was “one of the plans being considered”. An Israeli official quoted by CNN confirmed the veracity of the quote but said: “Seeing it positively does not mean adopting it.”

According to the UN, between 300,000 and 500,000 Palestinians, most of them displaced, are living in the northern part of Gaza.

The retired Israel Defense Forces major general Giora Eiland, a former IDF strategist and a previous head of Israel’s national security council, explained the main steps of the plan in a video published two weeks ago.

“The reality today in Gaza is that [the Hamas leader Yahya] Sinwar is really not stressed,” he said in the video. “The right thing to do is to inform the approximately 300,000 residents who remained in the northern Gaza Strip, citizen residents, of the following: not that we are suggesting you leave the northern Gaza Strip; we are ordering you to leave the northern Gaza Strip.

“In a week, the entire territory of the northern Gaza Strip will become military territory. And this military territory, as far as we are concerned, no supplies will enter it. That is why 5,000 terrorists who are in this situation, they can either surrender or starve.”

Most of Gaza’s population has been displaced. An estimated 1 million people – half the population – are crammed into a designated humanitarian zone that comprises less than 15% of the territory and is lacking essential infrastructure and services, according to the UN. Humanitarian access to northern Gaza is especially difficult, it has said.

The plan does not tackle the question of what would happen to Palestinian civilians who are unable or unwilling to leave, or how it will help with releasing the hostages.

‘‘I hope this plan will help release the hostages,’’ says Boaron, who had collected signatures for the plan at the Knesset. ‘‘But it will definitely help to defeat Hamas.’’

Prof Eyal Zisser, the vice-rector of Tel Aviv University and an expert on Lebanon and Arab-Israeli relations, said Netanyahu had so far refrained from detailing what his vision or plan was for the “day after” in Gaza or when the war would end.

“Since there is no chance in the near future for a deal or a ceasefire, this means that the current situation will continue as it is – limited military operations by Israel in the Gaza Strip, but not full occupation,” Zisser said.

“The fear in the Israeli army is that such a thing allows Hamas to restore its military capabilities and its ability to control the population, since a vacuum has been created which Hamas exploits. That is the reason behind the idea that some of the generals have had that in practice Israel will control and establish a kind of military government in the Gaza Strip.”

The 79th United Nations general assembly is to open on Tuesday morning amid a massive bombing campaign in southern Lebanon that has brought Israel and the Shia militant group Hezbollah closer than ever to all-out war, despite fevered diplomatic efforts to de-escalate the conflict.

On Monday, diplomats huddled behind the scenes at the United Nations headquarters and midtown Manhattan hotels for bilateral and ministerial meetings on issues from Atlantic Ocean ecology to Ukraine’s energy supply, before what the UN bills as its own “Super Bowl of global diplomacy”.

At the same time, media livestreams showed Israeli shells and bombs raining down over southern Lebanon in strikes that killed at least 490 people and displaced thousands, according to the country’s health minister.

“The continuing Israeli aggression on Lebanon is a war of extermination in every sense of the word and a destructive plan that aims to destroy Lebanese villages and towns,” the Lebanese prime minister, Najib Mikati, told a cabinet meeting, according to local media.

He urged “the United Nations and the general assembly and influential countries … to deter the [Israeli] aggression”.

But key Israeli allies including the US voiced only muted criticism over the new bombing campaign, raising questions about what diplomatic pressure was being put on the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, as his government claimed it was escalating the conflict in order to pressure Hezbollah into negotiations.

Speculation remains over whether Netanyahu will attend the general assembly, as he may remain at home to manage the government during the escalating violence in southern Lebanon.

As of Monday, he was still slated to arrive in New York towards the end of the week and address the UN on Thursday or Friday. Mikati has already cancelled his trip to the US.

In a statement on Monday, Netanyahu issued a defiant message that “Israel’s war” was not with the people of Lebanon but with Hezbollah. “For too long, Hezbollah has been using you as human shields … once our operation is finished, you can come back safely to your homes,” the message said.

The United Nations interim force in Lebanon (Unifil), a peacekeeping mission, expressed “grave concern for the safety of civilians in southern Lebanon amidst the most intense Israeli bombing campaign since last October”.

The attacks harming civilians are “not only violations of international law but could amount to war crimes”, the statement said.

The Unifil commander, Lt Gen Aroldo Lázaro, had been in contact with Lebanese and Israeli parties, and had made efforts to “reduce tensions and halt the shelling”, it said.

UN peacekeepers were deployed to monitor a ceasefire along the so-called blue line between Israel and Lebanon under resolution 1701, which brought an end to the war between the two sides in 2006. The mission includes recording violations of the ceasefire.

Netanyahu, a former UN ambassador in the 1980s, is famously critical of the institution, which he has accused of providing a forum for antisemitism and anti-Zionism.

An appearance by the Israeli prime minister would probably spark a walkout of a number of UN delegations who have criticised Israel’s war in Gaza. It would also come as a panel of judges from the international criminal court considers whether to charge him for war crimes.

He “hates and mistrusts the institution but he does like coming here to tell us that we’re all rubbish”, said Richard Gowan, UN director at the International Crisis Group.

The summit will mark Joe Biden’s last address before the United Nations as the US president caps off five decades of government service with an effort to settle one of the globe’s most intractable conflicts.

He has said repeatedly that a diplomatic resolution remains possible in the nearly year-old war in Gaza sparked by Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel, but has been unable to secure a temporary ceasefire and hostage exchange that would be the first step of a potential peace deal between the two sides.

Speaking with reporters after arriving at the White House on Marine One, he confirmed that he was worried about the rising tensions in the Middle East. “We’re going to do everything we can to keep a wider war from breaking out. And we’re still pushing hard,” he said.

On Monday Biden met Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, in the first visit by a United Arab Emirates leader to the US since 1971. While Biden was successful at strengthening regional ties with Gulf states such as the UAE, relations have become increasingly strained over the US support for Israel in Gaza.

Saudi Arabia last week said it would not recognise Israel unless it agreed to a two-state solution with an independent Palestine, and the Emirates have said they would not support postwar reconstruction in Gaza unless it was part of a plan to form an independent Palestinian state. The US vice-president, Kamala Harris, is to meet with Zayed later on Monday.

Keir Starmer and the French president, Emmanuel Macron, will also attend this week’s summit, where the UN will review a number of initiatives to reform its security council that will probably be blocked owing to divisions with other permanent members Russia and China.

Japan said its fighter jets used flares for the first time to warn a Russian reconnaissance aircraft to leave its airspace, the defence ministry in Tokyo said, as tensions rise over increasing Russian and Chinese military cooperation in the region.

An undisclosed number of F-15 and F-35 warplanes were scrambled and fired flares on Monday after the Russian II-38 maritime patrol aircraft apparently ignored their radio warnings, Japan’s defence minister, Minoru Kihara said.

Kihara said it was also the first publicly announced airspace incursion by a Russian aircraft since June 2019, when a Tu-95 bomber entered Japanese airspace in southern Okinawa and around the Izu Islands south of Tokyo.

He said the Russian plane had breached Japan’s airspace above Rebun Island, just off the coast of the country’s northernmost main island of Hokkaido,three times during its five-hour flight in the area.

“The airspace violation is extremely regrettable and today we lodged a very serious protest with the Russian government via diplomatic channels and strongly urged them to prevent a recurrence,” Kihara added.

The Japanese prime minister, Fumio Kishida, told government officials to respond “firmly and calmly” to the incident and work with the US and other nations, the chief cabinet secretary, Yoshimasa Hayashi, said.

“We will refrain from giving any definitive information on the intent and purpose of this action, but the Russian military has been active in the vicinity of our country since the invasion of Ukraine,” Hayashi added.

Kihara said the use of flares was a legitimate response to airspace violation and “we plan to use it without hesitation”.

The incursion came a day after a joint fleet of Chinese and Russian warships sailed around the Japanese northern coast. Kihara said the airspace violation could be related to a joint military exercise that Russia and China announced earlier this month.

Japanese defence officials are concerned about growing military cooperation between the China and Russia, and China’s increasingly assertive activity around Japanese waters and airspace. It led Tokyo to significantly reinforce defences of south-western Japan, including remote islands that are considered key to Japan’s defence strategy in the region.

Earlier in September, Russian military aircraft flew around southern Japanese airspace. A Chinese Y-9 reconnaissance aircraft briefly violated Japan’s southern airspace in late August.

The Chinese aircraft carrier Liaoning, accompanied by two destroyers, sailed between Japan’s westernmost island of Yonaguni and nearby Iriomote, entering close to Japan’s waters.

Japan’s air self-defence force said it had scrambled jets 669 times between April 2023 and March 2024, about 70% of the time against Chinese military aircraft, although that number did not include airspace violations.

Japan and Russia are in a territorial dispute over the Northern Territories, a group of Russian-held islands that the former Soviet Union seized from Japan at the end of the second world war. The row has prevented the two countries from signing a peace treaty formally ending hostilities.

Bilateral tensions have also risen over Japan’s support for Ukraine. Tokyo has offered Kyiv financial and material support and imposed sanctions on Russian individuals and organisations.

Democrats are increasingly worried that pollsters are undercounting Donald Trump’s voter support, rating his prospects of winning November’s presidential election as much higher than headline opinion polling figures suggest.

While most national surveys show consistent, though moderate, leads for Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, some supporters are unnerved by the small margin of her advantage in three northern battlegrounds – Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin – which are deemed must-wins in her quest for the White House.

Although some polls have shown the vice-president with leads of between four and six points in Pennsylvania – generally judged the most important swing state – others show Trump trailing by smaller deficits. Narrower gaps separate the two in Michigan and Wisconsin, where Harris’s lead is just 1 or 2%, according to several different recent polls.

Underpinning Democrats’ fears is the knowledge that Trump greatly out-performed predictions in all three states in 2016, when he narrowly won them en route to his election triumph over Hillary Clinton, and in 2020, when he was pipped by Joe Biden by far smaller margins than forecast.

The worries are compounded by the latest New York Times/Siena poll, which records Trump performing more robustly in three Sun belt battleground states – Georgia, Arizona and North Carolina – than he has in weeks.

The survey shows the Republican nominee leading by five points – 50 to 45% – in Arizona, which Biden won by just over 10,000 votes in 2020, and four points – 49 to 45% – in Georgia, which was won by the president by a similar margin. In North Carolina, where Trump is trying to avoid being tarred by revelations over past comments by Mark Robinson, the GOP’s candidate for governor, he has a smaller advantage, 49 to 47%.

Putting the Democrats’ worries into perspective are projections showing that Trump will win all seven designated battleground states – the seventh being Nevada – if he outstrips polling predictions by the same margins he achieved in losing the 2020 election.

A separate projection by Focaldata – using a model that takes into account different demographic factors in determining the likelihood that certain cohorts will vote – reduces Harris’s lead by an average of 2.4% across swing states.

“In an election which could be decided by just 60,000 voters in November, this margin could easily be the difference between a right and wrong call on the election winner,” writes Focaldata’s Patrick Flynn. “Pollsters who simply rely on self-reporting [in defining likely voters] may be subject to another polling miss in Trump’s favor.”

The one piece of encouraging news for Harris is that she will win every swing state except Georgia if the polls turn out to be as wrong as they were in the campaign for the 2022 congressional midterm elections.

That has not placated some Democrats, who note that both Clinton and Biden were performing better against Trump in polling – both nationally and in swing states – than Harris is now.

“That’s ominous. There’s no question that is concerning, but you’re working as hard as you can work, no matter what,” the Hill quoted one unnamed Democratic senator as saying. “My sense is there’s not a lot more you can do than we’re already doing.”

John Fetterman, the Democratic senator for Pennsylvania, told the same site that Trump was a threat despite some buoyant recent polling for Harris in his state. “Polling has really been seriously damaged since 2016 … Trump is going to be tough in Pennsylvania, and that’s absolutely the truth,” he said.

In a further worrying sign for Harris, the New York Times/Siena poll indicated that her “bounce” from this month’s debate against Trump – which most surveys indicated she won – was the smallest enjoyed by any presidential debate-winning candidate in the 21st century.

“On average, Kamala Harris is faring about one point better across 34 polls that measured the race before and after the debate,” wrote the New York Times’ chief polling analyst Nate Cohn, concluding that the contest remained deadlocked despite the encounter.

“George W Bush, John Kerry, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and, yes, Donald J Trump earlier this year, all peaked with gains of at least two points after their debates.”

Donald Trump returned to Pennsylvania, telling his rally attendees that their state was critical to his ability to win back the White House and encouraging them to turn out to vote, though he also called early voting “stupid stuff”.

“If we win Pennsylvania, we win the whole thing,” Trump said, soon after taking the stage more than 45 minutes later than scheduled. “It’s very simple.”

Pennsylvania swung for Joe Biden in 2020, delivering its 20 electoral votes and helping Biden secure the victory in one of the few states that help decide US elections. This year, polls on average have shown Vice-President Kamala Harris with a slight lead over Trump – though the state is clearly in play, and both candidates are campaigning through it frequently in the final two months before November.

Trump has held his signature rallies significantly less this year than he did in 2016, Axios recently reported, which said his campaign promises Trump will ramp up the rallies in the final stretch. Earlier in the day, Trump listened to farmers talk about the problems they’re facing and boosted his ideas about imposing tariffs on foreign countries as a way to improve economics in the US.

While he’s on the road for large rallies less, he’s increasingly known for his frequent digressions, a longtime fixture of Trump’s speaking style that appear to be increasing this year. At the rally at Indiana University of Pennsylvania in Indiana, Pennsylvania, on Monday, he hopped around at breakneck pace and was difficult to follow. When coherent, he painted a dark vision of America under Democratic rule and starkly laid out what he would do if he won, including mass deportations.

Trump has started defending his meandering rambles as a storytelling technique called “the weave” – a sign of his oratory brilliance. Critics say his tangents about bacon sales or Hannibal Lecter, and his defense of them as intentional and smart, show a salesman trying to rebrand his disarray.

After starting on claims that Harris would turn the US into Venezuela at Monday’s rally, Trump then moved into “where they cure the tar”, saying: “For the environmentalists, you know where they cure the tar, where they take the tar and they make it into beautiful oil, Houston, Texas, and it all goes flying up in the air.”

Trump joked that he nearly called Pennsylvania a “state” rather than a commonwealth, saving himself from a gaffe that he claimed would invite negative headlines. He caught himself before calling it a state, though, because “I’m cognitively very strong.” He also called Harris “a very dumb person”.

“Winston Churchill was this great speaker – great,” he said at one point. “I get much bigger crowds than him, but nobody ever says I’m a great speaker.”

Despite his nonstop verbal wandering, he bragged about his lack of a script: “Isn’t it nice to have a president that doesn’t have to use a teleprompter?”

He repeated a spate of false claims, such as that crime is up. Crime is down. He alleged he won the 2020 election by millions of votes. He lost. He wove an alternate reality where wars between Russia and Ukraine and between Israel and Hamas do not exist because he had won in 2020.

He lashed out at Biden and Harris. He said he was again calling Biden “sleepy Joe”, regressing back to that insult instead of “crooked Joe” because he is not smart and is not acting as president any more. Harris, for her part, is a “very dumb person”, Trump said, and cannot answer basic questions.

He brought up a recent interview Harris did with Oprah Winfrey, who Trump claimed “used to love me until I decided to run for politics”. He said some people believe former president Barack Obama, who Trump called Barack Hussein Obama with an emphasis on his middle name, is leading the country instead of Biden. And he surfaced the unproven claim that Harris did not actually work at McDonald’s as a student, something that recently has irked him as rightwing accounts spread rumors questioning her fast-food work history.

“I’m going to go to a McDonald’s next week,” Trump said. “I’m going to go to a McDonald’s and I’m going to work the french fry job for about a half an hour. I want to see how it is.”

He brought up abortion, a key liability for Trump and other Republicans after the overturning of Roe v Wade. Several states have direct ballot measures that would protect access to abortion, and Democrats have made abortion access a major plank of the 2024 race. He praised the US supreme court for overturning Roe, saying the decision took “courage”. He added that there should be unspecified “exceptions” to abortion bans.

“That’s all they talk about. The country is falling apart. We’re going to end up in world war three, and all they can talk about is abortion,” he said.

The stop in the critical swing state comes after two assassination attempts, including one in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July. Trump will be returning to Butler in early October, some news outlets reported Monday. He displayed the immigration chart that he says saved his life from the Butler shooter during Monday’s rally, joking that he “sleeps with that page” at night. “Immigration saved my life,” he said.

Later in the speech, he again railed against immigration and migrants, bringing up towns that have received increases of people in recent years and saying those places are “lawless”, full of gangs and irreparably damaged. He promised that all migrant flights to Pennsylvania and elsewhere would be ended if he wins.

“You have to get them the hell out,” Trump said of migrants.

A Republican attempt to change the electoral system in Nebraska to give Donald Trump a possible advantage in the event of a tied presidential election has been rebuffed after a state legislator refused to back the plan.

Mike McDonnell, a former Democrat who crossed to the Republican party this year, said he would not vote to change the midwestern state’s distribution of electors to the same winner-takes-all process that operates in most of the US.

His decision followed intense lobbying from both Republicans and Democrats, who anticipated that a change in the allocation of Nebraska’s five electoral college votes could have have a decisive impact on the outcome of the 5 November poll.

It reduces the possibility that the former president and Kamala Harris could be tied on 269 electoral college votes each, a scenario that would throw the final say on the election’s outcome to the House of Representatives.

A tie scenario could have arisen if Trump earned five electoral votes – rather than four, as expected under the present set-up – from winning Nebraska, then won the four “Sun belt” states of North Carolina, Georgia, Nevada and Arizona, while the vice-president carried the northern battlegrounds of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

US presidential elections are not decided by the popular vote nationwide but by which candidate wins a majority of 538 electoral college votes, usually awarded to the winner of the popular vote in each state.

Nebraska’s Republican legislators, egged on by Republicans on Capitol Hill, proposed to change the distribution of electors to ensure that Trump would be awarded all five electoral votes if, as expected, he wins the solidly pro-Republican state.

That would have upended the status quo under which Nebraska, unlike every other state apart from Maine, splits its allocation to give two to the presidential candidate that wins the popular vote while awarding the other three on the basis of who prevails in each of its three congressional districts.

The state’s second congressional district, covering its biggest city, Omaha, was won by Joe Biden in 2020, a feat Harris hopes to emulate.

The spotlight had fallen on McDonnell, a former firefighter and the chair of Omaha’s federation of labour, because his support would have provided the two-thirds majority needed in the state legislature to change Nebraska’s distribution system law, which has operated since 1992.

In a statement, McDonnell, who had seemed to wavering in recent days from his earlier vow not to vote to restore the winner-takes-all system, made it plain that he had not moved from his original position.

“Elections should be an opportunity for all voters to be heard, no matter who they are, where they live, or what party they support,” he said. “I have taken time to listen carefully to Nebraskans and national leaders on both sides of the issue. After deep consideration, it is clear to me that right now, 43 days from election day, is not the moment to make this change.”

His announcement came despite a meeting with the Republican senator Lindsey Graham, a close Trump ally, who travelled to Nebraska last week to lobby local legislators, and appeared to end plans by Jim Pillen, Nebraska’s governor, to call a special legislative session to change the law.

“With Mike McDonnell being an absolute no, that kind of closes the lid,” the Republican state senator Loren Lippincott told the Nebraska Examiner newspaper.

McDonnell’s stance won praise from a former ally, Jane Kleeb, the chair of Nebraska’s Democrats, who hailed him for “standing strong against tremendous pressure from out-of-state interests to protect Nebraskans’ voice in our democracy”.

The man accused in the apparent assassination attempt of Donald Trump at a golf course in Florida left behind a note saying that he intended to kill the former president and maintained in his car a handwritten list of dates and venues where the Republican White House nominee was to appear, the justice department said on Monday.

The new allegations were included in a detention memo filed before a hearing on Monday. At that hearing, prosecutors said they would seek to charge Routh with the attempted assassination of a major political candidate, and he was ordered to be held in jail pending trial.

The details in the memo are designed to buttress prosecutors’ assertions that Routh had set out to kill Trump before the plot was thwarted by a Secret Service agent who spotted a rifle poking out of shrubbery on the West Palm Beach golf course where the former president was playing on 15 September.

The note, addressed “Dear World”, was placed in a box that was dropped at the home of an unidentified person who contacted officials after last Sunday’s arrest. It appears to have been based on the premise that the assassination attempt would ultimately be unsuccessful.

The box, which also contained ammunition, a metal pipe and other items, was not opened by the person until after Routh was taken into custody. The person who received the box and contacted law enforcement was not identified in the justice department’s detention memo.

“This was an assassination attempt on Donald Trump but I failed you. I tried my best and gave it all the gumption I could muster. It is up to you now to finish the job; and I will offer $150,000 to whomever can complete the job,” the note said, according to prosecutors.

An attorney for Routh did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.

The letter gives further indications of Routh’s alleged motivation. The former president “ended relations with Iran like a child, and now the Middle East has unraveled”, the note states, apparently alluding to the Trump White House’s decision to withdraw from a nuclear agreement with Iran in 2018.

Investigators believe that Routh, a pro-Ukraine activist, had staked out the grounds of Trump’s West Palm Beach golf course for a month before his arrest, the filing said. On the day of the apparent attempt on Trump’s life, he had secreted himself outside the fence at the sixth hole of the course.

A Secret Service agent patrolling one hole ahead of Trump’s group spotted Routh and the barrel of his gun, eventually leading to his arrest.

Prosecutors say Routh positioned himself near the sixth hole with the intention of using a semi-automatic rifle equipped with a scope to shoot Trump. Routh had a round in the rifle’s chamber and 11 additional bullets in the weapon, which he left at the scene after being spotted and trying to flee.

The memo states that “at approximately 1.30pm, the agent spotted the partially obscured face of a man in the brush along the fence line … directly in line with the sixth hole. The agent then observed a long black object protruding through the fence and realized the object was the barrel of a rifle aimed directly at him.”

The memo adds: “The agent jumped out of the golf cart, drew his weapon, and began backing away. The agent saw the rifle barrel move, and the agent fired at Routh.

“The agent took cover behind a tree and reloaded his weapon, then looked up and saw that Routh was gone. The agent called out over his radio that shots had been fired by the agent and that there was a subject with a rifle.”

Prosecutors submitted the note as part of a filing arguing for Routh to be detained in custody while he awaits trial on two gun charges.

During a search of Routh’s Nissan SUV after authorities caught him, the memo said, investigators also found “a handwritten list of dates in August, September and October and venues where the former president had appeared or was expected to be present”.

Agents also found six cellphones (including one that contained a Google search of how to travel from Palm Beach county to Mexico), 12 pairs of gloves, a Hawaii driver’s license in Routh’s name, and a passport.

After he was arrested, Routh was charged with possessing a firearm despite a prior felony conviction prohibiting him from legally doing so as well as possession and receipt of a firearm with an obliterated serial number.

The memo alleges that, in the area of the tree line where Routh was hiding, agents found a digital camera, a backpack, a loaded SKS-style rifle with a scope and a black plastic bag containing food. The serial number on the rifle was obliterated, which is against federal law.

Deputies with the nearby Martin county sheriff’s office later arrested Routh in coordination with the Palm Beach county sheriff’s office as he headed north.

Monday’s memo noted how Routh’s arrest was not his only brush with the law. The document made reference to a 2002 conviction of illegally possessing what a media report referred to at the time as a “fully automatic machine gun”. According to the Greensboro News & Record, in that case Routh barricaded himself at his roofing company during a three-hour standoff before he led police on a car chase and ultimately surrendered.

A second felony conviction mentioned in Monday’s memo dated back to 2010 and was for multiple counts of possession of stolen goods.

The Associated Press contributed reporting

South Korean pistol shooter Kim Yeji, whose skill and nonchalance won the internet at the Paris Olympics, has landed her first acting role – as an assassin.

The 32-year-old took silver in the women’s 10m air pistol in July and her ultra-calm demeanour, combined with her wire-rimmed shooting glasses and baseball cap, turned her into a worldwide online sensation.

As videos of her shooting went viral, she drew praise from celebrities such as Elon Musk.

“She should be cast in an action movie. No acting required!” Musk wrote on his social media platform X at the time.

Now she will play an assassin in “Crush”, a spinoff short-form series of the global film project “Asia”, a spokesperson for Seoul-based entertainment firm Asia Lab told AFP on Friday.

Kim will star alongside Indian actress and influencer Anushka Sen, the company said in a separate statement, saying it was excited to witness “the potential synergy that will arise from Kim Yeji and Anushka Sen’s new transformation into a killer duo”.

Since winning silver, a short clip showing Kim at the Baku World Cup in May has gone viral, spawning fan art, endless memes and multiple edits setting the clip to K-pop.

Kim signed with a South Korean talent agency in August to assist her in managing her extracurricular activities and she has since been featured in a magazine photoshoot for Louis Vuitton.

South Korean pistol shooter Kim Yeji, whose skill and nonchalance won the internet at the Paris Olympics, has landed her first acting role – as an assassin.

The 32-year-old took silver in the women’s 10m air pistol in July and her ultra-calm demeanour, combined with her wire-rimmed shooting glasses and baseball cap, turned her into a worldwide online sensation.

As videos of her shooting went viral, she drew praise from celebrities such as Elon Musk.

“She should be cast in an action movie. No acting required!” Musk wrote on his social media platform X at the time.

Now she will play an assassin in “Crush”, a spinoff short-form series of the global film project “Asia”, a spokesperson for Seoul-based entertainment firm Asia Lab told AFP on Friday.

Kim will star alongside Indian actress and influencer Anushka Sen, the company said in a separate statement, saying it was excited to witness “the potential synergy that will arise from Kim Yeji and Anushka Sen’s new transformation into a killer duo”.

Since winning silver, a short clip showing Kim at the Baku World Cup in May has gone viral, spawning fan art, endless memes and multiple edits setting the clip to K-pop.

Kim signed with a South Korean talent agency in August to assist her in managing her extracurricular activities and she has since been featured in a magazine photoshoot for Louis Vuitton.

Industrial civilisation is close to breaching a seventh planetary boundary, and may already have crossed it, according to scientists who have compiled the latest report on the state of the world’s life-support systems.

“Ocean acidification is approaching a critical threshold”, particularly in higher-latitude regions, says the latest report on planetary boundaries. “The growing acidification poses an increasing threat to marine ecosystems.”

The report, from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), builds on years of research showing there are nine systems and processes – the planetary boundaries – that contribute to the stability of the planet’s life-support functions.

Thresholds beyond which they can no longer properly function have already been breached in six. Climate change, the introduction of novel entities, change in biosphere integrity and modification of biogeochemical flows are judged to be in high-risk zones, while planetary boundaries are also transgressed in land system change and freshwater change but to a lesser extent. All have worsened, according to the data.

Stratospheric ozone depletion has remained stable, however, and there has been a slight improvement in atmospheric aerosol loading, the research says.

At a briefing outlining the findings, Levke Caesar, a climate physicist at PIK and co-author of the report, said there were two reasons the levels of ocean acidification were concerning.

“One is [that] the indicator for ocean acidification, which is the current aragonite separation state, while still being in the safe operating space, is approaching the threshold of transgressing the safe boundary,” Caesar said.

“The second is that there are actually several new studies that were published over the last years that indicate that even these current conditions may already be problematic for a variety of marine organisms, suggesting a need [to] re-evaluate which levels can actually be called safe.”

Ocean acidification was getting worse globally, with the effects most pronounced in the Southern Ocean and the Arctic Ocean, she added.

Ocean acidification is the phenomenon of increasing acidity (decreasing pH) in ocean water due to the absorption of atmospheric CO₂. The process not only harms calcifying organisms, potentially leading to food web breakdown, but also reduces the ocean’s efficiency in acting as a vital carbon sink.

“This illustrates the connection between ocean acidification … and biosphere integrity,” Caesar said. “Indeed, one of the main messages of our report is that all nine planetary boundaries are highly interconnected.

“This means that any human perturbation of the global environment that we observe at the moment … cannot be addressed as if they were separate issues, which is how it is at the moment primarily handled. Because this type of approach ignores that the components of the Earth system constantly interact forming a large network where changes in one area affect the others.”

Planetary boundary science was pioneered in 2009 by Johan Rockstrom, the director of the PIK, and others. In that research and two subsequent reports, the researchers identified and quantified boundaries relating to climate change, biosphere, land system change, freshwater change, biogeochemical flows, ocean acidification, atmospheric aerosol loading, ozone layer depletion and the introduction of novel entities, such as synthetic chemicals, to the environment.

The transgression of boundaries in each of those areas risks disrupting the stability, resilience and liveability of the state of the planet that has persisted for the past 12,000 years and that has allowed the rise of complex human civilisation.

The report, which came a year after the last, is the first of what will now be annual “planetary health checks” published by PIK, Rockstrom said.

“We recognise that the planet’s health … is at such risk today that we in science must also now step up and step right out in to the uncomfortable zone and say that we are now committing ourselves to produce every year a scientific measuring of the entire health assessment – a risk assessment – across all the planetary boundaries,” he said. “This is much more than science, this is science for change.”

Unlike previous iterations of PIK’s planetary boundaries research, the report does not appear in an academic journal but is instead written and formatted for a popular audience. Rockstrom and his colleagues said the findings were based on peer-reviewed science.

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he believes the war with Russia is “closer to the end” than many believe and called on allies to strengthen Ukraine’s army. In excerpts of an interview with ABC News’ Good Morning America, set to be broadcast in full on Tuesday, the president said “I think that we are closer to the peace than we think … We are closer to the end of the war.” He added: “That’s why we’re asking our friends, our allies, to strengthen us. It’s very important.” Zelenskyy told ABC that Putin is “afraid” of Ukraine’s Kursk operation, in which it has taken more than 1,000 square km of Russian territory. Zelenskyy is in the US to attend sessions at the UN general assembly as well as to present a “victory plan” to US President Joe Biden and presidential hopefuls Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.

• After a bipartisan meeting with members of the US Congress, Zelenskyy also said “decisive action now could hasten the just end of Russian aggression against Ukraine next year.” The US played a “critical role” in protecting freedom around the world, he said in a Telegram post, and praised the US Congress and both main parties for their “unwavering commitment to this cause”.

• His comments came as Republican presidential candidate Trump suggested Zelenskyy wanted Harris to win the November election. “I think Zelenskyy is the greatest salesman in history. Every time he comes into the country, he walks away with 60 billion dollars,” Trump said at a rally in Pennsylvania. “He wants them [the Democrats] to win this election so badly.” Trump said if he wins the election, he would call Putin and Zelenskyy and urge them to reach a deal to end the war.

• Foreign ministers of the G7 major democracies were on Monday to discuss the issue of sending long-range missiles to Ukraine that could be used to hit Russian territory, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said. Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of the UN general assembly, Borrell said it was clear that Russia was receiving new weapons, including Iranian missiles despite Tehran’s repeated denials.

• Zelenskyy said early on Tuesday that he had held talks with Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida on Japan’s energy aid to Kyiv. “Restoring our energy supply after Russian shelling and preparing for winter are tasks we are actively working on now,” Zelenskiy said in a post on the Telegram messaging app.

• Jails controlled by Russia are deliberately withholding medical care for Ukrainian prisoners, with doctors in one prison even taking part in what it called “torture”, according to a commission mandated by the UN rights council. The commission, set up by the Human Rights Council to investigate violations in Ukraine since Russia’s invasion, had already concluded that Moscow’s occupying forces were using torture “systematically”. But in his oral report to the council, commission chair Erik Mose said torture had become a “common and acceptable practice”, with Russian authorities acting with “a sense of impunity”.

• A UN-backed human rights expert monitoring Russia decried on Monday increased violence in the country caused by former prisoners who have their sentences shortened or pardoned to fight in Ukraine and then return home. Mariana Katzarova said the return home to Russia of former criminals who have had their legal slates wiped clean is adding to more domestic violence. Katzarova said an estimated 170,000 convicted violent criminals have been recruited to fight in Ukraine. “Many of them who return – and this is an emerging trend – have been perpetrating new violent crimes to begin with against women, against girls, against children, including sexual violence and killings,” she said in Geneva.

• Katzarova also said the rights situation inside Russia had become “much worse” over the past year amid a tightening “state-sponsored system of fear and punishment”. “Nobody is safe,” Katzarova said. Already a year ago, the independent expert said repression had hit unprecedented” levels. But the quashing of dissent had intensified since then, Katzarova warned.

• Ukraine accused Russia at an international court on Monday of flouting sea law by trying to keep the Kerch Strait between mainland Russia and annexed Crimea under its sole control. Kyiv began proceedings at The Hague-based intergovernmental Permanent Court of Arbitration in 2016 after Moscow began building the 19 km (12 mile) Crimea Bridge link to the peninsula it seized from Ukraine two years previously. The bridge is crucial for the supply of fuel, food and other products to Crimea, where the port of Sevastopol is the historic home base of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, and became a major supply route for troops after Moscow’s full-scale invasion in 2022.

• Russian forces launched the latest of a series of strikes on Ukraine’s southeastern city of Zaporizhzhia on Monday evening, killing one person, regional governor Ivan Fedorov said. A city official, quoted by public broadcaster Suspilne, put the injury toll at five, including a 13-year-old girl. Strikes on the city earlier in the day and the previous night wounded at least 23.

• Ukrainian shelling killed three people, including a child, in the Russian border village of Arkhangelskoe, the provincial governor said Monday. “The village came under shelling by the Ukrainian armed forces. Two adults and a teenager were killed by the enemy strike,” Belgorod governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said in a post on Telegram.

• Russia will not test a nuclear weapon as long as the United States refrains from testing, President Vladimir Putin’s point man for arms control said on Monday after speculation that the Kremlin might abandon its post-Soviet nuclear test moratorium. “Nothing has changed,” deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov, who is in charge of Russian arms control policy, told Russian news agencies about the speculation that a nuclear test could be Russia’s answer to missile strikes deep into Russia.

• Russia’s Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile – known in the west as Satan II – appears to have suffered a “catastrophic failure” during a test launch, according to analysis of satellite images. The images captured by Maxar on 21 September show a crater about 60 metres wide at the launch silo at the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia. They reveal extensive damage that was not visible in pictures taken earlier in the month.

A former Canadian diplomat detained by China for more than 1,000 days said he was placed in solitary confinement for months and interrogated for up to nine hours every day, treatment he said amounted to psychological torture.

Michael Kovrig, speaking to the Canadian Broadcasting Corp in his first major interview since his release, also said he had missed the birth of his daughter and met her for the first time when she was two-and-a half years old.

Kovrig and fellow Canadian Michael Spavor were taken into custody in December 2018 shortly after Canadian police detained Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei, on a US warrant. Both men were accused of spying.

“I still carry a lot of pain around with me and that can be heavy at times,” Kovrig said in his first substantial comments since he and Spavor were released in September 2021.

Kovrig noted that UN guidelines say prisoners should not be put into solitary confinement for more than 15 days in a row.

“More than that is considered psychological torture. I was there for nearly six months,” said Kovrig, who had been working as an adviser with a thinktank when he was arrested.

Kovrig said there was no daylight in the solitary cell, where the fluorescent lights were kept on 24 hours a day. At one point, his food ration was cut to three bowls of rice a day.

“It was psychologically absolutely, the most gruelling, painful thing I’ve ever been through,” he said. “It’s a combination of solitary confinement, total isolation, and relentless interrogation for six to nine hours every day,” he said. “They are trying to bully and torment and terrorise and coerce you … into accepting their false version of reality.”

Kovrig and Spavor were released on the same day the US justice department dropped its extradition request for Meng and she returned to China.

The Chinese embassy in Ottawa, responding to Kovrig’s interview, said he and Spavor had been suspected of engaging in activities endangering China’s national security.

Chinese judicial authorities handled the cases in strict accordance with the law, it said in a statement.

Bilateral ties remain chilly. China this month opened a one-year anti-dumping investigation into imports of rapeseed from Canada, just weeks after Ottawa announced 100% tariffs on Chinese-made electric vehicles.

Kovrig’s partner was six months pregnant at the time of his arrest. She played their daughter recordings of his voice and showed pictures of her father so she would recognise him when they finally met.

“I’ll never forget that sense of wonder, of everything being new and wonderful again and pushing my daughter on a swing that had her saying to her mother ‘Mummy, I’m so happy’,” Kovrig said.

A former Canadian diplomat detained by China for more than 1,000 days said he was placed in solitary confinement for months and interrogated for up to nine hours every day, treatment he said amounted to psychological torture.

Michael Kovrig, speaking to the Canadian Broadcasting Corp in his first major interview since his release, also said he had missed the birth of his daughter and met her for the first time when she was two-and-a half years old.

Kovrig and fellow Canadian Michael Spavor were taken into custody in December 2018 shortly after Canadian police detained Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei, on a US warrant. Both men were accused of spying.

“I still carry a lot of pain around with me and that can be heavy at times,” Kovrig said in his first substantial comments since he and Spavor were released in September 2021.

Kovrig noted that UN guidelines say prisoners should not be put into solitary confinement for more than 15 days in a row.

“More than that is considered psychological torture. I was there for nearly six months,” said Kovrig, who had been working as an adviser with a thinktank when he was arrested.

Kovrig said there was no daylight in the solitary cell, where the fluorescent lights were kept on 24 hours a day. At one point, his food ration was cut to three bowls of rice a day.

“It was psychologically absolutely, the most gruelling, painful thing I’ve ever been through,” he said. “It’s a combination of solitary confinement, total isolation, and relentless interrogation for six to nine hours every day,” he said. “They are trying to bully and torment and terrorise and coerce you … into accepting their false version of reality.”

Kovrig and Spavor were released on the same day the US justice department dropped its extradition request for Meng and she returned to China.

The Chinese embassy in Ottawa, responding to Kovrig’s interview, said he and Spavor had been suspected of engaging in activities endangering China’s national security.

Chinese judicial authorities handled the cases in strict accordance with the law, it said in a statement.

Bilateral ties remain chilly. China this month opened a one-year anti-dumping investigation into imports of rapeseed from Canada, just weeks after Ottawa announced 100% tariffs on Chinese-made electric vehicles.

Kovrig’s partner was six months pregnant at the time of his arrest. She played their daughter recordings of his voice and showed pictures of her father so she would recognise him when they finally met.

“I’ll never forget that sense of wonder, of everything being new and wonderful again and pushing my daughter on a swing that had her saying to her mother ‘Mummy, I’m so happy’,” Kovrig said.

Mexico’s southern coast was bracing for flash floods and storm surges as Hurricane John quickly intensified into a category 2 storm on Monday afternoon.

Originally forecast as a tropical storm, Hurricane John “rapidly strengthened” into a category 2 hurricane with maximum sustained winds of 100mph (160kmh), according to the US National Hurricane Center, which warned of “damaging hurricane-force winds, life-threatening storm surge and flash flooding”.

The storm was located 50 miles (90km) south of Punta Maldonado, and was moving north at 6mph (9km/h).

John was forecast to continue strengthening to a major hurricane before making landfall on Tuesday, bringing with it heavy downpours.

“This heavy rainfall will likely cause significant and possibly catastrophic, life-threatening flash flooding and mudslides to the Mexican states of Chiapas, Oaxaca and south-east Guerrero, particularly in areas near the coast,” the NHC warned.

In Oaxaca’s coastal cities residents and businesses braced themselves for the storm.

Hotels in the tourist city of Puerto Escondido were awaiting instructions from Mexican civil protection to begin the eventual evacuation of tourists to transfer them to safer areas.

An employee of one of the hotels in the town said “we are on alert” awaiting instructions from local authorities.

Videos on social media from Puerto Escondido showed flip-flop-clad tourists walking through heavy rain and people pulling their boats out of the water. Strong rains in previous days have already left some roads in the region in a precarious position.

Mexican authorities were meeting on Monday afternoon to plan their response to the hurricane.

Through Thursday, John is expected to produce 6in to 12in (15cm to 30cm) of rain across coastal areas of Chiapas state with more in isolated areas. In areas along and near the Oaxaca coast to south-east Guerrero, between10in and 20in of rain with isolated higher totals can be expected through Thursday.

The hurricane is bleak news for the region, which last year was walloped by a similar rapidly intensifying hurricane.

Hurricane Otis devastated the resort city of Acapulco last October, damaging more than 200,000 homes and killing at least 45 people, with dozens reported missing.

Residents had little warning of the strength of what was about to hit them. One of the most rapidly intensifying hurricanes ever seen, scientists at the time said it was a product of changing climate conditions.

Otis blew out power in the city for days, left bodies scattered on the coast and desperate family members searching for lost loved ones. Much of the city was left in a state of lawlessness and thousands scavenged in stores, scrambled for food and water.

Russia’s Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile – known in the west as Satan II – appears to have suffered a “catastrophic failure” during a test launch, according to analysis of satellite images.

The images captured by Maxar on 21 September show a crater about 60 metres (200 feet) wide at the launch silo at the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia. They reveal extensive damage that was not visible in pictures taken earlier in the month.

The RS-28 Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile is a key weapon in the modernisation of Russia’s nuclear arsenal. It is designed to strike targets thousands of miles away in the US or Europe, but its development has been dogged by delays and testing setbacks.

“By all indications, it was a failed test. It’s a big hole in the ground,” said Pavel Podvig, an analyst based in Geneva, who runs the Russian Nuclear Forces project. “There was a serious incident with the missile and the silo.”

Timothy Wright, research associate at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in London, said the destruction of the area immediately surrounding the missile silo was suggestive of a failure soon after ignition.

“One possible cause is that the first stage (booster) either failed to ignite properly or suffered from a catastrophic mechanical failure, causing the missile to fall back into or land closely adjacent to the silo and explode,” he told Reuters.

James Acton, nuclear specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, posted on X that the before and after satellite images were “very persuasive that there was a big explosion” and said he was convinced that a Sarmat test had failed.

The Kremlin referred questions on Sarmat to the defence ministry. The ministry did not respond to a Reuters request for comment and has made no announcements about planned Sarmat tests in recent days.

The US and its allies are closely watching Russia’s development of its nuclear arsenal at a time when the war in Ukraine has pushed tensions between Moscow and the west to the most dangerous point for more than 60 years.

Since the start of the conflict, President Vladimir Putin has said repeatedly that Russia has the biggest and most advanced nuclear arsenal in the world, and warned the west not to cross a threshold that could lead to nuclear war.

The 35-metre-long RS-28 Sarmat has a range of 11,000 miles (18,000km and a launch weight of more than 208 tonnes. Russian media say it can carry up to 16 independently targetable nuclear warheads as well as Avangard hypersonic glide vehicles, a new system that Putin has said is unmatched by Russia’s enemies.

Russia at one point had said the Sarmat would be ready by 2018, replacing the Soviet-era SS-18, but the date for deployment has been repeatedly pushed back.

Putin said in October 2023 that Russia had almost completed work on the missile. His defence minister at the time, Sergei Shoigu, said it was set to form “the basis of Russia’s ground-based strategic nuclear forces”.

IISS analyst Wright said a test failure did not necessarily mean that the Sarmat programme was in jeopardy.

“However, this is the fourth successive test failure of Sarmat which at the very least will push back its already delayed introduction into service even further and at most might raise questions about the programme’s viability,” he said.

Wright said the damage at Plesetsk – a test site surrounded by forest in the Arkhangelsk region, about 800km (500 miles) north of Moscow – would also impact the Sarmat programme.

The delays would put pressure on the serviceability and readiness of the ageing SS-18s the Sarmat is meant to replace, as they will have to remain in service for longer than expected, Wright said.

The former partner of a co-defendant in a mass rape trial that has sparked horror and protests in France has broken down in tears and told the court she might herself have been sexually assaulted.

“I don’t know if I was raped,” Emilie O told a criminal court in the south-eastern French city of Avignon on Monday. “It’s terrible. I will always have doubts.”

Emilie O is the former partner of Hugues M, one of dozens of men accused of raping Gisèle Pelicot while she was drugged into unconsciousness by her now former husband, Dominique Pelicot.

The 71-year-old, who has admitted inviting strangers into their home to rape her, has been on trial since the start of the month along with 50 other men aged between 26 and 74. Many of them have denied the accusations.

Emilie O said she herself might have been drugged and sexually assaulted by Hugues M, her former companion. “I was manipulated and lived a lie,” said Emilie O, who lived with the man for five years. “I’m still questioning everything,” she said, without glancing at her former partner.

Recounting her story, Emilie O broke down as she looked at Gisèle Pelicot, who smiled back at her in a show of support. The 33-year-old said she had first met Hugues M online. The two shared a passion for motorcycling.

She described Hugues M as respectful and considerate but added that he was repeatedly unfaithful to her. She said he had needed “adrenaline that he only found by riding a motorbike and engaging in sexual relations”.

Emilie O began seeing her life with former partner in a different light when she learned in 2021 of the charges against him. Her life was turned upside down when she received a call from the Avignon police.

“I was summoned and told that Hugues had raped a woman in October 2019, a few days before my birthday,” she said.

“I didn’t believe them; I was stunned, shocked. I asked to see the photo and then I realised that it wasn’t a nightmare,” she said.

Hugues M has been charged with the “attempted rape” of Gisèle Pelicot. Emilie O told the court she had begun to doubt their entire relationship and now thought she may have suffered the same treatment.

She told the court that one night in 2019 she had woken up to find her partner attempting to assault her. She launched a police complaint, but it was dismissed for “lack of material evidence”.

She also told the court she had experienced “dizziness” between September 2019 and March 2020, but investigators did not detect any substances that might have affected her at the time.

Gisèle Pelicot has testified that for years she had strange memory lapses and other health problems and thought she might have had Alzheimer’s.

On Monday the Avignon court began examining evidence against five more defendants. Among them was Joan K, the youngest of the 50 co-defendants, who was 22 at the time of the alleged assaults.

In 2019, he was absent for the birth of his own daughter on one of the occasions he is accused of sexually assaulting Gisèle Pelicot, a psychological profiler told the court.

He is suspected of having visited the couple’s home in Mazan to rape Gisèle Pelicot on two occasions. Born in French Guiana, he joined his brother in Avignon when he was 16 before enlisting in the army.

Joan K was in a relationship with a woman he met on the internet, but their time together was marked by “numerous” conflicts and “extramarital relations”, the court heard.

At the time of their separation, Joan K’s partner was pregnant.

Gisèle Pelicot has become an overnight feminist icon and received praise for demanding that the trial be open to the public to raise awareness about the use of drugs to commit sexual abuse.

At the weekend a letter in support of Gisèle Pelicot signed by more than 200 prominent men was published in the French daily Libération.

The relief felt by Germany’s Social Democrats at having narrowly won a regional election against the far right was tempered on Monday when it became clear they would need the support of hard-left Russophiles in order to form a government.

Olaf Scholz’s centre-left party pulled off an unexpected victory in Brandenburg on Sunday, receiving 31% of the vote after a mass tactical voting drive to exclude the far-right populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).

While there was relief at the SPD’s headquarters in Berlin, there was no escaping the fact that Germany’s political landscape has been profoundly shaken by a rise in support for populist extremists of different political shades.

The AfD, touting proposals for mass deportations, achieved its best result in Brandenburg, a state the SPD has governed since reunification. The far-right party came second with 29% of the vote after a wave of youth support.

Three other parties with whom the SPD would usually consider a partnership performed miserably, with the Greens failing to get into parliament at all. The leftist-conservative Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), which came in third with 13%, appears crucial to coalition talks.

The SPD now faces negotiations with a party that is demanding a cancellation of plans to station US long-range missiles in Germany and is calling for Berlin to push for peace talks with Moscow rather than supply Ukraine with weapons.

In a sobering recognition of the task ahead, Brandenburg’s leader, the SPD’s Dietmar Woidke, said: “Political stability will not be easy to achieve.”

Kevin Kühnert, the SPD’s general secretary in Berlin, said the party had contacted the BSW, but admitted that it knew very little about its regional political strategy. He predicted “a Pandora’s box” would open if and when talks began.

Like the AfD, the BSW is anti-Nato, Kremlin-friendly and anti-migration, skilled at tuning into, as well as stoking, voters’ fears over living costs, immigration and a sense that Scholz’s government is endangering the safety of its own citizens by sending weapons to Ukraine.

Analysts said the Brandenburg results reinforced the notion that extremist parties were increasingly able to set the agenda. The BSW is also the kingmaker in two other eastern states, Thuringia and Saxony, where recent elections resulted in strong showings for the AfD, with which mainstream parties refuse to govern.

In Brandenburg, a coalition between the SPD and the Christian Democrats might have been a possibility, but the centre-right party won only 11% of the vote, its worst performance in the state. The result means that an alliance between the two mainstream parties would be one seat short of the necessary majority.

Woidke’s win was seen to have been partly as a result of him distancing himself from the increasingly unpopular Scholz. He had made it clear that the chancellor was not welcome on the campaign trail, even though Scholz and his wife live in the state capital, Potsdam.

Woidke himself preferred to attribute his success to his party’s effort to keep the far right out. The AfD had been leading in the polls for a year leading up to Sunday’s election.

Woidke claimed the SPD was the only party to have clearly stated its aim to keep the AfD out of power. Other parties had tried to bring national issues to the regional campaign and to focus on the poor standing of Scholz’s government.

On Monday, as he was received as a party hero at the SPD’s Willy Brandt House headquarters, Woidke said: “We were the only political power in Brandenburg that said right from the start that we would win against the AfD. Others didn’t have the guts to do so.”

Woidke’s win was seen as a harbinger that the SPD could yet save itself before the federal election scheduled for a year’s time. The party’s poll ratings are at rock bottom, while Scholz’s popularity rating is lower than any of his predecessors.

The SPD co-leader Lars Klingbeil said: “It has become clear that if the SPD takes on the fight against the AfD, with a clear stance, then we have a chance to land in first place.”

In the event, however, three-quarters of SPD voters said they had been motivated by the desire to keep the AfD out of power, rather than a belief in the SPD’s ability to govern. Voter participation was at its highest level ever, at 73%.

The AfD’s party leaders predicted that the mainstream parties’ “firewall” would be difficult to maintain in light of its growing electoral successes.

Police said they were investigating reports and videos circling on social media appearing to show members of the party’s youth wing singing along to an AI-manipulated song in which a plan to “deport millions” of foreigners was feted.

The AfD had put the issue of what it calls “remigration” at the centre of its campaign, with the slogan “Re:migration – of course” plastered on campaign posters and party memorabilia.

Analysis of the Brandenburg result showed the AfD had made considerable gains compared with the last state election in 2019, in particular among young people, enjoying a 16.6% increase in support among 16- to 24-year-olds.

By contrast, the Greens lost support in every age bracket, most starkly among the youngest group, dropping 25 percentage points.