Israel’s top general has said the country is preparing for a ground operation inside Lebanon as the country’s military called up two brigades of reserve troops and an intense bombing campaign inside Lebanon stretched into a third day.

Israel’s chief of staff, Maj Gen Herzi Halevi, visiting troops in the north of Israel, said that current attacks on Lebanon aimed to destroy Hezbollah infrastructure and prepare for the possibility of Israeli troops crossing the border.

Earlier on Wednesday, Hezbollah aimed a long-range missile at Tel Aviv and Israel targeted the mountains north of Beirut for the first time in this war, expanding the range and scope of the aerial conflict across the border.

The death toll after three days of Israeli bombardment had passed 600, health authorities said, with thousands more injured. The United Nations said 90,000 people had been displaced since Monday, on top of more than 200,000 people who had left their homes in southern Lebanon over the past year as Hezbollah and Israel exchanged fire over the border.

With Israel and Hezbollah now in effect at war, world leaders gathered for the United Nations general assembly in New York warned overnight of the dangers of hostilities spiralling into a full-blown regional conflict.

They called for de-escalation while they prepared for the opposite: from Moscow to London to Washington, governments told citizens in Lebanon to return home while they could, as airlines cancelled flights out of Beirut.

The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said he was working “tirelessly” with allies to try to shift the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah back to “a diplomatic process that would allow Israelis and Lebanese alike to go back to their homes”.

Israel says its campaign against Hezbollah is needed so 60,000 people evacuated from border regions will be able to return home. It has so far been confined to aerial attacks but Israel’s military on Wednesday called up two reserve brigades for operations in the north and signalled that troops will soon be ready to cross the border.

It was not clear if Israel had decided to enter ground combat with Hezbollah or was just warning of the possibility. Halevi told troops the intense bombing of southern Lebanon was designed “to prepare the ground for your possible entry and to continue degrading Hezbollah”, Reuters reported.

Maj Gen Uri Gordin, commander for the region, told soldiers from an armoured corps that the war was in a “different phase” and they should “strongly prepare” for action. “We need to change the security situation,” he told troops in a clip shared on army radio.

Hundreds of thousands of people have fled southern Lebanon to escape Israeli bombs, but Wednesday’s strike on Maysaara, about 60 miles north of the border, fuelled fears that Israel could also unleash heavy attacks on other parts of the country.

In the scramble to save their lives, thousands of people had reversed the refugee flow seen for more than a decade and crossed from Lebanon into Syria, aid agencies said.

Hezbollah attempted to strike Tel Aviv for the first time on Wednesday but Israel intercepted the surface-to-surface missile with air defences, and no damage was reported.

Hezbollah said it was targeting intelligence headquarters, in an apparent signal that it can still pose a serious threat even after days of intensive Israeli attacks which have killed many top commanders and destroyed much of its arsenal.

An Israeli military spokesperson said the unguided missile had been heading towards civilian areas along the coast. “The Mossad headquarters is not in that area; it is a bit east and north of that area,” the Israel Defense Forces’ international spokesperson, Lt Col Nadav Shoshani, told a briefing.

Israel estimated that Hezbollah had 150,000 rockets and missiles at the start of the war and has not said how many have been destroyed. Senior commanders killed include the head of the elite Radwan force last week, and on Tuesday the head of the missile and rocket force, Ibrahim Qubaisi.

Israel’s successful strikes have decimated the top of Hezbollah’s chain of command, but Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, one of Hezbollah’s key backers, said on Wednesday that the group would survive the death of senior leaders, Reuters reported.

“The organisational strength and human resources of Hezbollah is very strong and will not be critically hit by the killing of a senior commander, even if that is clearly a loss,” he said.

Over decades of conflict, Hezbollah has previously managed to rebound from heavy blows and fight Israeli forces to a standstill, despite a vast disparity in military technology.

As it braces for further retaliation, Israel has brought in tighter restrictions, which include school closures, for over a million people in northern parts of the country, including the city of Haifa. One rocket hit an assisted living home in Safed City, starting a fire, but no casualties were reported.

In Tel Aviv, after the morning missile scare, life returned to something like normal on Wednesday, with kite surfers enjoying the sea off its beaches.

Bar Zinderman, 34, said racing to a bomb shelter with his two-year-old son Ar on Wednesday morning had been frightening, but that he backed the decision to attack Hezbollah.

“I think we are doing the right thing,” he said. “We had no choice but to fight against two enemies at our borders, who forced thousands of my fellow countrymen to evacuate. I hope that our pressure on them will soon lead to an agreement to end this war.”

Nabih Berri, the speaker of Lebanon’s parliament, said he was making “great efforts” to reach a diplomatic solution between Israel and Hezbollah, in coordination with the US and his own government. The next 24 hours would be decisive, he added.

Lebanon’s foreign minister, Abdallah Bou Habib, said the US was the only country that could end the conflict, but expressed disappointment after Joe Biden addressed the United Nations on Tuesday. His remarks were “not strong” and “would not solve the Lebanese problem”.

Israel’s bombardment of Gaza continued, even as global attention shifted to Lebanon. An airstrike on a house in the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza on Wednesday killed a pregnant woman and her four children.

Hospital records showed that the 35-year-old woman was six months pregnant. Her four children were aged between eight and 18, Associated Press reported; one of its journalists also saw the bodies.

The death toll in the war has now risen to nearly 41,500 people, the majority of them civilians, according to health authorities. Israel launched the war after a cross-border attack led by Hamas on 7 October killed 1,200 people, the majority civilians, and resulted in another 250 being taken hostage.

The expansion of Israel’s war on the northern front means efforts to reach a deal for a ceasefire and hostage release has in effect been put on hold.

Families and supporters of the hostages attacked the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, over his plans to attend the UN general assembly in New York in person this week.

“While the country is burning and 101 hostages have been abandoned in the Hamas death tunnels for 355 days, the prime minister chooses another unnecessary show trip to the US,” the Hostages and Missing Families Forum said in a statement.

The escalating conflict between Israeli forces and Hezbollah has put a renewed focus on the battle-hardened Lebanese militant group.

The two sides have been exchanging fire since the beginning of the war in Gaza in October last year, but the violence has increased markedly in the past week on the Lebanese side of the border, where Israel killed hundreds of people in strikes on Monday.

The violence is seen as the most likely avenue for the war in Gaza to explode into an uncontrollable regional conflagration. Here is a guide to the “Party of God” and its position in – and testy relationship with – the fragile Lebanese state.

What is Hezbollah?

Hezbollah is a powerful Islamist movement that was founded by Iran during the middle of the Lebanese 1975-90 civil war. It was further shaped by its fight with Israeli forces after their 1982 invasion of Lebanon.

While the US and other western governments deem it a terrorist organisation – and Hezbollah has conducted mass-casualty attacks on civilians – the group’s reach extends far beyond militancy.

The Shia Muslim movement has become a political and social powerhouse in Lebanon, running medical clinics, schools, a regional television network and even a hilltop museum that has been popular with European tourists.

What is Hezbollah’s position in Lebanon?

For years, Hezbollah has played an official political role, with ministers in government and lawmakers in parliament. It holds the ministry of public works and the ministry of labour, and has often formed coalitions with other political parties, including Christian ones, under power-sharing agreements.

Fractured, sectarian politics means the government in Lebanon has remained weak, politically divided and plagued by corruption. Currently, there is no president due to infighting. The upshot is that even Hebzollah’s domestic adversaries are unable to reel in the group. Lebanon’s prime minister, Najib Mikati, for example, describes himself as “liberal” and is not part of Hezbollah, but he has little control over what it does.

It is widely accepted that Hezbollah could overpower the national army if it wanted to, although the group appears to have preferred to maintain its current status as a powerful player.

How has Hezbollah become so influential?

Lebanon’s 15-year civil war, which was fought largely along religious and sectarian lines, ended with warring militias laying down their arms. Hezbollah, however, was the exception, keeping its weapons ostensibly to fight the Israeli forces that occupied southern Lebanon at the time.

Hezbollah garnered widespread domestic support for pushing out Israel in 2000, even among Christian, Druze and Sunni Muslim sections of society outside its main Shia base in the south of Lebanon. It fought a five-week war with Israel in 2006.

Substantial backing from allies in Iran and Syria has also allowed Hezbollah to play an outsized role in the Lebanese state.

How popular is Hezbollah in Lebanon?

The local support Hezbollah received as the only Lebanese force able to provide a deterrent to Israel’s attacks has been chipped away over the years, most significantly after it helped the Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad, suppress a pro-democracy uprising with bloody and lethal force.

As Iran’s most powerful proxy force in its region, Hezbollah could have been forced or at least coerced into fighting for Assad, who is a close ally to Tehran and part of its “axis of resistance” against Israel and the US.

However, many Lebanese people saw Hezbollah’s attacks on Syrians as an unjust intervention in a foreign conflict – one that risked drawing their fragile state into further unrest while it was still recovering from the scars of its own civil war, decades after it formally ended.

What is Hezbollah’s relationship with Hamas in Gaza?

Hezbollah has allowed Hamas to operate in Lebanon and coordinates closely with the group.

However, while they share a common enemy in Israel, they are certainly not strong allies. The Sunni Muslim Hamas is also considered an Iranian proxy force but it operates with independence, notably by initially backing anti-Assad forces during the Syrian civil war, which strained its relationship with Hezbollah.

US intelligence officials have briefed Donald Trump about a suspected Iranian plot to kill him, his campaign has said.

The briefing, from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), is believed to have focused on a scheme unrelated to two failed domestic assassination attempts against the Republican nominee for president, and came amid reports suggesting that Iran is conducting an ongoing hack against Trump’s campaign.

Steven Cheung, the Trump campaign’s spokesman, said the briefing concerned “real and specific threats from Iran to assassinate [Trump] in an effort to destabilize and sow chaos in the United States”.

He added: “Intelligence officials have identified that these continued and coordinated attacks have heightened in the past few months, and law enforcement officials across all agencies are working to ensure President Trump is protected and the election is free from interference.”

The ODNI confirmed to the Guardian on Wednesday morning that the briefing took place.

Trump referred to the briefing in a post on his Truth Social site and predicted that another assassination attempt would be made against him.

“Big threats on my life by Iran,” he wrote. “Moves were already made by Iran that didn’t work out, but they will try again. Not a good situation for anyone. I am surrounded by more men, guns, and weapons than I have ever seen before….An attack on a former President is a Death Wish for the attacker!”

Intelligence officials were reported to have been tracking an Iranian-backed conspiracy to kill Trump even before the 13 July attempt, which was carried out by a lone gunman, Thomas Crooks, who killed one rally attendee before being killed himself by a Secret Service agent.

Investigators have found no evidence that Crooks, 20, was part of a larger plot and have concluded that he acted alone.

The Iranian motivation to kill Trump is believed to stem from a desire for revenge over his decision when he was president to order the US strike that killed Maj Gen Qassim Soleimani, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ elite Quds force in January 2020.

Iran has denied plotting to assassinate Trump.

It came as a Senate report was issued on Wednesday on Trump being shot in July in an attempt to kill him at an election rally in Pennsylvania. It concluded that there was a failure of leadership among the Secret Service team assigned to protect him.

The plot identified by the ODNI is thought not only to be distinct from the Pennsylvania attempt but also from a second suspected domestic assassination bid that took place at Trump’s golf club in West Palm Beach, Florida, earlier this month that was foiled after a Secret Service agent fired on an armed man who was spotted lurking in bushes.

The alleged gunman, Ryan Routh, was apprehended after fleeing and was charged on Tuesday with the attempted assassination of Trump.

In August, federal prosecutors charged a Pakistani man said to have ties to Iran with taking part in an alleged murder plot against an unidentified US politician.

Last week, US intelligence officials said Iranian hackers stole materials from the Trump campaign and passed them to media outlets and the now-defunct campaign of Joe Biden, which all declined to publish them. A Microsoft threat assessment analysis has linked the hack to a group within the Iranian revolutionary guards.

Even as Donald Trump seeks to disavow Project 2025, he and the rightwing effort’s authors have voiced similarly hostile plans for the US’s 2 million-plus federal employees – to replace many of them with political appointees.

These plans are stirring alarm among federal employees, with many warning that “politicizing” the civil service will hurt not just them, but also millions of Americans across the US by undermining how well the US government provides services and enforces regulations that protect the public.

Speaking about federal employees last month, the former president said: “They’re destroying this country. They’re crooked people, they’re dishonest people. They’re going to be held accountable.”

Project 2025, which is backed by the rightwing Heritage Foundation thinktank, has proposed to “dismantle the administrative state”, while Trump’s official “Agenda 47” calls for “cleaning out the Deep State” and “on Day One” issuing an “executive order restoring the president’s authority to fire rogue bureaucrats”.

That executive order would set up a system, known as Schedule F, that would revamp the federal bureaucracy so that far more jobs could be filled with political appointees rather than through traditional merit rules. Trump’s supporters say Schedule F would cover about 50,000 federal employees, but unions representing federal workers say it would cover many times that. Currently, approximately 4,000 federal positions are subject to presidential appointment. Trump’s allies are said to have compiled a list of 20,000 loyalists who could quickly move into federal jobs in a new Trump administration.

Jacqueline Simon, policy director of the 750,000-member American Federation of Government Employees, said: “The question is: do you want people with the skills, expertise and credentials to perform their jobs or do you want people who love Donald Trump? If that’s what the main factor is to get a job, you won’t have the same food safety, workplace safety, consumer product safety, mine safety, and clean air and water.”

Donald Moynihan, a public policy professor at the University of Michigan, said Trump and his allies’ plans to increasingly politicize the federal civil service are the “most important topic that the fewest number of people understand in the run-up to” the November election. In the final months of his presidency, Trump issued an order setting up Schedule F, but Joe Biden vacated it, and now Trump and his advisers are raring to restore it.

Doreen Greenwald, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, said many of her union’s 150,000 members worry about these efforts. “This focus on the federal workforce is awful,” she said. “It really looks to destroy what has been in place for decades, which is to make sure that you have the best and brightest with the skills necessary to deliver the mission for each federal agency.”

Brian Kelly was an emergency EPA responder to the 2023 train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, that spilled hazardous chemicals. Kelly voiced concern about how an emergency responder’s job might become more difficult – and how it might become harder to serve the public – if that job were covered by Schedule F.

“If you’re Schedule F and you’re not following the political narrative, you could be fired,” Kelly said. “If you can inject political or egotistical opinions into an emergency where you’re an EPA scientist collecting data, taking samples, advising about evacuation of the area, whether it’s clean or not – if you inject political biases that have no basis in science, that will endanger the public.” Kelly said that if a federal employee is classified as Schedule F (and thus is an at-will worker), and doesn’t follow the orders of their political superiors, perhaps to protect a politician, they can quickly be terminated.

Bringing back Schedule F would in some ways undermine the Pendleton Act, a landmark federal law that was passed in 1883 to replace the old, derided spoils system with merit hiring that focused on competence and professionalism. The Pendleton Act sought to fix a widely criticized system in which every new president brought in a whole new wave of employees, a system that spurred corruption and inefficiency and compelled workers to focus on pleasing their political bosses rather than serving the public. One factor that helped win passage of the Pendleton Act was that the man who assassinated President James Garfield in 1881 was seething after being turned down for a spoils system position.

Trump’s plans to overhaul civil service rules clash with the findings of what the US public wants, according to public opinion polls. The Partnership for Public Service conducted a poll of 800 adults last March that found that Americans, by 87% to 7%, believe that “having a nonpartisan civil service is important for having a strong American democracy”. (Republicans agreed 87% to 6%.) Ninety-five per cent agreed that “civil servants should be hired and promoted based on their merit, rather than their political beliefs”, while 90% agreed that “civil servants should serve the people more than any individual president”.

Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, estimated that Schedule F would cover not 50,000 federal employees, but 500,000 nationwide. He predicted that a new Trump administration would take an expansive view of Schedule F, which would cover federal positions loosely seen as having a say in policy. “These people could be replaced at any time,” Kelley said. “Your performance would be based on your loyalty to the president and not on your skills and ability to get the job done for the American people.”

Moynihan said Schedule F would have two big effects. “One is it will reduce the capacity and performance of the federal government,” he said. “Second, it will enable democratic backsliding or anti-democratic behavior to become more common. Schedule F would be a bad idea under any president, Democrat or Republican, but I think it would be an especially bad thing under a president who has shown authoritarian tendencies. Much of Trump’s disdain for the deep state is he wants to do things that are often skirting the law or illegal.”

Mandate for Leadership, the Project 2025 policy blueprint for a new Trump administration, is highly critical of today’s federal civil service, saying: “The specific deficiencies of the federal bureaucracy – size, levels of organization, inefficiency, expense, and lack of responsiveness to political leadership – are rooted in the progressive ideology that unelected experts can and should be trusted to promote the general welfare.” Project 2025 calls for implementing Schedule F in several, but not all, agencies, while Trump’s Agenda 47 calls for it to be invoked it across the government.

The Heritage Foundation didn’t respond to the Guardian’s questions about how the project would affect the federal civil service.

Donald Kettl, a professor of public management at the University of Texas, said there is a widespread misconception that almost all of the nation’s 2.4 million federal employees work in or near Washington DC. He noted that 85% aren’t based in Washington and that seven of the 10 states with the highest percentage of federal employees per capita are red states, with, for instance, their air traffic controllers, park rangers and social security office workers.

“People miss the fact that these bureaucrats may be the parents sitting next to them at their kids’ soccer games or the people they go to church with on Sunday,” Kettl said.

Kettl said that while a new Trump administration might seek to reclassify a huge number of federal employees as exempt from the traditional merit system, there is no way Trump would fire 50,000, no less 500,000, federal employees, and then hire that many. It would be far too cumbersome, he said, although he said that if 500,000 were classified as political, at-will employees under Schedule F, those workers would worry that they could be fired if they displeased the political appointees above them.

“It reminds me of the bad old days of King Henry VIII,” Kettl said. “One of the ways he exacted loyalty was he executed a few people at the Tower of London to make the point that this could happen to you if you’re not careful.”

The University of Michigan’s Moynihan said studies have found that the average job tenure for political appointees is just 18 months. Moynihan said Schedule F “would speed up the revolving door between industry and government”. When one recruits political loyalists, he said, “they’re not going to stay in government very long. They’ll look for opportunities and then return to the private sector and then try to exploit that by seeking contracts with the government.”

Jacob Morrison, who has worked for seven years as a project manager with the army corps of engineers in Huntsville, Alabama, said he was worried that his job would get converted into a political position if Schedule F is brought back. “I consider all this an attack on people who dedicate their lives to civil service,” Morrison said. “If we were motivated by greed or politics, we would not stay in the civil service in the first place.”

Like many federal employees, Morrison is worried not just about Schedule F, but also about Project 2025’s recommendations to greatly increase the privatization of federal operations, to abolish government-employee unions and to end collective bargaining for many federal employees. If implemented, all those plans would hurt federal employees in many ways and could result in large-scale layoffs in Huntsville, where there are more than 21,000 federal employees, and in other communities across the US with many federal workers.

Cheryl Monroe, a Detroit-based chemist with the Food and Drug Administration, says Schedule F’s effects could be “devastating”. “I fear that we’ll be forced to give politically motivated findings rather than scientific findings – people need their jobs, people need their paychecks,” she said. “I can see this happening. I’m told: ‘Here’s this product. It was manufactured by Company X, which is a big supporter of the president. Whatever you find, let me see your findings first before you send them or publicize them. Let’s make sure that everything is looking good for Company X.’”

Noting that her agency inspects toothpaste, food and medications, Monroe said: “We need people in place based on merit and professionalism, not on the political situation. Or else this can cost lives.”

Kettl warned that the more politicized the federal civil service becomes, the harder it will become for the government to attract top-level scientists and professionals.

“It’s very hard to get political loyalty at the same time you get high levels of expertise,” he said. “Experts want to work at a place where people aren’t going to mess with them. They want to do the best scientific analysis, provide the best customer service. But if there’s too much hassle, well, the very best will have opportunities elsewhere.”

Tropical Storm Helene strengthened into a hurricane on Wednesday morning.

It is expected to hit Florida’s Gulf coast later on Thursday as a forceful hurricane and is forecast to potentially be the most powerful storm to hit the US in more than a year.

The storm was expected to intensify to a category 3 hurricane as it roars across the Gulf of Mexico. It was moving off the coast of Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula and into the Gulf of Mexico, where it was expected to “rapidly intensify to a major hurricane and grow in size in the eastern Gulf of Mexico [with] danger of life-threatening storm surge along [the] entire west Florida coast and Big Bend area,” the National Hurricane Center said on Wednesday morning.

The hurricane center, part of a federal agency, said Helene was expected to have a bigger high-wind expanse than 90% of other major hurricanes, with its wind field and rain bands expected to stretch more than 140 miles (225km) east of the eye.

Forecasters early on Wednesday morning predicted storm intensification from a 45mph (72km/h) tropical storm to a category 3 major hurricane in less than 48 hours.

On its current track, the powerful core of the storm could cross directly over Florida’s state capital of Tallahassee. Hurricane and tropical storm warnings have been issued for the state’s west coast, from the Florida Keys and inland to Orlando, as well as most of the east coast, and up through the so-called Big Bend region and the area around Tallahassee, where the coast then stretches west into the Florida Panhandle.

Evacuations of thousands of people south of Tallahassee were under way on Wednesday morning and Tuesday afternoon, and Joe Biden declared a state of emergency for Florida. The US president pledged federal resources ahead of the storm hitting.

Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor, expanded a state of emergency to 61 of Florida’s 67 counties and mandatory evacuations are set to begin in the Big Bend area, where the highest storm surges are anticipated.

At a press conference on Tuesday morning, DeSantis said the state had deployed Florida national guard, search and rescue teams, and Florida fish and wildlife crews to respond. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has also deployed teams.

“The wind you can hide from,” DeSantis added. “But it is the water that can be very, very devastating if you remain there when you are told to evacuate.”

Kevin Guthrie, the executive director of Florida’s division of emergency management, said Helene was set to be a very large storm, even compared with recent tempests, warning it could be “nearly twice the size of Debby and Idalia, with possibly a stronger core”.

Jamie Rhome, deputy director of the hurricane center, said: “The wind swath is going to be huge with this system, and it is basically going to carve a path right over a good portion of the Florida peninsula, including the highly populated I-4 corridor.”

Farther north, Georgia’s governor, Brian Kemp, also declared a state of emergency and directed management teams “to prepare for and direct resources well in advance of the storm’s arrival. Stay vigilant and stay safe,” he said on X.

The storm’s rapid intensification comes as water temperatures in the Gulf reach 90F (32C). Hurricane predictors had been expecting an unusually busy season but that has not materialized, allowing storm-friendly sea temperatures to increase without interruption and fuel Helene’s power, driven by the climate crisis that is rapidly warming seas and is believed to intensify storms.

When Helene makes US landfall, expected late on Thursday or early Friday, it will be the fourth hurricane to make landfall in the US this year and the fifth to slam into Florida since 2022.

The Associated Press contributed reporting

The Taliban are to be taken to the international court of justice for gender discrimination by Canada, Australia, Germany and the Netherlands in a groundbreaking move that may make it easier for countries to slip into diplomatic normalisation with the Afghan leadership.

The move announced at the UN general assembly is the first time the ICJ, based in The Hague, has been used by one country to take another to court over gender discrimination.

The case is being brought under the convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women, which was adopted by the general assembly in 1979 and brought into force in 1981.

Afghanistan, prior to the 2021 Taliban takeover of the country, ratified the convention in 2003.

In the first legal move of this type since the Taliban took over, it is expected that Afghanistan would have six months to provide a response before the ICJ would hold a hearing and probably propose provisional measures.

Advocates of the course argue that even if the Taliban refuse to acknowledge the court’s authority, an ICJ ruling would have a deterrent effect on other states seeking to normalise diplomatic relations with the Taliban. Signatories to the ICJ are expected to abide by its rulings.

There has been concern that the UN has held talks with the Taliban in which women’s issues have been excluded from the agenda in an attempt to persuade the Taliban to attend.

The initiative has the support of three female foreign ministers: Penny Wong from Australia, Annalena Baerbock from Germany, and Mélanie Joly from Canada. It is also being backed by the Dutch foreign minister, Caspar Veldkamp.

In the latest round of suppression in Afghanistan the Taliban have decreed that Afghan women are prohibited from speaking in public, prompting an online campaign in which Afghan women sing in protest.

At a UN side event this week the actor Meryl Streep said: “A female cat has more freedom than a woman. A cat may go sit on her front stoop and feel the sun on her face. She may chase a squirrel into the park. A squirrel has more rights than a girl in Afghanistan today because the public parks have been closed to women and girls by the Taliban. A bird may sing in Kabul, but a girl may not.”

The countries involved in the litigation say they are willing to negotiate with the Taliban in good faith to end gender discrimination, but will, if the necessary stages prove fruitless, seek a hearing at the ICJ.

Last month, the Taliban published a new set of vice and virtue laws that said women must not leave the house without being fully covered and could not sing or raise their voices in public.

Streep spoke alongside Afghan activists and human rights defenders, who called on the UN to act to protect and restore the rights of women and girls in Afghanistan

Asila Wardak, a leader of the Women’s Forum on Afghanistan, said that the system of what has been described as gender apartheid being imposed on women and girls in Afghanistan, was not just an Afghan issue, but part of the “global fight against extremism”.

Akila Radhakrishnan, strategic legal advisor on gender justice at the Atlantic Council thinktank, said: “This case, by centering violations of women’s rights not only has the potential to deliver much needed justice to the women and girls of Afghanistan, but also forge new precedents for gender justice.”

The Taliban are to be taken to the international court of justice for gender discrimination by Canada, Australia, Germany and the Netherlands in a groundbreaking move that may make it easier for countries to slip into diplomatic normalisation with the Afghan leadership.

The move announced at the UN general assembly is the first time the ICJ, based in The Hague, has been used by one country to take another to court over gender discrimination.

The case is being brought under the convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women, which was adopted by the general assembly in 1979 and brought into force in 1981.

Afghanistan, prior to the 2021 Taliban takeover of the country, ratified the convention in 2003.

In the first legal move of this type since the Taliban took over, it is expected that Afghanistan would have six months to provide a response before the ICJ would hold a hearing and probably propose provisional measures.

Advocates of the course argue that even if the Taliban refuse to acknowledge the court’s authority, an ICJ ruling would have a deterrent effect on other states seeking to normalise diplomatic relations with the Taliban. Signatories to the ICJ are expected to abide by its rulings.

There has been concern that the UN has held talks with the Taliban in which women’s issues have been excluded from the agenda in an attempt to persuade the Taliban to attend.

The initiative has the support of three female foreign ministers: Penny Wong from Australia, Annalena Baerbock from Germany, and Mélanie Joly from Canada. It is also being backed by the Dutch foreign minister, Caspar Veldkamp.

In the latest round of suppression in Afghanistan the Taliban have decreed that Afghan women are prohibited from speaking in public, prompting an online campaign in which Afghan women sing in protest.

At a UN side event this week the actor Meryl Streep said: “A female cat has more freedom than a woman. A cat may go sit on her front stoop and feel the sun on her face. She may chase a squirrel into the park. A squirrel has more rights than a girl in Afghanistan today because the public parks have been closed to women and girls by the Taliban. A bird may sing in Kabul, but a girl may not.”

The countries involved in the litigation say they are willing to negotiate with the Taliban in good faith to end gender discrimination, but will, if the necessary stages prove fruitless, seek a hearing at the ICJ.

Last month, the Taliban published a new set of vice and virtue laws that said women must not leave the house without being fully covered and could not sing or raise their voices in public.

Streep spoke alongside Afghan activists and human rights defenders, who called on the UN to act to protect and restore the rights of women and girls in Afghanistan

Asila Wardak, a leader of the Women’s Forum on Afghanistan, said that the system of what has been described as gender apartheid being imposed on women and girls in Afghanistan, was not just an Afghan issue, but part of the “global fight against extremism”.

Akila Radhakrishnan, strategic legal advisor on gender justice at the Atlantic Council thinktank, said: “This case, by centering violations of women’s rights not only has the potential to deliver much needed justice to the women and girls of Afghanistan, but also forge new precedents for gender justice.”

A €5bn EU fund aiming to stem the mass movement of people from Africa to Europe lacks focus and fails to address the risk of human rights abusers benefiting from European money, the bloc’s spending watchdog has found.

In a report on Wednesday, the European court of auditors intensified its previous criticism of the EU trust fund for Africa, which was set up in 2015 by European leaders seeking to curb the growing numbers of people making dangerous sea crossings in an attempt to reach Europe.

While the funds have largely been spent, the criticism from the EU’s official spending watchdog carries added weight after recent EU deals with Egypt and Tunisia aimed at stopping migration and shoring up stability on Europe’s southern border.

Couched in the cautious language of auditors, the ECA report is a quietly devastating critique of one of the EU’s flagship policies, at a time when migration remains high on the political agenda. The trust fund, the auditors said, was “still not properly focused on priorities”, and spread too thinly to be effective while “human rights risks are not properly addressed”.

The ECA also questioned whether the EU-Africa trust fund had succeeded in its goal of “address[ing] the root causes of instability, forced displacement and irregular migration”.

“Even after seven years, and despite the lessons learned and a midterm review, the commission is still unable to identify and report on the most efficient and effective approaches to reducing irregular migration and forced displacements in Africa,” the report stated.

Some of the starkest findings concern Libya, where the EU has a controversial agreement to fund the country’s coastguard to carry out search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean. Migrants returned to Libya have been detained in government-run detention centres where, according to NGO reports, they have been subject to torture, sexual violence and beatings.

The ECA noted that EU-funded equipment in Libya, such as boats, could be used by people “other than the intended beneficiaries” while EU-funded cars and buses “may have facilitated the transfer of migrants” to detention centres, “exacerbating overcrowding”. Similarly, EU-funded equipment for detention centres, the ECA said, could have been sold or “may have potentially benefited criminal organisations”.

The EU audit team visited Libya, but were not able to visit a detention centre. Nor could Libyan authorities tell the auditors who was responsible for detention centres that had been closed down having previously benefited from EU funds.

More broadly, the auditors concluded that contract clauses threatening to freeze EU funds if a violation of human rights was found were “not applied systematically” especially “relating to security, border management or other sensitive activities”.

The auditors said the commission had no “formal procedures for reporting and assessing alleged human rights violations” and urged it to fill this gap.

“We found that human rights risk had not been comprehensively addressed by the commission,” said Bettina Jakobsen, the ECA member who led the audit. She added that the commission had “done what it could” by hiring a third-party organisation to monitor human rights in Libya, but there was still “a lack of formal procedures at the commission for reporting, recording and following up on allegations of human rights violations in relation to EU-funded projects”.

Since its launch in 2015, the trust fund has funded projects in 27 countries. While €4.4bn comes from the EU budget, the remainder comes from national governments, including Switzerland, Norway and the UK. David Cameron, the former UK prime minister, who signed the UK up to the trust fund, said at the time that a “real partnership” was needed “with the countries from which these people are coming” to try to stem the numbers of people trying to reach Europe.

Last week, on a visit to Italy, Keir Starmer, the current UK prime minister, said he was impressed with the “upstream work” done by Giorgia Meloni’s government aimed at stopping people coming to Europe.

Nearly nine years after the plan was announced at a high-profile summit in Valletta, the ECA concluded not enough projects were linked to “the most urgent aspects of the migration crisis”. It cited the example of an EU-funded music radio station in the Sahel. In an unnamed country, a school without any electricity supply was provided with a blender.

In other cases, projects ran aground with no apparent follow-up. In 2021 the EU funded a solar-power chicken shed big enough for 1,000 birds and slaughter house in the Lake Chad and Sahel region. When auditors visited it was empty and the youth association running the project said it wasn’t economically viable.

A sample of 115 EU-backed business, infrastructure and equipment investments assessed by the ECA found that 33 were no longer operational and 66 were at risk of closing down or falling out of use.

Jakobsen said EU-funded projects had partially achieved their objectives, but overall outcomes could not be measured.

“The scope of the fund is so broad that it can almost fund everything in development, humanitarian aid and security, which makes it perhaps a little bit difficult to say that it has achieved all the output that it would like. It has resulted in output, but the outcome could not be measured and the sustainability was not there.”

In a statement the commission said respect of human rights was considered at every stage of a project and that it examined incidents of alleged abuses “on a case-by-case basis” based on substantiated evidence. “However, the commission recognises that this procedure should be further strengthened and formally documented as recommended by ECA.”

The commission added that in Libya, “it operates in a fast evolving political and security context where suspending EU assistance is unlikely to improve the situation”.

It added that the trust fund had “already delivered a significant share of its planned outputs” and that the commission was applying lessons learned in current and future EU programmes.

Joe Biden has lauded the US’s progress in fighting the climate crisis during his presidency, while also criticizing Donald Trump for his dismissal of the “more dangerous world” that global heating poses to future generations.

The US president was speaking at a Bloomberg event on Tuesday being held as part of Climate Week in New York, a summit that runs alongside the United Nations general assembly, which the US president spoke at earlier in the day.

Climate Week has already featured stark warnings that the phasing-out of fossil fuels is moving too slowly. On Tuesday, the UN’s top climate diplomat called for the proliferation of renewable energy to spread from wealthy to poorer countries more urgently.

Biden said that “virtually nothing” had been done about climate change when he came into office, but that his policies “changed the mindset” about the issue by reframing it as an opportunity to build new jobs in clean energy.

“We passed the most significant climate law in the history of the world,” Biden said of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. “They told me it couldn’t be done, but we did it. Not a single Republican voted for it.”

More than 330,000 jobs and tens of billions of dollars in investments in electric vehicle, battery and renewable energy manufacturing have spread across America since the bill, Biden said, meaning that the “US has reasserted global leadership on climate change”.

This progress is “in stark contrast to my predecessor”, Biden said of Trump. “He says he’d repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, he’d let our factories shut down, he’d move the world backwards.

“His denial of climate change condemns future generations to a more dangerous world.”

In reference to a baseless conspiracy theory espoused by Trump, Biden added: “And by the way, windmills do not cause cancer.”

Biden said the US was now in prime position to lead the world in dealing with the climate crisis. “The rest of the world looks to us,” he said. “If we didn’t lead, who the hell leads? Who fills the vacuum? That’s our obligation and our incredible opportunity.”

Simon Stiell, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, said: “If more developing countries don’t see more of this growing deluge of climate investment, we will quickly entrench a dangerous two-speed global transition. The injustice and imbalance is not only unacceptable, it is self-defeating – for every economy.”

France’s new rightwing interior minister has said there will be consequences after a Moroccan man suspected of murdering a 19-year-old university student and leaving her body in a forest was arrested in Switzerland.

A source close to the case said the alleged attacker was a 22-year-old man of Moroccan nationality. Prosecutors have said the suspect had been previously convicted of rape and had been the subject of an order to leave France.

The killing of the student, named only by the authorities as Philippine, is expected to further inflame political tensions in France where the new rightwing government plans to crack down on immigration.

“This is an abominable crime,” said Bruno Retailleau, the interior minister, who has promised to boost law and order, tighten immigration legislation and make it easier to deport foreigners convicted of crimes.

“It is up to us, as public leaders, to refuse to accept the inevitable and to develop our legal arsenal, to protect the French,” he added. “If we have to change the rules, let’s change them.”

On Saturday, the body of a student was discovered in the Bois de Boulogne park in western Paris, not far from the Université Paris-Dauphine, which Philippine attended.

A Moroccan national was arrested on Tuesday in the Swiss canton of Geneva and was identified as a suspect in a murder committed in Paris, a spokesperson for the Swiss justice ministry told AFP.

“The Federal Office of Justice then ordered detention for extradition purposes on the basis of an arrest request from France,” she added.

The student had last been seen at the university on Friday. Witnesses reported seeing a man with a pickaxe, said one police source.

According to the prosecutors, the man was convicted in 2021 of a rape committed in 2019, when he was a minor. He was released in June having serving his sentence, then placed in an administrative detention centre, according to the source. In early September, a judge freed him on condition he reported regularly to the authorities. But just before the murder of the student, the suspect had been placed on a wanted list because he had flouted the conditions of his release.

The killing of the student has sparked outrage in the country, with both far right and leftwing politicians urging tough measures.

“Philippine’s life was stolen from her by a Moroccan migrant who was under a removal order,” Jordan Bardella, the leader of the far right National Rally (RN), the largest single party in parliament, said on X on Tuesday. “Our justice system is lax, our state is dysfunctional and our leaders are letting the French live alongside human bombs,” he added.

“It’s time for this government to act: our compatriots are angry and will not mince words.”

The former socialist president François Hollande also chimed in, saying deportation orders had to be enforced “quickly”.

The race to treat snakebite patients in time to save them could be eased by the development of software powered by artificial intelligence.

The medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is trialling AI snake detection in South Sudan using a database of 380,000 pictures of snakes to identify venomous species.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), as many as 5.4 million people are bitten by snakes each year, of whom up to 2.7 million become seriously ill and 138,000 die from complications. Identification is a difficult but crucial part of treatment to ensure that rare and expensive antivenoms are only used when necessary.

Dr Gabriel Alcoba, an MSF medical adviser on snakebites and neglected tropical diseases, said: “Early results are promising; the AI sometimes identifies snakes even better than experts.

“I remember a time when we used photo albums to identify snakes in MSF hospitals. Medical staff would flip through pictures to figure out which snake had bitten a patient,” he added.

The app is being piloted at two MSF hospitals in South Sudan, where the numbers of people taken to hospital with snakebites are high. Between January and the end of July 2024, more than 300 snakebite patients had been treated in MSF medical facilities across the country.

When someone is bitten, medics encourage pictures to be taken at the time or for their staff to return to the site, with caution, to photograph the snake.

The photos are fed into AI-powered software to help identify the type of snake and what type of treatment is needed, even before the patient gets to hospital. Alcoba said the program’s accuracy could be developed further with more funding, research and better quality photos.

“Often, patients receive the wrong treatment because the snake isn’t correctly identified, or valuable antivenom is wasted on bites from non-venomous snakes, which can also cause serious side-effects. Antivenom is rare and extremely expensive, costing a patient anywhere from a month to a year’s salary,” said Alcoba.

David Williams, a WHO snakebite expert, said bites can cause a person to stop breathing, as well as kidney failure, tissue damage and fatal haemorrhages.

Rural communities are worst affected, said Williams, and many of the 240,000 people left disabled by snakebites each year are pushed into poverty by the cost of treatment and loss of income.

He said climate breakdown was causing increasing concern about snakebites, with recent flooding leading to a rise in incidents in South Sudan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Pakistan and Myanmar.

Many of those countries do not have enough treatments – only 2.5% of what is needed in Africa is available – and a lack of regulation has led to sales of fake antivenoms that have eroded trust within many communities.

A prominent AI artist has announced he will open the world’s first AI art museum in Los Angeles, which will highlight the “intersection of human imagination and the creative potential of machines”.

The artificial intelligence art museum, dubbed Dataland, is slated to open in late 2025, in a new development next to the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Broad Museum and the home of the LA philharmonic, creating a space for AI art among some of Los Angeles’s most prestigious cultural venues.

Dataland co-founder Refik Anadol, 38, is a media artist whose “crowd-pleasing – and controversial” works using artificial intelligence have been displayed around the world, including at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Serpentine and, most recently, the United Nations headquarters.

In the past two years, Anadol has found himself at the center of debates over the value of AI-generated art, as crowds have been reportedly “transfixed” by his massive interactive digital canvases, while some art critics have panned them as over-hyped and mediocre.

Now Anadol is looking to build artists like himself a permanent exhibition space among some of LA’s most prominent high-culture venues, and he is pledging that the AI art museum will promote “ethical AI” and use renewable energy sources.

“LA – and California – is the right place for imagining new worlds,” Anadol said. While he is a longtime fan of the film Blade Runner, he rejected the idea that there might be anything dystopian about founding an AI art museum in the heart of Los Angeles. “This museum is utopian,” he said.

With Dataland, Anadol said, he and his small team of artists and technologists hope to reinvent the museum for the artificial intelligence era, while highlighting the innovative work of digital artists, who have long been viewed with scepticism by more traditional arts establishments, as well as providing a space for ongoing scientific and technological research.

He said he is trying to create a new, high-tech physical museum space, outfitting the building itself “with cloud computing and special sensors and special activities”.

While he hopes to use his new museum to demystify AI, Anadol, who has worked with Google, Nvidia and other major industry players, also says that the potential of the technology is vast.

“AI is not a tool. AI is beyond a tool,” he said. “Literally, in human history, we have never had intelligence as a technology.”

In the wake of last year’s historic double Hollywood strike, when both writers and actors took to the picket lines with concerns over AI being used to replace human artists, Los Angeles may be one of the cities in the world where culture workers are most hostile to artificial intelligence.

Anadol said that he shared some of the Hollywood artists’ concerns, and that they were also “right about” some criticisms of the AI economy.

“I don’t believe machines should be the only creators. It’s a horrible future if you just let the machines do creative work,” he said.

Anadol said he believed it was important for artists to build their own artificial intelligence tools, and that simply using a tool someone else had built was not enough. “I collect my own data, train my own model,” he said. “I am literally co-creating with the machine in every single step.”

The museum will highlight “ethically collected” datasets, Anadol said, like his Large Nature Model, a open-source, generative AI tool built with data shared by the Smithsonian, the UK’s Natural History Museum and other prominent institutions.

And, as the AI industry faces major scrutiny over the immense amount of energy it requires, Anadol said he aims to be transparent about the energy usage behind the museum’s new tools and technologies. He said he worked with Google to find a sustainable energy park in Oregon to power its AI tools without using fossil fuels, even if that means the process is slower.

“Here the idea is not about being fast, or first – it’s about being right,” Anadol said.

The Museum of AI Arts is starting as a for-profit venture, though Anadol said he is open to moving in a non-profit direction if the new venture can secure the patrons who would make that possible.

“AI arts is a very new art form. It is barely explored. It is just starting,” he said.

Not yet 40 and already exhibiting his work globally, Anadol is very much a man on the move – sometimes quite literally, as he spoke to the Guardian in part from a taxi driving through New York City on the day of the United Nations general assembly.

Last year, the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired Anadol’s Unsupervised, a giant digital canvas that uses artificial intelligence to generate new, constantly shifting displays based on 200 years of images from Moma’s own collection. Anadol said that this was the Moma’s first acquisition of a generative AI work.

Anadol, who teaches in the design department at the University of California, Los Angeles, is well connected in the LA art and museum worlds. His work is prominently featured in the Getty’s current southern California arts festival, PST: Art, and, in a recent interview before the museum announcement, the Getty’s president and CEO, Katherine Fleming, named him as “probably LA’s most famous AI artist”.