Optimism that a three-week ceasefire could be reached between Hezbollah and Israel appeared to recede as Benjamin Netanyahu issued a pair of contradictory statements on the proposal within hours of each other, as fresh Israeli strikes on Lebanon in the early hours of Friday killed 25 people.

In the latest statement from Netanyahu’s office, issued overnight on Friday, the Israeli prime minister chided reporting on the issue as he confirmed Israel had been consulted regarding a US-led ceasefire proposal.

“Israel shares the aims of the US-led initiative of enabling people along our northern border to return safely and securely to their homes. Israel appreciates the US efforts in this regard because the US role is indispensable in advancing stability and security in the region,” the statement read.

A previous release earlier on Thursday, however, had said that reporting “about a ceasefire is incorrect. This is an American-French proposal that the prime minister has not even responded to.”

Netanyahu’s twin statements appeared to replicate his response to previous US-led diplomatic initiatives over a Gaza ceasefire, where Israel has suggested it is more open to talks in private before reversing in the face of opposition from his coalition members.

Not for the first time US officials appear to have been wrongfooted by Netanyahu, saying initially they had believed his government was “onboard” with the plan for a 21-day ceasefire when it was announced by the US, France and other allies, saying the proposal had been “coordinated” with Israel.

“We had every reason to believe that in the drafting of it and in the delivery of it, that the Israelis were fully informed and fully aware of every word in it,” John Kirby, the White House national security spokesperson, told reporters on Thursday, adding that the US “wouldn’t have done it if we didn’t believe that it would be received with the seriousness with which it was composed”.

The late-night statement came after Abdallah Bou Habib, Lebanon’s foreign minister, urged all parties to implement the proposal, saying the escalating violence threatened his country’s “very existence”.

Speaking at the UN general assembly in New York, Bou Habib said the US-French ceasefire proposal was an “opportunity to generate momentum, to take steps towards ending this crisis”.

Earlier, the office of Netanyahu – who is addressing the UN general assembly on Friday – said the IDF would “continue fighting with full force” to achieve its war goals. Those war goals include the safe return home of more than 60,000 Israelis forced to abandon their homes in northern Israel by Hezbollah bombing, which began on 8 October last year, the day after the start of the Gaza war.

The International Organization for Migration estimated that more than 200,000 people have been displaced in Lebanon since Hezbollah began firing rockets into northern Israel in October in support of Hamas.

According to officials in Lebanon, 25 people have been killed in Israeli strikes on Lebanon since the early hours of Friday, including a family of nine in the Lebanese border town of Chebaa after a missile destroyed their three-storey building.

On Thursday, Lebanon’s health ministry said nearly 700 people had been killed this week, as Israel dramatically escalated strikes it says are targeting Hezbollah’s military capacities. According to health authorities, a total of 1,540 people have been killed within its borders since 7 October.

The IDF said a strike on a southern suburb of Beirut killed the head of Hezbollah’s drone force, Mohammad Surur. Israel has carried out several strikes in Beirut this week, targeting senior Hezbollah commanders.

The UN refugee agency says “well over 30,000” people have crossed from Lebanon into neighbouring Syria over the past 72 hours in the wake of fighting between Hezbollah and Israeli forces in Lebanon.

Gonzalo Vargas Llosa, the representative for the refugee agency UNHCR in Syria, said roughly half of the people who have fled were children and adolescents. He said about 80% were Syrians returning to their home country and the rest were Lebanese.

“Now these, of course, are people who are fleeing bombs and who are crossing into a country that has been suffering from its own crisis and violence for 13 years now,” he told reporters in Geneva by video from the Lebanon-Syria border. Syria is facing “economic collapse”, he said.

“I think that this just illustrates the kind of extremely difficult choices both Syrians and Lebanese are having to make,” he said.

After the Beirut explosion, dozens of rockets were fired toward the northern Israeli city of Safed, with one hitting a street in a nearby town. In total, 175 projectiles were fired from Lebanon on Thursday, the military said. Most were intercepted or fell in open areas, some sparking wildfires.

The IDF said on Friday it had intercepted a missile fired from Yemen that set off air raid sirens across Israel’s populous central area, including Tel Aviv. Another missile from Yemen landed in central Israel about two weeks ago. The strikes came after Israel’s military chief said on Wednesday the country was preparing for a possible ground operation in Lebanon.

On Thursday, the Israeli army spokesperson Avichay Adraee reiterated that the military was preparing for a ground operation while awaiting a decision on whether to go ahead, and that the air force had reduced Hezbollah’s weapons stockpile and was working to prevent the transfer of further arms from Iran.

Hezbollah has yet to respond to the call for a truce, although it and its backer Iran have previously said it would halt its strikes only if there is a ceasefire in Gaza.

Emmanuel Macron – who was a co-backer with Joe Biden of the 21-day ceasefire proposal – said Netanyahu would have to take responsibility for a regional escalation if he did not agree to the truce. “The proposal that was made is a solid proposal,” the French president said, adding that the plan supported by the US and the EU had been prepared with Netanyahu himself.

The domestic political repercussions of a ceasefire for Netanyahu were made clear when his national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, told the prime minister that his party, Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power), would not vote with the coalition if the government agreed a ceasefire with Hezbollah.

“We will not abandon the residents of the north. Every day that this ceasefire is in effect and Israel does not fight in the north, Otzma Yehudit is not committed to the coalition,” Ben-Gvir said at a party meeting.

The leader of the opposition Democrats party, Yair Golan, also argued against committing to a three-week ceasefire, saying Israel should initially agree to a truce of a few days to see how well it was enforced.

Ten trade unions have accused Israel of breaching international labor law by holding back pay and benefits from more than 200,000 Palestinian workers since 7 October.

The Israeli government stands accused of “blatant” violations of the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) protection of wages convention, tipping many Palestinians into extreme poverty.

Workers from Gaza and the West Bank, employed in Israel, did not receive payment for work completed prior to last October – when Hamas militants led an attack that killed nearly 1,200 people in southern Israel – and have received no wages since, according to the complaint. The attack triggered an Israeli assault on Gaza that has killed more than 41,000 Palestinians and laid waste to much of the territory.

A complaint filed on Friday aims to recover the wages of Palestinian workers who previously worked in Israel.

“Two hundred thousand workers in the West Bank lost their jobs,” said Assaf Adiv, executive director of Maan Workers Association, an independent workers’ organization in Israel that was not involved in the filing of the complaint. “They did not receive any compensation and have been suffering ever since from extreme poverty.

“Thousands of workers who risk entering Israel without permits face repression, humiliation and even death. Workers are a major social layer in Palestinian society that is peaceful and doesn’t associate with Hamas and thus should not be punished.”

According to ILO estimates, the average daily wage for Palestinian workers in Israel was 297.30 shekels ($79), with average weekly wages ranging from 2,100-2,600 shekels ($565-$700).

Israel revoked work permits for about 13,000 Palestinian workers from the Gaza Strip to work legally in Israel following the Hamas attack on 7 October, according to a legal brief on the complaint, leaving those workers with unpaid wages from September and October. Those wages would have normally been paid on 9 October.

An additional nearly 200,000 Palestinian workers from the West Bank employed in Israel have not been permitted to enter Israel, and have received no termination notices, according to the brief, which argues they are owed wages stipulated by their employment contracts for their previous work and subsequent months.

The unions allege that Israel is violating the ILO’s protection of wages convention, which has been ratified by a hundred member states, including Israel in 1959.

A May report from the ILO estimated that, since 7 October, unemployment for Palestinians has been at an all-time high. “Economic production losses throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territory are estimated at almost US$19 million per day,” it stated.

“When the war started, we returned home during the initial phase of the conflict. Since then, we haven’t received any salaries or found any work,” said Khaled Jamal Muhammad Karkash, a Palestinian worker. “We’re trying our best to find something to do to meet some of our needs. I’m the breadwinner for my family. No one else is working at home.”

Another Palestinian worker, Mahmoud Salhab, had also been working in Israel, but since last October has not been allowed back to work.

“I’m the primary breadwinner, and I have a four-year degree, yet I can’t find a job,” said Salhab. “Since the first war, I’ve only been working four days a month, just enough to cover basic necessities like bread and oil. I was engaged before the war, but now, I’ve not finished building my house, I can’t afford to get married.”

More than 500,000 jobs have been lost in Gaza and the West Bank, according to the International Labour Organization, worsening an already dire economic landscape for Palestinians. In March, Mohamed Mustafa, the Palestinian prime minister, claimed the unemployment rate was at 89%.

“When I visited the West Bank earlier this year, I witnessed the economic destitution experienced by the families of Palestinian workers employed in Israel,” said Luc Triangle, general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation. “As always, working people are enduring the worst of the continuing conflict. Through this petition, we want to ensure that the much-needed back pay is paid out to workers who are struggling to make ends meet.”

The trade unions behind the complaint represent some 207 million workers across more than 160 countries. They include the Building and Wood Workers’ International, Education International, the IndustriAll Global Union, the International Federation of Journalists, the International Trade Union Confederation, the International Transport Workers’ Federation, the International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers’ Associations, Public Services International, and UNI Global Union. The Trade Union Advisory Committee to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development also signed on to the complaint.

The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has for decades used set-piece speeches to the UN to denounce it. In 2017, he said it had been “the epicentre of global antisemitism” and there was “no limit to the UN’s absurdities when it comes to Israel”, but never have the tensions between him and the body he reviles reached such a pitch.

Since the 7 October massacre by Hamas, Israel has ignored four UN resolutions calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and has not just described the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency Unrwa as a terrorist state, but launched a campaign to bankrupt it. Arab envoys have walked out when the Israeli ambassador has started to speak.

Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, now itself a near full member of the UN, told the general assembly in his speech on Thursday that Israel no longer deserved to be a member, since it flouted its resolutions.

It is the UN’s historic role in the birth of the state of Israel, alongside a state for Palestinians, with the partition resolution of November 1947 that makes Israel such a central and difficult issue for the organisation. Having blessed Israel’s creation, by 1975 the UN general assembly was passing a resolution saying Zionism was a form of racism and racial discrimination.

History is catching up with both sides. When the UN’s premier court, the international court of justice, in July found Israel’s extended occupation of the Palestinian territories discriminatory, the UN’s role in the birth of the state of Israel was the cornerstone of its wider judgment.

The UN general assembly has demanded Israel leave the occupied territories within a year, and that the general secretary, António Guterres, prepare a report on progress towards this goal within a month. This last high-level week at the UN has seen speech after speech by world leaders condemning Israel for defying international law, and so damaging the UN’s authority. Many have been crude, such as the Turkish president comparing Netanyahu to Hitler.

Israel has long called the UN human rights council the terrorist rights council, but the conflict between the UN and Israel has now become visceral. In his farewell speech in August, the outgoing Israeli ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, said: “In this warped place, I hope one day you will also see the bias and perversion of morality here, and I pray that you will see the truth.”

Erdan’s often theatrical and passionate defence of his country won him few friends at the UN, but is passionately supported back home. Pew research published earlier this month found the proportion of those in Israel who had a favourable view of the UN in Israel fell from 31% – which was already relatively low – to 21% over the past year. The median among 35 countries was 58%.

Erdan’s successor, Danny Danon, has this week attacked the UN over its agency for Palestinian refugees. “Peace is hard to come by while the UN remains loth to come to terms with the sinister reality that one of its agencies, Unrwa in Gaza, has been overrun by Hamas terrorists,” he wrote in an article for Fox News. “For that reason, and for the sake of peace for Israelis and for Gazans, Unrwa must be disbanded.”

Following a meeting on the sidelines of the UN in support of Unrwa, the Jordanian foreign minister, Ayman Safadi, said it was intolerable that a UN agency was being described as terrorist, and subject to a political assassination campaign. “The attack was undermining the whole UN system,” he said.

The Unrwa chief, Philippe Lazzarini, said behind the Israeli attack was an attempt to strip Palestinians of refugee status, and even their right to self-determination. But in the short term what will be disturbing Netanyahu, himself a former Israeli envoy to the UN, is not the hostility of UN mainstream opinion. He has entered the lion’s den many times before and ultimately emerged unscathed.

What will be exercising Netanyahu is the evident tension between him and the US administration over his behaviour before his eventual rejection of the US plan for a 21-day ceasefire in Lebanon. The deal was supposed to be the day diplomacy fought back, but by Thursday it looked like it was the day it fell over. The US clearly feels he reneged on a deal, and not for the first time since 7 October.

One senior European diplomat, long opposed to US strategy, was incredulous that the US had not sought clearer guarantees from Netanyahu before going public with the 21-day ceasefire plan.

Reflecting US anger, the US national security spokesperson John Kirby said pointedly: “That statement we worked on last night wasn’t just drawn up in a vacuum. It was done after careful consultation, not only with the countries that signed on to it, but Israel itself.”

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, who had been at the heart of the talks in New York, said the proposal had been “prepared, negotiated with the [Israeli] prime minister and his teams, both by the Americans and by ourselves” .

But it will not be the first time the west has thought Netanyahu is making a strategic mistake, but then proved unable or unwilling to force him to rethink.

Donald Trump has met Volodymyr Zelenskyy in New York in a high-stakes meeting at which the Ukrainian leader hoped to repair ties with the former US president.

The two men met at Trump Tower on Friday amid a growing feud between Zelenskyy and Republicans that Ukraine fears could sabotage further US military aid if Trump wins in November.

“We have a very good relationship, and I also have a very good relationship, as you know, with President Putin,” Trump said as he stood next to Zelenskyy before the meeting. “And I think if we win, I think we’re going to get it resolved very quickly … I really think we’re going to get it … but, you know, it takes two to tango.”

Going into the meeting, Zelenskyy noted he and Trump last met in person five years ago. “I think we have common view that the war in Ukraine has to be stopped, and Putin can’t win, and Ukraine has to prevail,” the Ukrainian leader said. “And I want to discuss with you the details of our plan.”

That last meeting came before Trump was impeached for asking Zelenskyy in a 2019 phone call to investigate Joe Biden and his son in an attempt to influence the outcome of the 2020 US presidential election. He was acquitted in the Senate.

In his opening remarks, Trump thanked Zelenskyy for what he said was his support during that scandal. “One of the reasons we won it so easily is that when he [Zelenskyy] was asked … he could have grandstanded and played cute, and he didn’t do that,” Trump said. “He said President Trump did absolutely nothing wrong. He said it loud and clear, and the impeachment hoax died right there.”

Zelenskyy told reporters in October 2019 as Congress was launching its impeachment inquiry that there was “no blackmail” from Trump.

The sit-down – which lasted less than an hour – could be Zelenskyy’s last chance to head off a growing conflict with Trump, who has frequently made complimentary remarks about Vladimir Putin and has also at times said he would cut off aid to Ukraine in order to force Kyiv to negotiate a truce – under any terms – with Moscow.

“It has to end,” Trump said of the war in Ukraine. “At some point, it has to end. [Zelenskyy’s] gone through hell. This country has gone through hell like few countries have ever … Nobody’s ever seen anything like it.”

The meeting took place after Zelenskyy’s visit to the UN general assembly and the White House to meet Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. During their meeting, the vice-president indirectly attacked Trump’s policy on Ukraine by saying “some in my country” would pressure Ukraine to cede territory to negotiate a peace with Putin.

“These proposals are the same as those of Putin, and let us be clear, they are not proposals for peace,” Harris said. “Instead, they are proposals for surrender, which is dangerous and unacceptable.”

The feud between the two men reignited this week after Zelenskyy said in an interview he did not believe Trump knew how to end the war in Ukraine and that his running mate, JD Vance, was “too radical” for endorsing a peace deal that would result in Kyiv giving up large swaths of occupied land to Russia.

The Republican candidate has grown extremely critical of Zelenskyy on the campaign trail, attacking him in public speeches this week for “making little nasty aspersions toward your favourite president, me”.

“I watched this poor guy yesterday at the United Nations,” Trump had said of Zelenskyy in a campaign speech in North Carolina. “He just didn’t know what he was saying.”

He added: “Any deal – the worst deal – would’ve been better than what we have now. If they made a bad deal it would’ve been much better. They would’ve given up a little bit and everybody would be living and every building would be built and every tower would be aging for another 2,000 years … What deal can we make? It’s demolished. The people are dead. The country is in rubble.”

Before the meeting on Friday, Trump posted on the Truth Social social media platform what appeared to be a private message from Zelenskyy requesting a meeting with the former president. The message, which was sent by text, was transmitted through Denys Sienik, Ukraine’s deputy ambassador to Washington.

The decision to post the message online with little explanation will heighten concerns that any frank negotiations about the war and what aid the US government would be willing to provide could be made public at any time by Trump.

“Days ago, we requested a meeting with you, and I really want to hear your thoughts directly and firsthand,” the message read. “I believe it’s important for us to have a personal contact and to understand each other 100%. Let me know if you are in the city at that time – I would really like for our meeting to take place.” It was signed “Volodymyr”.

Helene has reportedly killed at least 10 people and inflicted more than 4m power outages across the south-eastern US after crashing ashore in north-western Florida late on Thursday as a potent category 4 hurricane, according to officials.

The storm – which registered maximum sustained winds of 140mph (225km/h) – had weakened to a tropical storm over Georgia early on Friday, when residents whose communities experienced Helene’s peak effects more directly were only just beginning to fathom the recovery process ahead.

Among the dead was a person in Florida after a sign fell on their car.

At least six were killed in Georgia alone, including two in the south part of the state during a possible tornado spurred by Helene on its approach. Four others died in cases involving falling trees, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Another person died in Charlotte, North Carolina, after a tree fell on a home as the storm roared through that area. Also in Claremont, North Carolina, earlier on Thursday, a four-year-old girl was killed when two cars crashed in intense rain conditions preceding Helene’s arrival.

Meanwhile, as of early Friday, about 1.1m households and businesses in Florida were without power, though some had started regaining electricity later. South Carolina was reporting 1.3m power outages, Georgia had more than 1m and North Carolina had about 865,000, according to poweroutage.us. Large swaths of Tennessee, Kentucky and Virginia were also out.

Helene made landfall at about 11.10pm in Florida’s sparsely populated Big Bend area, home to fishing villages and vacation hideaways where the state’s Panhandle and peninsula meet.

Nonetheless, social media site users watched in horror as video showed sheets of rain lashing Perry, Florida, near Helene’s landfall. Winds tore siding from buildings in almost complete darkness. One local news station recorded a home as it flipped over.

Forecasters had asked residents to prepare for what they called a “nightmare” 20ft (6-meter) storm surge, essentially a wide wall of water pushed inland by the approaching storm.

Drone video from the storm chaser Aaron Rigsby showed residences that collapsed and were damaged amid storm surge in the Florida community of Steinhatchee. Areas that were badly inundated by storm surge included Florida’s Tampa Bay.

The Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, urged residents to prepare themselves for the likelihood that Helene’s death toll would rise as communities complete damage assessments in the storm’s aftermath. But he also said the state’s rescue crews had ultimately kept that number down as low as possible by performing “thousands of missions” overnight.

“Those missions saved a lot of lives,” DeSantis said.

First responders were out on boats on Friday in Perry. Officials in Citrus county, Florida, about 120 miles south, warned people who were trapped in homes or other buildings to resist treading through floodwaters without rescuers’ help, saying there could be dangers such as live electric wires, sewage and sharp objects lurking underneath.

In Valdosta, Georgia, a city of 55,000 near the state’s border with Florida, Rhonda Bell and her husband spent a sleepless night in the downstairs bedroom of their century-old home. She told the Associated Press that an oak tree smashed through the roof of an upstairs bedroom and collapsed on to the living room below.

“I just felt the whole house shake,” said Bell, whose neighbors had roof shingles torn away and fence panels knocked down. “Thank God we’re both alive to tell about it.”

Beyond Florida and Georgia, up to 10in (25cm) of rain fell in the North Carolina mountains. Forecasters were predicting up to 14in more before the end of the deluge, an amount that could cause flooding that is more severe than anything seen in the past century.

“This is one of the worst storms in modern history for parts of … North Carolina,” the state’s governor, Roy Cooper, said. “Our hearts are heavy.”

Areas 100 miles (160km) north of the Florida-Georgia line expected hurricane conditions. Georgia opened its parks to evacuees and their pets, including horses. Officials imposed overnight curfews in many cities and counties in south Georgia. Atlanta was under a rare flash flood emergency warning.

One county in Georgia, Thomas, extended such a curfew until noon Friday, a signal that conditions were “still very hazardous there”, the local sheriff’s office said in a social media post.

Another sheriff’s office, in Florida’s Taylor county, asked residents who chose not to evacuate ahead of Helene to write their names, birthdays and other identifying information on their limbs in permanent marker. “So that you can be identified and [your] family notified,” the agency wrote in what was grim advice ahead of the storm.

“I’m going to stay right here at the house,” the state ferry boat operator Ken Wood, 58, told Reuters from coastal Dunedin in Florida, where he planned to ride out the storm with his 16-year-old cat Andy.

School districts and multiple universities across the affected region canceled classes. Airports in Tampa, Tallahassee and Clearwater were closed Thursday, while cancellations of flights and other matters were widespread elsewhere in Florida and beyond.

Helene on Wednesday had swamped parts of Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula. It was the ninth major hurricane – category 3 or higher – to make landfall along the US’s Gulf coast since 2017. Experts attribute such a high rate of powerful, destructive storms to the climate crisis, which is spurred in part by the burning of fossil fuels.

“It’s as if something has changed,” the Texas meteorologist Matt Lanza said in a widely shared X post.

As for this Atlantic hurricane season, which began 1 June and does not officially end until 30 November, Helene was the eighth named storm. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) predicted this Atlantic hurricane season would be above average because of record high ocean temperatures.

• Reuters and the Associated Press contributed reporting

Brazilians call overcast São Paulo their country’s “land of drizzle”.

But in recent months it has been raining punches not precipitation as Latin America’s largest city endures what observers call the most violent and unruly election in its history.

Physical violence has meant two recent debates ahead of the 6 October mayoral election ended with participants being treated in hospital and questioned by police.

In the first case, José Luiz Datena, the celebrity host of a sensationalist crime TV show, lost his cool and walloped a rival for the mayoralty called Pablo Marçal with a carbon steel stool.

During a second debate, an aide to Marçal – a far-right self-help guru and convicted fraudster – thumped an adversary’s spin doctor, landing him in hospital where he required a Cat scan and six stitches to a face wound.

Those attacks led the campaign’s leading female candidate, Tabata Amaral, to deplore what she called “a horror show of out of control and violent men”.

“It’s a real shame for the city,” complained Amaral, 30, a centrist congresswoman who said she had hoped for a campaign focused on education, healthcare and public safety, not bloodshed and brawls.

The president of Brazil’s top electoral court, Cármen Lúcia Antunes Rocha, echoed those comments, urging police and prosecutors to investigate and punish violence which she called an insult to voters and democracy. The 2024 election, Rocha complained on Tuesday, had witnessed “the most contemptible and criminal scenes, which had reduced politics to episodes of pugilism, irrationality and police reports”.

The fisticuffs have caused anger and bemusement, but also a hint of titillation among São Paulo’s 11 million-plus citizens – and made global headlines. “Brazilian Politician Upends Debate by Hitting Opponent With Chair,” the New York Times declared in its report about Datena’s “stunning” on-air assault on Marçal which came after the latter called the former a coward. The British tabloid the Sun invited readers to watch footage of “the WWE-style brawl”.

One political journalist, José Roberto de Toledo, said that in nearly 40 years covering São Paulo elections he had never witnessed such ignominious scenes as the weaponisation of furniture. But Toledo, whose podcast, A Hora, is chronicling the slugfest’s political implications, challenged the generalization that São Paulo’s election was in itself violent.

Rather, Toledo believed the turmoil was the handiwork of one man – Marçal – a controversial social media whiz and populist provocateur who many accuse of deliberately stirring up trouble in order to attract attention and win votes.

“This phenomenon has a name [and] a surname … It’s called Pablo Marçal,” said Toledo, describing how the multimillionaire rightwing influencer goaded rivals into verbal or physical confrontations he hoped would go viral.

“He’s the violent element in this election,” Toledo added. “If you take him out of the picture, everything’s normal.”

The attention-grabbing tactics employed by Marçal, a 37-year-old often portrayed as a more provocative version of Brazil’s far-right ex-president Jair Bolsonaro, have been shocking, even for a nation accustomed to Bolsonaro’s brash behaviour.

In recent weeks Marçal has relentlessly harassed and smeared opponents and journalists during media appearances, calling them pussies, wimps, lame arses, crypto-communists, scumbags, mental retards and orangutans.

He has also made a series of baseless insinuations about his rivals, suggesting, without evidence, that one was a cocaine user and another a rapist. In July, Marçal went so far as to suggest that Amaral was responsible for her father’s suicide – a slur she called a “dirty, filthy lie” and for which he later apologized.

Toledo said Marçal’s aggressive rhetoric and mastery of the dark arts of social media had helped him commandeer a significant chunk of Bolsonaro’s electorate. Bolsonaro has endorsed São Paulo’s incumbent rightwing mayor, Ricardo Nunes, but polls suggest many Bolsonaristas will vote Marçal. “Pablo Marçal has broken Bolsonaro’s hegemony over the radical right,” Toledo said.

Marçal looks unlikely to win the election, despite dominating headlines and boasting about 20% of intended votes. Polls indicate that about half of voters oppose a politician whose past run-ins with the police have been widely documented in the media. In 2010, Marçal received a four-year prison sentence for allegedly being part of a cyber gang that used malware to steal money from banks. (Marçal, who denied knowledge of the criminal racket, reportedly avoided jail thanks to the statute of limitations). A run-off between Nunes and Guilherme Boulos, a leftist congressman supported by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, looks likely.

But Marçal’s incendiary style of politics looks set to linger, with the influencer tipped to run for Brazil’s 81-seat senate in 2026.

Amaral, who is polling in fourth place, behind Nunes, Boulos and Marçal, decried how such a “despicable character” was hogging the election limelight. “I find it utterly absurd that such a person is being considered [for mayor],” she said, pointing to Marçal’s criminal past and reports – which he denies – linking close allies to organized crime.

One of the culprits for his success, Amaral thought, was social media, whose algorithms allowed such rabble-rousers to thrive. “We need to regulate the social networks in Brazil,” she said.

Brazilians call overcast São Paulo their country’s “land of drizzle”.

But in recent months it has been raining punches not precipitation as Latin America’s largest city endures what observers call the most violent and unruly election in its history.

Physical violence has meant two recent debates ahead of the 6 October mayoral election ended with participants being treated in hospital and questioned by police.

In the first case, José Luiz Datena, the celebrity host of a sensationalist crime TV show, lost his cool and walloped a rival for the mayoralty called Pablo Marçal with a carbon steel stool.

During a second debate, an aide to Marçal – a far-right self-help guru and convicted fraudster – thumped an adversary’s spin doctor, landing him in hospital where he required a Cat scan and six stitches to a face wound.

Those attacks led the campaign’s leading female candidate, Tabata Amaral, to deplore what she called “a horror show of out of control and violent men”.

“It’s a real shame for the city,” complained Amaral, 30, a centrist congresswoman who said she had hoped for a campaign focused on education, healthcare and public safety, not bloodshed and brawls.

The president of Brazil’s top electoral court, Cármen Lúcia Antunes Rocha, echoed those comments, urging police and prosecutors to investigate and punish violence which she called an insult to voters and democracy. The 2024 election, Rocha complained on Tuesday, had witnessed “the most contemptible and criminal scenes, which had reduced politics to episodes of pugilism, irrationality and police reports”.

The fisticuffs have caused anger and bemusement, but also a hint of titillation among São Paulo’s 11 million-plus citizens – and made global headlines. “Brazilian Politician Upends Debate by Hitting Opponent With Chair,” the New York Times declared in its report about Datena’s “stunning” on-air assault on Marçal which came after the latter called the former a coward. The British tabloid the Sun invited readers to watch footage of “the WWE-style brawl”.

One political journalist, José Roberto de Toledo, said that in nearly 40 years covering São Paulo elections he had never witnessed such ignominious scenes as the weaponisation of furniture. But Toledo, whose podcast, A Hora, is chronicling the slugfest’s political implications, challenged the generalization that São Paulo’s election was in itself violent.

Rather, Toledo believed the turmoil was the handiwork of one man – Marçal – a controversial social media whiz and populist provocateur who many accuse of deliberately stirring up trouble in order to attract attention and win votes.

“This phenomenon has a name [and] a surname … It’s called Pablo Marçal,” said Toledo, describing how the multimillionaire rightwing influencer goaded rivals into verbal or physical confrontations he hoped would go viral.

“He’s the violent element in this election,” Toledo added. “If you take him out of the picture, everything’s normal.”

The attention-grabbing tactics employed by Marçal, a 37-year-old often portrayed as a more provocative version of Brazil’s far-right ex-president Jair Bolsonaro, have been shocking, even for a nation accustomed to Bolsonaro’s brash behaviour.

In recent weeks Marçal has relentlessly harassed and smeared opponents and journalists during media appearances, calling them pussies, wimps, lame arses, crypto-communists, scumbags, mental retards and orangutans.

He has also made a series of baseless insinuations about his rivals, suggesting, without evidence, that one was a cocaine user and another a rapist. In July, Marçal went so far as to suggest that Amaral was responsible for her father’s suicide – a slur she called a “dirty, filthy lie” and for which he later apologized.

Toledo said Marçal’s aggressive rhetoric and mastery of the dark arts of social media had helped him commandeer a significant chunk of Bolsonaro’s electorate. Bolsonaro has endorsed São Paulo’s incumbent rightwing mayor, Ricardo Nunes, but polls suggest many Bolsonaristas will vote Marçal. “Pablo Marçal has broken Bolsonaro’s hegemony over the radical right,” Toledo said.

Marçal looks unlikely to win the election, despite dominating headlines and boasting about 20% of intended votes. Polls indicate that about half of voters oppose a politician whose past run-ins with the police have been widely documented in the media. In 2010, Marçal received a four-year prison sentence for allegedly being part of a cyber gang that used malware to steal money from banks. (Marçal, who denied knowledge of the criminal racket, reportedly avoided jail thanks to the statute of limitations). A run-off between Nunes and Guilherme Boulos, a leftist congressman supported by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, looks likely.

But Marçal’s incendiary style of politics looks set to linger, with the influencer tipped to run for Brazil’s 81-seat senate in 2026.

Amaral, who is polling in fourth place, behind Nunes, Boulos and Marçal, decried how such a “despicable character” was hogging the election limelight. “I find it utterly absurd that such a person is being considered [for mayor],” she said, pointing to Marçal’s criminal past and reports – which he denies – linking close allies to organized crime.

One of the culprits for his success, Amaral thought, was social media, whose algorithms allowed such rabble-rousers to thrive. “We need to regulate the social networks in Brazil,” she said.

The Russian judge who convicted the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich has said the trial was short because it did not examine any “material evidence” and the verdict did not take long because he could “type quickly”.

“The case itself was small. I don’t remember how many folders there were – three or five,” said Andrei Mineyev, according to the RIA Novosti news agency.

“Why did it go so quickly? The point is the court did not examine material evidence,” Mineyev said, adding that this was because neither the prosecution nor the defence had requested it.

Mineyev made the comments at a conference in the city of Ekaterinburg, where he spoke about different cases he had worked on, according to Russian media.

Gershkovich was arrested in March 2023 while on a reporting trip to Ekaterinburg. He became the first foreign journalist held for espionage in post-Soviet Russia.

Gershkovich, his employer and the US have always denied the accusation.

His trial in Ekaterinburg, which was widely described as a sham, began in June 2024.

Prosecutors accused Gershkovich, 32, whose parents emigrated from the Soviet Union, of gathering secret information about the activities of a big tank factory in the region.

The trial was held behind closed doors, which is common in espionage cases, and concluded with unusual haste.

On 19 July he was sentenced to 16 years in prison. Two weeks later he was released in the biggest prisoner swap between Russia and the west since the cold war.

The judge said he was “100-200%” sure that Gershkovich was “at the same time a journalist, a spy and a CIA agent”, the Russian newspaper Kommersant reported.

The judge said he retired to consider the verdict at midday and pronounced it at 5pm, saying the quick turnaround was because he could “type quickly”, the paper said.

The boss of a Tesla factory has defended the decision to send managers to the homes of workers on long-term sick leave.

In recent weeks, a director of Tesla’s electric car plant in Germany sent managers to check up on about two dozen employees who have continued to be paid while being on sick leave over the past nine months.

André Thierig, the plant’s manufacturing director, said the home visits were common practice in the industry and that the company simply wanted to “appeal to the employees’ work ethic”.

The move by Elon Musk’s US-headquartered carmaker has sparked outrage at the trade union IG Metall, which represents a proportion of the 12,000 workers at the Berlin-Brandenburg gigafactory.

The union has campaigned against what it has alleged are harsh working conditions with “unreasonably” long hours and a poor health and safety record.

“Employees from almost all areas of the factory have reported an extremely high workload,” said Dirk Schulze, a regional director at the union. “When there are staff shortages, the ill workers are put under pressure and those who remain healthy are overburdened with additional work.

“If the factory’s overseers really want to reduce the level of sickness, they should break this vicious circle.”

Sick leave rates at the factory on the outskirts of Berlin, which the union says operates with a “culture of fear”, have commonly hit 15% or higher.

The union has said that there is a “culture of fear” that has caused stress and sick leave among workers.

However, Thierig said some workers were taking advantage of Germany’s labour protection laws.

He said that among the factory’s 1,500 temporary workers, who operate under similar conditions to full-time employees, the average rate of absence through illness is just 2%.

“In our analyses of attendance at work, some phenomena have become obvious: on Fridays and late shifts, about 5% more employees take sick leave than on other weekdays,” Thierig said. “That is not an indicator of bad working conditions because the working conditions are the same on all working days and across all shifts. It suggests that the German social system is being exploited to some extent.”

The company had identified about 200 members of staff who were still being paid but had not turned up for work at all this year. “They submit a new sicknote from the doctor at least every six weeks,” he said.

Last October, Tesla rejected claims made by IG Metall that health and safety provisions at the factory were not adequate.

The factory, which is in Grünheide, south-east of Berlin, was opened in 2022 and is the electric car manufacturer’s first in Europe.

Musk, the Tesla chief executive, cited Brexit uncertainty as a factor in deciding against building a factory in the UK.

Tesla has been contacted for comment.

A deal backed by leaders on both sides of Libya’s political divide to appoint a new central bank governor has the potential “to resolve all the political issues” in the country, Libya’s head of state has said.

Mohamed al-Menfi, the president of Libya’s Presidential Council who is largely aligned with the UN-recognised government in Tripoli, was accused of acting unilaterally and propelling the country into fresh turmoil when in August he dismissed the previous long-serving bank governor, Sadiq al-Kabir, who then fled into exile.

Kabir’s dismissal led to a shutdown of oil production and exports by forces in eastern Libya – rivals to the Tripoli government – who were furious at Menfi’s decision.

Libya’s deep political divisions have given the central bank the key role of distributing state revenues between the east and west.

In a rare interview with western reporters given at the UN in New York, Menfi justified his decree by claiming Kabir had been managing the bank’s funds, largely made up of oil income, “without any form of accountability” and “had exploited the state of division” in the country.

“It was an abnormal and unsustainable situation,” he said.

He said he had also issued his decree “to spare the capital, Tripoli, from a certain war that would directly target the Central Bank after the failure of months of negotiations between the dismissed governor and the parliament”.

He claimed Kabir had lost the support of the armed forces in Tripoli. “I tried to convince Kabir to share financial decisions in the country with others through the supreme financial committee. People were complaining they were not getting paid,” he said.

Kabir has said he and other senior bank staff were forced to leave the country to “protect our lives” from potential attacks by armed militia and described the attempts to remove him as illegal.

The deal to appoint a new governor and a deputy brokered by the UN mission in Libya has to be ratified by the country’s two key representative bodies, the High Council of State in the west and House of Representatives in the east.

Under the deal, Naji Issa is to be appointed interim governor, while Marai al-Barassi continues as deputy. A new board of governors, intended to be experts but reflecting the geographical interests in the country, will be nominated within two weeks to a month.

Menfi said the three main purposes of the deal were to ensure good governance; for there to be accountability and transparency; and to enable a financial committee to distribute money equally inside the country.

“The agreement that has now been reached regarding a governor and a deputy has happened because of the pressure we exerted to create a transparent administration and an integrated board of directors,” he said. “We have to put the money away from politicians and for it to be run by a financial committee.”

It is not clear how long the interim deal will stick, but first indications are that it will be enough for eastern forces who played a role in agreeing the new board and may now be minded to end the shutdown on oil production and exports. Oil production, concentrated in the east, had fallen from 1.2m barrels a day to about 350,000.

Menfi’s critics say the dismissal was not purely about accountability, but the west’s loss of trust in how Kabir was distributing revenues. He denied the interim bank leadership he had installed had been unable to operate due to loss of access to the international banking system. But prices did rise as the value of the dinar fell.

He said as a result of the deal “international accountability should return by reinstatement of the international auditor that was unilaterally suspended by the previous and without the approval of any other institutions”.

Kabir has accused the government of not implementing reforms and spending money irresponsibly. He said the state had spent more than 420bn dinars since 2021, most of which was on consumer spending and not on development investments.

Menfi said the agreement might open the path to tackling corruption in the country, including the smuggling of heavily subsidised fuel. That, he said, was turning into “a real obstacle “to any economic development”, adding: “There are ideas to replace it gradually with direct cash support that will stimulate investments and create a private sector in the field of oil housing and transportation.”

He also backed simultaneous national parliamentary and presidential elections – long promised by all Libyan politicians – to end the existence of two competing legislative councils. He said the difficulty with presidential elections was that people were fearful of being excluded if someone else was elected. “We tried to go for parliamentary elections on its own and it did not work,” he said.

He said the long-term economic prospects for Libya were bright, and the country could diversify away from its dependency on oil.

Climate activists have thrown tomato soup over two Sunflowers paintings by Vincent van Gogh, just an hour after two others were jailed for a similar protest action in 2022.

Three supporters of Just Stop Oil walked into the National Gallery in London, where an exhibition of Van Gogh’s collected works is on display, at 2.30pm on Friday afternoon, and threw Heinz soup over Sunflowers 1889 and Sunflowers 1888.

The latter was the same work targeted by Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland in 2022. That pair are now among 25 supporters of Just Stop Oil in jail for climate protests.

“Future generations will regard these prisoners of conscience to be on the right side of history,” Phil Green, one of those taking part in Friday’s action, told visitors to the gallery.

Ludi Simpson, 71, who also took part, said: “We will be held accountable for our actions today, and we will face the full force of the law. When will the fossil fuel executives and the politicians they’ve bought be held accountable for the criminal damage that they are imposing on every living thing?”

The protest came almost exactly an hour after Plummer, 23, was sentenced to two years in prison for causing an estimated £10,000 of damage to the frame of Sunflowers 1888. Her co-defendant, Anna Holland, 22, received 20 months for the same offence.

Passing sentence at Southwark crown court on Friday, the judge, Christopher Hehir, told them: “You two simply had no right to do what you did to Sunflowers, and your arrogance in thinking otherwise deserves the strongest condemnation.

“The pair of you came within the thickness of a pane of glass of irreparably damaging or even destroying this priceless treasure, and that must be reflected in the sentences I pass.”

The defendants embraced and blew kisses to the public gallery from the dock before they were led down to the cells.

In October 2022, Plummer and Holland had gone to room 43 of the National Gallery at Trafalgar Square and hurled two tins of soup over the 1888 painting, one of Van Gogh’s most famous works, before glueing themselves to the wall beneath it.

In July, they were found guilty of criminal damage by a jury after three hours of deliberations. Judge Hehir told them at the time to be “prepared, in practical and emotional terms, to go to prison”.

Plummer was further sentenced to three months in jail for interfering with national infrastructure by taking part in a slow march along Earls Court Road in west London in November 2023. Her co-defendants in that case, Chiara Sarti and Daniel Hall, received suspended sentences and community work orders.

Plummer gave a 20-minute address to the judge in mitigation, in which she cited Emmeline Pankhurst, Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela as examples of people who had been criminalised while fighting for justice.

“On 14 October 2022 and in November 2023 I made the choices to take actions that I knew would likely lead to my arrest and prosecution,” she said. “I made those choices because I believe that non-violent civil resistance is the best, if not the only, tool that people have in order to bring about the rapid change required to protect life from the accelerating climate emergency and the political decisions being made that pour fuel on the flames and which sentence us all to a catastrophic future.

“Whilst of course there are reasons why my life and the lives of people I love and care for would be easier if I don’t receive prison sentences today I don’t intend to go into detail about these, my choice today is to accept whatever sentences I receive with a smile, knowing that I have found peace in doing what I can to defend countless millions of innocent people suffering and dying.”

She added: “I chose to peacefully disrupt a business-as-usual system that is unjust, dishonest and murderous.”

In passing his sentence, Hehir said he took into account not only the damage caused to the frame but the potential for even greater damage to be caused to the painting had the soup seeped behind the glass that covered it.

Hehir told them: “Section 63 of the sentencing code requires me, in assessing the seriousness of your offending, to consider not only the harm your offence caused, but also the harm it might foreseeably have caused. For the reasons I have explained, that foreseeable harm is incalculable. Your offending is so serious that only custodial sentences are appropriate.”

Hehir noted that gallery staff had immediately taken the painting away to examine it and ensure it had come to no serious harm.

More than 3,600 chemicals approved for food contact in packaging, kitchenware or food processing equipment have been found in humans, new peer-reviewed research has found, highlighting a little-regulated exposure risk to toxic substances.

The chemicals have been found in human blood, hair or breast milk. Among them are compounds known to be highly toxic, like PFAS, bisphenol, metals, phthalates and volatile organic compounds. Many are linked to cancer, hormone disruption and other serious health issues.

But many others are substances for which there are very limited public toxicological profiles, such as synthetic antioxidants used as preservatives and oligomers that stabilize ink on packaging. The study’s authors say the knowledge gaps highlight the need for further scrutiny of food contact chemicals.

“What is certainly of concern is that we have a strong link that shows some hazardous chemicals … migrate from packaging into food, so there is a contribution to exposure from packaging,” said Birgit Geueke, a study co-author with the Food Packaging Forum, a Zurich-based non-profit that advocates for stronger regulations.

The study identified about 14,000 chemicals approved for food contact, and checked databases and scientific literature for evidence of human accumulation on each. Humans are exposed to many of the chemicals in other scenarios, so the research does not mean to suggest that food packaging is solely responsible.

Among the worst offenders is plastic, a material that is largely unregulated and can contain thousands of chemicals. Silicone and coatings on metal cans can also contain toxic or understudied compounds, Geueke said. Many paper and cardboard products were until recently treated with PFAS and can contain a layer of plastic.

Several factors can cause chemicals to leach into food at higher rates, like higher temperatures, fat content and acidity. The ratio of packaging to product also matters – foods in smaller containers can be much more contaminated.

Many chemicals in the US are approved with limited scrutiny under the US Food and Drug Administration’s “generally regarded as safe” rule, which allows chemicals to be used for food contact with very little agency scrutiny. US law also does not require the FDA to consider new science after a chemical is approved for food contact.

That has been a problem with chemicals like PFAS or titanium dioxide that were on the market for decades before being removed or further studied. Though the European Union has in place stricter regulations for some chemicals, like PFAS, “there is still a lot of room for improvement”, Geueke said.

Consumers can protect themselves by buying foods in glass jars, which typically have very few chemicals. Some researchers who work in the field say they bring their own glass containers to restaurants in case they want to pack leftovers. Geueke said removing food from plastic containers bought at a store or from carryout containers and placing it in glass jars at home reduces the amount of time chemicals have to transfer from packaging.

“But you cannot completely avoid [the chemicals],” Geueke said, adding that the solution was stronger regulation.