Russia is to increase its spending on defence by 25% to its highest on record, as Vladimir Putin vows to continue his war efforts in Ukraine and further escalate his standoff with the west.

The latest planned increase in spending will take Russia’s defence budget to a record 13.5tn rubles (£109bn) in 2025, according to draft budget documents published on Monday on the parliament’s website. That is about 3tn rubles more than was set aside for defence this year, which was the previous record.

Taken together, spending on defence and security will account for about 40% of Russia’s total government spending – or 41.5tn rubles in 2025.

The 2025 budget suggests Putin has embraced what economists have dubbed “military Keynesianism”, marked by a significant rise in military spending, which has fuelled the war in Ukraine, spurred a consumer spending boom and driven up inflation.

“This increase is confirmation the economy has switched to a war footing, and, even if the war in Ukraine ends soon, channeling money to the army and a bloated defence sector will remain a top priority,” the Bell, a leading Russian outlet specialising on the economy, wrote in its newsletter.

“It’s clear that spending on the military and security will exceed combined expenditure on education, healthcare, social policy and the national economy,” it added.

According to the draft budget, social spending is expected to decrease by 16% from 7.7tn rubles this year to 6.5tn rubles next year.

The massive Russian investment in the military has worried European war planners, who have said Nato underestimated Russia’s ability to sustain a long-term war. Meanwhile, Ukraine is facing uncertainty over the level of future support from its closest allies.

This has increased confidence in Moscow, where on Monday Putin boasted that “all goals set” in what Russia calls its special military operation “will be achieved”.

Putin’s speeches over the last year have been marked by growing confidence as Russian troops make creeping gains in eastern Ukraine.

Recently, he has taken a hardline stance, demanding Ukraine’s unconditional surrender and calling for the “denazification of Ukraine, its demilitarization, and neutral status”.

Analysts believe the long-term economic outlook for Russia is far gloomier than it was before the invasion.

The Kremlin’s pivot toward China and other markets, sanctions-busting and other workarounds cannot make up for direct access to western markets or technology.

Russia’s military spending boom has sent inflation surging at home, forcing the central bank to raise borrowing costs, while the country struggles with acute labour shortages as Moscow pumps fiscal and physical resources into the military.

• Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Monday that the situation was “very, very difficult” on the frontline of the war against Russia, as well as in terms of “our capabilities, our future capabilities and our specific tasks”, with Ukraine’s forces needing to do everything they could over the autumn period.

• Ukrainian military bloggers have reported in recent days that the Russians have been advancing on the hilltop town of Vuhledar, which Ukraine’s forces have defended over the course of the war, in the south of the Donetsk region. Russian troops have also been advancing slowly for months further north, with the aim of capturing the entire Donbas region, made up of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts.

• Nato members should not be deterred from giving more military aid to Ukraine by Vladimir Putin’s “reckless Russian nuclear rhetoric”, the alliance’s outgoing secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, has said as he hands the job over to Mark Rutte. “Every time we have stepped up our support with new types of weapons – battle tanks, long-range fires or F-16s – the Russians have tried to prevent us,” Stoltenberg said. “They have not succeeded and also this latest example should not prevent Nato allies from supporting Ukraine,” he added, referring to Vladimir Putin’s recent supposed changes to Russian nuclear doctrine. Stoltenberg said Nato had not detected any change in Russia’s nuclear posture “that requires any changes from our side”.

• Mark Rutte, writes Jennifer Rankin, takes the reins of Nato at a perilous moment for Ukraine as it faces a third winter fighting Russia’s brutal invasion. Nato allies recently pledged to bolster long-term support to Ukraine “so it can prevail in its fight for freedom”. Rutte is a blunt-speaking liberal who led four Dutch coalition governments over 13 years. He will formally take over as Nato secretary general on Tuesday morning.

• HR McMaster, a US national security adviser during Donald Trump’s presidency, has dismissed as “a real myth” the Republican presidential nominee’s boasts that he would broker an end to Russia’s war in Ukraine if elected in November. “I don’t really buy it,” HR McMaster said Sunday on CBS’s Face the Nation. “It’s a real misunderstanding of war to assume that you can get a favourable political outcome without a favourable military outcome. That’s never really happened in war.”

• Three journalists working for independent Russian media outlets were arrested in Moscow on Monday outside a concert celebrating the Kremlin’s claimed annexation of Ukrainian regions, a rights group said. Citing the detainees’ relatives, human rights NGO OVD-info said one of the journalists worked at the news site Republic and the other two for SOTAvision, which said its reporters – who were denied access to the celebration on Red Square – had been arrested while interviewing spectators. The outlet is one of the last Russian media still working to document the Kremlin’s crackdown on dissent.

• Russia is planning to draft 133,000 troops between October and January, according to a decree signed by Vladimir Putin that affects those not in the reserve and who are eligible for military service. Russia plans to boost its defence budget by almost 30% next year as it diverts resources to its war on Ukraine, spending more on the military than welfare and education combined, a draft budget indicates.

• Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Monday that the situation was “very, very difficult” on the frontline of the war against Russia, as well as in terms of “our capabilities, our future capabilities and our specific tasks”, with Ukraine’s forces needing to do everything they could over the autumn period.

• Ukrainian military bloggers have reported in recent days that the Russians have been advancing on the hilltop town of Vuhledar, which Ukraine’s forces have defended over the course of the war, in the south of the Donetsk region. Russian troops have also been advancing slowly for months further north, with the aim of capturing the entire Donbas region, made up of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts.

• Nato members should not be deterred from giving more military aid to Ukraine by Vladimir Putin’s “reckless Russian nuclear rhetoric”, the alliance’s outgoing secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, has said as he hands the job over to Mark Rutte. “Every time we have stepped up our support with new types of weapons – battle tanks, long-range fires or F-16s – the Russians have tried to prevent us,” Stoltenberg said. “They have not succeeded and also this latest example should not prevent Nato allies from supporting Ukraine,” he added, referring to Vladimir Putin’s recent supposed changes to Russian nuclear doctrine. Stoltenberg said Nato had not detected any change in Russia’s nuclear posture “that requires any changes from our side”.

• Mark Rutte, writes Jennifer Rankin, takes the reins of Nato at a perilous moment for Ukraine as it faces a third winter fighting Russia’s brutal invasion. Nato allies recently pledged to bolster long-term support to Ukraine “so it can prevail in its fight for freedom”. Rutte is a blunt-speaking liberal who led four Dutch coalition governments over 13 years. He will formally take over as Nato secretary general on Tuesday morning.

• HR McMaster, a US national security adviser during Donald Trump’s presidency, has dismissed as “a real myth” the Republican presidential nominee’s boasts that he would broker an end to Russia’s war in Ukraine if elected in November. “I don’t really buy it,” HR McMaster said Sunday on CBS’s Face the Nation. “It’s a real misunderstanding of war to assume that you can get a favourable political outcome without a favourable military outcome. That’s never really happened in war.”

• Three journalists working for independent Russian media outlets were arrested in Moscow on Monday outside a concert celebrating the Kremlin’s claimed annexation of Ukrainian regions, a rights group said. Citing the detainees’ relatives, human rights NGO OVD-info said one of the journalists worked at the news site Republic and the other two for SOTAvision, which said its reporters – who were denied access to the celebration on Red Square – had been arrested while interviewing spectators. The outlet is one of the last Russian media still working to document the Kremlin’s crackdown on dissent.

• Russia is planning to draft 133,000 troops between October and January, according to a decree signed by Vladimir Putin that affects those not in the reserve and who are eligible for military service. Russia plans to boost its defence budget by almost 30% next year as it diverts resources to its war on Ukraine, spending more on the military than welfare and education combined, a draft budget indicates.

A Georgia judge on Monday struck down the state’s six-week abortion ban, ruling that the ban is unconstitutional and blocking it from being enforced.

In a 26-page opinion, the Fulton county superior judge Robert McBurney ruled that the state’s abortion laws must revert to what they were before the six-week ban – known as the Life Act – was passed in 2019. The ban was blocked as long as Roe v Wade was the law of the land, but went into effect after the US supreme court overturned Roe in 2022.

“When a fetus growing inside a woman reaches viability, when society can assume care and responsibility for that separate life, then – and only then – may society intervene,” McBurney wrote.

Abortions are now legal in Georgia up until about 22 weeks of pregnancy – the point at which Georgia permitted abortions prior to the Life Act. However, fetal viability tends to occur closer to 24 weeks of pregnancy. Although the Roe line of jurisprudence was supposed to prevent states from banning abortion prior to fetal viability, Georgia and several other states did so anyway even before Roe fell.

Under the six-week ban, providers could not perform abortions if they detected fetal cardiac activity, which emerges at about six weeks into pregnancy. Many women, McBurney wrote, do not even know they are pregnant at six weeks.

“For these women, the liberty of privacy means that they alone should choose whether they serve as human incubators for the five months leading up to viability,” McBurney wrote. “It is not for a legislator, a judge, or a commander from The Handmaid’s Tale to tell these women what to do with their bodies during this period when the fetus cannot survive outside the womb any more so than society could – or should – force them to serve as a human tissue bank or to give up a kidney for the benefit of another.”

In a footnote, McBurney added: “There is an uncomfortable and usually unspoken subtext of involuntary servitude swirling about this debate, symbolically illustrated by the composition of the legal teams in this case. It is generally men who promote and defend laws like the Life Act, the effect of which is to require only women – and, given the socio-economic and demographic evidence presented at trial, primarily poor women, which means in Georgia primarily black and brown women – to engage in compulsory labor, ie, the carrying of a pregnancy to term at the government’s behest.”

McBurney’s ruling arrives weeks after ProPublica reported that two Georgia women, Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller, died after being unable to access legal abortions in the months after Roe was overturned. In statements after McBurney’s ruling, abortion rights supporters highlighted Thurman and Miller’s deaths.

“We are encouraged that a Georgia court has ruled for bodily autonomy,” said Monica Simpson, executive director of SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, a plaintiff in the case that led to Monday’s ruling. “At the same time, we can’t forget that every day the ban has been in place has been a day too long – and we have felt the dire consequences with the devastating and preventable deaths of Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller.”

Georgia’s attorney general, Republican Chris Carr, could appeal the case to the state supreme court and ask it to reinstate the six-week ban. The supreme court previously let the ban take effect at an earlier stage in the case.

A painting that was found by a junk dealer while he was clearing out the cellar of a home in Capri, and was regularly decried by his wife as “horrible”, is an original portrait by Pablo Picasso, Italian experts have claimed.

After he stumbled across the painting in 1962, Luigi Lo Rosso took the rolled-up canvas home with him to Pompeii, where it hung in a cheap frame on the living room wall for the next few decades.

The portrait, which is now believed by its owners to be a distorted image of Dora Maar, a French photographer and painter who was Picasso’s mistress and muse, featured the famous artist’s distinctive signature in the top left-hand corner. But Lo Rosso didn’t know who he was.

It was only much later, when his son Andrea started to ask questions after studying an encyclopedia of art history given to him by his aunt, that suspicions were aroused.

The family eventually sought the advice of a team of experts, including a well-known art detective, Maurizio Seracini. After years of complex investigations, Cinzia Altieri, a graphologist and member of the scientific committee of the Arcadia Foundation, which deals with the valuations, restorations and attributions of art works, confirmed that the signature on the painting, today valued at €6m (£5m), was Picasso’s.

“After all the other examinations of the painting were done, I was given job of studying the signature,” Altieri told the Guardian. “I worked on it for months, comparing it with some of his original works. There is no doubt that the signature is his. There was no evidence suggesting that it was false.”

Picasso was a frequent visitor to the southern Italian island of Capri and the painting, which is strikingly similar to Picasso’s Buste de femme (Dora Maar), is believed to have been produced between 1930 and 1936.

Lo Rosso has since died but his son Andrea, now 60, pursued his quest to discover the artist behind the painting.

“My father was from Capri and would collect junk to sell for next to nothing,” he said. “He found the painting before I was even born and didn’t have a clue who Picasso was. He wasn’t a very cultured person. While reading about Picasso’s works in the encyclopedia I would look up at the painting and compare it to his signature. I kept telling my father it was similar, but he didn’t understand. But as I grew up, I kept wondering.”

Andrea Lo Rosso said there were moments when the family considered getting rid of the painting. “My mother didn’t want to keep it – she kept saying it was horrible.”

He has contacted the Picasso Foundation in Málaga several times, but he said it had shown no interest in examining his claims, believing them to be false. The foundation has the ultimate word on the authenticity of the painting, now stashed in a vault in Milan.

Picasso, who died in 1973, produced more than 14,000 works and the foundation receives hundreds of messages a day from people claiming to be in possession of an original.

The Buste de femme (Dora Maar) was painted in 1938 and stolen from a Saudi sheikh’s yacht in 1999 before being found 20 years later.

Luca Marcante, president of the Arcadia Foundation, believes there may be two versions of the work. “They could both be an original,” he told Il Giorno newspaper. “They are probably two portraits, not exactly the same, of the same subject painted by Picasso at two different times. One thing is for sure: the one found in Capri and now kept in a vault in Milan is authentic.”

Marcante will now present the evidence to the Picasso Foundation.

“I am curious to know what they say,” said Lo Rosso. “We were just a normal family, and the aim has always been to establish the truth. We’re not interested in making money out of it.”

Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, has won the endorsement of Rudy Giuliani’s daughter, who declared: “I’ve been grieving the loss of my dad to [Donald] Trump. I cannot bear to lose our country to him too.”

Caroline Rose Giuliani was writing in Vanity Fair, where she lamented how her father, who was once the former president’s personal attorney and trusted adviser, became caught up in the “destructive trail” and chaos of the Trump administration and its aftermath.

“I’m unfortunately well suited to remind Americans of just how calamitous being associated with Trump can be, even for those who are convinced he’s on their side,” wrote Giuliani, a California-based film-maker and activist who has frequently taken issue with her father’s political positions.

“I am constantly asking myself how America is back here, even considering the possibility of electing Donald Trump again, after all of the damage he has caused, both in office and since. There are unmistakable reminders of Trump’s destructive trail all around us, and it has broken my heart to watch my dad become one of them.”

Rudy Giuliani, who became an immensely popular mayor of New York after guiding the city through the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, paid a severe price for promoting Trump’s lies that his 2020 election defeat was fraudulent.

He was permanently disbarred from practicing law in Washington DC last week for leading the legal effort to overturn Joe Biden’s victory, and attempted to declare bankruptcy to avoid paying $148.1m in damages to two Georgia election workers he defamed.

“Watching my dad’s life crumble since he joined forces with Trump has been extraordinarily painful, both on a personal level and because his demise feels linked to a dark force that threatens to once again consume America,” Caroline Giuliani wrote, referring to Trump’s third presidential election as the Republican nominee.

“Not to disregard individual accountability in the slightest, but it would be naive for us to ignore the fact that many of those closest to Trump have descended into catastrophic downward spirals. If we let Trump back into the driver’s seat this fall, our country will be no exception.”

She described her relationship with her father as “cartoonishly complicated”.

“Despite his faults, I love him. I’ve seen him experience surreal heights, and, now, unfathomable lows. The last thing I want to do is hurt him, especially when he’s already down,” she wrote. “Plus we never know how much time we have left with our parents. The totality of that makes this the most difficult piece I’ve ever written. Yet this moment and this election are so much bigger than any of us.”

She cited Harris’s positions on reproductive rights, as well as the economy, and foreign and environmental policy, as reasons for backing her.

“We need experienced, sane, and fundamentally decent leaders who will fight for us instead of against us, who will safeguard our democracy rather than dismantle it,” she wrote.

“As a recently-engaged-to-be-married 35-year-old who hopes to feel more joyous than fearful about the potential of becoming a parent myself, I need to advocate for a future worth bringing children into.”

She also recalled how she pleaded with her father to reconsider after she learned he was considering becoming Trump’s lawyer at a New York city cigar bar.

“Surrounded by thick smoke and powerful men, I ugly-cried for a few minutes, then spent the next three hours making my vehement case to my father that he not go down this morally perilous path,” she wrote.

She said being his daughter allowed her to see flaws in Rudy Giuliani “that people blinded by his celebrity couldn’t see”.

She wrote: “The deeper my dad gets stuck in the quicksand of his problems, the more fleeting our opportunities to connect as father and daughter become.

“After months of feeling the type of sorrow that comes from the death of a loved one, it dawned on me that I’ve been grieving the loss of my dad to Trump. I cannot bear to lose our country to him too.”

As the south-east US continues recovery efforts after Hurricane Helene’s devastation, the storm’s death toll keeps climbing, with more than 120 killed across several states.

Joe Biden will visit North Carolina, where the western part of the state has been devastated by flooding, on Wednesday.

In recent days, the president pledged federal assistance to help with recovery efforts – and has said that his administration is giving states “everything we have” to help with their response to the storm.

“It’s not just a catastrophic storm. It’s a historic, history-making storm,” Biden said on Monday morning. He added that “damage from the hurricane stretches across at least 10 states”.

The US homeland security adviser, Liz Sherwood-Randall, said on Monday that there could be as many as 600 deaths, though the figure has not yet been confirmed.

More than 1 million Americans were still without power in the Carolinas and Georgia as of Monday morning.

Helene made landfall last Thursday night in Florida’s Big Bend region as a category 4 hurricane. Even though it weakened to a tropical storm before moving through Georgia, the Carolinas and Tennessee, the storm’s winds, rainfall, storm surge and flooding destroyed entire communities in its path.

On Sunday, North Carolina’s department of public safety said that supplies such as food, water and other needs were arriving in Asheville, a city in Buncombe county that has seen widespread destruction. The state’s national guard was airlifting supplies into counties across western North Carolina, too, officials said.

“This is an unprecedented tragedy that requires an unprecedented response,” Roy Cooper, North Carolina’s governor, said.

Federal Emergency Management Agency officials said Monday that hundreds of roads had been closed across western North Carolina and that shelters were housing more than 1,000 people.

On Sunday on CBS News, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) administrator, Deanne Criswell, had described the flooding in North Carolina as “historic”, adding: “I don’t know that anybody could be fully prepared for the amount of flooding and landslides that they are experiencing right now.

Over the weekend, more than 500 national guard soldiers helped conduct more than 100 rescue operations in western North Carolina, officials there said. At least 119 North Carolina residents and their pets were rescued.

Cooper has said that the death toll in North Carolina may rise as rescuers and other emergency workers reach other isolated and devastated areas. More than 50 search teams were spread throughout the region in search of stranded people, he said. He has urged residents in western North Carolina to avoid travel, largely so the roads can be clear for emergency crews.

On Monday morning, Cooper appeared on CNN and said that hundreds of roads had been destroyed – and that entire communities had been “wiped off the map”.

“We have to make sure that we get in there and are smart about rebuilding and doing it in a resilient way,” he said. “But right now we’re concentrating on saving lives and getting supplies to people who desperately need them.

“A lot of communities are completely cut off. And by the way, rivers are still rising, so the danger is not over, the flooding is likely not over.”

The University of North Carolina-Asheville said over the weekend that due to the storm’s damage, classes would be suspended until 9 October. The school said that parts of the campus were inaccessible and described “significant tree damage”.

“Cell and internet coverage is nonexistent at this point,” the school also said on Saturday, adding that they were providing security, food, water and comfort to the students who remain on campus.

According to the Associated Press, the storm unleashed the worst flooding in a century in North Carolina.

As of Monday morning, more than 700,000 homes in South Carolina were without power – including more than 500,000 in Georgia and 400,000 in North Carolina, according to poweroutage.us.

In Florida’s Tampa Bay region, the death toll as a result of the hurricane reached nine people on Sunday. All deaths took place in a mandatory evacuation zone, county officials in Pinellas county said.

In Augusta, Georgia, which suffered widespread damage due to the storm, officials are urging residents to limit water use to “essential drinking only for the next 24-48 hours” – a temporary effort to help with the recovery of the area’s water supply.

State officials in South Carolina have announced 25 storm-related deaths in the state so far, according to the Post and Courier, and many residents in South Carolina remain without power.

The National Weather Service office of Greenville-Spartanburg, South Carolina, described the storm over the weekend as the “worst event in our office’s history” in a post on Facebook addressing the residents of western North Carolina and north-east Georgia.

“We are devastated by the horrific flooding and widespread wind damage that was caused by Hurricane Helene across our forecast area,” the post reads. “There are no words to express our sorrow at the loss of life and incredible impacts to property.”

The American Red Cross announced that it had opened or supported more than 140 shelters across the US for nearly 9,400 people driven out of their homes by the storm.

AccuWeather is estimating that Hurricane Helene inflicted between $145bn and $160bn in property damage and economic losses.

Kamala Harris reportedly will visit the areas struck by Helene this week. Her opponent Donald Trump visited Georgia on Monday.

“We’re here today to stand with complete solidarity with the people of Georgia and all those suffering in the terrible aftermath of Hurricane Helene,” the former president said in front of the collapsing brick storefront of Chez What, a furniture and fashion collective in Valdosta. He also turned to spouting falsehoods about the storm and the federal response.

As the south-east US continues recovery efforts after Hurricane Helene’s devastation, the storm’s death toll keeps climbing, with more than 120 killed across several states.

Joe Biden will visit North Carolina, where the western part of the state has been devastated by flooding, on Wednesday.

In recent days, the president pledged federal assistance to help with recovery efforts – and has said that his administration is giving states “everything we have” to help with their response to the storm.

“It’s not just a catastrophic storm. It’s a historic, history-making storm,” Biden said on Monday morning. He added that “damage from the hurricane stretches across at least 10 states”.

The US homeland security adviser, Liz Sherwood-Randall, said on Monday that there could be as many as 600 deaths, though the figure has not yet been confirmed.

More than 1 million Americans were still without power in the Carolinas and Georgia as of Monday morning.

Helene made landfall last Thursday night in Florida’s Big Bend region as a category 4 hurricane. Even though it weakened to a tropical storm before moving through Georgia, the Carolinas and Tennessee, the storm’s winds, rainfall, storm surge and flooding destroyed entire communities in its path.

On Sunday, North Carolina’s department of public safety said that supplies such as food, water and other needs were arriving in Asheville, a city in Buncombe county that has seen widespread destruction. The state’s national guard was airlifting supplies into counties across western North Carolina, too, officials said.

“This is an unprecedented tragedy that requires an unprecedented response,” Roy Cooper, North Carolina’s governor, said.

Federal Emergency Management Agency officials said Monday that hundreds of roads had been closed across western North Carolina and that shelters were housing more than 1,000 people.

On Sunday on CBS News, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) administrator, Deanne Criswell, had described the flooding in North Carolina as “historic”, adding: “I don’t know that anybody could be fully prepared for the amount of flooding and landslides that they are experiencing right now.

Over the weekend, more than 500 national guard soldiers helped conduct more than 100 rescue operations in western North Carolina, officials there said. At least 119 North Carolina residents and their pets were rescued.

Cooper has said that the death toll in North Carolina may rise as rescuers and other emergency workers reach other isolated and devastated areas. More than 50 search teams were spread throughout the region in search of stranded people, he said. He has urged residents in western North Carolina to avoid travel, largely so the roads can be clear for emergency crews.

On Monday morning, Cooper appeared on CNN and said that hundreds of roads had been destroyed – and that entire communities had been “wiped off the map”.

“We have to make sure that we get in there and are smart about rebuilding and doing it in a resilient way,” he said. “But right now we’re concentrating on saving lives and getting supplies to people who desperately need them.

“A lot of communities are completely cut off. And by the way, rivers are still rising, so the danger is not over, the flooding is likely not over.”

The University of North Carolina-Asheville said over the weekend that due to the storm’s damage, classes would be suspended until 9 October. The school said that parts of the campus were inaccessible and described “significant tree damage”.

“Cell and internet coverage is nonexistent at this point,” the school also said on Saturday, adding that they were providing security, food, water and comfort to the students who remain on campus.

According to the Associated Press, the storm unleashed the worst flooding in a century in North Carolina.

As of Monday morning, more than 700,000 homes in South Carolina were without power – including more than 500,000 in Georgia and 400,000 in North Carolina, according to poweroutage.us.

In Florida’s Tampa Bay region, the death toll as a result of the hurricane reached nine people on Sunday. All deaths took place in a mandatory evacuation zone, county officials in Pinellas county said.

In Augusta, Georgia, which suffered widespread damage due to the storm, officials are urging residents to limit water use to “essential drinking only for the next 24-48 hours” – a temporary effort to help with the recovery of the area’s water supply.

State officials in South Carolina have announced 25 storm-related deaths in the state so far, according to the Post and Courier, and many residents in South Carolina remain without power.

The National Weather Service office of Greenville-Spartanburg, South Carolina, described the storm over the weekend as the “worst event in our office’s history” in a post on Facebook addressing the residents of western North Carolina and north-east Georgia.

“We are devastated by the horrific flooding and widespread wind damage that was caused by Hurricane Helene across our forecast area,” the post reads. “There are no words to express our sorrow at the loss of life and incredible impacts to property.”

The American Red Cross announced that it had opened or supported more than 140 shelters across the US for nearly 9,400 people driven out of their homes by the storm.

AccuWeather is estimating that Hurricane Helene inflicted between $145bn and $160bn in property damage and economic losses.

Kamala Harris reportedly will visit the areas struck by Helene this week. Her opponent Donald Trump visited Georgia on Monday.

“We’re here today to stand with complete solidarity with the people of Georgia and all those suffering in the terrible aftermath of Hurricane Helene,” the former president said in front of the collapsing brick storefront of Chez What, a furniture and fashion collective in Valdosta. He also turned to spouting falsehoods about the storm and the federal response.

More than 100 passengers are due to finally leave Belfast on Monday on a three-year round-the-world “perpetual” cruise after being marooned unexpectedly in the city for four months.

They were supposed to have set sail from the legendary Harland and Wolff dockyards in Belfast, best known as the home of the Titanic, on 30 May.

But after years of being out of service, work to get the Odyssey’s seaworthiness certified took longer than expected. The vessel was due to depart just before midnight on Monday evening after last-minute paperwork was completed and checked, with the ship moving to a new mooring to allow passengers board just before 9pm. It was later reported, however, its departure had been pushed back to 6pm on Tuesday.

One retired wealth manager, Holly Hennessy, said “most of us don’t really care” and that passengers were just excited to get going. “The shuttle buses have been booked to bring us [on]board today at 5pm,” said the Florida native. “First of all, we are supposed to be heading to Brest in France, then Bilbao and Vigo in Spain, Porto in Portugal, then the Azores, Bermuda and then the Bahamas.”

The inaugural voyage will last 1,301 days, visiting all seven continents and stopping at 425 ports, ranging from Rio de Janeiro to Singapore. The ship is equipped with restaurants, a pool, spa, business centre and medical facilities.

Even though passengers have been stuck in Belfast, they have tried to enjoy their time in the city. “I will always have a fond place in my heart for Belfast,” said Hennessy. “Meeting so many different kind people, living in an urban environment, being car-less, and being away from American politics has been wonderful.”

Passengers on the Villa Vie Residences’ Odyssey, described as the world’s first perpetual cruise, circumnavigating the globe every three and a half years, can either buy their cabins for the entire operational life of the ship or rent them to travel segments of the journey.

Passengers, mostly from the US, had already arrived in Belfast for their dream trip in May when the bad news was announced, leaving many of them stranded in hotels and Airbnbs over the summer. They were allowed onboard during the day but not overnight.

Some took the opportunity to explore their Irish roots; some enjoyed a holiday in the Canary Islands, paid for by the company. Others made use of their unexpected spare time by exploring Europe and checking in for any departure news as the months rolled by.

Two passengers fell in love and are engaged to be married. The ship’s captain will marry the new couple as part of a “gigantic wedding” onboard in April, between Costa Rica and Panama.

Both of the passengers had been looking forward to an adventure at sea but neither had been looking for a relationship.

One passenger waiting to board on Monday was Monica Finn. “It’s not just about the journey and about the destinations we are going to; it’s about the new friends we have made,” she said. “We have our down days but then we always rally together and we are raring to go.”

The company announced on social media on Friday that it had passed its public health and safety certification tests. “We can’t wait to welcome our residents onboard,” it said.

As for the delay, Hennessy believed the cruise would be “worth the wait”. She paid $329,000 (£246,000) for her balcony mini-suite: “I’m going to be incredibly comfortable.”

The Villa Vie Odyssey has been sold as “a long-term cruise”, sailing “to the world’s most stunning destinations” on a continual three-and-half year journey that allows passengers to “marvel at awe-inspiring landscapes from your home at sea”. Perhaps next time without a four-month stopover.

The US National Transportation Safety Board on Monday said more than 40 foreign operators of Boeing 737 airplanes may be using planes with rudder components that may pose safety risks.

The NTSB last week issued urgent safety recommendations about the potential for a jammed rudder control system on some Boeing 737 airplanes after a February incident involving a United flight.

The NTSB also disclosed on Monday that it had learned that two foreign operators suffered similar incidents in 2019 involving rollout guidance actuators.

“We are concerned of the possibility that other airlines are unaware of the presence of these actuators on their 737 airplanes,” NTSB chair Jennifer Homendy said Monday in a letter to Federal Aviation Administration chief Mike Whitaker.

The NTSB is investigating an incident in which the rudder pedals on a United Boeing 737 Max 8 were “stuck” in the neutral position during a landing at Newark. There were no injuries to the 161 passengers and crew.

Boeing shares fell 2.7% on Monday.

The NTSB said 271 impact parts may be installed on in-service aircraft operated by at least 40 foreign air carriers; that 16 may still be installed on US-registered aircraft; and up to 75 may have been used in aftermarket installation.

Homendy said she was concerned the FAA “did not take this issue more seriously until we issued our urgent safety recommendation report”.

The FAA said it was taking the NTSB recommendations seriously and scheduled to do additional simulator testing in October.

An FAA corrective action review board met Friday and the agency said it “is moving quickly to convene a call with the affected civil aviation authorities to ensure they have the information they need from the FAA including any recommended actions”.

United said last week the rudder control parts at issue were in use in only nine of its 737 aircraft originally built for other airlines, and the components were all removed earlier this year.

The NTSB said on Thursday no 737s on US airlines are operating with the affected actuators, which were installed in some 737 Max and prior-generation 737 NG planes that included an optional landing system.

Boeing said in August it informed “affected 737 operators of a potential condition with the rudder rollout guidance actuator”. It did not immediately comment on Monday.

Argentina’s vice-president has lambasted a new UK-Argentina Falkland Islands agreement, saying her nation had been offered “crumbs”.

The pact, announced last week, includes resuming flights to the islands, restarting negotiations on a humanitarian project plan, and organising a trip for relatives of fallen soldiers of the Falklands war to visit their graves.

Argentina’s foreign minister, Diana Mondino, and her British counterpart, David Lammy, reached the agreement on the sidelines of the United Nations general assembly, with both foreign offices saying the measures would “improve the bilateral relationship”.

Once a month, flights to the islands from São Paulo in Brazil will stop in Córdoba, Argentina, while both countries have also agreed to cooperate on the conservation of fisheries.

But the vice-president, Victoria Villarruel, hit out at the plans over the weekend, saying they were “contrary to the interests of our nation”.

“Do they take us for fools? They are getting material, concrete and immediate benefits, while they are offering us crumbs as emotional consolation and weakening our ability to negotiate,” said Villarruel, a fiercely conservative politician who comes from a military family.

The Falklands, known in Argentina as the Malvinas, lie 300 miles east of the South American country’s coast. Sovereignty over the islands has been disputed since colonial times. Argentina has claimed sovereignty since the early 19th century, but Britain, which has also claimed sovereignty, seized the territory in 1833, expelling the few remaining Argentinian occupants. A 74-day war between the two countries in 1982 ended with Argentina’s surrender, and the loss of 649 members of the Argentinian military, 255 British service personnel, and three islanders.

In a 2013 referendum, 99.8% of residents voted for the islands to remain a British territory. Nonetheless, sovereignty remains a fraught topic across Argentina; all public transport units must display signs reading “The Malvinas are Argentinian”, while the dispute is used frequently during political campaigning.

It is not the first time Villarruel – who was crucial in building the voter base that led to Javier Milei’s surprising electoral success last year – has broken ranks with the president. Other disagreements have seen the pair clash over pay rises and even a football chant.

Dr Julio Montero, an associate professor in political theory at the University of San Andrés, said the dispute “speaks to the ideological tensions” within Javier Milei’s recently formed La Libertad Avanza party. “Milei is meant to be a libertarian. Villarreal is a conservative nationalist with ties with the military,” he said.

Jack Ford, the chair of the Falkland Islands legislative assembly, said that “all parties stand to gain from this cooperation”, which he said would provide substantial economic benefits, along with closure for the families who lost loved ones in the war.

Climbing Mount Everest has always been a feat, but it seems the task might be getting harder: researchers say Everest is having something of a growth spurt.

The Himalayas formed about 50m years ago, when the Indian subcontinent smashed into the Eurasian tectonic plate – although recent research has suggested the edges of these plates were already very high before the collision.

With the process still going on, the mountain range continues to be pushed upwards, though landslides and other events mean rock is also being lost.

But now experts say Everest – which currently stands at 8,849m (29,032ft) – has been experiencing an additional boost to its height as a result of erosion by its neighbouring rivers.

The team say the process has resulted in Everest rising an extra 15 to 50 metres over the last 89,000 years, with the uplift continuing today.

“Our study demonstrates that even the world’s highest peak is subject to ongoing geological processes that can measurably affect its height over relatively short geological timescales,” said Prof Jingen Dai, co-author of the study from China University of Geosciences in Beijing.

Dai noted Everest is something of an anomaly, with its peak about 250 metres higher than the Himalayas’ other tallest mountains. In addition, data has suggested a discrepancy between Everest’s long-term and short-term rates of uplift.

“This raised the question of whether there was an underlying mechanism making Everest’s anomalous elevation even higher,” said Dai.

Writing in the journal Nature Geoscience, Dai and colleagues report how they created computer models to explore the evolution of river networks in the Himalayas.

Their results suggest that about 89,000 years ago the upper reach of the Arun River that lies to the north of Everest – and which would have flowed eastward on the Tibetan plateau – merged with its lower reach, as a result of the latter eroding northward. The upshot was that the entire length of the Arun River became part of the Kosi River system.

The team suggest the rerouting arising from this “river capture” resulted in an increase in river erosion near Everest, and the formation of the Arun River gorge.

“At that time, there would be an enormous amount of additional water flowing through the Arun River, and this would have been able to transport more sediment and erode more bedrock, and cut down into the valley bottom,” said Dr Matthew Fox, co-author of the research, from University College London.

The researchers say the reduction in weight on the Earth’s crust as this material was removed has led to an uplift of the surrounding land – a process known as isostatic rebound.

The team estimates the process is propelling Everest upwards by about 0.16mm to 0.53mm a year, with its neighbouring peaks Lhotse and Makalu, the world’s fourth and fifth highest peaks respectively, experiencing a similar uplift.

“This effect will not continue indefinitely,” said Dai. “The process will continue until the river system reaches a new equilibrium state.”

Prof Mikaël Attal of the University of Edinburgh, who was not involved in the work, said while river capture was a well-known phenomenon, it was relatively rare.

“What is unique in this study is the demonstration that erosion resulting from river capture can lead to such a dramatic response of the Earth’s surface, with an area the size of Greater London going up a few tens of metres in tens of thousands of years, which is fast,” he said.

However, Attal notes this rebound only explains a fraction of the unusual height of the highest peaks of the Himalayas. Indeed, Fox noted other mechanisms such as tectonic stresses associated with earthquake cycles, and loss of mountain glaciers, could also cause uplift.

Dr Elizabeth Dingle of Durham University said the study’s findings could be important beyond Everest.

“There are other river captures known to have occurred in the Himalaya,” she said, “So it would be interesting to know whether similar effects are preserved elsewhere, or in other tectonically active mountain ranges more broadly.”

California became the fifth state in the US to ban universities from admitting students based on their family connections, and the second state, after Maryland, to extend the ban to private, non-profit universities.

“Hard work, good grades and a well-rounded background should earn you a spot in the incoming class – not the size of the check your family can write or who you’re related to,” Phil Ting, the Democratic state assembly member, who authored the legislation, said in a statement.

Private non-profit colleges popular with wealthy Americans, including Stanford and the University of Southern California, will be affected by the new legislation, which goes into effect in September 2025.

Illinois, Colorado and Virginia have previously passed legislation banning public university admission based on “legacy status”, or connections to donors, according to the National Conference of State Legislators.

The wave of new state laws comes in response to the decision last year by the supreme court’s conservative majority to bar both private and public universities from considering race as a factor in college admissions. The litigation over racially-based “affirmative action” put a spotlight on all the ways that white students benefit from non-racially-coded admissions practices, particularly “legacy” admissions, which media outlets dubbed “affirmative action for rich kids”.

The California law will ban admissions offices from “favoring applicants whose family members are graduates of or are significant donors to the school”, which Ting’s office called an “unfair practice often results in a wealthier, less racially diverse student body”.

Advocacy groups that supported the bill called it an important step forward.

In a statement, Helen Iris Torres, CEO of Hispanas Organized for Political Equality, called it “a bold step to dismantle unfair admission practices”.

“Legacy and donor preferences are a recipe for aristocracy, not justice. [The law] is a critical first step toward ensuring that California’s most selective colleges do not further tip the scales in favor of those who already enjoy the most privilege,” Ryan Cieslikowski, a recent Stanford graduate and the lead organizer at Class Action, an organization that fights against inequitable admissions processes, said in a statement.

Across the US, the practice of giving priority university admission to students with family connections is coming under attack from multiple directions. Last year, the US department of education announced it was investigating allegations that Harvard’s admissions process “discriminates on the basis of race by using donor and legacy preferences in its undergraduate admissions process”.

In a complaint against Harvard, Lawyers for Civil Rights, a non-profit based in Boston, argued that students with legacy ties are up to seven times more likely to be admitted to Harvard and can make up nearly a third of a class – and that about 70% are white.

Some high-status private colleges and universities have announced they are voluntarily ending any admissions priority for “legacy” students, including Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland; Amherst College in Massachusetts, and Wesleyan University in Connecticut.

A 2023 study that compared students by test scores and income found that wealth played a tremendous role in getting students admitted to elite private colleges. “Children from families in the top 1% are more than twice as likely to attend an Ivy-Plus college (Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, Duke and Chicago) as those from middle-class families with comparable SAT/ACT scores,” the study concluded, pointing to private schools’ preference for admitting children of alumni, among other advantages.

Under an earlier California law, also authored by Ting, elite private schools in California had been forced to report how many of the students they admitted had each had benefitted in their applications from a personal connection to a donor or from a family member or members previously attending the school.

In 2023, Stanford reported that 15.4% of its incoming fall 2023 class, or 271 students, had benefitted from a legacy or donor connection, though it said that all of those students had also met the school’s academic standards for admission. “First generation” students, whose parents did not attend college, represented 21.2% of the incoming class, Stanford said.

The University of Southern California, a school that featured prominently in the recent “Varsity Blues” admissions bribery scandal, disclosed that, for its fall 2023 class, it admitted 1,791 students, and enrolled 1,097, based on their relationships to donors or alumni. That was about 14.5% of USC’s admitted students, the Los Angeles Times reported. Like Stanford, USC said that every legacy admit met their academic criteria for admissions.

In signing the legislation into law, the California governor Gavin Newsom said the policy would make higher education in the state more fair: “In California, everyone should be able to get ahead through merit, skill, and hard work,” he said in a statement.

The public University of California system eliminated legacy admissions in 1998, Newsom said.

It’s not yet clear how the new anti-legacy laws will play out in practice, since children from wealthy, highly-educated and well-connected families have many different kinds of advantages when approaching the increasingly competitive colleges admissions process.

The supreme court ending “affirmative action” for racial minorities in US college admissions is expected to lead to a decrease in the number of students from underrepresented backgrounds who are admitted to US schools with competitive admissions processes, which is what happened at University of California schools when California voters banned affirmative action in 1996.

The Associated Press contributed reporting