Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has vowed that Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza will emerge with new leaders and not back down, after a wave of Israeli strikes that have killed the groups’ senior figures.

In a sermon at Friday prayers in Tehran in front of tens of thousands – a rare public address – Khamenei defended the ballistic missile attack on Israel this week that Iran has said was in retaliation for the deaths of the Hezbollah secretary general Hassan Nasrallah and the Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh.

He said “the brilliant action of our armed forces a couple of nights ago was completely legal and legitimate”, and in line with the Qur’an, Iran’s constitution and international law. He said any nation had the right to defend its soil and its interests in the face of aggressors.

Iran fired more than 180 missiles at Israel, most of which were intercepted, though some landed on or around military bases. Israel has said it will respond.

Khamenei, speaking predominantly in Arabic but also in Farsi, urged places from “Afghanistan to Yemen and from Iran to Gaza and Yemen” to be ready to take action, and praised those who had died doing so. “The resistance in the region will not back down with these martyrdoms, and will win,” he said, calling for the belt of Muslim unity to be tightened.

It was the first time the 85-year-old supreme leader had led Friday prayers since the US killed the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps leader Qassem Suleimani in Baghdad in January 2020.

The Iranian leadership aimed to show through the size of the crowd attending the Grand Mosque that ordinary Iranians supported the leadership’s decision to attack Israel over the killings of its two allies and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard brigadier general Abbas Nilforoushan.

Iran’s elected president, Masoud Pezeshkian, who campaigned as a reformist who wanted better ties with the west, described the collective prayers attended in the front rows by senior military, clerics and politicians as a show of unity and power.

Despite Khamenei’s appeal for Muslim unity, the speech made little effort to build unity with moderate Arab leaders, instead praising the Hamas attack on 7 October last year in which 1,200 people were killed and that triggered the Gaza war as a “legitimate act” and insisting the root of the region’s problems lay solely in foreign interference and the actions of Israel.

He did little to prepare Iranians for an imminent Israeli attack or for what Iran would do in response. He said: “We need not procrastinate nor rush, but to do what is logical and correct.”

Khamenei said the policy of hegemonic powers and aggressors was to sow discord, but he claimed Muslim nations had been awakened to the fact that Palestinians, Lebanese, Iraqis, Egyptians, Syrians and Yemenis were facing a common enemy with a single command centre.

Listing many militia leaders who had been assassinated, he said: “Each of these were considered pillars of the revolution at the national or local level, and their loss was not an easy thing. But the revolution didn’t stop, didn’t retreat, but accelerated.”

He said Israel’s only achievement after spending billions of dollars in Gaza and Lebanon had been the destruction of schools and a new questioning of Israel’s ability to exist.

The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, this week made what he called a direct appeal to ordinary Iranians to rise up and overthrow their leadership. He argued that if the regime truly cared about their future it would stop wasting billions of dollars on futile wars across the Middle East and spend more on public services.

He laced his appeal with a warning that there was nowhere in the Middle East that Israel could not reach.

The aim of the Iranian officials, by contrast, was to underline that Iranians feel inextricably intertwined with resistance to Israel in Gaza and Lebanon, and are even willing to sacrifice their lives if a war breaks out.

At a meeting on Thursday in Doha, Gulf state leaders insisted they would not support a US attack on Iran but remain neutral.

Linking the fate of Iran so closely with the Palestinian resistance carries risks since Iran’s economy remains racked by 31% inflation, low growth and reduced living standards. Iranian defence spending is about 2.9% of GDP.

The Israeli military launched a series of strikes on southern Beirut on Thursday night, in one of the most intense bombardments on the city since the campaign began last week as Hezbollah continued to attack northern Israel.

The raids came as Israel also cut off a key road near to Lebanon’s Masnaa border crossing with Syria that has been used by hundreds of thousands of people to flee Israeli bombardments in recent days.

A source close to Hezbollah told the AFP news agency that Israel had conducted 11 consecutive strikes on the group’s stronghold in the Lebanese capital.

Hashem Safieddine, the most likely candidate to replace Hassan Nasrallah as leader of Hezbollah and the head of its executive council, was the target of the strikes, the New York Times and Axios reported, citing Israeli officials. The result of the attacks, said to have targeted a meeting of senior Hezbollah figures, is unclear.

Footage showed giant balls of flame rising from the targeted site with thick smoke billowing and flares shooting out. Reporters in the capital and beyond heard loud bangs that made car alarms go off and buildings shake.

The strike on the road near the Masnaa crossing came a day after Israel accused Hezbollah of using border crossings with Syria to bring in weapons and amid evidence that Israel is targeting key roads, both international routes and internally, as it did during the 2006 war.

Avichay Adraee, a spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces, said on X: “The IDF will not allow the smuggling of these weapons and will not hesitate to act if forced to do so, as it has done throughout this war.”

Lebanon’s transport minister, Ali Hamieh, said the Israeli strike hit Lebanese territory near the border crossing, creating a 4-metre (12ft) wide crater.

According to the Lebanese government, more than 300,000 people – a vast majority of them Syrian – haave crossed from Lebanon into Syria over the past 10 days to escape escalating Israeli bombardment. Earlier this week, Israel bombed and cut off a road near Nabatieh.

The Israeli military has ordered people in 20 more southern towns in Lebanon to evacuate immediately as it presses ahead with its incursions.

Safieddine leads Hezbollah’s highest political decision-making body, the executive council, and was considered the number two in the organisation’s political wing before the death of Nasrallah, who was killed by Israeli airstrikes in Dahiyeh last week.

He is reportedly designated to succeed Nasrallah, though no formal announcement of his succession has been made. Previously, the group’s political leaders such as Nasrallah, Safieddine and other officials in its political wing were thought not to be targets of Israel during wartime.

On Thursday, an Israeli airstrike struck a building that housed the Hezbollah’s media relations office in southern Beirut. Earlier in the evening, a source close to Hezbollah told AFP that another Israeli strike had targeted a warehouse next to Beirut airport, south of the capital.

Israel announced this week that its troops had begun “ground raids” into parts of southern Lebanon after days of heavy bombardment of Hezbollah strongholds around the country.

The bombardment of Hezbollah strongholds in Lebanon came as Israel weighed up retaliation for Tuesday’s Iranian missile attack on Israel.

On Thursday, Joe Biden said he still believed an all-out war in the Middle East could be avoided, but added “there is a lot to do yet”.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is due to lead Friday prayers and deliver a public sermon that could shed light on the Islamic republic’s plans after the massive missile attack on Israel this week.

Khamenei’s rare Friday sermon – a first in almost five years – comes three days before the first anniversary of the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October. Khamenei last led Friday prayers in January 2020 after Iran fired missiles at a US army base in Iraq, in response to a strike that killed the Revolutionary Guards commander Qassem Suleimani.

The prayer will follow “a commemoration ceremony” for Nasrallah. Iran said its attack on Israel was carried out in “self-defence” and warned of further “crushing attacks” if it retaliated.

Iran also warned the US against intervening, threatening “a harsh response” if it did. Washington has said Iran must suffer “consequences”, which may be coordinated with Israeli officials, for the ballistic missile fire.

Biden said on Thursday he was discussing possible Israeli strikes on Iranian oil sites.

Hours after the latest Israeli strikes, which including a location close to the perimeter of Beirut’s international airport, Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araqchi, landed safely in the city for meetings with Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister, Najib Mikati, and the speaker of parliament, Nabih Berri, who is a close ally of Iran-backed Hezbollah.

Agence France-Presse contributed to this report

Israel is likely to mount a large-scale airstrike against Iran’s oil industry and possibly a symbolic attack on a military target related to its nuclear programme, former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak has predicted.

Barak said there was no doubt there would be an Israeli military response to Iran’s assault on Tuesday with over 180 ballistic missiles, most of which were intercepted, but some landed on and around densely populated areas and Israeli military bases.

“Israel has a compelling need, even an imperative, to respond. I think that no sovereign nation on Earth could fail to respond,” Barak said in an interview.

The former prime minister, who also served as defence minister, foreign minister and army chief of staff, said the model for the Israeli response could be seen in Sunday’s reprisal airstrikes against Houthi-controlled oil facilities, power plants and docks in the Yemeni port of Hodeidah, a day after Houthi fired missiles aimed at Israel’s international airport outside Tel Aviv.

“I think we might see something like that. It might be a massive attack, and it could be repeated more than once,” he told the Guardian. Joe Biden said on Thursday there had been discussions in Washington about a possible Israeli attack on Iran’s oil sector, but it not give any details or make clear whether the US would support such an assault.

Barak, now aged 82, said there had also been suggestions in Israel that it should make use of this opportunity, in reprisal for the Iranian attack, to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, but he argued it would not significantly set back the Iranian programme.

When Barak served as defence minister from 2007 to 2013, under both Ehud Olmert and Benjamin Netanyahu, he was among Israel’s most vociferous advocates for bombing the Iranian nuclear facilities, trying and failing to convince presidents George Bush and then Barack Obama, to contribute US military might to the campaign.

On Wednesday, Biden followed Obama in voicing his opposition to any Israeli strikes against Iranian nuclear sites. And Barak himself now accepts the Iran nuclear programme is too far advanced for any bombing campaign to set it back significantly.

“There are some commentators and even some people within the defence establishment who raised the question: Why the hell not hit the nuclear military programme?” Barak said. “A little bit more than a decade ago, I was probably the most hawkish person in Israeli leadership arguing that it was worth considering very seriously, because there was an actual capability to delay them by several years.

“That’s not the case right now, because Iran is a de facto threshold country,” he argued. “They do not have yet a weapon – it may take them a year to have one, and even half a decade to have a small arsenal. Practically speaking, you cannot easily delay them in any significant manner.”

Under a 2015 multilateral nuclear agreement, Tehran accepted tight restrictions on its uranium enrichment and other elements of its programme in exchange for sanctions relief, but that agreement has steadily fallen apart since the US withdrawal under Donald Trump in 2018.

Iran now has a stockpile of enriched uranium that is 30 times higher than the agreed 2015 limit, and it is enriching uranium to up to 60% purity, which in terms of the additional processing required, is very close to 90% weapons grade fissile material. Under the 2015 agreement, Iran’s “breakout time” – the period it would need to produce a nuclear bomb – was at least a year. Now it is a few weeks.

Barak believes there is pressure within the Netanyahu government for at least some symbolic strike against the Iranian programme, even though the former prime minister sees such a gesture as futile.

“You can cause certain damage, but even this might be perceived by some of the planners as worth the risk because the alternative is to sit idly by and do nothing,” Barak said. “So probably there will be even an attempt to hit certain nuclear-related targets.”

While Barak believes that a significant Israeli military response to Tuesday night’s Iranian military attack is now unavoidable and justifiable, he argues the drift to a regional war could have been averted much earlier, if Netanyahu had been open to a US-promoted plan to rally Arab support for a postwar Palestinian government in Gaza to replace Hamas. Instead, Israel’s incumbent prime minister opposed any political “day after” solution that recognised Palestinian sovereignty.

“I think that a strong response is inevitable. That doesn’t mean it was written in heaven a year ago that it’s going to happen,” Barak said. “There were probably several opportunities to limit this conflict before it turned into something like a full-scale Middle East clash. For reasons that cannot be explained under any strategic thought, Netanyahu rejected any kind of discussion of what we call ‘the day after’.

“I do not put the blame for the whole event on Netanyahu. This is basically the fault of Hamas and Hezbollah and Iran behind them,” Barak said. “But having said that, we have a responsibility to take action under a certain innate logic that understands the situation, the opportunity, and the constraints. There is an old Roman saying: ‘If you don’t know which port you want to reach, no wind will take you there.’”

Donald Trump unleashed a foul-mouthed tirade about undocumented immigrants and predicted that this “could be the last election we ever have” if Kamala Harris wins during a private fundraising dinner this summer.

The Guardian obtained a 12-minute recording of a speech that the Republican presidential nominee gave at a dinner on 10 August in Aspen, Colorado, where attendees were required to donate anywhere from $25,000 to $500,000 a couple.

Trump devoted most of his address to border security and immigration, recycling xenophobic claims now familiar from his rallies. “Radical leftwing lunatics” want people to come in from prisons, mental institutions and insane asylums, he asserted without evidence, adding that the US was harbouring “a record number of terrorists”.

The former president insisted that “smart, very streetwise” leaders of Venezuela and other South American countries were sending murderers and drug dealers to the US to reduce their own crime rates, relieve the burden on their prisons and save money.

Trump cited a false example of 22 people he claimed had come to the US after being released from prison in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. “We said, ‘Where do you come from?’ They said, ‘Prison’. ‘What did you do?’ ‘None of your fucking business what we did.’ You know why? Because they’re murderers.”

The candidate added, “I hate to use that foul language”, apparently recognising that his use of the F-word went further than his campaign rallies. The Congolese government has said there is no truth to Trump’s statements.

The candidate went on: “These are the toughest people. These people are coming in from Africa, from the Middle East. They’re coming in from all parts of Asia, the bad parts, the parts where they’re rough, and the only thing good is they make our criminals look extremely nice. They make our Hell’s Angels look like the nicest people on earth.”

Studies show that immigrants are less likely to commit crime than native-born Americans.

Trump flew to Aspen on a Gulfstream G-550 jet once owned by Jeffrey Epstein, the late disgraced financier and convicted sex offender, after his own private plane – a Boeing 757 known colloquially as Trump Force One – encountered engine trouble.

The dinner was held at the $38m home of the investors and art collectors John and Amy Phelan. Guests included the casino mogul Steve Wynn, billionaire businessman Thomas Peterffy, Texas governor Greg Abbott, Florida congressman Byron Donalds, Colorado congresswoman Lauren Boebert and former Colorado senator Cory Gardner.

Trump, who instigated an attempted coup on 6 January 2021 and has claimed that his Democratic rival Harris poses the true threat to democracy, used the exclusive event to warn of dire consequences if she becomes president.

“Look, we gotta win and if we don’t win this country’s going to hell,” he said. “You know, there’s an expression, this could be the last election we ever have and it’s an expression that I really believe, and I believe that this could be the last election we ever have.”

The ex-president was speaking a month before his first and probably only televised debate against Harris, of which opinion polls and pundits would widely judge her to be the clear winner. That was not what he predicted.

“I’m telling you we have a radical left person that’s going be president – if she wins it’s going to be a disaster – she wants to be president very badly. Thank God she’s supposed to be horrible at debating, although she’s nasty, and she’s supposed to be really bad at interviews. She can’t do an interview.”

Trump also claimed that Harris supports the “defund the police” movement, suggesting that she was a typical politician who will revert to type once she is elected.

“Her policy is defund the police. She wants to defund the police. She wants open borders. With a politician – and I’ve seen it because I’ve been on both sides of politics for a long time; now, a short time for this side but I was always a contributor – she wants to go out and she wants to defund the police. And they always go back to their original plot. They always do.”

Harris, a former courtroom prosecutor, did voice support for the “defund the police” movement in a radio interview in June 2020 but later reversed her position after becoming Joe Biden’s running mate.

Trump also reflected on surviving an assassination attempt at a July rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, where 20-year-old Thomas Crooks opened fire from a rooftop, killing firefighter Corey Comperatore, 50, and injuring two other Trump supporters.

Trump told how members of his Florida golf club, Mar-a-Lago, asked to make a contribution to Comperatore’s family. “I said absolutely and they gave me a cheque for a million dollars. That’s a lot of money. Maybe even more impressively we put out a GoFundMe and we raised more than $6m for the group that got hurt, which is essentially three people.”

Then, recalling a meeting with Comperatore’s widow, Helen, he made a risky attempt to find humour in the tragedy. “So they’re going to get millions of dollars but the woman, the wife, this beautiful woman, I handed her the cheque – we handed her the cheque – and she said, ‘This is so nice, and I appreciate it, but I’d much rather have my husband.’ Now, I know some of the women in this room wouldn’t say the same.”

As dinner guests erupted in laughter, Trump quipped: “I know at least four couples. There are four couples, Governor [Abbott], that I know and you’re not one of them. At least four couples here would have been thrilled, actually.”

The event is understood to have raised $12m for Trump’s campaign but was not enough to prevent Harris raising more than four times as much as her opponent in August, the first full month of her bid for the White House.

Doctors are hailing “amazing” trial results that show a new drug combination stopped lung cancer advancing for more than 40% longer than the standard treatment.

Lung cancer is the world’s leading cause of cancer death, accounting for about 1.8 million deaths every year. Survival rates in those with advanced forms of the disease, where tumours have spread, are particularly poor.

Patients diagnosed with advanced forms of lung cancer who took the combination of amivantamab and lazertinib were still alive with no progression in their disease after 23.7 months on average, according to data from the global study. Average progression-free survival in patients using the standard drug, osimertinib, was 16.6 months, the trial found.

Experts said the breakthrough came amid a “golden age” of cancer research where a greater understanding of what spurs on specific tumours is informing better ways to beat the disease.

Prof Martin Forster, a medical oncologist at University College hospital and the trial’s chief investigator in the UK, said: “Better understanding of the biology that drives lung cancers has guided the development of these targeted therapies.

“It’s amazing to see this new combination shows longer cancer control than osimertinib, which was itself a breakthrough treatment only a few years ago.”

In the phase 3 trial, 1,074 patients were recruited between 2020 and 2022 from countries including the UK, US, Australia, France, Brazil, India and China. Each had an advanced form of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), the most common form of the disease.

In the UK arm of the trial, patients were recruited from University College London NHS trust, the Christie in Manchester, Chelsea and Westminster hospital in London, Nottingham university hospitals NHS trust, the Royal Marsden NHS trust, and the Edinburgh Cancer Centre at Western general hospital.

Everyone in the trial also had a mutation of the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) gene, found in as many as a quarter of global lung cancer cases, and about 40% of cases in Asia.

An EGFR mutation is more common in women than men, and in people who have never smoked or have been light smokers.

Patients in the trial were randomly assigned to receive either the drug combination of amivantamab and lazertinib; the standard treatment for this group of patients, osimertinib; or lazertinib.

Amivantamab is a monoclonal antibody while Lazertinib is a tyrosine kinase inhibitor. Both drugs target cancer cells to halt their advance.

Prof Raffaele Califano, a consultant in medical oncology and the trial’s principal investigator at the Christie, said: “By combining these two drugs, which stop the cancer from growing in different ways, we see a significant improvement in progression-free survival rates compared to the drug we currently use.

“Survival rates for lung cancer are still very low compared with other types of the disease and so to see such positive results is a welcome development.”

In August, the drug combination was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in the US. Doctors involved in the trial hope the treatment might also be available on the NHS in future.

“The more treatment options we have, the more hope we bring to patients and families,” said Califano. “We are hopeful that this option will be endorsed by Nice [the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence] and reimbursed for use in the NHS.”

Most of the patients experienced some side-effects. The most common types reported in the trial, which was funded by Janssen, were a rash, an infection or a blood clot.

Doctors involved with the trial said the drug combination formed part of an emerging area of treatment called precision medicine.

Advances in precision medicine have led to new treatments tailored to specific characteristics of individuals, such as a person’s genetic makeup, or the genetic profile of a patient’s tumour.

Forster said: “This precision approach is improving outcomes for many more of our patients, as new drugs are being developed to exploit vulnerabilities being identified in increasing numbers of lung cancers.”

Paula Chadwick, the chief executive of the Roy Castle Lung Cancer Foundation, said: “Hope is rocket fuel for people with lung cancer. Each new breakthrough keeps that hope burning, even if it doesn’t directly benefit an individual.

“While this potential new treatment would only be available to a select group of people within the lung cancer community, it demonstrates the ongoing progress in our fight against the disease, improving treatment options, transforming care and, ultimately, helping people live well with lung cancer for longer.”

Anna Kinsella, a research information manager at Cancer Research UK, described the results as “good news”, with those on the drug combination “able to have more time with their loved ones”.

“We are in a golden age of cancer research where a greater understanding of what drives specific cancers is informing new and better ways to beat the disease,” Kinsella added. “Research like this helps more people to live longer, better lives, free from the fear of cancer.”

Barack Obama will go on the road to campaign for Kamala Harris next week as she and her Republican challenger, Donald Trump, prepare to crisscross the battleground states that will probably decide the 2024 presidential election, now just one month away.

After what is increasingly being seen as a strong showing for the Republican JD Vance over Tim Walz in the vice-presidential debate on Tuesday and a week dominated by the devastation of Hurricane Helene and controversial statements from Trump and his wife, Melania, former president Obama will be hoping to inject fresh energy into the Harris campaign.

Trump, meanwhile, returns on Saturday to Butler, the Pennsylvania town where he survived an assassination attempt in July, where he will campaign alongside Elon Musk, who openly endorsed him for the first time in the moments following the shooting.

Obama will kick off in all-important Pennsylvania next Thursday, according to a senior Harris campaign official, the beginning of a blitz across the string of Rust belt and Sun belt battleground states, in an effort to break through in a race that is mostly in a dead heat.

“President Obama believes the stakes of this election could not be more consequential and that is why he is doing everything he can to help elect Vice President Harris, Governor Walz and Democrats across the country,” Eric Schultz, a senior Obama adviser, said in a statement.

Obama remains one of the Democrats’ most powerful surrogates, second perhaps only to his wife, Michelle Obama. His return to the campaign trail follows a rousing speech at the Democratic national convention in August, in which he cast Harris as a forward-looking figure and a natural heir to his diverse, youth-powered political coalition.

“We do not need four more years of bluster and bumbling and chaos,” he told the convention in August. “We have seen that movie before and we all know that the sequel is usually worse. America is ready for a new chapter.”

On Friday, three Democratic Senate candidates running in competitive races in Michigan, Maryland and Florida launched ads featuring the former president. An aide said it was the first release in a series of candidate-specific ads and robocalls that Obama will record to support key down-ballot races in closely contested races.

Last month, Obama headlined his first solo fundraiser for Harris in Los Angeles, bringing in more than $4m for her campaign.

Harris was one of Obama’s earliest supporters when he launched a long-shot presidential bid against Hillary Clinton in 2007. She would go on to knock on doors for him ahead of the Iowa caucuses in 2008. In 2010, as president, he endorsed Harris in her successful bid to be the attorney general of California. At the time, he called Harris “a dear, dear friend of mine”.

“I want everybody to do right by her,” he said then.

Though Obama remained publicly silent following Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance against Trump this summer, he was considered to be among the party elders who helped the president realize that his path to victory in November had all but disappeared.

Harris’s campaign, the structure of which she inherited from Biden, already includes several former Obama campaign staff. Among them are strategist David Plouffe, Stephanie Cutter – who was Obama’s deputy campaign manager in 2012 – and Mitch Stewart, Obama’s grassroots strategist for both campaigns. Stewart is Harris’s adviser for battleground states, among which Pennsylvania is seen as a must-win for either side.

Musk has said he will attend Trump’s Saturday rally in Butler, at the same site where a would-be-assassin opened fire, bloodying the former president’s ear and killing one of his supporters.

“I will be there to support!” Musk replied to a post from Trump on X. “Butler on Saturday–Historic,” Trump tweeted, including the dramatic photo of himself raising a fist as he was pulled off stage by Secret Service during the shooting.

Musk, the CEO of Tesla and owner of X, where he increasingly boosts rightwing causes and amplifies misinformation, officially endorsed Trump after the July assassination attempt. Trump was the target of what the FBI said appeared to be a second attempted assassination at his Florida golf club last month. Trump was safe and the suspect was arrested and charged with attempting to assassinate the Republican presidential nominee.

As Trump draws fundraising and support from tech industry executives in Silicon Valley, seen as a bastion of liberalism, Harris announced support on Friday from a trio of prominent business leaders, including Reid Hoffman, a co-founder of LinkedIn; Mark Cuban, an entrepreneur and part-owner of the Dallas Mavericks; and Reed Hastings, a co-founder of Netflix. The group launched a podcast, titled Business Leaders for Harris.

Harris is in Michigan on Friday, after appearing in Wisconsin at an event with Liz Cheney, one of Trump’s fiercest Republican critics. On Saturday, when Trump is in Pennsylvania, Harris will travel to North Carolina, another swing state, to survey the damage wrought by Hurricane Helene. Earlier this week she visited battleground Georgia, which was also badly hit, and promised the Biden administration would deliver federal resources to assist with the damage. “We are here for the long haul,” she told residents.

In his own visit to Georgia on Monday, Trump attacked Biden’s response to the storm, for which his administration has received bipartisan plaudits. He falsely asserting that the president had been “sleeping” when the state’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, tried to call. Kemp refuted the claim.

Polling averages show Harris and Trump neck-and-neck in national and battleground state surveys. In several states, ballots have already been mailed out.

Leaving the White House on Thursday, Biden said he was hardly surprised by the razor-thin margins but expressed confidence that Harris would defeat his predecessor.

“It always gets this close,” the president told reporters. “She’s going to do fine.”

EU leaders have given the green light to extra tariffs on electric vehicles from China despite opposition from five countries including Germany, where car manufacturers condemned the decision as a potential “fatal” blow for the auto industry.

The European Commission – which provisionally approved the step in June after an inquiry found that Beijing’s state aid to auto manufacturers was unfair – now has free rein to impose steep tariffs for five years from the end of this month.

The tariffs of up to 35.3%, coming on top of existing duties of 10%, were supported by 10 member states including France, Italy and Poland, several European diplomats told the AFP news agency.

Only five nations including Germany and Hungary, which has significant investment promises from China, voted against, while 12 abstained including Spain and Sweden.

BMW and Volkswagen criticised the EU decision. BMW said it was a “fatal signal” for the European car industry, while VW said it was the “wrong approach”.

Germany’s auto industry association, the VDA, also waded in, saying the country’s vote against tariffs was the “right signal” for the industry. The carmakers’ opposition led to some criticism that instead of falling behind EU policy, they were siding with China, which condemned the vote as “protectionist”.

“We strongly encourage the EU to … delay the implementation of these tariffs, and prioritise resolving disputes and trade tensions through consultations and dialogue,” the China Chamber of Commerce to the EU said in a statement.

Although the tariffs did not win support from a majority of states, the opposition was not enough to block them – which would have required the objection at least 15 nations representing 65% of the bloc’s population.

That leaves the choice on moving ahead in the hands of the commission, which “can be expected to decide in line with its proposal,” an EU diplomat said. The extra duties also apply, at various rates, to vehicles made in China by foreign groups such as Tesla, which faces a tariff of 7.8%.

Brussels says the measures aim to protect European carmakers in a critical industry that provides jobs to about 14 million people across the EU but does not benefit from hefty state subsidies like in China.

Canada and the US have in recent months imposed much higher tariffs of 100% on Chinese electric car imports.

The EU duties have pitted France and Germany against each other, with Paris arguing they are necessary to level the playing field for EU carmakers against Chinese counterparts. The levies due to come into force from the start of November and hold for at least five years, range from 7.8% extra duties on Tesla cars manufactured in China to 35.3% for cars made by the conglomerate SAIC including the British brand MG.

In an indication of fears spreading in Europe over the move, the Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, reversed course and asked Brussels last month to “reconsider”, despite Madrid’s initial support. Spain is among several European countries where China has invested significant sums in auto manufacturing.

The prospect of a trade war with China comes amid fears that UK manufacturers of EVs are struggling to meet sales targets.

The UK bosses of BMW, Ford and the Land Rover maker JLR were among those who wrote to the British Treasury on Friday ramping up pressure for government subsidies for EV sales amid a race to comply with the UK’s zero-emission vehicle (ZEV) mandate. The initiative is aimed at managing the phase-out of new petrol and diesel car sales, and the switch to EVs, over the next six years.

The latest data in the UK shows diesel sales continued to grow at a much higher rate than EVs.

The figures show registrations of new diesel cars for private buyers in September grew by about 17.2% compared with the same month in 2023. That compares with a rise of approximately 3.7% for pure battery electrics.

EU leaders have given the green light to extra tariffs on electric vehicles from China despite opposition from five countries including Germany, where car manufacturers condemned the decision as a potential “fatal” blow for the auto industry.

The European Commission – which provisionally approved the step in June after an inquiry found that Beijing’s state aid to auto manufacturers was unfair – now has free rein to impose steep tariffs for five years from the end of this month.

The tariffs of up to 35.3%, coming on top of existing duties of 10%, were supported by 10 member states including France, Italy and Poland, several European diplomats told the AFP news agency.

Only five nations including Germany and Hungary, which has significant investment promises from China, voted against, while 12 abstained including Spain and Sweden.

BMW and Volkswagen criticised the EU decision. BMW said it was a “fatal signal” for the European car industry, while VW said it was the “wrong approach”.

Germany’s auto industry association, the VDA, also waded in, saying the country’s vote against tariffs was the “right signal” for the industry. The carmakers’ opposition led to some criticism that instead of falling behind EU policy, they were siding with China, which condemned the vote as “protectionist”.

“We strongly encourage the EU to … delay the implementation of these tariffs, and prioritise resolving disputes and trade tensions through consultations and dialogue,” the China Chamber of Commerce to the EU said in a statement.

Although the tariffs did not win support from a majority of states, the opposition was not enough to block them – which would have required the objection at least 15 nations representing 65% of the bloc’s population.

That leaves the choice on moving ahead in the hands of the commission, which “can be expected to decide in line with its proposal,” an EU diplomat said. The extra duties also apply, at various rates, to vehicles made in China by foreign groups such as Tesla, which faces a tariff of 7.8%.

Brussels says the measures aim to protect European carmakers in a critical industry that provides jobs to about 14 million people across the EU but does not benefit from hefty state subsidies like in China.

Canada and the US have in recent months imposed much higher tariffs of 100% on Chinese electric car imports.

The EU duties have pitted France and Germany against each other, with Paris arguing they are necessary to level the playing field for EU carmakers against Chinese counterparts. The levies due to come into force from the start of November and hold for at least five years, range from 7.8% extra duties on Tesla cars manufactured in China to 35.3% for cars made by the conglomerate SAIC including the British brand MG.

In an indication of fears spreading in Europe over the move, the Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, reversed course and asked Brussels last month to “reconsider”, despite Madrid’s initial support. Spain is among several European countries where China has invested significant sums in auto manufacturing.

The prospect of a trade war with China comes amid fears that UK manufacturers of EVs are struggling to meet sales targets.

The UK bosses of BMW, Ford and the Land Rover maker JLR were among those who wrote to the British Treasury on Friday ramping up pressure for government subsidies for EV sales amid a race to comply with the UK’s zero-emission vehicle (ZEV) mandate. The initiative is aimed at managing the phase-out of new petrol and diesel car sales, and the switch to EVs, over the next six years.

The latest data in the UK shows diesel sales continued to grow at a much higher rate than EVs.

The figures show registrations of new diesel cars for private buyers in September grew by about 17.2% compared with the same month in 2023. That compares with a rise of approximately 3.7% for pure battery electrics.

Scotland Yard is facing claims that corrupt police officers helped Mohamed Al Fayed in persecuting members of his staff, including a young woman who allegedly rebuffed the Harrods owner’s sexual advances.

One detective constable, who is accused of regularly taking cash bribes to carry out Fayed’s wishes, was secretly given a mobile phone from Harrods to facilitate his illicit work, according to a former security chief at the luxury department store.

Separately, a senior commander in the Met was alleged to have received large Harrods hampers “whenever he had been a particularly great help”, and Fayed was described as “ingenious” in his use of the police to access confidential records on the Police National Computer.

One alleged victim of the corruption is said to have been a young nanny to Fayed’s children, Hermina da Silva, who was was dismissed in 1994 after apparently rejecting the billionaire’s advances. She was arrested on trumped up allegations of theft after threatening a sexual harassment case but was later released without charge.

“It’s amazing what they will do for just a few readies,” John Macnamara, Fayed’s long-time security chief and an ex-detective, was said to have remarked about the police at the time of Da Silva’s arrest.

A Met police spokesman said: “We are carrying out full reviews of all existing allegations reported to us about Al Fayed to ensure there are no new lines of enquiry based on new information which has emerged. This includes liaising with the Directorate of Professional Standards where appropriate.”

The allegations of police corruption are contained in 52-page written statement drafted in 1997 by Bob Loftus, who worked under Macnamara at Harrods, as part of Vanity Fair’s defence to a libel action pursued by Fayed against the magazine.

The case was settled out of court but a draft copy of Loftus’s statement seen by the Guardian was retained by Vanity Fair’s then British editor, Henry Porter, who claimed to this newspaper that some Met police officers had been “important enablers and it could be said that they were a factor in allowing him to continue his abuse years after we settled in 1997”.

Loftus, 83, who worked for Fayed as the director of security at Harrods between 1987 and 1996, was unable to comment due to ill health, but Eamon Coyle, 70, who was Loftus’s deputy, said he recognised the allegations contained in the statement to be true.

Coyle said: “I knew that there was a tame policeman. He was under the direct control of Macnamara. He was on tap. He was on the payroll.”

He added that it was generally understood Macnamara had significant influence in Scotland Yard at commander level.

“There were some commanders he was regularly in contact with and I assume, when solutions were found for various issues, that he had tapped them up to assist,” Coyle said. “Bob had confided that in me, because we were quite shocked, you know, that should occur. You know, it was just part and parcel of the services that he provided to Fayed.”

A BBC documentary aired last month, based on an investigation by the producer Keaton Stone, carried the testimony of five women who allege they were raped by Fayed.

The Met has since said they are investigating a number of new allegations of sexual crimes in addition to reviewing the case of 19 women who had already come forward between 2005 and Fayed’s death in 2023, at the age of 94.

Scotland Yard has said that although it was not possible to bring criminal proceedings against someone who had died, “we must ensure we fully explore whether any other individuals could be pursued for any criminal offences”.

Porter said the allegations contained in Loftus’s statement suggested the conduct of former police officers should be included in the review of potential criminality related to Fayed, who sold Harrods to the Qatar Investment Authority for £1.5bn in 2010.

According to Loftus’s statement, he was instructed in the middle of 1994 to “find an attractive young Portuguese girl who could work as a cleaner” at Fayed’s home in Oxted, Surrey.

Da Silva “proved to be acceptable” to Fayed and “quickly became a nanny because the children liked her” but she was dismissed in August that year.

Loftus writes: “She made a fuss. Macnamara told me that Mohamed Al Fayed wanted the problem sorted out. He said that, ‘We’ve done a moody, she is going to be nicked’.

“I understood this to mean that a false allegation would be made that she had committed a criminal offence and this would be a set-up to stop her from claiming that Fayed had sexually harassed her.”

Loftus claimed Macnamara told him he had arranged for a detective constable from a London police station to organise the arrest.

He wrote: “He was a policeman who had been bribed in the past to trump up charges against a bodyguard who had fallen foul of Mohamed Al Fayed. Macnamara told me: ‘It’s amazing what they will do for just a few readies’. Hermina was accused of stealing property from [Fayed’s brother’s property in] Park Lane.”

Da Silva was subsequently released without charge and given a £12,000 pay-off from Harrods.

Loftus further alleged that the police officer had been given a mobile phone but that Macnamara had said they needed to be careful because the officer was getting “greedy”.

Loftus said he recalled being told by a colleague at Harrods at Christmas time that year that the officer had turned up “looking for a bung”.

He wrote: “I understood this to mean one of the white envelopes full of cash that Mohamed Al Fayed was in the habit of giving his employees.

“I told him to make sure [he] was sorted out but to be careful and keep a record … On another occasion [he] had come into Harrods and was given a suit.”

Loftus claimed Macnamara often sought out confidential information from the police.

He wrote: “Fayed’s use of the police is ingenious. There are tight controls in place to ensure that unauthorised checks on the Police National Computer are not made explicitly… Mr Macnamara would get around this by networking and having a number of contacts all over the country.”

Loftus added that he was personally pressured by Macnamara to “use my personal contact with a senior CID [central investigation department] officer at Chelsea police station to cause an investigation to be made in order to discredit” a senior executive at Harrods who had angered Fayed.

Macnamara was alleged to have been liberal in giving out hampers to police officers, with those in the most senior ranks enjoying greater largesse.

Loftus wrote: “Macnamara would arrange that a number of chief superintendents would send their car round to receive their hamper.”

One commander was said to be a particularly “great receiver of hospitality” and would receive the gifts “whenever he had been a particularly great help to Harrods”.

A Harrods spokesperson said: “We want to offer our assistance with any new or existing inquiries the Metropolitan police receive in relation to accusations regarding the actions of Fayed. Harrods is in direct communication with the Metropolitan police to ensure we are offering our assistance with any of their relevant inquiries.”

More than 100 people are still missing after smugglers apparently forced migrants to leave their boats and swim in the Red Sea off the coast of Djibouti, the International Organization for Migration has said.

Forty-eight people have so far been confirmed dead after the incident on Monday, which involved two boats that had left Yemen for Djibouti with a total of 310 people onboard, said Frantz Celestin, a regional director at the UN agency. “Unfortunately, we have yet to account for about 108 of the migrants,” he said.

A search and rescue mission is ongoing, led by the Djiboutian coastguard and other Djiboutian authorities.

The incident happened 150 metres from a beach in the administrative district of Khor Angar, in the country’s north-west. One boat was carrying 100 people, of whom 99 survived, while the other had 210.

It is not clear why the smugglers forced the passengers out of the vessels. Celestin said they were probably “spooked” by the coastguard or they wanted to go back to pick up more people.

The route between the Horn of Africa and Arab peninsula is one of the busiest migration paths in the world. Each year hundreds of thousands of people, mostly Ethiopians and Somalis, use it to reach Gulf countries, mainly Saudi Arabia. Some have been forced out of their communities by conflict and natural disasters, and others move to seek work and other economic opportunities. “They’re looking at addressing their aspirations,” Celestin said.

The eastern route accounts for most of the migratory movement from the Horn of Africa. The other main ones are the northern route to north Africa and Europe, and the southern route to southern Africa.

The eastern route differs from the others because it is more likely to involve temporary movement patterns, for example people migrating to Saudi Arabia to work for a short period of time and then coming back, said Ayla Bonfiglio, the regional head for eastern and southern Africa at the Mixed Migration Centre, a research organisation.

The route is also one of the most dangerous globally, with some people dying from walking long distances in searing heat and others from the capsizing of boats that smugglers have crammed them on to in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.

Monday’s tragedy was the second deadliest on the eastern route sea crossing and it made this year the deadliest for migrant sea crossings on the migration corridor, the IOM said. In June, 196 people died on the path.

“The kind of deaths and tragedies that we see along this route are devastating,” Bonfiglio said.

Celestin said there were probably a lot more such incidents that were not reported. “The smugglers don’t have an incentive to report such things,” he said.

Argentina’s rightwing populist president, Javier Milei, has been accused of plagiarising a chunk of his recent speech to the United Nations general assembly from the political drama The West Wing.

“It seems like fiction, but it isn’t,” the left-leaning Buenos Aires newspaper Página 12 reported on Friday, claiming Milei had “copied, word for word, a monologue” by the television show’s fictional president, Josiah “Jed” Bartlet.

Suspicions over Milei’s address surfaced this week when the political columnist Carlos Pagni flagged the “extraordinary” similarities between part of the president’s speech and words uttered by Martin Sheen’s Bartlet 21 years earlier. “Didn’t anyone else notice?” Pagni wrote in the newspaper La Nación, before transcribing the words of both men.

Addressing world leaders on 24 September, Argentina’s shaggy-haired libertarian leader said: “We believe in defending everyone’s lives. We believe in defending everyone’s property. We believe in freedom of speech for everybody. We believe in freedom to worship for everybody. We believe in freedom of trade for everybody … And because in these times what happens in one country quickly has an impact in others, we believe all people should live free from tyranny and oppression, whether in the form of political oppression, economic slavery or religious fanaticism. This fundamental idea must not be mere words – it has to be supported by deeds: diplomatically, economically and materially.”

During episode 15 of season four of the Washington-set drama, Bartlet tells his staff: “We’re for freedom of speech everywhere. We’re for freedom to worship everywhere. We’re for freedom to learn … for everybody. And because in our time, you can build a bomb in your country and bring it to my country, what goes on in your country is very much my business. And so we are for freedom from tyranny, everywhere, whether in the guise of political oppression … or economic slavery … or religious fanaticism … That most fundamental idea cannot be met with merely our support. It has to be met with our strength: diplomatically, economically, materially.”

The likeness between the two speeches raised Argentinian eyebrows and was attributed by one newspaper to the West Wing obsession of Milei’s chief strategist, Santiago Caputo. “Fanatical about the screenwriter [and creator of the series] Aaron Sorkin, Caputo has watched the whole of The West Wing between seven and nine times,” La Nación reported this year.

Many observers emphasised the irony of Milei – a volatile rightwinger with ties to Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Jair Bolsonaro and Viktor Orbán – cribbing from a fictional Democratic president known for his even-keeled administration and progressive politics.

But politicians of all stripes appear to have sought inspiration from the Emmy-winning series. The former British prime minister Theresa May faced similar accusations during the Conservative party’s 2017 conference, although Downing Street said there was “no question of plagiarism” and denied that The West Wing was among May’s favourite US shows.

In 2020, a West Wing-watching reporter in Australia noticed that a speech given by the Labor politician Will Fowles had a distinct whiff of Bartlet. “There were a couple of phrases that jumped out at me as being very familiar … [and] sure enough when I put them side by side I realised that what I thought I had heard is what I had heard,” the journalist, James Talia, later recalled. He told Newsweek that Fowles had admitted being “a very big West Wing fan” and to paying “an unconscious homage” to Sorkin, whom he considered “one of the greatest political speechwriters we have ever seen”.

Bartlet is also not the only fictional US president to have had his words pirated. At the height of the coronavirus pandemic, the Argentinian politician Alejandro Torres was filmed trying to lift voters’ spirits with the words of Thomas J Whitmore, the fictional president played by Bill Pullman in the 1996 alien invasion film Independence Day.

In 2017, the Mexican politician Miguel Ángel Covarrubias was accused of poaching lines from Frank Underwood, the machiavellian president played by Kevin Spacey in the Netflix series House of Cards. Covarrubias denied plagiarism and claimed it was a deliberate tactic to provoke interest.

Five years earlier it was President Andrew Shepherd, played by Michael Douglas in the 1995 romantic comedy The American President, whose words were misappropriated by a real-life politician. “D’oh!,” Australia’s Anthony Albanese, then a cabinet minister, tweeted in embarrassment after being called out for lifting Shepherd’s lines.

Plant cover across the Antarctic peninsula has soared more than tenfold over the last few decades, as the climate crisis heats up the icy continent.

Analysis of satellite data found there was less than one sq kilometre of vegetation in 1986 but there was almost 12km2 of green cover by 2021. The spread of the plants, mostly mosses, has accelerated since 2016, the researchers found.

The growth of vegetation on a continent dominated by ice and bare rock is a sign of the reach of global heating into the Antarctic, which is warming faster than the global average. The scientists warned that this spread could provide a foothold for alien invasive species into the pristine Antarctic ecosystem.

Greening has also been reported in the Arctic, and in 2021 rain, not snow, fell on the summit of Greenland’s huge ice cap for the first time on record.

“The Antarctic landscape is still almost entirely dominated by snow, ice and rock, with only a tiny fraction colonised by plant life,” said Dr Thomas Roland, at the University of Exeter, UK, and who co-led the study. “But that tiny fraction has grown dramatically – showing that even this vast and isolated wilderness is being affected by human-caused climate change.” The peninsula is about 500,000km2 in total.

Roland warned that future heating, which will continue until carbon emissions are halted, could bring “fundamental changes to the biology and landscape of this iconic and vulnerable region”. The study is published in the journal Nature Geoscience and based on analysis of Landsat images.

Prof Andrew Shepherd, at Northumbria University, UK, and not part of the study team, said: “This is a very interesting study and tallies with what I found when I visited Larsen Inlet [on the peninsula] a couple of years ago. We landed on a beach that was buried beneath the Larsen Ice Shelf until the shelf collapsed in 1986-88. We found it to now have a river with green algae growing in it!”

“This place had been hidden from the atmosphere for thousands of years and was colonised by plants within a couple of decades of it becoming ice free – it’s astonishing really,” he said. “It’s a barometer of climate change but also a tipping point for the region as life now has a foothold there.”

The acceleration in the spread of the mosses from 2016 coincides with the start of a marked decrease in sea ice extent around Antarctica. Warmer open seas may be leading to wetter conditions that favour plant growth, the researchers said. Mosses can colonise bare rock and create the foundation of soils that, along with the milder conditions, could allow other plants to grow.

Dr Olly Bartlett, at the University of Hertfordshire and also co-leader of the new study, said: “Soil in Antarctica is mostly poor or nonexistent, but this increase in plant life will add organic matter, and facilitate soil formation. This raises the risk of non-native and invasive species arriving, possibly carried by eco-tourists, scientists or other visitors to the continent.”

A study in 2017 showed the rate of moss growth was increasing but it did not assess the area covered. Another study, in 2022, showed that Antarctica’s two native flowering plants were spreading on Signy Island, to the north of the Antarctic peninsula.

Green algae is also blooming across the surface of the melting snow on the peninsula. Trees were growing at the south pole a few million years ago, when the planet last had as much CO₂ in the atmosphere as it does today.

Three feminist campaigners in the Netherlands want to reclaim the insult “witch” and recognise the innocent victims of Dutch witch-hunts from the 15th to the 17th centuries with a national monument.

Susan Smit, Bregje Hofstede and Manja Bedner, the chair and board members of the National Witches Monument foundation, have raised €35,000 (£29,000) for an official site of memory for about 70,000 people who died during a Satanic panic that swept Europe and the Americas.

“It’s about creating more awareness around this history of, basically, femicide,” Hofstede said. “To this day a witch is still a comic figure. In the Netherlands, every year at the carnaval, people burn effigies of witches … but there’s hardly any knowledge of the actual history of people being burned at the stake.”

The foundation is asking for public feedback on three municipalities that want to host the national monument. In Roermond, at least 75 people, mostly women, were burned alive during the most significant witch trials in 1613 and 1614. In the area of Montferland, Mechteld ten Ham was burned alive in 1605, although she had asked for a court trial. The last candidate is Oudewater, which had an official witches’ weigh house and royal dispensation to issue certificates of innocence if someone’s weight matched their body mass (meaning they were too heavy to fly on a broom).

The historian Steije Hofhuis, who is publishing a book on the European witch-hunts, said it was a time when the masses really believed that others – generally “weak” women – were consorting with the devil and causing chaos. “People were genuinely panicking about the witch,” he said. “It was widely thought that the end of time was nigh … and horrific witches were very dangerous. You could say it was a big conspiracy theory that the devil was cooperating with people to ruin Christian communities, and the way it spread was like a cultural virus.”

It is skated over in the Dutch historical “canon” of 50 events taught to all children. It is one of the “shadowy” areas that some politicians want to teach explicitly, and a revelation to schoolchildren who visit Museum de Heksenwaag in Oudewater.

Isa van der Wee, the museum’s director, believes Oudewater would be an ideal site for the monument as it actually protected the victims, typically women and minorities, the subject of a temporary exhibition. “Maybe they were a bit different, maybe they didn’t take care of their surroundings, maybe they had a very strong personality and stood up for themselves, or simply knew a lot about herbs and how to heal,” she said, pointing out the witch-hunts still happening on modern social media. “You can disagree with others but you should not judge them … and that’s a message for all times.”

In Roermond, which has formally recognised the injustice done to victims of its witch trials as “a dark page in the city’s history”, the mayor, Yolanda Hoogtanders, has briefed councillors that a monument could help with awareness of modern-day issues such as femicide and violence against women.

Although historians such as Hofhuis say witch-hunts were not an explicit conspiracy by church or government, campaigners believe a monument would carry a strong political message. The rightwing MP Geert Wilders called the former first deputy prime minister Sigrid Kaag a “heks” (witch) in widely shared tweets and comments. She was ambushed by protesters with burning torches and later said “hate, intimidation and threats” had chased her from Dutch politics.

The Netherlands Institute for Human Rights points out that the country comes 28th in the World Economic Forum’s global gender gap index, while Germany is seventh and the UK 14th. A third of women are not economically independent, according to Statistics Netherlands, women are under-represented in politics and in boardrooms, and one in 10 report unwanted sexual advances at work. There is a national plan to counter femicide and a new law against street intimidation.

“On paper, women’s rights are often well regulated, but in practice gender inequality regularly occurs,” said a spokesperson for the institute. “This is often due to persistent traditional and stereotypical views on women’s position in the private sphere and in society.”

For Hofstede, more awareness of the people, mostly women, who were put to death as witches is not just about restoring past honour. “Culturally, ideas haven’t changed that quickly in just a few centuries and we’re still dealing with some of the thinking that went on back then, right now,” she said.

“This cultural unease with powerful women is for me the big theme linking these historical witch-hunts and the way we treat women today … And the witch can be a figure of warning.”