An international network of “race science” activists seeking to influence public debate with discredited ideas on race and eugenics has been operating with secret funding from a multimillionaire US tech entrepreneur.

Undercover filming has revealed the existence of the organisation, formed two years ago as the Human Diversity Foundation. Its members have used podcasts, videos, an online magazine and research papers to seed “dangerous ideology” about the supposed genetic superiority of certain ethnic groups.

The anti-racism charity Hope Not Hate began investigating after encountering the group’s English organiser, a former religious studies teacher, at a far-right conference. Undercover footage was shared with the Guardian, which conducted further research alongside Hope Not Hate and reporting partners in Germany.

HDF received more than $1m from Andrew Conru, a Seattle businessman who made his fortune from dating websites, the recordings reveal. After being approached by the Guardian, Conru pulled his support, saying the group appeared to have deviated from its original mission of “non-partisan academic research”.

While it remains a fringe outfit, HDF is part of a movement to rehabilitate so-called race science as a topic of open debate. Labelled scientific racism by mainstream academics, it seeks to prove biological differences between races such as higher average IQ or a tendency to commit crime. Its supporters claim inequality between groups is largely explained by genetics rather than external factors like discrimination.

Dr Rebecca Sear, the director of the Centre for Culture and Evolution at Brunel University, described it as a “dangerous ideology” with political aims and real-world consequences.

“Scientific racism has been used to argue against any policies that attempt to reduce inequalities between racial groups,” she said. It was also deployed to “argue for more restrictive immigration policies, such as reducing immigration from supposedly ‘low IQ’ populations”.

In one conversation, HDF’s organiser was recorded discussing “remigration” – a euphemism for the mass removal of ethnic minorities – saying: “You’ve just got to pay people to go home.” The term has become a buzzword on the hard right, with Donald Trump using it in September to describe his own policies in a post on X that has been viewed 56m times.

In Germany, protesters took to the streets in February after it emerged politicians had attended a conference on “remigration” in Potsdam. Among the delegates was an activist called Erik Ahrens.

Already notorious in Germany, he has been designated a “rightwing extremist” by authorities, who have concluded he poses an “extremely high” danger, particularly in regard to the radicalisation of young people.

This investigation reveals Ahrens spent months working with members of HDF.

At a sold-out event in London last year, Ahrens was recorded urging his audience to join a secret club dedicated to restoring the power of “white society”. Later, he boasted of spending the next year “travelling around from major city to major city, just setting up these cells”.

‘Do you know the history of the SS?’

One evening last October, 90 paying ticket holders arrived at the Little Ship, a sailing clubhouse on the Thames, for a YouTuber’s lecture on the supposed genetic decline of western civilisation.

First to address the room was a young man with a short crop of light brown hair. “Hello, ladies and gentlemen,” said Ahrens. “I work for the Alternative for Germany party as a consultant.”

Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is Germany’s leading far-right party, and support for its hardline policies on migration is surging. After reciting recent polling victories, Ahrens turned to European higher education. “The universities used to be where society – where western European, where white society – used to produce elites capable of exerting power,” he said.

“The organisation which I am working with is taking more concrete steps towards the establishment of such an elite,” he went on to claim. “We’re doing this partly through media outreach, partly through talking to people on the ground, and partly through networking, which is taking place more behind the scenes.”

An adviser to the AfD’s lead candidate in this year’s European parliament elections, Ahrens, now operates outside its ranks. The party distanced itself from him after a series of controversies.

The Brandenburg state office for the protection of the constitution, part of the region’s interior ministry, has put Ahrens on its watchlist. In a statement to the Guardian’s reporting partners Der Spiegel and Paper Trail Media, the office’s director, Jörg Müller, described him as having made “anti-constitutional” statements. “Due to his high reach in social networks and his considerable self-radicalisation, we estimate the danger he poses – especially with regard to young people – to be extremely high.”

Unknown to Ahrens, his speech at the Little Ship was being recorded. A researcher for Hope Not Hate spent more than a year undercover posing as a would-be donor, covertly filming a wide circle of activists and academics with an interest in race science and eugenics.

Also present at the event was Matthew Frost. A former teacher at a £30,000-a-year private school in London, Frost was until recently editor of the online magazine and podcast Aporia. He publishes under the name Matthew Archer.

Between October and November last year, Frost and Ahrens were filmed pitching plans for what they called a “gentlemen’s club”, with members paying for networking and training courses. While the plan now appears to have been abandoned, Ahrens seemed to suggest that recruits could be transformed into an elite group modelled on the SS, the Nazi party’s paramilitary wing. On his phone screen, he pulled up a video of muscular men punching each other in a field, overseen by a drill instructor. “This is what we want to build as well,” he said.

“Do you know the history of the SS?” he asked. “They didn’t have IQ tests and stuff like that … they had, like, certain outward characteristics. But the principle is the same. You take the elite.”

Ahrens said he held ambitions to seek political office himself. “My vision is actually to one day run in Germany, in a Trump-like fashion. It hasn’t been done for 100 years. To run a populist movement centred around a person.”

Towards the end of the dinner, Ahrens boasted of his commitment to his cause. “It’s all in. We live for the race now.”

In response to written questions, Ahrens said the men in the training video were engaged in “peaceful and legal activities” and that he had been suggesting “week-long retreats for character development and network formation among highly selected participants”. Instead of the SS, he said he could “just as well have referenced any other ‘select inner circle’ with high entry requirements as a historical example”.

Legitimacy via association

Frost began publishing on Substack in April 2022. Since his first post – titled “The Smartest Nazi”, about IQ tests administered at the Nuremberg trials – his newsletter, Aporia, has become one of the platform’s most popular science publications, with more than 14,000 subscribers and hundreds of posts and podcasts.

“We’d rather be read by a few billionaires than 10,000 new normies,” Frost said. “Judging by our email lists, this is already happening. I can look down, I can see academics, entrepreneurs, journalists … I can see very important people, and that’s what we want to grow further.”

The blog was sold to HDF early in its development, and was the key part of its media arm, Frost said.

Aporia presents its output as impartial exploration of controversial ideas. However, some of its content appears to have gradually become more nakedly political, with headlines such as “What is white identity?” and “America must have race realism”.

Frost described his goal as to influence wider society, saying he wanted to “become something bigger, become that policy, front-facing thinktank, and bleed into the traditional institutions”. Mainstream writers had been commissioned by Aporia for “legitimacy via association”.

Aporia’s reach is limited, but some of the ideas it publishes are gaining ground.

Trump, who has promised mass deportations should he win a second term as US president, told an interviewer last month: “We got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.” In June Steve Sailer, credited with rebranding scientific racism as “human biodiversity”, was given a platform by the former Fox News journalist Tucker Carlson on his podcast.

The language of race science is filtering into UK politics. A candidate for Nigel Farage’s Reform party was disavowed this summer after he was discovered to have claimed: “By importing loads of sub-Saharan Africans plus Muslims that interbreed the IQ is in severe decline.”

In addition to Aporia, Frost claimed the group controlled output from a YouTuber called Edward Dutton, the keynote speaker at October’s Little Ship event, who has more than 100,000 subscribers to his channel.

Known for diatribes on “dysgenics”, a term for the supposed deterioration of genetic stock, Dutton’s recent videos include one titled: “You’re more related to a random white person than your half-African child.” In another, he toured Clacton-on-Sea wearing a cravat, describing it as “one of the most dysgenic towns in the UK”.

Dutton said he did not support eugenics and had never signed any contract with HDF. He suggested it was using his name to impress others.

Frost told the Guardian he did not hold far-right views. He announced his departure from Aporia in August. The newsletter continues to be published under a new editor.

‘Remigration’

The US National Institutes of Health describes scientific racism “an organised system of misusing science to promote false scientific beliefs in which dominant racial and ethnic groups are perceived as being superior”.

The ideology rests on the false belief that “races” are separate and distinct. “Racial purity is a fantasy concept,” said Dr Adam Rutherford, a lecturer in genetics at University College London. “It does not and has not and never will exist, but it is inherent to the scientific racism programme.”

Prof Alexander Gusev, a quantitative geneticist at Harvard University, said that “broadly speaking there is essentially no scientific evidence” for scientific racism’s core tenets.

The writer Angela Saini, author of a book on the return of race science, has described how it traces its roots to arguments originally used to defend colonialism and later Nazi eugenics, and today can often be deployed to “shore up” political views.

In multiple conversations, HDF’s organisers suggested their interests were also political. Frost appeared to express support for what he called “remigration”, which Ahrens had told him would be the AfD’s key policy should the party win power.

“Imagine: a new German state,” he said. “Imagine if they got this through. It wouldn’t be nice. It’s like you’re a bouncer in a nightclub. It’s your job. You didn’t invite these people in. You’ve just got to pay people to go home, whatever. Take two battleships to the coast of Morocco, and say you’re going to do this. We’re smarter than you, we’re bigger than you, you’re going to do this.”

AfD leaders have denied any plan for mass expulsions, which have been prohibited since the 1960s under protocol 4 of the European convention on human rights. The law requires courts to separately consider each individual case.

In the same conversation, which took place shortly after the start of the Israel-Gaza conflict, Frost said the Israeli political class “understand it instinctively, that the Palestinians are different. That they can’t be reasoned with. You can’t educate them. They have to be contained. They understand that. Likewise the Hamas leadership understand certain things about Ashkenazi Jews, whatever. Like we all do.”

Frost said he rejected any suggestion of extreme beliefs. “Unfortunately, in reality, it is sometimes necessary to engage with undesirable people to secure funding for essential scientific research intended to benefit humanity,” he said. “However, I am not politically aligned with any ‘far-right’ ideology, nor do I hold views that could reasonably be characterised as such.”

He said he was no longer affiliated with HDF and had parted ways with Ahrens in December 2023 after becoming aware “of our divergent political views”.

Underground research wing

HDF’s owner, Emil Kirkegaard, has made similar comments about “remigration”, saying of families settled for two or three generations: “I generally support policies that pay them to leave.”

Kirkegaard, who also appears to use the name William Engman, is an author of more than 40 papers published by Mankind Quarterly, a British race science journal established in the 1960s.

Originally from Denmark and now living in Germany, he heads what Frost described as an “underground research wing” for HDF consisting of about 10 hobby researchers and academics.

Ongoing HDF projects, discussed in a video call between the group last year that was led by Kirkegaard, included studies into “international dysgenics”, whether dating apps alter human breeding, whether people with progressive opinions are mentally ill or whether Wikipedia editors are too leftwing.

Kirkegaard responded by saying: “The HDF is not involved in politics. It’s not affiliated with any political party or group. If one must attribute some company values to the HDF, these are those of the Enlightenment: reason, science, open mindedness, and free speech.”

The principal benefactor

Andrew Conru founded his first internet business while studying mechanical engineering at Stanford. In 2007, he hit the jackpot, selling his dating website Adult FriendFinder to the pornography company Penthouse for $500m.

In recent years, the entrepreneur has turned his attention to giving away his money, declaring on his personal website: “My ultimate goal is not to accumulate wealth or accolades, but to leave a lasting, positive impact on the world.”

His foundation has given millions to a wide and sometimes contrasting range of causes, including a Seattle dramatic society, a climate thinktank and a pet rehoming facility, as well as less progressive recipients: an anti-immigration group called the Center for Immigration Studies, and Turning Point USA, which runs a watchlist of university professors it claims advance leftist propaganda.

Conru’s contribution to HDF has only emerged thanks to the recordings. He is described as HDF’s principal benefactor, having invested $1.3m, exchanged for a 15% stake. “Andrew realised at the tail end of last year [2022] that this needed to be scaled up, systematised, and this was how the HDF was born,” Frost claimed during one filmed encounter.

Approached for comment, a spokesperson for Conru said in a statement he had “helped to fund the HDF project at the beginning” but that it “now appears that it has deviated from its initial objective, and the motivation for his funding, which was to promote free and non-partisan academic research”.

They said Conru rejected racism and discrimination, and he was unaware of Ahrens’s involvement. “In response to the information you’ve provided, he has cut ties with the Human Diversity Foundation, ceased his funding, and ordered an immediate review of governance processes across all of his philanthropic activities to ensure such a situation does not arise again.”

• Undercover: Exposing the Far Right, a film about Hope Not Hate, will be broadcast on Monday 21 October at 10pm on Channel 4.

Britain joined its Five Eyes intelligence partners on Wednesday in saying India’s cooperation with Canada’s legal process was “the right next step” in the deepening diplomatic row between the two countries, adding that it had full confidence in Canada’s judicial system.

Canadian police said on Monday they had credible evidence that Indian agents including India’s high commissioner to Canada were linked to the murder of the Sikh leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar on Canadian soil in June 2023 and accused Delhi of a broader effort to target Indian dissidents in Canada.

India has rejected the Canadian accusations, and retaliated by ordering the expulsion of six high-ranking Canadian diplomats, including the acting high commissioner.

The British Foreign Office said in a statement: “We are in contact with our Canadian partners about the serious developments outlined in the independent investigations in Canada. The UK has full confidence in Canada’s judicial system … The government of India’s cooperation with Canada’s legal process is the right next step.”

The statement follows a phone call between the UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, and the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, on Tuesday night. In a statement, Downing Street said the two leaders “discussed recent developments regarding allegations under investigation in Canada. Both agreed on the importance of the rule of law. They agreed to remain in close contact pending the conclusions of the investigation.”

Last year Sikh activists in the West Midlands were handed “threat to life” warnings, amid growing concern about the safety of separatist campaigners who Sikhs claim the Indian government is targeting.

Three members of a family received warnings in March from West Midlands police, meaning there is intelligence of a death threat or risk of murder but not enough evidence to justify an arrest.

A spokesperson for West Midlands police said at the time: “We received information that suggested that members of a family may have been at risk of harm.”

Canada’s foreign minister, Mélanie Joly, had said she was reaching out to rally diplomatic support from its Five Eyes intelligence partners: the US, New Zealand, the UK and Australia. The UK will be trying to balance the close trade ties it has with India and the need to support Canada.

New Zealand’s foreign minister, Winston Peters, suggested he would let the judicial processes unfold, in a statement that did not mention India. “The alleged criminal conduct outlined publicly by Canadian law enforcement authorities, if proven, would be very concerning,” Peters wrote on X, saying Ottawa had highlighted “ongoing criminal investigations into violence and threats of violence against members of its south Asian community”.

The US state department spokesperson, Matthew Miller, would not comment on the substance of the new claims at his daily briefing on Tuesday, but said “they are serious allegations and we have wanted to see India take them seriously and cooperate with Canada’s investigation. They have chosen an alternate path.”

Australia’s foreign affairs department said: “Australia has made clear our concerns about the allegations under investigation in Canada, and our respect for Canada’s judicial process. Our position of principle is that the sovereignty of all countries should be respected and that the rule of law should be respected.”

The Australian prime minister, Anthony Albanese, however, refused to answer any questions on the India-Canada diplomatic row during a press briefing on Tuesday.

The allegations have been broadening, making it difficult for the Five Eyes partners to ignore the evidence.

Canadian police now claim that Indian diplomats have worked with criminal gangs to orchestrate a wider campaign of extortion, intimidation and coercion against members of the Canadian south Asian community, resulting in homicides, home invasions, drive-by shootings and arson.

An Indian delegation visited Washington to discuss a related alleged murder-for-hire plot that US officials revealed last November.

An unsealed indictment alleged an Indian government employee had directed an attempted assassination of the Sikh separatist Gurpatwant Singh Pannun in the US, and spoke about others, including Nijjar.

Miller said the visit by what he called the Indian inquiry committee, announced on Monday, was unrelated to the allegations made public by Canadian authorities that same day, calling the timing “completely coincidental”.

The UK has its own diplomatic battle with India over the continued detention of Jagtar Singh Johal, a British man who has been detained in India since 2017 and faces a possible death sentence.

In May 2022, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention concluded that, under international law, Johal’s detention was arbitrary and had no legal basis.

The UK Foreign Office issued a statement criticising India in October 2023 for seeking to expel 41 Canadian diplomats without first declaring them persona non grata, a breach of article 9 of the Vienna convention.

The UK, France and Algeria have called an urgent meeting of the UN security council amid mounting pressure on Israel to respond to a US warning that it would partially cut off military assistance unless humanitarian aid was allowed to flow unhindered into Gaza within 30 days.

In a volte face over the weekend, after months of refusing to use US weapons supplies as leverage on Israel, Washington sought commitments to open border crossings that have been kept shut since the beginning of the month. UN aid agencies warned that starving Palestinians were so desperate they are sifting through rubble for food and money.

The UK foreign secretary, David Lammy, said: “The humanitarian situation in northern Gaza is dire, with access to basic services worsening and the UN reporting that barely any food has entered in the last two weeks. Israel must ensure civilians are protected and ensure routes are open to allow life-saving aid through.”

The demand for action, which was couched as a legal requirement in order for Washington to comply with its own domestic laws, comes amid signs that the vacillating US position is being driven by concerns over Kamala Harris losing key support in the US presidential election. Yet the 30-day deadline by which Israel must comply comes after the 5 November vote.

Past pressure from the US over the supply of aid into Gaza has normally led to Israel lifting the blockages, but it has subsequently reverted to well documented stricter bureaucratic controls on aid once diplomatic pressures eased.

A senior Israeli general staff officer reacted to the US pressure cautiously on Tuesday, saying: “We take orders only from the chief of staff and pass them on to the divisional commanders. There is no starvation of the population here in order to evacuate them. No way.”

In the past two days, he added, the IDF has taken unusual measures in order to bring convoys of trucks to Jabalya, despite the fighting. “Not much has changed in the routine of humanitarian aid,” he said. “The decisions and the plans are made only on the basis of operational planning.”

The US is demanding the entry of at least 350 aid trucks into Gaza each day through all four major crossings controlled by the IDF. It also requires adequate pauses in fighting to allow aid to flow, and written undertakings that Israel is not seeking to starve and drive Palestinians from northern Gaza. The letter sent to the minister of defence, Yoav Gallant, and the strategic affairs minister, Ron Dermer, and signed by the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, and its secretary of defence, Lloyd Austin, insisted there had been a recent reduction in the amount of aid entering the strip.

COGAT, the Israeli military body that oversees aid distribution in Gaza, posted on social media on Wednesday that 50 trucks carrying humanitarian aid – including food, water, medical supplies and shelter equipment provided by Jordan – were transferred to northern Gaza through the Allenby Bridge crossing and the Erez West crossing. It added that 145 humanitarian aid trucks entered Gaza via the Kerem Shalom and Erez crossings.

In March, Israel gave the US a written commitment on aid in response to a National Security Memorandum (NSM) issued by Joe Biden. The memo applies to all recipients of US security assistance.

But the letter sent by Blinken and Austin said aid deliveries had dropped by more than 50% since March.

They said the amount of aid that entered Gaza in September was the lowest of any month during the past year, figures that were confirmed at a UN security council meeting last Thursday.

The letter also signalled an unusual defence of the UN’s Palestinian relief agency Unrwa, saying that restrictions on the organisation being proposed by the Israeli government “would devastate the Gaza humanitarian response at this critical moment and deny vital educational and social services to tens of thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which could have implications under relevant US law and policy.”

As part of a law passed earlier this year, the US is barred from funding Unrwa until March 2025, though the White House said last month that it backed the restoration of that aid “with appropriate safeguards”.

The US letter makes no reference to the claim that Israel is in breach of successive international Court of Justice orders requiring a step change in the flow of aid.

The demarche signals how the US is offering contrasting levels of support in the three theatres of war that Israel is operating, and in the process risks sending mixed messages that may reflect divisions within the US administration.

In Lebanon, the US backed calls in September for a 21-day ceasefire, but then in the wake of the killing of the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah appeared to greenlight Israel’s air and ground offensive. But on Tuesday, state department spokesperson Matthew Miller said Washington had “made clear that we are opposed to the campaign the way we’ve seen it conducted over the past weeks”.

The US is also backing European allies angered by the insistence of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, that the international peacekeeping force Unifil leave its posts in southern Lebanon to avoid getting caught in the crossfire between Israel and Hezbollah. The Italian prime minister, Georgia Meloni, will visit Italian troop commanders in Lebanon on Friday to confirm that Italy opposes the withdrawal of Unifil forces in the face of Israeli threats.

In the face of an expected Israeli attack on Iran, seen as a reprisal for Tehran’s strikes on Israel at the start of this month, the US is sending an air defence system to supplement Israel’s ability to protect itself from a ballistic missile attack. The supply of the Thad missile system is part of a bargain designed to ensure Israel holds back from hitting Iranian economic and nuclear targets, an induced self-restraint that might persuade Iran in turn not to mount further retaliation, which could bring the whole region closer to all-out war.

Tens of thousands of civilians are still trapped in Jabalia in northern Gaza by a major Israeli offensive against Hamas militants, who have returned to the neighbourhood in recent months.

The Israeli military says it has killed more than 50 fighters over the past days in airstrikes and close-quarters combat as troops try to destroy Hamas forces.

Israel has ordered people to evacuate to what are supposedly safer areas in the south, fuelling fears among Palestinians that it aims to remove them from northern Gaza permanently as part of a plan to control the territory. Many refused to comply, or were unable to move.

Israel has denied the evacuation orders are part of a systematic clearance plan, saying they have been issued to ensure people’s safety and separate them from militants. It accuses Hamas of using civilians as human shields, a charge Hamas denies.

Hospitals have received about 350 bodies since the offensive in Jabalia began on 6 October, according to Dr Munir al-Boursh, the director general of Gaza’s health ministry. He said more than half of the dead were women and children, and many bodies remained in the streets and under the rubble, with rescue teams unable to reach them because of Israeli strikes. “Entire families have disappeared,” he said.

Palestinian health officials called for a humanitarian corridor to the Kamal Adwan, Al-Awda and Indonesian hospitals in northern Gaza, where doctors have refused to leave their patients, despite Israel’s evacuation orders. “We are calling on the international community, the Red Cross and the World Health Organization to play their humanitarian role by opening up a corridor towards our healthcare system and allow the entry of fuel, medical, delegations, supplies and food,” said Hussam Abu Safiya, the director of the Kamal Adwan hospital.

“We are talking about more than 300 medical staff working at Kamal Adwan hospital, and we can’t provide even a single meal for them to be able to offer medical services safely,” he said.

Earlier this week, a White House national security council spokesperson said Israel had a responsibility to do more to ensure civilians were not harmed by its attacks against Hamas, after footage was posted on social media of what appeared to be Palestinians burning alive in tents set ablaze by missiles fired at the Al-Aqsa hospital in the city of Deir Al-Balah. Israel said Monday’s strike, which killed at least four people and wounded dozens of others, targeted Hamas militants.

The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza said on Wednesday that at least 42,409 people have been killed in the war between Israel and Palestinian militants. The offensive has left large areas in ruins and displaced about 90% of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million people, forcing hundreds of thousands into crowded tent camps or schools turned into shelters.

Israeli warplanes separately struck targets in southern Lebanon and Beirut on Wednesday, as it continued to press its air and ground offensive there, despite mounting civilian casualties and more than a million people now displaced.

The strikes in Beirut came six days after Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister, Najib Mikati, said the US had given him assurances that Israel would curb its strikes on the capital.

Lebanon’s health ministry reported that five people were killed in a strike on a municipal building in Beirut, adding that efforts were still underway to remove debris.

Hezbollah, a militant Islamist movement backed by Iran, has a strong presence both in the southern neighbourhoods of Beirut, known as the Dahiyeh, and in southern Lebanon.

The mayor of the city of Nabatiyeh was killed in an Israeli strike on Wednesday and major damage was done to a historic market. Four other people were reported to have died in the attack, but the exact number is unclear.

In a statement, Mikati said the strike had deliberately targeted a meeting of the municipal council that was discussing the city’s services and relief situation. Israeli military officials said the attacks had targeted Hezbollah.

The mayor of one of the largest cities in southern Lebanon has been killed with at least five others in an Israeli airstrike on its municipal headquarters as they met to coordinate aid deliveries to residents and those displaced by war.

Israel carried out a series of airstrikes on Nabatieh on Wednesday morning, with one hitting the building while members of the provincial capital’s crisis committee were meeting, said Howaida Turk, the governor of Nabatieh province.

It was the most significant Israeli hit yet on a Lebanese state institution since fighting between Israel and the Lebanese Shia militia Hezbollah broke out a year ago and followed a week of intensifying aerial bombardment across Lebanon.

Efforts to rescue people stuck under the rubble stretched into the afternoon, with a source in a paramedic association in Nabatieh saying they expected the number of casualties to rise.

A government civil defence centre in Nabatieh was also hit by an Israeli airstrike, killing 50-year-old Naji Fahs, who had worked as a member of the emergency response force since 2002. Later in the afternoon, the Lebanese Red Cross said that two of its paramedics were lightly injured after Israel struck a site in Joya, south Lebanon, where first responders were trying to rescue people injured in a previous attack.

Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister, Najib Mikati, condemned the attack, saying Israel had “intentionally targeted” municipal employees while they were meeting to discuss humanitarian aid efforts.

The UN special coordinator for Lebanon, Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, said suffering in Lebanon had reached unprecedented levels and that it was imperative to “protect civilians at all times”.

Israel said on Wednesday that it had hit dozens of Hezbollah targets in the Nabatieh area and that its navy had also hit Hezbollah “launchers, military positions and weapons caches” in south-west Lebanon.

On 3 October, Israel ordered people to evacuate the city, saying it would soon attack Hezbollah installations in Nabatieh. Some residents and displaced people remained in the city.

Israel has stepped up its airstrikes on Nabatieh over the last week, levelling swathes of the city. An Ottoman-era market, which dated back to 1910, was destroyed in the bombings on Sunday.

Turk said: “It’s terrible destruction, the weapons that are being used are so destructive. They are damaging not only the targeted areas, but also the surroundings.”

Israel also carried out strikes on Dahiyeh in the southern suburbs of Beirut on Wednesday morning after several days of calm around the capital city. Israel last struck Beirut on Thursday, when it levelled a block of flats and killed 22 people in the deadliest strike on the capital city since 2006.

The strikes defied what Mikati had told Al Jazeera just a day earlier were assurances given by the US that Israel would reduce its attacks on Beirut.

Meanwhile, the UN’s human rights office on Wednesday called for an investigation into an Israeli airstrike that killed 24 people on Monday in the Christian-majority village of Aitou, in northern Lebanon. The strike hit a residential block rented out to families displaced from fighting in Lebanon’s south. All of those killed were displaced people.

The UN Human Rights spokesperson, Jeremy Laurence, said the UN had “real concerns with respect to [international humanitarian law]”, surrounding the strike.

Raymond Alwan, an official in the Aitou municipality, said the strike had left people in Aitou “terrified” and that those who had hosted displaced people feared their homes would be struck next. Alwan said the municipality was ensuring that the rights of displaced people would still be respected, “under the condition that they do not bring us any problems”.

Hezbollah has stepped up the frequency of its attacks in Israel in recent days, despite the loss of most of its senior military and political leadership. A drone attack on a military base in northern Israel on Sunday killed four soldiers and wounded 54.

Its deputy secretary general, Naim Qassem, said on Tuesday that the group had adjusted its tactics to cause renewed damage to Israel.

More than 2,350 people have been killed and 10,906 wounded in Lebanon since Hezbollah fired rockets at Israel on 8 October 2023 “in solidarity” with Hamas’s attack a day earlier – starting a year of fighting. Most of the casualties are from the last month of fighting.

Counter-terrorism police are investigating whether Russian spies planted an incendiary device on a plane to Britain which later caught fire at a DHL warehouse in Birmingham, the Guardian can reveal.

Nobody was reported injured in the fire on 22 July at a warehouse in the suburb of Minworth that handles parcels for delivery, and the blaze was dealt with by the local fire brigade and staff.

The parcel is believed to have arrived at the DHL warehouse by air, though it is not known if it was a cargo or passenger aircraft, nor where it was destined for. There could have been serious consequences if it had ignited during the flight.

A similar incident occurred in Germany, also in late July, when a suspect package bound for a flight caught fire at another DHL facility in Leipzig. German authorities warned this week that had it gone off in mid-air it could have downed the plane.

On Monday, Thomas Haldenwang, the head of Germany’s domestic intelligence service, told members of the country’s parliament that had the Leipzig package started burning during a flight “it would have resulted in a crash”.

However, the incident in Birmingham was only disclosed after joint inquiries by the Guardian and German broadcasters WDR and NDR, prompting questions as to why the authorities did not reveal it earlier.

A Metropolitan police counter-terrorism spokesperson said: “We can confirm that officers from counter-terrorism policing are investigating an incident at a commercial premises in Midpoint Way, Minworth.

“On Monday 22 July, a package at the location caught alight. It was dealt with by staff and the local fire brigade at the time and there were no reports of any injuries or significant damage caused.”

British investigators suspect that the incendiary device is part of a wider campaign that Russian spies have been carrying out across Europe this year, which has been condemned as reckless by spy chiefs in the UK and elsewhere.

Ken McCallum, the head of MI5, warned last week that Russia’s GRU military intelligence appeared to be on “a sustained mission to generate mayhem on British and European streets: we’ve seen arson, sabotage and more”.

A warehouse in east London belonging to a company linked to Ukraine caught fire in a suspected arson attack in March. Seven men have been charged with involvement in the incident, which has been linked to a Russian plot.

A shopping centre in Warsaw was destroyed by a fire in May. Shortly after, Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, said was “quite likely” that the blaze was caused by operatives from Russia’s intelligence services.

However, the most serious plot uncovered was an attempt to assassinate Armin Papperger, the CEO of the German arms maker Rheinmetall. In July, it was reported that US intelligence services had foiled Russian plans to murder him.

The German newspaper Tagesspiegel reported that the incendiary device had started burning in Leipzig as it was about to be loaded on a cargo plane. The flight had been delayed. If the plane taken off on time, it would have ignited mid-air.

Given the similarity to the Leipzig fire, also linked to Russian sabotage, Met counter-terrorism police are leading the Birmingham investigation with support from specialist officers from the West Midlands and comparing notes with investigators around Europe.

Last month, DHL said the package that started burning in Germany was originally posted from Lithuania. The company said it had tightened “security protocols and procedures” in line with advice from European authorities.

No arrests have been made in relation to the Birmingham fire, and British police inquiries are continuing. “Officers are liaising with other European law enforcement partners to identify whether this may or may not be connected to any other similar-type incidents across Europe,” the police spokesperson said.

DHL was approached for comment.

Counter-terrorism police are investigating whether Russian spies planted an incendiary device on a plane to Britain which later caught fire at a DHL warehouse in Birmingham, the Guardian can reveal.

Nobody was reported injured in the fire on 22 July at a warehouse in the suburb of Minworth that handles parcels for delivery, and the blaze was dealt with by the local fire brigade and staff.

The parcel is believed to have arrived at the DHL warehouse by air, though it is not known if it was a cargo or passenger aircraft, nor where it was destined for. There could have been serious consequences if it had ignited during the flight.

A similar incident occurred in Germany, also in late July, when a suspect package bound for a flight caught fire at another DHL facility in Leipzig. German authorities warned this week that had it gone off in mid-air it could have downed the plane.

On Monday, Thomas Haldenwang, the head of Germany’s domestic intelligence service, told members of the country’s parliament that had the Leipzig package started burning during a flight “it would have resulted in a crash”.

However, the incident in Birmingham was only disclosed after joint inquiries by the Guardian and German broadcasters WDR and NDR, prompting questions as to why the authorities did not reveal it earlier.

A Metropolitan police counter-terrorism spokesperson said: “We can confirm that officers from counter-terrorism policing are investigating an incident at a commercial premises in Midpoint Way, Minworth.

“On Monday 22 July, a package at the location caught alight. It was dealt with by staff and the local fire brigade at the time and there were no reports of any injuries or significant damage caused.”

British investigators suspect that the incendiary device is part of a wider campaign that Russian spies have been carrying out across Europe this year, which has been condemned as reckless by spy chiefs in the UK and elsewhere.

Ken McCallum, the head of MI5, warned last week that Russia’s GRU military intelligence appeared to be on “a sustained mission to generate mayhem on British and European streets: we’ve seen arson, sabotage and more”.

A warehouse in east London belonging to a company linked to Ukraine caught fire in a suspected arson attack in March. Seven men have been charged with involvement in the incident, which has been linked to a Russian plot.

A shopping centre in Warsaw was destroyed by a fire in May. Shortly after, Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, said was “quite likely” that the blaze was caused by operatives from Russia’s intelligence services.

However, the most serious plot uncovered was an attempt to assassinate Armin Papperger, the CEO of the German arms maker Rheinmetall. In July, it was reported that US intelligence services had foiled Russian plans to murder him.

The German newspaper Tagesspiegel reported that the incendiary device had started burning in Leipzig as it was about to be loaded on a cargo plane. The flight had been delayed. If the plane taken off on time, it would have ignited mid-air.

Given the similarity to the Leipzig fire, also linked to Russian sabotage, Met counter-terrorism police are leading the Birmingham investigation with support from specialist officers from the West Midlands and comparing notes with investigators around Europe.

Last month, DHL said the package that started burning in Germany was originally posted from Lithuania. The company said it had tightened “security protocols and procedures” in line with advice from European authorities.

No arrests have been made in relation to the Birmingham fire, and British police inquiries are continuing. “Officers are liaising with other European law enforcement partners to identify whether this may or may not be connected to any other similar-type incidents across Europe,” the police spokesperson said.

DHL was approached for comment.

Human rights activists have condemned the EU’s decision to host the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, at a Brussels summit, cementing his international rehabilitation six years after the brutal murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader was one of six Gulf representatives taking part in the first summit between the EU and the Gulf Cooperation Council, which also includes Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

The gathering, the initiative of the outgoing head of the European Council, Charles Michel, looks likely to expose differences between the two regional blocs on Ukraine, the Middle East and their future ties on trade and access to visas.

“We don’t see eye to eye on all topics. And of course, negotiating a statement with this part of the world is not always easy,” a senior EU official said before the one-day meeting on Wednesday. “To be frank, that’s not easy with our 27 member states.”

Asked whether any of the EU’s member states had qualms about the invitation to Prince Mohammed, a senior EU diplomat said: “The question you raised is not raised here.”

US intelligence agencies concluded in 2021 that the Saudi crown prince had approved the murder of Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist who lived in exile in the US and was one of the regime’s strongest critics. The killing, torture and dismemberment of the dissident inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul caused global horror, leaving the kingdom briefly an international pariah. Riyadh blamed rogue agents and rejected the US intelligence accounts.

The rehabilitation of Prince Mohammed was well under way in mid-2022 after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine when Joe Biden travelled to Saudi Arabia and greeted the crown prince with a fist bump. The then British prime minister Boris Johnson, and the leaders of France and Germany, Emmanuel Macron and Olaf Scholz, also held talks in the kingdom with Prince Mohammed. Macron hosted the crown prince in Paris in July 2022, after Prince Mohammed had received a red-carpet greeting in Athens from the Greek prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis.

Several senior leaders will not take part in the Gulf summit, which precedes a separate gathering of EU leaders on Thursday. Scholz and the Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, will miss the Gulf summit, although Macron will speak for Scholz.

Claudio Francavilla, an associate EU director at Human Rights Watch, said: “MBS [Prince Mohammed] has been portraying himself as a reformist, as a progressive ruler, but the reality is that repression in contemporary Saudi Arabia has never been so strong as it is under his rule. People got sentenced for decades in prison, two decades in prison for tweets, even to death for some tweets.” The EU summit “risks helping him whitewash his image”, he added.

Saudi authorities have executed at least 198 people so far in 2024, the highest number recorded since 1990, according to Amnesty International.

The senior EU official said one objective of the summit was “to make our relationship with [Gulf countries] more strategic”, referring to the war in Ukraine and the crisis in the Middle East.

Human rights was “always on the agenda”, the official said, adding that they could not predict which leader may raise the topic. A briefing note released by the EU did not refer to human rights.

The Middle East will dominate the talks, but the EU also wants Gulf countries to sign off on a statement on Ukraine. That has proved difficult, and going into the talks Gulf countries were resistant to even mentioning Russia in the final communique, which is unacceptable for the EU side.

Francavilla argued that the EU could engage with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states in other forums. “You don’t need to roll out the red carpet, you don’t need to have a summit to engage. There are many ways in which you engage,” he said. “They meet in the UN, they meet in Unga [the UN general assembly], they meet in other places. This is clearly not the purpose of the summit. The summit is a show of closeness.”

Four people, including two toddlers, died after falling overboard from an overcrowded speedboat in which they were travelling off the island of Kos, the Greek coastguard has said.

After scouring the seas throughout the night, officials confirmed the fatalities on Wednesday, saying the two children aged between two and four and two women who died had been among a group of 31 people trying to reach Italy from the Turkish coast.

The coastguard said the driver of the power boat made “abrupt and dangerous moves” when a patrol boat crew signalled it to stop. As a result, 10 of the vessel’s passengers fell into the sea.

Of the 27 who survived the incident, five children and a baby were taken to the island’s general hospital where a paediatrician described harrowing scenes administering first aid.

“Things are very unpleasant. We have to be here to help,” Dr Violetta Molenda told a local media outlet. “Today there were two dead babies from the shipwreck … We rescued [another] baby … His body was black. We wrapped the baby up and I fed him with milk and then I put him down. He drank and smiled.”

The drowning, only the latest tragedy to occur off Europe’s coastline, comes as EU leaders prepare to gather on Thursday and Friday for a migration summit at which the European Commission has said it will propose new measures to reduce the number of people making it to Europe.

The commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, has called on leaders to explore the idea of “return hubs” outside the EU, citing a controversial deal between Italy and Albania as a possible model.

On Wednesday, 16 men – 10 from Bangladesh and six from Egypt – became the first people to be taken to the Balkan nation as part of Italy’s pact, arriving in the port of Shëngjin.

There has been a rise in Europe-bound asylum seekers reaching Greece’s southern shores, with authorities on Crete reporting a 400% jump in arrivals since 2023.

This month the head of the union of coastguard personnel in the east of the island said officials estimated that about 3,380 “irregular migrants” had reached Crete and the southern isle of Gavdos in 76 separate incidents, compared with 780 arrivals for the whole of 2023.

With the Middle East conflict expanding to Lebanon, the numbers of people trying to reach Europe are expected to rise further, raising fears of more loss of life in the Mediterranean.

On Monday, Athens’ deputy migration minister, Sofia Voultepsi, warned that while war and climate change were increasing global displacement, an EU migration pact agreed earlier this year was so flawed that it had failed “in practical terms” to deal with the issue.

She told a conference in the Greek capital: “We got the [agreement] but the basic piece is still missing: returns. We must have a common system for asylum, a common system for returns, and a common system for integration.”

Migrant solidarity workers said the loss of life was down to the lack of legal pathways Europe offered to desperate people fleeing war and persecution at a time of unprecedented strife and conflict.

“Yet again, the most vulnerable have died in our seas,” said Lefteris Papagiannakis who heads the Greek Council of Refugees, referring to the loss of life off Kos. “And that’s because they are the victims of the continuing policies that ignore the possibility of legal pathways of migration. Conflicts are increasing; the numbers [trying to flee] will only increase.”

A Russian man rescued after 67 days adrift in a small inflatable boat in the Sea of Okhotsk has described how he survived by battling shivering cold and drinking rainwater.

Mikhail Pichugin, 46, had set off to watch whales with his 49-year-old brother and 15-year-old nephew. But the boat’s engine shut down on their way back on 9 August.

Initial efforts by emergency services to locate the trio failed. Pichugin’s brother and nephew later died, and he tied their bodies to the boat to prevent them from being washed away.

A fishing vessel spotted the boat this week and rescued Pichugin about 11 nautical miles off Kamchatka, about 1,000km (about 540 nautical miles) from its departure point.

Speaking to reporters from his hospital bed on Wednesday, Pichugin described how the boat’s engine broke down and then one of the oars broke, making the boat uncontrollable.

The phone on board was useless as there was no network coverage, but the trio used it for geolocation for a week until the phone battery and a power bank ran out. They tried unsuccessfully to attract rescuers’ attention using the few flares they had.

“A helicopter flew past close, then another one after three days, but they were useless,” Pichugin said in comments broadcast by Russian state television.

He said they collected rainwater and struggled to get warm on the sea off eastern Russia. “There was a sleeping bag with camel wool, it was wet and didn’t dry,” he said. “You crawl under it, wiggle a little and get warm.”

They had a limited stockpile of noodles and peas and tried to catch some fish.

Russian media quoted Pichugin as saying his nephew died of hypothermia and hunger in September. His brother started behaving erratically and tried at one point to jump off the boat.

Pichugin said he survived “thanks to God’s help,” adding softly that “I simply had no choice, I had my mother and my daughter left at home.”

Doctors at the Magadan hospital said he was suffering from dehydration and hypothermia but in stable condition.

A Russian man rescued after 67 days adrift in a small inflatable boat in the Sea of Okhotsk has described how he survived by battling shivering cold and drinking rainwater.

Mikhail Pichugin, 46, had set off to watch whales with his 49-year-old brother and 15-year-old nephew. But the boat’s engine shut down on their way back on 9 August.

Initial efforts by emergency services to locate the trio failed. Pichugin’s brother and nephew later died, and he tied their bodies to the boat to prevent them from being washed away.

A fishing vessel spotted the boat this week and rescued Pichugin about 11 nautical miles off Kamchatka, about 1,000km (about 540 nautical miles) from its departure point.

Speaking to reporters from his hospital bed on Wednesday, Pichugin described how the boat’s engine broke down and then one of the oars broke, making the boat uncontrollable.

The phone on board was useless as there was no network coverage, but the trio used it for geolocation for a week until the phone battery and a power bank ran out. They tried unsuccessfully to attract rescuers’ attention using the few flares they had.

“A helicopter flew past close, then another one after three days, but they were useless,” Pichugin said in comments broadcast by Russian state television.

He said they collected rainwater and struggled to get warm on the sea off eastern Russia. “There was a sleeping bag with camel wool, it was wet and didn’t dry,” he said. “You crawl under it, wiggle a little and get warm.”

They had a limited stockpile of noodles and peas and tried to catch some fish.

Russian media quoted Pichugin as saying his nephew died of hypothermia and hunger in September. His brother started behaving erratically and tried at one point to jump off the boat.

Pichugin said he survived “thanks to God’s help,” adding softly that “I simply had no choice, I had my mother and my daughter left at home.”

Doctors at the Magadan hospital said he was suffering from dehydration and hypothermia but in stable condition.

Kamala Harris has agreed that Donald Trump is a fascist in her most forthright statement yet in casting her presidential opponent as a potential autocrat harboring authoritarian visions should he return to the White House.

The US vice-president and Democratic nominee crossed a psychologically important boundary in addressing the issue of fascism in an interview with Charlamagne Tha God, an influential radio host whose audience reaches a predominantly Black audience of 8 million listeners monthly. The talk happened during a campaign stop in Detroit, the centre of a battle between the two candidates for the battleground state of Michigan.

Setting out the electoral options in the hourlong phone-in interview, Harris was initially cautious, telling her host that voters in the 5 November election “have two choices … and it’s two very different visions for our nation” before giving a vague definition of her vision.

Charlamagne then in effect goaded her into making a leap, saying: “The other is about fascism. Why can’t we just say it?”

Harris immediately replied: “Yes, we can say that.”

It is the first time Harris has publicly endorsed using the word fascist to describe Trump and his plan for governance, although it has been raised repeatedly by some observers as his campaign rhetoric and threats to jail his political opponents have grown more ominous.

Her explicit approval of the word to describe Trump breaks new ground in a presidential campaign in which she has already criticised his warm relationship with the Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, and stated admiration for other foreign autocrats.

Harris’s comments went significantly further than her previous day’s attack on Trump’s increasingly authoritarian rhetoric, when she called him “unstable and unhinged” and “dangerous” in response to his branding of Democratic opponents as “the enemy within”. Trump had also advocated using the military against opponents he accused of plotting “chaos” on election day, although – as an opposition candidate – he has no power to do so.

A newly published book by the journalist Bob Woodward quotes the retired chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, Gen Mark Milley, as calling Trump a “total fascist” and “a fascist to the core”.

Trump’s campaign immediately denounced Harris’s remarks as inciting Trump’s most virulent critics to try to kill him – a claim the ex-president’s supporters have frequently levelled at Democrats for framing him as a threat to democracy.

“This is the type of disgusting rhetoric that led to two assassination attempts against President Trump,” the ex-president’s campaign posted on X.

The condemnation overlooked the fact that Trump has repeatedly labelled Harris as fascist – as well as communist and Marxist.

At a rally in Michigan on 29 August, for instance, Trump said: “She’s a Marxist.” He also branded her “comrade”, a prefix meant to denote her supposedly communist affiliations. He also called the Democrats “scum” and “absolute garbage”.

Speculation has long circulated about Trump’s suspected fascist sympathies. John Kelly, who was served as White House chief of staff during his presidency, said in an interview promoting his memoir that Trump said Hitler “did some good things”, crediting him with rebuilding Germany’s economy.

Kelly said he replied: “‘Sir, you can never say anything good about the guy. Nothing. I mean, Mussolini was a great guy in comparison.”

More than 140 people have died in an explosion while rushing to scoop up fuel from a crashed tanker in north-west Nigeria, in one of the country’s worst such incidents in recent times.

Local authorities said the vehicle crashed late on Tuesday night after the driver lost control on the Kano-Hadejia expressway near the town of Majiya in Jigawa state. It then exploded while onlookers were scooping spilt fuel with cups and buckets.

“People gathered around the accident scene,” Shi’isu Adam, a spokesperson of the Jigawa police command, was quoted as saying in local newspaper the Cable. “That is the reason for the mass casualty.”

Jigawa state emergency services put the death toll at 147. Dozens more were seriously wounded.

Adam said a warning from officials not to approach the vehicle went unheeded and that a crowd overwhelmed security personnel.

Crashes involving tankers are common in Nigeria, one of the world’s largest oil producers, because road transport is the most popular form of conveying cargo across a country with inadequate rail infrastructure and a chain of underused airports. According to the National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency, several hundred spills happen nationwide each year, even outside the hotspots of oil-producing areas in the Niger delta.

Fuel has become a commodity coveted almost as much as food in poorer areas of Africa’s most populous nation, where the economy is in its worst state in a generation. Fuel prices have tripled since the start of last year, when the government removed a fuel subsidy, exacerbating a cost of living crisis. Desperation rose further last week after the state oil company raised prices for the second time in just over a month.

Despite the risks, increasing numbers of people are being drawn to the scene of crashed tankers to recover fuel that they either use at home or sell.

On Wednesday, junior petroleum minister Heineken Lokpobiri directed a regulatory agency to “promptly commence a detailed investigation into the circumstances surrounding this unfortunate event”.

“Our thoughts and prayers are with the injured, and we wish them a swift and full recovery,” his statement added.

The extended family of Erik and Lyle Menendez will advocate for the brothers’ release from prison during a news conference set for Wednesday in downtown Los Angeles as prosecutors review new evidence to determine whether they should be serving life sentences for killing their parents.

Billed as “a powerful show of unity” by more than a dozen family members – including the brothers’ aunt – who are traveling across the country to Los Angeles, the news conference will take place less than two weeks after the LA county district attorney, George Gascón, announced his office was looking at the brothers’ case again.

Erik Menendez, now 53, and his 56-year-old brother, Lyle Menendez, are currently incarcerated in state prison without the possibility of parole after being convicted of killing their parents in their Beverly Hills mansion more than 35 years ago.

Lyle Menendez, who was then 21, and Erik Menendez, then 18, admitted they fatally shotgunned their entertainment executive father, Jose Menendez, and their mother, Kitty Menendez, in 1989 but said they feared their parents were about to kill them to prevent the disclosure of the father’s long-term sexual molestation of Erik.

The extended family’s attorney Bryan Freedman previously said they strongly support the brothers’ release. Comedian Rosie O’Donnell also plans to join the family on Wednesday.

“She wishes nothing more than for them to be released,” Freedman said earlier this month of Joan VanderMolen, Kitty Menendez’s sister and the brothers’ aunt.

Earlier this month, Gascón said there was no question the brothers committed the 1989 murders, but his office would be reviewing new evidence and would make a decision on whether a resentencing is warranted in the notorious case that captured national attention.

The brothers’ attorneys said the family believed from the beginning they should have been charged with manslaughter rather than murder. Manslaughter was not an option for the jury during the second trial that ultimately led to the brothers’ murder conviction, attorney Mark Geragos previously said.

The case has gained new traction in recent weeks after Netflix began streaming the true-crime drama Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story.

The new evidence includes a letter written by Erik Menendez that his attorneys say corroborates the allegations that he was sexually abused by his father. A hearing was scheduled for 29 November.

Prosecutors at the time contended there was no evidence of any molestation. They said the sons were after their parents’ multimillion-dollar estate.

But the brothers have said they killed their parents out of self-defense after enduring a lifetime of physical, emotional and sexual abuse from them. Their attorneys argue that because of society’s changing views on sexual abuse, that the brothers might not have been convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life without parole today.

Jurors in 1996 rejected a death sentence in favor of life without parole.

Pope Francis has written an autobiography, publisher Penguin Random House (PRH) has announced. Hope, which will be published globally in January next year, is the first such book written by a sitting pope.

The pope and his chosen co-writer, Italian publisher Carlo Musso, have been working on the book for the last six years. The original plan was to publish it after his death, but the opportunity to publish at the time of the 2025 Jubilee – a time dedicated to forgiveness, spiritual renewal and celebration in the Catholic church that happens every 25 years – as well as “the needs of our times”, moved the pope to release it while he is still alive, according to PRH.

Hope tells Francis’s life story, from his Italian roots and his ancestors’ emigration to Latin America, to his childhood, adolescence, choice of vocation and adult life, covering the whole of his papacy up to the present day.

“In recounting his memories with intimate narrative force and reflecting on his own personal passions, Pope Francis deals unsparingly with some of the crucial moments of his papacy and writes candidly, courageously, and prophetically about some of the most important and controversial questions of our present times,” according to PRH.

“The book of my life is the story of a journey of hope, a journey that I cannot separate from the journey of my family, of my people, of all God’s people. In every page, in every passage, it is also the book of those who have travelled with me, of those who came before, of those who will follow,” Pope Francis said. “An autobiography is not our own private story, but rather the baggage we carry with us. And memory is not just what we recall, but what surrounds us. It doesn’t speak only about what has been, but about what will be.”

Writing the book, which will contain a selection of previously unpublished photographs alongside the text, “has been a long, intense adventure”, Musso said.

Publishing director Daniel Crewe and senior commissioning editor Shyam Kumar at Viking, the imprint of PRH that will be publishing Hope in the UK, described the title as “a powerful and personal book”.

“We were amazed by the vividness and intimacy of his writing which reflects on controversial questions from global conflicts to the future of the church, as well as discussing his passions from football to tango,” they added.

The pope’s previous books include Let Us Dream, his reflections written during lockdown, and Life: My Story Through History, in which the pontiff looked back on the most significant occurrences of the past eight decades. That book, however, was based on interviews about his views on and experiences of events across the 20th century, making Hope his first full account of his life.

Hope will be published in 80 countries on 14 January, 2025. The UK edition, published by Viking, is translated by Richard Dixon.