The mayor of one of the largest cities in southern Lebanon has been killed in an Israeli airstrike that hit the city’s municipal headquarters during a meeting to coordinate aid deliveries to residents and those displaced by war.

The strike, one of a series on Nabatieh on Wednesday morning, killed 16 people and wounded 52, the Lebanese health ministry said. Howaida Turk, the governor of Nabatieh province, said members of the provincial capital’s crisis committee were meeting at the time.

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.

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 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.

Late on Wednesday, UN peacekeepers again accused Israeli forces of firing on their position in a “direct and apparently deliberate” attack.

Peacekeepers in the southern village of Kfar Kila saw an Israeli army tank “firing at their watchtower”, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (Unifil) said.

Israel has faced international criticism for a series of incidents in which Unifil positions have been targeted, injuring at least five members of the UN force.

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 leave the city, saying it would soon attack Hezbollah installations in Nabatieh. Some residents and displaced people remained there.

Israel has stepped up its airstrikes on Nabatieh over the past week, levelling swathes of the city. An Ottoman-era market that 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 last 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 there “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.

The US has demanded proof on the ground that Israel does not have a policy of starvation in northern Gaza as it turned up the pressure on the Netanyahu government to allow more aid into the territory.

The US ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, told the security council on Wednesday at a meeting convened by France UK and Algeria that such a policy “would not just be horrific and unacceptable” but also had “implications under international and US law”.

“The government of Israel has said that this is not their policy, that food and other essential supplies will not be cut off, and we will be watching to see that Israel’s actions on the ground match this statement,” she added.

Her warning came after a US government letter sent to Israel privately on Sunday, warning it would partly cut off arms supplies unless the supply of aid was permanently transformed within 30 days.

The sudden surge in pressure is in part a response to growing fears that Israel may be trying to force Palestinians to leave northern Gaza using starvation, but also reflects a new assertive line being pushed by the US vice-president, Kamala Harris, worried her election prospects will be damaged if the administration is seen to have presided over an enforced mass exodus.

Thomas-Greenfield also warned that civilians must not be declared combatants by Israel if they fail to obey instructions to leave northern Gaza.

Israel’s UN ambassador, Danny Danon, said Israel “remains committed to working with our international partners to ensure aid reaches those who need it” in Gaza. He denied there was a shortage of aid in Gaza and said the “problem is Hamas, which hijacks the aid – stealing, storing and selling it to feed their terror machine”.

UN statistics show the number of convoys crossing into Gaza collapsed in October.

Joyce Msuya, the acting head of UN humanitarian affairs, accused Israel of impeding food convoys and told the security council: “Given the abject conditions and intolerable suffering in north Gaza, the fact that humanitarian access is nearly nonexistent is unconscionable.”

She said that nearly 400 Palestinians had reportedly been killed and almost 1,500 injured in the past week in Gaza. “The world has seen the images of patients and displaced persons, sheltering near al-Aqsa hospital, burning alive,” she told the security council. “Scores of others, including women and children, are suffering the excruciating pain of severe life-changing burns. There is no way to get them the urgent care they need to survive and manage such injuries. If such horror does not awaken our sense of humanity and propel us to action, what will?”

In its volte-face over the weekend, Washington sought commitments to open border crossings that have been kept shut since the beginning of October, after months of refusing to use US weapons supplies as leverage on Israel. 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 had taken unusual measures in order to bring convoys of trucks to Jabaliya, 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, said there had been a recent reduction in the amount of aid entering Gaza.

It 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 and had dropped by more than 50% since March.

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 Western Erez crossing. It added that 145 humanitarian aid trucks entered Gaza via the Kerem Shalom and Erez crossings.

The Blinken-Austin 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”.

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. The state department spokesperson Matthew Miller said on Tuesday, however, that 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. The Italian prime minister, Giorgia 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. Italy may call for a change in the Unifil mandate.

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 Thaad 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.

The brother of a teenage Palestinian computing student who burned to death in a blaze sparked by an Israeli strike on a Gaza hospital compound has described how he tried to save his injured sibling as flames engulfed tents.

“I heard the sound of bombing, I looked out and saw very black smoke next to our tent,” said Mohammed al-Dalou, speaking to Reuters at the location of the strike in Deir al-Balah, where charred ground and twisted debris lay between still standing tents.

Dalou, 17, said he ran out of the tent and saw his father pulling his younger siblings from the flames. When he tried to reach his older brother Shaban, people held him back, he said.

Three other people died, including Dalou’s mother, Ala’a Abdel Nasser al-Dalou, 37. “I can’t describe the feeling. I saw my brother burning in front of me and my mother was burning,” Mohammed said.

Footage taken by witnesses on mobile phones shows 19-year-old Shaban, who was being treated for an injury, lying on his back on a bed, frantically waving his arms before being engulfed by the blaze. The images, which have been viewed by millions around the world since the attack on Monday, have prompted further outrage at a time when Israel faces acute concern from allies about its conduct of the war in Gaza.

Dalou’s aunt Karbahan al-Dalou and her family were also at the hospital. “I suddenly woke up to fire burning towards me and my children,” she said at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis where her family had been taken after the fire. She said she saw her nephew and sister-in-law burning and waving their hands. “I can’t describe to you how disturbing it was.”

Shaban’s father, Ahmad al-Dalou, who was severely burned, told Al Jazeera he was able to save two children before the fire “just engulfed everything”. “I couldn’t rescue anyone [else] … I did what I could,” Dalou told the Qatar-based network, adding that Shaban was a “studious boy” who had memorised the Qur’an and once wanted to become a doctor.

Israel says the attack targeted a Hamas command and control centre at al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital and that it is investigating the cause of the blaze but believes it was probably started by a secondary explosion.

Israeli military officials said the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had “conducted a precise strike on terrorists who were operating inside a command and control centre in the area of a parking lot [next to the hospital]”.

“The IDF is taking numerous steps to mitigate the risk of harming civilians, including the use of precise munitions, aerial surveillance, and additional intelligence,” the Israeli military said.

Israeli officials have not said what might have caused a secondary explosion to ignite the tents.

A medic at the hospital told Reuters that cooking gas canisters exploded in the fire, which Reuters could not immediately independently confirm.

Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US ambassador to the United Nations, said on Wednesday she had “watched in horror … images of what appeared to be displaced civilians burning alive following an Israeli airstrike [in Gaza]”.

She said: “Israel has a responsibility to do everything possible to avoid civilian casualties, even if Hamas was operating near the hospital in an attempt to use civilians as human shields.”

Hamas denies that any militants were present or that it uses hospitals for military purposes.

Like most others in Gaza, the Dalou family have been displaced multiple times. Shaban al-Dalou had posted video clips to social media describing the physical and mental impact of harsh living conditions in the territory since the war began more than a year ago, and how he hoped to escape to Egypt.

The attack on the hospital compound comes amid renewed fighting and airstrikes across much of Gaza. Tens of thousands of civilians are still trapped in Jabaliya in northern Gaza by a major Israeli offensive against Hamas fighters who have returned to the neighbourhood in recent months.

The Israeli military says it has killed more than 50 fighters in recent 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 that 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.

Hospitals have received about 350 bodies since the offensive in Jabaliya 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.

The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza said on Wednesday that at least 42,409 people had been killed in the war so far. The conflict 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 that have been turned into shelters.

More than half the world’s food production will be at risk of failure within the next 25 years as a rapidly accelerating water crisis grips the planet, unless urgent action is taken to conserve water resources and end the destruction of the ecosystems on which our fresh water depends, experts have warned in a landmark review.

Half the world’s population already faces water scarcity, and that number is set to rise as the climate crisis worsens, according to a report from the Global Commission on the Economics of Water published on Thursday.

Demand for fresh water will outstrip supply by 40% by the end of the decade, because the world’s water systems are being put under “unprecedented stress”, the report found.

The commission found that governments and experts have vastly underestimated the amount of water needed for people to have decent lives. While 50 to 100 litres a day are required for each person’s health and hygiene, in fact people require about 4,000 litres a day in order to have adequate nutrition and a dignified life. For most regions, that volume cannot be achieved locally, so people are dependent on trade – in food, clothing and consumer goods – to meet their needs.

Some countries benefit more than others from “green water”, which is soil moisture that is necessary for food production, as opposed to “blue water” from rivers and lakes. The report found that water moves around the world in “atmospheric rivers” which transport moisture from one region to another.

About half the world’s rainfall over land comes from healthy vegetation in ecosystems that transpires water back into the atmosphere and generates clouds that then move downwind. China and Russia are the main beneficiaries of these “atmospheric river” systems, while India and Brazil are the major exporters, as their landmass supports the flow of green water to other regions. Between 40% and 60% of the source of fresh water rainfall is generated from neighbouring land use.

“The Chinese economy depends on sustainable forest management in Ukraine, Kazakhstan and the Baltic region,” said Prof Johan Rockström, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and one of the co-chairs of the commission. “You can make the same case for Brazil supplying fresh water to Argentina. This interconnectedness just shows that we have to place fresh water in the global economy as a global common good.”

Tharman Shanmugaratnam, the president of Singapore and a co-chair of the commission, said countries must start cooperating on the management of water resources before it was too late.

“We have to think radically about how we are going to preserve the sources of fresh water, how we are going to use it far more efficiently, and how we are going to be able to have access to fresh water available to every community, including the vulnerable – in other words, how we preserve equity [between rich and poor],” Shanmugaratnam said.

The Global Commission on the Economics of Water was set up by the Netherlands in 2022, drawing on the work of dozens of leading scientists and economists, to form a comprehensive view of the state of global hydrological systems and how they are managed. Its 194-page report is the biggest global study to examine all aspects of the water crisis and suggest remedies for policymakers.

The findings were surprisingly stark, said Rockström. “Water is victim number one of the [climate crisis], the environmental changes we see now aggregating at the global level, putting the entire stability of earth’s systems at risk,” he told the Guardian. “[The climate crisis] manifests itself first and foremost in droughts and floods. When you think of heatwaves and fires, the really hard impacts are via moisture – in the case of fires, [global heating] first dries out landscapes so that they burn.”

Every 1C increase in global temperatures adds another 7% of moisture to the atmosphere, which has the effect of “powering up” the hydrological cycle far more than would happen under normal variations. The destruction of nature is also further fuelling the crisis, because cutting down forests and draining wetlands disrupts the hydrological cycle that depends on transpiration from trees and the storage of water in soils.

Harmful subsidies are also distorting the world’s water systems, and must be addressed as a priority, the experts found. More than $700bn (£540bn) of subsidies each year go to agriculture, and a high proportion of these are misdirected, encouraging farmers to use more water than they need for irrigation or in wasteful practices.

Industry also benefits – about 80% of the wastewater used by industries around the world is not recycled.

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the director general of the World Trade Organization, also a co-chair of the commission, said countries must redirect the subsidies, axing harmful ones while ensuring poor people were not disadvantaged. “We must have a basket of policy tools working together if we are to get the three Es – efficiency, equity and environmental sustainability and justice. Therefore we have to couple the pricing of water with appropriate subsidies,” she said.

At present, subsidies mainly benefit those who are better off, Okonjo-Iweala added. “Industry is getting a lot of the subsidy, and richer people. So what we need are better targeted subsidies. We need to identify the poor people who really need this,” she said.

Developing countries must also be given access to the finance they need to overhaul their water systems, provide safe water and sanitation, and halt the destruction of the natural environment, the report found.

Mariana Mazzucato, professor of economics at University College London, and a co-chair of the commission, said loans made by public sector banks to developing countries should be made conditional on water reforms. “These could be improving water conservation and the efficiency of water use, or direct investment for water-intensive industries,” she said. “[We must ensure] profits are reinvested in productive activity such as research and development around water issues.”

Water problems also had an outsized impact on women and girls, Mazzucato added. “One of our commissioners is Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, the mayor of Freetown in Sierra Leone. She says most of the rapes and abuse of women actually happen when they’re going to fetch water,” Mazzucato said. “Child mortality, gender parity, the water collection burden, the food security burden – they’re all connected.”

Five main takeaways from the report

The world has a water crisis

More than 2 billion people lack access to safe drinking water, and 3.6 billion people – 44% of the population – lack access to safe sanitation. Every day, 1,000 children die from lack of access to safe water. Demand for fresh water is expected to outstrip its supply by 40% by the end of this decade. This crisis is worsening – without action, by 2050 water problems will shave about 8% off global GDP, with poor countries facing a 15% loss. Over half of the world’s food production comes from areas experiencing unstable trends in water availability.

There is no coordinated global effort to address this crisis

Despite the interconnectedness of global water systems there are no global governance structures for water. The UN has held only one water conference in the past 50 years, and only last month appointed a special envoy for water.

Climate breakdown is intensifying water scarcity

The impacts of the climate crisis are felt first on the world’s hydrological systems, and in some regions those systems are facing severe disruption or even collapse. Drought in the Amazon, floods across Europe and Asia, and glacier melt in mountains, which causes both flooding and droughts downstream, are all examples of the impacts of extreme weather that are likely to get worse in the near future. People’s overuse of water is also worsening the climate crisis – for instance, by draining carbon-rich peatlands and wetlands that then release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Water is artificially cheap for some and too expensive for others

Subsidies to agriculture around the world often have unintended consequences for water, providing perverse incentives for farmers to over-irrigate their crops or use water wastefully. Industries also have their water use subsidised, or their pollution ignored, in many countries. Meanwhile, poor people in developing countries frequently pay a high price for water, or can only access dirty sources. Realistic pricing for water that removes harmful subsidies but protects the poor must be a priority for governments.

Water is a common good

All of human life depends on water, but it is not recognised for the indispensable resource it is. The authors of the report urge a rethink of how water is regarded – not as an endlessly renewable resource, but as a global common good, with a global water pact by governments to ensure they protect water sources and create a “circular economy” for water in which it is reused and pollution cleaned up. Developing nations must be given access to finance to help them end the destruction of natural ecosystems that are a key part of the hydrological cycle.

Kamala Harris said her presidency “would not be a continuation of Joe Biden’s presidency” in a testy interview with the rightwing Fox News channel on Wednesday night as she criticized Donald Trump over his continuing threats against “the enemy within”.

The 25-minute interview, conducted after Harris held a rally with more than 100 Republican officials in Pennsylvania, was the first time Harris had sat for a conversation with Fox News, which has been a consistent supporter of Trump.

Bret Baier, Fox News’s chief political anchor, is seen as a straight news counterbalance to the vitriol of Fox News’s evening shows, but still came with a laundry list of rightwing topics, including immigration, the rights of transgender people and Joe Biden’s performance, as Harris attempted to sell herself to the channel’s older, largely Republican, audience.

Harris was asked if there was anything she “would do differently” from Joe Biden, as Baier played a clip of the vice-president, in a previous interview, saying there is “not a thing that comes to mind” that she would have changed. That response has become an attack point among Republicans as they seek to tie Harris to the unpopular Biden administration.

“Let me be very clear. My presidency will not be a continuation of Joe Biden’s presidency, and like every new president that comes into office, I will bring my life experiences, my professional experiences, and fresh new ideas. I represent a new generation of leadership,” Harris said.

“For example, as someone who has not spent the majority of my career in Washington DC, I invite ideas: whether it be from the Republicans who are supporting me, who were just on stage with me minutes ago, and the business sector and others, who can contribute to the decisions that I make.”

Baier pointed to polling which shows a majority of Americans believe the country is “on the wrong track”, and asked Harris why they were saying that when she has been vice-president since January 2021. Harris suggested the polls show a fatigue with Biden and Trump, given the latter has “been running for office” since 2016.

Harris noted that several high-profile former members of the Trump administration now believe “that he is unfit to serve, that he is unstable, that he is dangerous, and that people are exhausted with someone who professes to be a leader, who spends full time demeaning and engaging in personal grievances”.

Baier asked why, given those criticisms, Trump has support of “half the country”. He added: “Are they stupid?”

“I would never say that about the American people. And in fact, if you listen to Donald Trump, if you watch any of his rallies, he’s the one who tends to demean, and belittle, and diminish the American people,” Harris said.

“He’s the one who talks about an enemy within. An enemy within, talking about the American people, suggesting he would turn the American military on the American people.”

Trump had appeared on a Fox News town hall episode which aired earlier on Wednesday, where he doubled down on his comments about “the enemy from within”. He characterized this alleged internal enemy, which he has said should be “handled by” the military, as “the Pelosis” and his other political opponents.

The former president had reacted furiously to the news that Baier would be interviewing Harris, posting on social media that the anchor was “often very soft to those on the ‘cocktail circuit’ left” and falsely claiming that Fox News “has grown so weak and soft on the Democrats”.

But Baier, while being an alternative from the more radical nighttime hosts such as Sean Hannity and Jesse Watters, largely stuck to rightwing issues.

He played a Trump campaign ad, which he suggested was among the few political ads to “break through” this year. The ad quoted an interview with Harris in 2019, when she said she supported “surgical care” for trans prisoners.

Trump has spent tens of millions on anti-transgender advertising, but Harris brushed off the issue, pointing out that “under Donald Trump’s administration, these surgeries were available on a medical necessity basis, to people in the federal prison system”.

“And I think, frankly, that ad from the Trump campaign is a little bit of like throwing, you know, stones when you’re living in the glass house,” she said.

Polls show Harris and Trump effectively tied in most swing states, as both campaigns seek to convince voters before 5 November. Harris’s appearance on Fox News came amid a raft of interviews over the past week. She was interviewed on CBS’s prestigious 60 Minutes news show, sat down with the crowd from The View talkshow, appeared on the Call Her Daddy podcast, and on Tuesday spoke with radio host Charlamagne tha God.

Harris is also reportedly in negotiations to appear on Joe Rogan’s podcast – the most popular podcast in the US, which has a large following among young men. Trump, who refused to take part in a second debate on CNN with Harris, has said he will appear on Rogan’s podcast.

This was Harris’ first sit-down interview with Fox News, although her running mate, Tim Walz, has appeared on the network multiple times. Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary, has been a regular presence on Fox News screens, with his calm responses to sometimes hostile questions frequently going viral and delighting Democrats.

Kamala Harris faced a grilling on Fox News, with host Bret Baier pressing the vice-president on immigration, the economy and the Biden administration in a 30-minute interview on Wednesday night.

The Democratic candidate’s first appearance on the conservative network formed part of a direct appeal to right-leaning voters, after she was joined by more than 100 Republicans at a campaign event in Pennsylvania earlier in the day.

The interview was combative, with Harris, towards the end, speaking over Baier as she asked him to interview her “grounded in full assessment of the facts”, while calling him out for playing clips that she said were not relevant to what they were discussing.

Here are the key takeaways:

Trump used a town hall event on America’s largest Spanish-language network, Univision, to address Latino voters in Miami on Wednesday, with pointed questions about abortion rights, the 6 January US Capitol attack and immigration all featuring.

Trump once again defended mass deportations and his baseless claims about immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. Here’s what else we learned:

A Georgia judge has declared that seven new election rules recently passed by the state election board are “illegal, unconstitutional and void”.

Fulton county superior court judge Thomas Cox issued the order Wednesday after holding a hearing on challenges to the rules. The rules that Cox invalidated include three that had gotten a lot of attention – one that requires that the number of ballots be hand-counted after the close of polls and two that had to do with the certification of election results.

Cox found that the rules are “unsupported by Georgia’s Election Code and are in fact contrary to the Election Code”. He also wrote that the state election board did not have authority to pass them. He ordered the board to immediately remove the rules and to inform all state and local election officials that the rules are void and not to be followed.

The Associated Press has reached out to the lawyers for the state election board, as well as the three Republican members who had supported the rules, seeking comment on the judge’s ruling. They could appeal but time is running short with less than three weeks to go until election day.

The state election board, which is controlled by three Republicans endorsed by Donald Trump, has passed numerous rules in recent months mostly dealing with the processes that happen after ballots are cast. The former president narrowly lost Georgia to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election but claimed without proof that widespread fraud cost him victory in the state.

Democratic party organizations, local election officials and a group headed by a former Republican state lawmaker have filed at least half a dozen lawsuits over the rules. Democrats, voting rights groups and some legal experts have raised concerns that some rules could be used by Trump allies to delay or avoid certification or to cast doubt on results if he loses next month’s presidential election to Kamala Harris.

Cox’s ruling came in a lawsuit filed by Eternal Vigilance Action, which was founded and led by former state representative Scot Turner, a Republican. The organization had argued that the state election board overstepped its authority in adopting the rules.

Reached by phone Wednesday evening, Turner said he was “thrilled with the victory”.

“It was a complete and total victory for the constitution of the United States,” he said. “These rules were opposed by citizens that are Republican, as well as Democrats and independents. This is not about party. It’s about doing what’s constitutional and re-establishing separation of powers, and that’s something that every conservative in this country should be concerned with and support.”

One new rule that the judge blocked requires that three separate poll workers count the number of election day ballots by hand to make sure the number of paper ballots matches the electronic tallies on scanners, check-in computers and voting machines.

Georgia voters make selections on a touchscreen voting machine that prints out a piece of paper with a human-readable list of the voter’s choices as well as a QR code. That is the ballot that the voter puts into a scanner, which records the votes. The hand-count would be of the paper ballots – not the votes.

Critics, including many county election officials, argued that a hand-count could slow the reporting of election results and put an extra burden on poll workers at the end of an already long day. They also said there isn’t enough time to adequately train poll workers.

Fulton county superior court judge Robert McBurney on Tuesday had temporarily blocked the hand-count for the November election while he considers the legal merits. He said the hand-count may ultimately prove to be good policy, but it’s too close to the general election to implement it now.

Cox wrote that the rule “is nowhere authorized” by Georgia laws, which “proscribe the duties of poll officers after the polls close. Hand-counting is not among them”.

Two other new rules that Cox invalidated were passed by the state election board in August and have to do with certification. One provides a definition of certification that includes requiring county officials to conduct a “reasonable inquiry” before certifying results, but it does not specify what that means. The other includes language allowing county election officials “to examine all election related documentation created during the conduct of elections”.

Supporters argued those rules are necessary to ensure the accuracy of the vote totals before county election officials sign off on them. Critics said they could be used to delay or deny certification.

The first certification rule is not part of Georgia law and “adds an additional and undefined step into the certification process”, Cox wrote, saying it is thus “inconsistent with and unsupported by” Georgia law, making it “void and unenforceable”. The second rule is “directly inconsistent” with Georgia law, “which provides the time, manner, and method in which election-related documents must be produced and maintained”, he wrote.

The other rules Cox said are illegal and unconstitutional are ones that: require someone delivering an absentee ballot in person to provide a signature and photo ID; demand video surveillance and recording of ballot drop boxes after polls close during early voting; expand the mandatory designated areas where partisan poll watchers can stand at tabulation centers; and require daily public updates of the number of votes cast during early voting.

At least half a dozen lawsuits had been filed challenging some or all of the new rules. The Democratic National Committee and the Democratic party of Georgia had filed two lawsuits and joined others. Election boards in some counties and individual election officials in other counties had also sued.

Liam Payne, a former member of the boyband One Direction, has died aged 31 after falling from a third-floor hotel room in Buenos Aires, police have confirmed.

The singer died on Wednesday at 5pm local time.

“Liam James Payne, composer and guitarist, former member of the band One Direction, died today after falling from the third floor of a hotel in Palermo,” Buenos Aires police said in a statement.

Alberto Crescenti, head of the state emergency medical system, told Argentina’s Todo Noticias TV channel that Payne had fallen into an internal courtyard at the hotel.

“A few minutes later [an] emergency team arrived and confirmed the death of this man who we later learned was from a musical group. He had injuries incompatible with life as a result of his fall. There was no way to do anything,” Crescenti said.

Crescenti said authorities were investigating the circumstances of Payne’s death and conducting an autopsy.

In a statement on Wednesday, the police said they had gone to the hotel after being notified of an “aggressive man who could be under the effects of drugs and alcohol”, according to Reuters. The hotel manager said he heard a loud noise at the back of the hotel, and when police arrived they found that a man had fallen over the balcony in his room, the statement said.

Payne had been visiting Argentina along with his former bandmate Niall Horan, who performed at the city’s Movistar Arena on 2 October. Payne was seen dancing and singing along with Horan’s fans at the concert.

Hundreds of fans gathered outside the hotel on Wednesday evening, where police sectioned off the entrance with tape.

A quiet disbelief hung over the street. Supporters stood in shock, many of them in tears as they consoled one another. Others stared up at the hotel, of which all the curtains were closed.

“I’m feeling heartbroken. I remember when I was a kid I had a lot of bullying in my school and his songs helped. I’m devastated. I came as soon as I heard the news,” said 26-year-old fan Martina Belaustgui. “I saw him at Niall’s show a few weeks ago. He was singing and dancing and jumping.”

“I met him when I was 12. He was with his family and I asked for a picture. He was so nice. I was so shy, he tried to talk to me but I couldn’t say anything. I regret that,” said 25-year-old fan Mariana Pinto.

Born in Wolverhampton, England in 1993, Payne was just 16 years old when he became part of One Direction, a boyband formed by music executive Simon Cowell on British reality show The X Factor in 2010.

The band, which consisted of Payne, Horan, Harry Styles, Louis Tomlinson and Zayn Malik, didn’t win that season of The X Factor, but went on to become one of the biggest boybands of all time.

They sold more than 70m records worldwide, with hits including What Makes You Beautiful, Night Changes and Steal My Girl.

One Direction went on an indefinite hiatus in 2016, and Payne signed as a solo act, releasing his debut single, Strip That Down featuring Quavo, the following year. Other hit songs aside from Strip That Down, which peaked at No 10 on the US Billboard charts, included For You with Rita Ora and Get Low with Zedd.

Speaking to the Guardian in 2019, Payne opened up about his mental health, revealing he’d been in therapy for two years. He said that at the height of One Direction’s fame, he began using alcohol and an epilepsy drug as a mood stabiliser to counter the “erratic highs and lows” he was experiencing. “I just needed a little bit of help to keep me stable … it was very touch and go at times,” he said.

Last year, he said in an interview that he’d completed more than three months of sobriety. “I’m sober now, over 100 days,” he told IFL TV. “I feel amazing, I feel really, really good and the support from the fans has been really, really good, so I’m super happy.”

Payne became a father in 2017, having a son Bear Grey Payne with his then-partner, the X Factor judge Cheryl Cole. The couple split in 2018 after two years together.

Liam Payne, a former member of the boyband One Direction, has died aged 31 after falling from a third-floor hotel room in Buenos Aires, police have confirmed.

The singer died on Wednesday at 5pm local time.

“Liam James Payne, composer and guitarist, former member of the band One Direction, died today after falling from the third floor of a hotel in Palermo,” Buenos Aires police said in a statement.

Alberto Crescenti, head of the state emergency medical system, told Argentina’s Todo Noticias TV channel that Payne had fallen into an internal courtyard at the hotel.

“A few minutes later [an] emergency team arrived and confirmed the death of this man who we later learned was from a musical group. He had injuries incompatible with life as a result of his fall. There was no way to do anything,” Crescenti said.

Crescenti said authorities were investigating the circumstances of Payne’s death and conducting an autopsy.

In a statement on Wednesday, the police said they had gone to the hotel after being notified of an “aggressive man who could be under the effects of drugs and alcohol”, according to Reuters. The hotel manager said he heard a loud noise at the back of the hotel, and when police arrived they found that a man had fallen over the balcony in his room, the statement said.

Payne had been visiting Argentina along with his former bandmate Niall Horan, who performed at the city’s Movistar Arena on 2 October. Payne was seen dancing and singing along with Horan’s fans at the concert.

Hundreds of fans gathered outside the hotel on Wednesday evening, where police sectioned off the entrance with tape.

A quiet disbelief hung over the street. Supporters stood in shock, many of them in tears as they consoled one another. Others stared up at the hotel, of which all the curtains were closed.

“I’m feeling heartbroken. I remember when I was a kid I had a lot of bullying in my school and his songs helped. I’m devastated. I came as soon as I heard the news,” said 26-year-old fan Martina Belaustgui. “I saw him at Niall’s show a few weeks ago. He was singing and dancing and jumping.”

“I met him when I was 12. He was with his family and I asked for a picture. He was so nice. I was so shy, he tried to talk to me but I couldn’t say anything. I regret that,” said 25-year-old fan Mariana Pinto.

Born in Wolverhampton, England in 1993, Payne was just 16 years old when he became part of One Direction, a boyband formed by music executive Simon Cowell on British reality show The X Factor in 2010.

The band, which consisted of Payne, Horan, Harry Styles, Louis Tomlinson and Zayn Malik, didn’t win that season of The X Factor, but went on to become one of the biggest boybands of all time.

They sold more than 70m records worldwide, with hits including What Makes You Beautiful, Night Changes and Steal My Girl.

One Direction went on an indefinite hiatus in 2016, and Payne signed as a solo act, releasing his debut single, Strip That Down featuring Quavo, the following year. Other hit songs aside from Strip That Down, which peaked at No 10 on the US Billboard charts, included For You with Rita Ora and Get Low with Zedd.

Speaking to the Guardian in 2019, Payne opened up about his mental health, revealing he’d been in therapy for two years. He said that at the height of One Direction’s fame, he began using alcohol and an epilepsy drug as a mood stabiliser to counter the “erratic highs and lows” he was experiencing. “I just needed a little bit of help to keep me stable … it was very touch and go at times,” he said.

Last year, he said in an interview that he’d completed more than three months of sobriety. “I’m sober now, over 100 days,” he told IFL TV. “I feel amazing, I feel really, really good and the support from the fans has been really, really good, so I’m super happy.”

Payne became a father in 2017, having a son Bear Grey Payne with his then-partner, the X Factor judge Cheryl Cole. The couple split in 2018 after two years together.

Justin Trudeau has accused India of making a “horrific mistake” in violating Canadian sovereignty, amid an escalating diplomatic row over the murder of a Sikh separatist in British Columbia and allegations of a broader campaign of threats and violence against Indian exiles.

Testifying at a public inquiry into foreign interference on Wednesday, the Canadian prime minister accused Delhi of rebuffing efforts to cooperate and causing the increasingly bitter public feud that resulted in the mutual expulsion of senior diplomats on Monday.

“We are not looking to provoke or create a fight with India,” Trudeau said. “The Indian government made a horrific mistake in thinking that they could interfere as aggressively as they did in the safety and sovereignty of Canada. We need to respond in order to ensure Canadians’ safety.”

In his most detailed remarks on the saga so far, Trudeau said Canada had not wanted to “blow up” its valuable relationship with India.

But he said that after Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Canadian citizen, was shot dead outside a Sikh temple in British Columbia last June, “we had clear and certainly now ever clearer indications that India had violated Canada’s sovereignty.”

Trudeau made a number of explosive statements, including claims that highly classified intelligence suggested members of the opposition Conservative party were “engaged, or at high risk of” being a part of foreign interference efforts.

His comments came in a tumultuous week in which Canadian police accused the Indian diplomats of working with a criminal network led by a notorious imprisoned gangster to target Sikh dissidents in the country. India has rejected the allegations as “ludicrous”.

Responding to Trudeau’s comments, a spokesperson for India’s ministry of external affairs said: “What we have heard today only confirms what we have been saying consistently all along – Canada has presented us no evidence whatsoever in support of the serious allegations that it has chosen to level against India and Indian diplomats. The responsibility for the damage that this cavalier behaviour has caused to India-Canada relations lies with Prime Minister Trudeau alone.”

Trudeau said Canadian officials privately shared evidence with their Indian counterparts who, he said, have been uncooperative.

“The decision by the RCMP to go forward with that announcement was entirely anchored in public safety and a goal of disrupting the chain of activities that was resulting in drive-by shootings, home invasions, violent extortion and even murder in and across Canada,” Trudeau said.

The prime minister said Canadian authorities first raised the Nijjar murder during the 2023 G20 summit in New Delhi. Officials working “behind the scenes” told the Indians “there are real concerns that your security agencies were involved in the killing”, he said.

But when Trudeau confronted Narendra Modi on the final day of the summit, he was told by the Indian prime minister that Canada should do more to crack down on Sikh separatists, he said.

And despite Canadian efforts to engage with Indian officials, Trudeau said, they appeared uninterested in “taking the off-ramp” offered.

Since Trudeau first told parliament of “credible allegations potentially linking” the Indian government and Nijjar’s murder, Ottawa and Delhi have been locked in an worsening feud over the issue.

India temporarily stopped issuing in visas in Canada, and on Monday Canada expelled six senior diplomats, including the high commissioner, Sanjay Verma. India retaliated by ordering the expulsion of six high-ranking Canadian diplomats, including the acting high commissioner.

Trudeau’s latest statement comes as Canada seeks to convince allied nations to also condemn India’s alleged actions – an effort that has so far produced mixed results.

Earlier on Wednesday, the UK called on India to co-operate with Canadian legal authorities to investigate the allegations, following a phone call between Trudeau and the UK prime minister, Keir Starmer.

The British Foreign Office said: “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.”

As Canada’s allegations have broadened, it has become more difficult for its allies in the Five Eyes intelligence partnership to remain silent.

Canada’s federal police force on Monday alleged that Indian diplomats have worked with criminal gangs to orchestrate a campaign of extortion, intimidation and coercion against members of the Canadian south Asian community, resulting in homicides, home invasions, drive-by shootings and arson. Since September 2023, at least 13 people have been “warned by the RCMP of grave threats against them” according to a coalition of lawmakers.

The US has repeatedly said that New Delhi is not cooperating with Canada’s investigation, but the state department said on Wednesday that it was satisfied with India’s cooperation in a separate case involving an alleged plot against a Sikh separatist leader in New York last year.

Washington has alleged that Indian agents were involved in the attempted assassination of Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, and has indicted an Indian national working at the behest of an unnamed Indian government official.

An Indian government committee investigating the foiled murder plot met US officials in Washington, for a meeting the state department described as “productive”.

During his testimony, Trudeau also warned Tory lawmakers were involved in, or vulnerable to, foreign interference.

“I have the names of a number of parliamentarians, former parliamentarians and/or candidates in the Conservative party of Canada who are engaged [in] or at high risk of or for whom there is clear intelligence around foreign interference,” Trudeau said.

The Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has so far refused to get the security clearance necessary to be briefed the full scope of his party’s involvement, Trudeau said.

Trudeau also told the commission parliament’s national security and intelligence committee found evidence of foreign interference during the Tory leadership convention, which Poilievre won in 2022.

“The fact that there is absolutely no curiosity or openness in trying to figure out what happened or whether someone was compromised or whether a foreign country impacted those leadership races is simply irresponsible,” Trudeau said.

In a statement, Poilievre called on Trudeau to name the compromised lawmakers, and accused the prime minister of “lying to distract from a Liberal caucus revolt against his leadership and revelations he knowingly allowed Beijing to interfere and help him win two elections”.

Trudeau told the commission said he received intelligence in his role as prime minister but did not use it for “partisan” benefit. “I don’t believe in using national security information for partisan purposes,” he said.

A parliamentary public safety committee confirmed it will launch an emergency study of RCMP allegations that Indian government agents have been involved in violent crimes in Canada.

A Philippines former police colonel has testified that Rodrigo Duterte’s office offered police up to $17,000 to kill suspects as part of his “war on drugs”, sparking calls for the evidence to be referred to the international criminal court.

Royina Garma, a former police colonel who had close ties to Duterte, gave the most damning evidence yet against the former president, when she told a parliamentary committee last week he had called her in May 2016, asking her to find a police officer capable of implementing a nationwide “war on drugs”.

The national crackdown was to be based on the model implemented in Davao, where Duterte was previously mayor, she said: “This Davao Model referred to the system involving payment and rewards.”

Garma told the hearing that under this “model”, police could earn between P20,000 ($346) and P1m ($17,340) per killing, depending upon the target. Rewards were given only for killings, not arrests, she said.

Duterte has previously denied authorising extrajudicial killings. However, he repeatedly and openly threatened drug dealers with death prior to and during his presidency and urged people to kill drug addicts and dealers. In 2016, he claimed he personally killed suspects while mayor.

Duterte’s anti drugs crackdowns, in which rights groups estimate as many as 30,000 people, mostly young men, were killed, is being investigated by the international criminal court, but President Ferdinand Marcos Jr – who ran a joint election campaign with Duterte’s daughter, Sara Duterte in 2022 – has previously said he will not comply with the ICC.

Marcos Jr has said that cases must be handled by the Philippine’s courts, and has described the ICC as a threat to the country’s sovereignty.

Kristina Conti from the National Union of People’s Lawyers, who represents some of the families of victims of the drug war, said the government should submit the evidence to the ICC, and allow its investigators access to Garma, who is now in detention.

Doing so could expedite investigations, she said. “There’s a layer of judicial processes that you could skip if it was formally referred by the government. The authentication and then perhaps future referral to interviews, to access to the witness, could be brokered through the government,” she added.

Relations between the dynastic Marcos and Duterte families have soured in recent times, and analysts say it is possible Marcos could expose Duterte to prosecution if he believes this would be politically advantageous.

Speaking at a House of Representative’s committee on Friday, Garma said she had received a call from Duterte in May 2016, at about 5am, instructing her to meet him at his residence in Dona Luisa, Davao.

“I was already acquainted with then-mayor Duterte, having served as a station commander in one of the police stations in Davao during his tenure,” she said in her affidavit.

“During our meeting, he requested that I locate a Philippine national police (PNP) officer or operative who is a member of the Iglesia Ni Cristo, indicating that he needed someone capable of implementing the war on drugs on a national scale, replicating the Davao model.”

Iglesia Ni Cristo is an influential Christian group that had endorsed Duterte during his presidential campaign.

“The Davao Model involves three levels of payments or rewards. First is the reward if the suspect is killed. Second is the funding of planned operations. Third is the refund of operational expenses,” Garma alleged.

Her comments add to previous testimony given to the committee by police Lieutenant Colonel Jovie Espenido, known as the drug war’s former poster boy, who also alleged that rewards were given for killings.

Garma, who was also former general manager of the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office, named several individuals in her affidavit, including Duterte’s key aide, Bong Go, who is now a senator. All killings and requests for refunds for operational expenses were reported to Go, she alleged.

Go has denied that money was offered in exchange for killings, or that he had a role in handling funds. Go has said he would support an investigation into the drugs war by the senate, of which he is a member.

Human rights groups and lawyers acting for the families of victims say domestic agencies cannot be trusted to provide real justice. Victims lawyer Conti said: “We are wary of any domestic investigation, judicial investigation, [or] rather prosecutorial investigation, because the persons investigating or prosecuting could be the same ones involved in it as well.”

Carlos Conde, senior researcher at the Asia division of Human Rights Watch covering the Philippines, said: “There’s no way we can expect [law enforcement agencies] to do an honest to goodness, impartial, thorough investigation of the killings.”

The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has laid out details of his “victory plan” in a speech to parliament that acknowledged increasing pressure from allies to negotiate an end to the conflict.

An “unconditional invite” to join Nato is at the heart of the plan he had pitched in private meetings in Washington DC and on a tour of European capitals before unveiling it publicly in Kyiv on Wednesday.

“We heard the word ‘negotiations’ from partners, and the word ‘justice’ much less often,” he admitted to lawmakers. His project was a response to that, he said, offering a chance of “decent peace” for the country.

A commitment to allow Ukraine into Nato would show the Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, that his geopolitical plans were “headed for defeat”, Zelenskyy said.

Later on Wednesday, Zelenskyy spoke to Joe Biden, who announced a new $425m (£327m) military aid package, including air defence capability, air-to-ground munitions, armoured vehicles and critical munitions, the White House said.

Ukraine’s allies have been wary of the conflict expanding since Putin launched a full-scale invasion in February 2022 and began threatening to use nuclear weapons soon after.

The Nato chief, Mark Rutte, gave a muted response to Zelenskyy’s plans, saying he and allies “take note” of it. “The plan has many aspects and many political and military issues we really need to hammer out with the Ukrainians to understand what is behind it, to see what we can do, what we cannot do,” Rutte said.

Moscow rapidly denounced Zelenskyy’s proposal as an escalation. “He is pushing Nato into direct conflict with our country,” the foreign ministry spokesperson, Maria Zakharova, told reporters.

Zelenskyy also ruled out conceding territory to Russia, although analysts have said allowing Moscow effective control of some territory seized over nearly three years of war would be needed to halt fighting.

Overall, the vision laid out by Zelenskyy was as much an attempt to shift the global narrative around Ukraine’s future prospects as a strategic military project.

As the full-scale war heads towards its fourth year, Russia has been throwing soldiers and weapons into a slow but consistent advance on the eastern front.

The crisis in the Middle East has diverted funds and diplomatic attention from Ukraine, and if Donald Trump wins the US presidential election next month then Zelenskyy could soon be making his case to a hostile administration in Washington.

Zelenskyy described a Ukraine that could achieve a “just peace” if allies gave it better defence capabilities and a strategic non-nuclear deterrent, and that could then reward those who stood by it with investment opportunities.

Key to Ukraine’s economic potential are strategic mineral deposits that he said were worth trillions of dollars, including uranium, titanium, lithium and graphite, and the country’s rich soil, which produces a significant portion of the world’s wheat.

These were “strategically valuable resources and they will strengthen either Russia and its allies or Ukraine and the democratic world”, Zelenskyy said.

When the war with Russia ended, Ukraine would also have ranks of battle-hardened troops who could strengthen Nato forces in Europe and worldwide, he added.

Zelenskyy also argued that supporting Ukraine was as much self-defence as solidarity, describing a war that was already metastasising beyond Europe, with North Korean soldiers fighting alongside Russians troops for a state deploying Iranian weapons and cheered on by China.

“Russia and its allies want more wars. And that’s a fact. They are learning, and the more time they have to learn … the more the world will have to pay, unfortunately and inevitably, for the right to life, for the right to peace,” he said.

Artem Mazhulin contributed reporting

The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has laid out details of his “victory plan” in a speech to parliament that acknowledged increasing pressure from allies to negotiate an end to the conflict.

An “unconditional invite” to join Nato is at the heart of the plan he had pitched in private meetings in Washington DC and on a tour of European capitals before unveiling it publicly in Kyiv on Wednesday.

“We heard the word ‘negotiations’ from partners, and the word ‘justice’ much less often,” he admitted to lawmakers. His project was a response to that, he said, offering a chance of “decent peace” for the country.

A commitment to allow Ukraine into Nato would show the Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, that his geopolitical plans were “headed for defeat”, Zelenskyy said.

Later on Wednesday, Zelenskyy spoke to Joe Biden, who announced a new $425m (£327m) military aid package, including air defence capability, air-to-ground munitions, armoured vehicles and critical munitions, the White House said.

Ukraine’s allies have been wary of the conflict expanding since Putin launched a full-scale invasion in February 2022 and began threatening to use nuclear weapons soon after.

The Nato chief, Mark Rutte, gave a muted response to Zelenskyy’s plans, saying he and allies “take note” of it. “The plan has many aspects and many political and military issues we really need to hammer out with the Ukrainians to understand what is behind it, to see what we can do, what we cannot do,” Rutte said.

Moscow rapidly denounced Zelenskyy’s proposal as an escalation. “He is pushing Nato into direct conflict with our country,” the foreign ministry spokesperson, Maria Zakharova, told reporters.

Zelenskyy also ruled out conceding territory to Russia, although analysts have said allowing Moscow effective control of some territory seized over nearly three years of war would be needed to halt fighting.

Overall, the vision laid out by Zelenskyy was as much an attempt to shift the global narrative around Ukraine’s future prospects as a strategic military project.

As the full-scale war heads towards its fourth year, Russia has been throwing soldiers and weapons into a slow but consistent advance on the eastern front.

The crisis in the Middle East has diverted funds and diplomatic attention from Ukraine, and if Donald Trump wins the US presidential election next month then Zelenskyy could soon be making his case to a hostile administration in Washington.

Zelenskyy described a Ukraine that could achieve a “just peace” if allies gave it better defence capabilities and a strategic non-nuclear deterrent, and that could then reward those who stood by it with investment opportunities.

Key to Ukraine’s economic potential are strategic mineral deposits that he said were worth trillions of dollars, including uranium, titanium, lithium and graphite, and the country’s rich soil, which produces a significant portion of the world’s wheat.

These were “strategically valuable resources and they will strengthen either Russia and its allies or Ukraine and the democratic world”, Zelenskyy said.

When the war with Russia ended, Ukraine would also have ranks of battle-hardened troops who could strengthen Nato forces in Europe and worldwide, he added.

Zelenskyy also argued that supporting Ukraine was as much self-defence as solidarity, describing a war that was already metastasising beyond Europe, with North Korean soldiers fighting alongside Russians troops for a state deploying Iranian weapons and cheered on by China.

“Russia and its allies want more wars. And that’s a fact. They are learning, and the more time they have to learn … the more the world will have to pay, unfortunately and inevitably, for the right to life, for the right to peace,” he said.

Artem Mazhulin contributed reporting

Genaro Garcia Luna, the official who for several years led Mexico’s fight against the country’s violent drug trade, was sentenced to more than 38 years in US prison for accepting bribes from the cartels he was supposed to fight.

The US district judge Brian Cogan announced the sentence at a hearing in Brooklyn federal court on Wednesday.

Prosecutors had urged a life sentence for Garcia Luna, 56, after he was convicted at trial in February 2023 for engaging in a criminal drug enterprise, taking part in various conspiracies and making false statements.

They argued Garcia Luna took millions of dollars in bribes from the Sinaloa cartel once led by Joaquin Guzman Loera, better known as El Chapo, and in exchange shielded its members from arrest and protected its cocaine shipments.

In announcing the 460-month sentence, Cogan said Garcia Luna should have “some light at the end of the tunnel”, crediting him for his work teaching fellow inmates at Brooklyn’s metropolitan detention center. But the judge said Garcia Luna lived a “double life”, with the harm he caused outweighing his good deeds.

“Aside from your very pleasant demeanor and your articulateness, you have the same kind of thuggishness as El Chapo, it just manifests itself differently,” Cogan said.

Garcia Luna served as Mexico’s public security minister from 2006 to 2012.

His defense lawyer Cesar de Castro had suggested Cogan should sentence him to no longer than the mandatory minimum of 20 years, noting he has already spent nearly five years in jail since his 2019 arrest.

The defense had argued at trial that the former Sinaloa cartel members who cooperated with prosecutors and testified against Garcia Luna had falsely implicated him to try to reduce their own sentences.

Before learning the sentence, Garcia Luna said in court that Mexico’s government and criminal groups had smeared him. “I have not committed any of these crimes,” he said. “I am not the person that the criminals point to.”

El Chapo is serving a life sentence at a Colorado maximum security prison after being convicted in 2019 on drug charges.

• Australia is to give 49 superseded M1A1 tanks to Ukraine, whose president sent his thanks for the “brave” donation which he described as essential assistance in its defence against Russia’s invasion. Some will need refurbishment first, or could be used for spare parts as Ukrainian soldiers are already using American M1A1 tanks, also known as the Abrams, donated by the US. Australia’s most recent A$245m aid package for Ukraine also includes air defence missiles, guided weapons, anti-tank weapons, artillery, mortars and small arms ammunition.

• The tanks bring Australia’s total military aid contribution to Ukraine since Russia’s invasion in February 2022 to A$1.3bn, which includes 120 Bushmaster vehicles. Australia’s defence industry minister, Pat Conroy, told national broadcaster the ABC: “We’re really privileged to be the largest non-Nato contributor of military assistance.” Australia is upgrading to the M1A2 version of the Abrams tank.

• A Russian military officer recently returned from fighting in Ukraine was assassinated in a village in the Moscow region, the Russia’s Tass state news agency has reported. The victim was named as Nikita Klenkov, whom the independent news outlet Important Stories named as a high-ranking officer in the GRU military intelligence service. Tass said at least three shots were fired into the side window of his moving car and it crashed into a fence.

• Volodymyr Zelenskyy will attend a Nato defence ministers’ meeting on Thursday, according to a Nato agenda. Zelenskyy unveiled his “victory plan” on Wednesday. Its major points include an invitation for Ukraine to join Nato and permission to use western-supplied longer-range missiles to strike military targets inside Russia – steps that have been met with reluctance by Kyiv’s allies so far. In his remarks to Ukraine’s parliament Zelenskyy said that in private communications with Ukraine its partners were increasingly mentioning “negotiations” and much less frequently using the word “justice”. He reiterated that Ukraine was not prepared for a “frozen conflict” or any “trade-offs involving territory or sovereignty”.

• North Korea must face sanctions for taking Russia’s side in the war, Ukraine has told its allies. Zelenskyy told Ukraine’s parliament on Wednesday that spy services had confirmed North Korea’s supply of both weapons and personnel. “These are workers for Russian factories to replace Russians killed in the war. And personnel for the Russian army. In fact, this is the participation of a second state in the war against Ukraine on the side of Russia.” The Kremlin has denied the allegation of North Korea sending people. Justin McCurry, the Guardian’s correspondent in Tokyo, goes into the details of how North Korean troops are believed to be involved.

• The Ukrainian foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, said North Korea’s involvement posed a “huge threat of further escalation. We are approaching a new phase, new realities of war.” The US army’s Indo-Pacific commander, Gen Charles Flynn, told an event in Washington that North Korean personnel being involved in the conflict would allow Pyongyang to get real-time feedback on its weapons, something that had not been possible in the past.

• Joe Biden will be in Germany on Friday on a whirlwind trip and hold talks with the chancellor, Olaf Scholz. The White House said the US president and Scholz would “coordinate on geopolitical priorities, including Ukraine’s defence against Russian aggression and events in the Middle East”. The US president and the chancellor could be joined by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, according to unconfirmed media reports.

• Biden spoke to Zelenskyy on Wednesday and announced $425m in further military aid including air defences, munitions and armoured vehicles, the White House said.

• Six Russian soldiers who fled the war in Ukraine have been granted temporary visas as they apply for political asylum in France, in what human rights activists describe as the first major case of a group of deserters being admitted to a EU country. The men arrived in Paris on separate flights over the last few months after initially fleeing Russia to Kazakhstan in 2022 and 2023, according to an organisation that assists soldiers in fleeing, and to accounts from the deserters.

• A Polish court has sentenced a 26-year-old Ukrainian identified as Oleksandr D to two years and eight months’ imprisonment for trying to recruit a Polish citizen to spy against military aid efforts to Ukraine. The convicted man had sought “to send photos of military vehicles headed to Ukraine as part of the aid”, security services spokesman Jacek Dobrzynski said. In exchange the Polish recruit was to receive a payment of €15,000, Dobrzynski said without specifying if he had accepted. The planned recipient of the photos was believed to be Russia.

• Russia claimed to have captured two more Ukrainian villages: Krasnyi Yar, south of the town of Myrnograd, which lies close to Pokrovsk; and Nevske, which lies in the Luhansk region, near the border with the Donetsk region. There was no independent confirmation, while the Institute for the Study of War reported attacks or advances in those locations and others.

The Roman Catholic archdiocese of Los Angeles has agreed to pay $880m to 1,353 people who alleged that they were sexually abused as children by Catholic priests, in the largest settlement by a US diocese over decades-old abuse claims.

Archbishop Jose H Gomez expressed sorrow for the abuse in announcing the settlement on Wednesday.

“I am sorry for every one of these incidents, from the bottom of my heart,” Gomez said in a statement. “My hope is that this settlement will provide some measure of healing for what these men and women have suffered.”

The archdiocese began mediating the abuse claims after California enacted a law that allowed new lawsuits to be based on past instances of sexual abuse involving minors.

The California law and similar laws in other states have driven many large Catholic organizations to seek bankruptcy protection around the US. In California, the archdiocese of San Francisco and the dioceses of Oakland and San Diego have filed for bankruptcy to resolve similar abuse claims.

The Los Angeles archdiocese reached its settlement without filing for bankruptcy. Gomez said the archdiocese would be able to pay victims from cash reserves, investments, loans and contributions from other religious organizations that had been named in lawsuits. The payments will not impact the archdiocese’s mission of “serving the poor and vulnerable in our communities”, Gomez said.

Attorneys for the archdiocese and the plaintiffs’ liaison counsel representing abuse claimants issued a joint statement on Wednesday thanking survivors for coming forward with their stories and ensuring that similar abuse will not occur in the future.

“While there is no amount of money that can replace what was taken from these 1,353 brave individuals who have suffered in silence for decades, there is justice in accountability,” the plaintiffs’ liaison counsel said in a joint statement.

Mysterious tar balls washing up in Sydney have forced the closure of seven beaches, including Bondi beach, but authorities are yet to identify where they are coming from.

Clovelly beach and the northern end of Maroubra beach were closed on Thursday when more tar balls were found after Gordons Bay and Coogee beaches were previously closed by Randwick council. People have been warned not to touch or go near the debris.

Bondi, Tamarama and Bronte beaches were also closed “out of precaution”, neighbouring Waverley council said in a statement on Thursday afternoon.

Randwick council said on Wednesday evening that preliminary test results had identified the dark spheres as “tar balls” – which are formed when oil comes into contact with debris and water, usually as a result of oil spills or seepage.

The council testing showed the debris was a hydrocarbon-based pollutant – the chief component of petroleum-based products.

Council jetskis spotted a suspected oil slick out at sea on Wednesday morning, the Randwick council mayor, Dylan Parker, said at the time.

However, the Port Authority of NSW said no oil spills had been reported by vessels.

“We don’t yet know what has happened to produce the debris washing up on our beaches,” Parker said in a statement on Thursday. “We will continue to work with relevant authorities to ensure the safety of the public and clean up our beaches.”

The four Randwick beaches were closed until further notice.

Waverley council said it had closed its beaches after the environment watchdog formally notified it that “pea to marble-size balls of light grey–white colour were observed by EPA staff on Bondi, Bronte and Tamarama beaches”.

“As a precaution, all Waverley beaches will be closed until further investigation has been carried out by the EPA and relevant government bodies,” the council said.

The New South Wales premier, Chris Minns, said eastern suburbs beaches had been closed “out of an abundance of caution”.

He said the public would be kept updated on the investigations being led by the Environment Protection Authority.

“We need to make sure that we’re fully investigating,” Minns said. “It’s an unusual occurrence on Sydney’s beaches. The EPA is leading those investigations. The council is responsible for closing down the beaches.”

The EPA said in a statement that balls had also been observed at Congong, Frenchmans, Little Bay and Malabar beaches.

“At this stage, the origin and contents of the balls remains a mystery,” the watchdog said on Thursday.

“But the EPA is conducting extensive testing on a number of samples. While we understand initial Randwick City Council testing suggests the presence of hydrocarbon, at this stage EPA tests cannot confirm the contents.”

The EPA said until the clean-up was concluded “we advise against swimming and touching any balls that may have washed ashore in the identified areas”.

Parker said Randwick council staff had been working with the EPA, port authority and Transport for NSW on the clean-up response.

“Our community is rightfully very protective of our natural environment and this has been a very concerning incident,” the mayor said on Wednesday.

“We have engaged an expert occupational hygienist and a specialist waste removal contractor who are currently systematically removing the debris from the beaches in accordance with an agreed safe work method statement developed with the NSW EPA.”

Louise Morris, the oil and gas campaign manager at the Australian Marine Conservation Society, has said tar balls are usually formed following an oil spill when petroleum is washed in waves and currents, making it condense and coagulate.

“The more it keeps gripping onto other substances, it solidifies and condenses,” Morris said. “Part of that process of washing through the ocean means that they form a spherical shape.”