Israel has confirmed the killing of the presumed next leader of Hezbollah in an airstrike on southern Beirut earlier in October.

In a statement on Tuesday evening, the Israeli military said strikes in the suburb of Dahiyeh had killed Hashem Safieddine and Ali Hussein Hazima, the head of the militant group’s intelligence branch, three weeks ago.

It was the first time Israel confirmed the killing of the most senior political official in Hezbollah after the former secretary general Hassan Nasrallah. Hezbollah had yet to comment on Israel’s claim.

Safieddine was the head of Hezbollah’s highest political decision-making body, the executive council, and was reportedly picked as the successor to Nasrallah some years ago. He was also a cousin of the former secretary general and was seen as having much of the same charisma that inspired the cult of personality around Nasrallah.

His fate was unknown after Israeli strikes on Dahiyeh on 3 October, which Israel said were targeting an underground bunker where the senior leader was living.

Hezbollah had reportedly not been able to re-establish contact with Safieddine since the strike and rescue workers were prevented from reaching the site of the bombing.

With the killing of Safieddine, only Naim Qassem, the deputy secretary general of Hezbollah, remains from Hezbollah’s public-facing senior leadership. Qassem has been the face of the group since the assassination of Nasrallah, but he does not enjoy the same popularity among Hezbollah supporters that the late secretary general had.

It remains unknown who will take the helm as the next leader of the group. In a speech two weeks ago, Qassem said that appointing a new leader was a complex procedure and would take some time. Alongside blows to its political leadership, almost all of Hezbollah’s senior military cadre has been killed by Israel in the last three months.

The strike that killed Safieddine also killed 25 other Hezbollah leaders, according to Israel. Last week, Israel killed the leader of Hamas, Yahya Sinwar, in Gaza.

US secretary of state Antony Blinken said during a trip to Israel on Tuesday that leaders there should “capitalise” on Sinwar’s death as an opportunity to end the war in Gaza and secure the release of hostages taken as part of the deadly Hamas attack that started the war. Blinken also stressed the need for Israel to do more to help increase the flow of humanitarian aid to Palestinians.

Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office called his meeting with Blinken, which lasted more than two hours, “friendly and productive.”

Despite the losses in its command structure, Hezbollah has insisted that the group has retained its organisational strength. The group has said this is evidenced by what it says is Israel’s lack of progress in south Lebanon.

Hezbollah fighters have been engaged in daily clashes with Israeli troops since Israel announced its ground incursion into Lebanon on 30 September. Israeli tanks have been spotted in villages along the Israel-Lebanon border and entire towns have been levelled in south Lebanon by Israeli remote detonations.

Israel has said its ground operation into south Lebanon is meant to degrade Hezbollah infrastructure along the border to prevent the group from launching cross-border attacks into Israel. The extent of Israel’s success in its mission is unclear, with limited media access to south Lebanon.

Safieddine was born in 1964 in southern Lebanon and was a founder member of Hezbollah. He was thought to have spent many years in Qom, the Iranian religious city, and was entrusted by Hezbollah with a variety of tasks over the decades, including managing the organisation’s extensive portfolio of legal and illegal businesses.

The US and Saudi Arabia had put him on their respective lists of designated “terrorists” in 2017.

Unlike Nasrallah, who lived in hiding for years, Safieddine continued to appear openly at recent political and religious events. During the past year of hostilities with Israel, he addressed funerals and other events that Nasrallah had long avoided for security reasons.

Over the past few days, Israel has stepped up its aerial campaign in Lebanon, striking infrastructure connected to a Hezbollah-linked bank, Al-Qard Al-Hassan, which it accused of financing the organisation. The bank, which is part of Hezbollah’s charitable arm, has more than 30 buildings across Lebanon.

Israel also carried out strikes on Greater Beirut on Monday night, killing 18 people, including four children, and wounding 60 in a strike in Dahiyeh. The strike also caused “major damage” to the nearby Rafik Hariri university hospital, Lebanon’s largest public hospital.

Hezbollah launched a rocket salvo at Kiryat Shmona, north Israel as well as downing an Israeli Hermes 450 drone with a surface-to-air missile on Tuesday afternoon.

Fighting began between Hezbollah and Israel after Hezbollah launched rockets against Israel on 8 October 2023, “in solidarity” with Hamas’s attack the day prior. Fighting has dramatically escalated since Israel launched “Operation Northern Arrows” on 23 September.

More than 2,500 people have been killed and above 11,850 have been wounded in Lebanon over the past year.

Israel is weighing the use of private security contractors – possibly involving UK special forces veterans – to deliver aid to Gaza, as conditions in the north of the strip worsen dramatically, the Guardian has learned.

According to an Israeli official, the security cabinet discussed the issue on Sunday, before an expected vote in the Knesset next week on two bills that would ban the UN relief agency, Unrwa, from operating in Israel. If passed, the bills would severely curtail the operations of by far the biggest aid operation in Gaza.

After more than a year of bombardment, all form of law and order has collapsed in Gaza, where the population is desperate and armed gangs run much of what is left of its urban areas.

Security threats are a major obstacle to aid deliveries, including the threat of attack by Israeli forces. Aid agencies have resisted being part of militarised convoys, state or privately run, for fear of being targeted as being party to the conflict.

“There’s a reason that humanitarians don’t operate this way,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, a former senior aid official in the Biden administration, now president of Refugees International. “The US, during the peak ‘war on terror’ era, occasionally experimented with military contractors and this kind of militarised aid delivery, and it was always a disaster.”

Konyndyk added: “US-funded contractors that took an armed security approach got hit a lot because they were seen as combatants.”

Mordechai “Moti” Kahana, an Israeli-American businessman whose firm, Global Delivery Company (GDC), is bidding for the Gaza aid delivery contract, said the Israeli cabinet did not formally make a decision on Sunday on the grounds that it was up to the defence ministry and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

“Aid mechanisms” had been discussed by the cabinet on Sunday but no final decision had been made, according to an official who was briefed on the meeting. Cogat, the arm of the IDF that operates in occupied Palestinian territories, referred questions to the Israeli defence ministry, which did not reply to a request for comment on Tuesday.

A spokesperson for the US Agency for International Development said: “USAid has not been in contact with and is not funding GDC. We have not discussed any such plan with the GoI [Israeli government].”

The USAid spokesperson referred to “trusted and experienced UN and NGO partners” and added: “Any type of security or political arrangement must ensure sustained access for humanitarians and freedom of movement for civilians, including voluntary, safe, and dignified returns or resettlement.”

The Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth reported on Tuesday that the IDF had chosen Kahana’s firm for handling aid delivery into Gaza, but Kahana said he had not received confirmation.

He said that if GDC was given the contract, the actual aid deliveries into Gaza would be carried out by a British security firm now working in Iraq, which he said he could not name until the agreement was finalised.

“These are British special forces,” he said. “They know what they’re doing.”

He said the UK implementing partner would need 30 days to deploy once given a green light.

Discussions over aid deliveries come against a backdrop of increasingly desperate conditions, particularly in northern Gaza, after nearly three weeks of intense IDF bombardment, in what Israel describes as mopping up operations against Hamas but which critics suspect is an effort to drive out the Palestinian population entirely and settle the territory with Israelis.

“Our staff report they cannot find food, water or medical care,” Philippe Lazzarini, the head of Unrwa, said in a social media post. “The smell of death is everywhere as bodies are left lying on the roads or under the rubble. Missions to clear the bodies or provide humanitarian assistance are denied. In northern Gaza, people are just waiting to die.”

The UN reported on Monday that “during the first 20 days of October, only four out of 66 planned humanitarian missions through the Israeli checkpoint from southern to northern Gaza were facilitated by Israeli authorities”.

The Biden administration has lobbied the Knesset not to pass the bills banning Unrwa. The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, met Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday and according to his spokesperson, Matthew Miller, “emphasised the need for Israel to take additional steps to increase and sustain the flow of humanitarian assistance into Gaza”.

Kahana is a celebrated figure in Israel. He made his fortune in the rental car industry in the US and organised an aid mission for refugees from the Syrian civil war and the rescue of residual Jewish communities trapped in the Syrian and Afghanistan conflicts. He has a farm in New Jersey but spoke to the Guardian from what he said was a vineyard he owns in France.

Kahana alleged that aid deliveries into Gaza were being looted and the supplies were falling into the hands of Hamas. A proposal for aid deliveries put forward by GDC in May, seen by the Guardian, envisages a pilot scheme in which supplies would be taken across the Erez crossing point to a protected storage facility in Beit Hanoun in the north of Gaza, and driven from there to nearby distribution points.

Distribution would be carried out by lightly armed teams in small armoured trucks. They would have riot control gear for use in controlling crowds, including plastic bullets and water cannon. But there would be a standby quick reaction force a kilometre or less away, which would intervene with heavier weapons if the distribution teams came under attack.

Kahana said that the IDF was not equipped or trained for such aid deliveries, and pointed to the “flour massacre” on 29 February in Gaza City, in which IDF troops opened fire on a crowd of Palestinian civilians converging on an aid delivery, killing 118 Palestinians and wounding 760.

“There’s no need for 18-, 19-year-olds to give lollipops to kids and have 100 kids jump on them,” Kahana said. “If you have a soldier there, he’s going to freak out and start shooting and people die.”

Ultimately, the GDC plan envisages that the distribution areas would expand into “gated communities” under armed guard, a safe place for aid to be distributed.

“It’s the same as a Miami gated community, but without the pool, tennis court and golf course or whatever,” Kahana said. “The idea is that it’s gated, it’s safe. We just provide the security and people run their own lives, and take humanitarian supplies into their communities.”

Israeli officials have repeatedly dismissed US-backed plans to bring the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority back to govern Gaza. Early in the war, Israel approached Arab states such as Egypt and the UAE to discuss forming a security force that could operate in Gaza “the day after”, but the idea was met with a tepid response, regional diplomats said.

In January, the IDF trialled “humanitarian bubbles” run by local people with no ties to Hamas, such as respected community elders, in three areas of north Gaza. These vetted figures were supposed to administer the distribution of aid funnelled by the Israeli army from the western Erez crossing. If successful, their responsibilities would be expanded to include areas of civilian governance and service provision such as bakeries, and use of the “bubbles” would be extended southwards.

The pilots never got off the ground, however. Palestinian and Israeli analysts said the “bubbles” plan was a resounding failure that ended in Hamas killing several Palestinians tasked with distributing aid.

It appears Israeli officials have since realised that Palestinians from Gaza are unable and unwilling to carry out the plan.

Gaza’s economy has been left in “utter ruin” by the year-long war between Israel and Hamas, and it would take 350 years to return to its pre-conflict levels, the United Nations has warned.

In a report on the economic costs of the war prepared by its trade and development wing (Unctad), the UN said the fighting since Hamas killed more than 1,000 Israelis on 7 October last year had devastated the remnants of Gaza’s economy and infrastructure.

The report, presented to last month’s UN general assembly, said economic activity across Gaza – which had been weak before the war – had ground to a halt, apart from minimum humanitarian health and food services provided under conditions of severe water, fuel and electricity shortages, and significant access constraints.

Construction output was down by 96%, agriculture output by 93%, manufacturing by 92% and services sector output by 76%. Meanwhile, unemployment reached 81.7% in the first quarter of 2024, a rate the UN said was likely to worsen or persist for as long as the military operation continued.

“The intense military operations in Gaza resulted in an unprecedented humanitarian, environmental and social catastrophe and propelled Gaza from de-development to utter ruin,” the report said.

“The far-reaching repercussions will linger for years to come, and it may take decades to return Gaza to the status quo ante.

“Once a ceasefire is reached, a return to the 2007–2022 growth trend would imply that it would take Gaza 350 years just to restore GDP to its level in 2022.”

The report said the past 12 months of military action had followed a period between 2007 and 2022 when the economy of Gaza had been severely affected by restrictions imposed by Israel on the movement of goods and people.

The UN said the income loss caused by the restrictions and military operations was “staggering”.

“According to thorough estimations described in the present report, in the absence of those constraints, by the end of 2023 it is estimated that Gaza’s gross domestic product (GDP) would have been, on average, 77.6% higher than its actual level.

“This implies a conservatively estimated cumulative loss of $35.8bn of unrealised GDP potential during the period 2007–2023 – equivalent to 17 times the GDP of Gaza in 2023.”

In the first three-quarters of 2023 – before the war began – the Gazan economy was contracting at an annual rate of about 3%. It contracted by 22.6% in 2023 as a whole, with 90% of that drop coming in the fourth quarter.

The report said that, by the end of July 2024, 88% of school buildings had suffered some damage, 21 out of 36 hospitals were out of service and 45 out of 105 primary health facilities were non-operational. More than 62% of residential buildings were damaged or destroyed, and more than 59% of the water, sanitation and hygiene sector infrastructure was heavily damaged, with an impact on water and sanitation services.

Unctad said in the fourth quarter of 2023, Gaza registered its largest economic slump in recent history. GDP contracted by 80.8% compared with the third quarter of 2023, while GDP a head fell by 81.4% over the same period.

The rescuers struck at the concrete with jackhammers, excavators and even pickaxes, pausing occasionally and demanding silence, straining to hear anyone still trapped under the collapsed building.

Beneath the rubble, nothing stirred. They resumed, many working through the night after Israel carried out airstrikes on residential buildings across the street from Rafik Hariri university hospital, killing 18 people, including four children, and wounding 60 on Monday night.

“They accuse us of belonging to a culture of death, but it’s not true – we have a culture of life, we are a people who love life. They are the ones who are killing us,” said Qassem Fakih, 39, whose skin was ghost-white from dust after digging for hours trying to find his relatives who lived in the block of flats. Four of his cousins, all children, had been pulled out of the rubble dead, and he was working to find two more family members who were missing.

Rescuers called for a stretcher, they had found a body. A man – Fakih did not know him – was placed in a black bag and carried off to be identified.

The small cluster of buildings on the edge of Dahiyeh, in the southern suburbs of Beirut, was referred to as “the neighbourhood of the neglected”. Its inhabitants were impoverished, some refugees from Syria and Sudan and others Lebanese who eked out an existence on at most a few hundred dollars a month – “enough just to eat and drink,” a resident said as he watched his former home exhumed one concrete block at a time.

A little after 10pm on Monday, Israel dropped a bomb on the neglected neighbourhood without warning. The Israeli military said it had struck a “Hezbollah terrorist target” near the hospital. As rescuers continued to dig, Fakih climbed on top of a ruined structure and emptied out a bag of children’s toys he had found in the rubble, screaming: “Look! Do these look like Hezbollah weapons to you?”

The strike landed just 40 metres from the entrance of Rafik Hariri hospital, the largest public hospital in Lebanon, which, according to the health ministry, sustained “significant damage”.

Dr Fathallah Fattouh, the director of the hospital’s emergency room, said: “When the bombs hit the buildings beside the hospital, they thought it was the hospital itself and there was a great anxiety. Then people started to come from the shelled area, fully covered in white dust, with blood.”

He pulled out a piece of paper that he had been using as a triage list the night before and began to read: “Two children in the red zone – critically injured – five people in the black zone – close to death – most in the green zone, only lightly injured.” When a building collapses, the people inside tend to be killed, he said, while those who survive usually have light wounds from flying debris and shattered glass.

An hour before the strike near Rafik Hariri, Israel had issued a statement claiming Hezbollah was hiding up to half a billion dollars in cash and gold in a bunker under another hospital, al-Sahel, in Dahiyeh. It did not provide evidence but published an animated graphic of what it purported to be an underground bunker.

The announcement caused a rush at al-Sahel hospital, where staff, fearing Israel would strike, began to evacuate patients.

“The patients were screaming and shouting, there was horror and tears, there was a whole scene. We had around 30 patients and it took us seven hours to evacuate them,” Dr Omar Mneimneh said. The hospital temporarily closed so as not to expose staff and patients to danger of Israeli bombs.

“If this hospital closes, people who are on chemotherapy or dialysis, their lives will be at risk. Other hospitals are already overloaded because they are already full from the patients who left south Lebanon,” said Mneimneh, an emergency medicine physician, adding that al-Sahel had a type of dialysis machine not found elsewhere.

The hospital opened its doors to journalists on Tuesday afternoon in an attempt to refute Israel’s claims that the facility was being used by Hezbollah to store money. Doctors and officers from Lebanese state security watched as journalists inspected hospital beds and a mostly empty underground storage space. Members of Hezbollah stood at the perimeter of the hospital complex, but did not interfere.

“There are no tunnels, there is no money, no gold for Hezbollah. It’s a private institution, it doesn’t belong to any [party],” said Halimah al-Annan, a nurse and audit team leader who has worked at al-Sahel since 1985.

While journalists were examining the facility, Israel’s military spokesperson published a post on X urging them to inspect a building next door, which he claimed had an entrance to an underground bunker. Journalists went to the underground parking of the building, but found only old boxes and a few cars, plus a locked storage space.

Israel’s claims of tunnels under major hospitals and the strike near Rafik Hariri hospital made Lebanese doctors fear they could suffer the same fate as the medical facilities in Gaza. Israel has repeatedly struck hospitals in Gaza over the past year – which the World Health Organization has condemned as a “systematic dismantling of healthcare” – often claiming Hamas operates in or near them.

Israeli strikes have killed at least 115 healthcare workers in Lebanon in the past year and have forced most hospitals in border areas and Dahiyeh to close.

“The risk is becoming greater even though it’s a humanitarian activity. Things feel more serious now, we are exposed much more to [the risk] of being bombed, to being injured, to dying,” Fattouh said.

Gisèle Pelicot, the French grandmother who has become a feminist hero for insisting that the rape trial of her ex-husband and 50 other men should be held in public, will take the stand on Wednesday to comment on the evidence so far.

The 72-year-old former logistics manager was unknowingly sedated and raped by her then husband, Dominique Pelicot, 71, who crushed sleeping tablets and anti-anxiety medication into her food and drinks, and invited men to rape her over a nine-year period from 2011 to 2020 in the village of Mazan in Provence.

Dominique Pelicot has admitted the charges against him and said that for almost a decade he was in contact with men on an online chatroom titled “without her knowledge” where he would organise for strangers to come to the couple’s home in the southern village of Mazan to rape his wife while she was in a comatose state in her bed. He said he administered drugs to her at mealtimes or in a bowl of ice-cream he brought to her as she watched TV after dinner.

“I am a rapist, like the others in this room,” Pelicot told the court, saying the other men on trial were aware they were being invited to rape his wife.

“I never, even for a single second, gave my consent to Mr Pelicot or those other men,” Gisèle Pelicot told the court last month, saying she had been “sacrificed on the altar of vice”.

In almost two months of testimony, the court has heard from dozens of accused men. The majority denied rape. Some said they thought Pelicot was pretending to be asleep or was playing a game, or felt the fact her husband had consented was sufficient.

Video evidence of the alleged rapes was discovered by police after Dominique Pelicot was arrested in 2020 after filming up women’s skirts in a supermarket.

A total of 50 men were identified by police from films meticulously labelled and stored by Pelicot. The men on trial alongside Pelicot face sentences of up to 20 years in prison. In total, 49 men are accused of rape, one of attempted rape and one of sexual assault. Five others are also accused of possessing child abuse imagery.

Aged between 26 and 74, the accused include a nurse, a journalist, a prison officer, a local councillor, a soldier, lorry drivers and farm workers.

Pelicot said she felt humiliated by questioning from defence lawyers who had argued that the men might have made an error of judgment, or thought she was drunk or pretending to be asleep and complicit.

“I have felt humiliated while I’ve been in this courtroom. I have been called an alcoholic, a conspirator of Mr Pelicot,” she said in court last month, adding that her life had been “destroyed” for 10 years.

“In the state I was in, I absolutely could not respond. I was in a comatose state – the videos show that.”

She has been invited by the court president to speak as the trial nears the halfway point.

Pelicot’s lawyer, Antoine Camus, said she did not want a trial behind closed doors because “that’s what her attackers would have wanted”. She wanted the trial to raise awareness of the use of drugging in sexual assault.

Thousands have taken part in street demonstrations across France in support of Gisèle Pelicot.

The trial runs until 20 December.

First King George III. Now Sir Keir Starmer.

Citing the American revolution while misspelling “Britian”, Donald Trump’s campaign has filed an extraordinary complaint against the UK’s Labour party for what it claims is “interference” in the US presidential election.

The Trump campaign alleged that in recent weeks, Labour recruited and sent party members to campaign for his opponent, Kamala Harris, in critical battleground states in a bid to influence the 5 November election.

“When representatives of the British government previously sought to go door-to-door in America, it did not end well for them,” says a letter from Trump’s legal team to the Federal Election Commission in Washington.

“This past week marked the 243 anniversary of the surrender of British forces at the Battle of Yorktown, a military victory that ensured that the United States would be politically independent of Great Britian” – an incorrect rendering of “Britain”.

It is understood that volunteers are campaigning in the US in their own personal time, rather in their capacity working for the the Labour party.

The letter goes on to request an immediate investigation into “blatant foreign interference” in the election in the form of “apparent illegal foreign national contributions made by the Labour Party of the United Kingdom” and accepted by Harris’s campaign committee.

It also refers to a report in the Washington Post that claims advice has been offered between Labour and the Harris campaign, and other reports regarding meetings between senior Labour staff and the Democratic campaign.

Those referenced in the letter include Matthew Doyle, Downing Street director of communications, and Morgan McSweeney, the prime minister’s chief of staff.

The complaint references a social media post, which appears to have been deleted, in which Sofia Patel, head of operations at Labour, posted on LinkedIn last week that 100 current and former party staffers were headed to the US to campaign for Harris.

The letter refers to a “volunteer exemption” in US elections which means foreign nationals can volunteer, but the letter states “they may not be compensated, foreign nationals may not make expenditures, and they may not direct or control activities of US campaigns”.

Last week’s post received a swift backlash from Republicans, with far-right representative Marjorie Taylor Greene writing on X that “foreign nationals are not allowed to be involved in anyway in US elections”.

And Elon Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur backing Trump, wrote on X, the social media platform he owns: “This is illegal” – only to delete the post after a community note pointed out there is no law preventing foreigners from participating in unpaid door-knocking.

The Trump campaign followed up on Tuesday with its legal complaint. Susie Wiles, co-manager of the campaign, said: “In two weeks, Americans will once again reject the oppression of big government that we rejected in 1776. The flailing Harris-Walz campaign is seeking foreign influence to boost its radical message – because they know they can’t win the American people.

“President Trump will return strength to the White House and put America, and our people, first. The Harris campaign’s acceptance and use of this illegal foreign assistance is just another feeble attempt in a long line of anti-American election interference.”

Starmer, the British prime minister, met Trump, the former US president, during a trip to New York last month. Starmer visited Trump Tower, saying he wanted to meet Trump face to face because “I’m a great believer in personal relationships on the world stage”.

Kamala Harris said that she has no doubt that the US was ready for a female president, insisting that Americans care more about what candidates can do to help them, rather than presidential contenders’ gender.

The vice-president’s statement came during an interview with NBC News’s Hallie Jackson, who asked whether she thought the country was ready for a woman, and a woman of color, to be in the Oval Office. “Absolutely,” Harris said. “Absolutely.”

“In terms of every walk of life of our country,” Harris said, “part of what is important in this election is really, not really turning the page – closing a chapter, on an era that suggests that Americans are divided.

“The vast majority of us have so much more in common than what separates us and what the American people want in their president is a president for all Americans,” she said.

Harris was asked why she hasn’t leaned into the historic nature of her candidacy – that she is a woman of color running for the presidency.

“I’m clearly a woman. I don’t need to point that out to anyone,” Harris said with a laugh. “The point that most people really care about is: can you do the job and, do you have a plan to actually focus on them?”

“That is why I spend the majority of my time listening and then addressing the concerns, the challenges, the dreams, the ambitions and the aspirations of the American people,” Harris continued, saying that Americans deserve a president focused on them, “as opposed to a Donald Trump, who is constantly focused on himself”.

Harris also said she was aware that Trump might potentially try thwarting the presidential election results, noting that her team “will deal with election night and the days after as they come”.

Harris said that she is focused on campaigning over the next two weeks while noting “we have the resources and the expertise and the focus” on any potential threats to election results. Jackson noted that Trump declared victory before all the votes were tallied in 2020.

Trump, who has refused to accept the 2020 election results and claimed the race was stolen, has been stoking fears with unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud in the 2024 cycle. “This is a person, Donald Trump, who tried to undo the free and fair election, who still denies the will of the people who incited a violent mob to attack the United States Capitol, and 140 law enforcement officers were attacked, some who were killed. This is a serious matter,” Harris told Jackson.

Trump supporters on 6 January 2021 stormed the US Capitol in an effort to prevent certification of Joe Biden’s victory. That day, four people died at the Capitol and a police officer working during the insurrection died several days later; four other police officers posted at the building on 6 January 2021 committed suicide, according to CBS News.

“The American people are, at this point, two weeks out, being presented with a very, very serious decision about what will be the future of our country,” Harris also said.

Jackson also asked about voters’ concerns about the economy, noting that many blame the US president for rising prices.

Harris said her policies “will not be a continuation of the Biden administration” and with inflation, “I bring my own experiences, my own ideas to it.”

Jackson noted that if Harris won, her victory might coincide with Republican control of Congress, which would thwart protecting abortion at the national level.

“What concessions would be on the table?” Jackson asked.

“I don’t think we should be making concessions when we’re talking about a fundamental freedom to make decisions about your own body,” Harris said.

Harris said she would not “get into those hypotheticals” when asked if a pardon might be on the table for Trump.

“I’m focused on the next 14 days.”

Harris was pressed on the pardon topic, asked if she thought it could help the country move forward together and be less divisive.

“Let me tell you what’s going to help us move on: I get elected to president of the United States.”

Rudy Giuliani must give control of his New York City apartment, a 1980s Mercedes-Benz once owned by Lauren Bacall, several luxury watches and many other assets to two Georgia election workers he defamed.

Lewis Liman, a US district judge in New York, appointed Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss as recipients of the property and gave the former New York mayor and Trump confidante seven days to turn over the assets.

A jury ruled that Giuliani owes them around $150m for spreading lies about them after the 2020 election though Giuliani is appealing the ruling. Liman authorized the two women to immediately begin selling the assets.

“The road to justice for Ruby and Shaye has been long, but they have never wavered,” said Aaron Nathan, a lawyer representing Freeman and Moss. “Last December, a jury delivered a powerful verdict in their favor, and we’re proud that today’s ruling makes that verdict a reality.”

“We are proud that our clients will finally begin to receive some of the compensation to which they are entitled for Giuliani’s actions,” said Nathan. “This outcome should send a powerful message that there is a price to pay for those who choose to intentionally spread disinformation.”

A spokesperson for Giuliani did not immediately return a request for comment.

In addition to his apartment on the Upper East Side Giuliani was also ordered to turn over several items of Yankees memorabilia and around two dozen watches. The two women are also entitled to fees the Trump campaign owes Giuliani for his legal work in 2020.

Giuliani first listed the three-bedroom apartment for $6.5m in 2023, but had cut the price to a little more than $5.1m this fall.

Liman did not order Giuliani to turn over a separate Palm Beach condominium, for now, amid an ongoing legal dispute there. Liman instead entered an order barring Giuliani from selling the condo while that dispute is ongoing.

After losing the defamation case last fall, Giuliani declared bankruptcy to try and avoid paying Freeman and Moss the money they were owed. A judge dismissed that bankruptcy case earlier this year.

After the 2020 election, Giuliani amplified a misleading video and falsely accused Freeman and Moss of illegal activity while counting ballots in Atlanta on election night in 2020. He continued to do so even after Georgia election officials said the video showed both women doing their jobs with no issue. They have also been formally cleared by investigators of any wrongdoing.

The video and lie about the two women became central to Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the election results in Georgia. The ex-president mentioned Freeman by name on a phone call in 2021 with Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, asking her to overturn the vote.

Both women have rarely been seen in public since the incident, but have spoken about how it has upended their lives. They received constant death threats, were chased from their homes, and lost their jobs. During the defamation trial in Washington DC, they spoke about the depression they faced after the election.

Giuliani, who lost his law license in New York and Washington DC, has shown little regret for his false statements. During the trial, he gave a press conference on the courthouse steps in which he insisted everything he said about Freeman and Moss was true.

Freeman and Moss also recently settled a defamation suit with the Gateway Pundit, a far-right news site that was the first to publicly identify them and amplified the video. While the terms of that settlement were confidential, the site has deleted all articles mentioning the two women and posted a notice acknowledging they did not do anything wrong.

Freeman and Moss have also settled a lawsuit with One America News Network, another far-right network, which broadcast an apology.

All of those cases are being closely watched because they amount to the most significant accountability so far for those who spread lies about the 2020 election. Scholars are closely watching to understand how powerful a tool defamation law can be in curbing misinformation.

Giuliani also faces criminal charges in Georgia and Arizona over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

Elon Musk’s Pac is spending far more on ads on Facebook and YouTube than on X, Musk’s own social network.

America Pac paid $201,000 to run dozens of ads on X, formerly Twitter, during the past three months. However, it spent $3m on thousands of advertisements on Facebook and Instagram in roughly the same time period. Musk founded the pro-Donald Trump Pac in July and has funded it to the tune of $75m, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission.

From 8 July to 1 October, 85 days, America Pac spent more than $166,000 on 59 ads on X, according to political ad disclosures reported by Wired. After Musk requisitioned the @America handle for the Pac on 7 October, it has spent roughly $34,000 on X ads, Bloomberg reported. The ads targeted several swing states – Georgia, Nevada, Michigan, Arizona and Wisconsin – but focus heavily on Pennsylvania. They have generated roughly 32m impressions, per Wired.

Contrast those figures with America Pac’s ad buys on Facebook. From 22 July to 19 October, a 90-day stretch, the organization spent more than $3m to run 1,910 advertisements there, duplicating some to Instagram, according to Meta’s Ad Library. America Pac paid to show ads to users in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona.

Roughly a dozen ads from America Pac received more than 1m impressions. Others garnered hundreds of thousands. The Meta Ad Library does not give an aggregate number of impressions for individual advertisers, complicating a direct comparison with ads on X.

Musk’s Pac is also spending big with Google, which owns YouTube. Since the start of July, America Pac has lavished $1.5m on 251 ads on Google and its subsidiary, 10 times what the Pac has spent on X, according to the Google Ads Transparency Center. The Pac spent 80% of that money on video ads, and the largest share of the ads were shown in Georgia, per Google’s disclosures.

Musk boasts more than 200 million followers on X. With such a massive following, he can speak to an enormous audience without needing to pay. He often retweets America Pac’s posts. Fewer than 7,000 people follow the Pac itself.

The Facebook spending speaks to Musk’s shifting geographic focus. Audience data in Meta’s Ad Library show the biggest percentage of America Pac’s ads for the past 90 days have targeted North Carolina. In the past seven days, though, the largest share of the ads – more than 25% – targeted Pennsylvania, where Musk himself has been doing most of his in-person campaigning.

Facebook allows advertisers to refine their audiences by targeting users who have engaged with similar pages. America Pac is going after users interested in Kelsey Grammer, trophy hunting, Kid Rock, the Boy Scouts of America and Joe Rogan, among other things.

Since purchasing Twitter and renaming it X in 2022, Musk has trumpeted its advertising offerings and its performance in the app store. Advertising still made up 70-75% of X’s total revenue in 2023, Bloomberg reported, despite Musk’s introduction of a subscription product, Twitter Blue. The company took in just $2.5bn in revenue in 2023, a decline of nearly half from the year prior, mostly due to a slump in advertising dollars.

Musk has thrown money at in-person events as well. Over the weekend, he pledged to give away $1m per day until the election to registered voters who sign America Pac’s petition. He’s been awarding the prizes in the form of giant novelty checks held at rallies in Pennsylvania for the past several days.

A speech by Australian judge Patrick Keane KC has been met by a vociferous protest over his continued presence on the bench of Hong Kong’s controversial court of final appeal.

A slew of foreign judges has quit the court, with one arguing the rule of law in Hong Kong has been “profoundly compromised” and that the city-state is “becoming a totalitarian state”.

Of the six remaining foreign judges – down from 15 – four are Australian. Only two, including Keane, joined the court since the implementation of Hong Kong’s national security law, which criminalises acts of dissent and subversion, and is seen as a political weapon against the pro-democracy movement.

Keane spoke at Sydney’s Banco Court on Tuesday night, giving an address titled Christian Inspiration and Constitutional Insights that included quotes from such varied figures as Frederick the Great, Thomas Jefferson, John Locke and British judge Lord Jonathan Sumption, one of his former colleagues on the Hong Kong court bench.

Sumption quit the bench in June this year, writing in an excoriating opinion piece that the rule of law in Hong Kong was “profoundly compromised”, and that the territory was “becoming a totalitarian state”.

Sumption wrote that local judges were working under an “impossible political environment created by China”.

“I remained on the [court] in the hope that the presence of overseas judges would help sustain the rule of law. I fear that this is no longer realistic,” he wrote.

On Tuesday evening, on the forecourt of Sydney’s law courts building, protesters gathered bearing pictures of jailed Hong Kong pro-democracy publisher Jimmy Lai, who is being held in solitary confinement on charges – internationally seen as politically motivated – of organising illegal protests.

The Sydney protest seemingly prevented Keane from attending an advertised post-speech drinks. He had been due to attend but was not present.

Alerted to the protest, he left the court building via an alternative exit, as protesters held a flashing neon representation of Lai in chains, above the words “Prisoner of Conscience”.

One protester approached Keane in the street, filming him and asking: “Do you know Jimmy Lai?”

Keane declined to comment. The Guardian has sent a series of questions to Keane.

Keane, a justice of the Australian high court from 2013 until his retirement in 2022, has previously defended his position as a non-permanent judge on the Hong Kong bench.

He told the Guardian in 2023 “my own view would be that given how successful the court [of final appeal] has been in its role in upholding the rule of law, one should be very slow indeed to decline the opportunity to serve on such a successful court”.

He said the court had a long history as “a very successful institution that’s made an important contribution to the success of Hong Kong”, and that it was better to play a role rather than “vacate the field”.

“One has to be very careful about declining to do good work because one has an apprehension that one might be asked to do bad work,” he said.

But pro-democracy activists and Hong Kong advocacy groups have consistently called for foreign judges to quit the CFA bench, arguing their judicial credibility lends legitimacy to a legal system which has been undermined by the city’s worsening security environment, in particular the 2020 national security law.

Critics say the court cannot claim to stand fully independent of government wishes, and that the government wishes are increasingly anti-democratic. The court of final appeal is Hong Kong’s highest court, but on occasion the government has asked the Chinese central government – which has ultimate control of Hong Kong – to reinterpret laws after rulings it found unfavourable.

In November 2022 the Hong Kong government did precisely that after the CFA rejected its attempt to have foreign lawyers banned from representing clients in national security cases. Government prosecutors had been seeking to ban British lawyer Tim Owen from representing Lai in court. In December, Beijing’s top lawmaking body ruled that courts must get the Hong Kong leader’s approval to admit any foreign lawyer on a national security case.

Alyssa Fong, manager of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, said it was “shocking” that Keane had chosen to join the bench after the implementation of the national security law, which saw mass arrests of pro-democracy demonstrators, and widespread repression of civil liberties and press freedoms.

“As a Hongkonger, it is heartbreaking,” she said.

Well-known figures from the international legal community sitting on the court lend legitimacy to the authoritarian crackdown in Hong Kong, she said.

“Following the string of resignations this summer, Justice Keane should reevaluate his position … and step down from the court of final appeal.”

Five foreign judges have resigned from the CFA this year, and 10 since the national security law was introduced. Several have cited the political situation in their reasons for leaving.

There are now just six foreign judges left: four Australians including Keane, and two from the UK. Keane and fellow Australian justice James Allsop are the only ones to have joined the bench since the national security law was introduced. British judge David Neuberger, who joined the court in 2009 and is hearing appeals from Lai, told the Guardian earlier this year that he still believed Hong Kong’s judiciary was independent, and its legal profession “thriving and able”.

The foreign judges are in the judiciary’s pool of non-permanent judges, who sit on the five-person bench hearing final appeals. The overseas judges typically come to the city on rotation, for about one month. They are flown to Hong Kong on an ad hoc basis determined by the chief justice, on first-class tickets and given luxury accommodation as well as a reported salary of about HK$400,000 (AU$77,000).

A speech by Australian judge Patrick Keane KC has been met by a vociferous protest over his continued presence on the bench of Hong Kong’s controversial court of final appeal.

A slew of foreign judges has quit the court, with one arguing the rule of law in Hong Kong has been “profoundly compromised” and that the city-state is “becoming a totalitarian state”.

Of the six remaining foreign judges – down from 15 – four are Australian. Only two, including Keane, joined the court since the implementation of Hong Kong’s national security law, which criminalises acts of dissent and subversion, and is seen as a political weapon against the pro-democracy movement.

Keane spoke at Sydney’s Banco Court on Tuesday night, giving an address titled Christian Inspiration and Constitutional Insights that included quotes from such varied figures as Frederick the Great, Thomas Jefferson, John Locke and British judge Lord Jonathan Sumption, one of his former colleagues on the Hong Kong court bench.

Sumption quit the bench in June this year, writing in an excoriating opinion piece that the rule of law in Hong Kong was “profoundly compromised”, and that the territory was “becoming a totalitarian state”.

Sumption wrote that local judges were working under an “impossible political environment created by China”.

“I remained on the [court] in the hope that the presence of overseas judges would help sustain the rule of law. I fear that this is no longer realistic,” he wrote.

On Tuesday evening, on the forecourt of Sydney’s law courts building, protesters gathered bearing pictures of jailed Hong Kong pro-democracy publisher Jimmy Lai, who is being held in solitary confinement on charges – internationally seen as politically motivated – of organising illegal protests.

The Sydney protest seemingly prevented Keane from attending an advertised post-speech drinks. He had been due to attend but was not present.

Alerted to the protest, he left the court building via an alternative exit, as protesters held a flashing neon representation of Lai in chains, above the words “Prisoner of Conscience”.

One protester approached Keane in the street, filming him and asking: “Do you know Jimmy Lai?”

Keane declined to comment. The Guardian has sent a series of questions to Keane.

Keane, a justice of the Australian high court from 2013 until his retirement in 2022, has previously defended his position as a non-permanent judge on the Hong Kong bench.

He told the Guardian in 2023 “my own view would be that given how successful the court [of final appeal] has been in its role in upholding the rule of law, one should be very slow indeed to decline the opportunity to serve on such a successful court”.

He said the court had a long history as “a very successful institution that’s made an important contribution to the success of Hong Kong”, and that it was better to play a role rather than “vacate the field”.

“One has to be very careful about declining to do good work because one has an apprehension that one might be asked to do bad work,” he said.

But pro-democracy activists and Hong Kong advocacy groups have consistently called for foreign judges to quit the CFA bench, arguing their judicial credibility lends legitimacy to a legal system which has been undermined by the city’s worsening security environment, in particular the 2020 national security law.

Critics say the court cannot claim to stand fully independent of government wishes, and that the government wishes are increasingly anti-democratic. The court of final appeal is Hong Kong’s highest court, but on occasion the government has asked the Chinese central government – which has ultimate control of Hong Kong – to reinterpret laws after rulings it found unfavourable.

In November 2022 the Hong Kong government did precisely that after the CFA rejected its attempt to have foreign lawyers banned from representing clients in national security cases. Government prosecutors had been seeking to ban British lawyer Tim Owen from representing Lai in court. In December, Beijing’s top lawmaking body ruled that courts must get the Hong Kong leader’s approval to admit any foreign lawyer on a national security case.

Alyssa Fong, manager of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, said it was “shocking” that Keane had chosen to join the bench after the implementation of the national security law, which saw mass arrests of pro-democracy demonstrators, and widespread repression of civil liberties and press freedoms.

“As a Hongkonger, it is heartbreaking,” she said.

Well-known figures from the international legal community sitting on the court lend legitimacy to the authoritarian crackdown in Hong Kong, she said.

“Following the string of resignations this summer, Justice Keane should reevaluate his position … and step down from the court of final appeal.”

Five foreign judges have resigned from the CFA this year, and 10 since the national security law was introduced. Several have cited the political situation in their reasons for leaving.

There are now just six foreign judges left: four Australians including Keane, and two from the UK. Keane and fellow Australian justice James Allsop are the only ones to have joined the bench since the national security law was introduced. British judge David Neuberger, who joined the court in 2009 and is hearing appeals from Lai, told the Guardian earlier this year that he still believed Hong Kong’s judiciary was independent, and its legal profession “thriving and able”.

The foreign judges are in the judiciary’s pool of non-permanent judges, who sit on the five-person bench hearing final appeals. The overseas judges typically come to the city on rotation, for about one month. They are flown to Hong Kong on an ad hoc basis determined by the chief justice, on first-class tickets and given luxury accommodation as well as a reported salary of about HK$400,000 (AU$77,000).

Thirteen people have died from rare flesh-eating bacteria infections in Florida this year amid a spike in cases related to hurricane activity in the state.

Florida health authorities said there have been 74 confirmed cases of Vibrio vulnificus infections in 2024, compared with 46 cases and 11 deaths in 2023.

Vibrio vulnificus is “a naturally occurring bacteria in warm, brackish seawater”, requiring salt to live, according to the Florida department of health.

Authorities attributed the surge to Hurricane Helene, which last month lashed Florida with breakneck winds and historic storm surge. The storm then traveled into southern Appalachia, ravaging western North Carolina with deadly flooding and landslides, killing about 100 people there.

“In 2024 Citrus, Hernando, Hillsborough, Lee, Pasco, Pinellas, and Sarasota Counties experiences unusual increase due to the impacts of Hurricane Helene,” the department said. Hurricane Milton struck Florida as a powerful category 3 storm on 9 October; at least two dozen were killed by the storm, many in relation to a tornado outbreak that unfolded before landfall.

Florida health authorities said “Vibrio bacteria, commonly found in warm coastal waters, can cause illness when ingested or when open wounds are exposed to contaminated water.”

“After heavy rainfall and flooding, the concentration of these bacteria may rise, particularly in brackish and saltwater environments,” they added.

Once infected, Vibrio vulnificus can prompt the breakdown of skin and soft tissue, USA Today said. To prevent the infection from spreading, medics might have to amputate the infected limb, though the infection can prove deadly.

This is not the first year that cataclysmic weather has prompted a Vibrio outbreak in Florida. In 2022, there were 74 cases and 17 deaths; health officials noted that Collier and Lee counties saw “unusual increase due to the impacts of Hurricane Ian”.

While some Vibrio infections do lead to necrotizing fasciitis, the severe infection in where flesh around an open wound dies, public health authorities believe that a type of Streptococcus is actually the most common cause of this condition in the US, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Some experts have balked at the use of “flesh-eating” to describe severe Vibrio infection, noting that it cannot destroy healthy and intact skin even with prolonged exposure.

In the 18 months after the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, leading more than a dozen states to implement near-total abortion bans, hundreds more babies died than expected, new research has found.

The study, which was conducted by researchers from the Ohio State University and published on Monday in Jama Pediatrics, compared data on infant mortality from the months before Roe’s downfall with data from afterward. Overall infant mortality, they found, rose by 7% in October 2022, March 2023 and April 2023.

On average, in those months, researchers found that there were roughly 247 more infant deaths a month than expected. In six out of those 18 months, mortality among infants with congenital anomalies rose by 10%. In those months, there were about 210 more deaths a month than expected.

Infant mortality rates never dropped lower than expected.

This study is the latest to examine how Roe’s demise has affected babies’ health. In June, another study estimated that, after Texas outlawed abortions past roughly six weeks of pregnancy, the number of infants who died in their first year of life rose by 13%.

The researchers behind that study also found that deaths among infants with congenital anomalies spiked.

These conditions can frequently be detected in utero and, in states where abortion is still legal, lead people to terminate their pregnancies, especially since they may be incompatible with life. However, that may no longer be an option for people living under abortion bans.

“Any infant death is tragic, but then layering on top of that, this pregnant person’s situation where they know that they’re carrying a fetus that is incompatible with life, whereas before, they maybe would have had the option to terminate,” Alison Gemmill, the lead author of the June study and an assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told the Guardian after her study was released.

The study released on Monday did not break down infant mortality rates by state.

Abortion bans have also threatened pregnant women’s health. Dozens of women from across the country have said that, due to highly restrictive bans, they were denied medically necessary abortions.

Two women, Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller, died in Georgia after being unable to access legal abortions due to the state’s six-week abortion ban, ProPublica has reported.

Rudy Giuliani must give control of his New York City apartment, a 1980s Mercedes-Benz once owned by Lauren Bacall, several luxury watches and many other assets to two Georgia election workers he defamed.

Lewis Liman, a US district judge in New York, appointed Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss as recipients of the property and gave the former New York mayor and Trump confidante seven days to turn over the assets.

A jury ruled that Giuliani owes them around $150m for spreading lies about them after the 2020 election though Giuliani is appealing the ruling. Liman authorized the two women to immediately begin selling the assets.

“The road to justice for Ruby and Shaye has been long, but they have never wavered,” said Aaron Nathan, a lawyer representing Freeman and Moss. “Last December, a jury delivered a powerful verdict in their favor, and we’re proud that today’s ruling makes that verdict a reality.”

“We are proud that our clients will finally begin to receive some of the compensation to which they are entitled for Giuliani’s actions,” said Nathan. “This outcome should send a powerful message that there is a price to pay for those who choose to intentionally spread disinformation.”

A spokesperson for Giuliani did not immediately return a request for comment.

In addition to his apartment on the Upper East Side Giuliani was also ordered to turn over several items of Yankees memorabilia and around two dozen watches. The two women are also entitled to fees the Trump campaign owes Giuliani for his legal work in 2020.

Giuliani first listed the three-bedroom apartment for $6.5m in 2023, but had cut the price to a little more than $5.1m this fall.

Liman did not order Giuliani to turn over a separate Palm Beach condominium, for now, amid an ongoing legal dispute there. Liman instead entered an order barring Giuliani from selling the condo while that dispute is ongoing.

After losing the defamation case last fall, Giuliani declared bankruptcy to try and avoid paying Freeman and Moss the money they were owed. A judge dismissed that bankruptcy case earlier this year.

After the 2020 election, Giuliani amplified a misleading video and falsely accused Freeman and Moss of illegal activity while counting ballots in Atlanta on election night in 2020. He continued to do so even after Georgia election officials said the video showed both women doing their jobs with no issue. They have also been formally cleared by investigators of any wrongdoing.

The video and lie about the two women became central to Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the election results in Georgia. The ex-president mentioned Freeman by name on a phone call in 2021 with Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, asking her to overturn the vote.

Both women have rarely been seen in public since the incident, but have spoken about how it has upended their lives. They received constant death threats, were chased from their homes, and lost their jobs. During the defamation trial in Washington DC, they spoke about the depression they faced after the election.

Giuliani, who lost his law license in New York and Washington DC, has shown little regret for his false statements. During the trial, he gave a press conference on the courthouse steps in which he insisted everything he said about Freeman and Moss was true.

Freeman and Moss also recently settled a defamation suit with the Gateway Pundit, a far-right news site that was the first to publicly identify them and amplified the video. While the terms of that settlement were confidential, the site has deleted all articles mentioning the two women and posted a notice acknowledging they did not do anything wrong.

Freeman and Moss have also settled a lawsuit with One America News Network, another far-right network, which broadcast an apology.

All of those cases are being closely watched because they amount to the most significant accountability so far for those who spread lies about the 2020 election. Scholars are closely watching to understand how powerful a tool defamation law can be in curbing misinformation.

Giuliani also faces criminal charges in Georgia and Arizona over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

Rudy Giuliani must give control of his New York City apartment, a 1980s Mercedes-Benz once owned by Lauren Bacall, several luxury watches and many other assets to two Georgia election workers he defamed.

Lewis Liman, a US district judge in New York, appointed Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss as recipients of the property and gave the former New York mayor and Trump confidante seven days to turn over the assets.

A jury ruled that Giuliani owes them around $150m for spreading lies about them after the 2020 election though Giuliani is appealing the ruling. Liman authorized the two women to immediately begin selling the assets.

“The road to justice for Ruby and Shaye has been long, but they have never wavered,” said Aaron Nathan, a lawyer representing Freeman and Moss. “Last December, a jury delivered a powerful verdict in their favor, and we’re proud that today’s ruling makes that verdict a reality.”

“We are proud that our clients will finally begin to receive some of the compensation to which they are entitled for Giuliani’s actions,” said Nathan. “This outcome should send a powerful message that there is a price to pay for those who choose to intentionally spread disinformation.”

A spokesperson for Giuliani did not immediately return a request for comment.

In addition to his apartment on the Upper East Side Giuliani was also ordered to turn over several items of Yankees memorabilia and around two dozen watches. The two women are also entitled to fees the Trump campaign owes Giuliani for his legal work in 2020.

Giuliani first listed the three-bedroom apartment for $6.5m in 2023, but had cut the price to a little more than $5.1m this fall.

Liman did not order Giuliani to turn over a separate Palm Beach condominium, for now, amid an ongoing legal dispute there. Liman instead entered an order barring Giuliani from selling the condo while that dispute is ongoing.

After losing the defamation case last fall, Giuliani declared bankruptcy to try and avoid paying Freeman and Moss the money they were owed. A judge dismissed that bankruptcy case earlier this year.

After the 2020 election, Giuliani amplified a misleading video and falsely accused Freeman and Moss of illegal activity while counting ballots in Atlanta on election night in 2020. He continued to do so even after Georgia election officials said the video showed both women doing their jobs with no issue. They have also been formally cleared by investigators of any wrongdoing.

The video and lie about the two women became central to Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the election results in Georgia. The ex-president mentioned Freeman by name on a phone call in 2021 with Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, asking her to overturn the vote.

Both women have rarely been seen in public since the incident, but have spoken about how it has upended their lives. They received constant death threats, were chased from their homes, and lost their jobs. During the defamation trial in Washington DC, they spoke about the depression they faced after the election.

Giuliani, who lost his law license in New York and Washington DC, has shown little regret for his false statements. During the trial, he gave a press conference on the courthouse steps in which he insisted everything he said about Freeman and Moss was true.

Freeman and Moss also recently settled a defamation suit with the Gateway Pundit, a far-right news site that was the first to publicly identify them and amplified the video. While the terms of that settlement were confidential, the site has deleted all articles mentioning the two women and posted a notice acknowledging they did not do anything wrong.

Freeman and Moss have also settled a lawsuit with One America News Network, another far-right network, which broadcast an apology.

All of those cases are being closely watched because they amount to the most significant accountability so far for those who spread lies about the 2020 election. Scholars are closely watching to understand how powerful a tool defamation law can be in curbing misinformation.

Giuliani also faces criminal charges in Georgia and Arizona over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

Roman Polanski, the Oscar-winning film director who fled the US decades ago after admitting to the statutory rape of a 13-year-old, will no longer face trial over an alleged sexual assault of another minor after reaching a settlement.

The latest case against the now 91-year-old director, which concerned an alleged sexual attack in 1973, had been due in civil court in Los Angeles next August.

The civil suit, filed last year, claimed Polanski took a then-teenager – named anonymously in filings as Jane Doe – to dinner at a restaurant in Los Angeles in 1973.

The lawsuit alleged that he gave her tequila, and when she began to feel dizzy, drove her to his home, where she alleged he sexually assaulted her.

“She told him: ‘Please don’t do this,’” the plaintiff’s lawyer, Gloria Allred, told reporters in March, saying the alleged assault caused the plaintiff “tremendous physical, emotional pain and suffering”.

But the case was “settled in the summer to the parties’ mutual satisfaction and has now been formally dismissed,” Polanski’s lawyer, Alexander Rufus-Isaacs told Agence France-Presse on Tuesday.

Allred confirmed this to the Guardian, saying a settlement of claims was agreed “to their mutual satisfaction”.

The lawsuit, which sought unspecified damages, was filed in June 2023, just before the expiration of a California law that allowed for an extended window for claims against the alleged perpetrators of sexual crimes.

Court papers filed in California in July said a “conditional” accord had been reached.

Polanski is a divisive figure.

He admitted to the statutory rape of 13-year-old Samantha Geimer in a plea bargain in 1977 to avoid a trial on more serious charges.

But he fled to France the following year, after serving 42 days in jail, when it appeared a judge was reconsidering his release. He has been a fugitive from the US ever since.

Geimer has subsequently defended Polanski, and was photographed with him last year.

Four women came forward between 2017 and 2019 accusing Polanski of abusing them in the 1970s – three of them were allegedly minors at the time – including artist Marianne Barnard, who said Polanski sexually assaulted her when she was 10. Charlotte Lewis, a British actor, in 2010 accused Polanski of sexually assaulting her in 1983 when she was 16. Polanski has denied all of the allegations.

In May, a French court acquitted Polanski of defaming Lewis after he denied raping her when she was a teenager.

– Agence France Press contributed to this report.

• In the US, call or text the Childhelp abuse hotline on 800-422-4453 or visit their website for more resources and to report child abuse or DM for help. For adult survivors of child abuse, help is available at ascasupport.org. In the UK, the NSPCC offers support to children on 0800 1111, and adults concerned about a child on 0808 800 5000. The National Association for People Abused in Childhood (Napac) offers support for adult survivors on 0808 801 0331. In Australia, children, young adults, parents and teachers can contact the Kids Helpline on 1800 55 1800, or Bravehearts on 1800 272 831, and adult survivors can contact Blue Knot Foundation on 1300 657 380. Other sources of help can be found at Child Helplines International

Ireland’s prime minister has questioned how an eight-year-old boy who may have been killed up to two years ago could have disappeared without being noticed in a case he described as “utterly horrifying”.

Police have taken the unusual step of opening a murder investigation even though no body has been found in the case of Kyran Durnin, who was reported missing along with his mother on 30 August.

Detectives said they were told the pair were last seen two days previously. The boy’s mother has since been located, but police said there was no sign of the child and he was presumed dead.

“Despite extensive enquiries … Garda Síochána (Irish police) have been unable to either locate Kyran, identify any information on his current whereabouts or any evidence that he is currently alive.

“Following enquiries to date investigating Gardaí now believe that Kyran is missing, presumed dead,” the police said, appealing for anyone who has any information that might be connected to the case to contact them.

Police believe he may have disappeared two years ago and said he was known to have been a pupil at a local school until “approximately the end of the 2021/2022 primary school year”.

After obtaining a court order, they began a forensic search of the home and adjacent grounds in Dundalk where Kyran had previously lived.

The case has caused shockwaves across Ireland with the taoiseach, Simon Harris, describing it as “deeply disturbing, deeply upsetting” on Tuesday.

“For any of us as a human being, for any of us parents, to think that a child can effectively disappear and go unnoticed … is utterly heartbreaking and clearly something went extraordinarily wrong here. This child was failed and was failed badly,” Harris said.

“How was this child failed? How could an eight year old little boy effectively disappear and not be noticed?”

Police have stressed that the current tenants of the red-brick terrace house in Dundalk being searched “are not connected in any way with Kyran or his disappearance”. The property was the home of the boy’s family until May this year.

They said they were conducting a forensic search of the house, the garden and adjoining open ground “to discover any evidence which might provide” information about what happened to the child.

Speaking outside Dundalk Garda station, Ch Supt Alan McGovern said police were “liaising closely” with other state agencies including the child protection agency, Tusla.

In a statement, Tusla said that while Kyran was not in their care, its services had engaged with his family with “significant concern” raised in August 2024.

“Since August, we have continued to assist and work closely with the Gardai, and in line with normal practice, all relevant information has been shared,” it said.

The justice minister, Helen McEntee, described the case last week as “devastating”.

“Unfortunately the view is that he is most likely dead and has passed away, but we need to understand what’s happened.

“We need to know have there been failures here, where have those failures been taking taking place, but also who is responsible for them.

“I am absolutely adamant if there were failing here, they need to be addressed and people need to be held accountable.”

Doctors have begun trialling the world’s first vaccine against the vomiting bug norovirus in the hope the jab could bring huge health and economic benefits.

Norovirus causes sickness and diarrhoea and can spread very rapidly between people who are in close contact, with outbreaks often occurring in hospitals, care homes, schools and nurseries.

While most people recover within two to three days, the virus can be serious, particularly for the very young, elderly or people with a weakened immune system.

Dr Patrick Moore, a GP and national chief investigator for the trial in the UK, said that at present there were no approved vaccines for norovirus in the world, while people who become very ill were simply given intravenous fluids.

Moore added that the burden of the bug was huge, with about 685m cases and 200,000 deaths globally each year. In the UK it is thought there are about 4m norovirus cases annually, with 12,000 hospitalisations a year in England alone.

“In the UK, norovirus is estimated to cost about £100m annually to the NHS [and] if you take into account lost earnings, that’s about £300m,” Moore said.

Called Nova 301, the phase 3 clinical trial is to run for two years, and will enrol 25,000 adults – with a focus on those over the age of 60 – from countries including Japan, Canada and Australia.

In total, 27 NHS primary and secondary care sites in England, Scotland and Wales will be involved in the trial, with about 2,500 participants to be recruited from late October. The team added they will also be using mobile units to make it easier for people to take part.

The British arm of the study is part of the 10-year Moderna-UK Strategic Partnership and involves a collaboration between the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), and the pharmaceutical company Moderna, which is producing the vaccine.

Within the trial, half of the participants will be randomly allocated to receive the new vaccine, and the other half will receive a saline shot as a placebo.

The norovirus vaccine is based on mRNA technology – an approach used by companies such as Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech in the development of their Covid jabs.

Such vaccines work by introducing a single-stranded molecule – mRNA – into human cells. The mRNA carries instructions that can be used by machinery within these cells to make proteins associated with the virus. These proteins then trigger the body’s immune system, providing protection against a future encounter with virus itself.

In the case of the new jab, the mRNA carries instructions for making the protein coat of three different types of norovirus, giving rise to the formation of harmless virus-like particles which can trigger the production of antibodies.

While the team said earlier trials of the vaccine have shown it generates a strong immune response in humans, the new trial is designed to explore whether the jab is effective against the virus itself and, if so, how long protection lasts.

“At least 65% [efficacy] or higher is what we would consider to be clinically meaningful,” said Dr Doran Fink of Moderna.

Should the norovirus jab prove successful, the company expects to submit a marketing application to regulators in 2026, with the review process expected to take up to a year. Further trials would also be carried out in teenagers and younger children.

Prof Saul Faust, of the University of Southampton and NIHR Vaccination Innovation Pathway co-clinical lead, added a successful vaccine would help keep care homes running as normal so people can visit their loved ones, while Moore said it will help prevent those who are frail from becoming frailer.

“We wouldn’t be doing this sort of trial at this sort of pace if it wasn’t going to benefit the individuals themselves,” Faust said.

Doctors have treated a man for scurvy in Perth, warning what was once considered “a disease of the past” is re-emerging due to the rising cost of living.

The condition, caused by severe vitamin C deficiency, was common during the 18th century among sailors who spent months at sea without fresh food. But Australian doctors have described their surprise at seeing it in the present day in an article published on Wednesday in BMJ Case Reports.

A 51-year-old man presented to Sir Charles Gairdner hospital with tiny, painful red-brown pinpoints resembling a rash on his legs.

Doctors conducted extensive investigations, including blood tests, skin biopsies and a CT scan, but they provided no explanation for the underlying cause of the inflammation of his blood vessels and the rash continued to spread while he was in hospital.

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The doctors discovered the patient – who was unemployed and lived alone – had financial constraints which meant he mostly ate processed food, lacking in vegetables or fruit. The patient sometimes skipped meals, something which had occurred more frequently in recent weeks.

The patient had undergone bariatric surgery eight years prior to this incident, reducing the size of the stomach. He had stopped taking the vitamin and mineral supplements prescribed for him after surgery because he was unable to afford them.

Dr Andrew Dermawan, a senior registrar at the hospital, ordered blood tests to assess his nutritional status which came back indicating no detectable levels of vitamin C and very low levels of other key nutrients.

The diagnosis of scurvy came as a surprise, Dermawan, the lead author of the article, told Guardian Australia. “It’s not something that I expected to come up in today’s time.”

The body needs vitamin C to produce collagen, the tissue that makes up skin and connects muscle and bone. Severe deficiency can weaken the collagen’s triple-helix structures as well as blood capillaries, resulting in blood spots in the skin, as well as microscopic bleeding in urine.

The patient’s symptoms resolved after the doctors prescribed him 1,000mg of vitamin C daily, as well as a vitamin D3 supplement, folic acid, and a multivitamin, in addition to a meal plan created by a dietitian. Of his own initiative, “he also started eating a lemon daily”.

This disease is easily reversible with vitamin C supplements, with a dramatic response seen within 24 hours, but scurvy is often overlooked because it is considered a disease of the past, Dermawan said.

The article includes a “learning point” for other doctors, noting “scurvy is a re-emerging disease with the rising cost of living”. It points to the rising cost of food in Australia, making families more reliant on lower-cost foods, which tend to be poorer in nutritional value.

The article also highlighted that the patient’s obesity, previous bariatric surgery and low-income status were also among his risk factors for developing scurvy.

Dermawan explained that because the stomach produces enzymes to break down nutritional components, people who have had part of their stomach removed through bariatric surgery can have trouble absorbing nutrients, making it a risk factor for scurvy alongside alcoholism, gastrointestinal disorders and being on dialysis.

In 2016, diabetic patients at Westmead hospital in western Sydney were found to have symptoms of scurvy and reported they ate few vegetables, or overcooked them, destroying vitamin C.

Dr Tim Senior, the chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners’ specific interest group on poverty and health, said it was an important case report as the man could be a “canary in the coalmine”.

“What they’re describing in terms of cost-of-living pressures and the inability to afford good food, I think we are seeing more of that, definitely, and that will result in probably a whole range of micronutrient deficiencies, such as scurvy.”

While scurvy was the most notable diagnosis, Senior noted the man also had other nutrient deficiencies.

Senior, who works for Tharawal Aboriginal Corporation’s medical service in western Sydney, said he had seen patients losing weight because they couldn’t afford to eat.

Senior said poorer communities who are already known to be more likely to be in the unhealthy weight range are often more greatly affected by the problem of excess calories without nutrition. That in turn can result in conditions like obesity, which the authors identified as a risk factor for scurvy.

“Financial resources affect people’s health quite clearly … The way around that is understanding that’s happening, acting on the cost-of-living crisis, so that everyone should be able to afford the food that keeps them well,” Senior said.