The amount of aid reaching Gaza has dropped to the lowest level since December, official Israeli figures show, despite the US having issued a 30-day ultimatum last month threatening sanctions if there was no increase in humanitarian supplies reaching the territory.

The ultimatum was delivered on 13 October, so will expire on Tuesday or Wednesday. It is unclear what measures Israel’s apparent failure to fulfil US demands will trigger, but they may include a temporary halt to the supply of some munitions or other military assistance.

In an apparent last-minute concession on Monday, Israeli authorities announced an extension of the designated “humanitarian zone”, adding inland areas which could partially relieve intense overcrowding and allow some displaced people to move away from the coast as winter approaches.

However, Israel appears to have ignored most of the demands made in a letter sent jointly by Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, and Lloyd Austin, the defence secretary, on 13 October.

Aid officials in Gaza describe the situation in much of the territory, where more than 80% of the population of 2.3 million have been displaced and more than two-thirds of buildings have been destroyed or damaged in 13 months of war, as “apocalyptic”.

“Almost nothing is getting in any more. The small street markets that sprung up have all gone. There’s a bit of flour, some washing-up liquid … a kilo of tomatoes costs nearly $20 [£16]. Even if you have money there is nothing to buy. Everyone is going hungry again,” said one UN official.

Israel imposed a total blockade of Gaza in the first weeks of the war, before gradually easing restrictions under international pressure. Deliveries of aid peaked in May, when 117,000 tonnes of food entered Gaza on more than 6,000 trucks. Tents, medicine and other vital supplies also reached the territory.

Statistics released by Cogat, the Israeli military authority charged with coordinating humanitarian aid for Gaza, show that only 25,155 tonnes of food aid entered Gaza in October, less than in any full month since December 2023. Only 8,805 tonnes of aid has crossed through Israeli checkpoints into the territory so far this month.

In October, 57 trucks a day were allowed to cross into Gaza on average – far short of the 350 trucks a day demanded by the US and the 600 a day that aid agencies say are necessary to meet basic needs. So far, only 624 trucks have entered the territory in November, the Cogat statistics show.

It is unclear if the statistics include crossings on Sunday, when more than 170 trucks and fuel tankers entered Gaza, according to Cogat.

Israeli officials reject the charge that aid is deliberately restricted and accuse humanitarian agencies of failing to organise its distribution. UN logistics specialists in Gaza say Israeli military operations and general lawlessness often prevent them from collecting supplies, leaving hundreds of truckloads stranded at the border.

Humanitarian agencies also suffer from a shortage of drivers, communications equipment, protective gear and much else. Since May, only a tenth of more than 300 requests to Cogat to issue permits to individual drivers have been granted, UN officials said.

Coordination with the Israeli military authorities is also laborious and time-consuming, and many requests for convoys are turned down. In October, Israeli authorities directly denied or impeded 58% of aid movements, aid agencies said.

Lawlessness has led to systematic looting of about a third of all aid brought into Gaza, UN officials said. Some was taken by Hamas, which retains some influence in much of the territory, but most was stolen by criminal gangs for resale. Private commercial convoys have also been stopped.

The US has previously demanded that Israel allow in more aid but done little to enforce its requests, even reportedly ignoring its own agencies after they concluded that Israel had deliberately blocked deliveries of food and medicine to Gaza. US law requires that weapons shipments be cut off to countries that prevent the delivery of US-backed aid.

Last week, the US state department spokesperson, Matthew Miller, said Israel had made some progress by announcing the opening of a new crossing into central Gaza and approving new delivery routes, but said it must do more. “It’s not just sufficient to open new roads if more humanitarian assistance isn’t going through those roads,” he said.

The most acute crisis is in the far north of Gaza, where the towns of Jabaliya, Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahiya have been under a month-long siege. The Israeli military has said it is rooting out Hamas militants who have regrouped in the area and have been carrying out hit-and-run attacks from tunnels and bombed-out buildings. The military has surrounded the area with checkpoints, ordering residents to leave. Many Palestinians fear Israel aims to depopulate the north in the long term.

“People in north Gaza have got nothing. Every single day from 3 October to end of month, UN asked to take stuff into Jabaliya, but [was] turned down,” said one UN official in Gaza.

Last week, a committee of global food security experts known as the IPC warned of a “strong likelihood that famine is imminent in areas” of northern Gaza.

Cogat denied there was a risk of famine, saying that previous projections by the IPC had proved incorrect and relied on partial, biased data. Israeli officials say they also successfully facilitated a polio vaccination campaign across Gaza, which reached 94% of the target population of 600,000 children under the age of 10.

“There is a glaring gap between the reality on the ground and the distorted declarations that some NGOs have been stating about Israel,” Danny Danon, the Israeli ambassador to the UN, told the Jerusalem Post.

The conflict in Gaza was triggered by a surprise Hamas attack into southern Israel on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed, mostly civilians, and 250 abducted. Since then, more than 43,500 have died in the Israeli offensive in Gaza, more than half women and children.

The Kremlin has denied reports that the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, spoke to the US president-elect, Donald Trump, calling the media reports “pure fiction”.

The Washington Post first reported that a call had taken place, citing unidentified sources, and said Trump had told Putin he should not escalate the Ukraine war. Reuters also reported on a call.

“It is completely untrue. It is pure fiction; it is simply false information,” the Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said when asked about the call. “There was no conversation.

“This is the most obvious example of the quality of the information that is being published now, sometimes even in fairly reputable publications.”

Peskov added that Putin had no specific plans to speak to Trump.

According to the Washington Post, Trump reminded Putin of “Washington’s sizeable military presence in Europe”. It added that Trump expressed interest in follow-up conversations on “the resolution of Ukraine’s war soon”.

The reported call took place after Putin on Thursday congratulated Trump on his election win and expressed admiration for the way Trump reacted to an assassination attempt during the campaign.

Peskov has a history of dismissing media reports that later prove to be true; most recently, he labelled reports of North Korean soldiers arriving in Russia as “fake news”, despite credible audio and visual evidence confirming their presence. Still, the Kremlin’s swift denial of the phone call with Trump is likely to raise eyebrows, especially given that both leaders have previously expressed openness to dialogue.

Trump’s team has not yet confirmed the call. When asked by Fox News for comment about the Washington Post report, Trump’s communication director, Steven Cheung, released a statement saying: “We do not comment on private calls between President Trump and other world leaders.”

Peskov on Monday also accused European leaders of continuing to seek a “strategic defeat” of Russia. He was responding to a question about the possibility that Britain would allow Ukraine to use Storm Shadow long-range missile systems to hit targets inside Russia.

The Kremlin repeatedly said Putin was ready to discuss Ukraine with the west but that it did not mean he was willing to alter Moscow’s demands.

On 14 June, Putin staked out a maximalist position for an end to the war: Ukraine would have to drop its Nato ambitions and withdraw all its troops from all the territory of four regions claimed by Russia.

During the election campaign, Trump said he would find a solution to end the war “within a day” but did not explain how he would do so. He also spoke to Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Wednesday, according to reports. The Ukrainian president later confirmed the conversation with Trump, describing it as an “excellent call”.

Washington has provided tens of billions of dollars worth of military and economic aid to Ukraine since it was invaded by Russia in February 2022, funding that Trump has repeatedly criticised and railed against with other Republican lawmakers.

The US president, Joe Biden, will host Trump for a traditional post-election meeting in the Oval Office on Wednesday, where the current US leader is expected to try to convince the president-elect not to withdraw support from Ukraine when he takes office.

The meeting will take place against the backdrop of reports that Russia, with support from North Korean soldiers, is planning a significant assault to drive Ukrainian forces out of its western Kursk region.

On Sunday, the New York Times reported that Moscow had assembled a force of 50,000 troops, including North Koreans, in the region bordering Ukraine for an attack. According to US intelligence, 10,000 North Korean soldiers have arrived in Russia, a figure that Ukraine’s military intelligence chief says includes 500 officers and three generals.

In August, Ukraine launched a surprise incursion into the Kursk region, capturing settlements within Russian territory in what was widely seen as a major embarrassment for Putin. However, Russia has gradually recaptured some of this territory and also made steady advances across much of eastern Ukraine.

Italian police have uncovered a large-scale pan-European forgery network making and selling fake artworks attributed to some of the biggest names in modern and contemporary art including Banksy, Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol.

Thirty-eight people were placed under investigation in Italy, Spain, France and Belgium on suspicion of conspiracy to handle stolen goods, forgery and illegal sale of artworks, the paramilitary Carabinieri art squad and the Pisa prosecutors’ office said in a joint statement on Monday.

The chief prosecutor of Pisa, Teresa Angela Camelio, said experts from the Banksy archive who assisted with the investigation considered Monday’s operation as “the biggest act of protection of Banksy’s work“.

Pest Control, the office that represents the artist, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. On its website, it says forgery is common and urges people who want to buy any Banksy pieces to watch out for “expensive fakes“.

Other allegedly forged artists included giants of 19th- and 20th-century art such as Claude Monet, Vincent Van Gogh, Salvador Dali, Henry Moore, Marc Chagall, Francis Bacon, Paul Klee and Piet Mondrian.

Investigators said they had seized more than 2,100 fake pieces, with a potential market value of about €200m (£165m) and discovered six forgery workshops including two in Tuscany, one in Venice and the rest elsewhere in Europe.

They said their investigation started in 2023 when they seized about 200 fake pieces from the collection of a businessman in Pisa, including a copy of a drawing by the Italian painter Amedeo Modigliani.

That led them to forgeries sold by auction houses across Italy, and to connect them to a known group believed to specialise in forgeries of Banksy and Warhol.

To boost their credentials, the unnamed suspects organised two Banksy exhibitions with a published catalogue in prestigious locations in Mestre near Venice and Cortona in Tuscany, investigators said.

Emmanuel Macron will attend the France-Israel football match at the Stade de France on Thursday in a gesture of “fraternity and solidarity” after attacks on Jewish fans in Amsterdam last week.

Thousands of extra police will be on duty for the game taking place against a backdrop of high tension caused by the conflict in Gaza.

The Elysée said the president’s presence on Thursday aimed to “show his entire and full support for the French team as he does every match” but also “send a message of fraternity and solidarity after the intolerable acts of antisemitism that followed the match in Amsterdam”.

Authorities in the Netherlands are investigating how Israeli football hooliganism, antisemitism and local distress about the war in Gaza created a tinderbox situation that exploded into violence on the streets of Amsterdam.

The city’s police chief, Peter Holla, had said there had been “incidents on both sides”, starting on Wednesday night when Maccabi Tel Aviv fans tore down a Palestinian flag from the facade of a building in the city centre, burned another and destroyed a taxi.

One video posted online showed Maccabi fans chanting “olé, olé, let the IDF win, we will fuck the Arabs”, referring to the Israel Defense Forces.

Amsterdam mayor, Femke Halsema, said that on Thursday, “antisemitic hit-and-run squads” had attacked Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters, with calls on social media for the targeting of Jews. Footage showed men in blue and yellow Maccabi colours being beaten. One showed a man pleading with an attacker who shouts out: “You want to kill kids? … Free Palestine.”

Five people needed hospital treatment and up to 30 were injured. According to the prosecution service, there are four suspects still in custody and due before the magistrate this week.

The Dutch capital and nearby suburb of Amstelveen are in an official state of emergency.

Pro-Palestine activists were banned from gathering over the weekend amid high tensions. Organisers said in a message on Instagram that they were outraged by what they described as the “framing” of unrest around the match as antisemitic, which they said was being “weaponised to suppress Palestinian resistance”.

Amsterdam’s city council will on Tuesday hold an emergency debate on the situation.

In nearby France, the Paris police prefect, Laurent Nuñez, said the upcoming game in Paris was “high-risk” and security would be “extremely reinforced”. He said the arrangements were highly unusual for a national team match.

Nuñez said police had not demanded a limit on the number of fans allowed inside the stadium. The French football federation said the number of tickets on sale had reached about 20,000, a quarter of the stadium’s capacity.

Even with the reduced ticket sales, between 4,000 and 5,000 police officers and gendarmes will be mobilised, compared with a maximum of 1,300 for a French national team match in a sold-out stadium. They will be deployed inside and outside the Stade de France, on public transport and in Paris. In addition, 1,600 security staff have been drafted in for the game. An elite police unit has been assigned to protect the Israeli team.

Nuñez said: “The [interior] minister has made available to me the resources of the internal security force, which will enable us to be extremely reactive and prevent any excesses, any disturbances to public order, either during the match, or in the immediate vicinity of the match, or on the route of spectators who will be going to the match.”

The Dutch prime minister, Dick Schoof, was among those who condemned what he called “antisemitic violence against Israelis”. He is due to meet with Jewish groups on Tuesday.

The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, compared the incident to Kristallnacht, the state-sanctioned pogrom in Nazi Germany in 1938 in which an estimated 91 Jews were murdered.

Israel’s government has offered to help investigate the violence in Amsterdam but has also put pressure on the Netherlands to take tough action. On Monday, Israel’s foreign minister appeared to criticise what he said was a low number of arrests, all of which happened before Thursday’s match despite reports of anti-Israeli violence later that night.

“The mayor of Amsterdam informed me that they formed a special inquiry team, but I can tell that until now, the number of arrests is very low,” Gideon Saar told reporters in Jerusalem.

Israeli authorities have advised supporters not to attend the match in France and said Israelis abroad should avoid “recognisable Israeli or Jewish symbols”.

The Israeli national security council said on Sunday: “Groups that want to attack Israelis have been identified in a number of European cities” at the time of the planned match of the Israeli national team. It named Brussels, a number of British cities, Amsterdam and Paris.

Emmanuel Macron will attend the France-Israel football match at the Stade de France on Thursday in a gesture of “fraternity and solidarity” after attacks on Jewish fans in Amsterdam last week.

Thousands of extra police will be on duty for the game taking place against a backdrop of high tension caused by the conflict in Gaza.

The Elysée said the president’s presence on Thursday aimed to “show his entire and full support for the French team as he does every match” but also “send a message of fraternity and solidarity after the intolerable acts of antisemitism that followed the match in Amsterdam”.

Authorities in the Netherlands are investigating how Israeli football hooliganism, antisemitism and local distress about the war in Gaza created a tinderbox situation that exploded into violence on the streets of Amsterdam.

The city’s police chief, Peter Holla, had said there had been “incidents on both sides”, starting on Wednesday night when Maccabi Tel Aviv fans tore down a Palestinian flag from the facade of a building in the city centre, burned another and destroyed a taxi.

One video posted online showed Maccabi fans chanting “olé, olé, let the IDF win, we will fuck the Arabs”, referring to the Israel Defense Forces.

Amsterdam mayor, Femke Halsema, said that on Thursday, “antisemitic hit-and-run squads” had attacked Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters, with calls on social media for the targeting of Jews. Footage showed men in blue and yellow Maccabi colours being beaten. One showed a man pleading with an attacker who shouts out: “You want to kill kids? … Free Palestine.”

Five people needed hospital treatment and up to 30 were injured. According to the prosecution service, there are four suspects still in custody and due before the magistrate this week.

The Dutch capital and nearby suburb of Amstelveen are in an official state of emergency.

Pro-Palestine activists were banned from gathering over the weekend amid high tensions. Organisers said in a message on Instagram that they were outraged by what they described as the “framing” of unrest around the match as antisemitic, which they said was being “weaponised to suppress Palestinian resistance”.

Amsterdam’s city council will on Tuesday hold an emergency debate on the situation.

In nearby France, the Paris police prefect, Laurent Nuñez, said the upcoming game in Paris was “high-risk” and security would be “extremely reinforced”. He said the arrangements were highly unusual for a national team match.

Nuñez said police had not demanded a limit on the number of fans allowed inside the stadium. The French football federation said the number of tickets on sale had reached about 20,000, a quarter of the stadium’s capacity.

Even with the reduced ticket sales, between 4,000 and 5,000 police officers and gendarmes will be mobilised, compared with a maximum of 1,300 for a French national team match in a sold-out stadium. They will be deployed inside and outside the Stade de France, on public transport and in Paris. In addition, 1,600 security staff have been drafted in for the game. An elite police unit has been assigned to protect the Israeli team.

Nuñez said: “The [interior] minister has made available to me the resources of the internal security force, which will enable us to be extremely reactive and prevent any excesses, any disturbances to public order, either during the match, or in the immediate vicinity of the match, or on the route of spectators who will be going to the match.”

The Dutch prime minister, Dick Schoof, was among those who condemned what he called “antisemitic violence against Israelis”. He is due to meet with Jewish groups on Tuesday.

The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, compared the incident to Kristallnacht, the state-sanctioned pogrom in Nazi Germany in 1938 in which an estimated 91 Jews were murdered.

Israel’s government has offered to help investigate the violence in Amsterdam but has also put pressure on the Netherlands to take tough action. On Monday, Israel’s foreign minister appeared to criticise what he said was a low number of arrests, all of which happened before Thursday’s match despite reports of anti-Israeli violence later that night.

“The mayor of Amsterdam informed me that they formed a special inquiry team, but I can tell that until now, the number of arrests is very low,” Gideon Saar told reporters in Jerusalem.

Israeli authorities have advised supporters not to attend the match in France and said Israelis abroad should avoid “recognisable Israeli or Jewish symbols”.

The Israeli national security council said on Sunday: “Groups that want to attack Israelis have been identified in a number of European cities” at the time of the planned match of the Israeli national team. It named Brussels, a number of British cities, Amsterdam and Paris.

Haiti’s transitional presidential council has appointed the entrepreneur and former senate candidate Alix Didier Fils-Aimé as the new prime minister, according to the official gazette in the country.

The businessman replaces Garry Conille, who was named prime minister in May. The shake-up is the latest blow to political stability amid soaring levels of gang violence.

Haiti has not held democratic elections in years, and armed gangs have gained control of most of the capital, Port-au-Prince, with the violence spreading to nearby regions, fuelling hunger and forcing hundreds of thousands from their homes.

Promised international support still lags and nearby countries have deported Haitian migrants back to Haiti.

Didier Fils-Aimé is the son of the well-known Haitian activist Alix Fils-Aime, who was jailed under the regime of the dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier.

Conille, a longtime civil servant who has worked with the UN, was appointed to the role in May by Haiti’s transition council to return to the role as the Caribbean country works to restore stability.

The transitional council was established in April, tasked with choosing Haiti’s next prime minister and cabinet with the hope that it would help quell turmoil. But it has been plagued with political infighting, and has long been at odds with Conille.

Groups such as the Organization of American States tried unsuccessfuly last week to mediate disagreements in an attempt to save the fragile transition, according to reports in the Miami Herald.

The process suffered another blow in October when three members of the council faced corruption accusations, from investigators alleging they demanded $750,000 in bribes from a government bank director to secure his job.

The same members accused of bribery were among those to sign the decree. Only one member, Edgard Leblanc Fils, did not sign the order.

A spokesperson for the prime minister’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Reuters and the Associated Press contributed to this report

Asthma is linked to memory issues in children – and the condition appearing early may make memory difficulties worse, research suggests.

The study found that children with asthma performed worse in memory tasks than children without the lung condition.

According to the researchers, memory deficits may have longer-term consequences and may even increase the risk of developing conditions such as dementia.

In a sample of 473 children who were observed for two years, the scientists found that those with an earlier asthma onset – who had the disease for a longer period of time – also had a slower development of memory over time.

Simona Ghetti, the lead author of the study and a professor of psychology in the University of California, Davis, said: “This study underscores the importance of looking at asthma as a potential source of cognitive difficulty in children.

“We are becoming increasingly aware that chronic diseases, not only asthma but also diabetes, heart disease and others may place children at increased risk of cognitive difficulties.

“We need to understand the factors that might exacerbate or protect against the risks.”

Past studies with adults and with animals found that asthma was associated with a greater risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, both of which affect memory.

Nicholas Christopher-Hayes, a PhD candidate in psychology at UC Davis and the study’s first author, said: “Asthma might set children on a trajectory that could increase their risk to later develop something more serious like dementia as adults.”

Although the study did not look at the mechanism responsible for memory difficulties associated with asthma, the researchers cite potential factors such as prolonged inflammation from asthma or repeated disruptions in oxygen supply to the brain due to asthma attacks.

Episodic memory is how people remember experiences and emotions, like events and the people and objects that were there.

The studypublished in Jama Network Open, included data from 2,062 children aged between nine and 10 with asthma. The smaller sample that followed the children for two years included 473 children.

Paper industry bosses in Germany have hit back at claims by the national electoral commission that a lack of paper might hinder the timing of the country’s early elections.

“We have paper,” the seemingly exasperated head of the trade association for the German paper industry, Alexander von Reibnitz, told the state broadcaster ZDF, adding: “The German paper industry is very productive … we can deliver as long as the order is submitted in a timely manner.”

The head of the electoral commission, Ruth Brand, made headlines over the weekend with her remarks about the danger of holding the snap election without enough preparation time. Among her fears were that electioneering might clash with Christmas festivities, or Easter, as well as the popular carnival season, when days of street festivals dominate the calendar in western Germany in particular.

Talk of early elections was sparked last week when the chancellor, Olaf Scholz, sacked his finance minister in a lengthy row about how to fill a hole in the budget. There are plans for a vote of confidence in the Bundestag, which his government would probably lose, paving the way for new elections to be held anytime between January and the middle of April.

The government collapse took place just as Berlin was digesting the news from that morning that Donald Trump had won the US presidential election.

Brand warned of “unforeseeable risks at all levels, especially at the municipal level” if elections were called with little warning. She urged decision-makers to steer clear of Christmas and the New Year, saying that nobody would be in the mood for electioneering or for listening to politicians’ election bids at that time. She also referred to her concerns that there “might not be enough paper available to be able to print all the documents” so quickly, especially ballot papers for the more than 60 million people eligible to vote.

“It really is a big challenge in the current times to get hold of the paper and to carry out the printing process,” she told the TV news programme Tagesschau.

The remarks drew scorn and derision from across Europe, with neighbouring Poland gleefully offering to come to Berlin’s aid.

“If Germany need printers and paper, we will be able to sell both to our neighbours, and Polish companies would be happy to profit from this, and boost the nation’s GDP,” Dariusz Joński, an MEP for the centre-left Citizens’ Coalition said.

The rightwing opposition Law and Justice party urged Donald Tusk, the Polish prime minister, “to come to the aid of his German friends”.

Germany is the leading paper producer in the EU, manufacturing almost 13m cubic metres in 2022. Poland is the seventh largest, with an annual production of about 3.5m cubic metres.

Authorities are still smarting from the embarrassment of the botched Berlin election of September 2021, when insufficient ballot papers were available to voters, with many delivered to the wrong polling booths. The election had to be repeated for the first time in Germany’s history. Organisers blamed the clash with the Berlin Marathon which was taking place on the same weekend, a situation which authorities have vowed would never be repeated.

The mayor of Perugia, where the British student Meredith Kercher was murdered, has apologised for allowing a controversial TV series co-produced by Amanda Knox to be filmed in the Italian city.

Angry residents displayed banners reading “Rispetto per Meredith” (respect for Meredith) around the city as the crew arrived to film scenes of Blue Moon, an eight-part drama chronicling Knox’s battle to clear her name of the murder, that will be aired on the Disney-owned streaming service Hulu.

Kercher, 21, was murdered in the house she shared with Knox on 1 November 2007. Kercher’s body was found in her bedroom, partly undressed and with several stab wounds.

Knox, 37, and her Italian ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, were twice convicted of the murder before being definitively acquitted in 2015 in a court ruling that described “stunning flaws” in the investigation that led to their convictions.

Perugia, a medieval city appreciated for its cobbled alleyways, art and chocolate, has long struggled to shake off the image associated with it as a result of the notorious murder and the years of legal wrangling that followed.

“For too long, Perugia was sadly famous in the world as the city of Meredith Kercher’s murder,” Margherita Scoccia, a former councillor, said on Facebook. “Is it right that our community is associated with such a terrible crime again?”

Vittoria Ferdinandi, the mayor of Perugia, apologised in an open letter to residents, saying that when deciding to authorise filming, she had overlooked “the people and their sorrow, which is still alive in them”.

She explained that her administration could have refused permission, but that the scenes “would have been filmed in any other town in our region”. Ferdinandi said hosting the series allowed the authorities to have greater control over protecting the city’s image “because, as requested, we are able to view and authorise every scene”.

Hulu said Blue Moon was “based on the true story of how Knox was wrongfully convicted for the murder of her roommate, Meredith Kercher, and her 16-year odyssey to set herself free”.

The Kercher family said last week that they found it “difficult to understand” how the series served any purpose.

Orvieto, another Umbrian town, has also featured in the series, which is being co-produced by Monica Lewinsky, who was at the centre of a 1990s media storm after an affair with the then US president, Bill Clinton.

Knox and Sollecito spent four years in prison before their release in 2011. Since then, Knox earned a reported £3.5m for her memoir, took part in a Netflix documentary about the case in 2016, and has been the subject of other books and films.

The filming of the drama comes a few months after a Florence court upheld a slander conviction against Knox for wrongly accusing Patrick Lumumba, who owned a bar in Perugia, of Kercher’s murder.

Carlo Pacelli, Lumumba’s lawyer, claimed last week that his client had still not received the compensation money that Knox was ordered to pay over the allegation.

Rudy Guede, who was the only person definitively convicted of the murder, was released from prison in November 2021 after completing 13 years of a 16-year-sentence.

The council meeting of the Magic Circle on 9 October 1991 was a historic occasion, marking the moment when the first cohort of women, including Debbie McGee and Fay Presto, were admitted to its previously male-only ranks of magicians.

But the meeting was also memorable for another, lesser known, reason. The council voted to expel a member named Raymond Lloyd, who was in fact a woman named Sophie Lloyd, who had been “masquerading as a male” in order to gain access to the society.

She had been admitted 18 months earlier after donning her disguise, and decided to reveal herself when the organisation voted to admit women in 1991. Despite the new policy, Lloyd was rapidly expelled by members angry at her “deliberate deception”, the meeting notes state.

Now the Magic Circle is trying to track Lloyd down to apologise for what happened to her and admit her back into the society. Perhaps characteristically, after tricking the world’s most famous society of magicians, she now appears to have disappeared.

“It’s almost as if they just made her vanish from thin air, tried to brush it under the carpet, but obviously now the story has come out and we’re so desperate to right this wrong,” said Laura London, the first female chair of the Magic Circle.

“I think just to even sit down with her and find out her side of the story would be wonderful for us. But more than that, we could invite her back into the society, which would be the most incredible thing.

“We’re already in talks about making a movie of her extraordinary heist.”

Archive material shows that the deception was in fact a two-woman job, concocted by the magician Jenny Winstanley, who wanted to be the first woman admitted to the Magic Circle.

Feeling she was not up to the scale of the task herself, she recruited Lloyd, an actor, and helped her to create an elaborate disguise and character that would fool even the most advanced magicians.

“We really wanted to prove that women are as good as men,” Winstanley said in a radio interview after Lloyd revealed herself.

Lloyd, dressed as Raymond, passed a 20-minute magic test in order to gain access to the society, and even spent 90 minutes drinking a pint with her examiner afterwards.

“It wasn’t just literally putting on a wig, glasses and the baggy suit and going out and doing it,” she said at the time. “I had to study the character for two years. And I think I did it very well.”

Tracking Lloyd down has proved difficult, with the Magic Circle finding no trace of her beyond some local newspaper articles in Leamington Spa and Coventry in 1997. Winstanley died in a car crash in 2004.

“The trail goes cold in 1997 so we really don’t know what happened to her,” said London. “But I’d like to think that maybe we could give her some closure to this extraordinary thing that she did, let her know that it was remembered, it will go down in history.

“I think it’s really important to tell her: thank you for everything and we’re very sorry for what happened.”

Although much has changed in the last two decades, magic is still a male-dominated sector – of the Magic Circle’s 1,700 members, only 5% are women, although the figure is higher in its Young Magician’s Club for 10- to 18-year-olds.

“The fact that it’s changing now is great, but boy, it’s taken a long time,” said London.

“I’ve been one of the lucky ones but that isn’t the case for so many. I think not only was [Lloyd] pioneering, her statement was a really important one to make. That’s why we want to find her, to say thank you for doing something so extraordinary and I’m sorry that the outcome wasn’t what you had hoped for, but I tell you what, it’s so appreciated from all of us women now.”