In a critical press conference meant to make or break his presidential campaign, Joe Biden spiritedly defended his foreign policy record even as he faced a barrage of questions on his mental fitness and, in another gaffe, mistakenly referred to Kamala Harris as “vice-president Trump”.

Biden offered extensive remarks on thorny foreign policy issues including competition with China and the Israel-Hamas war, in which he said he had warned Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu away from an occupation of the Gaza Strip.

He said he was directly in contact with Xi Jinping to warn him not to offer further support for Russia’s war in Ukraine, but not with Vladimir Putin, whom he said: “I have no reason to speak to him right now.”

But Biden, who is running to be president until January 2029, fielded an equal number of questions during the press conference on his mental fitness, an issue that has loomed over his campaign since a faltering debate performance against Donald Trump that he called “that dumb mistake”.

Ultimately, it was a performance that supporters will probably say shows he is capable of handling his responsibilities as commander-in-chief, but unlikely to convince those already in doubt about his mental fitness that he can serve another four years in office.

Biden, 81, insisted he would stay in the race despite calls from some in his party to drop out and to allow another figure, including Harris, run in the November election.

Shortly after he finished speaking, Connecticut congressman Jim Himes, the top ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee, called on Biden to step down from the campaign, writing on X: “We must put forth the strongest candidate possible to confront the threat posed by Trump’s promised MAGA authoritarianism. I no longer believe that is Joe Biden.”

Appearing later on CNN, Himes said, “Imagine that three months from now, we get another performance like there was in the debate, right before the election. Do you want to take that risk? I don’t.”

Two more congressional Democrats also called on Biden to step aside, bringing the total to 17. Representative Scott Peters of California said, “The stakes are high, and we are on a losing course,” while Representative Eric Sorensen of Illinois said that Biden should “put country over party”.

Wrapping up a summit of the 32-member bloc in Washington DC, Biden said. “I’ve not had any of my European allies come up and say, ‘Joe, don’t run’. What I’ve heard them say is, ‘You’ve got to win’.

“If I slow down and can’t get the job done that’s a sign I shouldn’t be doing this,” he said. “But there’s no indication of that. None.”

Biden said he wouldn’t leave the race unless polls showed him that he had no chance of winning against Trump, even if they showed that Harris’s chances in the election were better than his own.

Nonetheless, he said Harris was qualified to be president as well, although he misnamed her in the endorsement. “I wouldn’t have picked vice-president Trump to be vice-president, if she’s not qualified to be president,” he said.

That gaffe was compounded by the fact that he had introduced the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, as “President Putin” just hours earlier, before correcting himself and saying “we’re going to beat Putin.”

Biden initially used the final Nato summit press conference as something of a stump speech, brandishing his national security record in supporting Ukraine against Russian aggression and saying that the November vote was “much more than a political question … It’s a national security issue.”

He then turned to his record on the economy, border security and his efforts to broker a peace in the Israel-Hamas war to bolster his case for his campaign in November.

Biden spoke for 58 minutes, including 50 minutes of unscripted question-and-answer. He appeared most comfortable and cogent as he discussed thorny foreign policy questions.

“Don’t make the same mistake America made after [Osama] Bin Laden,” he said he told Netanyahu, as he sought to ward off a potential occupation of the Gaza Strip. “There’s no need to occupy anywhere. Go after the people who did the job.”

He also indicated that European countries were prepared to cut their investments in China if Xi continued to “[supply] Russia, with information and capacity, along with working with North Korea and others, to help Russia in armament”.

But at times he got lost in the weeds. Asked about reports that he had asked his schedule to be moved up, he said: “I’m not talking about, and if you’ve looked at my schedule since I, since I made that stupid mistake in the campaign, in the debate. I mean, my schedule has been full bore.”

“Where’s Trump been?” he continued. “Riding around on his golf cart? Filling out his scorecard before he hits the ball?”

During Joe Biden’s press conference at the Nato summit, which many described as a test for the future of his re-election bid, he demonstrated clarity and conviction on foreign policy. But much was overshadowed by a couple of awkward gaffes and a shaky voice, at a time when the US is hyper-focused on his fitness to lead.

After roughly eight minutes of prepared remarks, Biden answered reporters’ questions on Nato, Ukraine, China and Israel, and just as many on his cognitive health and his vow to stay in the race.

“I’m determined on running, but I think it’s important that I allay fears,” Biden said at one point.

The press conference is not likely to be the decisive moment that some hoped would push a critical mass of elected Democrats to call for him to end his campaign – or decide that he can’t be replaced.

Here are the key takeaways:

The British politician Roy Jenkins once famously observed that Tony Blair’s challenge in getting Labour elected in 1997 was “like a man carrying a priceless Ming vase across a highly polished floor”.

Joe Biden dropped the vase, shattering it into a thousand crazy pieces, before his rare press conference even got started on Thursday.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Biden declared at the Nato summit in Washington while introducing Ukraine’s Volodymr Zelenskiy. “President Putin!”

It was a cringeworthy moment for European leaders who did not know whether to clap. The 81-year-old US president caught the error and corrected himself, but it was yet another blow to his anguished campaign to convince Democrats that he’s still got the vim and vigour to beat Donald Trump in November.

Come the press conference, Biden started by grinding fragments of that broken vase further into the carpet. The opening question was about him losing support among many fellow Democrats and key unions, and about Vice-President Kamala Harris possibly replacing him on the ticket.

Against the backdrop of Nato blue and eight US national flags, Biden proceeded to mix up Harris and his opponent Donald Trump. “Look, I wouldn’t have picked Vice-President Trump to be vice president if I didn’t think she was qualified to be president,” he said.

Harris is a 59-year-old Black woman and former criminal prosecutor. Trump is a 78-year-old white (orange) man and convicted felon beloved by white supremacists. The two are easily confused.

You could have heard a pin drop in this somewhat sterile, strip-lit room at a convention centre in downtown Washington. Dozens of reporters sat in silence like a concerned family sitting around of an elderly patient speaking nonsense. They said nothing, thinking it best not to stage an intervention.

Tragically, the only person unaware of what had happened was the patient himself. Indeed, Biden’s critics say he is the only one who cannot see what everyone else can: time has caught up with him and he should quit the US presidential race.

After a start like that, it had all the makings of total disaster, a bitter sequel to the president’s calamitous debate performance. His old foe, the frog in the throat, must have stowed away on Air Force One and followed him all the way from Atlanta.

There were more stumbles. “I’m following the advice of my commander-in-chief,” said the commander-in-chief. Sometimes his voice trailed off with an “anyway”. Sometimes he defaulted to his strange whispering habit.

No doubt a hundred members of Congress were sitting with their fingers poised on the “send” button to call for the president’s exit. If only George Clooney, the Hollywood star and Democratic donor who has wielded the dagger like Brutus in a New York Times column this week, was up on that stage, looking presidential.

And yet, as the night wore on, it wasn’t quite so simple. The second question reminded Biden of his Putin-Zelenskiy confusion and asked if he is damaging American’s standing in the world. He laughed and retorted: “Did you see any damage to our standing in my leading this conference?

“Have you seen a more successful conference? What do you think? I thought it was the most successful conference I’ve attended in a long time and find me a world leader who didn’t think it was.”

Biden has recently been accused of turning Trumpy, stubbornly digging in and putting his own interests ahead of the nation. The saviour of democracy in 2020 could destroy it all. What if you ruin your legacy, one reporter wondered. “Look, I’m not in this for my legacy,” he insisted. “I’m in this to complete the job I started.”

And reports of his early bedtime were “not true”, he said, though he acknowledged: “Instead of my every day starting at 7am and going to bed at midnight, it would be smarter for me to pace myself a little more.”

His schedule since the debate has been “full bore”, he added, before taking a swipe at the opponent who recently challenged him to a round of golf. “Where’s Trump? Riding around on his golf cart filling out his scorecard before he hits the ball?”

Less helpfully, he quipped: “I love my staff but they [add] things. They add things all the time at the very end. I’m catching hell from my wife.”

The questions about neurological exams and his fitness for office kept coming, and he continued to bat them away. “If I slow down, I can’t get the job done, that’s a sign that I shouldn’t be doing it. But there’s no indication of that yet! None!”

Nato is like a home fixture for Biden. He proved expansive on foreign policy regarding China, Israel, Russia and other parts of the world. He reminded everyone of his role in rebuilding alliances and partnerships. Among the “elites” that Biden now professes to scorn, he fought this near hour-long exchange with 11 reporters to a score draw.

For the Bidenites, there was a reminder of his canyons of expertise and experience: this man knew Golda Meir! Do you really want to throw all that away for some neophyte? The president himself observed: “The only thing age does is creates a little bit of wisdom, if you pay attention.”

But for the anti-Biden rebellion, there was sufficient hubris and missteps to confirm their view that he is going to lead the party to defeat in November. Remember King Lear: “Men must endure/ Their going hence, even as their coming hither;/ Ripeness is all.”

Sadly for the president quotable gaffes will get more attention – on cable news, social media and late night TV – than a snoozy masterclass on foreign policy. When the official questions were done, a chorus of reporters shouted more, including one about Biden’s Harris-Trump mix-up.

Peter Alexander of NBC News noted that Trump was already using the gaffe to mock Biden’s age and memory. Asked how he would combat that criticism, Biden smiled and said simply, “Listen to him,” then departed stage left. Piece by piece, he was putting the vase back together – but the cracks were showing.

Joe Biden has accidentally introduced the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, as “President Putin” in a gaffe that will fuel further concerns about his mental acuity that have threatened to scuttle his presidential campaign.

Biden made the mistake while flanked by Nato leaders during a signing ceremony alongside Zelenskiy on the final day of the Nato summit in Washington. It came just an hour before a rare press conference by Biden that has been called “make-or-break” for his campaign, as a growing number of political allies and donors have been calling for him to drop out of the race.

Concluding his opening remarks, Biden handed over to Zelenskiy with the words: “Now I want to hand it over to the president of Ukraine, who has as much courage as he has determination.”

He said: “Ladies and gentlemen, President Putin!”

A number of European leaders began clapping hesitantly. German chancellor Olaf Scholz and Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni turned their heads in surprise as Biden mentioned the Russian leader, while other European leaders broke into an awkward smattering of applause.

Realising his mistake, Biden caught himself and said: “President Putin! We’re going to beat President Putin. President Zelenskiy. I’m so focused on beating Putin. We’ve got to worry about it. Anyway, Mr President.”

“I’m better,” Zelenskiy said, shaking Biden’s hand.

“You are a hell of a lot better,” Biden responded in concluding his remarks.

The remark elicited gasps in a press centre, where hundreds of journalists were watching the remarks live on an internal television feed. A number of people in the room shouted out “Zelenskiy” to correct Biden’s mistake, after which he returned to the podium.

Zelenskiy had been due to give a press conference at the end of the Nato summit an hour later. But journalists who were waiting were told at short notice that the event was cancelled – meaning he didn’t have to respond to questions about Biden’s gaffe.

The news about the mistake quickly filtered into other press conferences with heads of government, rehashing questions about Biden’s mental state that have loomed over the conference since it began.

Keir Starmer, asked about President Biden’s gaffe, insisted that the Nato summit had made breakthroughs that were welcomed by President Zelenskiy and had left Nato in a stronger position.

Pressed by reporters on whether the US president was capable of serving another four years in office, he said: “Look, I was with him last night. We spent the best part of an hour together. We covered a lot of ground.

“We’ve been through two days of this council and come to a very good outcome. He’s led through all, spoken at every session, pulled people together, and we got a good outcome and I think he should give credit for that.”

French president Emanuel Macron in his press conference said: “Slips of the tongue happen, it’s happened to me.”

Scholz was asked, in English, about Biden’s gaffe in a press conference a few minutes later. He sidestepped the question, and said he hoped that Biden would continue to strongly support Ukraine.

Reports of aggressive and dangerous conduct by Chinese vessels in the fiercely contested South China Sea have surged over the past 17 months, as tensions mount in one of Asia’s biggest flashpoints.

Since February 2023, the Philippines has accused China of unsafe behaviour on at least 12 occasions, often within the water of its exclusive economic zone (EEZ), according to Philippine government data compiled by the thinktank the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), which tracks incidents as part of its regional Asia-Pacific Regional Security Assessment.

It comes as the Philippines marked the eight-year anniversary of a Hague tribunal ruling that overwhelmingly backed the Philippines, and rejected China’s sweeping claims over the South China Sea.

The Philippine ambassador to the United States, Jose Manuel Romualdez, told the Guardian tensions and “aggressive movements” needed to be reduced to “avoid a situation where something really major, conflict, can happen”.

On Friday, the Philippines national security adviser, Eduardo Ano, said the country would not back down. “We will continue to stand our ground and push back against coercion, interference, malign influence and other tactics that seek to jeopardise our security and stability,” Ano said.

Reported incidents include accusations China has rammed Philippine vessels, used water cannon on them, damaging their ships, deployed a military-grade laser against its coast guard, and, most recently, used knives to puncture its rubber boats.

Previous years might see fewer or more minor incidents recorded, although Meia Nouwens, senior fellow for Chinese security and defence policy and head of the China Programme at IISS, said collating data on confrontations was difficult as it was possible that some incidents were not publicly disclosed by past governments.

The frequency of encounters between Chinese and Philippine coast guard or navy personnel that involve contact is also higher than in recent years, when reports of rammings or water cannon deployment were rare, and analysts say the current tensions have risen to levels not seen over the past 10 years.

“The recent tensions have been much more physical, there’s been a lot more contact between Philippine and Chinese ships,” said Harrison Prétat, deputy director and fellow with the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative, who added that while there have previously been spikes in tensions between Vietnam and China, the Philippines is a US treaty ally. “One factor that makes this situation perhaps even more concerning is that there is this treaty obligation of the United States to the Philippines.”

The US has pledged to defend Manila in the event of an armed attack, and as reported incidents become more frequent and more intense, there are growing concerns that a miscalculation could pull the US into direct confrontation with Beijing.

The dispute over the South China Sea is long-running and volatile, and China has for years been accused of aggressive acts against neighbouring country’s vessels.

China has repeatedly denied acting unprofessionally, saying its coast guard operates legally and with restraint. However, video and images released by the Philippines coast guard has frequently appeared to support its allegations, as has independent media reporting.

The South China Sea is one of the world’s most important trade routes, and a strategically important waterway, but it is at the centre of a fierce dispute. Beijing claims the majority of the sea through a controversial demarcation known as the nine-dash line – despite a ruling by a Hague tribunal finding such claims to be without legal basis. Its claims not only clash with those of the Philippines, but also Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan.

Dangerous confrontations have mostly occurred when Philippine vessels attempt to conduct resupply missions to a small contingent of troops based at Second Thomas Shoal, a submerged reef in the Spratly Islands that sits within the Philippines’ EEZ. The soldiers are based at a rusting and dilapidated ship, BRP Sierra Madre, which was deliberately grounded at the shoal in 1999 by the Philippines to underline its claim to the shoal, and which continues to serve as an unlikely military outpost.

China has demanded the ship’s removal and argues that Manila’s resupply mission are trying to deliver construction materials to reinforce the ship.

Analysts say Beijing has essentially imposed a blockade on the Sierra Madre, which is severely degraded after more than two decades at sea, and warn China could take the shoal in the event the ship crumbles.

Romualdez said the Philippines “cannot and will not” abandon its presence at the shoal, but he added that its coast guard was committed to acting with restraint.

Deliveries had been “misconstrued as construction material”, he said, adding the purpose was not offensive in nature but intended to make the Sierra Madre safe for those who are based there. “It’s the typhoon season right now, a big typhoon can very well happen, and then our soldiers who are there can obviously be in harm’s way,” he said.

Facing China’s ‘monster’ ship

In addition to unsafe conduct, the Philippines has also accused China of wider intimidation tactics, including the anchoring of a 12,000-ton Chinese coast guard, known as “the monster”, due to its size, inside Manila’s EEZ, just 730 metres (800 yards) away from a Philippine coast guard ship at Sabina shoal. A state’s EEZ extends 370km (200 nautical miles) from the coast, and it has special rights to exploit resources and construct in this area.

In June, China also introduced a new regulation that empowers its coast guard to detain foreigners accused of trespassing, and detain them for up to 60 days without trial, a move that has created greater anxiety among Filipino fishing communities.

The Philippines has insisted it will not relent in defending its waters, however it faces a difficult decision about how to continue resupplying the Sierra Madre.

“It’s getting more and more clear that this is a blockade,” said Ray Powell, director of SeaLight, a maritime transparency project at Stanford University. “China’s got almost a semi-permanent [presence], they’ve their own small boats in and around the Sierra Madre, with a tight cordon.”

Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos said last month that if any Filipino serviceman or citizen were killed by a wilful act in the South China Sea, this would be “very, very close to what we define as an act of war, and therefore, we would respond accordingly”.

The US has stepped up efforts to target violent Israeli settlers, adding new individuals and organisations to a growing sanctions list and warning banks to check transactions linked to all Israeli “outposts” in the occupied West Bank.

The new sanctions cover the far-right group Lehava, already listed by the UK, and two founding members of Tsav9, a campaign group that blocked aid from reaching Gaza. The new measures also target outposts, suggesting the Biden administration is prepared to take at least some steps to confront Israel’s creeping land grab on the West Bank.

One of the outposts targeted was set up by a regional council, implying that branches of the Israeli state are potentially no longer off limits, when it comes to sanctions.

“It appears that they’ve not just targeted extremist settlers but have introduced a linkage to territoriality by citing illegal outposts,” Aaron David Miller, a former state department Middle East negotiator now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“It doesn’t take much imagination to conclude that the next target would be [Israeli] government financing for illegal outposts. And that would be a new departure to be sure.”

The G7 foreign ministers joined the UN and EU on Thursday in condemning the Israeli government’s decision last month to legalize five outposts in the West Bank, labelling the plan “inconsistent with international law”. The G7 statement comes at a time of rising concern that Israel’s rightist government is steadily moving towards annexation of the West Bank.

Matthew Miller, the state department spokesperson, said that the four West Bank outposts specifically targeted by Thursday’s sanctions, “are owned or controlled by US-designated individuals who have weaponized them as bases for violent actions to displace Palestinians”.

“Outposts like these have been used to disrupt grazing lands, limit access to wells, and launch violent attacks against neighboring Palestinians,” Miller said.

In a written statement, Miller reflected growing frustration in the Biden administration at the failure of the Israeli government to take its own measures against violent West Bank settlers, and warned that further US punitive measures could be in the pipeline.

“We strongly encourage the Government of Israel to take immediate steps to hold these individuals and entities accountable,” he said. “In the absence of such steps, we will continue to impose our own accountability measures.”

Potentially the most consequential element in the new US measures is the updated red flag alert from America’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCen). It raises the risks of punitive fines for banks dealing with West Bank settlements.

The alert warns financial institutions about potential “suspicious activity”, that could indicate a sanctioned individual or organisation is trying to bypass controls. This now includes “payments involving entities, individuals, addresses on accounts, receiving addresses, or IP addresses linked to any West Bank ‘outpost’,” the warning says.

Human Rights Watch, who have long campaigned to highlight settler violence on the West Bank, welcomed the US measures as being the most far-reaching on the issue to date, but called for direct action against the Israeli government for its support for the extremists.

“In this case we’re pleased that the Biden administration is going farther than before with the alert,” Sarah Yager, Washington director of Human Rights Watch, said. “Now it’s time for sanctions against the Israeli authorities that are approving and inciting. We want to see the US, UK, Canada and others focus on power behind all this in the West Bank.”

All settlements in the occupied West Bank are considered illegal under international law. Outposts are settlements considered illegal even under Israeli law. There are nearly 200 all across the West Bank, according to the activist group Peace Now.

Many of the small outposts have close links to over 140 larger settlements recognised by the Israeli state though deemed illegal under international law. The broad language used in the FinCEN alert could mean financial transactions with all West Bank settlements could be affected.

Richard Nephew, a former state department coordinator on global anti-corruption in the Biden administration, said the financial crimes alert combined with the newly announced sanctions and the G7 declaration “create a pretty toxic environment”.

“That is the goal,” Nephew, author of The Art of Sanctions and now a senior research scholar at Columbia University, said. “The goal is to make it so that financial institutions, companies and others say: ‘This just isn’t worth it’, because the risks of actually falling into a sanctions problem or to a compliance problem, if you’re a US entity, is just simply too great.”

Additional reporting by Quique Kierszenbaum in Jerusalem

Four people have died overnight trying to cross the Channel, according to reports in French media.

A rescue operation took place off Boulogne-sur-Mer on France’s northern coast after reports of people in the sea trying to cross to Britain. Four of those pulled from the sea had drowned.

About 60 people were rescued in total from Thursday into Friday morning, according to the French newspaper La Voix du Nord.

A navy patrol boat went to the site after being alerted that several people had fallen into the sea while trying to cross the Channel, according to a briefing by maritime police to Agence France-Pressse news agency. Four of those winched out of the water by helicopter were dead.

The deaths are the first to happen since Keir Starmer took office. He has pledged to “stop the criminal gangs” but it is unlikely that any new policy can happen fast enough to make a dent in the peak in crossings through the summer months.

The last major incident was on 23 April, when five people died off the French coast trying to reach the UK.

The deaths take the total number killed on the perilous crossing from France to Britain this year to 19.

Home Office figures show 419 people made the journey across the Channel from France to the UK in six boats on Tuesday. The figures mean an average of about 70 people for each boat and take the provisional total for 2024 to date to 14,058, according to Press Association.

The only construction worker to survive March’s deadly bridge collapse in Baltimore has said he is haunted by the fact that he told his nephew to go rest in his car – shortly before the relative fell, along with the vehicle, to his death and became one of six men killed in the disaster.

“If I had told him to come with me, maybe it would have been different,” Julio Cervantes Suarez told NBC News in an interview that the network exclusively aired late on Wednesday. “Maybe he would be here with us.

“I relive it all the time – the minutes before the fall and when I’m falling.”

As he recounted to NBC during his first remarks about the ordeal he endured, Cervantes was among seven Latino construction crew members who were repairing potholes on the Francis Scott Key Bridge when the cargo ship Dali struck it in the early morning of 26 March.

The six other men included Cervantes’s nephew, Carlos Daniel Hernández, and brother-in-law, Alejandro Hernández Fuentes. The crew’s members were all taking a break either inside their personal cars or in work vehicles when the ship knocked the bridge down.

Cervantes told NBC that he was in his truck when it slammed into the Patapsco River, and the water quickly rose to his neck, preventing him from opening the doors to escape. He got out by manually rolling one of his windows down as his truck sank, swallowing water in the process.

Once above the surf, Cervantes – who can’t swim – found a piece of floating wreckage, grabbed it and waited until emergency responders rescued him. He said he had only realized what had happened when he looked “at the bridge and it was no longer there”.

Before he was saved, he could only watch helplessly as his companions disappeared one at a time. Cervantes said he called out to each of the other men by name – but never got an answer.

“That’s when I realized what happened,” Cervantes, speaking Spanish, said to NBC.

It took six weeks for officials to recover all of the bodies of Cervantes’s relatives and co-workers, whom he considered friends.

“They were good people, good workers,” he added. “[They] had good values.”

An investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has since found that the Dali reported power outages before embarking to Sri Lanka from Baltimore. The NTSB has not yet established what caused those electrical problems.

The companies owning and managing the ship – both from Singapore – have sought to limit their liability in court. It was left up to a federal court in Maryland to determine who was to blame and how much they owe over the collapse of the bridge, which could take several years and more than $1.5bn to rebuild.

Cervantes told NBC he would like those held responsible “to pay for the damage they have done” even though he knew “money is not going to buy a hug from a father or a son”.

He also said he was undergoing therapy to emotionally heal – and as part of his search for a reason he survived.

“I think maybe there is still a goal for me,” Cervantes said.

• The Associated Press contributed reporting

The only construction worker to survive March’s deadly bridge collapse in Baltimore has said he is haunted by the fact that he told his nephew to go rest in his car – shortly before the relative fell, along with the vehicle, to his death and became one of six men killed in the disaster.

“If I had told him to come with me, maybe it would have been different,” Julio Cervantes Suarez told NBC News in an interview that the network exclusively aired late on Wednesday. “Maybe he would be here with us.

“I relive it all the time – the minutes before the fall and when I’m falling.”

As he recounted to NBC during his first remarks about the ordeal he endured, Cervantes was among seven Latino construction crew members who were repairing potholes on the Francis Scott Key Bridge when the cargo ship Dali struck it in the early morning of 26 March.

The six other men included Cervantes’s nephew, Carlos Daniel Hernández, and brother-in-law, Alejandro Hernández Fuentes. The crew’s members were all taking a break either inside their personal cars or in work vehicles when the ship knocked the bridge down.

Cervantes told NBC that he was in his truck when it slammed into the Patapsco River, and the water quickly rose to his neck, preventing him from opening the doors to escape. He got out by manually rolling one of his windows down as his truck sank, swallowing water in the process.

Once above the surf, Cervantes – who can’t swim – found a piece of floating wreckage, grabbed it and waited until emergency responders rescued him. He said he had only realized what had happened when he looked “at the bridge and it was no longer there”.

Before he was saved, he could only watch helplessly as his companions disappeared one at a time. Cervantes said he called out to each of the other men by name – but never got an answer.

“That’s when I realized what happened,” Cervantes, speaking Spanish, said to NBC.

It took six weeks for officials to recover all of the bodies of Cervantes’s relatives and co-workers, whom he considered friends.

“They were good people, good workers,” he added. “[They] had good values.”

An investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has since found that the Dali reported power outages before embarking to Sri Lanka from Baltimore. The NTSB has not yet established what caused those electrical problems.

The companies owning and managing the ship – both from Singapore – have sought to limit their liability in court. It was left up to a federal court in Maryland to determine who was to blame and how much they owe over the collapse of the bridge, which could take several years and more than $1.5bn to rebuild.

Cervantes told NBC he would like those held responsible “to pay for the damage they have done” even though he knew “money is not going to buy a hug from a father or a son”.

He also said he was undergoing therapy to emotionally heal – and as part of his search for a reason he survived.

“I think maybe there is still a goal for me,” Cervantes said.

• The Associated Press contributed reporting

US intelligence services have foiled a Russian plot to assassinate the chief executive of Germany’s leading arms manufacturer, which was an apparent attempt at retaliation over the company’s role in providing a large amount of armaments for Ukraine, according to reports on Thursday.

The plot to murder Armin Papperger, the CEO of Rheinmetall, was one of several Russian government plans to kill defence industry executives in several countries in Europe who have been supporting Ukraine’s war effort, unidentified US and western officials told CNN.

The plans to kill Papperger were in the most advanced stages of any of the plots, the investigators reportedly said.

US authorities had immediately informed their German counterparts, according to the report, and security around Papperger and Rheinmetall had been stepped up accordingly.

Papperger told the Financial Times that the German government had set up a “great level of security around my person”.

While he did not directly confirm the threats, he told the Financial Times that the CNN report was credible, saying, “I think CNN is not just looking up at the sky”.

Rheinmetall has declined to comment but said in a statement to media that “necessary measures are always taken” in regular consultation with security authorities.

German authorities have yet to respond to requests for comment but a government official confirmed that the US had warned Berlin about the plot.

Rheinmetall is one of the world’s biggest armaments’ producers, making artillery and tank shells as well as armoured vehicles. It considerably ramped up its production after Russia’s full-blown invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and is one of the largest suppliers of military equipment and ammunition to Ukraine, Germany’s Der Spiegel reports.

In February, Rheinmetall announced plans to open an ammunition factory in Ukraine to produce and repair armoured vehicles. The factory was the main reason for the plot against Papperger, German security authorities told Der Spiegel.

Observers noted that a patrol car and several police officers carrying submachine guns had been parked in front of the Rheinmetall headquarters in the western German city of Düsseldorf every day for months, while Papperger has had visible personal protection for a similar time period.

In public settings such as football matches, cultural events and association meetings, he has been accompanied by security provided by the police from the state of North Rhine-Westphalia – one of only a handful of people to be afforded such protection.

The white-haired, stockily built CEO has even appeared, during a visit to Ukraine, donning a bulletproof vest, declaring: “It is very important for us to support Ukraine efficiently and reliably,” Der Spiegel reports.

In the Spring, he took Olaf Scholz on a tour of a Rheinmetall production hall full of Leopard battle tanks.

Papperger’s profile has been boosted by Rheinmetall’s role in the conflict, with the company becoming one of the 40 largest companies listed in the DAX index as a result, according to Der Spiegel. Last year, its operating result shot up to almost €1bn, and the order books expanded by about 44 % to more than €38bn.

Rheinmetall has been described since the Russian full-blown invasion and Germany’s subsequent involvement as one of the biggest suppliers of weapons to Kyiv and a thorn in Moscow’s side.

In their piece they state that the Rheinmetall boss “had long been considered a threat by the German security authorities”. They suspected that because of his prominent position he was in danger of becoming the target of a Russian attack. The main reason given was that the company was building a factory for the Lynx infantry fighting vehicle in Ukraine and wanted to develop the arms industry in the country.

Rheinmetall is one of the largest single suppliers of military equipment and ammunition to Ukraine and wants to expand its production so that it is able to produce 700,000 rounds of artillery ammunition annually. Though 1 million is considered an approximate requirement for Ukraine to be able to adequately defend itself against Russia.

The Ukrainian army is equipped with a range of weapons from the German manufacturer, including Leopard 1 main battle tanks and Marder infantry fighting vehicles. In addition the company has supplied Ukraine with 155mm artillery shells, which have been central to Ukraine’s unrelenting war of attrition, and provided a comprehensive service involving repair, delivery and replacement parts.

The company says it has long been the target of so-called hybrid warfare from Russia, including cyber-attacks. The latest threats are being taken very seriously, and are considered plausible, a company insider told Der Spiegel, adding, “We will not let this divert ourselves from the decisive action to support Ukraine”.

The assassination plot revelations come amid a flurry of incidents believed to be part of a systematic Russian sabotage campaign in revenge for support for Ukraine. It has reportedly recruited amateurs locally to carry out everything from arson attacks on warehouses and shopping centres to smaller actions, including acts of vandalism and graffiti, as well as espionage operations, all intended to undermine Ukraine’s war effort and to help dent public support for Ukraine. The actions have been described as a “shadow war” that Moscow is waging in western Europe.

On Thursday a senior Nato official told reporters attending the alliance’s conference in Washington that the sabotage campaign had been increasing in intensity and had to be taken extremely seriously.

“We’re seeing sabotage, we’re seeing assassination plots, we’re seeing arson. We’re seeing things that have cost in human lives,” he said. “I believe very much that we’re seeing a campaign of covert sabotage activities from Russia that have strategic consequences.”

The German foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, said at the Nato summit that Russia was waging a hybrid war of aggression, including cyber-attacks and sabotage of infrastructure. “This underlines once again that we as Europeans must protect ourselves as best we can and not be naive,” she told Reuters.

The French Green leader, Marine Tondelier, has said the risk of the far right rising to power in France has not disappeared after the snap election, and politics must urgently change to regain voters’ trust.

“It was a warning,” Tondelier said of this month’s election, where a spectacular rush of tactical voting in the final round held back Marine Le Pen’s far-right, anti-immigration National Rally. The RN’s first-round surge had brought it the closest it had ever been to a parliament majority and entering government.

“The Republic held on, but for how much longer?” Tondelier said in an interview in her Paris office, days after a left alliance including her Green party finished ahead in the election in a surprise result.

Talks are now under way over what type of government France could form and Tondelier, a 37-year-old environmentalist, is among names being suggested for prime minister – a prospect she has not commented on, saying policy is more important than personalities.

In the interview, she said it was crucial that France “does not continue the same discriminatory public policies that break, exhaust and damage [society] for another two years” or there could be a fresh surge by the far right in the presidential election of 2027.

“There are a lot of people who want and need social justice and we are fighting for those people. Whether or not they voted for us, or didn’t vote at all, we’ll fight for them all the same,” she said.

The broad left alliance known as the New Popular Front – which includes Tondelier’s party, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s leftwing France Unbowed, the Socialists and Communists – finished first but fell far short of an absolute majority. Tondelier wrote on social media this week that Macron – who has insisted that no one political force won the election and called for a broad coalition – was refusing to accept the election results. She said his denial was “damaging the country and democracy”.

Tondelier, a local councillor from northern France who took over the French Green party (EELV) two years ago, went from a relative unknown to a household name during the snap election campaign.

Commentators said she stood out for her impassioned TV appearances, humorous one-liner put-downs of far-right politicians and her trademark green jacket, which she started wearing as a subliminal way of raising awareness of environmental issues but which now carries such brand recognition that it has its own social media account.

If Tondelier’s heartfelt pleas won over voters on the left and centre, it was because her battle with the far right is deeply personal.

She was born, grew up and still lives in the former coal-mining town of Hénin-Beaumont in the northern rust belt of the Pas-de-Calais. Its population of 27,000 has suffered from factory closures and unemployment, and a decade ago the town went from being a leftwing heartland to Le Pen’s laboratory for gaining power.

Paris-born Le Pen was re-elected as MP for the town last week. But since the far right won Hénin-Beaumont town hall in 2014, Tondelier as a local councillor has fought them in rowdy council meetings. She has complained that the far right so resented opposition that her mic was switched off in meetings where they called her “hysterical” when she kept speaking. She wrote about it in a 2017 book, News from the Front, which caused fury on the far right and reads like a manual for the left’s resistance.

Tondelier, who for five years worked in air quality control, says the years spent facing the far right in northern council meetings was her political training. “I’ve learned everything through getting their political custard pies in my face. It was harsh. It could have made me crack, but actually it’s built me.”

So when the first-round election results on 30 June saw the far right top the poll across more than half of France and come within reach of power, she immediately began working on tactical voting and candidates pulling out to avoid splitting the vote. “I was 10 years ahead of everyone else’s anxiety. I saw very experienced politicians stupefied, in denial or anger, not knowing what to do, panicking, defeatist or saying it was too late … but I was very calm and determined.”

Tondelier had herself already stood aside in several elections to facilitate tactical voting to hold back the far right in her northern area, including the 2015 regional elections. “I know the political and human cost of it,” she said. This time, she became the media voice of the huge tactical voting drive nationwide.

Five generations of Tondelier’s family come from the mining town where she still lives and raises her young son with her partner, who coaches the town’s triathlon club. One side of the family were farmers. Her great-grandmother ran a tobacconist’s and became the first female taxi driver in the area. Her mother, a dentist, still practises in the town, as does her father, an acupuncturist and osteopath.

Taking on people bigger than herself has become Tondelier’s political trademark, her supporters say. She joined the Greens as a student in 2009 during the European election campaign by the farmer José Bové, impressed that years earlier he had trashed a half-built McDonald’s in a protest campaign. “The David versus Goliath struggle has always spoken to me,” she said.

She went with other Greens to protest at the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen in 2009, and when she returned she became vegetarian for environmental reasons, realising she had only been eating meat to be polite. In rural, northern France, it was bizarre to be a vegetarian at that time, she said. When she told people she didn’t eat meat, she would often hear: “Don’t worry love, we’ll give you ham instead.”

Tondelier thinks one of the reasons the young far-right leader Jordan Bardella refused to debate her during the election campaign was because in her northern town she had learned to use humour effectively against the far right.

She said: “If you shout, they shout. It’s like a mudfight with a pig: you can train and make progress but it’s their favourite sport so you’re going to end up dirty and in the mud.” Humour, on the other hand, destabilised them, she said. “And it’s a way to try to stay happy and positive.”

Tondelier’s famous green jacket hangs in her office beside her supporter’s cap for the northern football club Lens, where she goes to games. She bought her first formal green jacket secondhand for €50 and had to buy a second one during the campaign when it was getting threadbare. She also has a casual denim green jacket for demos and a green puffa for winter. “My idea was that it’s hard to bring ecology into the conversation, so if I wore a green jacket it would be a subliminal message … Now everyone’s asking for the jacket, it’s more famous than I am.”

Tondelier says humanism in politics is crucial, and she learned this from helping charities who work with families sleeping rough on the northern coast. During the 2015 regional election campaign, she regularly drove up to Calais to the vast shantytown where up to 8,000 refugees and migrants were living in squalid conditions. “I used to cry the whole way home from shame,” she said. She feels that if all French people spent a day helping charities working with migrants, they might change their mind about politics.

When Tondelier had her son in December 2018, some told her that if she wanted to quit campaigning and politics, parenthood could be an honourable excuse. That weekend, however, the biggest gilets jaunes anti-government protests over fuel tax took place at the same time as France’s major climate march. “I saw that all happening and I said of course we’ll carry on. We’ve got to save biodiversity and the climate.”

A sci-fi-inspired spacesuit that recycles urine into drinking water could enable astronauts to perform lengthy spacewalks on upcoming lunar expeditions.

The prototype, modelled on the “stillsuits” in the sci-fi classic Dune, collects urine, purifies it and can return it to the astronaut through a drinking tube within five minutes.

The suit’s creators hope it could be deployed before the end of the decade in Nasa’s Artemis programme, which is focused on learning how to live and work for prolonged periods on another world.

“The design includes a vacuum-based external catheter leading to a combined forward-reverse osmosis unit, providing a continuous supply of potable water with multiple safety mechanisms to ensure astronaut wellbeing,” said Sofia Etlin, a researcher at Weill Cornell Medicine and Cornell University and co-designer of the suit.

Nasa is preparing for the Artemis III mission in 2026, which aims to land a crew on the lunar south pole, with a stated ambition of launching crewed missions to Mars by the 2030s. Urine and sweat are already routinely recycled on the International Space Station (ISS), but Etlin says an equivalent system is needed for when astronauts are out on expedition.

“Astronauts currently have only one litre of water available in their in-suit drink bags,” said Etlin. “This is insufficient for the planned longer-lasting lunar spacewalks, which can last 10 hours, and even up to 24 hours in an emergency.”

There are also longstanding complaints about the current waste management solution, the so-called maximum absorbency garment (MAG), which is essentially an adult nappy.

The garments are reportedly leak-prone, uncomfortable and unhygienic, prompting some astronauts to limit food and drink intake before spacewalks and others to complain of urinary tract infections (UTIs).

“If you’re giving Nasa billions of dollars, you’d think they wouldn’t keep the diaper,” said Etlin, who surveyed astronauts while researching the new design.

“It’s commonplace for the MAG to leak,” she added. “The astronauts talk about how at a certain point they can’t tell whether it’s urine or sweat any more. They’re like: ‘Yes, I’m an astronaut and this is a burden I have to bear.’”

Future commercial astronauts may be less likely to take such a stoical view, she suggested.

Prof Christopher Mason, of Weill Cornell Medicine, the study’s senior author, said: “Even in the absence of a large desert planet, like in Dune, this is something that could be better for astronauts.”

The proposed stillsuit system comprises a collection cup of moulded silicone to fit around the genitalia, with a different shape and size for women and men. This is contained within an undergarment made of multiple layers of flexible fabric.

The silicon cup connects to a moisture-activated vacuum pump that automatically switches on as soon as the astronaut begins to urinate. Once collected, the urine is diverted to the filtration system where it gets recycled into water with an efficiency of 87%. The system uses an osmosis system to remove water from urine, plus a pump to separate water from salt.

Collecting and purifying 500ml of urine takes only five minutes. In deployment, the purified water could be enriched with electrolytes and returned to the astronaut as an energy drink.

The system measures 38cm by 23cm by 23cm, with a weight of approximately 8kg, which was judged to be sufficiently compact and light to be carried on the back of a spacesuit. The team are planning to recruit 100 volunteers in New York in the autumn to test the system for comfort and functionality.

“Our system can be tested in simulated microgravity conditions, as microgravity is the primary space factor we must account for,” said Mason. “These tests will ensure the system’s functionality and safety before it is deployed in actual space missions.”

Details of the prototype are published in the journal Frontiers in Space Technology.

Fresh questions have been raised about the suppression of free speech in Saudi Arabia after the brother of a man facing the death penalty for tweeting to 10 followers was handed a 20-year sentence for largely innocuous tweets.

The Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, had said Mohammed al-Ghamdi was a victim of “bad laws” after being sentenced to death, yet the crown prince permitted the same laws to be used to sentence Ghamdi’s younger brother, Asaad al-Ghamdi.

Mohammed al-Ghamdi’s British-based lawyers have revealed that a UN special rapporteur on arbitrary detention judged in a recent report that their client was a victim of arbitrary detention and denial of an appropriate lawyer.

Mohammed al-Ghamdi was sentenced to death in July 2023 and has been given no notification of whether he is allowed to appeal, or when the sentence will be carried out. Prince Mohammed said in a Fox News interview in September that his death sentence was shameful for the judicial system.

A third, UK-based brother of the two Saudi-based Ghamdis is a human rights campaigner, and the arrest of his siblings is seen as a means by which Riyadh can threaten the political activities of dissidents based abroad.

Asaad al-Ghamdi was arrested by Saudi authorities in November 2022 in a night raid on his home in al-Hamdaniya, a neighbourhood of Jeddah, while his wife and children looked on. Security forces confiscated electronic devices and ransacked every room of the house.

He was not told of the reasons for his arrest or of the charges against him for at least 10 months and was denied a lawyer for 10 months. Nearly a third of that time was spent in solitary confinement. He suffers from epilepsy and had numerous bad falls in jail.

After eight hearings, he was convicted on 29 May this year, 10 months after his brother had been handed his death sentence.

Asked last September on Fox News about reports of Mohammed al-Ghamdi’s death sentence, Prince Mohammed said: “Shamely it is true. It is something we don’t like.”

Asked if he could change the laws, he replied: “We are doing our best to do that. We have changed tens of laws. I am trying to prioritise the change day by day, but we are not happy about that. The jail system has to follow the laws and I cannot tell the judge to do that and ignore the law because that is against the rule of law. But do we have bad laws? Yes. Are we changing that? Yes.”

He added that it was possible in the next phase of Mohammed al-Ghamdi’s trial that “the judge is more experienced and he might look at it totally differently”.

Yet eight months later Asaad al-Ghamdi was sentenced to 20 years in jail for the same offence, using the same articles of Saudi Arabia’s counter-terrorism laws.

In a report issued this week, the UN working group on arbitrary detention told the Saudi authorities that widespread or systematic imprisonment may constitute crimes against humanity. The group said Mohammed al-Ghamdi had been detained for exercising his lawful right to free expression, and his arrest was “completely inconsistent with human rights law”.

The group said he should be released immediately and paid compensation. It also recommended that the Saudi government review its anti-terror laws and the independence of its judiciary.

Riyadh told the working group that Mohammed al-Ghamdi was guilty of sedition, spreading chaos and disrupting public security, and his case was heard at a specialised criminal court in a fair and open trial. Saudi Arabia said it had a right under its anti-terror laws to hold a suspect in solitary confinement.

Dr Saeed al-Ghamdi, the brother of Mohammad and Asaad and a prominent Islamic scholar and exiled government critic, said: “The arbitrary detention working group decision regarding Mohammed al-Ghamdi is very good and I value it highly, but the Saudi government has a history of defying international law.

“I believe that the arrest of my brothers and the unjust sentences against them are due to my activism. Saudi authorities asked me several times to return to Saudi Arabia but I refused to do so. It is very probable that this sentence against my brothers is in retaliation for my activity. Otherwise, these charges wouldn’t have carried such a severe penalty.”

Haydee Dijkstal, the international counsel for the arrested brothers, said: “The blatant and clear reality is sentencing a retired teacher to death for exercising his fundamental right to free expression to a handful of followers on Twitter is objectively outrageous.”

The Sanad Human Rights Organization said Saudi Arabia had no intention of reforming its human rights record.

Documents show that Asaad al-Ghamdi was charged with “challenging the religion and justice of the king and the crown prince”, seeking to disrupt the public order and “publishing false and malicious news and rumours”. The documents state that he was arrested “for publishing posts that harmed the security of the homeland on social media websites (Twitter)”.

The tweets used as evidence against him criticised projects related to Vision 2030, Prince Mohammed’s programme for diversifying the country’s economy, including a lack of investment in Jeddah. One tweet mourned Dr Abdullah al-Hamid, a co-founder of the Saudi Civil and Political Rights Association and a leading Saudi human rights figure who died in prison after his conviction on charges relating to peaceful human rights activism, and offered condolences to his family.

The Saudi embassy has been contacted for comment.