Donald Trump, wearing a bandage partially covering his right ear, appeared in public for the first time since surviving an assassination attempt over the weekend.

Trump made a dramatic entrance to loud cheers on Monday during the first night of the Republican national convention in Milwaukee, emerging on the floor of the convention hall at about 9pm CT to cheers of “USA!” and “fight!” Lee Greenwood played “Proud to be an American” as Trump entered the convention hall.

Trump worked his way across the convention floor before making his way to a box, where he joined several notable Republicans, including Tucker Carlson, Congressman Byron Donalds, and JD Vance, whom he named his running mate earlier in the day.

“He has proven to be one tough SOB,” Sean O’Brien, the president of the Teamsters union, said to thunderous applause after Trump appeared.

His appearance came after a slew of speakers including Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right congresswoman from Georgia, called Trump a “founding father” of the “America First movement”.

The speakers hailed Trump’s survival as a godly act. They also offered dueling visions of America: a country in decline under Joe Biden, beset by soaring grocery and housing prices while politicians were more concerned with undocumented immigrants and transgender issues. They tried to paint an opposite vision of America under Trump, claiming it was a prosperous country where these problems did not exist.

Greene directly referenced the attempted assassination of Trump on Saturday.

“Unfortunately, this is also a somber moment for our nation. Two days ago, evil came for the man we admire and love so much. I thank God that his hand was on President Trump,” she said.

Senator Tim Scott, of South Carolina, also suggested divine intervention had played a role in the event. “If you didn’t believe in miracles before Saturday, you better be believing right now,” he said. “A devil came to Pennsylvania holding a rifle, but a lion got back on his feet and he roared,” he added, to thunderous applause in the Fiserv Forum.

Kristi Noem, the South Dakota governor, also brought up Saturday’s assassination attempt. “Two days ago, the whole world changed. Evil displayed itself in the very worst way through a cowardly act,” she said.

“An innocent American lost his life and we will continue to lift his family up in our prayers every single day,” added the governor, who was considered a potential vice-presidential pick until she published a story about killing her dog and goat. “Prior to this week, we already knew the President Donald Trump was a fighter. He is the toughest man that I have ever met. Nobody has endured more than what he has gone through.”

Amid calls for unity during the convention, Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin said that Democrats and their policies represented a “clear and present danger to America, to our institutions, our values and our people”. A Johnson staffer later told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel that the senator did not intend to read the line during the speech and said it was from an old version that was inadvertently loaded into the teleprompter.

Mark Robinson, the lieutenant governor of North Carolina, who has attracted criticism for violent, racist and sexist remarks also spoke on Monday. Speaking at a church last month, Robinson had said: “Some folks need killing.”

But much of his speech on focused on his personal story and rising prices – in alignment with the convention’s Monday theme of “Make America wealthy again”.

“Grocery prices have skyrocketed, gas is nearly double, factories, just like the one I worked at closing, leaving North Carolina families feeling hopeless.”

“Democrats have given hundreds of billions of dollars to the illegals and foreign nations while Gen Z has to pinch and it’s just so that they can never own a home, never marry and work until they die,” Charlie Kirk, a Republican who is the founder of Turning Points USA. “Donald Trump refuses to accept this vacant, pathetic and mutilated version of the American dream.”

The evening also featured speeches from several handpicked “ordinary Americans” who offered a firsthand account of how Biden’s policies had harmed them.

Several speakers also focused on LGBTQ+ matters and immigration as decisive issues.

“Let me state this clearly, there are only two genders,” Greene said during her remarks.

The speeches underscored how Republicans are moving into the final stretch of the election with confidence, offering a succinct encapsulation of the way Republicans plan to frame the choice between Biden and Trump.

“We don’t have to imagine a brighter day, we just have to remember,” John James, a Republican congressman from Michigan, said during his speech.

The independent presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr apologised to Donald Trump on Tuesday, after Kennedy’s son posted video and audio of a call between the two men in which Trump made bizarre remarks about vaccines and babies, as well as appearing to offer Kennedy some sort of political deal.

“When President Trump called me I was taping with an in-house videographer,” Kennedy said. “I should have ordered the videographer to stop recording immediately. I am mortified that this was posted. I apologise to the president.”

The call was apparently made before Trump and Kennedy’s later meeting on Monday at the Republican national convention in Milwaukee, reportedly to discuss the possibility of Kennedy endorsing Trump.

The recording was posted online by Kennedy’s son, Bobby Kennedy III, with the message: “I am a firm believer that these sorts of conversations should be had in public. Here’s Trump giving his real opinion to my dad about vaccinating kids – this was the day after the assassination attempt.”

Trump survived an assassination attempt on Saturday, during a rally in Pennsylvania when a gunman with an AR-15-style rifle opened fire from a nearby rooftop, grazing the president’s ear and killing a rally-goer.

Robert Kennedy Jr’s father, the US attorney general and senator Robert F Kennedy, and uncle, President John F Kennedy, were assassinated in the 1960s. After the Trump shooting, Joe Biden ordered the Secret Service to protect Kennedy.

The video of the Trump-Kennedy call is a little over one minute and 40 seconds long. It shows Kennedy standing close to a US flag in a dimly lit room, holding a phone and listening to Trump on speaker.

Parts of Trump’s remarks are hard to hear. But he can be heard speaking about a subject close to Kennedy’s heart: the supposed dangers of vaccinations.

A former environmental attorney, Kennedy rose to prominence before and during the Covid pandemic by spreading conspiracy theories about vaccines and their supposed effects.

Trump was president in the first year of the pandemic, a period of rapid development of Covid vaccines but also growing rightwing distrust of public health directives.

In his call with Kennedy, Trump says: “I agree with you, man. Something’s wrong with that whole system.”

Kennedy says: “Yeah.”

Trump continues: “And it’s the doctors you find. Remember I said, ‘I want to do small doses.’ Small doses.”

His words then take a bizarre turn.

“When you feed a baby, Bobby, a vaccination that is like 38 different vaccines, and it looks like it’s meant for a horse, not a, you know, 10lb or 20lb baby, it looks like you’re giving, you should be giving a horse this thing, and do you ever see the size of it? It’s massive and then you see the baby all of a sudden starting to change radically. I’ve seen it too many times. And then you hear that it doesn’t have an impact, right? But you and I talked about that a long time ago.”

Trump then appears to suggest the two men work together.

“Anyway, I would love you to do something and I think it would be so good for you, and so big for you.”

Kennedy listens. Trump’s words become hard to make out. He describes the shooting in Pennsylvania, saying the bullet that grazed him “sounded like the world’s largest mosquito”.

“It’s an AR-15 or something,” says the former president, who rejects efforts for gun control reform. “That’s a big gun. Those are pretty tough guns, right?”

In posting the recording, Bobby Kennedy III also suggested Anthony Fauci, formerly Biden’s chief medical adviser, should be in prison; appeared to suggest his father should have been Trump’s running mate on a “unity ticket” rather than “JD ‘fire all the unvaccinated nurses’ Vance”, the Ohio senator named on Monday; and implied Republicans and Democrats were subordinate to Pfizer, a multinational vaccine producer.

Kennedy III added: “This is not a cheapfake or somebody doing a Trump voice. This is the real deal.”

Polling shows that Kennedy could influence the presidential race in key states. Debate continues over whether he pulls more support from Biden or Trump.

Kennedy’s spokesperson, Stephanie Spear, confirmed the two men met at the RNC in Milwaukee, claiming it was “to discuss national unity” and saying that Kennedy “hopes to meet with leaders of the Democratic party as well.

“And no, he is not dropping out of the race. He is the only pro-environment, pro-choice, anti-war candidate who beats Donald Trump in head-to-head polls.”

Within minutes of Donald Trump’s announcement that he had tapped Ohio senator JD Vance as his running mate in the 2024 elections, abortion rights groups vociferously condemned the pick.

“A Trump-Vance administration will be the most dangerous administration for abortion and reproductive freedom in this country’s history,” Mini Timmaraju, president and CEO of Reproductive Freedom for All, said in a statement.

“By naming Vance to his ticket, Trump made clear that his administration will sign a national abortion ban and put birth control and IVF at risk,” said Jessica Mackler, president of Emily’s List, an organization that supports Democratic women who support abortion rights running for office.

Vance, the venture capitalist turned Hillbilly Elegy author turned GOP standard-bearer, has long opposed abortion.

In 2021, while running for Ohio senate, Vance told an Ohio news outlet that he did not support rape and incest exceptions in abortion bans. “It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term,” he said. “It’s whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society.”

But voters’ outrage over the overturning of Roe v Wade has grown, leading abortion rights supporters to a string of victories at the ballot box, and harnessing that outrage is widely considered Democrats’ best hope for winning the November elections. As Trump and other Republicans have tried to project a moderated stance on the issue – despite the fact that Trump handpicked three of the supreme court justices who overturned Roe – Vance has also tempered his public position.

“We have to accept that people do not want blanket abortion bans. They just don’t,” Vance told CNN’s Jake Tapper last year. “I say this as a person who wants to protect as many unborn babies as possible. We have to provide exceptions for the life of the mother and rape and so forth.”

In 2022, Vance said he would support a national 15-week abortion ban with exceptions. He also told NBC News that he wants mifepristone, a common abortion pill that was at the heart of a major supreme court case this year, to remain accessible.

Even while supporting a national ban, Vance has said he would like abortion to be “primarily a state issue”.

“Ohio is going to want to have a different abortion policy from California, from New York, and I think that’s reasonable,” he said. “I want Ohio to be able to make its own decisions, and I want Ohio’s elected legislators to make those decisions.”

But, he added: “I think it’s fine to sort of set some minimum national standard.”

Much of Vance’s public persona, however, remains defined by his support of what he sees as the traditional nuclear family. He has backed policies that he says will increase birth rates, such as making childbirth free, and said that people who are childfree by choice “do not have any physical commitment to the future of this country”.

“I think the rejection of the American family is perhaps the most pernicious and the most evil thing that the left has done in this country,” said Vance, a father of three. He then went on to suggest that several Democratic politicians, like Kamala Harris and New Jersey senator Cory Booker, should not have political power because they do not have children.

“Why have we let the Democrat party become controlled by people who don’t have any children? And why is this just a normal fact of American life?” Vance asked. “That the leaders of our country should be people who don’t have a personal and direct stake in it via their own offspring, via their own children?” (The vice-president has two stepchildren.)

“Many of the most unhappy and most miserable and most angry people in our media are childless adults,” he continued.

Vance has also called people who fear having kids “cat ladies” who “must be stopped” and said that universal daycare is “class war against normal people”.

Two days after the US supreme court overturned Roe, Vance tweeted: “If your worldview tells you that it’s bad for women to become mothers but liberating for them to work 90 hours a week in a cubicle at the New York Times or Goldman Sachs, you’ve been had.”

Shortly after Trump announced he had chosen Vance as his running mate, Joe Biden’s campaign started to circulate a clip of comments Vance made in 2021 about violence in marriages.

“This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that, like: ‘Well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term,’” Vance said in response to a question on fatherlessness.

Vance has said that he was not defending men who commit domestic abuse and that he himself is a victim of domestic abuse.

Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the powerful anti-abortion group SBA Pro-Life America, praised Vance on Monday.

“His ability to compellingly share these stories on a national stage will surely be an asset,” Dannenfelser said in a statement. “With approximately 750,000 babies in states like California and New York still lacking basic protections, we need champions whose boldness will not waver.”

Viktor Orbán has claimed that Donald Trump has “detailed and well-founded” plans for peace between Russia and Ukraine in a letter to a top EU body that is likely to inflame tensions about the Hungarian prime minister’s diplomatic freelancing.

Orbán, who met Trump at his Palm Beach compound last week, said in his letter to the president of the European Council, who organises meetings of the bloc’s 27 national leaders, that the Republican presidential nominee was ready to act as peace broker “immediately” after his election.

The “likely outcome” of a Trump victory meant that the EU should reopen “direct lines of diplomatic communication” with Russia and “high-level political talks” with China, Orbán wrote in the letter addressed to the council’s president , Charles Michel, which was first reported by the Financial Times. The Guardian has seen a copy.

The Hungarian prime minister said Trump’s likely victory would mean that the financial burden of supporting Ukraine’s war effort would shift to the EU’s disadvantage.

“I am more than convinced that in the likely outcome of the victory of President Trump, the proportion of the financial burden between the US and the EU will significantly change to the EU’s disadvantage when it comes to the financial support of Ukraine,” he wrote.

Orbán also said that after his recent talks with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, and the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, “the general observation” was that “the intensity of the military conflict will radically escalate in the near future”.

European strategy, Orbán wrote, had “copied the pro-war policy of the US”. He called for a discussion of “whether the continuation of this policy is rational in future”.

The letter emerged after the European Commission took the unprecedented decision to boycott meetings organised by Budapest as part of Hungary’s EU presidency.

A spokesperson for the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, said on Monday: “In light of recent developments marking the start of the Hungarian presidency the president has decided that @EU_Commission will be represented at senior civil servant level only during informal meetings of the council.”

That means neither von der Leyen, nor any of her team, including the EU’s chief diplomat, Josep Borrell, will attend “informal” EU meetings in Hungary, although formal meetings in Brussels and Luxembourg are expected to continue with the usual attenders.

The unprecedented snub follows apparent decisions by some EU member states to send lower-level officials to EU events in Hungary.

The commission also cancelled a visit to Budapest from von der Leyen and her team of EU commissioners that was expected to have taken place in the first few days of July.

Soon after Hungary took over the rotating presidency of the EU council of ministers on 1 July, Viktor Orbán visited Kyiv, Moscow, Beijing, Azerbaijan and the US in a tour he described as a “peace mission” that has provoked deep anger among other EU leaders.

The EU presidency gives Orbán no formal role to speak for the EU. Other European leaders have sharply criticised the visits, in a near-unanimous chorus of disapproval. Slovakia, led by Orbán’s ally Robert Fico, was the only EU member state that did not speak out against Hungary at a meeting of senior diplomats last week.

Responding to the leaked letter on X, the Hungarian prime minister’s political director, Balázs Orbán (who is unrelated), doubled down on the message bound to provoke Hungary’s EU partners. “Instead of copying the pro-war policy of the US, #Europe needs a sovereign and independent strategy with a focus on a ceasefire and the start of peace negotiations,” he wrote.

Separately, he offered congratulations to JD Vance, the hard-right Ohio senator, who was selected as Trump’s running mate on Tuesday and is a leading opponent of aid to Ukraine. “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other,” Vance said on a podcast last year.

“A Trump-Vance administration sounds just right,” tweeted Balázs Orbán, accompanied by a strong-arm emoji.

In an interview with the pro-government daily Magyar Nemzet, Balázs Orbán claimed Trump was “committed to peace” and “will soon create peace himself” if he became president of the US again. “If Europe wants peace and wants to have a decisive say in the settlement of the war and an end to the bloodshed, it must now work out and implement a change of course,” he wrote.

And in a statement likely to deepen alarm in EU capitals, he added: “We are convinced that – in political terms – we should use the entire period of Hungary’s EU presidency to establish the right conditions for peace negotiations.”

Michel, the European Council president, who has yet to comment on Orbán’s letter, has previously condemned efforts by Hungary to negotiate with Russia, albeit without naming names.

“The EU rotating presidency has no mandate to engage with Russia on behalf of the EU,” he said earlier this month. “The European Council is clear: Russia is the aggressor, Ukraine is the victim. No discussions about Ukraine can take place without Ukraine.”

Gareth Southgate has announced he has stepped down as England’s manager after eight years. The Football Association had hoped he would extend his contract after he led the team to the final of Euro 2024 but Southgate has decided to seek a new challenge.

“As a proud Englishman, it has been the honour of my life to play for England and to manage England,” Southgate said. “It has meant everything to me, and I have given it my all. But it’s time for change, and for a new chapter. Sunday’s final in Berlin against Spain was my final game as England manager.”

The 53-year-old is England’s most successful manager in terms of consistent major tournament performance. England also reached the European Championship final in 2021, losing to Italy, and a World Cup semi-final in 2018, when they were beaten by Croatia. In his other World Cup, the team were eliminated by France in the quarter-finals.

Newcastle’s Eddie Howe and three former Chelsea managers, Graham Potter, Thomas Tuchel and Mauricio Pochettino, are near the top of the FA’s shortlist to succeed Southgate. Howe, who has previously described the England post as “the ultimate” job, is thought to be open to discussions should the FA approach Newcastle. Howe loves the day-to-day coaching of club management but could view the job as too good to turn down. England’s next fixtures are against the Republic of Ireland and Finland in the Nations League in September.

“The squad we took to Germany is full of exciting young talent and they can win the trophy we all dream of,” Southgate said. “I am so proud of them, and I hope we get behind the players and the team at St George’s Park and the FA who strive every day to improve English football, and understand the power football has to drive positive change.”

Southgate signed a contract to December because he and the FA wanted to create breathing space after Euro 2024 to make a decision. But he made clear before the final defeat by Spain that he would not need long to make up his mind.

Southgate spent much of the Euros under huge pressure after poor England performances in the group stage and in the last 16 against Slovakia. He had empty beer cups thrown at him and boos directed at him after England drew 0-0 with Slovenia in their final group match.

After the Slovenia game Southgate said he understood “the narrative towards me” but that it was “creating an unusual ­environment to operate in”.

Southgate took charge of England, initially on a caretaker basis, in September 2016 after Sam Allardyce’s sudden departure. He had indicated he thought his time would be up if England did not win in Germany.

Southgate, who has worked at the FA since 2013, has admirers at Manchester United, who gave Erik ten Hag a new contract this summer. His only job in club football was with Middlesbrough from 2006-09.

Other candidates in the FA’s thinking are likely to include Lee Carsley, the England Under-21 mana­ger, and the former England internationals Frank Lampard and Steven Gerrard. The hiring process will be overseen by the FA’s technical ­director, John McDermott, and the chief executive, Mark Bullingham. Pochettino has a strong relationship with McDermott from his time at Tottenham. He is understood to be considering his options but has previously stated ambitions to manage England.

“Gareth has made the impossible job possible and laid strong foundations for future success,” Bullingham said. “He is held in the highest regard by the players, the backroom team, by everyone at the FA and across the world of football.

“We are very proud of everything Gareth and Steve achieved for England, and will be forever grateful to them. The process for appointing Gareth’s successor is now under way.”

It’s a venerable football equation: English defeat = Irish glee.

Mary Lou McDonald, the Sinn Féin leader, reflected this tradition when she posted “Olé, Olé, Olé” and celebrated Spain’s victory over England in the Euro 2024 final in Berlin on Sunday. “Felicidades! Comhghairdeas to the champions of Europe,” she added, using the Irish word for congratulations.

For many it was harmless banter and arguably restrained given Ireland’s tangled history with England – conquest and famine were mentioned.

Critics disagreed and called the Sinn Féin leader’s post obnoxious trolling that did not help bilateral relations. “This is pathetic. At a time when we need leaders to build bridges,” Pippa Hackett, a senator and junior minister in the coalition government, posted on X.

The spat prompted others to wade in on either side, some accusing McDonald of bad manners, others accusing Hackett of lacking a sense of humour.

The taoiseach, Simon Harris, who has welcomed the Labour government as a chance to reset relations between Dublin and London, steered a neutral course by congratulating Spain while commending England for a hard-fought match.

The Belfast hip-hop group Kneecap, in contrast, uploaded a video of weeping English players and shared an extract of the Pogues’ song Fiesta. “Come all you rambling boys of pleasure, and ladies of easy leisure, we must say adiós! Until we see Almeria once again.”

Lindsay Robinson, the wife of the Democratic Unionist party (DUP) leader Gavin Robinson, said her family received vile messages after she posted a picture of her husband and her 10-year-old son rooting for England. “I’m not a big fan of the sport but his love of it seems pretty normal to me. Some of the nasty, hate-filled responses to it are anything but normal. Sort yourselves out.”

Jack Black has put his rock duo Tenacious D on hold following an onstage comment made by his bandmate Kyle Gass, which seemed to support the assassination of Donald Trump.

Gass was celebrating his birthday during a concert in Sydney on Sunday, with a cake presented to him on stage. Black told Gass to make a wish as he blew out the candles, and Gass responded, to audience laughter, “Don’t miss Trump next time” – a reference to the failed assassination attempt by 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks at a Trump rally the previous day.

Black continued with the concert following Gass’s comments, but has now put out a statement:

I was blindsided by what was said at the show on Sunday. I would never condone hate speech or encourage political violence in any form. After much reflection, I no longer feel it is appropriate to continue the Tenacious D tour, and all future creative plans are on hold. I am grateful to the fans for their support and understanding.

Tenacious D had been due to perform four more dates across Australia before travelling to New Zealand.

An Australian senator, Ralph Babet, had called for the band to be removed from the country, saying on Tuesday: “I call on the prime minister Anthony Albanese to join me in denouncing Tenacious D, Jack Black and band member Kyle Gass, and I call on the immigration minister Andrew Giles to revoke their visas and deport them immediately. Anything less than a deportation is an endorsement of the shooting and the attempted assassination of Donald J Trump.”

Tenacious D have spliced together comedy and classic rock for over 30 years, with the creative partnership of Black and Gass dating back even longer, to the mid-1980s when they were both performers in the Actors’ Gang theatre troupe. They began writing music together, gave their debut performance in 1994, and became much-loved by the rock bands they somewhat lampooned, earning support slots with Tool, Foo Fighters and others.

A crossover into TV was short-lived, but as Black’s acting career took off, the band were signed to a major label and released their self-titled debut album in 2001, which gradually became a platinum-selling success in the US (and two times platinum in the UK). Their second album The Pick of Destiny was paired with feature film Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny, and the band have released two further studio albums. 2012’s Rize of the Fenix was their biggest chart hit, reaching No 2 in the UK and No 4 in the US.

Prior to their Australian tour, Tenacious D played arenas across the UK earlier this year. The Guardian’s Dave Simpson gave their Manchester concert a four-star review, calling it “a parody of a rock show that’s a great rock show in itself”.

The Guardian has contacted representatives for Tenacious D for comment from Gass.

An Iranian television presenter, who was attacked in London by men believed to be acting for the Tehran regime, has moved abroad, saying that he no longer felt safe in the UK.

Pouria Zeraati said the UK’s approach to the threat posed by Iran on British soil could not guarantee his safety.

Zeraati, a presenter for Iran International, a Persian-language news channel, was stabbed by a group of men outside his home in Wimbledon, south London, in March.

Leading up to the attack, the London-based channel received repeated threats from Iran, with UK intelligence services foiling at least 15 plots to either kidnap or kill employees of the TV station.

Now, reluctantly, the 36-year-old has left London with his wife, saying the UK government’s strategy towards the Iranian regime meant that it felt able to strike on British soil with few repercussions.

Speaking from a location he did not want to publicise, Zeraati said: “The place I live right now is a little safer.”

Officers from SO15, the Metropolitan Police’s counter-terrorism command, have briefed their counterparts in the undisclosed country of the risk posed to Zeraati by the Iranian regime.

“There have been communications between the UK police and the police here,” Zeraati said. “They know about my situation and have taken extra measures to make sure I’m safe.”

Before his move, SO15 officers had told Zeraati that he would be secure in the UK. “The police said, ‘You are safe right now. You are living in a safe country, there is no severe and imminent threat.’ But I replied that there was no imminent threat against me before the attack.”

His move will raise fresh questions over how safe the UK is for dissidents targeted by foreign states.

Counter-terrorism police are continuing to investigate the attack, with one line of inquiry being that the group who attacked Zeraati belong to a criminal gang from eastern Europe.

The Iranian regime has used criminal proxies to target critics on western soil previously – hiring individuals with no apparent link to Iran makes it harder for police to counter a potential attack.

Less than four hours after stabbing Zeraati in the leg, three suspects flew out of Heathrow airport. Zeraati said a Met officer had warned him that a follow-up attack might be fatal.

“One of the officers involved in the case said what they did to me was a warning shot. When criminal gangs warn someone before killing them, they stab them in the back of the leg. It was a very clear message: ‘We will kill you next time.’”

A recent report – based on testimony from dozens of exiled Iranian journalists living in the UK – revealed that the level of transnational threat they are facing is “unprecedented”. Almost 90% of journalists from the country surveyed by the press freedom organisation Reporters Without Borders confirmed they had experienced online threats or harassment in the past five years.

Last year, staff at the BBC’s Persian-language news service in London told the Guardian that they were terrified of walking alone after being harassed by the Iranian authorities.

Despite such levels of intimidation and signs that Iran was prepared to orchestrate physical attacks on UK soil, Zeraati said the UK’s approach meant the Iranian regime was able to act with near impunity.

After revelations last December that Tehran was plotting to kill two other Iran International journalists in Britain, the Foreign Office announced sanctions against members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

However, Zeraati – who said he had recovered physically, though not mentally, from the attack – said the sanctions were too obscure and did little to punish Tehran.

“They were nonsense sanctions,” he said. “The attack on me happened about three and a half months later. That shows the policies are not working.”

Instead, he said, the UK should hurt the Iranian regime by targeting their assets and showing there was a “financial consequence” for committing criminal acts on British soil.

“If there is some sort of consequence like that, the Iranian regime will reconsider acting like this,” added Zeraati.

Zeraati is among many calling for the British government to proscribe the IRGC, an arm of the Iranian state, as a terrorist organisation. The previous UK government’s position was to swerve the issue to maintain direct diplomatic relations with Iran. The new Labour government is reported to be unlikely to rush into a decision.

Iran International says it provides independent coverage of events in the country but the regime in Tehran has declared it a terrorist organisation and said its workers would be pursued by its security services.

The Iranian chargé d’affaires in the UK, which serves as the head of its diplomatic mission, has denied any link between the Iranian regime and the attack on Zeraati.

The Metropolitan police has been contacted for comment.

An Iranian television presenter, who was attacked in London by men believed to be acting for the Tehran regime, has moved abroad, saying that he no longer felt safe in the UK.

Pouria Zeraati said the UK’s approach to the threat posed by Iran on British soil could not guarantee his safety.

Zeraati, a presenter for Iran International, a Persian-language news channel, was stabbed by a group of men outside his home in Wimbledon, south London, in March.

Leading up to the attack, the London-based channel received repeated threats from Iran, with UK intelligence services foiling at least 15 plots to either kidnap or kill employees of the TV station.

Now, reluctantly, the 36-year-old has left London with his wife, saying the UK government’s strategy towards the Iranian regime meant that it felt able to strike on British soil with few repercussions.

Speaking from a location he did not want to publicise, Zeraati said: “The place I live right now is a little safer.”

Officers from SO15, the Metropolitan Police’s counter-terrorism command, have briefed their counterparts in the undisclosed country of the risk posed to Zeraati by the Iranian regime.

“There have been communications between the UK police and the police here,” Zeraati said. “They know about my situation and have taken extra measures to make sure I’m safe.”

Before his move, SO15 officers had told Zeraati that he would be secure in the UK. “The police said, ‘You are safe right now. You are living in a safe country, there is no severe and imminent threat.’ But I replied that there was no imminent threat against me before the attack.”

His move will raise fresh questions over how safe the UK is for dissidents targeted by foreign states.

Counter-terrorism police are continuing to investigate the attack, with one line of inquiry being that the group who attacked Zeraati belong to a criminal gang from eastern Europe.

The Iranian regime has used criminal proxies to target critics on western soil previously – hiring individuals with no apparent link to Iran makes it harder for police to counter a potential attack.

Less than four hours after stabbing Zeraati in the leg, three suspects flew out of Heathrow airport. Zeraati said a Met officer had warned him that a follow-up attack might be fatal.

“One of the officers involved in the case said what they did to me was a warning shot. When criminal gangs warn someone before killing them, they stab them in the back of the leg. It was a very clear message: ‘We will kill you next time.’”

A recent report – based on testimony from dozens of exiled Iranian journalists living in the UK – revealed that the level of transnational threat they are facing is “unprecedented”. Almost 90% of journalists from the country surveyed by the press freedom organisation Reporters Without Borders confirmed they had experienced online threats or harassment in the past five years.

Last year, staff at the BBC’s Persian-language news service in London told the Guardian that they were terrified of walking alone after being harassed by the Iranian authorities.

Despite such levels of intimidation and signs that Iran was prepared to orchestrate physical attacks on UK soil, Zeraati said the UK’s approach meant the Iranian regime was able to act with near impunity.

After revelations last December that Tehran was plotting to kill two other Iran International journalists in Britain, the Foreign Office announced sanctions against members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

However, Zeraati – who said he had recovered physically, though not mentally, from the attack – said the sanctions were too obscure and did little to punish Tehran.

“They were nonsense sanctions,” he said. “The attack on me happened about three and a half months later. That shows the policies are not working.”

Instead, he said, the UK should hurt the Iranian regime by targeting their assets and showing there was a “financial consequence” for committing criminal acts on British soil.

“If there is some sort of consequence like that, the Iranian regime will reconsider acting like this,” added Zeraati.

Zeraati is among many calling for the British government to proscribe the IRGC, an arm of the Iranian state, as a terrorist organisation. The previous UK government’s position was to swerve the issue to maintain direct diplomatic relations with Iran. The new Labour government is reported to be unlikely to rush into a decision.

Iran International says it provides independent coverage of events in the country but the regime in Tehran has declared it a terrorist organisation and said its workers would be pursued by its security services.

The Iranian chargé d’affaires in the UK, which serves as the head of its diplomatic mission, has denied any link between the Iranian regime and the attack on Zeraati.

The Metropolitan police has been contacted for comment.

Democratic bosses are moving to kill off efforts to force Joe Biden from the party’s presidential ticket by rushing ahead with plans to formalise his candidacy before next month’s convention in Chicago.

The move comes while the rebellion triggered by last month’s debate fiasco – which prompted multiple calls from within the party for Biden to be replaced as the candidate – has stalled following Saturday’s failed assassination attempt on Donald Trump.

The Democratic National Committee is seeking to exploit the impasse by pushing ahead with a plan that would secure the president’s nomination by arranging for convention delegates to vote electronically in a week-long roll call starting in late July, Axios reported.

If a majority of the 4,000 delegates back Biden, it will make his candidacy technically unchallengeable when the convention starts on 19 August.

Under the plan, the electronic vote would probably start on 29 July and end on 5 August, meaning Biden will in effect secure his candidacy if he can survive the mutiny for another two weeks.

The party had initially planned to hold an early roll call to comply with election law in Ohio, which decreed that nominees had to be confirmed by 7 August to make it on to state ballots. However, the early poll is no longer necessary on those grounds after Ohio changed its law to push back the nomination deadline to 1 September.

Jaime Harrison, chair of the Democratic National Committee, suggested that the early vote was being staged to circumvent the Ohio law, telling Axios: “We certainly are not going to leave the fate of this election in the hands of Maga Republicans in Ohio that have tried to keep President Biden off of the general election ballot.”

However, party insiders say the Ohio rule is not mentioned internally as a reason for holding the early ballot.

The proposal to go ahead nevertheless has angered those Democrats who are worried that widespread concerns over Biden’s age and signs of cognitive decline put him on course for a catastrophic loss to Trump in November.

“Behind the scenes, people at the Biden campaign and DNC are working to put in the fix,” Axios quoted one delegate, Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi, as writing in an internal email. “Put simply, they are trying to shut down the process earlier. We can’t allow it. I am asking you to ask the DNC [Democratic National Committee] to stop pushing for an early vote.”

A DNC spokesperson said no early vote had been scheduled as yet.

But the prospect was criticised by Lloyd Doggett, a Texas congressman, who was the first elected Democrat to publicly appeal to Biden to stand aside as candidate following the 27 June debate in Atlanta, when he frequently appeared confused and was ineffectual in the face of a rampantly lying Trump.

“Those so eager to overly protect President Biden ignore his own words inviting anyone questioning his nomination to do so at the convention,” Doggett said.

He was referring to Biden’s call last week to dissatisfied Democrats to “challenge me at the convention” in response to pleas for him to stand down, arguing that 14 million Democratic voters had supported him in the party primaries.

So far, 20 Democratic members of Congress and one senator have followed Doggett’s lead in publicly asking the president to end his campaign. But tellingly, none have done so since the weekend attack on Trump – since when Biden has asserted a presidential posture in a series of statements calling for national unity and denouncing political violence.

After a temporary pause on political campaigning following the assassination attempt, Biden will resume his campaign on Tuesday with an appeal to Black voters, addressing the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Las Vegas and giving an interview to the BET TV channel.

He will face the delicate balancing act of vigorously targeting Trump – who he continues to depict as a threat to democracy – while being seen to stay true to his own call to “lower the temperature” by cooling the political rhetoric.

In an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt on Monday, the president was forced into admitting he had erred by telling Democratic donors last week that he wanted “to put a bullseye” on Trump.

The resumption of Biden’s campaign comes as even his own congressional supporters and strategists voice concern that he may be receiving a misleadingly rosy picture of what the poll data is saying about his race with Trump.

The Washington Post reported rumblings after Biden claimed without evidence in a weekend Zoom call that he was leading within the margin of error even after the debate. In fact, several polls showed his support falling after the event and a spike among voters – including Democrats – in favour of him standing aside.

“The polling data we’re seeing nationally and on the swing states has been essentially where it was before,” Biden said during the 45-minute call with the New Democratic Coalition. “You noticed the last three polls, nationally, they had me up four points. And I mean, I don’t have much faith in the polls at all, either way, because they’re so hard to read any more.”

In fact, no polls listed by the 538 website since June has shown Biden up by four points. A New York Times/Siena poll on Monday showed him trailing Trump by three points in the vital swing state of Pennsylvania while leading by the same margin in Virginia, which he won by 10 points in 2020.

FBI agents went house to house scouring the Bethel Park neighborhood lived in by Thomas Matthew Crooks and his family as mystery continued to surround the motives of the gunman who tried to assassinate Donald Trump while he was addressing a crowd in nearby Butler, Pennsylvania.

The FBI said it had managed to access Crooks’s phone but preliminary analysis of the information at the FBI lab in Quantico, Virginia, had reportedly not advanced the search into Crooks’s reasons for shooting at Trump, injuring the former US president, killing a rally-goer and wounding two more.

Crooks was almost instantly killed by Secret Service agents returning fire, but the shocking incident has plunged America into political turmoil and roiled an already brutal election campaign, marred by fears of political violence and growing unease about the prospect of civil unrest.

The FBI is investigating whether Crooks was a politically motivated homegrown domestic violent extremist. In an updated statement on Monday, the agency said that the search of the suspect’s residence and vehicle were complete, and it had conducted nearly 100 interviews of law enforcement personnel, event attendees and other witnesses who had been at Big Butler Fairgrounds on Saturday.

“The firearm used in the shooting was purchased legally. The shooter was not known to the FBI prior to this incident,” the agency said.

It added: “While the investigation to date indicates the shooter acted alone, the FBI continues to conduct logical investigative activity to determine if there were any co-conspirators associated with this attack. At this time, there are no current public safety concerns.”

On Monday, it was disclosed that Crooks, 20, may have been trained in marksmanship at the local Clairton Sportsmen’s Club where he was registered as a member.

In a statement to the New York Times, the club’s general counsel said the organization “fully admonishes the senseless act of violence that occurred yesterday” but declined to describe what training Crooks may have had, citing the FBI investigation.

At the gun club, a ramshackle collection of huts on a hillside 15 miles south of Pittsburgh, a US and a POW/MIA flag, symbolizing US commitment to prisoners of war and missing in action during the Vietnam war and all conflicts, flew over the range.

The sharp crack of rounds could be heard as two club members fired at rifle targets, some farther away than the estimated 130 yards between Crooks’s rifle and Trump’s podium when the shooter squeezed off as many as eight shots, striking Trump’s ear, killing a member of the audience and injuring two others.

A manager at Clairton refused to discuss what instruction Crooks had received, and ordered reporters to leave the property.

A firearms instructor at a local gun shop, Legion Arms, said Crooks had not been a customer at that store but opined that the distance of the shot was not great for the type of gun, an AR-15-style rifle, to be fired accurately in the right hands.

“That kind of round and gun are good for 700 or 800 yards,” the instructor, who declined to be identified, said. Crooks, he added, had shown inexperience in his aim, which may also have been affected because he had been rushed after being spotted on his perch above a glass research factory.

“He shot at the head and not the body – the body is what you shoot at when you’re shooting long distance,” the instructor said. “Shooting for the head is what people do because they’ve seen it in movies.”

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette newspaper reported that Crooks purchased 50 rounds of ammunition at Allegheny Arms and Gun Works in Bethel Park hours before the Butler rally. Investigators also said Crooks bought 50 rounds the morning of the shooting.

The Allegheny county bomb squad confirmed on Monday that it had joined the investigation after explosives, some appearing to be grenades, were found in Crooks’s car.

Separately, the Butler sheriff, Michael Slupe, confirmed to the news outlet KDKA-TV that an armed municipal officer with the Butler Township had encountered Crooks before he fired shots at the former president from outside the perimeter of the fairground.

“All I know is the officer had both hands on the roof to get up on the roof, never made it because the shooter had turned towards the officer, and rightfully and smartly, the officer let go,” Slupe said.

In Bethel Park, where Crooks lived with his mother, attended Bethel Park high school, and later got a job in the kitchens of a nursing home, residents continued to puzzle over his motives for attempting to assassinate Trump.

Multiple school friends have described an isolated student who excelled at math but fell short socially. Some described him as conservative-leaning in his politics but overall the picture that has emerged so far is unclear. Unusually for many young people, Crooks had little online presence which might have revealed his political leanings or state of mind in the run-up to the attack.

Alex Williams, 23, who graduated a year before Crooks, said the local community was still reeling.

“Nothing really crazy happens in Bethel so I think a lot of people are disturbed, because it’s not normal,” Williams said. “They’re disappointed that the guy came from here and disappointed it happened at all.”

Williams said he did not recall if Crooks had been bullied, as some direct contemporaries have said. Bullying at the school was often limited to “eye-rolling” and social exclusion, he recalled.

One former student at Crooks’s school, Jason Kohler, has said Crooks was bullied often. “He was quiet, but he was bullied. He was bullied so much,” Kohler said.

Williams said he believed his generation had been deeply affected by Covid lockdowns that had “made us really online” and the extreme political environment had made it possible to become “very right-leaning or very left-leaning … they’ll go down like a pipeline whether it’s left or right.”

As the investigation continues, Biden has called on Americans to reject politically motivated violence. Trump has said his speech to the Republican national convention will focus on “unity”.

“It’s 100% possible for someone to go down pretty far and be, like, ‘yeah, I’m gonna kill the president,’” Williams said.

Crooks’s neighbor Steve Riviere told KDKA that the community “is shocked and surprised, maybe not as surprised as we should be, but shocked that this kind of thing happened” and hoped “this will be the end of it and we’ll get to a position where people can have regular polite discourse about their issues rather than pulling out a gun and climbing on a roof”.

An autopsy has confirmed that a body found by Spanish rescuers in Tenerife on Monday is that of the missing British teenager Jay Slater.

A court spokesperson has reportedly confirmed that fingerprints taken from the body matched those of the missing 19-year-old from Lancashire. He disappeared after attending a music festival four weeks ago and was last seen walking alone in a remote area in the north of the island, near the village of Masca.

The court said injuries on his body suggested his death had been caused by an accidental fall. “We have a positive identification and more data, fingerprint tests show that the body is [that] of Jay Slater and that the death was caused by trauma consistent with a fall in a rocky area,” a statement by the high court of justice in the Canary Islands said.

Slater’s mother, Debbie Duncan, said in a statement that confirmation of his death was the “worst news”. “I just can’t believe this could happen to my beautiful boy,” she said. “Our hearts are broken.”

Slater had been staying with a group of friends on the coast and had attended the NRG music festival in the nearby resort of Playa De Las Americas. He had left the festival and gone with two men to their Airbnb in the remote Rural de Teno national park, about 11 hours on foot from where he was staying.

Ofelia Medina Hernandez, whose brother owns the Airbnb, said he had asked her about bus times and she later saw him walking uphill in the opposite direction to Los Cristianos, where he had rented an apartment. “It’s dangerous walking around here, it’s easy to lose yourself,” she said. “He walked along the road when I saw him for the last time, up there … He was there alone. He was walking normally, though fast, a little fast.”

Slater phoned a friend, Lucy Law – who had attended the festival but left before him – at about 8.30am on 17 June, saying he was lost, thirsty and his phone battery was on 1%.

Reacting to the news that the body found was Slater’s, Law posted on Instagram: “Honestly lost for words. Always the happiest and most smiley person in the room, you was one of a kind Jay and you’ll be missed more than you know.”

“I’m sure you’ll ‘have your dancing shoes polished and ready’ waiting for us all,” she added. “We all love you buddy. Fly high.”

The Guardia Civil said one of its mountain rescue teams had found Slater’s body while carrying out a search on the ground, four weeks to the day since the teenager went missing.

A search operation had been launched after he was reported missing, with dogs, helicopters and drones employed to help search the rugged terrain. It was scaled down after two weeks, but had continued, with volunteer search experts from both Spain and the UK joining the efforts. “It’s so big [here] that it’s very difficult to search in such a steep area. But we’re doing everything we can,” one member of the Spanish rescue team had told the Guardian. He said it was a “very difficult area to search”, with cliffs, ravines and vegetation.

Tenerife’s El Día newspaper reported that the terrain where the body was found was so inaccessible that a helicopter had to be used to recover it. On Tuesday, rescue teams continued to comb the thick undergrowth to ensure nothing had been missed.

Matthew Searle, from the British overseas missing person charity LBT Global, said it was working with Slater’s family on the next steps, which would include recovering his belongings and repatriating his body.

He said further details about travel plans and funeral arrangements would not be released at this stage and asked for privacy for Slater’s family. He also called for an end to “hurtful comments on social media and elsewhere”, referring to conspiracy theories that have spread rapidly online since Slater’s disappearance.

Tired of waiting for the authorities to come to their aid, young men in the Mayo-Kebbi Ouest region of south-west Chad are banding into vigilante groups, using bows, arrows and spears to fight gunmen who have turned kidnapping into a professional pastime.

“We guide the gendarmes in the bush, but we are also the first to go after the criminals after a kidnapping,” said Amos Nangyo, head of one of the units in Pala, capital of the region, which borders Cameroon, told Agence France-Presse earlier this month.

In the last decade, the Sahelian tri-border area of Liptako-Gourma – where Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger meet – has become a hotspot for booming jihadist activity.

But another crisis is brewing in a nearby area that some have called “the triangle of death”: the area from Mayo-Kebbi Ouest and Logone Oriental in Chad to Cameroon’s North Region and Lim-Pendé in the Central African Republic.

Official data is hard to come by for this area and many people do not report incidents for fear of further attacks.

But Chadian authorities say ransoms paid in the area amounted to 43 million Central African Francs (CFA) in 2022 and increased to 52.4 million CFA the following year.

In February, a Polish doctor and her Mexican colleague were abducted from the Tandjilé region but were freed a week later, after a combined rescue mission by Chadian and French forces.

Approximately 86 million CFA was paid in ransom in six incidents between February and May 2023 in Cameroon’s Northern Region, according to a recent report by the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime.

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The rise in abductions is happening alongside small arms trafficking, cattle rustling and drug trafficking. Economic interests, rather than ethnic or religious grudges, are driving kidnappings, according to experts.

In west and central Africa, porous borders are the norm, allowing terror groups such as Boko Haram, for example, to move along the diagonal from northern Nigeria to the Cameroon-Chad-CAR corridor to find possible victims as well as criminal allies to finance their jihadist ventures.

Other regional players include ethnic Fulani herders, who experts say can be both perpetrators and victims, given their nomadic lifestyle and the complex nature of criminal activity in the zone.

The Fulani, perceived as having a lot of money by virtue of having herds of cattle, have long been targets of kidnapping. But some herders, grieving the loss of their cattle and other belongings to rustling, or tired of being harassed by security personnel, have turned to kidnapping too.

There are also the zaraguinas, gangs of rampaging bandits and mercenary rebels who are active in the forests of northern CAR, some having migrated in from its neighbours such as Chad. With the presence of foreign counterparts like the Wagner group in CAR, some local mercenaries have moved to Chad.

Targets include traders, civil servants, aid workers and anyone who seems remotely important or likely to have relatives and friends capable of raising ransoms.

Insecurity escalated south of the Sahara in 2011 after the Nato-led ousting of Muammar Gaddafi opened a highway for the southward flow of small arms and light weapon, galvanising rebel activity from Mali to Nigeria.

This made Chad, a country with a history of long-running domestic conflicts and a reputation for breeding warriors in the hinterlands, even more fertile ground for armed non-state actors who export themselves to stoke conflicts or extinguish them elsewhere.

Remadji Hoinathy, a senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies for Central Africa and Lake Chad Basin who is based in N’Djamena, said “the geography and even the demography and anthropology of that zone” was key to its emergence as a recruitment centre for armed groups and a nucleus of the kidnapping crisis.

“A lot of people in Chad [have] grown up with rebellions [and learned] that the only life they have is a link with weapons,” he said. “They are finding ways of living by the gun … either you are a rebel with the army, or you end up as a mercenary, kidnapper, in banditry or Boko Haram.”

The perpetrators have thrived partly because of weak state governance architecture but also because of spaces – and forests – that serve as criminal hideouts. Combined, the three countries in the corridor account for almost a tenth of the area of Africa but only 4% of its population. Their borders with Maghreb states, which have local conflicts waged by actors with transnational communal ties, stretch for thousands of kilometres. Worse still, the armies in the corridor are stretched by conflicts at their other borders.

“Chad is very concerned about security on the border with Sudan in the east, so they’ve moved their capacity to better monitor that border,” said Ulf Laessing, director of the Sahel programme at German thinktank the Konrad Adenauer Foundation. “That might be a reason that they are not able to effectively guard the border with Cameroon as before.”

The kidnappings have had an adverse impact on movements of goods, cattle and humans across the corridor. Farmers are also scared to work, leading to rotting harvests and depleting food volumes.

This in turn could “cause damaging economic ripples across the region”, according to a January 2024 report by Global Initiative. “Following the 2023 coup in Niger, and with instability continuing in Libya, Sudan and the Lake Chad basin, Cameroon has become the main trade artery for Chad and the CAR. The majority of imports and exports into these countries now pass through the tri-border region,” the report said.

Last October, service chiefs from Cameroon and Chad met in Yaoundé to discuss a bilateral cooperation to tackle cross-border crime.

But experts say more action must be taken to dismantle criminal networks, including a structured regional collaboration to increase security and patrol remote forest zones.

Until then, the local vigilantes in the corridor are staying alert to protect their families and communities. “It’s dangerous volunteer work and we ask the state for means to [help] us,” Nangyo told Agence France-Presse.

The case of Craig Wright, an Australian computer scientist who falsely claimed to be the creator of bitcoin, has been referred to the Crown Prosecution Service over a potential prosecution for perjury and forgery.

In March, Wright lost a legal battle with a coalition of cryptocurrency businesses who had pre-emptively sued to prevent him from enforcing his claim in the courts. In a sign of the extent of his defeat, the presiding judge, Mr Justice Mellor, took the unusual step of issuing an oral verdict within seconds of the case concluding.

“The evidence is overwhelming,” Mellor said at the time, “that Dr Wright is not the author of the bitcoin white paper.” In the written judgment that followed, Mellor said that Wright lied “extensively and repeatedly” in written and oral evidence. “Most of his lies related to the documents he had forged which purported to support his claim … Dr Wright’s attempts to prove he was/is Satoshi Nakamoto represent a most serious abuse of this court’s process.”

Wright’s written evidence was called out as a potential forgery before the trial even opened, and his own expert witnesses appeared to concur. In cross-examination, Wright dismissed the allegations, and claimed his expert witness was not suitably qualified. “If I had forged that document then it would be perfect,” he said at one point.

In a ruling on Tuesday, Mellor said he would refer “relevant” papers in the legal action to the CPS to consider whether criminal charges should be brought against Wright.

“In advancing his false claim to be Satoshi through multiple legal actions, Dr Wright committed ‘a most serious abuse’ of the process of the courts of the UK, Norway and the USA,” the ruling said.

“In these circumstances … I have no doubt that I should refer the relevant papers in this case to the CPS for consideration of whether a prosecution should be commenced against Dr Wright for his wholescale perjury and forgery of documents and/or whether a warrant for his arrest should be issued and/or whether his extradition should be sought from wherever he now is.

“All those matters are to be decided by the CPS.”

An earlier court case, brought by Wright against a bitcoin celebrity who had accused him of being “a liar” and “a fraud”, had ended in a shock victory for the Australian, after the respondent, Peter McCormack, dropped his defence on the grounds of truth. But Wright’s victory was a pyrrhic one: the judge, Mr Justic Chamberlain, ruled that he had “advanced a deliberately false case”, and awarded token damages of just £1.