Iran’s supreme leader says Israel’s killing of Nasrallah will “not go unavenged”, as fears grow of spiralling conflict

Iran’s supreme leader has warned Israel that its assassination of Hezbollah’s veteran leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, will “not go unavenged”, as fears of a spiralling conflict in the Middle East grow.

As the shockwaves from Friday evening’s airstrike that killed Nasrallah reverberated through the region, and Israel continued to pound targets in Lebanon, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei announced five days of official mourning on Saturday and called for an urgent meeting of the 57-member Organisation of Islamic Cooperation.

The group’s secretary general rose from humble beginnings in Beirut to a position of great power. Applicants for his job will need strong nerves

The killing of Hassan Nasrallah, the veteran leader of Hezbollah, on Friday marks a turning point in the conflict in the Middle East. Both Nasrallah and the organisation he led were hardened by successive decades of conflict within Lebanon, against Israel and, latterly, in Syria. Both were powerful political and social forces with very significant regional and local influence.

Through more than three decades in charge of Hezbollah, Nasrallah built up a fervent personal following, steering the Shia Muslim movement through a number of transitions, balancing the demands of its military role with those of its expansive social welfare systems, building a political wing and negotiating the various crises that broke across the region. He earned adulation from supporters and bitter personal enmity from foes.

Residents of Lebanon’s capital flee their homes and seek shelter as the death toll from Israel’s airstrikes rises

Gunshots fired into the air, women wailing in the streets, the ever-present buzz of drones and the distant thud of Israeli airstrikes: this was the sound of mourning in Beirut on Saturday. Hassan Nasrallah, who led Hezbollah for 32 years, was dead, killed in an Israeli airstrike on Dahieh, in the southern suburbs of Beirut, the day before.

For many in Lebanon, his killing had been unimaginable. But Israel’s war with Hezbollah had long surpassed what was previously thought possible. Pagers had exploded in hands, walkie-talkies blew up in belts and Israeli warplanes killed hundreds in half a day. The death of Nasrallah was one more blow to the Lebanese psyche, already struggling to grasp soaring death tolls and, for some, the loss of their home overnight.

Conservative grandees at the conference in Birmingham fear that none of the candidates can unite the party’s factions

Senior Tories are already predicting that whoever wins the Conservative leadership race is unlikely to survive until the next election, amid criticisms of a “B-list” contest that risks taking the party farther to the right.

Some veteran figures have decided to give this weekend’s conference in Birmingham a miss, fearing the party has learned little from the complete loss of discipline that characterised its final years in government.

Politician cites ‘cruel and unnecessary policies’ as she lambasts prime minister’s ‘managerial and technocratic approach’

A Labour MP has resigned from the parliamentary party after criticising Keir Starmer’s “cruel and unnecessary” policies and lambasting the prime minister’s “managerial and technocratic approach” to politics.

In a furious letter announcing her decision, Rosie Duffield, the Canterbury MP, said she felt relief in making the decision. She said the row over freebies handed to Starmer and his top team demonstrated that “sleaze, nepotism and apparent avarice are off the scale”.

Schools that are part of the Harris Federation accused of taking too long to help staff get UK teaching qualification

Teachers recruited from Jamaica to work for a major chain of academy schools in London have spoken of their “devastation” on finding out that they are being paid thousands of pounds a year less than English-trained recruits with similar levels of experience.

The Harris Federation, England’s second largest academy chain, with 54 state-funded schools, has been recruiting from Jamaica in recent years, bringing teachers to the UK who are attracted by higher salaries than they can earn in the Caribbean.

Sergei Lavrov accuses west of using Ukraine ‘to defeat’ Russia days after Putin shifts Moscow’s nuclear posture

Russia’s top diplomat warned on Saturday against “trying to fight to victory with a nuclear power”, delivering a UN general assembly speech packed with condemnations of what Russia sees as western machinations in Ukraine and elsewhere – including inside the United Nations itself.

Three days after Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, aired a shift in his country’s nuclear doctrine, his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, accused the west of using Ukraine – which Russia invaded in February 2022 – as a tool to try “to defeat” Moscow strategically, and “preparing Europe for it to also throw itself into this suicidal escapade”.

Incident at London’s National Gallery came just hours after other members of group jailed over similar protest

Three protesters have been charged with criminal damage and will appear in court after soup was thrown at two Vincent van Gogh paintings on Friday.

Just Stop Oil activists poured soup over two paintings in the National Gallery, London, just hours after other members of the group were jailed for damaging the gold frame of the artist’s Sunflowers painting.

Reports of dissenters working for £4 a day on onion plantation owned by Saxony state parliament AfD member Jörg Dornau

Midway through Nikolai’s shift sorting onions alongside other political prisoners in a warehouse in western Belarus, a tall and bald foreigner entered the building.

“He arrived in a car with German license plates. Then he came over and greeted us warmly,” Nikolai*, recalled in an interview with the Observer.

Rescue services say they saved 27 of the 84 people aboard the vessel believed to have come from Mauritania

Nine people are confirmed drowned and at least 48 are missing after a boat carrying migrants capsized off Spain’s Canary Islands overnight, rescue services said on Saturday, the latest in a series of such disasters off the west coast of Africa.

Sea rescue teams said in a statement they had answered a distress call off El Hierro, one of the islands in the Atlantic archipelago, shortly after midnight. They managed to save 27 of the 84 people on board.