A former climate chief of the World Bank has been appointed to lead the UK’s efforts to forge a global coalition on climate action, the Guardian can reveal.

Rachel Kyte, who previously served as special representative for the UN and a vice-president of the World Bank, will take up the role of climate envoy to lead the UK’s return to the front ranks of global climate diplomacy.

Her role will be vital to the pledge made last week by David Lammy, the foreign secretary, that the UK would play a central role in tackling the climate and nature crises, in contrast with the previous government, whom he described as “climate dinosaurs”.

The envoy role was axed by Rishi Sunak, to the anger of campaigners and dismay of foreign governments and allies. Sunak also snubbed international climate meetings.

Kyte, a veteran of international climate summits, and most recently a professor at Oxford’s Blavatnik school of government, is widely respected among developed and developing country governments. She worked with many of them during her stint as chief executive of the Sustainable Energy for All initiative.

Kyte told the Guardian: “This government is committed to reconnecting the UK to the world with climate action as a priority. And the world is being shaped politically and economically by climate change. This provides an opportunity to use international action to help deliver on the UK’s energy mission. And it provides challenges, not least in mobilising the financing to protect people and drive greener growth. There is no time like now for the UK to help drive action and I am excited to play my part in this new role.”

Lammy and Ed Miliband, secretary of state for energy and net zero, will announce the appointment on Wednesday at New York climate week, where they are hosting an event on building a global clean power alliance.

Miliband will hold discussions with other governments on the need for vastly increased pledges of climate finance to the developing world. Poor countries want assurances that they will receive at least $1tn a year in assistance to help them cut greenhouse gas emissions and cope with the impacts of climate breakdown.

Climate finance will be the main topic of what are expected to be fraught discussions at the next UN climate summit, Cop29, in Azerbaijan. Miliband will lead the UK’s negotiations himself, in contrast with the previous government, in which it was left to junior ministers.

The diplomatic charm offensive has already begun, as Miliband welcomed the president of Cop29, Mukhtar Babayev, to London in July, and in August made an extensive trip to Brazil, which is the current president of the G20 group and host of next year’s Cop30 climate summit.

Lammy will also, with environment secretary Steve Reed, appoint a nature envoy for the first time, to push for global action on protecting the natural environment, as the Guardian revealed last week. That appointment is not expected until next month.

Kyte, whose official title will be UK special representative for climate, will coordinate the UK’s relations with other donor countries, as well as forging alliances with the poor world, and with the economic giants of the developing world, China and India.

Her appointment was welcomed by climate experts and campaigners. Edward Davey, UK head of the World Resources Institute thinktank, said: “Rachel is a giant and a ball of fire, with a vast hinterland of knowledge and experience and a global network of friends and allies. She will be brilliant and a force to be reckoned with.”

Planet-heating pollution doubled the chance of the extreme levels of rain that hammered central Europe in September, a study has found.

Researchers found global heating aggravated the four days of heavy rainfall that led to deadly floods in countries from Austria to Romania.

The rains were made at least 7% stronger by climate change, World Weather Attribution (WWA) found, which led to towns being hit with volumes of water that would have been half as likely to occur if humans had not heated the planet.

“The trend is clear,” said Bogdan Chojnicki, a climate scientist at Poznań University of Life Sciences, and co-author of the study. “If humans keep filling the atmosphere with fossil fuel emissions, the situation will be more severe.”

Storm Boris stalled over central Europe in mid-September and unleashed record-breaking amounts of rain upon Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia. The heavy rains turned calm streams into wild rivers, triggering floods that wrecked homes and killed two dozen people.

The researchers said measures to adapt had lowered the death toll compared with similar floods that hit the region in 1997 and 2002. They called for better flood defences, warning systems and disaster-response plans, and warned against continuing to rebuild in flood-prone regions.

“These floods indicate just how costly climate change is becoming,” said Maja Vahlberg, technical adviser at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, and co-author of the study. “Even with days of preparation, flood waters still devastated towns, destroyed thousands of homes and saw the European Union pledge €10bn in aid.”

Rapid attribution studies, which use established methods but are published before going through lengthy peer-review processes, examine how human influence affects extreme weather in the immediate aftermath of a disaster.

The scientists compared the rainfall recorded in central Europe over four days in September with amounts simulated for a world that is 1.3C cooler – the level of warming caused to date by burning fossil fuels and destroying nature. They attributed a “doubling in likelihood and a 7% increase in intensity” to human influence.

But the results are “conservative”, the scientists wrote, because the models do not explicitly model convection and so may underestimate rainfall. “We emphasise that the direction of change is very clear, but the rate is not.”

Physicists have shown that every degree celsius of warming allows the air to hold 7% more moisture, but whether it does so depends on the availability of water. The rains in central Europe were unleashed when cold air from the Arctic met warm, wet air from the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.

Warmer seas enhance the rainy part of the hydrological cycle, though the trend on parts of the land is towards drier conditions, said Miroslav Trnka, a climate scientist at the Global Change Research Institute, who was not involved in the study. When the conditions were right, he said, “you can have floods on steroids”.

Trnka compared the factors that result in extreme rainfall to playing the lottery. The increase in risk from global heating, he said, was like buying more lottery tickets, doing so over a longer period of time, and changing the rules so more combinations of numbers result in a win.

“If you bet long enough, you have a higher chance of a jackpot,” said Trnka.

The study found heavier four-day rainfall events would hit if the world heats 2C above preindustrial levels, with a further increase from today of about 5% in rainfall intensity and 50% in likelihood.

Other factors could increase this even more, such as the waviness of the jet stream, which some scientists suspect is increasingly trapping weather systems in one place as a result of global heating. A study published in Nature Scientific Reports on Monday projected that such blocking systems would increase under medium- and worst-case emissions scenarios.

Hayley Fowler, a climate scientist at Newcastle University, who was not involved in the study, said: “These large storms, cut off from the jet stream, are able to stagnate in one place and produce huge amounts of rainfall, fuelled by increased moisture and energy from oceans that are record-shatteringly hot.”

“These ‘blocked’ slow-moving storms are becoming more frequent and are projected to increase further with additional warming,” she added. “The question is not whether we need to adapt for more of these types of storm but can we.”

WWA described the week following Storm Boris as “hyperactive” because 12 disasters around the world triggered its criteria for analysis, more than in any week in the organisation’s history.

The study did not try to work out how much global heating had increased the destruction wreaked by the rains but the researchers said even minor increases in rainfall disproportionately increased damages.

“Almost everywhere in the world it is the case that a small increase in the rainfall leads to a similar order-of-magnitude increase in flooding,” said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute and co-author of the study. “But that leads to a much larger increase in the damages.”

Large-scale renewable energy investment and construction in Australia is rebounding this year after a slump, but will need to accelerate to reach the pace needed to meet the Albanese government’s goal for 2030.

The country could add more than 7 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity this year, up from 5.3 GW last year, according to data released by the Clean Energy Regulator.

Dylan McConnell, an energy systems researcher at the University of New South Wales, said: “There is this narrative that has developed that the transition has stalled and that’s demonstrably not true. It is happening, it just needs to speed up.”

The new capacity is split roughly equally between household rooftop solar systems, which continue to be installed at what has been a world-leading pace, and large-scale renewable energy developments.

Industry group the Clean Energy Council said the country was likely to have more than 25GW of rooftop solar by the end of the year, surpassing the total 21.3GW capacity of the national coal-fired power fleet. More than 3.7m homes and small businesses have systems.

But the bigger change has been in construction of large-scale solar and wind farms, which fell in 2023, but has increased beyond expectations this year. The regulator said it was expected between 3GW and 4GW would be added.

The climate change and energy minister, Chris Bowen, said the data showed the national grid supplying the five eastern states was expected to run on 42% renewable energy this year.

The regulator said final investment decisions were made on 1.8GW of new large renewable developments in the first half of the year. This surpassed 1.6GW in total commitments in 2023.

Investment in grid-scale renewable energy fell last year after a long-standing legislated federal renewable energy target was reached and as investors faced uncertainty over when coal-fired power plants would close.

The Albanese government chose not to expand the legislated target, but has promised to underwrite 25GW of new large-scale solar and wind as they aim to have 82% of Australia’s electricity from renewable sources by 2030.

The Australian Energy Market Operator has declared the national grid would remain reliable as it shifted from running on mostly coal to mostly renewables, but would require planned investments in new generation to be delivered “on time and in full”.

Bowen said the latest data showed the government’s renewables plan was “on track and building momentum”. He repeated his argument that the Coalition’s proposal to limit investment in large-scale renewables and eventually build nuclear plants would put the country at risk of supply shortages and blackouts.

“[Opposition leader] Peter Dutton wants to stop renewable investment, tear up contracts for new renewable and transmission projects and deliver expensive nuclear reactors in two decades’ time,” he said.

Dutton gave a speech on nuclear energy on Monday, but did not release new information about what the Coalition planned. He promised those details – including the expected cost for households and businesses and how the Coalition planned to prevent blackouts as ageing coal plants reached the end of their scheduled lives – before the next election.

A man accused of lurking outside Donald Trump’s south Florida golf course on 15 September with a gun – and allegedly writing about his desire to kill him – was charged on Tuesday with attempting to kill the Republican presidential candidate.

Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, was indicted on five counts in south Florida federal court: attempted assassination of a major political candidate, possessing a firearm in furtherance of a crime of violence, assaulting a federal officer, felon in possession of a firearm and ammunition, and possession of a firearm with an obliterated serial number. He was first charged with federal firearms crimes after his arrest.

“Violence targeting public officials endangers everything our country stands for, and the Department of Justice will use every available tool to hold Ryan Routh accountable for the attempted assassination of former President Trump charged in the indictment,” the US attorney general Merrick Garland said in a statement.

“The justice department will not tolerate violence that strikes at the heart of our democracy, and we will find and hold accountable those who perpetrate it. This must stop.”

Prosecutors have laid out what they allege is evidence of a murder plot. Routh left behind a missive, addressed “Dear World”, in which he described his apparent intent to kill Trump; the note was put in a box, which had been left at the home of a person who authorities have not identified, officials said.

The recipient did not open this box – in which there was also allegedly ammunition and a metal pipe – until after Routh’s arrest. This person contacted authorities.

“This was an assassination attempt on Donald Trump but I failed you. I tried my best and gave it all the gumption I could muster. It is up to you now to finish the job; and I will offer $150,000 to whomever can complete the job,” the note read, which prosecutors disclosed in a memorandum arguing for Routh’s detention.

Routh’s note appeared to suggest Trump’s foreign policy decisions played into the motive behind his alleged assassination attempt, as it said that the ex-president “ended relations with Iran, like a child, and now the Middle East has unraveled”.

Authorities believe Routh staked out the golf course for a month before the alleged attempt on Trump’s life; on that day, he hid outside the fence near the sixth hole of the grounds. A US Secret Service agent on site, who was monitoring a hole ahead of Trump’s party, said he saw “the barrel of a rifle aimed directly at him”.

As the agent started backing up, he saw the rifle barrel move and fired at Routh, prosecutors said. Routh ran across the road from the golf course, and took off in his Nissan SUV; he was subsequently caught traveling north on I-95.

The prosecution said Routh planned to use a semi-automatic rifle, fitted with a scope, to open fire on Trump. There was a bullet in the rifle’s chamber, and 11 more in the gun, which Routh left behind when he tried to escape, prosecutors said.

“At approximately 1.30pm, the agent spotted the partially obscured face of a man in the brush along the fence line,” prosecutors’ detention memo stated, which as “directly in line with the sixth hole”.

“The agent then observed a long black object protruding through the fence and realized the object was the barrel of a rifle aimed directly at him,” the filing said, further noting: “The agent jumped out of the golf cart, drew his weapon, and began backing away. The agent saw the rifle barrel move, and the agent fired at Routh.

“The agent took cover behind a tree and reloaded his weapon, then looked up and saw that Routh was gone. The agent called out over his radio that shots had been fired by the agent and that there was a subject with a rifle.”

When authorities searched Routh’s SUV upon his arrest, they claimed to have found “a handwritten list of dates in August, September and October, and venues where the former president had appeared or was expected to be present”, and six mobile phones. On one of these cellphones, there had been a Google search for how to travel from Palm Beach to Mexico City, prosecutors said.

Before the alleged assassination attempt, Routh had had repeated run-ins with police. Routh was convicted in 2002 of illegally possessing what a report described a “fully automatic machine gun”. The Greensboro News & Record said Routh had barricaded himself at his roofing business in a three-hour standoff that turned into a car chase before his eventual surrender.

Ruth also has a second felony conviction for multiple counts of possession of stolen goods, prosecutors said.

The Haitian Bridge Alliance, a non-profit organization that “provides migrants and immigrants with humanitarian, legal and social services”, filed criminal charges against Donald Trump and JD Vance over their inflammatory, racist remarks about Haitian immigrants. The rhetoric has led to threats of violence in Springfield, Ohio, including more than 30 bomb threats, forced evacuations of schools and government buildings and violence against Haitians in the city.

The filing comes after both the Republican presidential candidate and his running mate made false statements about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, alleging that they were stealing and eating their neighbors’ pets. The charges include disrupting public services, making false alarms, two counts of telecommunications harassment, aggravated menacing, and complicity. Ohio law allows the public to file criminal charges in the same way a prosecutor would. In this case, the Haitian Bridge Alliance is asking the Clark county municipal court to affirm that there is probable cause that Trump and Vance committed the crimes, and to issue arrest warrants for them both.

“Trump and Vance have knowingly spread a false and dangerous narrative by claiming that Springfield, Ohio’s Haitian community is criminally killing and eating neighbors’ dogs and cats, and killing and eating geese,” the affidavit reads. “They accused Springfield’s Haitians of bearing deadly disease. They repeated such lies during the presidential debate, at campaign rallies, during interviews on national television, and on social media.”

Trump continued perpetuating the statements even after they had been confirmed to be false, while Vance recently remarked that he was willing to “create stories” for political gain.

They continued to repeat what the filing calls an “orchestrated … campaign of lies” that “spread a false narrative that Haitians in Springfield are a danger”.

“Many public institutions have been forced to evacuate, and vital local resources were diverted to investigate the barrage of threats to the community,” the filing reads.

Despite the public nature of Trump and Vance’s claims, local prosecutors have failed to take any action. But because the criminal charges were filed by citizens, a prosecuting attorney will be obligated to make a public decision.

Trump and Vance, the US senator from Ohio, have indicated that they may travel to Springfield. The filing asks the court to make a decision prior to their arrival.

“This should be done before Trump fulfills his threat to visit Springfield – despite Mayor Rob Rue’s request that he not do so – so that he may be arrested upon arrival for his criminal acts,” the affidavit reads.

The US Department of Justice has sued Visa, accusing one of the world’s largest payment networks of antitrust violations that affect “the price of nearly everything”.

The financial giant has suppressed competition by threatening merchants with high fees and paying off potential rivals, according to the complaint, filed in US district court for the southern district of New York.

The lawsuit alleges that Visa makes it difficult for merchants to use alternatives, like lower-cost or smaller payment processors, instead of its own payment processing technology, without incurring what prosecutors described as “disloyalty penalties”.

Some $3.3tn in transactions were processed on Visa’s sprawling financial network in the latest quarter.

The firm processes more than 60% of debit transactions in the US, bringing it $7bn each year in fees collected when transactions are routed over its network, the justice department said. The company protects that dominance through agreements with card issuers, merchants and competitors, prosecutors allege.

The attempt to tackle such fees, sometimes known as swipe fees or interchange fees, is part of the Biden administration’s efforts to combat rising consumer prices, which have been a key issue on the presidential election campaign trail.

“We allege that Visa has unlawfully amassed the power to extract fees that far exceed what it could charge in a competitive market,” said the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, in a statement. “Merchants and banks pass along those costs to consumers, either by raising prices or reducing quality or service.

“As a result, Visa’s unlawful conduct affects not just the price of one thing – but the price of nearly everything.”

Visa described the complaint as “meritless” and vowed to “vigorously” defend itself. “Anyone who has bought something online, or checked out at a store, knows there is an ever-expanding universe of companies offering new ways to pay for goods and services,” Julie Rottenberg, the firm’s general counsel, said. “Today’s lawsuit ignores the reality that Visa is just one of many competitors in a debit space that is growing, with entrants who are thriving.”

The San Francisco-based company is valued at more than $500bn on the stock market. Its shares dropped by almost 5% following reports of the lawsuit.

Visa’s alleged anticompetitive conduct began around 2012, as competing companies entered the payments space following reforms that required card issuers to accommodate unaffiliated networks, a senior justice department official said.

The lawsuit seeks to have a judge in Manhattan impose requirements that would restore competition for services to process debit payments both online and at physical stores.

The justice department’s antitrust division began investigating Visa over its debit card practices in 2021, the same year it blocked the credit card company’s acquisition of the financial technology company Plaid. Its rival Mastercard said in April it was being investigated by the justice department as well.

Both companies have been in litigation for nearly two decades over their dominance in the cards market, and agreed in 2019 to pay US merchants $5.6bn to settle damages claims in a class-action lawsuit accusing them of anticompetitive practices.

Jon Donenberg, deputy director of the White House national economic council, said: “We do not have a comment on this DoJ lawsuit, but the Biden-Harris administration has been clear that the American economy thrives when there is real competition. This ddministration has also taken on credit card late fees and banking overdraft fees, and will continue working to take on other unfair junk fees on everyday transactions.”

Reuters and Associated Press contributed reporting

A new species of invasive flatworm has been discovered in the United States and has been found in several states in the south, according to a new paper.

The species, named Amaga pseudobama, was discovered by an international team of researchers and first spotted in 2020 in North Carolina. It is thought to be native to South America.

The researchers said the flatworm was brown and a few centimeters long.

Apart from North Carolina, the species is also present in Florida and Georgia and may have already invaded other states, the researchers said in a news release of the research paper on Tuesday.

This new species joins other invasive flatworm species discovered in the southern United States, including Platydemus manokwari.

Initially, the researchers believed that the flatworm belonged to the species Obama nungara, an invasive species native to Brazil and Argentina that has invaded much of Europe. However, after more analysis, the researchers found that this flatworm species was a completely different species.

Once the species was officially identified, researchers found that samples of the species had been collected in the past in North Carolina, Georgia and Florida in 2015.

The researchers say that citizen science observations suggest that the worm is probably present in other states, and therefore, it is likely that the flatworm “has already invaded a part of south-east USA and that the invasion took place more than ten years ago”.

According to North Carolina State University, terrestrial flatworms are flat, shiny and covered in a slime-like substance that helps them move. “Terrestrial flatworms are known to kill other invertebrates, especially other native worms, snails, and slugs,” according to the university, and thus “they have been considered damaging where they are introduced.”

In a news release on Tuesday, Matt Bertone, the co-author of a paper on the discovery and director of the plant disease and insect clinic at North Carolina State University, said the newly identified flatworm “has not been observed in the wild or native habitats, so we don’t know much about how it interacts with its environment”.

He said that the researchers can infer what they know about related species, he said, but they don’t know yet exactly what it preys on or how quickly it reproduces.

“Do they pose a risk to native worms and, by extension, native ecosystems? We have to study these species to find out,” he added. “And the first step in that process is clearly identifying a species and naming it.”

I’m afraid I shrieked when I read that Michael Cole – longterm publicist for the late former Harrods owner Mohamed Al Fayed – cannot come to the phone these days. If you covered a certain phase of British public life, you would know that Michael Cole could always come to the phone. Coming to the phone was what Michael Cole did, always to emit some hugely pompous shitblast in defence of his master, who is now the subject of multiple rape and sexual assault allegations. Alas, Michael is currently so shocked that no emission has been forthcoming. Instead, his wife was deployed to inform the press that Michael “is not giving any interviews or talking at the moment”. However, she did claim he found the women’s allegations “terribly distressing” and that “of course” he had been unaware of all of it.

From spokesman to sending out your spokeswife … I would say life comes at you fast, but of course it doesn’t. Fayed ran his entire race without his years of alleged sexual crimes catching up with him, and though he is not entombed in a pyramid on the roof of Harrods, as he wished, he certainly got away with it all. When he died, Cole rushed out to inform Radio 4’s Today programme that his former boss was “fascinating … larger than life … full of great humanity”. Yeah – not the third one.

According to the spokeswife, Cole is now in seclusion dealing with the incredible shock of the mounting allegations that Fayed was a prolific sex offender. Since the BBC documentary based on the testimony of 20 women aired, another 100 approaches have been made to the legal team who were already representing 37 women, and it is safe to assume there are many still too traumatised to make that call. I shall leave it to readers to decide whether Michael, a former journalist, has somehow forgotten about all the allegations of sexual impropriety made during Fayed’s lifetime that he personally batted away – or whether he is simply the worst publicist ever for having zero clue about any of his client’s alleged … what is the word? … “vulnerabilities”. Given that Tom Bower’s unauthorised biography, which detailed several allegations of sexual assault, came out while Cole was specifically charged with handling Fayed’s publicity, his lack of curiosity/memory seems sensationally remarkable.

But then, it isn’t remarkable – and it is unfair to single out Michael. The Times yesterday published a useful rundown of Fayed’s people, from the mouthpieces, lawyers and security henchmen to the doctors who performed “purity examinations” on young female PAs. When you see the vast scale of it all, “entourage” sounds too wan a word for this motley crew of enablers, enforcers and concealers, and for all the other motley crews that surrounded “larger than life” men, from Michael Jackson to Harvey Weinstein to Jimmy Savile. I prefer to think of such set-ups as the sex-case industrial complex.

Fayed’s isn’t even the only one in the current news cycle. Much has and will be written about the charges of sex trafficking, racketeering and transportation to engage in prostitution laid against the music mogul Diddy, real name Sean Combs. But for space constraints I want to focus on a 2016 surveillance video which surfaced back in May, in which a towel-clad Combs is shown throwing his former girlfriend Cassie Ventura to the floor in a hotel corridor, then repeatedly kicking her before dragging her motionless body back towards the room she has just escaped.

I wasn’t surprised that Cassie had long been telling the truth, despite Diddy’s serial denials. What took my breath away was what the location implied – the sheer number of people who must have been involved in justice not being served. What exactly is the process for covering up a filmed incident of serious assault by an international star in the corridor of a hotel owned by a major international chain? Let’s just say I imagine Diddy’s lot are quite familiar with it. But think of the hotel side. There are CCTV images – it is a whole department’s job to monitor CCTV. Were the management informed? Where were the police? Quite the mystery.

In Combs’s camp, you can only guess at how many of the sex-case industrial complex were called upon to do their special designated job to make it go away. Lawyers, NDA experts, crisis PRs – who knows the precise combination of moving parts, but they were presumably all working in perfect symphony to ensure that this ghastly footage never went anywhere until CNN published it in May, a staggering eight years after it occurred. Diddy’s powers were beginning to desert him – but even weeks before, a raid as he was about to board his private jet had resulted in the arrest of only one individual for possession of drugs. Not Diddy, you understand, but a former college basketball star player who was part of his entourage. “How did a college hooper become Diddy’s alleged drug mule?” ran a New York magazine headline.

The sex-case industrial complex is a place where everyone has their job, a whole interconnected corrupt society that regularly comes into contact with actual society – a boring place of rules and boundaries – but only in order to take what it wants and spin off back into the lawless ether again. Mohamed Al Fayed’s Harrods was also like this, according to multiple allegations. As far back as 1998, Henry Porter wrote in this newspaper of some investigative run-ins with Fayed’s people, stating that he had been “left with the eerie sense that we had been dealing with a foreign power: a fiefdom, which despite its real location in Knightsbridge, operated quite independently from the rest of Britain, with a security service of its own, an armed police force and a tyrant in command”. He was right, as all those shut down by the Diddy machine in recent years were too. We still live in a world of powerful men’s Neverlands.

• Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

• Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from the following organisations. In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 500 2222 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, or 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html

• A year in Westminster: John Crace, Marina Hyde and Pippa Crerar
  On Tuesday 3 December, join Crace, Hyde and Crerar as they look back at a political year like no other, live at the Barbican in London and livestreamed globally. Book tickets here

• Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Police in northern Switzerland say several people have been detained and a criminal case opened in connection with the suspected death of a person in a new “suicide capsule”.

The “Sarco” capsule, which has never been used before, is designed to allow a person inside to push a button that injects nitrogen gas into the sealed chamber. The person is then supposed to fall asleep and die by suffocation in a few minutes.

Prosecutors in Schaffhausen canton were informed by a law firm that an assisted suicide involving use of the Sarco capsule had taken place on Monday near a forest cabin in Merishausen, police said in a statement.

Police added that “several people” were taken into custody and prosecutors had opened an investigation on suspicion of incitement and accessory to suicide.

The Dutch newspaper Volkskrant reported on Tuesday that police had detained one of its photographers who wanted to take pictures of the use of the capsule. It said Schaffhausen police indicated the photographer was being held at a police station but gave no further explanation.

The newspaper declined to comment further when contacted by Associated Press.

Exit International, an assisted suicide group based in the Netherlands, has said it is behind the 3D-printed device that cost more than $1m to develop.

Swiss law allows assisted suicide as long as the person takes his or her life with no “external assistance” and those who help the person die do not do so for “any self-serving motive”, according to a government website.

Dr Philip Nitschke, an Australian doctor who was behind Exit International, has told AP that his organisation had received advice from lawyers in Switzerland that use of the Sarco would be legal in the country.

In July, the Swiss newspaper Blick reported that Peter Sticher, a state prosecutor in Schaffhausen, wrote to Exit International’s lawyers saying that any operator of the capsule could face criminal proceedings if it was used there – and any conviction could bring up to five years in prison.

Prosecutors in other Swiss regions have also indicated that use of the capsule could lead to prosecution.

Over the summer, a 54-year-old woman from the US with multiple health ailments had planned to be the first person to use the device, but those plans were abandoned.

Israel struck Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon and the Iran-backed Islamist militant organisation fired rockets into northern Israel on Tuesday, a day after a wave of Israeli airstrikes killed nearly 500 people in Lebanon and sent tens of thousands fleeing for safety.

Hezbollah said it had targeted several Israeli military targets overnight including an explosives factory about 35 miles (60km) into Israel and the Megiddo airfield near the town of Afula, which it attacked three separate times.

Officials in Israel said more than 50 projectiles were fired from Lebanon into northern parts of the country on Tuesday morning, most of which were intercepted.

The fighting has raised fears that the US, Israel’s close ally, and Iran, which has proxies across the Middle East, will be drawn into a wider conflict. On Tuesday Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, expressed fears of a regional conflagration but said Hezbollah, which Iran helped to found in 1983, “cannot stand alone” against Israel.

“Hebzollah cannot stand alone against a country that is being defended and supported and supplied by western countries, by European countries and the United States,” Pezeshkian said in an interview with CNN translated from Farsi to English.

The EU’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, described the escalating conflict between Israel and Hezbollah as almost a “full-fledged war”, as world leaders gathered in New York for the opening of the 79th United Nations general assembly.

“If this is not a war situation, I don’t know what you would call it,” Borrell said before the UN gathering, citing the increasing number of civilian casualties and the intensity of military strikes. He said efforts to reduce tensions were continuing but Europe’s worst fears about a spillover were becoming a reality.

That warning was echoed by the US, with a senior state department official saying Washington was discussing “concrete ideas” with allies and partners to prevent the war from broadening.

Diplomatic efforts appear to have had little impact so far, with Lebanon recording more casualties on Monday than in any other single day since the 15-year civil war that started in 1975.

Israeli officials have said the recent rise in airstrikes on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon is designed to force the group to agree to a diplomatic solution, cease its own attacks on Israel or unilaterally withdraw its forces from close to the contested border.

Many experts and officials question the assumption that air power or other military operations can achieve such strategic aims. Others point out that Hezbollah has repeatedly pledged to stop firing into Israel if there is a ceasefire in Gaza.

A US state department official said: “I can’t recall, at least in recent memory, a period in which an escalation or intensification led to a fundamental de-escalation and led to profound stabilisation of the situation.”

After almost a year of war against Hamas in Gaza, Israel has shifted its focus to its northern frontier. About 60,000 people were evacuated from northern Israel in the days after the 7 October raid by Hamas into southern Israel that triggered the conflict, and they have been prevented from returning by the ongoing exchanges of fire across the contested border with Lebanon.

Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defence minister, has said the campaign of airstrikes will continue until the residents are back in their homes. He said Monday marked a “significant peak” in the nearly year-long conflict.

“This is the most difficult week for Hezbollah since its establishment – the results speak for themselves,” Gallant said. “Entire units were taken out of battle as a result of the activities conducted at the beginning of the week in which numerous terrorists were injured.”

The Israeli military said Israeli strikes had hit long-range cruise missiles, heavyweight rockets, short-range rockets and explosive drones.

Though Hezbollah has remained defiant, there is no doubt that the waves of strikes have further ramped up pressure on the group, which was already reeling from heavy losses last week when thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies used by its members exploded.

That operation killed 42 and wounded several thousand. It was widely blamed on Israel, which has not confirmed nor denied responsibility.

The US has said it would send a small number of additional troops to the Middle East, given the escalating tensions.

The Lebanese prime minister, Najib Mikati, urged the UN and world powers to deter what he called Israel’s “plan that aims to destroy Lebanese villages and towns”. He said he was cancelling a scheduled cabinet meeting to fly to New York to “make further contacts” with leaders to try to end the violence.

In Lebanon, displaced families slept in shelters hastily set up in schools in Beirut and the coastal city of Sidon. With hotels quickly booked to capacity or rooms priced beyond the means of many families, those who did not find shelter slept in their cars, in parks or along the seaside.

Well-wishers offered up empty apartments or rooms in their houses in social media posts, while volunteers set up a kitchen at an empty petrol station in Beirut to cook meals for the displaced.

In the eastern city of Baalbek, the state-run National News Agency reported that queues formed at bakeries and petrol stations as residents rushed to stock up on essential supplies in anticipation of further strikes.

In northern Israel, Galilee Medical Center said two people arrived with minor head injuries from a rocket falling near their car. Several others were being treated for light wounds from running to shelters and traffic accidents when alarms sounded.

Joe Biden’s administration has repeatedly called for the Israel-Lebanon border crisis to be resolved through diplomacy, but in a call with Gallant on Monday he said the US “remains postured to protect US forces and personnel and determined to deter any regional actors from exploiting the situation or expanding the conflict”.

French officials have requested an emergency UN security council meeting to discuss the situation and called on all sides to avoid a regional conflagration.

China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, expressed support for Lebanon and condemned what he termed “indiscriminate attacks against civilians”, Beijing’s foreign ministry said on Tuesday.