Six water companies overcharged customers between £800m and £1.5bn by “significantly or systematically” underreporting the true scale of their sewage pollution of rivers and waterways, a tribunal heard on Monday.

In the first environmental competition class action against water companies in England, lawyers argued that the privatised firms had abused their monopoly position to mislead regulators over the amount of sewage they were discharging from their assets over the past 10 years.

As a result the companies, Thames Water, Yorkshire Water, Anglian Water, Severn Trent, Northumbrian Water and United Utilities, were able to charge customers higher bills than they would have been allowed to if they had provided the regulators with a true picture of their sewage pollution.

Prof Carolyn Roberts, a water resource specialist, is taking the action in the competition appeals tribunal and seeking to represent millions of consumers who she believes have been overcharged by hundreds of millions of pounds.

Julian Gregory, for Roberts, told the tribunal on Monday that all the water firms were monopolies that were not subject to any competitive pressures to provide sewerage services to the public. The companies were all legally required to report pollution to the regulators – the Environment Agency and Ofwat, he said.

“Sewage spills pose a threat to wildlife, the environment and public health,” said Gregory.

The pricing regime, controlled by Ofwat, allows the regulator to limit the amount charged to customers for the monopoly services of providing drinking water and sewerage.

The structure provides a financial incentive for water companies to reduce sewage pollution.

But Gregory said the six companies had misled both Ofwat and the Environment Agency by significantly or systematically underreporting the number of sewage discharges from their treatment works and combined sewer overflows from 2014 onwards.

By misleading the regulators on the true scale of sewage discharges, they had been allowed by Ofwat to charge customers higher prices than if they had reported the sewage pollution accurately, said Gregory.

“Carolyn Roberts estimates across the six water companies customers may have been overcharged £800m to £1.5bn,” he said.

“Many people care deeply about the state of our rivers … sewage spills to them can be incredibly damaging. As the true number of sewage spills have become apparent there has been a public outcry,” he said.

“If the defendants [water companies] have been underreporting spills they will not have been properly incentivised to reduce sewage spills.”

Gregory said analysis of Thames Water data alone suggested the company may have failed to report more than 6,000 raw sewage discharges.

Roberts is applying to the tribunal for collective proceedings orders (CPOs) against the six water companies.

If the orders are granted, the proposed claims can proceed to a full trial to establish whether water companies have been overcharging household customers. Customers would automatically be refunded millions of pounds.

“As a professor of the environment, I have a deep appreciation of our waterways and their influence on our wider environment and firmly believe in preserving them for future generations,” said Roberts.

“I hope to be authorised as the class representative to bring these claims on behalf of millions of household consumers who have been overcharged due to the anti-competitive practices employed by these six water companies.”

The six water companies are defending the allegations in the tribunal.

A spokesperson for Water UK, the industry body, said: “This highly speculative claim is entirely without merit. The regulator has confirmed that over 99% of sewage works comply with their legal requirements. If companies fail to deliver on their commitments, then bills will automatically be reduced.”

Heavy rain caused extensive flooding in central Japan over the weekend, with at least one person reported dead and several more unaccounted for.

Officials said “unprecedented” rainfall generated floods and landslides in Ishikawa prefecture, where a powerful 7.5-magnitude earthquake on New Year’s Day killed more than 200 people. The Japan meteorological agency issued its highest-level warning for Ishikawa, advising of a “life-threatening situation”.

Authorities ordered tens of thousands of people to evacuate as more than a dozen rivers overflowed by late morning on Saturday, and a number of people were rescued from flood water in the cities of Wajima and Suzu. On Saturday morning 121mm (4.8in) of rain was recorded in one hour in Wajima, and 84.5mm in Suzu.

This was the heaviest rain observed in these locations since comparative data became available in 1929. Niigata and Yamagata prefectures were also affected with 16,000 people told to evacuate.

Elsewhere, Storm Boris moved into Italy late last week, having earlier caused devastation and some of the worst floods in decades in parts of Austria, Romania, the Czech Republic and Poland. The storm inflicted more suffering in some northern and central Italian regions. More than 1,000 people in Emilia-Romagna were forced to evacuate after floods and landslides, while towns in the central region of Marche also experienced significant flooding. The Italian air force was called in to rescue people who had escaped the flood water by climbing on to their rooftops in several towns, including Traversara di Bagnacavallo.

On the Adriatic coast, the seaside resort of Falconara Marittima had more than 200mm of rain over Wednesday and Thursday. The September average is just 67mm. More than 300mm was recorded in the Apennine mountain region. Conditions improved on Friday and during the course of the weekend as the low pressure responsible for the extreme rainfall eased away.

In stark contrast to the wet weather, northern Portugal has been suffering the effects of deadly wildfires. The prime minister declared a “state of calamity” for the areas worst affected on Tuesday. By Wednesday, 5,000 firefighters were battling more than 100 wildfires. Seven people have died, including three firefighters. Favourable weather conditions helped firefighters to contain the vast majority of the blazes by Friday.

The first time I came face to face with a great white shark, it was dead. I had caught it in my net. And I was so happy. I thought: I can bring a fortune back to my village. I can feed my family. I’m Malagasy – I come from Andavadoaka, a small fishing village on the south-west coast of Madagascar. It is a very dry place where no crops can grow. The name of my tribe, Vezo, means people who live off the ocean, but also people who survive it. Because we rely on it.

I became a shark fisher when I was 16 years old. I dropped out of school because my parents couldn’t afford to support me any more, and followed my uncle into fishing so I could bring some money back to my family. I didn’t see a shark as a magnificent creature. My mindset was: make money, kill, make money, kill. Support my family.

I caught the great white when I was 18 years old. We were in shark territory, 15km offshore and decided to pull in our net because the weather was getting really bad. We couldn’t see what was inside because the net was too deep. Then one of my crew put on a diving mask, saw the shark and shouted.

I put my life in danger to bring that shark home. It was the most terrifying thing I have ever done. It was 4 metres (13ft) long and weighed about 400kg. My boat was 6 metres long, with a 4-metre sail.

The weather was very stormy, lots of wind and heavy rain, and the weight of the shark meant that I had to sink the boat to the surface level of the ocean to get it onboard. We had no radio, no mobile phones, no engine. It took us five hours to sail back to shore. I shared half the meat with my community, and sold the rest for $120 (£90).

For five years, I used to kill up to 50 sharks a day – although on a bad day it was more like three. What made me stop was my brother. He began working with Blue Ventures, a British conservation NGO, to educate the people in my village about sharks. He made me reflect on my work and helped me get a new job, as a shark fishing data collector for Frances Humber, a conservationist with the NGO. I didn’t make good money, but I learned English and about marine life conservation.

The more I learned about sharks and the important role they play in balancing our marine ecosystem and ensuring my own family has enough fish to eat, the more they fascinated me. So I put my life in danger again, this time to help conservationists document overfishing and expose the shark fin trade in Madagascar. I helped a US reporter, Isobel Yeung, go undercover and film a large Chinese warehouse of shark fins with a hidden camera, and more recently I myself filmed a huge industrial fishing vessel that had about 4,000 dead sharks onboard.

It was heartbreaking. My community could eat for two months from what just one of those boats catches in our waters and takes to China.

I became a conservation and wildlife film-maker and photographer because I realised that making films and documentaries is one of the key ways we can protect sharks. It allows me to raise awareness about how beautiful these creatures are – and what is happening to them in our oceans.

I had the best dive of my life recently, filming whale sharks. When I got into the water, nine of them congregated around me, feeding on small plankton. Each was large enough to kill me but they are among the most gentle animals in the ocean.

I cannot describe how happy I was that day, down there with those sharks, witnessing the thriving marine life of the ocean. When I’m 90, I will still tell my child about it. I wanted to stay in that water, for ever.

As told to Donna Ferguson

At least six people have died and 10 others are missing after heavy rain triggered flooding and landslides along a peninsula in Japan that is still recovering from a deadly earthquake at the start of the year.

Public broadcaster NHK and other outlets said on Monday that six people had been confirmed dead, while the Kyodo news agency said more than 100 communities had been cut off by blocked roads after almost two dozen rivers burst their banks.

Two of the deaths occurred near a landslide-hit tunnel in the city of Wajima, Ishikawa prefecture, which was undergoing repairs after being damaged in the New Year’s Day earthquake.

Elsewhere in Ishikawa, two people were missing after being swept away and eight others were unaccounted for, Kyodo added.

Rainfall in Wajima and the nearby city of Suzu reached twice the levels for September in an average year. Japan’s meteorological agency has downgraded its “special warnings” for the area to “warnings”, but advised residents to remain vigilant.

The prime minister, Fumio Kishida, has instructed officials to monitor the damage and cooperate with local authorities as the region was still in the process of recovering from January’s earthquake when the rain, caused by an extratropical depression, arrived.

Heavy rain pounded Ishikawa from Saturday, with more than 540 millimetres (21 inches) recorded in the city of Wajima over 72 hours, the heaviest continuous rain since comparative data became available.

The region is still reeling from a magnitude-7.5 quake at the start of the year, which toppled buildings, triggered tsunami waves and sparked a major fire.

Flood waters inundated emergency housing built for those who had lost their homes in the New Year’s Day quake, which killed at least 374 people, according to Ishikawa government figures.

On Monday, 4,000 households were left without power after the rain, according to the Hokuriku Electric Power Company.

Akemi Yamashita, a 54-year-old Wajima resident, said she had been driving on Saturday when “within only 30 minutes or so, water gushed into the street and quickly rose to half the height of my car”.

“I was talking to other residents of Wajima yesterday, and they said, ‘it’s so heart-breaking to live in this city’. I got teary when I heard that,” she said, describing the earthquake and floods as “like something from a movie”.

In Wajima on Sunday, splintered branches and a huge uprooted tree piled up at a bridge over a river where the raging brown waters almost reached ground level.

Military personnel were sent to the Ishikawa region to join rescue workers over the weekend, as tens of thousands of residents were urged to evacuate.

Scientists say human-driven climate change is intensifying the risk posed by heavy rains because a warmer atmosphere holds more water.

The areas under the emergency warning saw “heavy rain of unprecedented levels”, JMA forecaster Satoshi Sugimoto said on Saturday, adding: “It is a situation in which you have to secure your safety immediately”.

With Agence France-Presse

Abba’s Björn Ulvaeus has married his partner in a ceremony officiated by the TV presenter Sandi Toksvig.

The 79-year-old Swedish singer, who has been married twice before, met Christina Sas in Nuremberg, Germany, in 2021 in connection with the release of Abba’s latest album Voyage.

A post to his Instagram page said: “Today on the 21st of September 2024, Björn Ulvaeus married Christina Sas from Herning, Denmark. They met in Nurnberg in 2021 in connection with the release of Abba’s last album Voyage and started dating in the spring of 2022.

“The wedding took place in Copenhagen in the presence of close friends and family. Sandi Toksvig, Anne Linnet and Kaya Brüel generously performed and made the evening extra special.”

Ulvaeus posted photos from the day, one of which shows former Great British Bake Off host Toksvig dressed in a red robe. The presenter is standing next to Ulvaeus, wearing a suit, and his wife, wearing a muted green wrap dress.

Representatives for Ulvaeus confirmed to the PA news agency that Toksvig had held the ceremony.

Ulvaeus is known for being one-quarter of Swedish pop group Abba, who this year celebrated 50 years since they won the Eurovision song contest with Waterloo.

The group originally comprised two couples – Ulvaeus and Agnetha Fältskog, and Benny Andersson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad. Fältskog and Ulvaeus, who married in 1971, divorced in 1980, while Andersson and Lyngstad divorced in 1981 – a year before the band split.

The quartet did not reform to perform at Eurovision this year despite the event being held in Sweden after Loreen won the competition in 2023 with her hit single Tattoo. Ulvaeus was also previously married to Lena Kallersjö.

Kamala Harris laid down another challenge to Republican rival Donald Trump to meet her for a second debate before November’s presidential election, telling supporters in New York that her opponent “seems to be looking for an excuse” to avoid a second confrontation.

On Saturday, the vice-president and Democratic nominee said she had accepted an invitation from CNN to debate the former president, but Trump said it was already “too late”.

In her remarks at a New York fundraiser, Harris doubled down in her taunting of Trump over the issue, saying: “I think we should have another debate.”

“I accepted an invitation to debate in October, which my opponent seems to be looking for an excuse to avoid when he should accept,” she added. “He should accept because I feel very strongly that we owe it to the American people, to the voters, to meet once more before election day.”

The question of the US’s high stakes presidential debates has hung over the candidates since Joe Biden dropped out of the race following a disastrous performance in June. The single scheduled debate between Trump and Harris, earlier this month, was widely viewed to have gone Harris’s way and been a serious blow to Trump.

But it did not move the polls as much as the Harris campaign hoped and her campaign is still tasked with introducing her to US voters. Last week, Harris went on Oprah to help smooth the introduction along.

This week Harris is due to reveal a set of new economic policies. Polls show she is steadily gaining trust on the key issue of the economy, which often favors Trump and the Republican party.

On Sunday, Harris returned to the key themes of the message Democrats wish to underline – a threat to democracy they perceive a second Trump terms represents and the knife-edge that polls suggest the race remains balanced upon.

“This is a man who said he would be a dictator on day one … just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails,” Harris said in New York. “This race is as close as it could be. This is a margin of error race … and I am running and we are running as the underdog.”

Harris called Trump an “unserious man”, but said the consequences of putting him back in the White House were “very serious”.

Head-to-head polls tend to show Harris with a narrow but solid lead over Trump, though the situation is more mixed in the crucial swing states that will decide the race to the White House. That is a reverse of the situation when Biden was in the race, where Trump had established a firm lead over the US president.

Russia was left badly isolated at a high-profile UN summit in New York when it made a surprise move to derail an ambitious pact designed to revive the UN – and failed.

Russia’s move to defer adoption of the agreement on the grounds that it supposedly represented western interests was rejected on Sunday by 143 votes to seven with 15 abstentions.

The Russian delegation said that if the planned vote endorsing the high-profile “pact for the future” were not deferred pending further talks, it would seek to move an amendment asserting the key issues addressed in the pact are the subject of domestic jurisdiction in which the UN should not seek to intervene.

But the overwhelming UN general assembly vote threw out Russia’s call for deferment and its amendment.

The Russian move, at the outset of the two-day “summit for the future”, looked diplomatically clumsy, if perhaps designed for domestic consumption. It angered speakers from the African Union (AU) and Mexico, underlining that Moscow had only limited support, notably from Belarus, Venezuela, Syria and Iran.

The AU, led by the Democratic Republic of Congo, called for the Russian amendment to be rejected.

The pact is seen by many in the global south as both a well-intended and necessary collective effort at UN renewal as well as a personal legacy for a relatively popular UN secretary general António Guterres.

But the controversy underlined the extent to which ideological divisions have damaged multilateral cooperation at the UN, the very issue that the pact was seeking to address.

Russia objected to 25 provisions in the draft pact, including asserting the primacy of national jurisdiction and rejecting language on universal access to sexual and reproductive health rights, as well as gender empowerment more broadly.

With the Russian move crushed, Guterres told the summit that the pact’s aim was “to bring multilateralism back from the brink at a time when the world [is] heading off the rails”. Twenty-first-century challenges – from debt in developing countries to the climate crisis – required 21st-century solutions.

Graham Gordon, head of global advocacy at Christian Aid, said of the pact: “The key point of the document, given its inherent limits, is that it does provide pointers of what should be achieved in other forums including the IMF, at Cop and at the G20. The key test will be in 12 months in assessing how much momentum this provides. It is a striking document in its admission of how multilateralism is currently failing.”

Guterres had advocated for a Summit for the Future more than two years ago as an attempt to persuade world leaders in the wake of the global Covid outbreak that cooperation and multilateralism had to be revived.

The pact, spanning 26 pages and 56 recommendations, says it is offering a new beginning for multilateralism and repeatedly asserts the primacy of international law. But the lack of new specifics has weakened its impact.

The document covers reform and expansion of the UN security council to make the body more representative of the 21st century, a UN role in governing artificial intelligence, the phasing out of fossil fuels in energy systems, reform of multilateral financial institutions, a recommitment to full nuclear disarmament and modernising UN peacekeeping so it evolves into war prevention.

Concrete ideas include a biennial UN summit on the global economy, an emergency platform for managing pandemics, food insecurity and environmental disasters, and a new UN oversight body of experts advising on the risks posed by AI for all economies.

A major sticking point was western opposition to the UN playing a role in making international financial institutions more representative. A UN-led push to include a reference to a $500bn (£375bn) stimulus to put the sustainable development goals back on track was also rejected.

At least two students at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania have been suspended from the swim team after a report that a racial slur was scratched onto a student’s body, officials said.

Officials received “a deeply concerning report of a racial slur being scratched on to a student using a plastic or ceramic tool,” officials at the liberal arts school said in a statement last week.

“This is a serious report, which is being actively assessed through the student conduct process,” the college said. “At this point, the students involved are not participating in swim team activities.”

The school declined to release further details, citing the investigation and privacy laws.

However, a family of the victim contacted the Gettysburgian last week to give more details. They said the student had the N-word cut into their chest by someone they “trusted”. The victim’s family say they consider the incident a hate crime. They also said the victim was the only person of color at the scene.

“The reprehensible act was committed by a fellow student-athlete, someone he considered his friend, someone whom he trusted. This student used a box cutter to etch the N-word across his chest,” the family told the Gettysburgian.

They added: “As we wait to discuss the decisions made by college staff, the harm continues without much relief. Media outlets (social, online, and broadcast) continue to perpetuate misinformation stemming from an act of racial animus. In the same vein, the isolation that pairs with being isolated from many in the Gettysburg College community that he had come to trust deepens the harm.

“We want to be clear that we understand that an investigation should not be rushed. We support a fair and thorough investigation. To this end, we appreciate the standardized procedures and protocols that are in place. We know that they are meant to ensure that the rights and responsibilities of all parties involved are maintained and protected.”

Gettysburg College president Robert Iuliano said he felt “profound distress about what happened” and the impact on the implications “for a community continuing its evolving efforts to create a truly inclusive environment.”

“No matter the relationship, and no matter the motivation, there is no place on this campus for words or actions that demean, degrade, or marginalize based on one’s identity and history,” he said in a statement that also cautioned against speculation “based on fragments of information that may or may not be accurate.”

The city’s police chief, Robert Glenny Jr, said he contacted the college after hearing news reports and was told the victim chose to handle the matter through the college’s internal process, despite college officials encouraging the person to take the matter to police, WGAL-TV reported.

Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, called Donald Trump “just deranged” on Sunday after he said women would no longer be thinking about abortion if he is elected as president in November.

“This guy just doesn’t understand what the average woman is confronting in her life in this country, and how could he? He’s not lived a normal life,” Whitmer said in an interview on CNN’s State of the Union.

Whitmer also reaffirmed her support for Kamala Harris, describing her as a person “who has worked hourly jobs, who knows how important it is that women have healthcare and access to the medical care that they need”.

Whitmer was asked to comment about a speech the former president delivered on Saturday, saying women “will be happy, healthy, confident, and free” if he is elected president.

“He’s just deranged,” the governor of Michigan said.

On Friday, Trump made similar comments about women on his Truth Social platform.

“WOMEN ARE POORER THAN THEY WERE FOUR YEARS AGO, ARE LESS HEALTHY THAN THEY WERE FOUR YEARS AGO … AND ARE LESS OPTIMISTIC AND CONFIDENT IN THE FUTURE THAN THEY WERE FOUR YEARS AGO!” Trump said.

Harris is a staunch supporter of abortion rights. The vice-president delivered two speeches on Friday, first in Georgia and then Wisconsin, highlighting the case of Amber Thurman, who died in Georgia due to a strict abortion ban.

Whitmer’s comments on Sunday come a week after participating in an online campaign event with TV host, producer and author Oprah Winfrey, which was livestreamed nationally from Michigan.

The Michigan governor was previously named as a possible candidate for the Democratic nomination for president before ruling herself out in July. Michigan is a must-win prize for candidates, a state that has voted for the presidential winner in the last four national elections.

Joe Biden took Michigan by 154,000 votes in 2020. Two years later, Whitmer defeated a Trump-backed candidate and Democrats took full control for the first time in 45 years.