Democrats will target Donald Trump’s first full-scale campaign rally since his criminal trial with a billboard that brands him “a convicted white-collar crook”.

The ad, paid for by the Democratic National Committee (DNC), is the latest indication that the party is ready to become more aggressive in capitalising on last month’s guilty verdict in New York.

“Trump was a disaster for Nevada’s economy,” says the billboard, which will be displayed in Las Vegas, where Trump is due to speak on Sunday. “Now he’s back. A convicted white-collar crook. Coddling billionaires, leaving workers behind.”

A Manhattan jury found Trump guilty of all 34 counts of falsifying business records in his hush-money criminal trial, making him the the first former US president to be convicted of a felony. Judge Juan Merchan set a sentencing hearing for 11 July.

But Democrats have been unsure how far to go in hammering home the verdict to voters in this year’s presidential election campaign. Some fear it could fuel a narrative that the trial was politically motivated and backfire by generating sympathy for the presumptive Republican nominee.

However, this week there have been signs of a more direct approach. On Monday, at a campaign reception in Greenwich, Connecticut, Joe Biden referred to his opponent as a “convicted felon”.

The Las Vegas billboard attempts to tie Trump’s criminal record to his economic one, portraying him as a “white-collar crook” who ripped off Nevada’s working class when he was president. The phrase also has echoes of the “Crooked Hillary” label that proved effective for Trump during the 2016 campaign.

Stephanie Justice, a DNC spokesperson, said: “As Donald Trump returns to Nevada this weekend for the first time as a convicted felon, voters will remember this crook left Nevada’s workers out to dry as president.

“After promising to take care of Nevada’s middle class, he implemented a tax scam that made the ultra-wealthy and corporations wealthier off the backs of working families, repeatedly attacked unions and sat back as Nevada bled tens of thousands of jobs.”

Justice added: “Now he’s promising tax handouts to his billionaire donors instead of putting the interests of working Nevadans first. Nevada voters know that Trump is too corrupt and unfit to serve, and will reject him again in 2024.”

The political impact of Trump’s conviction remains uncertain, but a post-verdict analysis of nearly 2,000 interviews with voters who previously participated in New York Times/Siena College surveys found that Trump’s lead over Biden narrowed from three points to just one point.

There is “no chance” that the search for the British TV doctor Michael Mosley on the Greek island of Symi will be called off until he is found, the island’s mayor has said, after the search was described as “a race against time”.

Mosley, 67, has been missing since Wednesday afternoon when he decided to walk from the beach he was at with his wife, leaving his phone behind. The search and rescue operation, which involves divers, helicopters and drones, is now in its fourth day.

There has been no sign yet of Mosley, said Manolis Tsimpoukas, a search organiser, as firefighters resumed their search covering a four-mile (6.5km) radius on the island’s mountainous terrain.

The mayor, Eleftherios Papakaloudoukas, questioned how anyone could survive in the scorching heat gripping the island, with the mercury topping 40C on the day Mosley disappeared. Symi and nearby islands are under a yellow weather warning for high temperatures and the mayor said the search dog was only able to work for an hour on Saturday morning due to the heat.

Papakaloudoukas said the area where Mosley is believed to have walked through was “difficult to pass” and was “only rocks”, and there were “loads” of snakes.

Mosley’s four children arrived on Symi on Saturday to assist with the search, the mayor said, joining Mosley’s wife, Dr Claire Bailey, and her friends. Mosley and Bailey arrived on the island on Tuesday.

On Friday, CCTV images of Mosley were released showing him shielding himself from the sun with an umbrella outside a restaurant in the village of Pedi, providing the first piece of concrete evidence that he made it to the village. The images were taken about 20 minutes after he left St Nikolas beach at about 1.30pm local time.

While Bailey has been searching for her husband in a wooded area above the village of Pedi, search teams now believe Mosley travelled through a much sparser area on the other side of the bay, Papakaloudoukas said, citing other CCTV evidence. Police have instructed taxi boats to raise the alert if they see anything strange after the search was expanded to the sea.

Further CCTV footage from a house at the edge of Pedi’s marina showed Mosley on a mountain path that leads towards the island’s port town at about 2pm on Wednesday. A senior police officer coordinating the operation said of the development: “In some ways the mystery has only deepened. Now we have to ask where did he go from there, and if he took another unexpected route [to the port town] did he slip and fall? We’re still no nearer to solving this.”

One of the rescuers told the PA news agency that it would have taken a fit young person three hours to walk to the port from Pedi – the path on which Mosley is believed to have embarked after he reached the village. “The path is not easy to follow, if he took a wrong turn he would be lost. He could be anywhere, it is a race against time,” the rescuer said of the little-used path, which runs over inland terrain rather than along the coast.

The mayor’s daughter, Mika Papakalodouka, said some of the island’s 300 permanent residents were out searching for Mosley. “It’s such a small island to get lost on. It’s so weird for us. Everybody is worried and looking for him.”

South West Water has taken a legal stake in a customer’s home after she withheld her bill payments in a protest over sewage dumping in rivers and the sea.

Thousands of water company customers are thought to be withholding payments but this is the first known case of a company enforcing a claim against a customer’s home.

Imogen May, of Crediton, Devon, has withheld payment since 2019 and has a £2,809 debt. South West Water won a county court judgment over the debt and has claimed an interest in May’s cottage via the Land Registry. When it is sold, the company can claim what it says it is owed.

May has also withheld payment of council tax, arguing that the funds are not spent on people’s priorities, such as environmental projects and children’s mental health services. The council is now applying for a court order to force the sale of May’s cottage.

“This is about using my place of privilege as a homeowner to push the boundaries,” she said. “It’s about necessity – unless we challenge them and show them that we’re not frightened of them, they will continue to do what they’re doing.”

“They are killing our water,” May told the Guardian. “Without our water, we are dead. I care deeply about the planet and biodiversity and I just want to inspire people to stop paying these bastards to rip us off.

“The language of money is the only thing they really understand. They can have it by all means when they spend our money on what it’s designed for. But they are openly polluting our waters and I’m done with it.”

May, who works in a bakery, has frequently taken part in environmental protests. She was arrested while blocking Lambeth Bridge in London as part of an Extinction Rebellion protest in 2019 and released without charge. Charges brought over a protest against the HS2 rail development in Buckinghamshire in 2020 were later dismissed.

May’s home is already up for sale as she had decided to downsize after her two daughters left home. She is undecided about what to do once the house is sold, “but if I am set with a choice to pay these bills or go to prison then I’ll pay the bloody bills,” she said. “I’ve promised my kids that I would not end up in prison.”

A spokesperson for South West Water said it did not comment on individual customers’ cases. “We are serious about tackling storm overflows and change of this scale takes time, ambition and increased investment, and that is why we are investing £850m in our region over two years,” he said. “We will also be the first water company to meet the government target of less than 10 spills per overflow, per year, a decade ahead of target.”

South West Water increased its annual dividend to investors to £127m in May. In the same month, 17,000 of its customers had to boil water due to contamination with the cryptosporidium parasite, which results from faecal pollution of water supplies.

Frequent overflows of sewage into rivers and the sea has become a high-profile issue in recent years. Multimillion-pound court fines have been levied against a number of English water companies over their failings, and their large debts and dividend payments to shareholders have become controversial. Thousands of customers are thought to be boycotting their payments, with bill strikes ongoing against all nine companies dealing with wastewater in England.

Julie Wassmer, of Whitstable, Kent, helped found the BoycottWaterBills.com website. She has withheld the sewerage portion of her water bill from Southern Water since 2021, totalling about £1,000.

“We know for a fact that we’ve got boycott action in all the wastewater areas,” she said. “We haven’t got a complete figure on how many people are boycotting nationally but we believe it’s thousands,” based on mailing list numbers and web activity.

Wassmer said the process for complaining to water companies was “not fit for purpose” and that the industry regulator, Ofwat, was ineffective in stemming the sewage pollution. “So there’s no chance of holding the companies to account. The whole thing is just a legalised scam and it’s only benefited the companies, the executives and their shareholders, and people are doing the only thing I think we can do, which is to withhold payment.”

She likened the widespread bills boycott to the successful anti-fracking campaigns in which she has also taken part. “There are so many different people involved and that means we’re hydra-headed and more difficult for the companies to pick us off.”

Caz Dennett, of Weymouth, started the Don’t Pay for Dirty Water campaign with Extinction Rebellion. “It seemed like an obvious action for people to take to truly demonstrate how sickening and scandalous the water company racket is,” she said. She has withheld the sewage charge part of her Wessex Water bill for 14 months and is in dispute with the company over the £940 it says she owes.

Katy Taylor, the chief customer officer at Southern Water, said: “To reduce storm overflows, we have a £1.5bn investment increasing storage capacity and finding ways to divert rain back to the environment naturally.”

A Wessex Water spokesperson said: “We agree [storm overflows] are outdated and we’re currently spending over £3m a month to progressively improve them. Subject to regulatory approval, this investment will double.”

Wassmer said: “Nationalisation appears to be the only way forward. England is the only country in the world to have a fully privatised water industry. So it’s not only a national disgrace, it’s an international disgrace.”

Paola Ferraro marches through the neat grids of vines that chequer the slopes of Monfumo and rattles off the number of ways violent weather hurts her family’s prosecco production.

Spring frost kills buds, summer hail storms thrash leaves, long droughts starve vines of water, while strong rains spark landslides that drown them in mud.

In the rugged hills of Asolo, halfway between the canals of Venice and the peaks of the Dolomites, the farmers that produce prosecco, one of the most popular sparkling wines in the world, have been plunged into crisis mode by the tempestuous weather that has arrived with the climate crisis.

“It feels like there’s no time,” says Ferraro, from Bele Casel winery, whose grandmother lit candles and prayed during once-rare hail storms that have started to hit earlier in the year and pack more of a punch. “It’s changing so fast.”

Climate change is affecting wine producers everywhere. A study in Nature found that by the end of the century 90% of traditional wine regions could disappear from coastal and lowland parts of Spain, Italy, Greece and southern California.

Prosecco is particularly sensitive to volatile weather. When rain falls hard in the “hogback” hills of Valdobbiadene and Conegliano – a Unesco heritage site that, along with Asolo, makes the most exclusive labels – the steep slopes that grow glera grapes can quickly morph into torrents of fast-flowing earth. During long periods of drought, any water that does hit the sun-crusted inclines washes straight off.

“The impact of the two extremes is one thing on a plain, but it’s totally different on a steep slope,” says Paolo Tarolli, of the University of Padova, who studies the effects of climate change on wine terraces.

At the Vinitaly trade fair in Verona, where well-heeled wine dealers swill glasses of their finest, prosecco producers say the sector has only just woken up to the scale of the threat.

Nicola Ceschin, from the Sanfeletto winery, says that in the last couple of years “the debate has been opened, and it has become more and more lively. But in terms of practical action, I don’t know if much has really moved.”

Farmers can adapt to many of the changes, says Gregory Gambetta, a plant biologist at Bordeaux Sciences Agro and co-author of the Nature study. But customers place so much emphasis on a wine’s identity that it is “a completely different beast” to other foods threatened by global heating.

“The big fear is not: ‘I’m going to wake up and the climate change is so extreme I can’t grow grapes any more’,” says Gambetta. “The fear is that: ‘This product we always made – that everyone always loved – that they [the customers] don’t like it any more’.”

Sipped straight or mixed in a spritz, prosecco has had a boom in popularity over the last two decades, but green groups and some people in northern Italy have blamed the scale of the industry’s expansion for damaging the local environment, prompting pledges from producers to better protect ecosystems.

Some farmers have already started to change their practices. Black nets dot the green terraces of Valdobbiadene to guard grapes from hail. Some producers, taking a more experimental approach, have used cannon-style equipment to blast gas into clouds to stop stones from forming.

Others rely on natural solutions; Ferraro uses fig trees to shade the grapes and cool the vines. The trees also encourage a richer mix of wildlife, shelter plants from strong winds and keep soil stable in heavy rain.

There’s a reason trees were planted in vineyards from 100 years ago, says Ferraro. “It’s not just because they look good.”

Scientists have also looked to the past to deal with drought. Just a few generations ago, says Tarolli, farmers often built small ponds into the slopes to collect water. These “microwater storage systems” are still a common sight on terraces in south-east Asia and east Africa, he says, but the practice has mostly been lost in northern Italy.

To help farmers save water, Tarolli flies drones over slopes to build 3D models with which he can simulate rainfall patterns. He then uses these to find the best areas to build ponds, which farmers can connect to drip irrigation systems to water drier parts of the vineyard.

“It’s a low-cost intervention,” says Tarolli. “A mixture of ancient knowledge merged with modern technology.”

But even as such practices begin to take off, farmers say they have little control over the increasingly violent weather. At the Bresolin vineyard, which was founded by three brothers from a winemaking family who wanted to turn to organic farming, the years of drought and hail have led to a constant state of acute stress.

“The stress of the plant and the stress of the producer increases every year,” says Valentina Pozza, Bresolin’s export manager. “It’s your job, it’s your life, you live thanks to what the vineyards give to you.”

Though they try to adapt, she says, the lack of certainty leaves farmers feeling powerless.

“You cannot decide if there will be drought or rain or hail,” she says. “You wait and hope that everything will be OK. You try to do the best you can, but it’s not you who decides.”

Retired Maj Gen William Anders, the former Apollo 8 astronaut who took the famous Earthrise photo showing the planet as a shadowed blue marble from space in 1968, was killed Friday when the plane he was piloting alone plummeted into the waters off the San Juan Islands in Washington state. He was 90.

“The family is devastated,” said his son, retired air force Lt Col Greg Anders, who confirmed the death to the Associated Press. “He was a great pilot and we will miss him terribly.”

The former astronaut had said the photo was his most significant contribution to the space program, given the ecological philosophical impact it had, along with making sure the Apollo 8 command module and service module worked.

A report came in around 11.40am that an older-model plane had crashed into the water and sunk near the north end of Jones Island, the San Juan county sheriff Eric Peter said.

Only the pilot was on board the Beech A45 airplane at the time, according to the Federal Aviation Association.

Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, who is also a retired Nasa astronaut, wrote on the social platform X: “Bill Anders forever changed our perspective of our planet and ourselves with his famous Earthrise photo on Apollo 8. He inspired me and generations of astronauts and explorers. My thoughts are with his family and friends.”

William Anders said in a 1997 Nasa oral-history interview that he hadn’t thought the Apollo 8 mission was risk-free but that there were important national, patriotic and exploration reasons for going ahead. He had estimated there was about a one-in-three chance that the crew wouldn’t make it back, the same chance the mission would be a success and the same chance the mission wouldn’t start. He said he suspected Christopher Columbus had sailed with worse odds.

Anders had once recounted the experience as part of a BBC documentary on the mission. He recalled how Earth had looked fragile and seemingly physically insignificant, yet was home.

After two or three orbits around the moon, he and the crew began shooting photographs.

“We’d been going backwards and upside down, didn’t really see the Earth or the sun, and when we rolled around and came around and saw the first Earthrise,” he said. “That certainly was, by far, the most impressive thing. To see this very delicate, colorful orb, which to me looked like a Christmas tree ornament coming up over this very stark, ugly lunar landscape really contrasted.”

“I don’t know who said it, maybe all of us said: ‘Oh my God. Look at that!’” Anders said.

“And up came the Earth. We had had no discussion on the ground, no briefing, no instructions on what to do. I jokingly said, ‘Well, it’s not on the flight plan,’ and the other two guys were yelling at me to give them cameras. I had the only color camera with a long lens. So I floated a black-and-white over to Borman. I can’t remember what Lovell got. They were all yelling for cameras and we started snapping away.”

The photo of the thrilling swirl of life that is Earth on a backdrop of black space and a foreground of dull, lifeless moonscape became an icon of space travel and the defining image of our living world and its fragility.

The National Transportation Safety Board and FAA are investigating the crash.

Anders and his wife, Valerie, founded the Heritage Flight Museum in Washington state in 1996. It is now based at a regional airport in Burlington and features 15 aircraft, several antique military vehicles, a library and many artifacts donated by veterans, according to the museum’s website. Two of their sons helped them run it.

The couple moved to Orcas Island, in the San Juan archipelago, in 1993, and kept a second home in their hometown of San Diego, according to a biography on the museum’s website. They had six children and 13 grandchildren.

Associated Press contributed reporting

A 19-year-old who fatally shot an unhoused woman with a pellet gun in southern California was sentenced to five years and eight months in state prison on Thursday.

William Innes pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter in the killing last May of Annette Pershal, 68, who was living on the streets of San Diego and nicknamed “Granny Annie”. The case sparked national outrage after prosecutors reported that Innes had texted a group chat saying he was going “hobo hunting”.

Innes’s co-defendant, 19-year-old Ryan Hopkins, pleaded guilty last year to aiding and abetting assault with a deadly weapon and was sentenced to one year in jail. Police and prosecutors say that Hopkins drove Innes to the spot where Pershal had been camping, and that Innes fired multiple rounds at the woman with a pellet gun, hitting her in the head, leg and torso. Pershal, who was well-known in the neighborhood, was found unconscious and transported to a hospital, where doctors discovered she had been shot. She died several days later.

Brandy Nazworth, Pershal’s daughter, who attended the sentencing hearing, said in an interview on Friday that she felt the five-year sentence was appropriate: “Trying to understand this situation is impossible. I’m never really going to get closure, and none of it is going to make sense. It was a bad decision [Innes] made, but it shouldn’t affect his whole life.

“My mom always told me two wrongs don’t make a right,” she continued. “And me hoping for the worst for him isn’t going to bring me any more closure.”

Nazworth traveled to San Diego from Louisiana, where she lives, so she could share her mother’s story at the hearing: “I want to make sure she is remembered.”

In her victim impact statement, Nazworth said her mother’s friends had called her the “queen of Serra Mesa”, a reference to her San Diego neighborhood: “She had a great sense of humor, an infectious smile, and was a human library of San Diego history and stories.”

She also recounted the ways her mother had helped others on the street, giving her umbrella away to a young unhoused woman during a rainstorm, saying: “When a man ran out of gas in front of the sidewalk she slept on, she gave him some of her food money so he could get home. And she was grateful for every little thing that people did for her.”

After her death, two dozen people showed up for her memorial and left flowers at the spot of her killing, Nazworth said: “She was a person, not just a thing to be used for target practice. Her life mattered to me and my kids and her friends.”

Nazworth addressed some of her remarks to the defendant, saying: “I have no words for how angry and sad I am. But as a mother, I am not looking for revenge and take no joy in the harm you have done to yourself and your family. My only prayer and hope is that my mother did not suffer and die for nothing. The only good that can come from this senseless tragedy is if you use it to become a better man. She may have looked like just a dirty homeless person to you, but she was still my mom and the grandmother to my kids.”

She also recalled her mother’s many struggles, including losing her home and possessions, suffering the deaths of close friends, the sudden passing of her boyfriend and worsening arthritis – all of which contributed to her alcoholism. Nazworth said: “Alcohol use disorder is a serious disease … like cancer. Would you shoot a cancer patient with a pellet gun for fun?”

Nazworth added that she had tried many times to get her mother to live with her in Louisiana, “but she just couldn’t imagine leaving the neighborhood she grew up in and we couldn’t force her to go. She had a lot of friends, and her neighborhood was all she had left of the happier life she remembered.”

She also noted that local agencies had not been able to help her mother find appropriate housing.

Lawyers for both teenagers have sought to shift blame on to their co-defendants in court, but Innes’s lawyer said on Thursday that his client was “being punished appropriately”.

In court, Innes addressed the victim’s family, NBC 7 San Diego reported, saying: “I can’t change what happened, but I wish I could. That’s the only thing I can say that hopefully will make you feel better about what happened, which it probably never will.”

A high-seas shootout pitting drug runners against the law ended with the smugglers’ boat at the bottom of the Caribbean Sea and the US Coast Guard seizing $63m worth of cocaine, authorities in Florida said on Friday.

The dramatic encounter took place on Tuesday about 25 miles (40km) north of Puerto Cabello, Venezuela, when the coast guard cutter Resolute – patrolling with the Dutch navy ship Groningen – identified a vessel in international waters suspected of carrying narcotics, according to a press release from the USCG south-east region.

The crew of a joint forces fast interception craft fired on the suspected smugglers when the “non-compliant vessel” was turned at speed towards them, and the boat caught fire and sank. The US and Dutch sailors acted “in self-defense and defense of others in response to the life-threatening situation”, the press release said.

On Friday, the US Coast Guard and Dutch authorities said they had called off an air and sea search for the three persons onboard the boat, who went overboard when it caught alight.

A day earlier, the Coast Guard said in a tweet published on Thursday, Resolute docked at Port Everglades, Florida, and unloaded more than 4,800lb (2,177kg) of cocaine – valued at about $63m – recovered from the scene.

There were no reported injuries to any members of the joint law enforcement operation, officials said.

“Our crews work hard to safely bring suspected smugglers to face federal prosecution in the US for alleged crimes,” Lt Cmdr John Beal, public affairs officer for USCG district seven, headquartered in Miami, said in a statement.

“The missions our coast guard service members and allied partners do every day to deny transnational criminal organizations access to maritime smuggling routes are inherently dangerous. The decision to suspend active search efforts is not one we take lightly, and the coast guard is working to investigate the incident in accordance with coast guard policy.”

The region is one of the coast guard’s busiest for encounters with drug smugglers – as well as interdictions at sea of migrants attempting to reach the US.

Also on Friday, in a separate case, the crew of the coast guard cutter Charles David Jr offloaded 540lb (245kg) of cocaine in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and transferred nine suspected smugglers into the custody of the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

The cocaine, worth $7.4m, according to another USCG press release, was seized in the early hours of Monday after the USCG cutter Heriberto Hernández located a suspect vessel about 75 miles (121km) south of St Croix in the US Virgin Islands.

“The crew observed the occupants of the suspect vessel jettison multiple packages overboard,” the statement said, adding that nine men arrested onboard the boat claimed to be Venezuelan nationals.

“The cutter crew … recovered multiple packages of the jettisoned cargo and seized a total of 10 bales and two additional bags, with individual packages, which tested positive for cocaine.”

Denise Foster, DEA special agent in charge of the investigation, said: “The successful interdiction and seizure underscore the relentless commitment and collaboration of our federal, local, and regional partners in combating drug trafficking in the Caribbean.”

The United Nations has added Israel to the global list of states and armed groups who have committed violations against children, according to the country’s UN envoy, Gilad Erdan.

News of Israel’s inclusion on the list follows eight months of war on Gaza, in which more than 13,000 children are estimated to be among the 36,500 killed, and comes a day after the Israeli bombing of a UN school in central Gaza, which killed more than 40 Palestinians, some of them children.

According to human rights officials, Hamas is also named in the report for its killing and kidnapping of children in its 7 October attack on Israel, in which nearly 1,200 Israelis were killed.

Erdan said he was “shocked and disgusted” by the “shameful” decision to include Israel on this year’s list, which is part of a report on children and armed conflict due to be presented to the UN security council next Friday.

The report covers the killing, maiming, sexual abuse, abduction or recruitment of children, denial of aid access and targeting of schools and hospitals.

The report is compiled by the UN secretary general’s special representative for children and armed conflict, Virginia Gamba. The list attached to the report, is widely intended to name and shame parties to conflicts in the hope of deterring violence against children.

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, issued a statement that the UN had “added itself to the black list of history when it joined those who support the Hamas murderers”.

Israel Katz, Israel’s foreign minister, warned that the decision would have an impact on his country’s relations with the UN, which are already very strained. It is refusing to deal with the UN Relief and Works Agency (Unrwa), the main organisation channeling aid to Palestinian refugees in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.

There have been claims by UN staff that Israel had been left off the list of offenders in previous years after political pressure from Israeli officials.

“There have been already a few years in which there have been verified violations by Israel government forces and by Palestinian armed groups, but they have never been listed,” Ezequiel Heffes, the director of the human rights group, Watchlist on Children and Armed Conflict.

Heffes said that once a state or a group had been cited in the UN report for violations, the UN is supposed to engage with the parties, and “for those parties to take actions that may serve to prevent future violations”.

The UN had been in discussion in previous years with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and Palestinian armed groups, seeking the persuade them to mitigate harm to children, he added.

“This is a big deal because this is a framework that is created to protect children from the effects of armed conflict,” Heffes said.

Erdan said he had been notified of the decision by the chief of staff to the UN secretary general, António Guterres, and he gave his response in a video on social media.

“I am utterly shocked and disgusted by this shameful decision of the secretary-general,” said Erdan. “Israel’s army is the most moral army in the world, so this immoral decision will only aid the terrorists and reward Hamas.”

There was no immediate comment from Guterres’s office on the list.

Clarence Thomas, the US supreme court justice, officially disclosed he took luxury vacations paid for by the conservative billionaire, Harlan Crow – something he had yet to acknowledge in the official record.

The right-leaning justice has updated a financial disclosure to the court to confirm the Crow-funded travel, to Indonesia and a men’s club in California, amending a previous version.

He belatedly reported travel paid for by others from 2019: a hotel room in Bali and food and lodging in Sonoma county, California, both were paid for by Crow . He did not report any travel paid by others last year.

ProPublica first revealed the trips in April 2023, but Thomas, had not previously included them in court financial disclosure records, which are updated annually, although he had acknowledged publicly the “hospitality”. ProPublica’s reporting on Thomas and Crow won the Pulitzer Prize for public service this year.

The filing only offers a brief explanation of why Thomas is now disclosing the expenses. “During the preparation and filing of this report, filer sought and received guidance from his accountant and ethics counsel,” the report says.

Following ProPublica’s reporting last year, Thomas released a statement acknowledging travel with Crow, but said Crow, a Republican megadonor, did not have business before the court. Thomas previously said he had been advised that he did not have to report “this sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends”.

But Crow was affiliated with Club for Growth, which has lobbied the court with amicus briefs while Thomas has sat on it, the Guardian reported last year.

ProPublica has also reported that Thomas sold his mother’s home in Savannah, Georgia to Crow (Thomas disclosed the transaction last year after the report). Thomas also disclosed that his wife, Ginni, received income from consulting she did on behalf of various conservative organizations, Politico reported. Thomas has faced pressure to recuse himself on cases involving January 6 over his wife’s ties to the right, but he has refused so far.

Thomas received 103 gifts totaling $2.4m, according to an analysis by Fix the Court, a watchdog group. The total dollar amount he received is ten times what his fellow justices combined received over the same period.

Thomas’ relationship with Crow set off calls for more transparency by the justices and calls for more transparency. ProPublica also reported last year that Samuel Alito, another of the court’s conservative justices, flew on a private jet and vacationed with a billionaire who had business before the court. Alito was granted a 90-day extension to file his report, something he has routinely sought.

Alito is also under scrutiny after reports from the New York Times that there was an upside down flag flying outside of his home in Virginia as well as an appeal to heaven flag flying outside of a beach home in New Jersey. The former is affiliated with the January 6 attack on the capitol and the latter with Christian nationalism.

The supreme court’s nine justices all agreed to a code of conduct last year, though some experts have noted it does not go far enough and there is no way to adequately enforce it.

The newest justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, collected nearly $900,000 last year for her upcoming memoir, one of four supreme court justices who reported sizable income from book deals. Jackson also disclosed that Beyoncé gave her four tickets worth $3,700.