The Israeli military says it has launched airstrikes on hundreds of targets in southern Lebanon, as Hezbollah launched its deepest rocket attacks into Israel since the start of the Gaza war, fuelling fears of a wider conflict.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said on Saturday night it launched two wave of attacks – one attacking about 290 targets, and a second targeting 110 sites – across southern Lebanon as sirens warning of Hezbollah rocket attacks sounded in dozens of towns across northern Israel.

About 10 rockets are believed to crossed over from Lebanon, with most intercepted, the IDF said. Israel’s emergency medical services reported that a man was lightly wounded by shrapnel from a missile that was intercepted in a village in the lower Galilee.

Hezbollah posted on its Telegram channel early on Sunday morning that it had targeted the Israeli Ramat David airbase near Haifa with dozens of missiles in response to what it described as “repeated Israeli attacks on Lebanon”.

The airbase is the furthest target the Lebanese group has hit in Israel since the beginning of fighting in October, about 50km from the Lebanon-Israel border.

Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant delivered a speech at the Ramat David airbase on Wednesday, telling air force personnel that Israel’s war with Hezbollah had reached a “new phase”. He also praised the army’s Mossad intelligence agency for its “excellent achievements” in the region, just hours after a wave of attacks struck Lebanon, striking walkie-talkies commonly held by Hezbollah members. Wednesday’s attack, in addition to a previous operation targeting pagers, left 42 dead and more than 3,000 wounded. Israel is presumed to be behind the operation, though it has not officially claimed responsibility.

In July, Hezbollah released footage filmed by a drone over the city of Haifa that highlighted Ramat David airbase, as part of an almost 10-minute long video marking military infrastructure in the densely populated city in northern Israel.

On Saturday, Israel closed its northern airspace as it awaited Hezbollah retaliation for the assassination of Ibrahim Aqil, a veteran commander of the elite Radwan unit, along with more than a dozen other militants.

Three children and seven women were among 37 people killed by the Israeli strike on Beirut on Friday that targeted the top Hezbollah leader in a densely populated neighbourhood, Lebanese authorities have said.

US and UN officials have warned against further escalation, with airlines including Air France, Turkish Airlines and Aegean cancelling flights to Beirut, reflecting fears that a tumultuous week had pushed the region closer to full-blown war.

Israel has not visibly slowed its war in Gaza to focus on the north. On Saturday its forces bombed a school turned shelter, killing at least 22 and injuring 30 others, mostly women and children, the Gaza health ministry said. Israel’s military said the target was a Hamas base inside the school, without providing details or evidence.

Last week, however, Israel said it was expanding its strategic aims for the Gaza war to include returning 60,0000 evacuated residents of northern Israel to their homes, which are regularly targeted by Hezbollah. It then unleashed a series of unprecedented attacks on the group.

The US state department on Saturday urged Americans in Lebanon to leave. “Due to the unpredictable nature of ongoing conflict between Hezbollah and Israel and recent explosions throughout Lebanon, including Beirut, the US embassy urges US citizens to depart Lebanon while commercial options still remain available,” it said in an updated advisory. “At this time, commercial flights are available, but at reduced capacity. If the security situation worsens, commercial options to depart may become unavailable,” it added.

In late July, the US raised its travel advisory for Lebanon to its highest “do not travel” classification, after a strike on southern Beirut killed a Hezbollah commander.

Hezbollah began launching attacks in support of its ally Hamas after 7 October, and has indicated it will stop targeting Israel when the Gaza Strip offensive stops, unless Israel continues shelling Lebanon.

Months of missile, rocket and drone hits have killed at least 23 soldiers and 26 civilians, and in effect turned Israel’s border regions near Lebanon into a strategic buffer zone, too dangerous for ordinary life.

Inside Lebanon, more than 500 people have been killed by Israeli strikes, most of them fighters with Hezbollah and other armed groups, but also more than 100 civilians.

Israel has not visibly slowed its war in Gaza to focus on the north. On Saturday its forces bombed a school turned shelter, killing at least 22 and injuring 30 others, mostly women and children, the Gaza health ministry said. Israel’s military said the target was a Hamas base inside the school, without providing details or evidence.

With Agence France-Presse and Associated Press

Independent MPs and a crossbench senator are trying to increase the pressure on the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, to remove Howard-era exemptions that allow native forest logging to operate outside national environment laws.

The government has been negotiating over reforms to the laws in the Senate, where Greens and crossbenchers David Pocock and Lidia Thorpe have been pushing for an end to the exemptions for logging covered by regional forest agreements.

The independent MP for Mackellar in New South Wales, Dr Sophie Scamps, wrote to Albanese on Thursday urging him to remove the exemptions, saying without that step it would be “difficult to credibly say that your government has kept your promise” to fix broken environment laws.

Co-signatories to the letter, seen by Guardian Australia, were Allegra Spender, Zali Steggall, Zoe Daniel, Monique Ryan, Kylea Tink, Kate Chaney and Thorpe.

Two years ago the environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, said it was “time to change” laws that did not protect the environment and said new legislation could be introduced in 2023.

The government has since ruled out introducing the new laws in this term of government, but is trying to bring in legislation to create an independent environment agency. The powers and role of the agency are under negotiation in the Senate.

Scamps said: “It’s a critical time in these negotiations and we have been putting pressure on from the House and have moved amendments to have these RFAs abolished and we continue to apply pressure.”

She said the RFAs were signed by John Howard, adding: “The problem is we have a completely different context nearly 25 years later. We’re facing a climate crisis, an extinction crisis and an environment crisis. This needs to be addressed.”

Logging under the agreements is not assessed under environment laws geared to protect threatened species such as the koala and greater glider.

Scamps said forests were being logged for low-level products such as palettes and garden stakes while damaging critical habitat for threatened species.

In NSW, the state’s land court this year said the Forestry Corporation of NSW had a “pattern of environmental offending” with a “significant history of unlawfully carrying out forestry operations”.

Victoria and Western Australia ended native forest logging in January. Native forest logging will end across 70,000 hectares of state forest in south-east Queensland at the end of this year.

Questions to Albanese’s office were sent to the office of Plibersek, who said in a statement the government was “doing more than ever to protect our country’s natural treasures and iconic native plants and animals”.

She did not comment on the forestry agreements but encouraged the crossbench to support the government’s legislation before the Senate.

She said this would establish an independent environment protection agency that could “issue ‘stop-work’ orders to prevent serious environmental damage and proactively audit business to ensure they’re doing the right thing”.

Traffic came to a standstill on Saturday afternoon in Milan as Madonna arrived at Dolce & Gabbana fashion week show. Widely rumoured to be a front-row guest, the singer was the last to arrive at the brand’s HQ, prompting a spontaneous standing ovation from the 1,000-strong crowd.

A long-term friend of designers Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana and ambassador for their brand since the early 1990s, Madonna was dressed in a head-to-toe black lace look from the brand’s last collection and wore a gold crown atop a black Chantilly lace veil as she chatted with her front-row neighbours before the show began.

The show itself, called Italian Beauty, was a dedication to Madonna’s 1990 Blonde Ambition tour wardrobe, designed by Jean Paul Gaultier, and the titular theme.

Descending from a penthouse-style staircase, each model sported the conical bra bustier that Madonna wore during the tour and blond corkscrew-curl wigs reminiscent of the style she sported at the time and documented in the fly-on-the-wall documentary In Bed with Madonna. They were joined by pencil dresses with corset and suspender detailing; sheer lace overlays revealing more conical bras and big pants; and black and pinstripe tailoring that all featured in the music video for Vogue.

As the designers took their final bow, they made the unusual decision to walk the catwalk in search of their front-row muse who stood to receive kisses on her hands and more applause from the crowd.

It was not the first time that Dolce & Gabbana had dedicated a collection inspired by the platinum artist. In 2000, they presented their spring/summer 2001 collection entitled Madonna, Gli Anni Ottanta, preceded by the costumes they designed for her The Girlie Show tour in 1992.

“Madonna has always been our icon. It’s thanks to her that a lot of things in our lives changed,” the designers wrote in the show notes.

Jason Hughes, fashion and creative director of Wallpaper* magazine, said after the show: “Madonna has always engaged in her Italian American heritage long before she became Madonna the pop star and she has a long history with Dolce & Gabbana. They are a match made in heaven – think of their shared 1990s notoriety relating to religious iconography, sex appeal and female power. The Blonde Ambition era was Madonna at the height of her fame and power when she was the biggest superstar on the planet and in the newspapers every day. It’s hard when you’re working at that level to accept and understand how important it is what one has done, but now she can. This feels like her accepting how major it was.”

The Observer understands that Gaultier was not involved with the concept or realisation of the collection with the brand, and that the show was a homage to Madonna and the theme. Gaultier, who the Observer is in the process of trying to contact, continues to collaborate with Madonna.

Last June, it was reported that the designer was working on an animated feature directed by Benoît Philippon in which Madonna is to star, so one might assume that this collection has his blessing.

The grey wolf (Canis lupus) has generated fear and hatred. Seen as a danger to livestock and people, the once widespread predator was nearly completely eradicated from western Europe and most of the contiguous US in the 19th and 20th centuries. Pro- and anti-wolf groups now duel over how the species should be managed as populations have rebounded in places over the past few decades. American wildlife biologist Diane Boyd, 69, has spent 40 years studying the recovery of wild wolf populations in remote north-western Montana and Glacier national park. When she started in the late 1970s on the University of Montana’s Wolf Ecology Project (WEP) – which she later co-led – she was the only female biologist in the US trapping, radio-collaring and following their trails through the snow for research. Boyd’s new memoir, A Woman Among Wolves, charts her life’s work with the animals and looks at the challenges of wolf management across the world today.

What is it about wolves that drew you in?
I grew up in Minnesota, the only state in the lower 48, along with a tiny part of Michigan, where wolves hadn’t been completely extirpated. They were denizens of the wilderness that nobody saw and that fascinated me. They are clever, beautiful and interesting animals. The parallels between wolf and human society are intriguing – like us, they are social, live in family groups and defend their homes. I have also always been a dog person: a dog is kind of a dumbed down version of a wolf.

The successful reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone national park and central Idaho in 1995 is celebrated as a great wildlife conservation achievement. But what is the untold story?
That wolf recovery has been natural, too. Americans, along with the rest of the world, tend to think of wolves as all reintroduced and that reintroduction is the only way they become re-established: that is wrong. About 15 years prior to the Yellowstone and Idaho reintroductions, and just a few years after they had received federal endangered species status [granted in 1974], they walked down from Canada into north-western Montana and Glacier national park without any help or fanfare. And they began to filter out. The approximately 3,000 wild wolves in the western US today are, in part, because of that natural recolonisation.

Is reintroduction worthwhile, or should we let wolves just return naturally?
It is complicated. The advantage of reintroduction is it jump starts the process. The disadvantage is that wolves that are reintroduced can be resented by people: they’re not seen as native or natural any more, which leads to potentially less tolerance and therefore longevity for them.

An amazing piece of the wolf recovery puzzle is how, enabled by legal protection, wolves have so successfully recolonised western Europe on their own (nowhere in Europe has there been any reintroductions), squeezing into human-dominated landscapes and surviving. Germany, Denmark and even the heavily farmed Netherlands have all become home.

How would a typical year studying the wolves unfold?
Summer was trapping and radio-collaring. It is your classic, ugly, cold, steel foothold trap and it holds the animal against their will by their paw. The chance of success is low but you persist. I rebuilt the traps with modified parts to make them more humane and selective for wolves and we checked them often to minimise the time an animal was held. To fit the radio-collar, we would first tranquilise the wolf – I had a custom-made jab stick – and then wait nearby until it woke up.

Winter was tracking our animals with radio telemetry gear – both from the air (we hired a plane and skilled pilot) and from the ground on skis or snowmobiles. Following a wolf’s tracks in the snow is like reading a story. You can see where they stopped to sniff and pee, where they chased an animal and you learn their travel routes. We would also investigate wolf kills – skiing in after they left to determine what they had taken and its condition.

In spring, wolves den and we didn’t bug them.

You’ve had some hair-raising encounters with all sorts of wild animals. Have you ever been bitten?
I came close with an adolescent wolf we named Ice. We caught her on a cold rainy day and she was hypothermic. We drugged her and a colleague and I lay her on our laps in the front seat of our truck with the heater and our bodies trying to warm her up. As her temperature normalised, I turned the heater down and, though the rest of her was completely still, her ear swivelled in the direction of the click. I thought: “Oh my God, this wolf is fully awake.” I indicated silently to another colleague outside the truck to open the door. What happened next was a whirlwind: she leapt to her feet on top us. I grabbed her by the scruff and directed her snout away as she bit at the steering wheel and the air. My colleague pushed her rump and I fell out of the truck hanging on to her. We landed; she jumped up and ran away. All in the day of a life of a wolf biologist!

The Wolf Ecology Project ran over 15 years until 1995. What did it reveal about wolves that was new?
One of our most surprising findings, which hadn’t been documented before – there weren’t GPS collars then – was the distance wolves can travel: easily hundreds of miles within months. We would often get radio-collars returned from animals that had been shot huge distances away from their last signal or there would be a faraway sighting of a collared wolf. Our longest dispersal, Wolf 8551, was killed having travelled a straight-line distance of 540 miles north into Canada.

What does the future hold for wolves in the US and beyond? The species has been delisted as endangered in parts of the west – Montana, Idaho and Wyoming – and state-managed hunting outside of national parks is now allowed there. Meanwhile, the EU is undertaking a review of wolves conservation status after growing complaints from farmers whose livestock has become prey.
Those US states are required to maintain a population of 150 animals, but no more. And the new hunting laws they have adopted in the past few years are horribly archaic and torturous – allowing for wolves to be taken by virtually any method. In Europe, wolves have been well tolerated, but that has its limits. Wolves are resilient but ultimately their fate is up to us: they exist in the landscape at our whim. I hope we continue to protect them in enough areas that they will always be here.

A company that sells cleaning products is giving customers some surprising advice: wash your clothes less.

Ecover is calling for a change in our laundry habits after research found people felt under societal pressure to wash their clothes more frequently, and were unaware that this could damage the environment.

The brand, in partnership with Falmouth University, is publishing a report this week into the impact of laundry on the environment. The researchers found that 18% of the 2,000 Britons interviewed for the report in August believed – wrongly – that washing less frequently would not affect the planet. One in 10 feel pressure to do laundry more frequently.

The report also found that 75% of participants in recent studies mentioned fear of judgment from others for wearing the same clothes multiple days in a row.

Model and environmental activist Lily Cole, who will chair a panel discussion on the findings in London this week, said she had experienced this. “The attitude has changed in recent years, but I was in the sidebar of shame a few times for wearing the same look on the red carpet,” she said.

“Back then it was seen as a faux pas. Celebrity culture is often an extreme version of what we’re seeing in culture in general: the values, the shaming, the conversation around cleanliness.”

Figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed the number of wash loads in the UK increased by 9.6% from 6.2bn to 6.8bn between 2005 and 2014. By 2016, the ONS estimated that each household was responsible for 260 wash loads a year.

Pollution from detergent causes serious risks to flora and fauna and natural ecosystems. Changes to the textiles used to make modern clothes have exacerbated the problem – washing clothes made from synthetic fabrics accounts for about 8% of the microplastics released into our water. Microfibre shedding during washes decreases over time, but if “fast fashion” clothes are poorly made and quickly discarded, new clothes are constantly being added to the cycle.

Dr Cui Su, from the school of communication, Falmouth University, who worked on the report said: “For decades, our relationship with laundry has been shaped by powerful cultural forces and advertising that have conditioned us to believe that ‘perfectly clean’ is the only acceptable standard. From the smell of freshly washed clothes to the crispness of fabrics, cleanliness has been presented not just as a necessity, but as a reflection of success.”

In more recent years, influencers have also helped to shape our laundry habits – the hashtag #cleanwithme has 648.4k posts on TikTok and #cleaningobsessed has 162k posts on Instagram. But clean clothes and a large wardrobe of appropriate outfits have a long association with social standing.

Katherine Ashenburg, author of the book Clean: An Unsanitised History of Washing, says: “In the 17th and 18th centuries – among the dirtiest centuries in the west – people, including doctors, believed that changing your linen shirt frequently was a safer and more effective way of removing dirt than washing your body with soap and water. Louis XIV bathed twice in his long life, but he was considered very clean because he changed his shirt several times a day.”

Cole – who said she was wearing the same T-shirt for the second day running for her interview – added: “My mum, who grew up on a mountain in southern Wales without electricity, tells me her mother would spend a whole day handwashing their clothes each week. I must admit I love having a washing machine. But there’s a bigger message here of a mindset towards the things that we own, taking care of them and making investments.

“Build a long-term relationship with clothes and think about the way you wash them, how you repair them and if you can pass them on or donate them if it’s not something you can wear for a long time.”

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Donald Trump has named JD Vance, the Ohio senator who has aligned himself with the populist right, as his running mate at the Republican national convention on Monday.

“After lengthy deliberation and thought, and considering the tremendous talents of many others, I have decided that the person best suited to assume the position of Vice President of the United States is Senator JD Vance of the Great State of Ohio,” wrote Trump on Truth Social.

When Trump first ran for office, Vance’s eventual nomination to run alongside him would have seemed implausible. Vance, a venture capitalist who rocketed into the public eye with his 2016 memoir turned Netflix movie Hillbilly Elegy, was once among Trump’s conservative critics.

“I’m a never-Trump guy, I never liked him,” Vance said during an October 2016 interview with Charlie Rose. Trump was, by Vance’s estimation at the time, a “terrible candidate”.

He even wondered aloud, in texts to a former roommate, whether Trump was more of “a cynical asshole like Nixon”, or worse, “America’s Hitler”.

Since then, Vance has made a dramatic transformation into a Maga power figure and close ally of the former president who has supported some of Trump’s more authoritarian impulses, like questioning the results of the 2020 election and, in a 2021 podcast interview, suggesting Trump should purge civil servants from the federal government if re-elected.

Vance’s response to the assassination attempt at a Trump rally on Saturday was also notable. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” Vance wrote on X. “That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”

Vance has already vied for Trump’s blessing once before, while campaigning for a seat representing Ohio in the US Senate. During the primary, Vance pitched himself as a Trump-style rightwing populist. He criticized “elites”, fired off contemptuous tweets about crime in New York City, promoted the racist and antisemitic “great replacement” theory on Tucker Carlson’s show and grew a beard. He faced a storm of negative ads from the conservative, free market-oriented Club for Growth, which pointed to his past identity as a “never Trumper” as proof of his phoniness.

The tech billionaire Peter Thiel, who had previously backed Vance’s venture capital startup, poured record-breaking sums of money into the race, and Trump endorsed Vance – ushering in his victory in the primary. When he beat the former Democratic congressman Tim Ryan in the November 2022 general election, it cemented his place in the Maga right.

“I think we need more people like him in politics, who are energetic, dynamic, clear-headed about their ideology,” Vivek Ramaswamy, the biotech entrepreneur who ran for president during the Republican party primaries, said of Vance. “The only negative of it – if there is a negative to point out – is he’s probably one of the best we have in the US Senate, and he’s a principled fighter.”

In office, Vance has consistently aligned with the populist right, calling into question the US’s role in foreign conflicts and backing rightwing domestic legislation. In 2023, for example, he introduced a bill that would make English the official language of the US.

In a fundraising email, Trump speculated that media outlets “will say MAGA-Patriots like YOU won’t vote for me with JD Vance on the ticket. NOW’S THE TIME FOR US TO PROVE THEM WRONG!”

Researchers have found evidence for a substantial underground cave on the moon that is accessible from the surface, making the spot a prime location to build a future lunar base.

The cave appears to be reachable from an open pit in the Mare Tranquillitatis (Sea of Tranquility), the ancient lava plain where the Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first set foot on the moon more than half a century ago.

Analysis of radar data collected by Nasa’s lunar reconnaissance orbiter (LRO) revealed that the Mare Tranquillitatis pit, the deepest known pit on the moon, leads to a cave 45 metres wide and up to 80 metres long, an area equivalent to 14 tennis courts. The cave lies about 150 metres beneath the surface.

Lorenzo Bruzzone, of the University of Trento in Italy, said the cave was “probably an empty lava tube”, adding that such features could serve as human habitats for future explorers as they were “a natural shelter against the harsh lunar environment”.

Lunar orbiters first spotted pits on the moon more than a decade ago. Many are thought to be “skylights” that connect to underground caves such as lava tubes, giant underground tunnels that form through volcanic processes.

Such caves could form the basis for a moonbase or an emergency lunar shelter because the temperature is relatively stable inside and astronauts would be naturally shielded from harmful cosmic rays, solar radiation and micrometeorites.

Previous images taken from the LRO showed that the bottom of the Mare Tranquillitatis pit was strewn with boulders up to 10 metres wide. But it was unclear whether the pit was enclosed or served as an entry point to an underground cave, such as a lava tube whose roof had collapsed.

Writing in Nature Astronomy, the scientists describe how they used LRO data and computer simulations to show that the 100 metre-wide pit, which is bordered by vertical or overhanging walls, leads to a sloping floor and a cave that extends for tens of metres westwards.

Researchers are keen to study the rocks inside such caves as they are likely to hold clues to the moon’s formation and volcanic history. The caves may also contain water ice, a resource Bruzzone said was essential for long-term lunar missions and colonisation.

At least 200 pits have been spotted on the moon and many found on lava fields could be entrances to cavernous subterranean lava tubes. “The main advantage of caves is that they make available the main structural parts of a possible human base without requiring complex construction activities,” said Leonardo Carrer, the study’s first author.

In preparation for humans returning to the moon, space agencies are already wondering how to assess the structural stability of caves and reinforce their walls and ceilings. Habitats may also need monitoring systems to warn of movement or seismic activity and have separate areas for astronauts to retreat to should sections of their cave collapse.

“Lunar cave systems have been proposed as great places to site future crewed bases, as the thick cave ceiling of rock is ideal to protect people and infrastructure from the wildly varying day-night lunar surface temperature variations and to block high energy radiation which bathes the lunar surface,” said Katherine Joy, professor in earth sciences at the University of Manchester. “However, we currently know very little about the underground structures below these pit entrances.”

Robert Wagner, a researcher at Arizona State University, said one of the biggest challenges would be access. “Getting into that pit requires descending 125 metres before you reach the floor, and the rim is a steep slope of loose debris where any movement will send little avalanches down on to anyone below,” he said. “It’s certainly possible to get in and out, but it will take a significant amount of infrastructure.”