Anton Andreev, a Russian soldier from the fifth company of the 1009th regiment, painted a bleak picture of Russia’s offensive in the Ukrainian northern region of Kharkiv.

His unit had been decimated, he said, with only 12 out of 100 soldiers still alive as they came under constant Ukrainian fire and drones in Vovchansk, a prime target of Russia’s advances.

“They just chop us up. We are sent under machine guns, under drones in daylight, like meat. And commanders just shout ‘forward and forward’,” Andreev said in a video message.

Fighting has been raging near the city of Kharkiv since Russian troops crossed the border to open a new front on 9 May.

In the first week of the offensive, Russian troops seized about 99 sq miles of Ukrainian territory – some of its biggest gains in 18 months – raising serious questions about Kyiv’s ability to defend itself.

But Ukraine has been largely able to stabilise the front, alleviating immediate fears in the west that Moscow might be able to encircle Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second biggest city.

“I don’t know if I will get out of this or not, but I need to say this to honour the memory of those who died like meat here because of certain individuals,” Andreev said in the clip, which was first published by the Russian outlet Astra and verified by the Guardian.

“You walk through the street, and everything seems to be fine,” he continued. “But then you get caught up in a massacre. During the first night, half the company immediately died.”

Russian state media and senior officials continue to say its troops are on the advance in the direction of Kharkiv. Putin has claimed that Russian losses were “of course several times less than on the Ukrainian side” and the Kremlin has also gone to great lengths to ensure that accounts such as Andreev’s are kept from the public.

Ever since Yevgeny Prigozhin’s aborted mutiny in the summer of 2023, Moscow has purged some of the leading nationalist voices who had been allowed to criticise the country’s war efforts. It has jailed Igor Strelkov, a popular nationalist blogger and former FSB officer who had become a vocal critic of how the Kremlin has handled the invasion, and last month authorities arrested Maj Gen Ivan Popov, a widely respected commander in Russia who brought up problems on the battlefield, including deaths and injuries the army was suffering from Ukrainian attacks.

The cohort of influential military bloggers now largely toe the government line, painting an upbeat picture of Moscow’s advances while predicting Ukraine’s immediate collapse.

But on social media, dozens of posts have sprung up with Russians searching for their missing relatives in the Kharkiv offensive, hinting at the staggeringly high number of losses Moscow continues to suffer.

Some relatives have criticised the minimal training troops reportedly received before the offensive.

“I haven’t heard from my brother since the 12 May when they were sent to Volchanks,” wrote Yevgeni, in one post on the social media platform VK. “I am concerned that the training was only a week. Is that even legal?” Yevgeni added.

Despite the mass casualties, overall support for the war in Russia remains high, driven partly by non-stop state propaganda and a lack of alternative viewpoints.

A survey published by the independent Levada pollster showed that 79% of Russians supported the Kremlin’s actions in Ukraine. However, half supported initiating peace talks, while almost 40% said they would prefer to return to the period before Moscow invaded Ukraine.

In a rare protest, a group of Russian women made up of wives of some of the 300,000 Russian men conscripted in September 2022, gathered this month outside the defence ministry in Moscow to demand the return of their relatives.

The authorities have recently stepped up their efforts to crack down on the movement known as the Way Home, designating the group as a “foreign agent”, a term that carries negative Soviet-era connotations of spying.

The Russian military leadership has also gone after the growing number of deserters.

The independent Russian news outlet, Verstka published a report that alleged Russia’s military abducted hundreds of mobilised soldiers unwilling to fight and sent them into the trenches at gunpoint.

Moscow has so far been able to replenish its troops without ordering a mass mobilisation by offering recruits generous wages and signing bonuses. It has been able to recruit about 30,000-40,000 soldiers every month, according to an estimate by the UK defence ministry.

Ukraine is facing a shortage of munitions, fighters, and air defences, and is also suffering mass casualties.

And while Russia’s offensive in Kharkiv appears to have stalled for now, the push has managed to achieve at least one of its goals: to draw Ukrainian critical reserves into the region, away from defensive positions in the east, as Russian forces have continued to advance on the eastern axes, signalling their commitment to pressing ahead and trying to take the entire Donetsk region.

Far right? Hard right? Radical right? Or just plain right? The success in the recent EU elections of parties such as Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, or RN, (the rebadged Front National), and Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), has generated a debate about whether the label “far right” should be retired because, as Spectator editor Fraser Nelson argues, many parties that carry that moniker are “now mainstream in a way that wasn’t the case 15 years ago”.

Such parties are, for Nelson, better categorised as “new right”. Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, whose party the Brothers of Italy is descended from a fascist organisation, has shown in practice that “she is centre-right, not radical”. It is “nonsense”, Nelson insists, “to call Meloni’s party ‘post-fascist’ ” or to suggest that the disparate “new right” parties all belong to a single “ ‘far-right’ or radical-right lump”.

It is true that the term “far right” is thrown around too promiscuously and that, in power, far-right politicians often rule not like latter-day Mussolinis but rather as technocrats with a reactionary edge. What is missing from this argument, though, is the recognition that the mainstreaming of the far right should raise questions about the character not just of the far right but of the mainstream, too.

Organisations termed “far right” comprise, as Jon Bloomfield and David Edgar note in a new polemical critique of the “populist right”, at least three distinct lineages. First, there are the “unashamed neo-fascist parties”, such as Germany’s The Homeland, or NPD, and Golden Dawn in Greece. These may pose a threat on the streets but have little popular support.

Then there are the “fascist successor parties”, organisations that developed out of old fascist parties, including Meloni’s Brothers of Italy and France’s RN, many of whom have striven to “detoxify” themselves in search of electoral success. Finally, there are new parties such as the AfD, founded in 2013 as an anti-EU organisation and described at the time as the “party of the professors” and a “bourgeois party of protest” because of the number of academics on board, and Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom (PVV), created in the Netherlands in 2006 to oppose immigration and Islam, which triumphed in last year’s general election.

The burgeoning success of far-right or “new-right” parties does not herald the march of jackboots, or a return to 1930s fascism. The fascist parties of the interwar years emerged at a time of fierce class conflict and of violent confrontation between capital and labour. Today’s “new right” has been nurtured by almost the reverse social conditions.

Over the past 40 years, working-class organisations have disintegrated, class conflict has become less overt and large sections of the public have become disengaged from the political process. At the very time that economic and social developments, from the casualisation of work to the imposition of austerity, have made working-class lives so much more precarious, social democratic parties have moved away from their traditional working-class constituencies, leaving many feeling politically voiceless.

Meanwhile, the politics of class has given way to the politics of identity, and class itself has come to be seen not so much a political or economic category as a cultural, even racial, attribute. Politicians and journalists often talk now about the “white working class” but rarely about the “black working class” or the “Muslim working class”, even though a far greater proportion of black people and Muslims are working class.

Instead, commentators such as Matthew Goodwin, an academic researcher into rightwing populism who has now turned into an advocate for it, imagine an “informal alliance between white elites, corporations and minorities against the white working class”, thereby both excluding minorities from the working class and playing on white victimhood. All this has opened the way for reactionary movements to reshape politics by linking a bigoted form of identity politics, rooted in hostility to migrants and Muslims, to economic and social policies that were once the staple of the left: defence of jobs, support for the welfare state, opposition to austerity.

In practice, “new right” politicians advocate measures deeply inimical to working-class interests, from attacks on civil liberties to curbs on trade union rights. But as social democratic parties have abandoned the working class, so large sections of the working class have abandoned social democratic parties and many have sought refuge within the parties of the radical right.

Mainstream politicians, panicking about such political realignment, have appropriated many far-right themes. From the mass detention and deportation of undocumented migrants to the insistence on offshore processing, measures once advocated only by those on the political fringe have become policy. Far-right tropes, such as the “great replacement” – a conspiracy theory that the elites are replacing white Europeans with migrants – and fears about the falling birthrates of “indigenous” Europeans, are now recycled by respectable figures on the mainstream right.

“The positions which were once condemned, despised, looked down upon and treated with contempt are becoming jointly held positions,” the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, a political icon for many on the “new right”, told reporters in 2016. “And people who stand up for these positions are today being welcomed as equal partners.” Eight years on, that is even more true.

When Ursula von der Leyen was elected president of the European Commission in 2019, one of her first acts was to rebadge the vice-president responsible for migration policy as the “commissioner for promoting our European way of life”, making clear her sense that migrants posed an existential threat to European culture and identity. Von der Leyen’s move, Le Pen gloated, “confirms our ideological victory”.

There is, many critics insist, nothing “far right” or “racist” about wanting to restrict immigration or in raising concerns about radical Islamists. That is true. There is, though, something profoundly pernicious about demonising immigrants, describing asylum seekers as constituting an “invasion”, castigating Muslims as being incompatible with western societies, obsessing over London becoming a “minority white” city, claiming that immigration has led Britons into “surrendering their territory without a shot being fired”, fearing that Europe is “committing suicide”. These are far-right themes now advanced by mainstream intellectuals and politicians.

If the label “far right” seems redundant to some these days, that is largely because arguments that once were the staple of the political fringe now nestle at the heart of mainstream debate.

Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist

• Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at [email protected]

The Iowa great dane that was recently crowned the world’s tallest dog is the same height as the average three-year-old child – and is often mistaken for being a horse. But Kevin cannot stand up to his household’s vacuum cleaner, which “he is terrified of”, his owners Tracy and Roger Wolfe told Guinness World Records in a recently published interview.

“He won’t let it come within six feet of him!” Tracy Wolfe told the organization known for maintaining a database of more than 40,000 records. “He will jump and run to get away from it.”

To be fair, the three-year-old Kevin is far from the only creature to be skittish around vacuum cleaners, which make loud noises and give off odd smells that can put off dogs, cats and other pets. But because of the imposing figure he cuts, the phobia makes an odd contrast.

Kevin measures 3ft 2in (0.97 metres) from his feet to his withers, or the ridge between the shoulder blades. That’s not only about the same size as many toddlers – it’s eight inches taller than the average male great dane, which inspires many who encounter him to joke about saddling him up and riding on his back.

The pooch secured the title of world’s tallest living male dog in March after the record was vacated by the death six months earlier of fellow American great dane Zeus, Guinness said. The three-year-old Zeus had been 3ft 5.18in (1.046 metres) tall and battling bone cancer when he had his front right leg amputated and developed a fatal case of pneumonia.

At the West Des Moines house Kevin shares with the Wolfes, the married couple’s daughter and son, aged 10 and 12 respectively, and several other dogs, cats, chickens, goats and horses, the record-winner acts as if he has no idea how big he is.

He not only spends his time trying to squeeze into small beds, sit on top of his human family members and “do everything that the smaller dogs do”, but he is also quite easily frightened – and not just of the vacuum cleaner.

When Tracy and Roger had Kevin sized up for his official record attempt to succeed Zeus, the measuring tape spooked him. And when he accompanied the Wolfes’ son, Alexander, to his first training class at the youth development and mentoring organization 4-H, Kevin became so overwhelmed with nerves he soiled himself right in the middle of the session.

In some instances, he does remember how towering he is – such as when he simply steps over a small gate Tracy Wolfe erects at her office in the veterinary clinic where she works so she can keep the door open but the dogs out.

“He just steps right over … like it’s nothing,” Tracy said to Guinness.

Kevin also eats up to 10 cups of food daily. It’s an amount his family marvels at because he’s managed to stay svelte despite spending much of the rest of his time either napping as well as stealing whatever additional food he can off kitchen counters – which he can reach without even needing to raise his snout, much less get on his hind legs.

Taken together, all of the experiences with Kevin that the Wolfes relayed to Guinness have made them as grateful as ever to have brought him home after they endured losing their previous great dane, Cora, they said.

“Kevin is the epitome of a gentle giant,” Tracy remarked. “He was … just perfect for us.”

Donald Trump has made a point in recent months of deriding his rival Joe Biden as being cognitively impaired, mocking the 81-year-old US president for his verbal stumbles and accusing him of falling both up and down stairs.

But people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.

On Saturday night Trump, who turned 78 on Friday, returned to the theme during a speech in Detroit, Michigan to the rightwing group, Turning Point Action. He sarcastically quipped that Biden “doesn’t even know what the word ‘inflation’ means”, and challenged his rival in the 2024 election to take a cognitive test just as he had done when he was in the White House.

Trump told his audience that he had “aced” the cognitive test following advice from the then presidential physician, a Republican member of Congress whom he named as Ronny Johnson. “Has anyone heard of Ronny Johnson, congressman from Texas?” he asked the crowd.

“He was the White House doctor, and he said I was the healthiest president, he feels, in history. So I liked him very much.”

The Ronny Johnson who administered Trump’s test was in fact Ronny Jackson, who represents Texas’s 13th congressional district. Jackson has been one of Trump’s most loyal advocates since entering the US House in 2021.

Trump’s Saturday night gaffe was instantly shared on social media. One of the most gleeful postings came from Biden’s rapid response team.

Trump was speaking at the People’s Convention, a gathering of about 2,000 Make America Great Again (Maga) supporters organized by Turning Point Action. His 80-minute speech, in which he promised to answer questions from the audience but then notably failed to do so, was the headline act of three days of what the group billed as “training” for Republican troops ahead of the November election.

The event was held in downtown Detroit, a consciously provocative choice of location by Turning Point’s founder Charlie Kirk, given that the city is 77% African American and overwhelmingly Democratic. Kirk has been widely criticized in recent months for a stream of racist and sexist comments including his statement that Martin Luther King was an “awful” person.

Trump’s visit to Detroit was significant, given that Michigan is one of a handful of critical battleground states that are likely to determine the outcome of this year’s presidential race. In 2020 Biden won the state by just over 150,000 votes.

The former president has been attempting in recent campaign appearances to present himself as popular with Black and Latino voters in the wake of a series of polls that show his support among these demographic groups edging upwards. Last month he staged a rally in the heart of the South Bronx, a heavily Hispanic and African American community in New York City.

Before addressing the Turning Point convention, Trump visited a Black church in Detroit for an event billed as a “community roundtable”. His campaign team simultaneously announced the formation of what it called “Black Americans for Trump”, a coalition of African American elected officials, religious leaders and celebrities who have endorsed him.

Kwame Kilpatrick, the Black former Democratic mayor of Detroit who was released from a 28-year prison sentence for public corruption crimes after Trump pardoned him in 2021, was among those who leant their names to the announcement. “I can never thank President Trump enough for what he’s done for me and my family by giving me freedom,” he said.

But Kilpatrick stopped short of endorsing Trump for a return to the Oval Office. He added: “I believe this election and the issues involved are personal to every family and every person in America.”

If Trump had been hoping that a headline speech at the Turning Point convention would further improve his standing with Black voters, he would have been disappointed. The crowd before him was almost exclusively white.

Those attending were able to hear speeches from a range of Trump luminaries, including his former chief White House strategist Steve Bannon who was greeted in the auditorium by chants of “USA, USA”. Supporters could also pose for selfies in front of a gold-plated Mercedes bearing Trump’s image on the bonnet.

In his Turning Point speech, Trump managed to resist any temptation to disparage Detroit in line with his recent habit of pouring scorn on majority-minority Democratic cities. On Thursday, he sparked controversy with his comments on Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he is set to be nominated next month as presidential candidate at the Republican National Convention.

Trump reportedly denounced Milwaukee as a “horrible city” to fellow Republicans on Capitol Hill.

Though he spared Detroit, Trump did make similarly denigrating remarks on Saturday about the nation’s capital which is 53% Black and Latino. He called Washington DC a “nightmare of murder and crime”, warning visitors to the Washington Monument and Jefferson Memorial that “you end up getting killed, you end up getting shot, beat to a pulp”.

Up to ten people, including children, have been shot and wounded at a city-run water park near Detroit in what appeared to be a random attack, police have said.

The suspect was still at large late on Saturday, but police said they believed he had been cornered in a house nearby. A handgun and three empty magazines were found at the scene, Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard told a press conference.

A man got out of a vehicle in front of Brooklands Plaza Splash Pad park, in Rochester Hills, Michigan, at about 5 pm local time and fired about 30 shots from a 9mm semiautomatic Glock, reloading several times, Bouchard said.

The victims were taken to hospitals, and their conditions were not yet known, said police, who had initially reported five people shot. An eight-year-old was among those wounded.

Police had surrounded the home where the possible suspect was believed to be hiding, Bouchard said. It was not immediately clear if other people or weapons were inside with him. Law enforcement officials were trying to make contact with him, Bouchard said.

Rochester Hills is about 30 miles (50 km) north of Detroit. The neighboring community, Oxford Township, also in Oakland County, was the scene of a 2021 mass school shooting in which student Ethan Crumbley, then 15, killed four students and wounded six other students and a teacher at Oxford High School.

“It’s a gut punch, obviously, for us here in Oakland County,” Bouchard said. “We’ve gone through so many tragedies, you know. We’re not even fully comprehending what happened at Oxford.”

Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer said on X, “I am heartbroken to learn about the shooting in Rochester Hills.”

In the US as of Saturday, there had been more than 215 mass shootings so far this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

The nonpartisan online resource defines a mass shooting as one in which four or more victims are wounded or killed.

Such a high rate of mass shootings in the US has prompted calls to Congress for lawmakers to pass more substantial gun-control measures, but such requests have largely gone unheeded.

Reuters and Associated Press contributed to this report

A Missouri woman who was imprisoned for more than 40 years for murder has had her conviction overturned after a judge found “clear and convincing” evidence that she was innocent of the killing in question.

Sandra “Sandy” Hemme, 63, was convicted of – and sentenced to life imprisonment for – the 1980 slaying of Patricia Jeschke, a library worker in St Joseph, Missouri, after Hemme made statements to the police incriminating herself while she was a psychiatric patient.

On Friday, Livingston county circuit judge Ryan Horsman ruled that “evidence directly” ties the killing of Jeschke to a local police officer who later went to prison for another crime and has since died.

Hemme, who has spent the last 43 years behind bars, must be freed within 30 days unless prosecutors decide to re-try her, the judge said. The ruling came after an evidentiary hearing in January where Hemme’s legal team presented arguments supporting her evidence.

Hemme’s prison term marks the longest-known wrongful conviction of a woman in US history, her attorneys with the Innocence Project – a criminal justice nonprofit – said.

“We are grateful to the Court for acknowledging the grave injustice Ms Hemme has endured for more than four decades,” her attorneys said in a statement.

Hemme initially pleaded guilty to capital murder in exchange for avoiding the death penalty. But her conviction was thrown out on appeal, according to the Associated Press. She was convicted again in 1985 after a one-day trial in which the only evidence against her was her “confession”.

In a 147-page petition seeking her exoneration, attorneys argued that authorities ignored Hemme’s “wildly contradictory” and “factually impossible” statements while she was a patient at a psychiatric hospital.

Hemme, then 20, was receiving treatment for auditory hallucinations, de-realization and drug use when she was targeted by the police, her attorneys said. She had spent most of her life, beginning from the age of 12, in inpatient psychiatric treatment.

Over a series of hours-long interviews, Hemme gave conflicting statements about the murder while being treated with antipsychotic drugs, her attorneys said. “At some points, she was so heavily medicated that she was unable to even hold her head up and was restrained and strapped to a chair,” they wrote.

Detectives noted that Hemme seemed “mentally confused” and not able to fully comprehend their questions. Steven Fueston, a retired St Joseph police department detective, testified that he stopped one of the interviews because “she didn’t seem totally coherent”.

Police “exploited her mental illness and coerced her into making false statements while she was sedated and being treated with antipsychotic medication”, Hemme’s lawyers said.

They alleged that authorities at the time suppressed evidence that implicated Michael Holman, then a 22-year-old police officer who had tried to use the victim’s credit card. Holman’s truck was spotted near the crime scene and a pair of earrings identified by Jeschke’s father were found in Holman’s possession.

Holman had been a suspect and was questioned at the time. Many of the details uncovered during the investigation into Holman were never given to Hemme’s attorneys. Holman was investigated for insurance fraud and burglaries and spent time in prison. He died in 2015.

In his ruling Friday, Horsman wrote that “no evidence whatsoever outside of Ms Hemme’s unreliable statements connects her to the crime”, adding that those statements had been “taken while she was in psychiatric crisis and physical pain”.

In contrast, “this court finds that the evidence directly ties Holman to this crime and murder scene”, Horsman wrote. He said prosecutors had failed to disclose evidence that would have helped Hemme’s defense and that her trial counsel had fallen “below professional standards”.

The Missouri attorney general’s office, which fought to uphold her conviction, did not immediately comment on the judge’s ruling, the Kansas City Star reported.

Any sense of a ceasefire in Australia’s fractious climate wars was blown away this week after the Coalition said it would not back the country’s 2030 emissions reduction target at the next election.

Peter Dutton’s declaration would mean that, if elected, a Coalition government will seek to breach a central tenet of the global Paris climate accord that countries should not “backslide” on their climate ambition.

Dutton also said his party would not be taking any interim targets to the next general election, which could be as late as May next year.

“I’m not going to sign up to an arrangement that destroys our economy and sends families and small businesses into bankruptcy,” Dutton said.

Speaking to Guardian Australia, veterans of international climate negotiations and public advocacy spoke of their anger and disappointment at the Coalition’s position, saying it would damage Australia’s economy and international reputation.

Peter Garrett

Peter Garrett, the frontman of rock band Midnight Oil and a former Labor environment minister, said the shift was astonishing and alarming.

“It’s a bitter surprise but it renders the Coalition unfit to govern,” he said.

“Mr Dutton has abrogated all responsibility as Coalition leader and decided to allow the narrow self-interest of the fossil fuel industry to overturn rational climate policy. This action means the Coalition has abandoned the field of rational policymaking altogether.

“It’s alarming in the sense we don’t have a foundation of bipartisan support for moderate but necessary action on reducing emissions.

“It has cast a really big dark shadow over the climate policy debate because we’re disappearing backwards into a pit of his own making with no rational assessment of why he did this, other than he seems to believe what the fossil fuel lobbyists are whispering in his ear.

“It’s astonishing a political leader in 2024 can make such a poor decision with a judgment disastrous in consequences and destabilising for his own party.”

Erwin Jackson

Erwin Jackson has been an observer at climate negotiations since the 1990s and is currently the policy director with the Investor Group on Climate Change, whose members manage $35tn of assets globally.

“I remember these same arguments when [Paul] Keating was prime minister and when [John] Howard was prime minister,” Jackson said.

“It’s really really sad for me – the fact the body politic is going through these same old lines, and this lack of acknowledgment of how serious a threat climate change is to our communities, economy and people.

“We have so much to gain from action on climate, but we have so much to lose from inaction.”

Jackson said investor confidence in Australia had rallied significantly in the past two years.

“That’s why it’s important we stay the course. Investors over the last few days will be rolling their eyes, saying: ‘Why are we having to go through this again?’

“We will get to net zero. The politics will follow the economics. But the question is do we want to be a passenger or a prisoner in that process.”

Lesley Hughes

Prof Lesley Hughes is a pioneering climate change scientist and a Climate Council councillor with decades of science advocacy behind her. She is also a member of the Climate Change Authority.

Hearing Dutton was risking Australia’s international climate credibility, Hughes said she “let out an enormous, frustrated groan, followed by some swearing”.

“It shows the current leadership of the Liberal party is as willing to deny and delay as the previous conservative government. They have not progressed and it is extremely disappointing that there’s an active push to reignite the so-called climate wars. We had hoped we had matured beyond that, but apparently not.

“It’s absolutely damaging to our international reputation. When Australia became a signatory to the Paris agreement, it was a condition that there was no backsliding and every five years you put up a more ambitious target.

“There’s no consistency at all with a politician saying they still want to be part of the Paris agreement and then backsliding. It’s just not on.”

Bill Hare

Bill Hare, chief executive and senior scientist at Climate Analytics, has been involved in international climate negotiations since the late 1980s.

Speaking from a UN climate meeting in Bonn, he said Dutton’s statements were “an incredibly wilful and destructive regression – the very idea we are not going to have a 2030 target and these arguments they’re making that it will destroy the economy are totally wrong”.

“I just feel a towering sense of anger because of the climate crisis unfolding around the world and in Australia. I wonder who Dutton is listening to. Who is it?

“Opinion polls say most people want more climate action, not less.

“We elect politicians to represent the interests of ourselves and our country and we know, to the extent that we know anything, that [Dutton’s position] is a dead end for the economy and the planet.”

Hare believes Dutton’s shift is a “convenient” distraction for the Albanese government, which he said continued to approve coal and gas developments while releasing weak policy reforms on climate.

“Climate policy isn’t a left/right issue. Look at Texas – that hotbed of Marxist bedwetters – that is exploding with wind and solar because it’s good business. Peter Dutton and his party appear to be opposed to those opportunities for Australia.”

Howard Bamsey

Howard Bamsey is a long-time national and international public servant on climate change and a former Australian government climate ambassador.

“This feels like a debilitating illness that you hoped had gone away but it keeps coming back,” he said.

“The solution [to climate change] is changing the direction of investment and, if they take it seriously, this will only confound investors and boardrooms.

“If [the Liberal party] followed through, it would be devastating to the economy. It seems to me a reaction would be investors walking away from Australia.

“In the backrooms of political offices there are all these arcane calculations being made that are not based on any reality, or on the national interest.

“I’ve been a public servant most of my life and this sort of behaviour absolutely undermines the national interest. It’s a vacuous political move.”

Israel is falling into a trap laid by Hamas in its war in Gaza, Giorgia Meloni said at a press conference closing the G7 summit in Bari that affirmed her role as a leading figure in Europe. The Italian prime minister also stated that the EU will not directly contribute to a $50bn loan to Ukraine agreed by the G7 leaders.

And she underlined her status by declaring that she will start talks on Monday about the allocation of top jobs in the EU on the basis that Europe has to accept the verdict of the people reflected in the results of last week’s European parliament elections.

Meloni was one of the few European incumbents to do well in the elections. She said: “If we want to draw from the vote the indication that everything was fine it is a distorted reading. The citizens want pragmatism., a less ideological approach.”

Meloni is seen as vital to the reappointment of Ursula von der Leyen, whose European People’s Party came first, as Commission president, but insisted that Italy will also be seeking senior Commission posts.

She dismissed a row about the absence of the word abortion, which she fought to excise despite French and American protests, from the final G7 communique. Last year’s communique, issued under the Japanese presidency, explicitly referred to the right to abortion.

She said she “understood why some sought to light such fires”, a reference to the French president Emmanuel Macron publicly raising his rift with Meloni, but she insisted “the issue was constructed in a totally artificial manner, the controversy did not exist in our discussions because there was no reason to argue”.

The communique referred to “universal access to adequate, affordable, and quality health services for women, including comprehensive sexual and reproductive health and rights for all”.

She also insisted she had not sought to alter the commitment to the rights of LGBTQ+ people, saying: “We are not taking any steps backwards, and therefore the expectations of some have been disappointed, because the story did not correspond to the truth”.

Meloni, a self-described “Christian mother” has in the past condemned “LGBT lobbies”, but she said no rights had changed since she came to power in 2022.

In some respects her remarks about Israel falling into a trap set by Hamas were the most surprising. Although she stressed it was necessary to remember the attacks on women and children on 7 October, “it seems that Israel has fallen into a trap, a Hamas trap that had the aim of isolating it, and it seems to be working. We are working on its security,” she added.

But she is understood to believe that Israel should be willing to accept the peace plan set out by President Biden that seeks to create a permanent ceasefire on the basis of a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.

She also gave fresh details about the $50bn (£39bn) loan to Ukraine to be funded out of the interest accrued from the $230bn frozen Russian state assets, saying the cash will be provided by the US, Canada, UK and probably Japan. “Currently, European nations are not involved”, she said.

US officials explained that some countries, notably the US and Canada, are going to contribute to the loan; others will help with the repayment. Yet more states, including the UK, will provide guarantees of repayment if the income flow isn’t sufficient to service and repay the loan in full.

Meloni said she saw little prospect of the assets being repaid to Russia for many years. She said: “Since the assets were frozen due to the sanctions and the sanctions are linked to the aggression towards Ukraine, the hypothesis of an unfreezing only occurs in the case of a peace process – but I assume that in this process of peace, the issue of who should pay for the reconstruction of Ukraine would also be negotiated.”

She described Vladimir Putin’s peace offer delivered on Friday as a propaganda initiative rather than a real peace proposal.

Eight Israeli soldiers have been killed in a blast that engulfed their armoured vehicle in southern Gaza, in the biggest loss of life for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in a single incident since January.

The deaths came amid continuing fighting around Rafah in which at least 19 Palestinians were killed in Israeli strikes.

According to the IDF, the squad of combat engineers were in a convoy of half a dozen armoured vehicles returning from a mission at about 5am on Saturday morning in the Tal al-Sultan area of the southern Gaza city when their vehicle was destroyed.

Earlier, the armed wing of Hamas said fighters had ambushed an armoured personnel carrier, killing and wounding a number of Israeli soldiers, in the area in the west of Rafah, where Israeli forces have been advancing for weeks.

According to reports in the Israeli media, the IDF was investigating whether the vehicle exploded after being targeted or following the accidental detonation of explosives which the soldiers had been transporting in their vehicle.

The explosives had been stored on the vehicle’s exterior, a tactic reportedly used to avoid harm to the occupants in the event of detonation. The blast occurred after several other vehicles had already passed the same location, and killed all those inside immediately.

The latest deaths will probably fuel mounting calls for a ceasefire and heighten Israeli public anger over ultra-Orthodox exemptions from the military. Although IDF fatalities from the Gaza operation and immediate surroundings, which now stand at 307, have been hugely outnumbered by Palestinian deaths – which have seen more than 37,000 killed, the majority of them civilians – the growing toll of death and injuries to Israel’s armed forces has taken greater prominence as the war has dragged on.

In January, 21 Israeli troops were killed in a single attack. On Sunday the Israeli cabinet is expected to discuss increasing the age limit for reserve duty for soldiers by a year. It follows the recent decision to raise the cap on the number of reservists who can be called up by 50,000, amid evidence that the IDF is being stretched fighting on two fronts and with no end to the conflict in sight.

In May, the parents of more than 900 Israeli soldiers deployed in Gaza signed a letter urging the military to call off its ongoing offensive in Rafah, calling it a “deadly trap” for their children.

“It is evident to anyone with common sense that after months of warnings and announcements regarding an incursion into Rafah, there are forces on the other side actively preparing to strike our troops,” said the letter, sent on 2 May.

“Our sons are physically and mentally exhausted,” adds the letter, addressed to the defence minister, Yoav Gallant, and the IDF chief of staff, Lt Gen Herzi Halevi.

“And now, you intend to send them into this perilous situation? … This appears to be nothing short of recklessness.”

The increasing combat toll also comes against the background of a heated debate around the issue of who serves in the army. Last month, Israel’s supreme court ordered an end to government subsidies for many ultra-Orthodox men who don’t serve in the army.

However, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government – which relies heavily on ultra-Orthodox parties – last week voted in favour of a new law extending exemptions for religious men.

Although the first vote was only procedural, it caused an uproar by being approved during a war in which hundreds of soldiers have died and many others remain inside Gaza or on the frontlines against Hezbollah militants in Lebanon.

That prompted a second open letter last week from families of combat soldiers addressed to Gallant and Halevi. In the letter the families said they were asking their “fighting children” to “stop the fighting right now, put down their weapons and return home immediately,” adding: “We will not sacrifice our children on the altar of public corruption.”

Harry, 71

My body just reacted. I suddenly felt, I’d love to take this person to bed just to get closer to her

I had a wonderful partner who died suddenly six years ago. I gave up hope for a while, but eventually started dating. I wasn’t sure I’d ever fall in love again, or meet somebody I’d want to be with for the rest of my life. So I was surprised when I met Meredith and we hit it off. We’ve now been together for two and a half years, and I probably have a constant smile on my face.

I think I have quite a big sex drive. Not ridiculous, but I’ve always enjoyed it. I could never understand why people would spend a fortune on a meal and wine, when sex and intimacy are the most wonderful free thing and can bring such happiness – and the experience lingers way longer than a gulp of red wine.

I was really anxious when Meredith and I first slept together, on our fourth date. I’ve never had problems achieving or maintaining an erection but I was worried whether I would be able to stay firm when I was with somebody else after my wife, or whether the picture of her would come into my mind. I even bought some Viagra. But my body just reacted. It’s as simple as that. I suddenly felt: I’d love to take this person to bed just to get closer to her.

I’m quite happy just pleasing Meredith. I enjoy it so much, especially going down on her. In the bedroom I try to play a little game to guess what’s going to turn her on. She might want me to gently lick and kiss her, or it might just be a hug. She’s very open about what she likes and we often spend hours discussing what’s bad or good, and what we can do to improve our love life – not just sex but our relationship.

There’s a 14-year gap between us, and I wonder if that will catch up with me, and how Meredith will feel about it. But after losing my wife so suddenly, it made me realise that I shouldn’t worry about the future.

So I’m just going to enjoy being in the moment: like climbing naked into bed with Meredith, drinking a cup of tea and just chatting, which usually leads to us making love.

Meredith, 57

I didn’t connect with my vulva really, and I was apprehensive to start with when Harry and I first slept together

I separated from my husband of over a decade in 2020. After a couple of years being single, I wanted to find someone I could have a serious relationship with, but also a lot of fun – something that had been missing in my marriage. The idea of a dating site was daunting but exciting. Harry was my first date.

Prior to meeting Harry, sex had never been a priority. My husband had a very Victorian attitude to sex – he wouldn’t go down on me and our sex life was very repetitive.

But Harry and I have such a good sex life that I think: “Christ, this is what I’ve been missing.” It’s been a revelation, particularly with cunnilingus. Because of my husband’s almost disgust of it, I just cut out that part of my body. I didn’t connect with my vulva, and I was apprehensive about it when Harry and I first slept together. I felt my body tighten up and couldn’t let go.

But Harry is a competent, confident lover. He kept saying: “Sweetheart, I absolutely love doing this.” It took me a while to accept that he did, but now I just let go and enjoy it, too. And that’s probably been one of the biggest changes for me sexually: it’s a pleasure for him and a huge pleasure for me.

We live about an hour apart and see each other at weekends. We’ve worked out that having sex in the morning works for us. We are very intimate and tactile, and kiss a lot. Kissing is really important and it’s always how things start, as that’s how Harry gets aroused.

We approach our whole relationship like a work in progress. We’ll have a review every now and then, where we each talk uninterrupted about every aspect of our relationship. That includes talking about sex, which I had never really done before. We discuss what we like, what we want, how to keep it fresh and have fun. And we do have a lot of fun.