Sir Salman Rushdie has told Sky News that Charlie Kirk’s murder was a “consequence of US gun culture”.

In an interview with Sky News lead presenter Wilfred Frost, Sir Salman said he thought the assassination of Mr Kirk, a conservative US activist, was an “appalling act of violence”.

“But it seems to me to be a characteristic or a consequence of America’s terrifying gun culture,” said the Booker-prize-winning author, who survived an attempt on his life at the Chautauqua Institution in New York in 2022.

“When you have a situation where there are more guns in private ownership than there are people in the country, I mean, guns are everywhere.

“When children are brought up being taught by their parents how to use guns, and guns are being left in the home in unlocked cabinets, it’s a country in which violent gun-related crime happens almost every day. And this is one of the most brutal examples of it.”

The Indian-British author also addressed the attempted assassination of US President Donald Trump, saying: “Well, I guess I’m happy that it failed. Beyond that, I don’t have a lot to say about it.”

Sir Salman was attacked by Hadi Matar, who stabbed him in the head, neck, torso and left hand, leaving him with damage to his liver and intestines as well as blind in one eye. Matar was jailed for 25 years in May.

He wrote about the attack and his recovery in his 2024 memoir Knife. His new book, Eleventh Hour, is a return to fiction.

Discussing the book and writing in general, he suggested that he doesn’t think AI would be able to capture emotion, humour and creativity like humans can.

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“The couple of little experiments that I’ve carried out with AI suggest to me that at least this far, it doesn’t have a sense of humour. And it’s not original,” he said.

“What it can do is to duplicate things that have been fed into it. But good art is original, and I don’t think that AI has an original bone in its body.”

Watch the full interview, including Sir Salman’s comments on book bans and freedom of speech in the US, during Mornings with Ridge and Frost on Sky News.

Rescue and recovery and efforts are underway in parts of South and Southeast Asia where the number of those killed in devastating flooding continues to rise.

The extreme weather last week has killed at least 334 people in Sri Lanka, 502 in Indonesia, and 170 in Thailand, according to authorities.

Rescuers in Sri Lanka are still searching for 370 people after a cyclone hit the island nation, with downpours flooding homes, fields and roads and triggering landslides in the hilly central region.

Nearly a million people have been impacted by the heavy rains and floods, which forced nearly 200,000 into shelters, the country’s disaster management centre said.

People were seen salvaging belongings from flooded homes along the banks of the Kelani river near capital Colombo on Monday.

Meanwhile, train and flight services have resumed after being disrupted last week, but schools stayed closed, officials said.

Cyclone Ditwah was the “largest and most challenging” natural disaster in Sri Lanka’s history, President Anura Kumara Dissanayake said.

The cyclone also brought heavy rain to India’s southern state of Tamil Nadu over the weekend, with authorities saying three people were killed in rain-related incidents.

The storm, which is currently 50km (30 miles) off the coast of the state capital Chennai, has already weakened into a “deep depression” and is expected to weaken further in the next 12 hours, weather officials said on Monday.

Hundreds still missing in Indonesia

In Southeast Asia, close to 700 people were killed as two different cyclones hit the region. Rescuers in Indonesia are still searching for at least 508 people missing, according to official figures.

People have started clearing mud, trees and wreckage from roads on the weekend as recovery operations continued.

More than 28,000 homes have been damaged, with 1.4 million people affected by the rare tropical storm.

The country’s president, Prabowo Subianto, called it a catastrophe and pledged to rebuild infrastructure as he visited the three affected provinces on Monday, where nearly 300,000 people have been displaced by the flooding.

In Thailand, flooding in eight southern provinces affected about three million people and led to a major mobilisation of its military to evacuate critical patients from hospitals and reach people stuck in floodwaters for days.

In the worst-affected city of Hat Yai, a southern trading hub, 335 mm (13 inches) of rain fell on 21 November, its highest single-day tally in 300 years, followed by days of unrelenting downpours.

Prime Minister Anutin Charnivirakul expects residents to be able to return home within seven days, a government spokesperson said on Monday.

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The first batch of compensation payments is set to be distributed on Monday, starting with 239m baht (£5.6m) for 26,000 people, the spokesperson added.

In Malaysia there have been at least three deaths and authorities are still on alert for a second and third wave of flooding as 11,600 remain in evacuation centres.

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