Wall Street and bitcoin rallied to fresh record highs and the dollar soared after Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election, while renewable energy stocks fell.

Trump was declared the winner on Wednesday morning after securing the 270 electoral votes needed to take the presidency.

The Republicans also grabbed a majority in the Senate and the House of Representatives, giving Trump sweeping powers to cut taxes and impose tariffs on imported goods, which was also judged as a positive for the US currency.

When New York opened for trading on Wednesday, the benchmark S&P 500 rose 2.1%, the Dow Jones industrial average increased 3.1%, and tech-focused Nasdaq composite climbed 2.1% – all hitting all-time records.

“That’s the Trump trade,” Marta Norton, chief investment strategist at Empower Investments, told CNBC. “There’s a lot of emotion, there’s a lot of euphoria, based on perspective in markets today. And I think that doesn’t necessarily mean that’s the way markets are going to trade in perpetuity.”

Shares in the former president and president-elect’s own Trump Media & Technology Group, hours after revealing another heavy quarterly loss, increased by as much as 30% before losing ground in another volatile rally.

The dollar’s climb began after very early indications of a Republican win in Georgia and gathered pace throughout the day.

The dollar index – which measures the currency against six major peers including the euro and yen – advanced 1.25%, having earlier hit a four-month peak.

Trump’s tariff and immigration policies were seen as inflationary by analysts, buoying up the dollar.

Bitcoin climbed as much as 9% at one point to reach a record $75,389, before falling back to below $74,000. Trump is seen as more actively supportive of cryptocurrencies than Harris.

The FTSE 100, which includes many large international companies that earn their revenues in dollars, rose by more than 1% to 8270.94.

US stock markets are expected to follow the same upward path when they open later, despite concerns that higher inflation would force the US Federal Reserve to scrap plans to cut interest rates, keeping them higher than previously expected.

Federal Reserve officials will begin a two-day meeting in Washington on Wednesday to decide whether to cut interest rates, with a decision due at 7pm GMT on Thursday. The Bank of England is expected to announce a rate cut on Thursday, before the Fed announces its decision.

James Knightley, the chief international economist at ING, said lower taxes after a Trump victory should boost consumer and business sentiment and lift spending in the near term. “However, promised tariffs, immigration controls and higher borrowing costs will increasingly become headwinds through his presidential term,” he said.

Among the early winners in pre-US stock market trading was Trump’s media business, TMTG. Its shares rose by more than a third to $34.

A surprise stock market filing as the first polls closed showed TMTG, which hosts the Truth Social rival to X, formerly Twitter, suffered a decline in income of almost 6% to $1m in the three months to 30 September, while net losses narrowed to $19.2m from $26m in the same period of last year.

However, investors expect the prospects of the company, which is dwarfed by other social media platforms, to improve once its main shareholder is installed in the White House.

Shares in Elon Musk’s electric carmarker Tesla rose 14% in pre-market trading. Musk was one of Trump’s more vocal supporters in the election.

The dollar jumped as much as 3.36% to 20.7720 Mexican pesos, a more than two-year high. It rose as much as 1.23% to 7.1860 yuan in offshore trading for the first time in almost three months. Mexico and China are among countries that stand to be hit hardest by Trump tariffs.

The euro fell as much as 1.92% to $1.0719 for the first time since 2 July. Sterling slipped as much as 1.35% to $1.2865. The dollar added as much as 1.8% to 154.34 yen, the highest since 30 July.

The Australian dollar fell to its lowest since August as the US election results came in on Wednesday, and was down by 1% at ¢65.66 after Trump’s victory was declared.

Trump has pledged to boost US oil production and reportedly offered to tear up environmental regulations if oil companies supported his campaign, and has also called wind energy “bullshit” and “disgusting”.

Renewable energy stocks fell after Trump’s victory became clear. Shares in Germany’s Nordex, which designs, sells and manufactures wind turbines, fell 6.4%, Vestas Wind Systems, the Danish wind turbine maker, dropped by 8%. In the UK, the clean technology business Ceres Power fell by 3.5% while shares in ITM Power, the Sheffield-based energy storage and clean fuel company, are down 6%.

The equipment rental company Ashtead, which benefits from a stronger US economy, was the top riser on the FTSE 100 share index, up 6.6%, followed by Intercontinental Hotels, which rose 5%, and the manufacturing firm Rolls-Royce, up 4.6%.

Deutsche Bank analysts wrote in a research note: “A potential unified government under President Trump would have the greatest degree of freedom for fiscal policy and would likely be the most dollar bullish outcome. But even without control of Congress, a Trump victory would be decidedly dollar bullish via the impact of tariffs.”

They added that the dollar should “especially outperform against high-beta currencies”, such as the Mexican peso and Australian dollar.

Cuba is bracing for Hurricane Rafael, which is expected to make landfall on Wednesday and compound the misery wrought by a recent blackout and Hurricane Oscar.

Early on Wednesday it was about 160 miles (260km) south-east of Havana and packing winds of 99mph (160km/h), making it a category 2 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson scale. Five is the strongest.

The National Hurricane Center in the US said the storm would become a major hurricane before it makes landfall, bringing with it a “life-threatening storm surge, damaging hurricane-force winds, and flash flooding”.

Writing on X, Cuba’s meteorological institute, Insmet, said it expected Rafael to be “very close to a category 3” when it slams into the west of the island, between Pinar del Río and Artemisa provinces.

Nine provinces in west and central Cuba, including the capital Havana, have been placed on cyclone alert. According to Cuban media, more than 70,000 people have been evacuated from their homes, mostly in Guantánamo in the east, where eight people were killed by Hurricane Oscar last month.

While Guantánamo is not expected to experience hurricane conditions, persistent rain this week has left the ground saturated.

The office of the Cuban president, Miguel Diaz-Canel, reported on Tuesday that it was mobilising the National Defense Council, consisting of military personnel, due to the storm. “We have activated the National Defense Council to provide the maximum attention to the passage of Hurricane Rafael,” Diaz-Canel said on X.

“Measures have been taken in each place to protect our people and material resources. As we have always done since the Revolution, we will overcome this situation.”

Hurricane Oscar lashed Cuba last month as it was in the throes of a four-day nationwide blackout caused by the failure of the island’s biggest power plant and a fuel shortage.

In Havana, state television showed workers clearing drains, collecting garbage and cutting back trees to prepare for Rafael. In the village of Alquizar, about 30 miles (50km) south-west of Havana, Liset Herrera, 57, said she had been unable to follow the news about Rafael “because there is no electricity”.

Further south, in the coastal village of Guanimar, Marisol Valle, a 63-year-old farmer, came home briefly to collect some belongings.She said that after the villagers had been evacuated “there didn’t appear to be a soul left”.

The US state department urged citizens to reconsider any travel to Cuba in light of the weather conditions.

Imane Khelif, the boxer who won Olympic gold amid a gender eligibility row, is taking legal action over media reports allegedly detailing her leaked medical records, the International Olympic Committee has said. Reports published in France this week claimed the 25-year-old has XY (male) chromosomes.

The boxer took gold in the women’s welterweight competition at this summer’s Games in Paris amid huge controversy after the International Boxing Association said the Algerian had been disqualified from last year’s World Championships for failing gender eligibility criteria.

Khelif’s first opponent in Paris, the Italian fighter Angela Carini, signalled she could not continue with their bout 46 seconds in, saying she “had never felt a punch like this”.

Khelif filed a legal complaint with the French authorities over the online abuse and harassment she was subjected to during the Games and the IOC said she was now also taking action over new reports which emerged in France earlier this week. It also said it was “saddened” by the abuse Khelif had received since her appearance in Paris.

“We understand that Imane Khelif has taken legal action against individuals who commented on her situation during the Olympic Games Paris 2024, and is also preparing a lawsuit in response to the latest reporting,” an IOC spokesperson said. “The IOC will not comment while legal action is ongoing, or on media reports about unverified documents whose origin cannot be confirmed.”

The statement pointed out Khelif had been competing in women’s boxing “for many years”, including at the previous Games in Tokyo as well as IBA-sanctioned events. The IBA was stripped of recognition by the IOC last year over governance failures. That meant it was the IOC which ran – and set the entry criteria for – the Olympic boxing tournament in Paris.

The IOC statement added: “All the athletes who participated in the boxing tournament at the Olympic Games Paris 2024 complied with the competition’s eligibility and entry regulations, together with all the applicable medical regulations enacted by the Paris 2024 Boxing Unit (PBU). As with previous Olympic boxing competitions, the gender and age of the athletes were based on their passport details.”

The IOC said the same rules had applied during the qualification period. Its statement concluded: “The IOC is committed to protecting the human rights of all athletes who have taken part in the Olympic Games as per the Olympic Charter, the IOC Code of Ethics and the IOC Strategic Framework on Human Rights. The IOC is saddened by the abuse that Imane Khelif is currently receiving.”

Khelif said after winning gold: “I am fully qualified to take part in this competition – I am a woman. I was born a woman, I’ve lived as a woman and I’ve competed as a woman. There’s no doubt that there are enemies of success and that gives my success a special taste because of these attacks.”

Scientists have raised hopes of treating some of the most aggressive cases of cancer by targeting small fragments of rogue DNA that help tumours thrive and become resistant to chemotherapy.

The breakthrough emerged from a US-UK study that found many hard-to-treat cancers contained loops of malignant genetic material that were crucial for the tumours to survive and withstand treatment.

Tests on 39 different tumour types from nearly 15,000 UK patients revealed more than one in six cancers had extrachromosomal DNA, or ecDNA – the loops of genetic code that can make tumours harder to treat.

The analysis cast light on how ecDNA drives cancer growth and resistance and led researchers to identify a new drug, already in early-stage clinical trials, that has the potential to selectively destroy affected cells and prevent tumours from evolving rapid resistance.

“It’s an important discovery because this affects a lot of people around the world,” said Paul Mischel, a professor of pathology at Stanford University. “These are the patients who are really suffering because they are not responding to our current therapies and their tumours are so aggressive.”

Most genes in human cells are carried on 23 pairs of chromosomes that sit inside the cell nucleus. But sometimes fragments break off the chromosomes and form circles of ecDNA that sit apart from the chromosomes. Until recently, ecDNA was considered rare and inconsequential in the development of cancer.

In three papers published in Nature, the researchers detail a deep dive into the origins and implications of ecDNA. They found that 17.1% of the tumours studied contained ecDNA, with the rogue genetic material more common in particular forms of breast, brain and lung cancer.

The ecDNA fragments carry cancer-driving genes and other genes that suppress the immune system. The former encourage tumour growth while the latter can help tumours to evade the body’s natural defences and resist modern immunotherapies that aim to direct the immune system’s firepower at cancer cells.

Rapid and chaotic replication of ecDNA also drives tumours, the researchers found. When a cancer cell divides, each resulting cell inherits the same number of chromosomes. But if the initial cell contains multiple ecDNAs, these can be passed on unevenly, with one of the cells formed by division inheriting more than the others. This increases the tumour’s genetic diversity, boosting its resilience to anti-cancer drugs.

Funded through Cancer Grand Challenges, an initiative co-founded by Cancer Research UK and the US National Cancer Institute, the research suggests that drugs called CHK1 inhibitors may selectively destroy tumour cells containing ecDNA. In experiments on a small number of mice, a CHK1 inhibitor developed by Boundless Bio, a start-up co-founded by Mischel, helped reduce tumours and prevent resistance when given alongside a traditional anti-cancer drug.

“This is not just a discovery about what can make cancer so bad, it is actually pointing the way to a new set of therapies,” Mischel said. “There’s a path forward for developing new treatments because this type of DNA is different and it creates vulnerabilities that are different.”

David Scott, the director of Cancer Grand Challenges at Cancer Research UK, said: “Many of the most aggressive cancers depend on ecDNA for survival, and as these cancers advance, ecDNA drives their resistance to treatment, leaving patients with few options. By targeting ecDNA, we could cut the lifeline of these relentless tumours, turning a terrible prognosis into a treatable one.”

Charles Swanton, the deputy clinical director at the Francis Crick Institute in London and a senior author on one of the papers, said: “This work demonstrates the importance of these circular DNA elements in cancer, and their emerging role in driving the fitness of cancer cells and supporting their ability to evade the immune system. We hope the work detailed in these three papers will help pave the way for new approaches to limit their origins and impact, to ultimately improve cancer drug sensitivity and outcomes for patients.”

Scientists have raised hopes of treating some of the most aggressive cases of cancer by targeting small fragments of rogue DNA that help tumours thrive and become resistant to chemotherapy.

The breakthrough emerged from a US-UK study that found many hard-to-treat cancers contained loops of malignant genetic material that were crucial for the tumours to survive and withstand treatment.

Tests on 39 different tumour types from nearly 15,000 UK patients revealed more than one in six cancers had extrachromosomal DNA, or ecDNA – the loops of genetic code that can make tumours harder to treat.

The analysis cast light on how ecDNA drives cancer growth and resistance and led researchers to identify a new drug, already in early-stage clinical trials, that has the potential to selectively destroy affected cells and prevent tumours from evolving rapid resistance.

“It’s an important discovery because this affects a lot of people around the world,” said Paul Mischel, a professor of pathology at Stanford University. “These are the patients who are really suffering because they are not responding to our current therapies and their tumours are so aggressive.”

Most genes in human cells are carried on 23 pairs of chromosomes that sit inside the cell nucleus. But sometimes fragments break off the chromosomes and form circles of ecDNA that sit apart from the chromosomes. Until recently, ecDNA was considered rare and inconsequential in the development of cancer.

In three papers published in Nature, the researchers detail a deep dive into the origins and implications of ecDNA. They found that 17.1% of the tumours studied contained ecDNA, with the rogue genetic material more common in particular forms of breast, brain and lung cancer.

The ecDNA fragments carry cancer-driving genes and other genes that suppress the immune system. The former encourage tumour growth while the latter can help tumours to evade the body’s natural defences and resist modern immunotherapies that aim to direct the immune system’s firepower at cancer cells.

Rapid and chaotic replication of ecDNA also drives tumours, the researchers found. When a cancer cell divides, each resulting cell inherits the same number of chromosomes. But if the initial cell contains multiple ecDNAs, these can be passed on unevenly, with one of the cells formed by division inheriting more than the others. This increases the tumour’s genetic diversity, boosting its resilience to anti-cancer drugs.

Funded through Cancer Grand Challenges, an initiative co-founded by Cancer Research UK and the US National Cancer Institute, the research suggests that drugs called CHK1 inhibitors may selectively destroy tumour cells containing ecDNA. In experiments on a small number of mice, a CHK1 inhibitor developed by Boundless Bio, a start-up co-founded by Mischel, helped reduce tumours and prevent resistance when given alongside a traditional anti-cancer drug.

“This is not just a discovery about what can make cancer so bad, it is actually pointing the way to a new set of therapies,” Mischel said. “There’s a path forward for developing new treatments because this type of DNA is different and it creates vulnerabilities that are different.”

David Scott, the director of Cancer Grand Challenges at Cancer Research UK, said: “Many of the most aggressive cancers depend on ecDNA for survival, and as these cancers advance, ecDNA drives their resistance to treatment, leaving patients with few options. By targeting ecDNA, we could cut the lifeline of these relentless tumours, turning a terrible prognosis into a treatable one.”

Charles Swanton, the deputy clinical director at the Francis Crick Institute in London and a senior author on one of the papers, said: “This work demonstrates the importance of these circular DNA elements in cancer, and their emerging role in driving the fitness of cancer cells and supporting their ability to evade the immune system. We hope the work detailed in these three papers will help pave the way for new approaches to limit their origins and impact, to ultimately improve cancer drug sensitivity and outcomes for patients.”

Somalia has announced that more than $1.1bn (£860m) of outstanding loans will be cancelled by the US, a sum representing about a quarter of the country’s remaining debt.

The announcement is the latest in a series of agreements in which Somalia’s creditors have committed to forgiving its debt obligations.

Most of Somalia’s debt had built up during the era of Siad Barre’s military dictatorship, which collapsed in the early 1990s and triggered a ruinous three-decade civil war.

Somalia’s president, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, said the country had been “suffocating under the huge weight of unsustainable debt” as interest payments that could not be paid accrued “during the painful, prolonged period of state collapse”.

On Tuesday, the US and Somalia signed an agreement formalising debt cancellation worth $1.14bn.

In a post on X, Somalia’s finance minister, Bihi Egeh, expressed gratitude, thanking the “US government and people for their unwavering support of our economic reforms and growth”.

Mohamed Shire, director general of Somalia’s Ministry of Planning, Investment and Economic Development, hailed the “historic” agreement, adding that it was more “excellent news for Somalia’s ongoing recovery effort”.

In a tweet on X, Mohamed Dubo, head of the Somali government’s official investment promotion office, posted: “Somalia can now face its future UNCHAINED.”

The US was Somalia’s largest bilateral lender, holding approximately a fifth of Somalia’s total debt in 2018, prior to the beginning of its debt-relief efforts, according to IMF figures.

Speaking at the embassy in Mogadishu, where the announcement was made, the US ambassador, Richard Riley, described it as a “great day” for both countries.

“This was the largest single component of the $4.5bn debt that Somalia owed to various countries, which was forgiven through the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative [HIPC].”

The initiative is an economic and financial reform programme led by the IMF and the World Bank, aimed at relieving the poorest countries of unsustainable debt levels. In December 2023, Somalia announced that after completing its HIPC programme it had become eligible for $4.5bn in debt relief, and normalised its relationship with international financial institutions after decades of exclusion.

Riley said: “With support from the United States and our partners, Somalia undertook a host of reforms, passing new laws, changing operational practices, and bringing improved accountability to its finances while transitioning to sustainable practices.”

In March, the Paris Club, a group of some of the world’s wealthiest creditor countries, announced that it would also waive 99% of $2bn Somalia owed its members. According to the World Bank, this reduced Somalia’s external debt from “64% of GDP in 2018 to less than 6% of GDP by the end of 2023”.

That was followed in June by another agreement with the Opec Fund for International Development, which cleared $36m Somalia owed, with a bridging loan provided by Saudi Arabia. “The signing of today’s agreement will also unlock new resources from the Opec Fund for our national development,” Egeh said at the time.

Harry Verhoeven, an expert on the political economy of the Horn of Africa, said Somalia’s debt forgiveness was “meaningful” as it “enables Somalia to more readily access public financing” from multilateral development banks. However, he said private creditors were likely to remain cautious due to lingering concerns about “financial governance and political instability”.

A “money obsessed” GP who poisoned his mother’s partner while disguised as a nurse administering a fake Covid booster jab has been jailed for 31 years and five months.

Thomas Kwan, 53, had denied attempting to murder Patrick O’Hara but changed his plea to guilty after one day of evidence at his trial at Newcastle crown court.

The sentencing judge, Mrs Justice Lambert, on Wednesday described it as “an audacious plan to murder a man in plain sight.”

The court heard Kwan was obsessed by money and motivated by “a sense of entitlement” to his mother’s estate. He attempted to murder O’Hara, his mother’s partner of 20 years, because he saw him as a “potential impediment” to his inheritance.

This was despite Kwan being “a man of considerable means himself” with a “wealthy lifestyle” who had made an offer to buy a £2m property in the south of England, the prosecutor, Peter Makepeace KC, said. “It’s not greed bred of a shortage of money, it’s not a greed bred of necessity,” Makepeace said. “It is a greed bred, purely and simply, of greed.”

The court heard how Kwan came up with an elaborate plan to murder O’Hara, 72, by disguising himself as a community nurse and injecting him with poison. Makepeace said the plot involved Kwan forging NHS documentation, disguising himself, using false number plates, and booking in to a hotel using a bogus name.

“It was an audacious plan,” Makepeace told the jury. “It was a plan to murder a man in plain sight, to murder a man right in front of his own mother’s eyes, that man’s life partner.”

At one point police feared that the chemical weapon ricin had been used to try to kill O’Hara. The court heard that a Ministry of Defence expert believed iodomethane, a chemical used as a fumigant pesticide, was the most likely poison Kwan used.

After the sentencing O’Hara thanked police and doctors and said he felt “justice had been done”.

The poison led to O’Hara getting a rare and life-threatening flesh-eating disease called necrotising fasciitis.

He survived but only after specialists had removed large portions of flesh from his arms in repeated procedures.

O’Hara has suffered extreme PTSD as a result of the crime, the court heard, and is no longer in a relationship with Kwan’s mother, Jenny Leung.

He opted to deliver his own victim impact statement in open court, describing how he was now a “shell of an individual” who suffered extreme fatigue and was constantly on edge. “This incident should have been the end of me,” O’Hara said. “Had it have not been for medical intervention I am positive that, not only would I have lost my left arm, but my life as well.”

He said it felt like his arm was on fire after the injection. “I remember that, when that needle entered my arm, I felt instant, excruciating pain. I had never in my life felt anything that painful before. I instantly thought that something had gone wrong.”

But the “nurse” reassured O’Hara that such a reaction was common. When he did go to hospital medics assumed the problem was a botched Covid injection, the court heard.

O’Hara said he feared Kwan being released and coming after him. “I am petrified that he will cause harm to my loved ones as a result of me assisting the police in his prosecution,” he said.

Neither Kwan’s mother nor O’Hara recognised Kwan behind his surgical gloves, mask and tinted spectacles, and he seemed entirely plausible as he went through a health questionnaire, measured blood pressure and took blood and urine samples, the court heard.

Makepeace said a “particularly unpleasant” aspect of the case, revealed in prison letters sent to the defendant’s wife, was that Kwan was angry that O’Hara was entitled to compensation. Kwan, a GP in Sunderland who lived with his wife and young son in Ingleby Barwick, Teesside, wrote: “One old man’s compensation for three young lives ruined. Where’s the justice in that?”

Paul Greaney KC, defending, said the GP was previously of positive good character, and had “ruined his life”.

He described Kwan’s disguise, when he passed himself off as a nurse, as “amateurish” and “clumsy”.

Nature campaigners have called for taxpayers to take stakes in forest and peatland projects designed to store carbon, to avoid all the profits from carbon credits going to private investors.

A report from the Revive Coalition, an umbrella group for Scottish land reform and conservation charities, says carbon credits also need to be used much more effectively to bolster demand and help the UK meet its net zero targets.

It argues that current policies are failing to restore nature quickly enough: it notes that upland areas are so heavily degraded by overgrazing and deforestation that Scotland is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world.

It said the UK’s carbon market, which is heavily focused on voluntary and privately owned projects, needs to be better regulated and should also involve the UK’s state-owned banks, so profits can be shared fairly with the public.

Big companies, investment houses and pension funds use carbon credits, which pay for each tonne of CO_2, which is stored by a forest or peat moor, to offset their own emissions and also to sell to investors.

This market helped propel a surge in land prices in the Scottish uplands and Highlands, with big firms such as BrewDog, Standard Life, Gresham House and Aviva buying estates to plant forests as carbon investments or to offset their own carbon emissions.

That has recently stalled, with investors unsure whether this market is financially attractive enough compared with other investments. Some believe that carbon offsetting projects in the UK are too small for major investors.

Only 124,000 hectares (306,000 acres) of land in the UK is taken up with woodlands and peatland registered with the woodland and peatland codes (with 103,300 ha of that in Scotland) – a fraction of the UK’s land mass.

Helen Armstrong, the report’s author, argues that these failures can be addressed by much greater public investment and by tougher regulations that push private companies into using nature-friendly carbon sequestration to reduce their emissions.

She recommends that:

• Government-owned banks such as the Scottish National Investment Bank should invest in carbon projects, including on public land.

• It becomes mandatory for all large and medium-sized companies to have audited carbon reduction targets to avoid green washing.

• All carbon offsetting projects must register with the official schemes, the Woodland carbon code and the Peatland carbon code.

• A new land tax is set up that is reduced if the land is managed to protect the climate and promote nature recovery.

Her proposals chime with recommendations from the Scottish Land Commission, which published research this week on “shared governance” schemes involving land use in other countries.

These include Danish laws that say local communities must be offered 20% of the shares of windfarms; the co-ownership of the grid and renewable energy projects by German local councils; and the co-design of forestry policy in Finland involving local communities.

“The people who degraded the land in the first place are the same people who are going to benefit from selling carbon credits. The money just circulates amongst landowners, and isn’t coming back to the people of Scotland,” she said.

Scottish government ministers claimed in 2023 they could raise £2bn for nature and woodland restoration projects in loans and shares from private firms and wealthy people by partnering with investment companies, but that, too, stalled.

The government recently cut the budget for forestry grants by 41% and has also cut the money it gives the Scottish Land Fund, which subsides community buyouts of rural estates, from £10m to £7.1m. Both measures are expected to hurt demand for nature restoration schemes.

Ministers hope to reinvigorate private sector spending by publishing a new framework for private natural capital investments that aims to ensure local communities benefit from carbon sequestration projects.

That framework proposes a pilot scheme to test how private and public money can be used at the same time in a peatland restoration project; a new biodiversity test for planning decisions, and seeing whether the UK’s carbon trading scheme for large energy users can be adapted to include woodland and peatland projects.

Tom Hanks has described film critics as “cocksuckers” in a jokey rant during an interview with Conan O’Brien.

Hanks was appearing on O’Brien’s podcast Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend to promote his new film Here, and was asked about his directorial debut That Thing You Do!, which was released in 1996 – which is now, according to O’Brien, considered a “cult classic” after an initially disappointing reception.

Hanks replied by saying: “Let me tell you something about these cocksuckers who write about movies …” He then described a writer who criticised That Thing You Do! on its release for looking like it was “shot on TV and not much of anything”, and then much more recently called the film a “cult classic”.

Hanks is not the only major Hollywood figures who has lashed out at critics. Incensed by negative coverage of his most recent film, Megalopolis, Francis Ford Coppola said that it is “unpardonable to attack a movie because it doesn’t play by Hollywood’s current rules”, and released a trailer for the film using supposed negative reviews of his earlier films. (The trailer was quickly pulled after it emerged the quotes were fake.) Titanic and Avatar director James Cameron also responded to negative comments about his work, saying: “You know what? Let me see your three-out-of-the-four-highest-grossing films – then we’ll talk about dialogue effectiveness.”

Hanks, though, quickly struck a conciliatory tone, saying: “But you know, that’s the thing we all signed up for. That’s the carnival, that’s the contest, right? I’ve got faith in that.”

Here, directed by Robert Zemeckis and promoted as a “Forrest Gump reunion” featuring a de-aged Hanks alongside Gump co-star Robin Wright, has been widely slated by critics, including in a one-star review from the Guardian’s Benjamin Lee.