Donald Trump’s nomination of Robert F Kennedy Jr as US secretary of health and human services has prompted widespread criticisms towards Kennedy, an anti-vaccine activist who has embraced a slew of other debunked health-related conspiracy theories.

In a Truth Social post on Thursday, Trump claimed that Americans have been “crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies” and that Kennedy “will restore these Agencies to the traditions of Gold Standard Scientific Research, and beacons of Transparency, to end the Chronic Disease epidemic, and to Make America Great and Healthy Again!”

In response to Kennedy’s nomination, Public Citizen, a progressive nonprofit organization focusing on consumer advocacy, said: “Robert F Kennedy Jr is a clear and present danger to the nation’s health. He shouldn’t be allowed in the building at the department of health and human services (HHS), let alone be placed in charge of the nation’s public health agency.”

“Donald Trump’s bungling of public health policy during the Covid pandemic cost hundreds of thousands of lives. By appointing Kennedy as his secretary of HHS, Trump is courting another, policy-driven public health catastrophe,” the organization added.

Apu Akkad, an infectious disease physician at the University of Southern California, called the announcement a “scary day for public health”.

“I’m saying this over and over – but it will be of the utmost importance to ONLY make public health decisions or changes based on robust evidence. I hope we have at least learned this much from Covid,” Akkad added on X.

The conservative pundit and lawyer George Conway also commented on Kenedy’s nomination, along with that of Tulsi Gabbard and Matt Gaetz.

“Very little of what Trump does these days amazes me. Any one of the last three of Trump’s Cabinet-level picks (Gabbard as DNI, Gaetz as AG, RFK Jr for HHS), standing alone, would arguably have been the worst in American history. The fact that Trump made all three in a span of roughly 24 hours is astonishing,” Conway wrote.

California’s Democratic representative Robert Garcia called the nomination “fucking insane”, writing on X: “He’s a vaccine denier and a tin foil hat conspiracy theorist. He will destroy our public health infrastructure and our vaccine distribution systems. This is going to cost lives.”

Alastair McAlpine, a pediatric physician at British Columbia’s children’s hospital, wrote: “It is hard to overstate what a terrible decision this is. RFK Jr has no medical training. He is a hardcore anti-vaccine and misinformation peddler. The last time he meddled in a state’s medical affairs (Samoa), 83 children died of measles.”

According to FactCheck.org, in 2018, two infants in Samoa died when nurses accidentally prepared the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine with an expired muscle relaxant instead of water. Following the infants’ deaths, the Samoan government temporarily suspended the vaccination program.

The temporary suspension prompted Kennedy and his anti-vaccine nonprofit Children’s Health Defense to reportedly spread various falsehoods about vaccinations across the island, in turn resulting in a drastic decline in vaccination rates.

A year later, a measles outbreak on the island caused by a sick traveler ended up infecting more than 57,000 people and killing 83, including children.

In an interview for a documentary, Shot in the Arm, Kennedy said he bears no responsibility for the outcome.

On another health issue, Kennedy has said that Trump would push to eliminate fluoride from drinking water, a mineral that strengthens teeth and reduces cavities, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Throughout his own independent campaign trail, Kennedy has also touted the effectiveness of raw milk and ivermectin, an anti-parasitic drug that has been disproved as a Covid cure. In addition to health-related conspiracies, Kennedy has admitted to decapitating a beached whale and collecting its head, and to dumping a dead bear cub in New York City’s Central Park a decade ago because he did not have time to skin it and eat it later.

Kennedy has also said that he had a worm in his brain which “ate a portion of it and then died” and vowed “to eat five more brain worms and still beat” Trump and Joe Biden in a staged debate earlier this year.

Fears that Donald Trump’s second presidency will be more extreme than his first have intensified amid a flurry of senior nominations that opponents have criticised as going from bad to worse.

Dismay over some of the president-elect’s early picks escalated to outrage after the far-right Florida congressman Matt Gaetz was unveiled as his selection to be attorney general – a position Trump has previously said he views as the most important in his administration.

The choice provoked disbelief, even among Republicans, and has fueled concerns that Trump is intent on carrying out mass firings at the Department of Justice in retribution for criminal investigations it instigated against him.

Trump reportedly chose Gaetz, 42, after the congressman – who himself was subject to a two-year justice department investigation into suspected sex-trafficking that ended without charges – told Trump: “Yeah, I’ll go over there and start cuttin’ fuckin’ heads.”

Others considered for the post were dismissed as too concerned with legal concepts or constitutional niceties.

Ty Cobb, a White House lawyer in Trump’s first presidency, called Gaetz’s nomination “a big f… you to America”.

“Matt Gaetz is just simply unqualified … academically, professionally, ethically, morally and experientially,” he told CNN this week.

On Thursday, Trump named his own attorney, Todd Blanche, to serve as the deputy attorney general under Gaetz – the second most senior position in the justice department. Blanche was a former federal prosecutor in the southern district of New York US attorney’s office. Another member of Trump’s legal team, Emil Bove, will serve as the principal associate deputy attorney general and as acting deputy attorney general until Blanche is confirmed, Trump said.

Gaetz’s nomination followed two other shock appointments: Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, and Fox News’s Pete Hegseth as defence secretary.

Gabbard, 43 – a former Democratic member of Congress turned Republican – would oversee America’s vast intelligence complex despite past accusations of being a Russian asset or spouting Kremlin talking points.

Her nomination followed repeated vows by Trump to purge intelligence chiefs who he considers to be part of a “deep state”.

Army veteran Hegseth, 44, has railed against “woke” leadership in the military. He was nominated following reports Trump was considering issuing an early executive order that would establish a “warrior board” empowered to recommend the removal of generals and admirals deemed to lack “requisite leadership qualities”.

And on Thursday, Trump announced that he had tapped the anti-vaccine crusader Robert F Kennedy Jr for the position of health and human services secretary, which will allow him to oversee the administration of the Affordable Care Act, Medicare and Medicaid.

Kennedy, who endorsed and campaigned for Trump after dropping his own third-party presidential bid, has established himself as an influential promoter of baseless conspiracy theories about vaccines and other public health staples, such as water fluoridation, which he opposes. Kennedy drew sharp rebuke in 2023 for remarking during an event that he believed the Covid virus was “targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people” and spare Jewish and Chinese people.

On the campaign trail with Trump, he adopted the slogan “Make America healthy again”, highlighting chronic illness as a top concern. In turn, Trump vowed to “let him go wild on health”, sparking fears among public health experts about Kennedy’s influence in the Trump administration.

Trump announced Kennedy’s nomination and several other cabinet picks on Thursday. He selected Doug Collins, a former congressman from Georgia who defended Trump in his first impeachment trial, for secretary of veterans affairs, and Dean John Sauer, who has worked on the president-elect’s legal team, as solicitor general. Doug Burgum, the North Dakota governor who Trump once considered as a running mate, will lead the interior department.

Some observers saw these nominations as a deliberate challenge to Senate Republicans, who on Wednesday elected John Thune to replace the retiring Mitch McConnell as Senate leader after the party won a 53-47 majority in the chamber in last week’s general election.

The Senate is constitutionally responsible for vetting senior appointments in confirmation hearings. Forecasts have already rolled in noting that Gaetz in particular would struggle to win acceptance.

But Trump has urged the Senate to circumvent such hearings by allowing him to make recess appointments in what is seen as an early test of Thune’s independence.

“These choices seem designed to poke the Senate in the eye,” Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice – a non-partisan law and policy institute – told the New York Times. “[They] are so appalling they’re a form of performance art.”

The latest nominees overshadowed concerns about Trump’s appointees on immigration, a key issue which he has highlighted by vowing mass deportations of an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants.

Tom Homan, a hardline former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has been chosen as border czar, while Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota, who earned notoriety by admitting that she shot her own dog, has been nominated as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.

Trump has chosen an even more immoderate figure, Stephen Miller – the architect of the child separation policy for migrant families in his first presidency – as his deputy White House chief of staff for policy, a brief certain to include immigration.

Trump had also raised eyebrows with his choice of Mike Huckabee, a former governor of Arkansas, as US ambassador to Israel. Huckabee has previously championed internationally illegal Israeli settlements and has said Israel has a “title deed” to the West Bank, which the Palestinians want as part of a future state; he calls the West Bank by its Hebrew name, Judea and Samaria.

Steve Witkoff, a golfing partner who was with Trump at his West Palm Beach golf club at the time of a second failed assassination attempt in September, has been chosen as Middle East envoy.

Elise Stefanik, a New York representative whose pugnacious questioning about antisemitism brought down two female Ivy League university heads, will be ambassador to the UN, a body she has frequently criticised.

Some nominations are relatively uncontroversial, including Marco Rubio, a senator for Florida, as secretary of state, and Susie Wiles, a veteran Republican operative and senior campaign adviser, as White House chief of staff.

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are asking Americans who are “high-IQ small-government revolutionaries” and willing to work over 80 hours a week to join their new Department of Government Efficiency – at zero pay.

In a new X post on Thursday that doubled as a job announcement and another one of Musk’s trolling attempts, the account for the newly formed Doge wrote: “We don’t need more part-time idea generators. We need super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting.”

The name of the department, which is not part of the federal government, harkens back to a meme of an expressive shiba inu dog.

“If that’s you, DM this account with your CV. Elon & Vivek will review the top 1% of applicants,” the statement added.

In a separate post, Musk chimed in on the callout, saying: “Indeed, this will be tedious work, make lots of enemies & compensation is zero.”

“What a great deal!” Musk, the richest man in the world, wrote with a laughing emoji. He has promised to reduce federal bureaucracy by a third and cut $2tn from US government spending, an endeavor he said “necessarily involves some temporary hardship”.

Earlier this week, Donald Trump announced the appointment of Musk and Ramaswamy to Doge, saying: “Together, these two wonderful Americans will pave the way for my administration to dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies – essential to the ‘Save America’ movement.”

Trump went on to describe the newly formed department as the “‘Manhattan Project’ of our time,” referring to the US-led research program during the second world war that sought to create the nuclear bomb, which killed an estimated 214,000 people in Japan in 1945.

Since the first assassination attempt against Trump in July, Musk has emerged as one of his staunchest allies, at one point proclaiming himself to be “dark Maga” during the campaign. He donated $120m to the president-elect’s campaign, held rallies for him in the swing state of Pennsylvania and promoted Trump’s message relentlessly on X.

Following Trump’s re-election victory, Musk posted an edited photo of him carrying a sink in the Oval Office, writing on X: “Let that sink in.”

The image harks back to Musk’s publicity stunt from October 2022, shortly after he closed his $44bn deal of buying X, previously known as Twitter. Musk walked into the company’s headquarters carrying a sink. According to a new Fidelity estimate, X is worth nearly 80% less than when Musk purchased it two years ago.

Donald Trump announced on Thursday he will nominate the former independent presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr as the US secretary of health and human services (HHS) in his administration.

Kennedy, an anti-vaccine activist, will be a contentious pick to lead the US health department, and the role will need to be confirmed by the Senate.

“Donald Trump’s selection of a notorious anti-vaxxer to lead HHS could not be more dangerous – this is cause for deep concern for every American,” said Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat of Washington state, adding the move could “set America back in terms of public health, reproductive rights, research, and more”.

Trump, in a post on his Truth Social platform on Thursday, claimed Americans had “for too long” been “crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies who have engaged in deception, misinformation, and disinformation when it comes to Public Health”.

“HHS will play a big role in helping ensure that everybody will be protected from harmful chemicals, pollutants, pesticides, pharmaceutical products, and food additives that have contributed to the overwhelming Health Crisis in this Country,” the president-elect wrote.

“Mr. Kennedy will restore these Agencies to the traditions of Gold Standard Scientific Research, and beacons of Transparency, to end the Chronic Disease epidemic, and to Make America Great and Healthy Again!”

Trained as an environmental lawyer, Kennedy, 70, is the son of the former attorney general and presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy and the nephew of president John F Kennedy.

Kennedy had attempted to win the White House himself during the 2024 presidential election but his bid never took off in the polls. After ending his attempt, he eventually endorsed Trump, who promised to put him into an influential position with regard to health policy.

“He’s going to help make America healthy again,” Trump said of Kennedy, in remarks after winning the election. “He’s a great guy and he really means it. He wants to do some things, and we’re going to let him go to it.”

However, shortly after the presidential election, Trump’s transition co-chair Howard Lutnick told CNN that Kennedy was “not getting a job for HHS”.

Kennedy became one of Trump’s top surrogates during the campaign, which came as a surprise to some observers as he is the scion of a famous Democratic dynasty and has had a long history of environmental activism often in causes to which Trump will probably do great damage.

Kennedy has also become well-known for his anti-vaccine beliefs and embrace of other conspiracy theories around health and wellness issues.

Trump has previously said he will let Kennedy “go wild on food” and “go wild on medicines” if re-elected, as well as wanting him to take care of women’s health. There has also been speculation he may be given influence over children’s health, too, which would particularly alarm proponents of vaccines. Kennedy has repeatedly claimed that childhood vaccines cause autism, a theory scientists have debunked.

Earlier this month, Kennedy declared on X that Trump would push to remove fluoride from drinking water on his first day of office, claiming that it was “an industrial waste” linked to a variety of health conditions. Health groups insist fluoride is safe.

Since Trump’s election victory, Kennedy has sought to allay concerns that he would seek to halt vaccinations. “We’re not going to take vaccines away from anybody,” he told NPR in an interview.

Despite this, some staff members at the Food and Drug Administration were considering a quick exit should Kennedy be selected for a prominent health role, according to NBC News. Shares of the vaccine makers Moderna, Pfizer and Novavax tumbled after news of Trump’s decision was first reported, Bloomberg reported.

Kennedy’s independent presidential campaign was marked by at times bizarre scandals that ranged from the revelation that part of his brain had been eaten by a worm to admitting to staging a dead bear corpse in Central Park as the victim of a hit-and-run accident.

Kennedy’s nomination to Trump’s government is likely to boost already strong fears that he is keen on appointing extremists and loyalists to his administration rather than experts and technocrats. It follows on jobs for the hard-right Stephen Miller on the issue of immigration, Fox News star Pete Hegseth at the Department of Defense and scandal-plagued Maga loyalist Matt Gaetz as attorney general.

In a statement following Trump’s announcement, Bill Cassidy, the Republican Louisiana senator and incoming chair of the Senate’s health, education, labor and pensions committee, said: “RFK Jr has championed issues like healthy foods and the need for greater transparency in our public health infrastructure. I look forward to learning more about his other policy positions and how they will support a conservative, pro-American agenda.”

Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, expressed skepticism that Kennedy was the right choice but said it was up to the Senate to confirm or reject him. “Is RFK Jr the best qualified person in the United States of America to lead us forward as we grapple with an enormous amount of health challenges in this country? The answer is clearly he is not,” he said in comments reported by Politico.

Elon Musk reportedly met with Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations on Monday, a day before Donald Trump named the SpaceX founder as one of the heads of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency.

The meeting was a discussion of how to defuse tensions between Iran and the United States, according to two Iranian officials who spoke with the New York Times. One of the Iranian officials said that the Tesla executive requested the meeting and that the ambassador picked the site.

As Trump prepares to address conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, Musk, the world’s richest man, has been assisting in discussions with foreign officials, establishing himself as the country’s most influential civilian come January.

Earlier this month, Musk reportedly made a guest appearance on a call between Trump and the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who thanked Musk for the satellites he had been providing Ukraine through his company, Starlink.

“He’s now engaging the Iranians,” said Sina Toossi, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, about Musk. “And the Iranians have not engaged Americans in direct negotiations since before Trump left the nuclear deal, so this could be a very big deal.”

Trump’s relationship with Iran is rocky, to say the least. During his presidency, he decided the US would withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal, established in 2015 during Barack Obama’s term, and reinstated severe economic sanctions on Iran.

Also during his presidency, Trump ordered the US strike that killed Maj Gen Qassim Soleimani, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ elite Quds force in January 2020. In September, intelligence provided to Trump’s campaign staff revealed that Iran was seeking to assassinate him.

“Whether America can have successful negotiations with Iran under Trump really will have to do with Musk or whoever is going to lead these negotiations, and a team that is dedicated to a negotiating process, that is willing to do the hard work that actual diplomatic process and international relations entails,” Toossi added.

Complicating matters is Trump’s strong support for Israel, which could open the way for all-out war between Israel and Iran once he becomes president. Israel has been at war with the Iranian-backed organizations Hamas and Hezbollah since the 7 October attack last year.

Seyed Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s minister of foreign affairs, said in an X post on Thursday: “Differences can be resolved through cooperation and dialogue. We agreed to proceed with courage and good will. Iran has never left the negotiation table on its peaceful nuclear program.”

Toossi said that, while Musk may be more “pragmatic” on issues related to foreign policy, that is still not enough to improve relationships between Washington and Tehran.

“We’re on the brink of an all-out regional war,” he said. “To restart this process, Trump is going to need technical experts on the nuclear issue, on the regional issue, to have working groups, to have honest interlocutors, and good-faith negotiators.”

A UN special committee has said that Israeli policies and practices in Gaza are “consistent with the characteristics of genocide”.

The committee, set up in 1968 to monitor the Israeli occupation, also said in its annual report that there were serious concerns that Israel was “using starvation as a weapon of war” in the 13-month-old conflict, and was running an “apartheid system” in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

The international court of justice (ICJ) is investigating a claim put forward by South Africa that Israel’s military campaign in Gaza is genocidal, and has ordered Israel to take interim measures to prevent genocide taking place.

The new report is by the special committee to investigate Israeli practices affecting the human rights of the Palestinian people and other Arabs of the occupied territories. The committee, set up in the aftermath of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, is made up of representatives from three member states: Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Senegal.

There was no immediate response from the Israeli government, which has portrayed the UN in general as obsessed with, and biased against, the country. The Israeli mission informed the body earlier this month that the government would stop cooperating with Unrwa, the main relief agency providing welfare services to Palestinians, within the coming three months.

The UN special committee said that its requests to visit Gaza, the West Bank, the Golan Heights and Israel had received no response, so its staff were not able to visit the areas it was scrutinising. It said its research raised “serious concerns of breaches of international humanitarian and human rights laws in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including starvation as a weapon of war, the possibility of genocide in Gaza and an apartheid system in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem”.

The developments over the past year had led the committee to conclude that “the policies and practices of Israel during the reporting period are consistent with the characteristics of genocide”, the report said.

“Civilians have been indiscriminately and disproportionally killed en masse in Gaza,” the report added. It also referred to the “life-threatening conditions imposed on Palestinians in Gaza through warfare and restrictions on humanitarian aid – resulting in physical destruction, increased miscarriages and stillbirths”.

The committee further accused Israel of deliberately using “food as a weapon of warfare”.

“Since the escalation of the conflict, Israeli officials have publicly supported policies depriving civilians of food, water, and fuel, indicating their intent to instrumentalise the provision of basic necessities for political and military objectives,” the report said.

In January the ICJ responded to the genocide case brought by South Africa by ordering South Africa to take interim steps pending the court’s ruling, telling the Israeli government to refrain from acts violating the Genocide Convention, to prevent and punish incitement to genocide, to ensure humanitarian aid reached Gaza citizens and to preserve evidence of genocide.

Israel rejected the court’s ruling, and the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, claimed that his country’s commitment to international law was “unwavering”.

Israel has intensified its air offensives on three fronts, launching dozens of new strikes in Lebanon, Gaza and Syria as negotiations for a ceasefire on its northern border reach a critical point.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said about 30 targets had been struck in the southern suburbs of Beirut in 48 hours and described continuing efforts to “dismantle and degrade” the military capabilities of the militant Islamist organisation.

Analysts said the wave of raids could also be aimed at increasing pressure on Hezbollah as indirect talks continued.

Eli Cohen, Israel’s energy minister, told Reuters an arrangement to end fighting with Hezbollah was drawing closer but insisted that Israel must retain freedom to act inside Lebanon should any deal be violated. “We will be less forgiving than in the past over attempts to create strongholds in territory near Israel. That’s how we will be, and so that is certainly how we will act,” he said.

A senior Lebanese official indicated on Wednesday that Hezbollah was ready to pull its forces away from the Lebanese-Israeli border in any ceasefire but rejected Israel’s demand to be allowed to intervene at will to enforce a deal.

Tens of thousands of Israelis with homes along the contested border are still displaced by the threat of Hezbollah attacks, and the costs of the war in Lebanon for Israel are mounting. Six Israeli soldiers were killed in combat with Hezbollah on Wednesday.

According to Lebanon’s health ministry, Israeli attacks have killed at least 3,365 people and wounded 14,344 across Lebanon since 7 October last year. Hezbollah attacks have killed about 100 civilians and Israeli troops in northern Israel, the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights and southern Lebanon over the past year, according to Israel.

Israel has been carrying out strikes against Iran-linked targets in Syria for years but has increased such raids since the October attack by Hamas that killed 1,200, mostly civilians, and triggered the Gaza war.

Thursday’s strike targeted two residential buildings in suburbs of the Syrian capital, Damascus, on Thursday and killed more than a dozen people, the Syrian state news agency SANA said. One building was in the suburb of Mazzeh, and the other in Qudsaya, west of the capital.

Commanders in Lebanon’s Hezbollah armed group, and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards based in Syria, have been known to live in Mazzeh, according to residents, and the authorities have used the area’s high-rise blocks in the past to house leaders of Palestinian factions, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

In Gaza, fighting has continued in Jabaliya, in the north, where Israeli forces are clashing with Hamas militants and four Israeli soldiers were killed earlier this week.

Israel says the siege it has imposed on Jabaliya allows for necessary operations against militants who have regrouped there, but many Palestinians fear the offensive is aimed at permanently displacing tens or even hundreds of thousands of civilians from their homes.

“They have torched schools and other shelters where people took refuge before ordering families to head south toward Gaza City. What do you call that, if not ethnic cleansing?” asked Said Abdel-Hadi, a resident from Beit Lahiya, now displaced in Gaza City.

“Many families who at the beginning were against leaving were forced to do so after they ran out of water and food. Large areas have become empty, under the control of the occupation. Those areas have become off-limits.”

Dr Hossam Abu Safia, Kamal Adwan hospital director in Beit Lahiya, in the north of Gaza, said medical supplies were running out, there was not enough food for patients, and there were no working ambulances. “Every hour, we lose patients due to these severe conditions,” Abu Safia said.

Israeli airstrikes have intensified in recent days across the whole of Gaza, with more than 40 people killed on Monday alone.

The IDF denied an explosion in a cafe near Khan Younis on Monday evening was caused by an airstrike. Eleven people were reported to have died in the blast, including two children. The Tophub café opened two weeks ago in a makeshift shelter of corrugated iron. It was popular with students and football fans drawn by its internet connection, low prices, electricity and big screen.

“I heard a huge blast like a strong earthquake. I ran towards the cafe. I began shaking when I saw the casualties being brought out, and I went inside to find my friend soaked in his own blood and already lifeless. I carried his body to the ambulance. I lost my best companion,” said Jihad Badriya, 20.

The IDF said it was not aware of any Israeli attack on Monday at the location of the cafe.

Palestinian health ministry officials on Thursday said Israel’s latest strikes killed at least 15 people across Gaza, including four at Gaza City’s Salahudeen school, which shelters displaced families. There was no immediate Israeli comment.

More than 43,500 Palestinians, mostly civilians, have been killed in Gaza since the beginning of the Israeli offensive there, with 2 million people displaced and much of the strip reduced to rubble.

Israeli military officials accuse Hamas of deliberately positioning military equipment, infrastructure and personnel among civilians. The militant Islamist organisation denies the charge.

Elizabeth Warren, a leading progressive voice in the US Senate, has denounced the Biden administration’s failure to punish Israel over the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza and endorsed a joint resolution of disapproval in Congress.

The amount of aid reaching the territory has dropped to the lowest level in 11 months, official Israeli figures show. The White House last month gave Israel an ultimatum of 30 days to improve conditions or risk losing military support. As the deadline expired on Tuesday, international aid groups said Israel had fallen far short.

But the US state department announced it would not take any punitive action, insisting that Israel was making limited progress and was not blocking aid and therefore not violating US law. Warren condemned the Biden administration’s decision to continue supplying arms to its ally.

“On October 13, the Biden administration told Prime Minister Netanyahu that his government had 30 days to increase humanitarian aid into Gaza or face the consequences under US law, which would include cutting off military assistance,” the Massachusetts senator said in a statement shared with the Guardian.

“Thirty days later, the Biden administration acknowledged that Israel’s actions had not significantly expanded food, water and basic necessities for desperate Palestinian civilians. Despite Netanyahu’s failure to meet the United States’ demands, the Biden administration has taken no action to restrict the flow of offensive weapons.”

For the first time on the issue, Warren threw her weight behind a joint resolution of disapproval, a legislative tool that enables Congress to overturn actions taken by the executive branch. Such a resolution must pass both the House of Representatives and the Senate.

She added: “The failure by the Biden administration to follow US law and to suspend arms shipments is a grave mistake that undermines American credibility worldwide. If this administration will not act, Congress must step up to enforce US law and hold the Netanyahu government accountable through a joint resolution of disapproval.”

Eight international aid groups have said that Israel failed to meet the US demands to improve access for assistance, while food security experts have said it is likely that famine is imminent in parts of Gaza.

Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, told reporters on Wednesday that Israel had taken some steps to improve aid but they needed to be sustained to take effect. He called on Israel to rescind evacuation orders to allow those displaced by its operations to return home and to resume commercial trucking deliveries into Gaza.

Biden has backed Israel since Hamas-led gunmen attacked the country in October 2023, killing 1,200 people and taking 250 hostages. Since then, more than 43,500 Palestinians, mostly civilians, have been killed in Gaza, with 2 million displaced people and much of the strip reduced to rubble.

The president, whose term ends in January and who will be replaced by his predecessor Donald Trump, is facing growing dissent from Democrats over his handling of the war. Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland told Zeteo this week: “President Biden’s inaction, given the suffering in Gaza, is shameful. I mean, there’s no other word for it.”

Bernie Sanders, an independent senator for Vermont, announced that next week he will bring joint resolutions of disapproval that would block the sale of certain weapons to Israel. “There is no longer any doubt that Netanyahu’s extremist government is in clear violation of US and international law as it wages a barbaric war against the Palestinian people in Gaza,” he said.

And on Thursday, 15 members of the Senate and 69 members of the House announced efforts to press the Biden administration to hold members of the Netanyahu government – specifically, the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, and the national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir – and others accountable for the rise in settler violence, settlement expansion and destabilising activity in the West Bank.

India’s capital Delhi has ordered all primary schools to cease in-person classes until further notice due to worsening pollution in the sprawling megacity, while 220km away the country’s monument to love, the Taj Mahal, was also obscured by toxic smog.

Delhi and the surrounding metropolitan area, home to more than 30 million people, consistently tops world rankings for air pollution in winter.

The smog is blamed for thousands of premature deaths each year and is an annual source of misery for the capital’s residents, with various piecemeal government initiatives failing to measurably address the problem.

“Due to rising pollution levels, all primary schools in Delhi will be shifting to online classes, until further directions,” chief minister Atishi, who goes by one name, announced on the social media platform X on Thursday.

Schools are often shut during the worst weeks of the annual smog crisis, which also prompts numerous other disruptions across the city.

The government on Thursday also banned all non-essential construction and appealed to citizens to use more public transport and avoid using coal and wood for heating, without saying how long the measures would be in place.

Air quality in northern India has deteriorated over the past week. Levels of PM2.5 pollutants – dangerous cancer-causing microparticles that enter the bloodstream through the lungs – were recorded more than 50 times above the World Health Organization’s recommended daily maximum on Wednesday.

The smog is primarily blamed on stubble burning by farmers elsewhere in India to clear their fields for ploughing, as well as factories and traffic fumes.

Cooler temperatures and slow-moving winds worsen the situation by trapping deadly pollutants each winter, stretching from mid-October until at least January.

India’s supreme court this October ruled that clean air was a fundamental human right, ordering both the central government and state-level authorities to take action.

But critics say arguments between rival politicians heading neighbouring states – as well as between central and state-level authorities – have compounded the problem.

Politicians are accused of not wanting to anger key figures in their constituencies, particularly powerful farming groups.

Delhi authorities have launched several initiatives to tackle pollution, which have done little in practice.

A new scheme unveiled this month to use three small drones to spray water mist was derided by critics as another “band-aid” solution to a public health crisis.

A study in The Lancet medical journal attributed 1.67m premature deaths to air pollution in the world’s most populous country in 2019.

The choking smog across Delhi came as researchers warned that planet-warming fossil fuel emissions would hit a record high this year, according to new findings from an international network of scientists at the Global Carbon Project.

With Agence France-Presse and Reuters

India’s capital Delhi has ordered all primary schools to cease in-person classes until further notice due to worsening pollution in the sprawling megacity, while 220km away the country’s monument to love, the Taj Mahal, was also obscured by toxic smog.

Delhi and the surrounding metropolitan area, home to more than 30 million people, consistently tops world rankings for air pollution in winter.

The smog is blamed for thousands of premature deaths each year and is an annual source of misery for the capital’s residents, with various piecemeal government initiatives failing to measurably address the problem.

“Due to rising pollution levels, all primary schools in Delhi will be shifting to online classes, until further directions,” chief minister Atishi, who goes by one name, announced on the social media platform X on Thursday.

Schools are often shut during the worst weeks of the annual smog crisis, which also prompts numerous other disruptions across the city.

The government on Thursday also banned all non-essential construction and appealed to citizens to use more public transport and avoid using coal and wood for heating, without saying how long the measures would be in place.

Air quality in northern India has deteriorated over the past week. Levels of PM2.5 pollutants – dangerous cancer-causing microparticles that enter the bloodstream through the lungs – were recorded more than 50 times above the World Health Organization’s recommended daily maximum on Wednesday.

The smog is primarily blamed on stubble burning by farmers elsewhere in India to clear their fields for ploughing, as well as factories and traffic fumes.

Cooler temperatures and slow-moving winds worsen the situation by trapping deadly pollutants each winter, stretching from mid-October until at least January.

India’s supreme court this October ruled that clean air was a fundamental human right, ordering both the central government and state-level authorities to take action.

But critics say arguments between rival politicians heading neighbouring states – as well as between central and state-level authorities – have compounded the problem.

Politicians are accused of not wanting to anger key figures in their constituencies, particularly powerful farming groups.

Delhi authorities have launched several initiatives to tackle pollution, which have done little in practice.

A new scheme unveiled this month to use three small drones to spray water mist was derided by critics as another “band-aid” solution to a public health crisis.

A study in The Lancet medical journal attributed 1.67m premature deaths to air pollution in the world’s most populous country in 2019.

The choking smog across Delhi came as researchers warned that planet-warming fossil fuel emissions would hit a record high this year, according to new findings from an international network of scientists at the Global Carbon Project.

With Agence France-Presse and Reuters

A skirmish involving Israel fans broke out in the stands of the Stade de France during a tense match between Israel and France’s men’s football teams, but a heavy police presence ensured a repeat of the serious violence in Amsterdam was avoided.

The game had been designated as “high risk” after the hooliganism and antisemitism witnessed in the Netherlands before and after a Europa League match between Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv last week.

The Israeli national anthem was booed by some in the crowd before kick-off and, within 10 minutes of the game starting, a small number of fans clashed on a high stand in the stadium.

The clash was quickly dealt with by the security guards, with riot police seen at the edge of the stands ready to intervene. The authorities in Paris had been on high alert.

Emmanuel Macron, who attended the game with his interior minister, Bruno Retailleau, and the prime minister, Michel Barnier, in an act of solidarity with the victims of antisemitism, said France would not accept discrimination. Former presidents François Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy were also in the stands to watch the goalless draw.

Macron told the French TV channel BFMTV: “We will not give in to antisemitism anywhere and violence, including in the French Republic, will never prevail, nor will intimidation.”

There were fewer than 20,000 people in the Stade de France at the Uefa Nations League match, making it the lowest attendance recorded in the 80,000-capacity stadium.

Patrick Bensimon, a co-founder of the NGO Diaspora Defense Forces, said he had organised for 600 Israel fans to be transported to the stadium in chartered buses under police escort.

He said: “80% of the people who are here did not want to go to the Stade de France. Some were afraid, especially following the events in Amsterdam.”

One Israel fan draped in the Israeli flag told reporters outside the stadium before the game: “We want to show that we are not afraid of anyone, except God.”

His friend said “we shouldn’t mix sport and politics” and that they hoped “there won’t be any scuffles outside the stadium”.

Despite the low attendance, about 4,000 police officers were on the streets around the stadium along with 1,600 security personnel.

Israel’s government had instructed its nationals to avoid the game amid heightened tensions.

A pro-Palestinian demonstration around 2km from the stadium outside the Front Populaire Métro station in St-Denis attracted a few hundred protesters. They marched in the direction of the stadium but were turned around by riot police.

Éric Coquerel, an MP for Seine-Saint-Denis and a member of the leftwing France Unbowed party, said: “We are living in a schizophrenic moment. On the one hand, international institutions recognise the existence of a genocide in Gaza. On the other, we have a French government that reluctantly agrees to call for a ceasefire.

“This match, which everyone knows is second rate, is attended by President Macron, the prime minister, Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande. How do you expect Benjamin Netanyahu to hear any message other than: ‘You can continue to raze Gaza’? France is looking the other way.

“This is purely a scandal. Let’s imagine a France-Russia match. Would Emmanuel Macron have honoured this encounter with his presence? Obviously not. While in both cases there are two aggressor countries.”

The French police chief Laurent Nuñez said his officers had learned from the scenes in the Netherlands. “What we learned is that we need to be present in the public space, including far away from the stadium,” he said.

Ticket sales ended at 11am on Thursday and fans had been warned they would not be allowed to bring any bags into the stadium. A wide security perimeter was enforced around the venue.

Only the French and Israeli national flags were allowed into the ground and fans were thoroughly searched as they went through checkpoints outside the stadium.

Concerns had been raised after riot police clashed with pro-Palestinian protesters on Wednesday night outside a gala event in Paris where funds were being raised for the Israeli military. Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, had been due to speak but subsequently cancelled.

Police pushed against dozens of protesters waving Palestinian flags and lighting flares near St-Lazare station, and reports suggested teargas had been deployed as officers struggled to contain the crowds.

Amid international condemnation of the violence in Amsterdam last week, a report published by the city’s mayor, Femke Halsema, suggested the cause had been a “toxic cocktail of antisemitism, football hooliganism and anger over the war in Palestine and Israel and other parts of the Middle East”.

Activists have called on Caribbean governments to halt the mass deportation of Haitians fleeing escalating gang violence that has claimed thousands of lives and displaced hundreds of thousands of people.

In the past month, tens of thousands of people have been deported to Haiti, including 61,000 from the neighbouring Dominican Republic, whose president recently pledged to deport 10,000 migrants a week.

In October, the US deported 258 Haitians, while Turks & Caicos, Jamaica and the Bahamas deported a combined total of 231, according to Sam Guillaume, a spokesperson for Haiti’s Support Group for Returnees and Refugees.

Activists and human rights organisations in the Caribbean say they are concerned about “draconian” deportation measures and argue that refugees who are returned to Haiti will simply join the estimated 700,000 people who were left homeless by the continuing conflict.

“A lot of them can’t make it back home because their neighbourhood is controlled by gangs,” said Guillaume.

Those held for deportation in the Dominican Republic are being forced into crowded jails with no water, no food and no beds, and are sometimes teargassed when they protest over their treatment, Guillaume said.

“People are being treated like criminals,” he said.

The allegations were denied by Julio Caraballo, a spokesman for the Dominican Republic’s migration office, who said deportations were carried out with “respect for the physical integrity of detainees, with respect for human rights and with dignity”, adding that meals and medical attention were provided to those detained.

In Jamaica, international human rights lawyer Malene Alleyne, who is supporting Haitian asylum seekers, also raised concerns about the processing of refugee cases.

Alleyne said that refugees had told her of their fears of being returned to a “war zone”.

“Jamaica has adopted a draconian approach that’s based on collective expulsion without assessing in an individualised way their protection needs and their risk of persecution on their return to Haiti, and so we have children and women who would have protection needs being sent back without due process and without an opportunity to speak with an attorney at law,” she said.

Jamaica’s minister of national security, Horace Chang, said immigration authorities were following the country’s laws.

“It’s not a government’s stance, it’s the law of the land. If you come here illegally and you’re not landed, they return you to your country. The law of the land says to me if the immigration authorities find a reason not to land them because they are here illegally, you send them back to their country. They do it to Americans, Colombians, Azerbaijan [nationals] – because we have had one – and we do it to the Cubans. We have sent home 17 Cubans,” he said.

Alleyne called for a regional approach to dealing with the mass exodus of people from Haiti, which is expected to rise amid a surge in violence despite the arrival of a Kenyan-led international policing mission earlier this year.

As gangs increase their control of Port-au-Prince and the country’s main airport, scenes of desperate families packing up to seek refuge are becoming more common in the embattled county.

Alleyne’s human rights organisation, Freedom Imaginaries, is campaigning for the Caribbean intergovernmental body, Caricom, to establish a framework to deal with asylum and refugee cases in line with humanitarian assistance principles.

She said: “We need an asylum procedure that allows us to screen people properly so that people with legitimate claims aren’t collectively expelled with others, and a multi-stakeholder approach that brings together government agencies, civil society international community, and, importantly, Caricom because this is not something that can be solved by any one actor acting alone, it has to be a region rights-based comprehensive approach.”

Legal documents released in ongoing US litigation between NSO Group and WhatsApp have revealed for the first time that the Israeli cyberweapons maker – and not its government customers – is the party that “installs and extracts” information from mobile phones targeted by the company’s hacking software.

The new details were contained in sworn depositions from NSO Group employees, portions of which were published for the first time on Thursday.

It comes five years after WhatsApp, the popular messaging app owned by Facebook, first announced it was filing suit against NSO. The company, which was blacklisted by the Biden administration in 2021, makes what is widely considered the world’s most sophisticated hacking software, which – according to researchers – has been used in the past in Saudi Arabia, Dubai, India, Mexico, Morocco and Rwanda.

The timing of the latest development is important in the wake of Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election. Pegasus has been used by autocratic leaders around the world to target journalists and dissidents, including by the government of Viktor Orbán, who Trump admires.

NSO has lobbied members of Congress in an attempt to be removed from the Biden administration’s so-called blacklist, and Trump’s return to the White House could signify a change in White House policy on the use of spyware.

WhatsApp filed suit in California in 2019 after it revealed that it had discovered that 1,400 of its users – including journalists and human rights activists – had been targeted by the spyware over a two-week period.

At the heart of the legal fight was an allegation by WhatsApp that NSO had long denied: that it was the Israeli company itself, and not its government clients around the world, who were operating the spyware. NSO has always said that its product is meant to be used to prevent serious crime and terrorism, and that clients are obligated not to abuse the spyware. It has also insisted that it does not know who its clients are targeting.

WhatsApp is seeking a summary judgment in the case, which means it is asking a judge to rule on the case now. NSO has opposed the motion.

To make its case, WhatsApp was allowed by Judge Phyllis Hamilton to make its case, including citing depositions that have previously been redacted and out of public view.

In one, an NSO employee said customers only needed to enter a phone number of the person whose information was being sought. Then, the employee said, “the rest is done automatically by the system”. In other words, the process was not operated by customers. Rather NSO alone decided to access WhatsApp’s servers when it designed (and continuously upgraded) Pegasus to target individuals’ phones.

A deposed NSO employee also acknowledged under questioning from WhatsApp lawyers that one known target of the company’s spyware – Princess Haya of Dubai – was one of 10 examples of clients who had been “abused” “so severely” that NSO disconnected the service. The Guardian and its media partners first reported in 2021 that Haya and her associates were on a database of people who were of interest to a government client of NSO. A senior high court judge in the UK later ruled that the ruler of Dubai hacked the phone of his ex-wife Princess Haya using Pegasus spyware in an unlawful abuse of power and trust.

The president of the family division found that agents acting on behalf of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, who is also prime minister of the United Arab Emirates, a close Gulf ally of Britain, hacked Haya and five of her associates while the couple were locked in court proceedings in London concerning the welfare of their two children.

Those hacked included two of Haya’s lawyers, one of whom, Fiona Shackleton, sits in the House of Lords and was tipped off about the hacking by Cherie Blair, who was working with NSO.

NSO was also expected to publish a new filing on Thursday.

Legal documents released in ongoing US litigation between NSO Group and WhatsApp have revealed for the first time that the Israeli cyberweapons maker – and not its government customers – is the party that “installs and extracts” information from mobile phones targeted by the company’s hacking software.

The new details were contained in sworn depositions from NSO Group employees, portions of which were published for the first time on Thursday.

It comes five years after WhatsApp, the popular messaging app owned by Facebook, first announced it was filing suit against NSO. The company, which was blacklisted by the Biden administration in 2021, makes what is widely considered the world’s most sophisticated hacking software, which – according to researchers – has been used in the past in Saudi Arabia, Dubai, India, Mexico, Morocco and Rwanda.

The timing of the latest development is important in the wake of Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election. Pegasus has been used by autocratic leaders around the world to target journalists and dissidents, including by the government of Viktor Orbán, who Trump admires.

NSO has lobbied members of Congress in an attempt to be removed from the Biden administration’s so-called blacklist, and Trump’s return to the White House could signify a change in White House policy on the use of spyware.

WhatsApp filed suit in California in 2019 after it revealed that it had discovered that 1,400 of its users – including journalists and human rights activists – had been targeted by the spyware over a two-week period.

At the heart of the legal fight was an allegation by WhatsApp that NSO had long denied: that it was the Israeli company itself, and not its government clients around the world, who were operating the spyware. NSO has always said that its product is meant to be used to prevent serious crime and terrorism, and that clients are obligated not to abuse the spyware. It has also insisted that it does not know who its clients are targeting.

WhatsApp is seeking a summary judgment in the case, which means it is asking a judge to rule on the case now. NSO has opposed the motion.

To make its case, WhatsApp was allowed by Judge Phyllis Hamilton to make its case, including citing depositions that have previously been redacted and out of public view.

In one, an NSO employee said customers only needed to enter a phone number of the person whose information was being sought. Then, the employee said, “the rest is done automatically by the system”. In other words, the process was not operated by customers. Rather NSO alone decided to access WhatsApp’s servers when it designed (and continuously upgraded) Pegasus to target individuals’ phones.

A deposed NSO employee also acknowledged under questioning from WhatsApp lawyers that one known target of the company’s spyware – Princess Haya of Dubai – was one of 10 examples of clients who had been “abused” “so severely” that NSO disconnected the service. The Guardian and its media partners first reported in 2021 that Haya and her associates were on a database of people who were of interest to a government client of NSO. A senior high court judge in the UK later ruled that the ruler of Dubai hacked the phone of his ex-wife Princess Haya using Pegasus spyware in an unlawful abuse of power and trust.

The president of the family division found that agents acting on behalf of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, who is also prime minister of the United Arab Emirates, a close Gulf ally of Britain, hacked Haya and five of her associates while the couple were locked in court proceedings in London concerning the welfare of their two children.

Those hacked included two of Haya’s lawyers, one of whom, Fiona Shackleton, sits in the House of Lords and was tipped off about the hacking by Cherie Blair, who was working with NSO.

NSO was also expected to publish a new filing on Thursday.

Tributes have been paid to a London-based Russian chef, television presenter and writer after he was found dead in Belgrade.

Alexei Zimin, 52, died in the Serbian capital after travelling there to promote a book, Anglomania, in which he gave an immigrant’s take on Britain’s cultural history.

The father of three had been a critic of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Crimea in 2014 and had spent his final years in the UK, where he was the cofounder of Zima, a restaurant in London bearing his name.

Authorities in Serbia said there were “no suspicious circumstances” related to his death and that a postmortem and toxicology report were ongoing, the BBC reported.

Zimin had enjoyed success in his native country as the face of a cookery show on the NTV channel, which was axed after he posted anti-war messages on social media following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Mikhail Fishman, a prominent liberal Russian journalist and film-maker who is based in Amsterdam and was a friend, said Zimin was “much more than just his literary and culinary talents”.

“He cooked, he sang, he wrote, he spoke – he embodied life itself, a zest for life. Intelligent, witty, joyful. We’ve known each other for about 30 years, maybe even more, and I don’t think I know anyone else who made things feel so comfortable and warm.”

Amid speculation about the death, he said he did not believe Zimin had been poisoned.

Alexander Baunov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, said Zimin “truly embodied the spirit of a renaissance man”.

“He engaged in everything – from writing to culinary arts – and did it all with remarkable success. His approach was deeply humanistic, driven by joy and a genuine care for people. Outwardly, he was just as warm and joyful.”

He is survived by his wife Tatiana Dolmatovskaya, a costume designer who previously worked at Vogue Russia, and their three teenage children.

Zimin had been GQ Russia editor in chief before training at Le Cordon Bleu London and went on to open Moscow’s first chef’s table restaurant, Ragout, as well as a food magazine, Eda, and a Moscow fast food chain.

In a social media post three months after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Zimin said: “Russia will be free, one way or another, or the third, more mysterious, way.”

Zimin was in Belgrade to promote Anglomania, described as “a personal take on the United Kingdom’s cultural history, anecdotes and fables through the eyes of the immigrant”.

According to his website, it covered British contributions including “modern ideas about democracy, freedom of speech, human rights, capitalism with an inhuman face and socialism with a human face, science, literature, Christmas turkey and afternoon tea”.

A hiker in the northern Italian Alps has stumbled across the first trace of what scientists believe to be an entire prehistoric ecosystem, including the well-preserved footprints of reptiles and amphibians, brought to light by the melting of snow and ice induced by the climate crisis.

The discovery in the Valtellina Orobie mountain range in Lombardy dates back 280 million years to the Permian period, the age immediately prior to dinosaurs, scientists say.

Claudia Steffensen, from Lovero, a village in Sondrio province, and her husband were navigating their way along a rocky trail in the Ambria valley, close to the Swiss border, when she stepped on a light grey rock covered in “strange designs”.

“It was a very hot day last summer and we wanted to escape the heat, so we went to the mountains,” Steffensen told the Guardian. “On our way back down, we had to walk very carefully along the path. My husband was in front of me, looking straight ahead, while I was looking towards my feet. I put my foot on a rock, which struck me as odd as it seemed more like a slab of cement. I then noticed these strange circular designs with wavy lines. I took a closer look and realised they were footprints.”

Steffensen took a photo and sent it to her friend Elio Della Ferrera, a photographer who specialises in the natural world. Della Ferrera then sent the photo to Cristiano Dal Sasso, a paleontologist at the museum of natural history in Milan, who in turn consulted other experts.

The footprints, found 1,700 metres above sea level, turned out to belong to a prehistoric reptile.

The experts mapped out an area of the Valtellina Orobie nature park, including at altitudes of almost 3,000 metres, and visits to the site since summer 2023 have revealed hundreds of other fossilised footprints of reptiles, amphibians and insects, which they said were often still aligned to form “tracks”. The traces are believed to have come from at least five different species of animal.

In a statement Dal Sasso said: “Dinosaurs did not yet exist, but the authors of the largest footprints must still have been of a considerable size – up to 2-3 metres long.”

Lorenzo Marchetti, an ichnologist, or trace fossils specialist, at the museum of natural history in Berlin, said the preservation of the footprints was such that they revealed “impressive details”, such as “the imprints of fingernails and the belly skin of some animals”.

The ecosystem also revealed fossilised fragments of plants, seeds and even imprints of raindrops.

The Permian period ended with the largest mass extinction, provoked by a sudden rise in temperature, that the world has ever known. Global warming today has revealed traces of other prehistoric animals in the Italian Alps, including the footprints of a crocodile-like reptile found at an altitude of 2,200-metres in Altopiano della Gardetta, in the province of Cuneo in Piedmont.

“The discovery in the Ambria valley is also an effect of climate change,” said Doriano Codega, president of the Valtellina Orobie nature park. “The exceptional thing was the altitude – these relics were found at very high levels and were very well preserved. This is an area subjected to landslides, so there were also rock detachments that brought to light these fossils. This is a very important paleontological discovery.”

Some of the relics were recently brought to Milan and displayed at the natural history museum this week. Research will continue at the site, experts said.

Steffensen, whose discovery has become known as “Rock Zero”, said: “I’m feeling very proud, especially to have made a small contribution to science.”

• The EU has for the first time funded member states’ joint procurement of weapons, including missiles and ammunition, which will in part be sent to Ukraine. It had previously financed arms purchases for Ukraine ad hoc and from outside its budget. The European Commission vice-president Margrethe Vestager said the EU was investing €300 million to help groups of up to nine member countries buy air defence systems, armoured vehicles and artillery ammunition. “Importantly, the selected projects will also increase our support to Ukraine with additional defence equipment.” The EU has been working to boost its defence industry to arm Ukraine and build up its own forces. It fell short of a promise to supply Kyiv with a million artillery shells by the end of March 2024, but the EU diplomacy chief, Josep Borrell, has vowed the goal will be reached before the end of the year.

• The Ukrainian foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, on Thursday said he hoped Marco Rubio, Donald Trump’s nominee for US secretary of state, would pursue a policy of “peace through strength”. Rubio in the past advocated an assertive US foreign policy with respect to America’s geopolitical foes, but has recently aligned more closely with Trump’s “America First” approach. In April, Rubio was one of 15 Republican senators to vote against a big military aid package to Ukraine and other US partners. In recent interviews, he has said that Ukraine should seek a negotiated settlement rather than focus on regaining its territory.

• A Russian attack on Ukraine’s Black Sea port of Odesa on Thursday hit a residential building, knocked out a heating supply boiler plant and damaged a pipeline, officials said. “Yet another terrorist act in Odesa. A strike on a residential building,” said the regional governor, Oleh Kiper. Unofficial Telegram-based news outlets posted a video of a building in flames, with firefighting equipment stationed nearby. “The enemy attack has damaged the main pipeline for heating supplies,” said the Odesa mayor, Hennadiy Trukhanov. “One of the city’s boiler plants has been forced to shut down.”

• Several exiled Russian opposition figures will stage an anti-war, anti-Kremlin demonstration in Berlin this weekend. The rally is the first organised by three of the most high-profile opposition figures – Yulia Navalnaya, Ilya Yashin and Vladimir Kara-Murza – and comes at a critical time for the movement. Many Ukrainians feel the Russian opposition has shown ambiguity over the invasion and could do more to put pressure on Putin. Navalnaya said the rally aims to “show that a lot of Russians are against Putin and against the war … [that there is] another Russia, that is not militaristic and is free”. But in an interview with the exiled Russian TV station Dozhd, she admitted there was “no plan” among the opposition on how to end Putin’s 24-year rule.

• Germany has refused to allow a Russian liquefied natural gas shipment into the Brunsbuttel terminal in northern Germany in line with Berlin’s policy not to import LNG from Russia, industry sources said on Thursday. “The cargo was destined for Brunsbuttel and someone tried its luck and it seems wanted to check how Berlin would react,” an industry source told the Reuters news agency, adding that this is “a bit of political PR stunt”. It was not clear who ordered the shipment, which left the Yamal LNG facility in Russia carried by three tankers. Germany has never directly imported Russian LNG and stopped buying Russian pipeline gas following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. It has relied on LNG from the US and elsewhere as well as pipeline gas from Norway since to replace Russian gas.

• It came as Europe’s gas market rose by as much as 5% on Thursday to its highest price in a year after one of the continent’s biggest gas traders said that there could be a halt on gas supplies from Russia, Jillian Ambrose writes. Austrian gas trader OMV said a court decision awarding it compensation in a subsidiary of Russia’s Gazprom could lead the latter to halt supplies. Gas prices on Europe’s main gas market jumped to more than €45 a megawatt hour for the first time since November 2023 – but Europe’s gas market prices remain well below the historic highs of over €300/MWh in August 2022 after Russia’s invasion .

• Nato and the EU are ramping up efforts to persuade China to help get North Korea to stop sending troops and other support to Russia to back its war on Ukraine – including by forging alliances in China’s back yard. In a blog published on Thursday, the EU foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, detailed his recent trip to Japan and South Korea, where North Korea’s troop deployment and other assistance to Russia was on the agenda. “This marks an escalation of the utmost seriousness, which was of course at the heart of our discussions with the Japanese and South Korean leaders,” wrote Borrell, who also held talks with Blinken on Wednesday. Borrell described the new security and defence partnerships with Japan and South Korea as “the first ones outside Europe”. “The EU was certainly not born as a military alliance but, in the current geopolitical context, it can and must also become a global security provider and partner.”

• The North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-un, has ordered the “mass production” of attack drones, state media reported on Friday, as concerns mount over the Kim regime’s deepening military cooperation with Russia.

• A Russian military court on Thursday sentenced a woman to eight years in jail for criticising the Ukraine offensive online and calling for the assassination of President Vladimir Putin, state media reported. Moscow has opened hundreds of criminal cases against those who oppose the Ukraine war. Russia’s second western district military court found Anastasia Berezhinskaya, 43, guilty of spreading “false information”, “discrediting” the armed forces and “justifying terrorism” in a series of posts on Russian social media platform VK, said Russian state media.

• Romania’s leftist prime minister, Marcel Ciolacu, and the head of an opposition far-right party, George Simion, are in the lead ahead of a presidential election this month and will likely face each other in a second round runoff, an opinion poll showed on Thursday. Ciolacu strongly supports Ukraine and the country’s EU and Nato membership. Simion opposes aid to Ukraine, particularly military.

• Greece said on Thursday that it would shake up its defence forces to economise funds and sideline older weapons in favour of drones after lessons drawn from Ukraine. The Greek defence minister, Nikos Dendias, said the military would introduce four different drone systems, merge army units and boost its cyberwarfare potential.

The satirical news outlet the Onion has purchased Infowars, the rightwing media platform run by the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, at a court-ordered auction.

The news was confirmed on Thursday morning in a video by Jones himself, as well as the head of the Onion’s parent company.

“I just got word 15 minutes ago that my lawyers and folks met with the US trustee over our bankruptcy this morning, and they said they are shutting us down even without a court order this morning,” Jones said in a video shared on X. “The Connecticut Democrats with the Onion newspaper bought us.”

The Onion plans to rebuild the website and feature well-known internet humor writers and content creators.

CEO Ben Collins confirmed this in a post on Bluesky on Thursday, writing: “The Onion, with the help of the Sandy Hook families, has purchased InfoWars. We are planning on making it a very funny, very stupid website. We have retained the services of some Onion and Clickhole Hall of Famers to pull this off.

“I can’t wait to show you what we have cooked up,” Collins added.

In another post on Bluesky, Collins said that “part of the reason we did bought [sic] InfoWars is because people on Bluesky told us it would be funny to buy InfoWars” adding that “those people were right” this “is the funniest thing that has ever happened”.

The purchase includes the acquisition of Jones’s company’s intellectual property, such as its website, customer lists, inventory and certain social media accounts, and the production equipment, according to CNN. The amount of the bid has not been disclosed.

In the immediate aftermath of the news breaking publicly, Jones started streaming live on X, lambasting the sale of his site. Railing against the Onion, among others, Jones told viewers that it’s “a distinct honor to be here in defiance of the tyrants”. He emphasized that no one told him he couldn’t go live.

Jones also began to ramble about the upcoming Donald Trump administration, telling viewers things like: “This is the fight. If you think the deep state has given up, think again … America is awake now.”

As of Thursday afternoon, InfoWars.com had turned into a white screen with a single sentence emblazoned across the screen: “Site unavailable till further notice.”

The sale follows a judge’s order earlier this year for Jones to liquidate his personal assets, to help him to pay off the $1.4bn he was ordered to pay the families of victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting that killed 20 first-graders and six educators when they took him to court for defamation after he falsely claimed that the shooting was a hoax, and that they were actors who staged the shooting as part of a government plot to seize Americans’ guns.

Jones and his company, Free Speech Systems, filed for bankruptcy protection in 2022.

In order to make the bid work, a lawyer representing the families told CNN that the families “agreed to forgo a portion of their recovery to increase the overall value of the Onion’s bid, enabling its success”.

“After surviving unimaginable loss with courage and integrity, they rejected Jones’s hollow offers for allegedly more money if they would only let him stay on the air because doing so would have put other families in harm’s way,” said Chris Mattei, an attorney for the families.

In a post on social media earlier this week, Mattei added that “the breakup of Infowars this week is just the start of Alex Jones’s lesson in accountability” and that the families “will go after his future income and any new Infowars owner acting as a vehicle for Jones’s continued control of the business”.