The Kremlin has said Joe Biden’s outgoing administration wants to escalate the conflict in Ukraine by allowing Kyiv to use long-range missiles for strikes inside Russia.

The decision, first reported on Sunday, to allow Ukraine to conduct strikes with US-made weapons deep into sovereign Russian territory has not been formally announced by the White House, but a German government spokesperson said on Monday that Berlin had been informed.

“It is clear that the outgoing administration in Washington intends to take steps to continue to add fuel to the fire and to further inflame tensions around this conflict,” Vladimir Putin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters on Monday. “This decision is reckless, dangerous, aimed at a qualitative change, a qualitative increase in the level of involvement of the United States.”

The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, had long pushed for authorisation from Washington to use the 190-mile range Army Tactical Missile System, known by its initials Atacms, to hit targets inside Russia.

Peskov said Putin had expressed Russia’s position clearly in September when the Russian leader warned that the move to let Kyiv use longer-range weapons against targets inside Russia would mean Nato would be directly “at war” with Moscow.

Putin had said Moscow would “take the appropriate decisions based on the threats that we will face” and previously suggested Moscow could supply long-range weapons to other countries with the aim of attacking western targets.

“If someone thinks it is possible to supply such weapons to a war zone to attack our territory and create problems for us, why don’t we have the right to supply our weapons,” Putin told a press conference in St Petersburg in June.

On Monday, Russian officials similarly pledged that Moscow would respond to Biden’s decision, though they did not elaborate on what that response might entail.

Leonid Slutsky, the chair of the ultranationalist Liberal Democratic party of Russia, said the US was now directly participating in the military conflict in Ukraine. “This will inevitably entail the toughest response from Russia, based on the threats that will be posed to our country,” he said.

There were more Russian threats issued in state media, with the prominent propagandist Dmitry Kiselyov saying the west was directly entering the war “with all the ensuing consequences for their own territories and those inhabiting them”. Kiselyov said: “The response could be anything. Anything.”

On Monday the Kremlin rejected a reported peace proposal from the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, to be put forward at the G20 summit in Brazil, to freeze hostilities at the current positions of both parties.

“Any option involving the freezing [of the conflict] along the line of engagement is unacceptable for Russia in any case,” Peskov said, adding that Putin had declared Russia’s demands for ending the war in June when he said Ukraine would have to drop its Nato ambitions and withdraw all its troops from all the territory of four regions claimed by Russia.

The US decision is being justified by the presence of North Korean troops fighting alongside Russia against Ukraine. Briefings to the New York Times, the Washington Post and the news agencies Reuters and Associated Press said permission to use the missiles would be limited to the Kursk region, where Ukraine launched an incursion into Russia in the summer.

Several western officials praised the US decision to permit Ukraine’s use of long-range missiles. “Ukraine should be able to use the arms we provide in order not only to stop the arrow but also to be able to hit the archers,” the EU’s chief diplomat, Josep Borrell, said before a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels on Monday.

The German foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, described Biden’s decision as “important” and “essential”. She said in Brussels: “The decision from the American side, and I would like to emphasise that this is not a rethink but an intensification of what has already been delivered by other partners, is so important at this moment.”

A German government spokesperson said, however, that Germany was sticking with its decision not to supply Kyiv with long-range Taurus missiles. The chancellor Olaf Scholz’s decision to withhold its most powerful missile has been a significant point of contention in Germany.

“The chancellor’s decision is unchanged,” the German government spokesperson told a regular news conference in Berlin.

Last week Scholz held a telephone conversation with Putin about the war in Ukraine, in a move that drew criticism from Kyiv.

Meanwhile, France said it was still considering whether to allow Ukraine to use its long-range Scalp missiles inside Russia. Jean-Noël Barrot, the minister for Europe and foreign affairs of France, said: “We openly said this was an option that we would consider if it was to allow to strike a target from where Russia is currently aggressing Ukrainian territory. So nothing new on the other side.”

Donald Trump’s team are yet to officially comment on Biden’s move. The president-elect’s son Don Jr criticised the decision, writing on X: “The military industrial complex seems to want to make sure they get world war three going before my father has a chance to create peace and save lives. Gotta lock in those $trillions. Life be damned! Imbeciles!”

Some Russian officials openly voiced hopes that the incoming Trump administration would overturn the decision after taking office in late January.

“These guys, Biden’s administration, are trying to escalate the situation to the maximum while they still have power and are still in office,” the Russian lawmaker Maria Butina said. “I have a great hope that Trump will overcome this decision if this has been made because they are seriously risking the start of world war three, which is not in anybody’s interest.”

Joe Biden has permitted Ukraine to use US-made Atacms ballistic missiles against Russian and North Korean forces inside Russian territory.

Officials in Washington told reporters the weapons could be used in the region of Kursk, where Kyiv has launched an incursion, but that the US president may agree to their deployment elsewhere before Donald Trump comes to power.

The first strikes using Atacms rockets could come within days. But what are they and why are they important for Ukraine?

Ukraine will be “top of my agenda” this week at a meeting of leaders from the world’s most powerful economies, Keir Starmer has pledged, though he said he had “no plans” to follow the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and speak directly to Vladimir Putin.

Starmer will meet world leaders on Monday at the G20 summit in Brazil, which the Russian president has declined to attend, sending his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, in his place.

Speaking to reporters en route to the summit, the UK prime minister said it was significant that leaders were gathering almost 1,000 days into Russia’s war and said there had “got to be full support for as long as it takes”, citing the use of North Korean soldiers in the war as a particularly disturbing development.

World leaders will gather in Rio de Janeiro for the summit, where there is significant division over the approach to Ukraine and an air of impotency given the imminent return of Donald Trump to the White House. The president-elect has signalled the US will take a different approach to funding Ukraine’s defence.

Overnight, Russia fired more than 200 missile and drones across Ukraine, targeting the country’s energy grid, in the biggest attack on Ukraine since August and the first significant Russian assault since the US election.

Starmer will attend the summit along with the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, and the outgoing US president, Joe Biden.

The UK prime minister said he had “no plans to speak to Putin”, when asked about Scholz’s call. He said: “We are coming up to the 1,000th day of this conflict on Tuesday: that’s 1,000 days of Russian aggression, 1,000 days of huge impact and sacrifice in relation to Ukrainian people, and recently we’ve seen the addition of North Korean troops working with the Russians, which does have serious implications.

“I think on the one hand it shows the desperation of Russia but it’s got serious implications for European security, that added additional element, and for Indo-Pacific security – and that’s why I think we need to double-down on shoring up our support for Ukraine and that’s top of my agenda for the G20.”

Starmer denied the G20 meeting was futile, with such extreme division between the leaders in attendance, not only on Ukraine but on economic issues, the climate and gender equality.

The Argentinian president, Javier Milei, is a close ally of Trump and was the first world leader to visit the president-elect at his Florida residence. He is said to be mounting a number of obstacles to the formal communique. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, visited Milei en route to the summit in an attempt to ease tensions and salvage an agreement from the meeting.


“We’re meeting the biggest economies in the world in the next few days and my number-one mission is to grow our economy and to get inward investment into our country,” Starmer said.

“So I’m going to use that opportunity at the G20 to do exactly that. And obviously, when it comes to security, there are really important issues right here, right now when it comes to Ukraine that I think are well worth it, and it’s important that we do pursue. And that’s why I’ll be trying to do what I can.”

As Donald Trump moves fast to expand his influence over prosecutorial and legal decisions while revamping the US justice department, concerns are rising quickly about how he may abuse his powers to target political foes for “retribution” as he often suggested during his campaign, say ex-federal prosecutors.

Fueling those fears was the president-elect’s stunning decision to choose ultra-loyalist and firebrand Florida representative Matt Gaetz to be his attorney general and help fight what Trump calls a “weaponized government” that he says baselessly used a special counsel to file criminal charges against him for trying to subvert his 2020 election loss.

Trump’s pick of Gaetz quickly set off alarm bells among former justice department officials and some congressional Republicans who view him as unfit due to ethics and legal problems that for years have dogged Gaetz, and could seriously jeopardize his confirmation by the Senate.

Above all, the choice of Gaetz underscores the premium Trump places on selecting a loyalist who can help him expand his powers at the justice department to further his revenge agenda, and avoid the conflicts Trump had at times with Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr when they were attorneys general in his first administration.

“It’s an extraordinary choice,” said the former justice department inspector general Michael Bromwich. “In a world where there are plenty of lawyers willing to do Trump’s bidding, he chooses the candidate who has so much baggage. He’s testing his strength and if anyone in his party has the backbone to oppose him.

“Gaetz will not be able to obtain a security clearance because of the sex-trafficking criminal investigation that was finally closed a year ago, the House ethics committee investigation, and other acts of mischief. It’s hard to imagine he is capable of being confirmed even with a Republican majority in the Senate.”

Similarly, Daniel Richman, a law professor at Columbia University and an ex-federal prosecutor, deplored Trump’s choice of Gaetz. “Trump’s selection of him shows a contempt for the department that is sure to lead those within it, particularly in the DC area, to think hard about whether they can bear to stay,” he said.

But in tapping Gaetz, Trump lavishly praised him, declaring he “will end Weaponized Government, protect our Borders, dismantle Criminal Organizations and restore Americans’ badly-shattered Faith and Confidence in the Justice Department”.

Further, Trump’s picking Gaetz jibed with older concerns about Trump’s debunked claims he was the victim of a vendetta and “lawfare” led by the special counsel Jack Smith, who filed criminal charges against Trump for conspiring to subvert his 2020 loss and for improperly taking hundreds of classified documents after he left office.

Trump and his lawyers have vehemently denied Smith’s charges.

Last month, Trump said he would fire Smith in “two seconds” and that Smith ought to be “thrown out of the country”. Likewise, Trump’s multibillionaire ally Elon Musk said Smith “cannot go unpunished”, and the House judiciary chair, Jim Jordan, has warned Smith to “preserve everything” and suggested investigations could be coming.

Smith is now in the process of winding down his two investigations and planning to leave his post before Trump takes office in January given that Gaetz would almost certainly move to drop the cases at Trump’s request, say ex-justice department prosecutors.

Compounding concerns about Trump’s plans to exert more influence at the justice department was the US supreme court’s highly controversial ruling on 1 July that granted presidents wide-ranging immunity from prosecution for their “official” acts.

Critics worry too that the rule of law and the justice department will be badly weakened in light of Trump’s often calling those convicted of crimes for their violent actions during the January 6 insurrection to block the certification of Biden’s win “patriots”, and suggested that he would grant many pardons when he takes office.

In another sign on Thursday that Trump is moving aggressively to overhaul the justice department, he tapped Todd Blanche, the key lawyer who defended him against the Smith charges and the 34 counts of business fraud that he was convicted on in New York, to be deputy attorney general.

Ex-justice department officials say Trump risks violating historical standards of independence with his threats to punish his political enemies who besides Smith include Biden, the ex-House speaker Nancy Pelosi and others.

“Trump’s revenge agenda is utterly inconsistent with the Department of Justice’s standards for initiating investigations and prosecutions,” said Bromwich. “Anyone in DoJ who implements that agenda would violate not only historical practice but specific DoJ requirements embodied in its internal regulations.

“Although they might curry favor with the White House, they would subject themselves to misconduct investigations within DoJ – unless that function is neutered – and risk the loss of their license to practice law.”

In a related vein, Bromwich warned: “There is no doubt that the Republican Congress will be willing accomplices in the pursuit of Trump’s enemies, including people who investigated and prosecuted him. The saving grace is the incompetence of the investigators who demonstrated their ineptness – over and over again – in pursuing the impeachment of President Biden and various other wild goose chases.”

Other ex-prosecutors worry Trump now may move aggressively to target his political foes given the supreme court presidential immunity ruling this year.

“I have concerns about a Trump administration in which he now enjoys immunity from criminal prosecution,” said Barbara McQuade, a former top prosecutor in the eastern district of Michigan who now teaches law at the University of Michigan. “An order by Trump to his attorney general to prosecute his rivals would be barred from prosecution,” giving Trump a freer hand to target his foes.

McQuade noted: “Even a loyalist attorney general can’t prosecute a case without assistants. I am hopeful that career professionals at DoJ would refuse to carry out illegal orders [and] that could result in their resignations or firings, and then replacement by people who are willing to obey.”

McQuade stressed too: “After Watergate, the justice department installed norms designed to protect it from partisan influence. Gaetz seems determined to take a sledgehammer to those norms.”

Richman worries Jordan and other Trump allies could try to undermine justice department independence to further Trump’s revenge agenda and bring law enforcement personnel to testify before Congress on their past actions under the Biden administration. “Should this happen – and it may start with Jack Smith and the career prosecutors who worked with him – the damage to department morale and effectiveness will be grievous,” he said.

Meanwhile, it’s not clear what will happen with Smith’s extensive work documenting his charges against Trump for conspiring to overturn his loss in 2020 and leaving office with a large cache of classified documents

Smith is reportedly working on a final report about his findings in the two federal cases charging Trump with criminal conduct to submit to Merrick Garland, which the attorney general has the option of making public before he leaves office.

Smith also faces a decision about whether to indict any of the co-conspirators who were unnamed but widely identified in the election-subversion case, although any Trump allies he charged would very likely get presidential pardons, say ex-prosecutors.

In another legal area, critics say that if Trump goes ahead with granting many presidential pardons to January 6 insurrectionists as he has suggested, that would be very damaging to the rule of law and justice department morale. While Trump has hedged at times about just how many people he would pardon of the more than 1,500 convicted of crimes for taking part in the violent attack on the Capitol, he told a CNN town hall in May 2023: “I am inclined to pardon many of them.”

“I am concerned that he may recklessly and contemptuously pardon the most serious of the January 6 perpetrators despite their insurrection and violence,” Ty Cobb, a former Trump White House lawyer and ex-justice department official, said.

Cobb said he was concerned about Trump’s overhaul of the justice department and what the Gaetz pick portends. “I’m concerned about the integrity of the entire department given the Gaetz appointment. Vengeance for Trump and further violence to the rule of law beyond what Trump’s crimes to date have seen are the desired consequences of having Gaetz as AG,” he said.

The internationally agreed goal to keep the world’s temperature rise below 1.5C is now “deader than a doornail”, with 2024 almost certain to be the first individual year above this threshold, climate scientists have gloomily concluded – even as world leaders gather for climate talks on how to remain within this boundary.

Three of the five leading research groups monitoring global temperatures consider 2024 on track to be at least 1.5C (2.7F) hotter than pre-industrial times, underlining it as the warmest year on record, beating a mark set just last year. The past 10 consecutive years have already been the hottest 10 years ever recorded.

Although a single year above 1.5C does not itself spell climate doom or break the 2015 Paris agreement, in which countries agreed to strive to keep the long-term temperature rise below this point, scientists have warned this aspiration has in effect been snuffed out despite the exhortations of leaders currently gathered at a United Nations climate summit in Azerbaijan.

“The goal to avoid exceeding 1.5C is deader than a doornail. It’s almost impossible to avoid at this point because we’ve just waited too long to act,” said Zeke Hausfather, climate research lead at Stripe and a research scientist at Berkeley Earth. “We are speeding past the 1.5C line an accelerating way and that will continue until global emissions stop climbing.”

Last year was so surprisingly hot, even in the context of the climate crisis, that it caused “some soul-searching” among climate scientists, Hausfather said. In recent months there has also been persistent heat despite the fading of El Niño, a periodic climate event that exacerbated temperatures already elevated by the burning of fossil fuels.

“It’s going to be the hottest year by an unexpectedly large margin. If it continues to be this warm it’s a worrying sign,” he said. “Going past 1.5C this year is very symbolic, and it’s a sign that we are getting ever closer to going past that target.”

Climate scientists broadly expect it will become apparent the 1.5C target, agreed upon by governments after pleas from vulnerable island states that they risk being wiped out if temperatures rise further than this, has been exceeded within the coming decade.

Despite countries agreeing to shift away from fossil fuels, this year is set to hit a new record for planet-heating emissions, and even if current national pledges are met the world is on track for 2.7C (4.8F) warming, risking disastrous heatwaves, floods, famines and unrest. “We are clearly failing to bend the curve,” said Sofia Gonzales-Zuñiga, an analyst at Climate Analytics, which helped produce the Climate Action Tracker (Cat) temperature estimate.

However, the Cop29 talks in Baku have maintained calls for action to stay under 1.5C. “Only you can beat the clock on 1.5C,” António Guterres, secretary general of the UN, urged world leaders on Tuesday, while also acknowledging the planet was undergoing a “masterclass in climate destruction”.

Yet the 1.5C target now appears to be simply a rhetorical, rather than scientifically achievable, one, bar massive amounts of future carbon removal from as-yet unproven technologies. “I never thought 1.5C was a conceivable goal. I thought it was a pointless thing,” said Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist at Nasa. “I’m totally unsurprised, like almost all climate scientists, that we are shooting past it at a rapid clip.

“But it was extremely galvanizing, so I was wrong about that. Maybe it is useful; maybe people do need impossible targets. You shouldn’t ask scientists how to galvanize the world because clearly we don’t have a fucking clue. People haven’t got a magic set of words to keep us to 1.5C, but we have got to keep trying.

“What matters is we have to reduce emissions. Once we stop warming the planet, the better it will be for the people and ecosystems that live here.”

The world’s decision-makers who are collectively failing to stem dangerous global heating will soon be joined by Donald Trump, who is expected to tear down climate policies and thereby, the Cat report estimates, add at least a further 0.04C to the world temperature.

Despite this bleak outlook, some do point out that the picture still looks far rosier than it did before the Paris deal, when a catastrophic temperature rise of 4C or more was foreseeable. Cheap and abundant clean energy is growing at a rapid pace, with peak oil demand expected by the end of this decade.

“Meetings like these are often perceived as talking shops,” said Alexander De Croo, the Belgian prime minister, at the Cop29 summit. “And yes, these strenuous negotiations are far from perfect. But if you compare climate policy now to a decade ago, we are in a different world.”

Still, as the world barrels past 1.5C there lie alarming uncertainties in the form of runaway climate “tipping points”, which once set off cannot be halted on human timescales, such as the Amazon turning into a savanna, the collapse of the great polar ice sheets, and huge pulses of carbon released from melting permafrost.

“1.5C is not a cliff edge, but the further we warm up the closer we get to unwittingly setting off tipping points that will bring dramatic climate consequences,” said Grahame Madge, a climate spokesman at the UK Met Office, who added that it would now be “unexpected” for 2024 to not be above 1.5C.

“We are edging ever closer to tipping points in the climate system that we won’t be able to come back from; it’s uncertain when they will arrive, they are almost like monsters in the darkness,” Madge said.

“We don’t want to encounter them so every fraction of a degree is worth fighting for. If we can’t achieve 1.5C, it will be better to get 1.6C than 1.7C, which will be better than getting 2C or more.”

Hausfather added: “We aren’t in for a good outcome either way. It’s challenging. But every tenth of a degree matters. All we know is that the more we push the climate system away from where it has been for the last few million years, there be dragons.”

At least 24 previously impossible heatwaves have struck communities across the planet, a new assessment has shown, providing stark evidence of how severely human-caused global heating is supercharging extreme weather.

The impossible heatwaves have taken lives across North America, Europe and Asia, with scientific analyses showing that they would have had virtually zero chance of happening without the extra heat trapped by fossil fuel emissions.

Further studies have assessed how much worse global heating has made the consequences of extreme weather, with shocking results. Millions of people, and many thousands of newborn babies, would not have died prematurely without the extra human-caused heat, according to the estimates.

In total, studies calculating the role of the climate crisis in what are now unnatural disasters show 550 heatwaves, floods, storms, droughts and wildfires have been made significantly more severe or more frequent by global heating. This roll-call of suffering is only a glimpse of the true damage, however. Most extreme weather events have not been analysed by scientists.

The new database of hundreds of studies that analyse the role of global heating in extreme weather was compiled by the website Carbon Brief and shared with the Guardian. It is the only comprehensive assessment and provides overwhelming proof that the climate emergency is here today, taking lives and livelihoods in all corners of the world.

The studies have examined the impacts resulting from about 1.3C of global heating to date. The prospect of 2.5C to 3.0C, which is where the world is headed, is therefore catastrophic, warn the scientists. They urge the world’s nations meeting at the Cop29 climate summit in Azerbaijan to deliver deep and rapid cuts to carbon emissions and to fund the protection desperately needed by many communities against now-inevitable climate disasters.

The science of determining the role of global heating in extreme weather events is called attribution. In its early days, more than a decade ago, the relatively subtle influence detected was likened to finding the fingerprints of climate change. Today, the influence is so obvious that the researchers are instead like eye witnesses to a crime.

“Some say climate scientists shouldn’t paint a picture of doom and gloom. But we are humans, we have feelings, we have children,” said Dr Joyce Kimutai at Imperial College London, UK, part of the World Weather Attribution group and an adviser with Kenya’s Cop29 delegation.

“The increasing role of climate change in the intensities of extreme weather events is definitely worrying,” she said. “And if this continues it’s really going to be difficult for everyone. The climate crisis is not discriminating how it affects people. It’s hitting every part of the world.”

Kimutai said the attribution studies show the “critical need” for a huge increase in the funding for protecting people from extreme weather, especially those communities already vulnerable to heatwaves, floods and storms. She said levels of funding were “strikingly and painfully insignificant compared with needs”. Delivering at least a trillion dollars of finance is a key task for negotiators at Cop29 in Azerbaijan.

“The sheer weight of this evidence reinforces the impact that human-caused warming is having today – not at some far-off point in the future,” said Robert McSweeney, at Carbon Brief, who compiled the database.

The impossibles

The impossible extreme weather events, ie those with a vanishingly low probability of happening without the turbocharge of human-caused global heating, are particularly striking.

They show that the burning of fossil fuels has so dramatically changed the climate that heatwaves are hitting communities with a severity and frequency never seen during the entire development of human civilisation over the past 5,000 years. It is a new world, for which cities, hospitals, roads and farms are unprepared, and a world that gets even more dangerous every day as carbon emissions continue to be pumped into the atmosphere.

Nowhere is safe. In the last two years, previously impossible heat struck from the Mediterranean to Thailand, and from the Philippines to the highly vulnerable populations inSahel in Africa at the end of Ramadan. In the two years before that, both North America and Europe sweltered in unprecedented heat, along with South Korea and even the icy Tibetan plateau.

The trail of impossibly scorched earth stretches back even further: China and Russia and the Arctic – where one town recorded 38C – in 2020, Europe again in 2019 and swathes of the northern hemisphere in 2018.

The earliest recorded impossible heatwaves were in 2016, when in fact the heat the entire planet then endured could not have occurred without global heating. The oceans have also suffered, with impossible marine heatwaves striking the Tasman Sea, north-east Pacific and Arctic ocean in recent years.

Many other extreme events have been made far more likely, heavily loading the weather dice. The sweltering heat in northern India and Pakistan in May 2022 was made 100 times more likely, as was the torrential rain that caused appalling flooding in Libya in September 2023 and the Amazon river basin drought in 2023.

The consequences

Attribution scientists are no longer only analysing the extreme weather events themselves but also making the human cost tangible by estimating how much of the damage caused would have been avoided if fossil fuel burning had not heated the world.

One study has found that one in three newborn babies that died due to heat would have survived if global heating had not pushed temperatures beyond normal bounds – that is about 10,000 lost babies a year. The study assessed low and middle income countries from 2001-2019.

Another study of heat-related deaths in summer from 1991-2018 also found a deadly impact of global heating in the 43 countries assessed. Extrapolating these findings to a global figure is not straightforward, but an approximate estimate given by the scientists is more than 100,000 deaths a year. Over the two decades, that implies a toll of millions of lives due to the climate crisis.

The deadly supercharging of extreme weather is not new – it has existed for at least 20 years, largely undetected. But more than 1,000 people who died prematurely in the UK in the 2003 heatwave would have lived without global heating.

More recently, the increased intensity of 2017’s Hurricane Maria, fuelled by climate change, was the reason for 3,700 deaths in Puerto Rico, while 13,000 people would not have been forced from their homes by Tropical Cyclone Idai in Mozambique in 2019 without global heating.

Global heating is destroying homes as well as lives. Hurricane Harvey would not have flooded 30%-50% of the US properties that it did submerge in 2017 without global heating.

It has driven up the price tags of hurricane destruction by billions of dollars, such as Hurricane Sandy in the US in 2012 and Typhoon Hagabis in Japan in 2019. Four major floods in the UK would have caused only half the $18bn of wrecked buildings were it not for human-caused climate change.

Adding to this litany of destruction is the loss of crops in the US and Southern Africa, with global heating responsible for taking billions of dollars worth of food off people’s table. It is changing cultural events too, playing a major part in the early flowering of the famous cherry trees in Kyoto, Japan, the earliest date in more than 1,200 years of records.

The details

The 744 attribution studies collated by Carbon Brief used weather data to compare extreme events in today’s heated climate with the same events in computer models of the climate that existed before large-scale fossil fuel burning. This comparison allows the scientists to calculate how much more likely and severe the extreme event was today, revealing the role of human-caused global heating in worsening the event.

Three-quarters of the analyses of extreme weather events found global heating made them more severe or more likely to occur. A further 9% were made less likely, as would be expected as these were mostly extreme cold and snow events. The rest found either no discernible influence of global heating or were inconclusive, in part due to lack of sufficient data. The analysis includes studies published up to the end of September 2024.

Major parts of the world, outside Europe, North America and China, have been little studied by attribution scientists, leaving the true impacts of the climate crisis underreported. Issues include lack of long term weather data and scientific capacity. There are particularly few in the Middle East and North Africa, despite these regions being both among the hardest hit and the biggest fossil fuel producers.

Pollution levels in India’s capital, Delhi, have soared to their highest levels this year, forcing schools and offices to close and cloaking the city in thick brown smog.

In some parts of the city, a live air quality ranking by IQAir put pollution levels at more than 30 times the maximum level deemed healthy.

India’s pollution control authority said its own reading of Delhi’s 24-hour air quality index (AQI) was 484, classified as “severe plus”, the highest so far this year. India’s Central Pollution Control Board defines an AQI reading of 0-50 as “good”.

The catastrophic levels of pollution led to numerous emergency measures, including most schools being closed and lessons moved online. All non-essential construction was stopped and heavy vehicles were prevented from entering the city.

The pollution has become an annual blight on the lives of the more than 30 million people who live in Delhi and surrounding areas. Experts say the toxic air quality is reducing life expectancy in the city by an average of seven years.

The smog arrives annually as the weather in the north of India gets colder, trapping toxic pollutants from the tens of millions of cars on the road, as well as from rubbish fires, construction and factory emissions.

The problem is further compounded by stubble fires, when farmers burn their field after harvesting rice to clear them for new crops. The practice is illegal in India and comes with a heavy fine, but according to Safar, a weather forecasting agency under the ministry of earth sciences, these fires have contributed as much as 40% of the pollution suffocating Delhi in recent days. On Sunday, satellites detected 1,334 such events in six Indian states.

Last month India’s supreme court ruled that clean air was a fundamental human right and ordered the central government and state-level authorities to take action. However, most measures have proved ineffective in stopping air quality deteriorating to levels highly dangerous to health.

In a city already riddled with inequality, pollution – and access to clean air – has become one of the great dividing lines between rich and poor. Many in the city are labourers who work outside for long hours during the day and return at night to homes open to the elements, with no air purifiers or protection from pollutants.

Shagun Devi, 34, lives in a small shanty with her husband and two daughters in a crammed neighbourhood of Delhi’s Okhla neighbourhood. “The air in my home is equally polluted as on a road,” she said. “Every year we face these difficult days of pollution and we just have to bear with it. I think it has become a part of our lives.”

Devi works as a domestic help and her husband is a construction worker. She leaves her house at 7am every day and walks 3km to work. Devi said everyone in her family had been sick for the past two weeks since the pollution had worsened and they had no place to seek out clean air, while an air purifier was far beyond their means.

She said: “By the time I reach my workplace, I am already exhausted due to the pollution. I feel short of breath and there is a burning sensation in my eyes and nose. The house I work in has an air purifier. I wanted to buy one for my children. But it costs three months of my earnings.”

For five decades, Sheikh Imamuddin, 70, has made his living selling books on a roadside stall in south-east Delhi. He fears that due to Delhi’s air quality, the job is killing him. He suffers from asthma and struggled repeatedly to speak in the toxic outdoor air, taking long puffs from his inhaler. In the past two weeks he has been to hospital three times.

“I can feel burning sensations in my eyes, lungs and belly. I know this toxic air is killing my lungs further, but I cannot stay home. My earnings are hand-to-mouth,” he said, dusting his books with shaking hands.

“It is a fight to stay alive no matter how little you can,” he added. “People have to breathe even if they know here in Delhi they are breathing poison.”

On Monday the supreme court reprimanded the Delhi government for being slow to introduce emergency pollution measures. Yet, as has become the norm in an annual blame game, the Delhi state government, ruled by the Aam Admi party, blamed the pollution on neighbouring states, governed by the Bharatiya Janata party, which also controls the central government.

Atishi, the Delhi chief minister who goes by a single name, said: “The central government needs to stop playing politics and take decisive action.”

Those who can afford it have been fleeing the city. Aarti Sharma, 41, who works as a tech professional, took a flight to the southern state of Kerala on Monday for what she described as an “escape from Delhi’s pollution”.

“Living in Delhi at this time is absolutely unbearable,” Sharma said. “The pollution is so terrible that I’ve had a continuous headache for the past week. I just couldn’t stay for another day. I feel fortunate that I can afford to do this. The majority of people around us have no options.”

As Delhi’s air turned dangerously toxic, a group of experts gathered on Monday for a press conference at Cop29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, to highlight the urgency of India’s air pollution situation.

Aarti Khosla, the director of Climate Trends, said: “We are all gathered here to talk about bigger issues that affect our climate and countries are dragging their feet so much when the lives and health of millions are at risk. We need to be urgently responsive to the realities of climate change that the world is facing today.”

Aakash Hassan contributed reporting

Canadian authorities foiled an alleged Iranian plot to assassinate a former justice minister and rights activist who has been a strong critic of Tehran, the Globe and Mail newspaper has reported.

Irwin Cotler, 84, was justice minister and attorney general from 2003 to 2006. He retired from politics in 2015.

According to the Globe and Mail, he was informed last month that he faced an imminent threat of assassination from Iranian agents.

Authorities tracked two suspects in the plot, the paper said, citing unnamed sources.

Cotler’s name reportedly also came up in an FBI investigation of a 2022 Iranian murder-for-hire operation in New York that targeted the American human rights activist Masih Alinejad.

Canadian officials did not immediately comment on the report.

Cotler had already been receiving police protection over the past year, over security concerns linked to his global advocacy to have Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps listed as a terrorist entity.

Ottawa, which severed diplomatic ties with Iran more than a decade ago, listed the Revolutionary Guard as a banned terror group in June.

As a lawyer, Cotler also represented Iranian political prisoners and dissidents. He is also international chair of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights and a strong backer of Israel.

His daughter, Michal Cotler-Wunsh, is an Israeli politician and diplomat who previously served as a member of Israel’s parliament.

Canadian authorities foiled an alleged Iranian plot to assassinate a former justice minister and rights activist who has been a strong critic of Tehran, the Globe and Mail newspaper has reported.

Irwin Cotler, 84, was justice minister and attorney general from 2003 to 2006. He retired from politics in 2015.

According to the Globe and Mail, he was informed last month that he faced an imminent threat of assassination from Iranian agents.

Authorities tracked two suspects in the plot, the paper said, citing unnamed sources.

Cotler’s name reportedly also came up in an FBI investigation of a 2022 Iranian murder-for-hire operation in New York that targeted the American human rights activist Masih Alinejad.

Canadian officials did not immediately comment on the report.

Cotler had already been receiving police protection over the past year, over security concerns linked to his global advocacy to have Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps listed as a terrorist entity.

Ottawa, which severed diplomatic ties with Iran more than a decade ago, listed the Revolutionary Guard as a banned terror group in June.

As a lawyer, Cotler also represented Iranian political prisoners and dissidents. He is also international chair of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights and a strong backer of Israel.

His daughter, Michal Cotler-Wunsh, is an Israeli politician and diplomat who previously served as a member of Israel’s parliament.

Beauty queen Chidimma Adetshina’s second place in this year’s Miss Universe competition was not only an occasion for Nigerians to rejoice at their highest ever placing in the global pageant, but an opportunity to celebrate a victory over their continental rivals South Africa.

Adetshina came first runner-up to Denmark’s Victoria Kjær Theilvig and was also crowned Miss Universe Africa and Oceania in Mexico on Saturday night.

She had originally entered Miss South Africa, but withdrew from the competition in August saying she needed to protect herself and her family, after her mother was alleged to have stolen the identity of a South African woman. The matter is being investigated by South African police.

The 23-year-old law student had faced weeks of abuse from South Africans who questioned her citizenship due to her Nigerian name and father. She was then invited to compete in and won Miss Universe Nigeria.

“To Nigeria: thank you is not enough for all the support you’ve shown. You picked me up when I was at my lowest,” Adetshina said in a statement posted to her Instagram Stories. “To Africa: thank you for showing your love and support. As much as I represent Nigeria, Africa fought for me.”

“You have made us all proud. You’re a star,” Ben Murray-Bruce, the founder of Silverbird Group, which owns the Miss Universe Nigeria pageant, posted on social media.

Some Nigerians also took the opportunity to rib South Africans on social media. Rinu Oduala, a human rights activist and social media personality, posted on X: “South Africans did not want to be represented by Chidimma Adetshina. But guess who’s now Miss Universe Africa representing the entire continent?”

South Africans and Nigerians often engage in standoffs over whose country is the “giant of Africa”. South Africans were triumphant when pop star Tyla won the inaugural Grammy for best African music performance for her breakout song Water in February, winning over the other nominees all from Nigeria.

Just three days later, Nigeria beat South Africa in a penalty shootout in the semi-final of the Africa Cup of Nations football tournament, prompting Nigerians to flood social media with videos and memes claiming the South African music genre amapiano was now “ourpiano”.

The rivalry has sometimes turned violent, with South Africa’s government having to dispatch a special envoy to Nigeria to apologise, after xenophobic attacks in 2019 in Johannesburg that targeted Nigerian-owned businesses.

Meanwhile, it is unclear if Adetshina will be able to return to South Africa, where she was born and thought she had dual citizenship with Nigeria. Last month, the South African home affairs department’s director general reportedly told parliament that Adetshina and her mother’s identity documents had been cancelled.

A series of X-rays showing a piece of shrapnel buried deep inside a 20-month-old girl’s head and a bullet embedded in an 18-month-old boy’s chest are among images released by medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) revealing the impact of the war in Sudan on children.

The two babies were treated at Khartoum’s Bashair teaching hospital.

“Cases like this are common,” said Dr Moeen*, who works with MSF at the hospital. “Thankfully, that little girl survived. Others are not so lucky.”

Bashair teaching hospital treated 314 children under the age of 15 for wounds from gunshots or blasts this year – about one in six of all war-wounded patients received at the hospital.

The baby girl was one of 12 children rushed to the hospital after an explosion at a nearby market. But the hospital’s capacity is limited – severe burns cannot be treated, and surgeries are stalled because the lack of access provided by the warring sides means supplies have not been received for more than a year.

The city has been carved up by the Sudanese Armed Forces and the rival Rapid Support Forces paramilitary since April 2023, with civilians unable to cross frontlines to seek out food, medicine or healthcare – or simply escape the gunfire and explosions.

This meant that when an 18-month-old boy named Riyad arrived with a 50% chance of survival after being hit by a bullet while sleeping, the medical team had to fight for hours to stabilise him but could not remove the bullet from his chest.

Mohammed al-Hammadi, MSF’s field coordinator at the hospital, said that in most cases, patients like Riyad cannot be evacuated because of the divisions in the city.

“The fighting has disrupted daily life, making movement between states, crossing frontline areas, extremely dangerous. There is a constant threat of violence, and continuous airstrikes in the city,” said Hammadi. “Movement within the city and across conflict lines is often hindered by the lack of permits, and many patients face significant delays or are unable to be evacuated to other facilities.”

These barriers have resulted in “invisible” deaths, caused by preventable disease and starvation, according to Dr Maysoon Dahab, co-director of the Sudan Research Group at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM).

A study led by Dahab estimated there were more than 61,000 deaths in Khartoum State in the first 14 months of the conflict – a 50% rise compared with before the war. It also put the number of violent deaths in the capital at 26,000, which is higher than the 20,000 recorded by civilian casualty monitor ACLED for the entire country.

Dahab said that alongside the direct violence wrought by the war, people were prevented from finding food and accessing medicine, while the primary healthcare system needed to detect, diagnose and treat disease had been shut down. The halting of vaccination programmes also posed a long-term threat.

She said the impact of disease and starvation has become larger as the war has dragged on.

“You can be hungry for one day, but hungry for three or four days, what does that do? You are hungry, you get sick, [when] you’re sick, you can’t seek food. It’s a vicious cycle,” said Dahab. “There is, in all wars, an accumulation of vulnerability that happens over time that touches upon the lives not only of those people who are facing the guns but even facing people who are well, far away and in relative safety, because they can’t get food, because they can’t get water, because the banking system has collapsed.”

MSF said it found 1,500 women and children who were severely malnourished from the 4,186 it screened between 19 October and 8 November 2024.

Dahab said the LSHTM report shows how the war is causing deaths that could be prevented, but the lack of aid and intervention meant Sudanese civilians were suffering.

“People are dying from preventable causes because there is a war, and wars will do that,” she said. “To continue to justify a war and not to stand and say ‘it has to stop’ – then you advocate for all of that happening.”

*Name has been changed to protect identity

Keir Starmer has raised concerns with the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, about sanctions on British MPs and the deterioration of the British citizen and Hong Kong democracy activist Jimmy Lai, in a meeting at the G20 summit in Rio.

The UK prime minister promised a “strong UK-China relationship” and said the pair had agreed there should be no more “surprises” between the two countries. He said he was keen for a full meeting with his Chinese counterpart, Li Qiang, in Beijing or London as soon as possible.

Chinese officials bundled British journalists out of the meeting when Starmer raised the plight of Lai, who is being held in Hong Kong.

In the first encounter between the Chinese president and a British prime minister for six years, Starmer also raised the issue of human rights, including sanctions on a number of Conservative MPs such as the former security minister Tom Tugendhat, the Commons deputy speaker, Nus Ghani, and the former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith.

Starmer said the pair had acknowledged they wanted “relations to be consistent, durable, respectful and, as we have agreed, avoid surprises where possible”.

“A strong UK-China relationship is important for both of our countries and for the broader international community,” he said at the top of the meeting. “The UK will be a predictable, consistent, sovereign actor committed to the rule of law.”

He proposed a full bilateral meeting with Premier Li in Beijing or London, and for the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, to meet her counterpart, He Lifeng, which is expected to take place in Beijing in January.

“I’m keen that my chancellor should meet with Vice-Premier He for the upcoming economic financial dialogue early next year to explore more investment projects and a more level playing field to help our businesses,” Starmer said.

“I’m very pleased that my foreign secretary and foreign minister Wang met recently to discuss respective concerns including on human rights and parliamentary sanctions, Taiwan, the South China Sea and our shared interest in Hong Kong. We are concerned by reports of Jimmy Lai’s deterioration.”

In a marked change of tone from previous years, Xi said Starmer was “fixing the foundations” of the UK economy, echoing the prime minister’s own slogan. He said the pair would “break new ground” in the relationship.

“The world has entered a new period marked by turbulence and transformation,” Xi said in the meeting. “The new UK government is working to fix the foundations of the economy and rebuild Britain and has set the vision of Britain reconnected. And China is further deepening reform across the board to advance Chinese modernisation.”

Tugendhat and the former foreign affairs committee chair Alicia Kearns, both prominent Tory critics of China, had called on Starmer to use the meeting to raise with Xi the plight of UK nationals including Lai, the pro-democracy media owner detained and tried in Hong Kong.

No British prime minister has met Xi since Theresa May visited Beijing in 2018 in the midst of a trade push during Brexit negotiations, though Boris Johnson spoke to the Chinese president during the pandemic.

Since then, relations have significantly cooled because of cyber threats, a human rights crackdown in Hong Kong and the sanctions against MPs.

Rishi Sunak attempted to renew relations at the G20 summit in 2022 where a bilateral meeting was planned but it was cancelled owing to events in Ukraine. Conservative leaders have toyed with designating China as a threat to British security – stronger language than the US had used.

The foreign secretary, David Lammy, visited China last month in the first signal that the new Labour government saw a renewal of better ties as a diplomatic priority. Reeves, who is understood to be taking a leading role in pursuing new economic opportunities with China, will head to Beijing in January.

Starmer and Reeves have been pursuing a thawing of relations with the world’s second largest economy on pragmatic grounds, suggesting that the UK cannot achieve its growth ambitions without better terms with China.

A German architecture foundation has rescinded one of its €10,000 (£8,360) awards from a British artist over an open letter he signed promising a boycott of Israeli cultural institutions, citing the German government’s controversial antisemitism resolution as a factor behind the decision.

The Athens-based artist and author James Bridle was announced in June as the recipient of the Schelling Architecture Foundation’s theory prize, awarded every two years, for his “outstanding contributions to architectural theory”.

But on Sunday, days before this Wednesday’s awards ceremony in the south-western city of Karlsruhe, Bridle was informed in an email that the foundation’s committee had decided unanimously not to award him the prize because he was among the several thousand authors who signed an open letter calling for a boycott of Israeli cultural institutions.

Signatories of the pledge, published on LitHub at the end of October, stated that “we will not work with Israeli cultural institutions that are complicit or have remained silent observers of the overwhelming oppression of Palestinians”.

In a press release, the foundation said Bridle’s signature on the letter was “in direct contradiction” to responsibilities from the “awareness of Germany’s national history”.

The foundation’s prizes, which have been awarded since 1992, are named after the late German architect Erich Schilling. On its website, the foundation says Schilling was a member of the NSDAP, the German Nazi party, between 1937 and 1945, and worked on the construction of the offices of the publishing house of the party newspaper Der Führer.

“We respect the right to express political views, especially since the foundation does not accuse James Bridle of antisemitism,” its statement said. “But the foundation can neither support nor be associated with a call for cultural isolation of Israel.”

In its email to Bridle, which has been seen by the Guardian, the foundation further linked its decision to a cross-party resolution passed by the German parliament earlier this month.

“The German Bundestag has just passed a resolution on the protection of Jewish life, which points the way forward for state institutions and is relevant to society as a whole,” the foundation said in its email.

The resolution, entitled Never Again is Now: Protecting, Preserving and Strengthening Jewish Life in Germany, was first proposed after the Hamas terror attack on 7 October 2023. International NGOs including Amnesty International and Israeli Jewish groups campaigning for a two-state solution have criticised its text for eliding antisemitism and criticism of Israel’s human rights record, predicting it would have a chilling effect on freedom of expression.

The resolution says “the Bundestag reaffirms its decision to ensure that no organisations or projects that spread antisemitism, question Israel’s right to exist, call for a boycott of Israel or actively support the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement receive financial support”.

Bridle told the Guardian: “Although they are clearly not prepared to state it outright, the foundation’s decision is an accusation of antisemitism, which is abhorrent. It is particularly so given the organisation’s own history.”

Bridle said there was an irony in that the Schilling jury cited as particularly deserving of recognition his 2022 bookd Ways of Being, which contained a discussion of Israel’s “apartheid wall” in the occupied West Bank, and “of the relationship between genocide and ecocide”.

A spokesperson for the foundation said the other nominees for the prize had been informed of their decision, “and we have to be prepared for there to be further reactions”.