The international criminal court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants for the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, the country’s former defence minister Yoav Gallant and the Hamas military leader Mohammed Deif for alleged war crimes relating to the Gaza war.

It is the first time that leaders of a democracy and western-aligned state have been charged by the court, in the most momentous decision of its 22-year history.

Netanyahu and Gallant are now at risk of arrest if they travel to any of the 124 countries that signed the Rome statute establishing the court. Israel claims to have killed Deif in an airstrike in July, but the court’s pre-trial chamber said it would “continue to gather information” to confirm his death.

The chamber ruled that there were reasonable grounds to believe Netanyahu and Gallant bore criminal responsibility as co-perpetrators for “the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts”.

The three-judge panel also said it had found reasonable grounds to believe Deif was responsible for crimes against humanity and war crimes including murder, torture, rape and hostage taking relating to the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 in which fighters killed more than 1,200 people, mostly Israeli civilians, and kidnapped 250.

Netanyahu’s office denounced the chamber’s decision as “antisemitic”.

“Israel utterly rejects the false and absurd charges of the international criminal court, a biased and discriminatory political body,” the office said in a statement, adding that “no war is more just than the war Israel has been waging in Gaza”.

The statement pointed to an investigation into accusations of sexual misconduct against the ICC prosecutor Karim Khan who sought the charges against the three men in May. Khan, 54, has denied the allegations and said he will cooperate with the investigation.

The US has previously welcomed ICC war crimes warrants against Vladimir Putin and other Russian officials for atrocities committed in Ukraine, while denouncing the court’s pursuit of Netanyahu and Gallant, a mixed stance which has exposed the Biden administration to accusations of double standards from many UN members, particularly from the global south.

Netanyahu can expect more resounding support from the incoming Donald Trump administration. During his first term, in 2020, Trump imposed US sanctions on the ICC, aimed at court officials and their families. The then secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, made clear the sanctions were imposed because the ICC had begun investigating the actions of the US and its allies in Afghanistan, as well as Israeli military operations in the occupied territories.

The panel said the full version of the warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant were secret “in order to protect witnesses and to safeguard the conduct of the investigations”, but the judges released much of their reasoning. This focused on the obstruction of the supply of humanitarian aid into Gaza, which it judged to be deliberate.

“The chamber considered that there are reasonable grounds to believe that both individuals intentionally and knowingly deprived the civilian population in Gaza of objects indispensable to their survival, including food, water, and medicine and medical supplies, as well as fuel and electricity,” the written ruling said..

The warrants were broadly welcomed by human rights groups. Balkees Jarrah, an associate international justice director at Human Rights Watch, said they would “break through the perception” that certain individuals were beyond the reach of the law.

“Whether the ICC can effectively deliver on its mandate will depend on governments’ willingness to support justice no matter where abuses are committed and by whom,” Jarrah said. “These warrants should finally push the international community to address atrocities and secure justice for all victims in Palestine and Israel.”

Israel has denied committing war crimes in Gaza and has rejected the jurisdiction of the court. However, the pretrial chamber noted that Palestine had been recognised as a member of the court in 2015, so the ICC did not require Israeli approval to investigate crimes on Palestinian territory.

The chamber also rejected an Israeli appeal for the warrants to be deferred, saying the Israeli authorities were informed of an earlier ICC investigation in 2021, and at that time, “Israel elected not to pursue any request for deferral of the investigation”.

An ICC statement said of Deif that “the chamber found reasonable grounds to believe that Mr Deif … is responsible for the crimes against humanity of murder, extermination, torture and rape and other form of sexual violence, as well as the war crimes of murder, cruel treatment, torture, taking hostages, outrages upon personal dignity, and rape and other forms of sexual violence”.

Khan had sought warrants for two other senior Hamas figures, Yahya Sinwar and Ismail Haniyeh, but they were killed in the conflict. Israel’s claim to have killed Deif has been neither confirmed nor denied by Hamas.

Benny Gantz, a retired general and political rival to Netanyahu, condemned the ICC’s decision, saying it showed “moral blindness” and was a “shameful stain of historic proportion that will never be forgotten”. Yair Lapid, another opposition leader, called it a “prize for terror”.

The warrants have been issued at a sensitive moment for Khan, in the face of an investigation of claims of sexual misconduct. The inquiry will examine the allegations against the prosecutor, which, the Guardian reported last month, include claims of unwanted sexual touching and “abuse” over an extended period, as well as coercive behaviour and abuse of authority. The alleged victim, an ICC lawyer in her 30s, has previously declined to comment.

The arrest warrants could increase the external pressure on Netanyahu’s government as the US seeks to broker a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, but could well strengthen the prime minister’s political position in Israel in the short term, as most Israelis reject the ICC’s jurisdiction, regarding it as interference in their country’s internal affairs.

Joe Biden has said he does not believe Netanyahu is doing enough to secure a ceasefire, after the Israeli leader vowed not to compromise over Israeli control over strategic territory inside Gaza. Netanyahu has accused Hamas of failing to negotiate in good faith.

Israeli leaders from across the political spectrum united to condemn the decision by a three-judge panel of the international criminal court to issue arrest warrants for the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the former defence minister Yoav Gallant.

Netanyahu’s office described the warrants as “an antisemitic decision … equivalent to the modern Dreyfus trial”, referring to the 1894 trial of a French artillery captain of Jewish descent that has become one of the most prominent examples of antisemitism.

Netanyahu added: “Israel rejects with disgust the absurd and false actions and charges against it by the international criminal court, which is a biased and discriminatory political body.”

Under the Rome statute that established the ICC, the court was set up to be an independent body that stands apart from international politics.

The Israeli statement said: “There is nothing more just than the war that Israel has been waging in Gaza since the seventh of October 2023, after the terrorist organisation Hamas launched a murderous attack against it, and carried out the greatest massacre committed against the Jewish people since the Holocaust.

“The decision was made by a corrupt chief prosecutor trying to save his own skin from the serious charges against him for sexual harassment, and by biased judges motivated by antisemitic hatred of Israel,” it continued, referring to claims made against the chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, which Khan has denied.

Benny Gantz, a former member of Netanyahu’s war cabinet, in a post on X described the ICC move as “moral blindness and [a] shameful stain of historic proportion that will never be forgotten”.

The Israeli president, Isaac Herzog, said: “This is a dark day for justice. A dark day for humanity. Taken in bad faith, the outrageous decision at the ICC has turned universal justice into a universal laughing stock. It ignores the plight of the 101 Israeli hostages held in brutal captivity by Hamas in Gaza.”

ICC judges said reasonable grounds existed to believe that Netanyahu and Gallant had committed the war crime of using starvation as a method of warfare, and the crimes against humanity of murder and persecution.

Most outspoken in Israel was the far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who said Israel should annex the West Bank in response to the ICC’s issuance of the arrest warrants.

“The response to the arrest warrants: applying sovereignty over all areas of Judea and Samaria [the West Bank], Jewish settlement throughout the entire land,” he said. Describing the warrants as “an unprecedented disgrace”, Ben-Gvir said the ICC “once again demonstrates that it is antisemitic from beginning to end”.

Israel’s foreign minister, Gideon Sa’ar, said: “This is a black moment for the international criminal court, in which it lost all legitimacy for its existence and activity. In fact, this is an attack on Israel’s right to defend itself. This attack is directed against the most attacked and threatened country in the world, which is also the only country that other countries in the region openly call for and work to destroy.”

The opposition leader, Yair Lapid, described the warrants as a “reward for terrorism”. “Israel is defending itself against terrorist organisations that attacked, murdered and raped our citizens. These arrest warrants are a reward for terrorism,” he said.

The chair of the Yisrael Beiteinu party, Avigdor Lieberman, who has previously served as defence minister under Netanyahu, said the move provided “further proof of the double standards and hypocrisy of the international community and the UN institutions”.

He said: “The state of Israel will not apologise for protecting its citizens and is committed to continuing to fight terrorism without compromise.”

The warrants were issued on a day when Netanyahu was meeting the US special envoy Amos Hochstein in Jerusalem to discuss recent renewed efforts to secure a ceasefire with Hezbollah. Hochstein has been in Beirut this week to advance an agreement to halt fighting between Israel and Hezbollah.

Describing the response by Israeli politicians to the ICC decision, Dahlia Scheindlin, a political scientist, told the Guardian: “Everything to do with international institutions tends to unite the opposition and coalition. There is a widespread conviction in Israel that international institutions are antisemitic and hypocritical.

“It is early, but you would expect a show of unity, even if Netanyahu is not popular because Israelis see it as an attack on the state. It has been a sword of Damocles hanging all these months. The court had to do it or lose credibility.”

Benjamin Netanyahu has become the first leader of a “western-style” democracy to have an arrest warrant issued in his name by the international criminal court. The court has also issued warrants for his former defence secretary, Yoav Gallant, and the Hamas military leader, Mohammed Deif.

Here the Guardian explains why the warrants have been issued and what they mean in practice.

Ukraine’s air force has said Russia fired an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) at the city of Dnipro, which if confirmed would be the first time the long-range weapon has been used in any armed conflict.

The claim was not immediately accepted by others, however. ABC News reported, citing western officials, that this was an exaggeration and that the weapon was in fact a shorter-range ballistic missile, similar to the types used repeatedly by Russia against Ukraine during the war.

Nine projectiles were launched at enterprises and critical infrastructure in Dnipro between 5am and 7am local time from the Astrakhan region of Russia, the air forces said, meaning that, if confirmed, the missile probably travelled about 500 miles (800km) to reach its target.

The missile was said to have hit “without consequences” the air force said, though it added that information about victims had yet to be received. Six of the nine projectiles were destroyed by air defences, the air force said in a morning update.

John Healey, the UK defence secretary, told MPs he was aware of media reports that Russia had used “a new ballistic missile into Ukraine” and he described them as unconfirmed.

Video said to be of the incident from a distance showed the ground being struck in multiple flashes.

Russian ICBMs can have ranges of more than 6,200 miles, in theory enough to reach the US east coast from Astrakhan, and are capable of being nuclear armed, suggesting that if the use of the weapon is confirmed, it was a signal from Moscow.

Russia has not officially acknowledged the use of an ICBM, and its defence ministry omitted any reference to it in its daily briefing.

The Russian foreign ministry spokesperson, Maria Zakharova, appeared to inadvertently reveal some details about the early morning strike during a live press briefing on Thursday.

A hot mic captured Zakharova’s phone conversation with an unidentified caller who instructed her not to comment “on the ballistic missile strike”. Notably, the caller did not use the word intercontinental.

In the brief telephone exchange – footage of which remains available on the foreign ministry’s official account on X – the caller appears to disclose that the strike targeted the Yuzhmash military facility in Dnipro.

An agreement between the US and Russia signed in 2000 provides in theory that each side should notify the other at least 24 hours ahead of any planned missile launch in excess of 500km. It is unclear if any such notification was made.

Pavel Podvig, an expert on Russian nuclear weapons, said there was not yet enough information to determine whether the weapon used was an ICBM or not. “One must be sceptical and cautious,” he said in a post on Bluesky.

Using an ICBM would not make military sense because of their low accuracy and high cost, he added, though he wrote: “This kind of a strike might have a value as a signal”.

ICBMs were developed in the 1950s, at the height of the cold war, as a way for the Soviet Union and the US to threaten each other’s populations directly with nuclear weapons. US congressional research estimates that Russia has 326 ICBMs in its nuclear arsenal, but no country had fired one in a war before.

This week the US and the UK gave permission for Atacms and Storm Shadow missiles to be used against targets in or near the Kursk region of Russia. The Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said this week that Moscow would respond “accordingly” in response to the initial permission to use Atacms.

On Wednesday the US suddenly announced that its embassy in Kyiv would be closed after receiving warning of a “potential significant air attack” somewhere in Ukraine. It is not clear what prompted the warning and the embassy was due to reopen, but the US closely monitors Russian ICBM activity given the homeland threat.

Ukraine did not identify the type of ICBM it believed had been fired, and there was no immediate corroborating detail, though the trajectory of the missile would be apparent to Ukraine’s air defences and its western allies.

Initial reports from Dnipro gave only a limited picture of any impact on civilians. Serhiy Lysak, the head of the civil military administration, reported that an industrial enterprise had been damaged and that there were two fires in the city.

A woman told police that she was sexually assaulted in 2017 by Pete Hegseth after he took her phone, blocked the door to a California hotel room and refused to let her leave, according to a detailed investigative report made public late on Wednesday.

Hegseth, a Fox News personality and Donald Trump’s nominee to be defense secretary, told police at the time that the encounter had been consensual and denied any wrongdoing, the report said.

News of the allegations surfaced last week when local officials released a brief statement confirming that a woman had accused Hegseth of sexual assault in October 2017 after he had spoken at a Republican women’s event in Monterey.

Hegseth’s lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment early on Thursday. He has said Hegseth paid the woman in 2023 to head off the threat of a baseless lawsuit.

The 22-page police report was released in response to a public records request and offers the first detailed account of what the woman alleged to have transpired – one that is at odds with Hegseth’s version of events. The report cited police interviews with the alleged victim, a nurse who treated her, a hotel staffer, another woman at the event and Hegseth.

The woman’s name was not released, and the Associated Press does not typically name people who say they have been sexually assaulted.

A spokesperson for the Trump transition said early on Thursday that the “report corroborates what Mr Hegseth’s attorneys have said all along: the incident was fully investigated and no charges were filed because police found the allegations to be false.”

The report does not say that police found the allegations were false. Police recommended the case report be forwarded to the Monterey county district attorney’s office for review.

Investigators were first alerted to the alleged assault, the report said, by a nurse who called them after a patient requested a sexual assault exam. The patient told medical personnel she believed she was assaulted five days earlier but could not remember much about what had happened. She reported something may have been slipped into her drink before ending up in the hotel room where she said the assault occurred.

Police collected the unwashed dress and underwear she had worn that night, the report said.

The woman’s partner, who was staying at the hotel with her, told police that he was worried about her that night after she did not come back to their room. At 2am, he went to the hotel bar, but she was not there. She made it back a few hours later, apologizing that she “must have fallen asleep”. A few days later, she told him she had been sexually assaulted.

The woman, who helped organize the California Federation of Republican women gathering at which Hegseth spoke, told police that she had witnessed the TV anchor acting inappropriately throughout the night and saw him stroking multiple women’s thighs. She texted a friend that Hegseth was giving off a “creeper” vibe, according to the report.

After the event, the woman and others attended an afterparty in a hotel suite where she said she confronted Hegseth, telling him that she “did not appreciate how he treated women”, the report states.

A group of people, including Hegseth and the woman, decamped for the hotel’s bar. That’s when “things got fuzzy”, the woman told police.

She remembered having a drink at the bar with Hegseth and others, the police report states. She also told police that she argued with Hegseth near the hotel pool, an account that is supported by a hotel staffer who was sent to handle the disturbance and spoke to police, according to the report.

Soon, she told police, she was inside a hotel room with Hegseth, who took her phone and blocked the door with his body so that she could not leave, according to the report. She also told police she remembered “saying ‘no’ a lot”, the report said.

Her next memory was lying on a couch or bed with Hegseth hovering over her bare-chested, his dog tags dangling over her, the report states. Hegseth served in the national guard, rising to the rank of major.

After Hegseth finished, she recalled him asking if she was “OK”, the report states. She told police she did not recall how she got back to her own hotel room and had since suffered from nightmares and memory loss.

At the time of the alleged assault in 2017, Hegseth, now 44, was going through a divorce with his second wife, with whom he has three children. She filed for divorce after he had a child with a Fox News producer who is now his wife, according to court records and social media posts by Hegseth. His first marriage ended in 2009, also after infidelity by Hegseth, according to court records.

Hegseth said he attended an after party and drank beer but did not consume liquor, and acknowledged being “buzzed” but not drunk.

He said he met the woman at the hotel bar, and she led him by the arm back to his hotel room, which surprised him because he initially had no intention of having sex with her, the report said.

Hegseth told investigators that the sexual encounter that followed was consensual, adding that he explicitly asked more than once if she was comfortable. Hegseth said in the morning the woman “showed early signs of regret”, and he assured her that he would not tell anyone about the encounter.

Hegseth’s attorney said a payment was made to the woman as part of a confidential settlement a few years after the police investigation because Hegseth was concerned that she was prepared to file a lawsuit that he feared could have resulted in him being fired from Fox News, where he was a popular host. The attorney would not reveal the amount of the payment.

The scandal-plagued former Florida congressman Matt Gaetz reportedly told senators skeptical of his suitability to be attorney general that he would not seek retribution against Donald Trump’s enemies – in his first week on the job, at least.

“Look, I’m not going to go there and indict [the former Wyoming congresswoman] Liz Cheney, have storm troopers bust through the studio door at MSNBC, and arrest [the retired public health official] Anthony Fauci in my first week,” Gaetz told senators, according to the Bulwark, a never-Trump conservative site.

Some senators, the Bulwark said, detected an “ominous disclaimer”. The site also said Gaetz added that he wanted to “break the cycle of weaponizing” the Department of Justice – a reference to Republican claims that federal charges against Trump over election subversion and retention of classified information were politically driven.

Meeting senators on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, Gaetz was accompanied by JD Vance, the vice-president-elect and junior senator from Ohio. Confirmation hearings for Gaetz would be expected in the new year. Attention is therefore focused on Republicans who might be less vulnerable than most to threats from Trump, and thereby might seek to block Gaetz either before or during hearings. Chief among them are Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, relative moderates, and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the former leader heading for retirement and widely seen as an institutionalist at least to a degree disdainful of Trump.

John Cornyn of Texas, a senior member of the judiciary committee, made headlines by predicting confirmation hearings for Gaetz would be like “Kavanaugh on steroids” – a reference to hearings in 2018 in which Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s second supreme court pick, angrily denied sexual assault allegations.

Gaetz, 42, is a hard-right Trump loyalist and dedicated controversialist with scant legal experience. Trump nominated Gaetz to run the justice department even though it recently investigated him over allegations that he paid for sex with women under the age of consent.

While that investigation was dropped and Gaetz vehemently denies wrongdoing, Washington remains abuzz over a House ethics committee report on the matter – and other controversies – which was due to be released before Gaetz resigned to seek confirmation as attorney general.

On Wednesday, the House ethics committee locked on partisan lines, 5-5, in a vote on whether the Gaetz report should be released. Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker, has said he opposes such a move. Sean Casten, an Illinois Democrat, has moved for a vote to secure publication.

“Ethics has their power to get their act together five minutes ago,” Casten told the Washington Post, adding: “What I know at this point is that we cannot trust the ethics committee to do the ethically correct thing.”

There is precedent for the release of an ethics report about a former House member: in 1987 and in the case of William H Boner, a Tennessee Republican accused of corruption.

Casten’s resolution cannot be resolved until after the Thanksgiving recess but Gaetz seems guaranteed to remain in the headlines. As reported by Politico, Democrats on the Senate judiciary committee have requested FBI files from the justice department investigation of Gaetz. Outside Congress, an attorney said this week Gaetz paid his client for sex in 2017, when the client was 17 years old and in a state, Florida, where prostitution is illegal.

Joel Leppard, who represents two women who say Gaetz paid them for sex, told NBC: “They want the American people to know the truth and that they are speaking the truth.” The second woman who says she was paid to have sex with Gaetz was 19 at the time, Leppard said.

On Wednesday, ABC News first reported that the ethics committee obtained records showing Gaetz paid more than $10,000 to two women who testified before the panel, with some of the payments being for sex.

In response, a Trump spokesperson pointed to the dropped justice department investigation and said: “These leaks are meant to undermine the mandate from the people to reform the justice department.”

Gaetz continues to deny wrongdoing. On Thursday, the Bulwark said Mike Lee of Utah, a Senate judiciary committee member and Trump ally who was touted for attorney general himself, said Gaetz told him: “There’s no there, there.”

But allegations range further. Last June, the House ethics committee said it was investigating claims that Gaetz “may have engaged in sexual misconduct and/or illicit drug use, shared inappropriate images or videos on the House floor, misused state identification records, converted campaign funds to personal use, and/or accepted a bribe, improper gratuity, or impermissible gift”.

Parts of that statement chimed with a now famous quote from Markwayne Mullin, a former House Republican turned Oklahoma senator who told CNN last October: “There’s a reason why no one in the [Republican] conference came and defended [Gaetz], because we had all seen the videos he was showing on the House floor … of the girls that he had slept with. He’d brag about how he would crush ED [erectile dysfunction] medicine and chase it with an energy drink so he could go all night.

“This is obviously before he got married.”

A star cloaked in an egg-shaped cocoon has been revealed in the first detailed images of a star beyond the Milky Way.

Until now, stars in other galaxies have been visible as little more than points of light, even when observed using telescopes. Now, thanks to the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI), astronomers have captured the first zoomed-in image.

“We discovered an egg-shaped cocoon closely surrounding the star,” said Dr Keiichi Ohnaka, an astrophysicist at the Andrés Bello National University in Chile. “We are excited because this may be related to the drastic ejection of material from the dying star before a supernova explosion.”

The star, called WOH G64, is located 160,000 light years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of the small galaxies that orbits the Milky Way. It is thought to be the largest star in the galaxy, classified as a red supergiant and about 2,000 times the mass of the sun. Even so, observing the behemoth star in detail still required a resolution equivalent to seeing an astronaut walking on the moon from Earth.

“We’re not able to do that with normal telescopes,” said Dr Jacco van Loon, a reader in astrophysics at Keele University and a co-author of a paper outlining the observations published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

The images reveal the star is undergoing a dramatic transition and suggest that in the past decade or so it has blown off its outer layer, leaving it surrounded by an egg-shaped cocoon of gas and dust. The elongated shape could be explained by either the star’s rotation or by the influence of a yet-undiscovered companion star.

This, the scientists say, could signal the star entering a final stage of life before it becomes a supernova. “Massive stars explode with an energy equivalent to the Sun shining for all of its 10bn years of life,” said Van Loon. “People have seen these supernova explosions, and astronomers have found some of the stars that exploded in older images. But we have never seen a star change in a way that signals its imminent death.”

There is evidence that some stars appear to throw off their outer layers just years or decades before reaching their demise in a supernova. But seeing things unfold in real time is not guaranteed. “It might still be tens of thousands of years,” said Van Loon. “For an astronomer that’s imminent because stars live millions or billions of years.”

The son of Jean McConville, a woman who was murdered and buried in secret by the IRA, has condemned a new Disney series on her death as “horrendous” and “cruel”.

The series is based on the acclaimed book Say Nothing, about McConville and the wider role of the IRA during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, written by the US journalist Patrick Radden Keefe.

She was abducted from her home in Belfast in 1972 and her disappearance remained a mystery until 2003, when her remains were found on a beach in County Louth, south of the Northern Irish border.

Michael McConville, who was a child when his mother was taken away, said her death was “not entertainment” but hurtful reality for him and his nine siblings for the past 52 years.

“The portrayal of the execution and secret burial of my mother is horrendous and unless you have lived through it, you will never understand just how cruel it is,” he said.

“Everyone knows the story of Jean McConville; even Hillary Clinton, who I met a few years ago, knew my mother’s story. And yet here is another telling of it that I and my family have to endure,” he said.

Radden Keefe told BBC News NI that he had met representatives from families whose stories were featured in the series to “make it clear that we were going to approach this story with a great deal of sensitivity”.

The killing of McConville has been the subject of extensive reporting since she was taken from her home in the Divis flats on the Falls Road, suspected of being an informer simply because she was a Protestant who married a Catholic.

One of her daughters spoke out for the first time in 2013 and told how she remembered hearing her mother screaming as she was taken away by a number of men and bundled into a van.

The IRA always denied it had anything to do with her disappearance but admitted its involvement after the Good Friday agreement and the establishment in 1999 of the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains.

A chilling 2018 documentary, I, Dolours, came close to explaining who had ordered McConville’s death, with the use of a posthumous interview by the veteran journalist Ed Moloney and the now-deceased IRA militant Dolours Price, who linked her disappearance to the former Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams.

Price told Moloney, on condition that the tapes would be released only after her death, how she and two other IRA members were involved directly in the murder.

Part of a secret unit of the IRA known as the “unknowns”, she detailed how she and two others had been ordered across the border to kill McConville but stopped short of revealing who had actually pulled the trigger.

Adams has strenuously denied he had anything to do with the murder and has consistently denied he was a member of the IRA. Last week, his solicitors issued a statement saying he had “no involvement in the killing or burial of any of those secretly buried by the IRA”.

The Disney series includes a disclaimer that Adams denies he was a member of the IRA at the end of each of the nine episodes.

“The reason for the disclaimer is pretty obvious, which is that Gerry Adams – it’s not that he will take issue with little bits and pieces of what we show. He takes issue with the whole premise of the series, which is that he was in the IRA,” Radden Keefe said in a recent interview.

The son of Jean McConville, a woman who was murdered and buried in secret by the IRA, has condemned a new Disney series on her death as “horrendous” and “cruel”.

The series is based on the acclaimed book Say Nothing, about McConville and the wider role of the IRA during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, written by the US journalist Patrick Radden Keefe.

She was abducted from her home in Belfast in 1972 and her disappearance remained a mystery until 2003, when her remains were found on a beach in County Louth, south of the Northern Irish border.

Michael McConville, who was a child when his mother was taken away, said her death was “not entertainment” but hurtful reality for him and his nine siblings for the past 52 years.

“The portrayal of the execution and secret burial of my mother is horrendous and unless you have lived through it, you will never understand just how cruel it is,” he said.

“Everyone knows the story of Jean McConville; even Hillary Clinton, who I met a few years ago, knew my mother’s story. And yet here is another telling of it that I and my family have to endure,” he said.

Radden Keefe told BBC News NI that he had met representatives from families whose stories were featured in the series to “make it clear that we were going to approach this story with a great deal of sensitivity”.

The killing of McConville has been the subject of extensive reporting since she was taken from her home in the Divis flats on the Falls Road, suspected of being an informer simply because she was a Protestant who married a Catholic.

One of her daughters spoke out for the first time in 2013 and told how she remembered hearing her mother screaming as she was taken away by a number of men and bundled into a van.

The IRA always denied it had anything to do with her disappearance but admitted its involvement after the Good Friday agreement and the establishment in 1999 of the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains.

A chilling 2018 documentary, I, Dolours, came close to explaining who had ordered McConville’s death, with the use of a posthumous interview by the veteran journalist Ed Moloney and the now-deceased IRA militant Dolours Price, who linked her disappearance to the former Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams.

Price told Moloney, on condition that the tapes would be released only after her death, how she and two other IRA members were involved directly in the murder.

Part of a secret unit of the IRA known as the “unknowns”, she detailed how she and two others had been ordered across the border to kill McConville but stopped short of revealing who had actually pulled the trigger.

Adams has strenuously denied he had anything to do with the murder and has consistently denied he was a member of the IRA. Last week, his solicitors issued a statement saying he had “no involvement in the killing or burial of any of those secretly buried by the IRA”.

The Disney series includes a disclaimer that Adams denies he was a member of the IRA at the end of each of the nine episodes.

“The reason for the disclaimer is pretty obvious, which is that Gerry Adams – it’s not that he will take issue with little bits and pieces of what we show. He takes issue with the whole premise of the series, which is that he was in the IRA,” Radden Keefe said in a recent interview.

The United States and India have made the greatest progress among the world’s top 20 economies in implementing climate policies since the 2016 Paris Agreement, a study commissioned by the Guardian has found.

The data underscores the importance of political leadership and international coordination, both of which are coming under intense pressure ahead of the inauguration of Donald Trump, who has threatened to pull the US out of the United Nations climate treaty.

Over the past nine years, the G20 group of the world’s biggest economies have together introduced policies that are likely to reduce CO2 discharges by 6.9 gigatons by 2030, the report by Climate Action Tracker shows.

Although this is not enough to keep global heating within the Paris target of 1.5C to 2C above preindustrial levels, the authors of the study say it is a substantial improvement on what was forecast in 2015, showing the Cop process – despite its many flaws – has had some effect in reducing the climate dangers facing the world.

Instead of emissions increasing by 20% between 2015 and 2030, as was predicted at the start of that period, the new policies – mostly to support renewable energy and phase out high-polluting power plants – adopted by most countries mean that CO2 emissions are now projected to return to 2015 levels by the end of this decade. This change in the policy scenario has contributed to avoided warming of about 0.9C since Paris.

“This is nothing to brush off. This is a major improvement in the group of countries covering more than 80% of global emissions,” said Leonardo Nascimento, an analyst at Climate Action Tracker, who compiled the statistics. “There is progress at the international level. I completely disagree that Cop is a useless process.”

There are, however, concerns that this already insufficient progress is stalling: Firstly because recent Cop agendas have been dominated by host nations that plan to expand fossil fuel production, including Egypt (Cop27), the United Arab Emirates (Cop28), Azerbaijan (the ongoing Cop29), and Brazil (next year’s Cop30). Prominent critics have said the process needs reform because it is “not fit for purpose.”

The other major threat comes from Trump, who will take power in January. Once again, by taking the world’s most powerful nation out of the Paris Agreement negotiations. Conservative supporters urge him to go further and entirely remove the US from the Cop process and roll back the renewable incentives introduced during the administration of Joe Biden.

This is a worry for two reasons. Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which supports solar, wind, electric vehicles and energy efficiency, is the main reason the US leads the G20 in projected CO2 reductions from 2015 to 2030. It accounts for two gigatons, far ahead of second-place India with 1.4Gt, and third-place European Union, and the UK with 1.1Gt. Depending on how far Trump goes with his rollback, these gains could be lost.

The other reason is the message this sends to the world. Different countries may be less inclined to accelerate the energy transition and provide funds for mitigation, adaptation and compensation for developing nations if the biggest economy steps back.

With global emissions still rising despite two years of record heat, frustrations with Cop are growing. Climate Action Tracker says current policies put the temperature rise on track for 2.7C by the end of the century, which would be calamitous.

Analysts said it was essential for nations to step up rather than back.

Relative to their size, many smaller countries have made greater progress than the US in trimming emissions. And some large emerging economies are moving in the right direction. China – the world’s biggest emitter – has invested heavily in renewables and is forecast to hit some of its 2030 climate targets six years early and perhaps peak its CO2 output next year. “It is not just developed countries that are doing a lot, it is also developing nations with big populations and big inequality,” Nascimento said.

The analyst said that under the most optimistic projections, global emissions may finally peak next year – though this long-awaited moment has been wrongly predicted on multiple occasions in the past. The key, he said, is to maintain the political momentum behind the technological and business trends that have made wind and solar cheaper than coal, oil and gas.

“Fossil fuels are growing in a linear fashion, while renewables are growing exponentially. The displacement is happening faster than expected,” he said. “But we must not underestimate the impact of Trump. If the US, the world’s second-largest emitter, were to permanently walk away from its commitment to reach net zero emissions by 2050, our optimistic scenario for global temperature could increase by a few tenths of a degree, which would be very significant. It also depends on whether countries continue to pursue climate action in the light of cheap renewables and whether other leaders like EU, China, Brazil and others step up and remain united.”

“Despite improvements in global climate policy, the overall direction of travel remains bleak,” Nascimento said. “Countries need to substantially scale up past efforts to keep any chance of meeting the 1.5C goal. The pace of improvement is simply not enough.”

John Prescott, the former British deputy prime minister and stalwart of the New Labour movement, has died aged 86.

Tony Blair and Gordon Brown led tributes on Thursday to Prescott, who had Alzheimer’s, after his family announced he had died peacefully at a care home.

“He was one of the most talented people I ever encountered in politics,” Blair told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. “One of the most committed and loyal, and definitely the most unusual … There were no rules he really abided by.”

Prescott served as deputy prime minister for more than a decade under Blair, and was seen as a custodian of the Labour party’s traditional values in the face of a modernising leadership.

He acted as a mediator in the often turbulent relationship between Blair and Brown, and oversaw government policy on the environment, transport and the regions, helping to negotiate the international Kyoto protocol on climate change.

At times short-tempered, Prescott famously punched a protester who threw an egg at him during an election campaign visit to north Wales in 2001.

He was ennobled in 2010 and introduced to the upper chamber as Lord Prescott of Kingston upon Hull, having served for four decades as an MP for the city.

Blair said in a statement: “There was nothing about John which fitted conventional wisdom. He was from proud traditional working-class stock yet understood instinctively and completely the aspirations of that class and their desire to better themselves.

“He could talk in the bluntest and sometimes bluest language, but it concealed a first-rate intellect which meant he thought as deeply about issues as much as he cared about them. It is no exaggeration to say the Labour party could never have won three consecutive full terms without John. He was a commanding presence.”

Brown described Prescott as a “titan” and a “gentleman” and said that “despite an outwardly deceptive image of uncompromising toughness, he was generous, believing in the good in everyone”.

“John Lennon said the working-class hero is a difficult thing to be, but I think John would be just fine with being remembered that way. He wanted the good things in life for everyone and not just himself. And he showed that Britain can be a country where if you work hard you can fill your potential,” Brown said.

Speaking on the Today programme, Brown said “Britain has got this image around the world of an aristocratic and still unreformed and sometimes deferential and hierarchical society. John broke through all this. John gave people who were starting from low-income backgrounds the sense that they could achieve something and achieve something right to the point of deputy prime minister – it’s something that [the deputy prime minister] Angela Rayner talks about now, to her great credit.”

On the same programme, Blair recalled: “He had this extraordinary instinctive sense that something was afoot. He often used to come in unannounced into my room in Downing Street and he would say to me: ‘I know you’re up to something, I don’t know quite what it is, but I know you’re up to something.’ And I would be sort of protesting and saying: ‘No, John, you’ve got it all wrong’ … and of course he would always be right.”

Blair recounted the moment Prescott punched the egg-throwing protester. “This caused a huge sort of fracas, obviously. We had to give a press conference in the election campaign the next day … I just said: ‘Well, John is John.’ And so was that supposed to be an answer? I said: ‘Yeah, that’s an answer, that’s as much as you can say.’”

Peter Mandelson, an architect of the New Labour movement, revealed he worked for Prescott in his 20s and that Prescott later gave him a reference when he applied to join the party as its campaign and communications director.

“What he said to me at the time was: ‘Peter I’ll do this for you. You’ll do a job. Well, you’ll do a reasonable job; you might as well do it. You’ve got to keep your nose out of politics’,” Lord Mandelson said.

“I said: ‘John, I’m wanting to be the campaign director of the Labour party’. He said: ‘You know what I mean. You keep your nose out of politics and stop stirring things up. Just do a job and then that will be fine’.”

Keir Starmer, the prime minister, said Prescott had been “a true giant” of the Labour movement. “His passion, force of personality and pride in his working-class roots was key to his authenticity – an honesty that was recognised and respected across the political divide and across the nation.”

Al Gore, the former US vice-president who worked with Prescott on the Kyoto protocol in 1997, said he had “never worked with anyone in politics – on my side of the pond or his – quite like John Prescott”.

“He possessed an inherent ability to connect with people about the issues that mattered to them – a talent that others spend years studying and cultivating, but that was second nature to him,” Gore said. “He fought like hell to negotiate the Kyoto protocol and was an unwavering champion of climate action for decades to come.”

William Hague, the former Conservative party leader, said Prescott had been “a formidable debater” who “had a unique ability to speak directly to the concerns of the people he represented”.

“It was a point of pride for both of us that we hailed from Rotherham. Although it shaped us in different ways, we shared a certain bluntness in our exchanges – though in true Yorkshire fashion John usually got straight to the point faster than I did!”

Prescott’s wife, Pauline, and sons Johnathan and David said he had died “surrounded by the love of his family and the jazz music of Marian Montgomery” and that representing the people of Hull had been “his greatest honour”.

“John spent his life trying to improve the lives of others, fighting for social justice and protecting the environment, doing so from his time as a waiter on the cruise liners to becoming Britain’s longest-serving deputy prime minister.”

Prescott ceased to be a member of the Lords in July after developing health difficulties. He had spoken only once in the chamber since having a stroke in 2019, official records show, and had not voted since February 2023.

Prescott was a loyal supporter of Blair in office but subsequently critical of parts of New Labour’s legacy, denouncing Britain’s involvement in the Iraq war. He also strongly defended Jeremy Corbyn during his time as party leader in the face of fierce criticism.

The son of a railway signalman, he was born in Prestatyn, Wales in 1938, and left school at 15 to work as a trainee chef and then as a steward on the Cunard Line before entering politics.

Alabama is hours away from carrying out its third execution this year using the controversial new method of nitrogen gas, a technique that in previous state killings caused visible signs of distress.

Barring a last-minute appeal to the US supreme court, Carey Dale Grayson will be put to death on Tuesday evening for the 1994 murder of a hitchhiker. The prisoner will have a mask strapped to his face through which nitrogen will be pumped, causing fatal oxygen deprivation.

Alabama is the only state in the US to use nitrogen, which it has adopted in the face of international condemnation. Veterinarians in the US and across Europe have ruled out nitrogen as a form of animal euthanasia for most mammals, yet the state has turned to it in the wake of a spate of gruesomely botched lethal injection executions.

“The only lesson from this grim sequence of events is that when states use human beings as guinea pigs for lethal experiments, they are bound to suffer, whether at the point of a needle or behind a mask,” said Matt Wells, deputy director of the human rights group Reprieve US.

The first two nitrogen executions conducted by the southern state did not proceed without controversy. Alabama insisted that the first nitrogen killing in January of Kenneth Smith was “perhaps the most humane method of execution ever devised”.

That claim conflicted with eyewitness accounts, which recorded that Smith writhed and convulsed on the gurney for several minutes, as his body shook and eyes rolled back.

Smith’s spiritual adviser, the Rev Jeff Hood, said that “what we saw was minutes of someone struggling for their life”.

In September, Alabama used nitrogen to kill Alan Miller. The prisoner shook and trembled on the gurney for about two minutes, followed by about six minutes of gasping, according to a witness from Associated Press.

Earlier this week, lawyers for Grayson, 50, argued before a federal appeals court that the experience of the first two executions suggested that nitrogen led to feelings in the inmates of “conscious suffocation” before unconsciousness sets in. They said that amounted to the infliction of terror that was a violation both of state law and of the US constitution.

The appeals court denied the request for a stay of execution.

Grayson was convicted of killing Vickie Deblieux. He was part of a group of four teenagers who picked her up as she was hitchhiking, then attacked and murdered her.

Of the four, only Grayson, who was 19 at the time, went on to face execution. The other three co-defendants were 18, and had their death sentences set aside by the US supreme court as part of a prohibition of the death penalty for juveniles.

A transgender woman in China has won a record amount of compensation from a hospital that subjected her to several sessions of electroshock conversion practices without her consent.

Changli county people’s court in Qinhuangdao, a city in Hebei, approved a 60,000 yuan (£6,552) award to Ling’er, a 28-year-old performance artist who was recorded male at birth but identifies as a woman. LGBTQ+ activists described the award, approved on 31 October, as a victory for trans rights in China.

Ling’er, who uses a pseudonym, said she hoped her case, which is the first instance of a trans person winning a legal challenge against the use of electroshock conversion practices in China, could help others in the LGBTQ+ community navigate medical disputes and protect their rights. “In China, the situation for transgender people is not very optimistic,” she said. “There’s a lack of protection for this group.”

Ling’er was admitted to Qinhuangdao City Fifth hospital in July 2022, having come out to her parents as transgender the previous year. Her parents were “very opposed” to her gender identity, Ling’er said, and “felt that I wasn’t mentally stable. So they sent me to a mental hospital.”

In hospital, she was diagnosed with “anxiety disorder and discordant sexual orientation”, despite the fact that her supposed “disorder” related to her gender identity, not her sexual orientation (she identifies as heterosexual). She was kept there for 97 days and subjected to seven sessions of electroshocks.

“It caused serious damage to my body,” Ling’er said. “Every time I underwent the treatment, I would faint … I didn’t agree to it, but I had no choice.”

The hospital “tried to ‘correct me’, to make me conform to society’s expectations”.

She said the electroshocks had caused ongoing heart problems which require medication.

Ling’er filed a lawsuit against the hospital, which was heard by a court in August. She argued that her personal rights had been violated by the treatments.

China’s mental health law says people cannot be forcibly subjected to psychiatric treatment unless they are a threat to the safety of themselves or others.

Darius Longarino, a research scholar at Yale Law School who focuses on Chinese law and civil society, said doctors who administered medicines or used electroshock practices to “convert” gay or trans people were “using intrusive, harmful treatments in order to treat something that should not be diagnosed in the first place”.

Ling’er’s doctor claimed in August that she might pose a risk to the safety of her parents if they killed themselves because of her gender identity, according to a report in Chinese media.

There is little precedent for this kind of legal challenge. In 2017, a gay man in Henan province was awarded 5,000 yuan after he was forced to stay in a psychiatric hospital for 19 days and to take medicines to “treat” his homosexuality.

Another ruling in 2014 ordered a clinic to pay a gay man 3,500 yuan, after he sued the institution for giving him hypnosis and using electroshocks to “cure” his homosexuality. The issue in that case, however, was not lack of consent but false advertising, because the judge ruled homosexuality was not an illness that could be “cured”.

Conversion practices operate within a legal grey area in China. In 2001, China removed homosexuality from an official list of psychiatric disorders, but it retained a diagnosis for distress about one’s sexual orientation. This left the door open for psychiatrists to tout physical and psychiatric remedies to “cure” a person’s sexual orientation, or in Ling’er’s case, gender identity.

Although the latest version of China’s medical guidelines have removed this particular diagnosis, enforcement and education in Chinese hospitals is patchy.

One of the few doctors in China to work in transgender healthcare, who asked to remain anonymous because of the sensitivities of talking to foreign media, said part of the problem was a lack of awareness in the profession. When hospitals receive transgender patients, “they don’t know how to treat them. They think that using these methods [such as electroshocks] could help, but in fact they are wrong. They make this choice because of their lack of knowledge.”

A study published in 2019, based on a survey of 385 people, found that nearly one in five transgender youths in China reported being forced into conversion practices by their parents.

Qinhuangdao City Fifth hospital declined to comment.

Additional research by Jason Tzu Kuan Lu