Vladimir Putin has said Russia fired an experimental ballistic missile at a military site in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro on Thursday morning, and that Moscow “had the right” to strike western countries that provided Kyiv with weapons used against Russian targets.

The Russian president, speaking during an unannounced televised address to the nation, appeared to directly threaten the US and UK, who earlier this week allowed Ukraine to fire western-made Atacms and Storm Shadow missiles into Russia.

The new ballistic missile was called Oreshnik [the hazel], Putin said, and its deployment “was a response to US plans to produce and deploy intermediate and short-range missiles”. He said Russia would “respond decisively and symmetrically” in the event of an escalation.

“Russia reserves the right to use weapons against targets in countries that permit their weapons to be used against Russian targets,” Putin added, in his most explicit threat to attack western countries who have been providing military aid to Ukraine since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022.

US and UK sources indicated that they believed the missile fired on Dnipro was an experimental nuclear-capable, intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM), which has a theoretical range of below 3,420 miles (5,500km). That is enough to reach Europe from where it was fired in south-western Russia, but not the US.

Ukraine’s air force had initially claimed Russia had fired a longer-range intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). However, the president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, later softened the claim to say the missile fired had “all the parameters” of an ICBM in terms of speed and altitude of flight.

“Obviously, Putin is using Ukraine as a testing ground. Obviously, Putin is terrified when normal life simply exists next to him,” Zelenskyy said. “When a country simply wants to be and has the right to be independent.”

In a statement published on Telegram, Zelenskyy later said the missile strike was “final proof that Russia definitely does not want peace”.

The missile was fired from the Astrakhan region of Russia, Ukraine’s air force said, meaning that it travelled about 500 miles to reach its target, as part of a wider salvo of nine missiles between 5am and 7am. Six of the missiles were intercepted by Ukraine’s air force but the new ballistic missile was not stopped.

Video of the incident from a distance showed the ground being struck in multiple flashes, though damage and casualty reports were modest. The missile was said to have hit “without consequences”, Ukraine’s air force said, though it added that complete information about victims had yet to be received.

Fabian Hoffmann, a doctoral research fellow at Oslo University who specialises in missile technology and nuclear strategy, said the significance of the Oreshnik missile strike was that it appeared to carry a type of payload that “is exclusively associated with nuclear-capable missiles”.

Ukraine used US Atacms missiles to target what it said was a weapons depot in Russia’s south-western Bryansk region on Monday, and fired a salvo of Storm Shadow missiles on Wednesday at a command post in Kursk, where Kyiv’s forces hold a small bridgehead of territory inside Russia.

Ukraine had previously used both weapons to strike targets inside its internationally recognised borders, but had been lobbying the US and UK for months to allow it to strike airfields, bases and depots deeper inside Russia.

Both sides are stepping up their military efforts in the near three-year-long war ahead of the inauguration of Donald Trump on 20 January. The Republican president-elect has said he wants to end the war, though it is unclear how he proposes to do so, and each side is hoping to improve its battlefield position before he takes office.

A US official told the Guardian that Russia had launched an “experimental intermediate-range ballistic missile” at Ukraine, of which Russia likely possesses only a “handful”. UK sources made similar comments and the weapon was described as having a range of a few thousand kilometres.

Russia is required by a treaty to inform the US of the launch of certain kinds of ballistic missiles, in the hopes of preventing an escalatory ladder that could lead to an all-out nuclear war.

A US official said Russia had “pre-notified” Washington of the launch before the attack in an attempt to prevent a retaliation – though Russia said it had only done so 30 minutes before through the US’s Nuclear Threat Reduction Center, according to the Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov.

On Wednesday the US suddenly announced that its embassy in Kyiv would be closed that day after receiving warning of a “potential significant air attack” somewhere in Ukraine. No further details were provided and, after a nervous day in the Ukrainian capital, the embassy reopened.

The US official also told the Guardian that Russia may have used the weapon as an attempt to “intimidate Ukraine and its supporters” or attract public attention, but that the weapon would not be a “gamechanger” in the conflict. “Russia likely possesses only a handful of these experimental missiles,” the official said.

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

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.

The United States believes Russia fired a never-before-fielded intermediate-range ballistic missile on Thursday in its attack on Ukraine, an escalation that analysts say could have implications for European missile defences.

Here’s what we know so far about the missile.

What kind of ballistic missile is it?

The US military said the Russian missile’s design was based on the design of Russia’s longer-range RS-26 Rubezh intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).

The new missile was experimental and Russia likely possessed only a handful of them, officials said.

The Pentagon said the missile was fired with a conventional warhead but that Moscow could modify it if it wanted.

“It could be refitted to certainly carry different types of conventional or nuclear warheads,” Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh said.

Jeffrey Lewis, a non-proliferation expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in California, said the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, had earlier hinted that Russia would complete the development of an intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) system after Washington and Berlin agreed to deploy long-range US missiles in Germany from 2026.

“The RS-26 was always [a] prime candidate,” Lewis said.

Singh said the new variant of the missile was considered “experimental” by the Pentagon. “It’s the first time that we’ve seen it employed on the battlefield … So that’s why we consider it experimental.”

US and UK sources indicated that they believed the missile fired on Dnipro was an experimental nuclear-capable, intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM), which has a theoretical range of below 3,420 miles (5,500km). That is enough to reach Europe from where it was fired in south-western Russia, but not the US.

Ukraine’s air force initially said the missile was an ICBM. While launching an IRBM sent a less threatening signal, the incident could still set off alarms and Moscow notified Washington briefly ahead of the launch, according to US officials.

Will Russia’s missile strike affect Nato?

Timothy Wright, at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said Russia’s development of new missiles might influence decisions in Nato countries regarding what air defence systems to purchase as well as which offensive capabilities to pursue.

A new US ballistic missile defence base in northern Poland has already drawn angry reactions from Moscow. The US base at Redzikowo is part of a broader Nato missile shield and is designed to intercept short- to intermediate-range ballistic missiles.

Still, Putin said Thursday’s launch of the new IRBM was not a response to the base in Poland but instead to recent Ukrainian long-range strikes inside Russian territory with western weapons.

After approval from the administration of President Joe Biden, Ukraine struck Russia with US-made Atacms on 19 November and with British Storm Shadow missiles and US-made Himars on 21 November, Putin said.

What has Vladimir Putin said about the new missile?

The Russian president acknowledged in a television address to the nation that Moscow had struck a Ukrainian military facility with a new ballistic missile and said it was called “Oreshnik” (the hazel).

He said its deployment “was a response to US plans to produce and deploy intermediate and short-range missiles”, and that Russia would “respond decisively and symmetrically” in the event of an escalation.

Moscow said it targeted a missile and defence firm in the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro, where missile and space rocket company Pivdenmash, known as Yuzhmash by Russians, is based.

Putin said Russia was developing short- and medium0range missiles in response to the planned production and then deployment by the US of medium- and shorter-range missiles in Europe and Asia.

“I believe that the United States made a mistake by unilaterally destroying the treaty on the elimination of intermediate-range and shorter-range missiles in 2019 under a far-fetched pretext,” the Russian president said, referring to the intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF) treaty.

The US formally withdrew from the 1987 (INF) treaty with Russia in 2019 after saying that Moscow was violating the accord, an accusation the Kremlin denied.

• Russia has fired an experimental ballistic missile at the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro in response to the US and UK allowing Kyiv to strike Russian territory with advanced western weapons, in a further escalation of the 33-month-old war. Russian president Vladimir Putin said in an unannounced televised address to the nation that Moscow struck a Ukrainian military facility on Thursday with a new ballistic missile known as “Oreshnik” (the hazel) and warned that more could follow. He said in an apparent threat to the US and the UK that Moscow “had the right” to strike western countries that provided Kyiv with weapons used against Russian targets. The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said the use of the new missile amounted to “a clear and severe escalation” in the war and called for strong worldwide condemnation.

• Ukraine’s parliament postponed a sitting due to have taken place on Friday out of security concerns, public broadcaster Suspilne reported, quoting sources. It said the order told members to keep their families out of Kyiv’s government district and quoted parliamentarians as saying that, for the moment, the next sitting was not scheduled until December.

• Russia also fired a Kinzhal hypersonic missile and seven Kh-101 cruise missiles, six of which were shot down, the Ukrainian air force said. The attack targeted enterprises and critical infrastructure in Dnipro, the air force said. The city was a missile-making centre in the Soviet era. The regional governor, Serhiy Lysak, said the attack damaged an industrial enterprise and set off fires in Dnipro. Two people were hurt.

• Russia notified Washington shortly before the strike, according to a US official, while another said the US had briefed Kyiv and allies to prepare for the possible use of such a weapon. Regional tensions have spiked in the past several days, with Ukraine firing US and British missiles at targets inside Russia this week despite Moscow’s warnings that it would see such action as a major escalation.

• Ukraine initially suggested Russia fired an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), a weapon designed for long-distance nuclear strikes and never before used in war. But US officials and Nato echoed Putin’s description of the weapon as an intermediate-range ballistic missile, which has a shorter range of 3,000-5,500km (1,860-3,415 miles).

• Zelenskiy said on X after Putin’s televised address that Russia’s acknowledgement it used the new weapon was another escalation after deployment of North Korean troops on Russian soil. Thursday’s attack, Zelenskiy said, was “yet more proof that Russia has no interest in peace”. “The world must respond,” he said. “Right now, there is no strong reaction from the world … A lack of tough reactions to Russia’s actions sends a message that such behaviour is acceptable.”

• A Nato spokesperson said Russia was seeking to “terrorise” civilians and intimidate Ukraine’s allies. “Deploying this capability will neither change the course of the conflict nor deter Nato allies from supporting Ukraine,” Farah Dakhlallah said.

• UN secretary general António Guterres’s spokesperson said Russia’s use of a new intermediate-range ballistic missile was “yet another concerning and worrying development. “All of this [is] going in the wrong direction,” Stéphane Dujarric said as he called on all parties to de-escalate the conflict and “to protect civilians, not hit civilian targets or critical civilian infrastructure”.

The international criminal court 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 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 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.

The US criticised the move, with Joe Biden describing the warrants in a statement on Thursday night as “outrageous”.

“Let me be clear once again: whatever the ICC might imply, there is no equivalence – none – between Israel and Hamas. We will always stand with Israel against threats to its security.”

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.

Netanyahu said in a video statement: “No outrageous anti-Israel decision will prevent us – and it will not prevent me – from continuing to defend our country in every way. We will not yield to pressure.”

The US national security council issued a statement “fundamentally” rejecting the court’s decision. “We remain deeply concerned by the prosecutor’s rush to seek arrest warrants and the troubling process errors that led to this decision,” the statement said, without any detail of the alleged errors.

“The United States has been clear that the ICC does not have jurisdiction over this matter. In coordination with partners, including Israel, we are discussing next steps.”

The US has previously welcomed ICC war crimes warrants against Vladimir Putin and other Russian officials for atrocities committed in Ukraine, exposing 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 UK is expected to agree to the request to arrest Netanyahu if he came to Britain, although Downing Street refused to directly confirm this, saying only that it would “respect” the court’s independence. A spokesperson said a UK-based court procedure would be needed to approve any request.

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.

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

The arrest warrants issued by the international criminal court (ICC) represent an earthquake on the world’s legal landscape: the first time a western ally from a modern democracy has been charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity by a global judicial body.

Inside Israel, the warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant will not have an immediate impact. In the short term they are likely to rally support around the prime minister from a defiant Israeli public.

In the longer term, however, the enormity of the charges against Netanyahu and Gallant could grow heavier over time, shrinking the patch on the globe still open to them. The stigma of being an accused war criminal is a hard one to shrug off.

Yahya Sinwar and the other two Hamas suspects named by the ICC prosecutor have all been killed by Israel since May when the warrants were first requested, but the pre-trial chamber at The Hague issued a warrant for one of them, the Hamas military commander Mohammed Diab Ibrahim al-Masri, also known as Mohammed Deif, on the grounds that his widely reported death, in an airstrike in July, has yet to be officially confirmed. That looks like a formality and it is all but certain that none of the three Hamas leaders will stand trial for the 7 October massacres last year that ignited the Gaza war.

In the world as viewed from The Hague, the approval of warrants by the ICC judges will for ever transform the court’s standing. The US – not an ICC member anyway – rejected the warrants, and said it would coordinate with its partners, Israel included, about the “next steps”.

Other Israeli allies, such as Germany, will distance themselves, but it will be a difficult moment for the UK government of Keir Starmer, whose background is in human rights and international law. The US is likely to lean on the UK to reject the validity of the warrants, but that would seriously damage UK credibility elsewhere in the world.

Amnesty International reminded Starmer: “The UK’s standing as a genuine supporter of the rule of law requires consistency and even-handedness.”

Many other countries who have hitherto seen the ICC as a tool of the western world are likely to embrace the decision and the tribunal itself. While the UN security council has done very little to mitigate the war in Gaza, the ICC will be widely seen, especially in the global south, as a more effective defender of the UN charter.

The question for Europe, in particular, is whether to have any dealings with Netanyahu on his turf in Israel. The European Council of Foreign Relations pointed out that when the former Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta was the subject of an ICC warrant, European officials adopted a policy of avoiding non-essential contact.

Iva Vukušić, an assistant professor in international history at Utrecht University, said: “This set of arrest warrants are groundbreaking because, for the first time in the case of Israel, they involve a close ally of the ‘western’ permanent members of the security council, which have so far been almost exempt from international judicial scrutiny.

“Israel is considered by many as a functioning democracy with a capable judicial system, and a close ally to the west, and we have not so far seen an arrest warrant in such a situation.”

One thing the warrants are very unlikely to do is topple Netanyahu – or even weaken him. That is critical, as many observers believe the war in Gaza is likely to continue for as long as he holds on to power.

“It will strengthen Netanyahu,” said Dahlia Scheindlin, an Israeli expert on international public opinion. “Israelis are absolutely rock-solid convinced that the international system in general basically exists in order to target and single out Israel unfairly. That kind of sentiment cuts across the board in the Jewish community.”

That means very few Israelis see the warrants as evidence that Netanyahu is weakening their country on the global scale, driving it towards pariah status. If anything, the prime minister’s many critics will pause their litany of complaints against him for long enough to reject the jurisdiction of a foreign court over their affairs.

In terms of the next Israeli elections, due by October 2026 and a critical moment for Israel and the region, ICC warrants are unlikely to change many votes. But the sting they leave will be more likely to make itself felt over the years and decades to come.

There will be a long list of countries that are members of the ICC that Netanyahu and Gallant will be unable to visit, as they would be obliged to act on the arrest warrant. The US, Russia and China are not members, but for the current White House at least, a visit by either man would be highly embarrassing – though the incoming Trump administration will be another matter.

“The ICC plays a long game,” Vukušić said. “Once issued, warrants follow you pretty much until you’re dead. If, upon the issuing of the warrants, Netanyahu again goes to the US to speak to Congress, for example, it at least massively embarrasses the US and makes their hypocrisy so plain to see.”

Donald Trump announced that he would nominate for attorney general Pam Bondi, the former Florida state attorney general, hours after the former representative Matt Gaetz withdrew in the face of opposition from Senate Republicans who had balked over a series of sexual misconduct allegations.

The move to name Bondi reflected Trump’s determination to install a loyalist as the nation’s top law enforcement official and marked another instance of Trump putting his personal lawyers in the justice department.

Trump almost immediately settled on Bondi as a replacement pick for Gaetz, according to people familiar with the matter. Bondi had not auditioned for the role and her loyalist credentials coupled with her willingness to defend Trump on television made her an attractive pick.

The fact that Bondi could count on broad support inside Trump’s world and the Senate Republican conference, in contrast with Gaetz who always faced an uphill struggle, also earned her the endorsement from most of Trump’s senior advisers on Thursday, the people said.

“I am proud to announce former Attorney General of the Great State of Florida, Pam Bondi, as our next Attorney General of the United States. Pam was a prosecutor for nearly 20 years, where she was very tough on Violent Criminals,” Trump said in a Truth Social post.

“Pam will refocus the DOJ to its intended purpose of fighting Crime, and Making America Safe Again. I have known Pam for many years — She is smart and tough, and is an AMERICA FIRST Fighter, who will do a terrific job as Attorney General!”

Should Bondi be confirmed by the Senate in the coming months, it would be a reward for years of her loyalty to Trump which started during the 2016 campaign, when she became an outspoken but fierce defender of his candidacy.

She also helped with Trump’s legal defense during his first impeachment trial, parroted claims that the 2020 election was stolen, and continued working as a surrogate through the 2024 campaign when she attended Trump’s criminal trial in New York.

Bondi’s elevation to lead the justice department would also come as a result of extraordinary serendipity, after Trump picked Gaetz almost on a whim after he decided against more conventional lawyers

The selection process for major positions has involved Trump pulling up each candidate on a bank of screens at his Mar-a-Lago club and looking for various qualities, including on their perceived loyalty and how they might play on television.

Trump did not like the initial list of names that included Mark Paoletta, the former counsel at the White House office of management and budget; Missouri’s attorney general, Andrew Bailey; and Robert Guiffra, co-chair of the New York law firm Sullivan and Cromwell, and decided he preferred a pugilist like Gaetz.

But the Gaetz nomination sank after a series of meetings on Wednesday with Republican senators. Later that evening, they broadly expressed to the Trump team their continued opposition to the Gaetz nomination, the people said.

On Thursday morning, Trump called Gaetz and told him that it was clear he did not have the votes in a rare moment of realpolitik for Trump. Gaetz agreed and took himself out of the running, one of the people said.

Gaetz told associates after he announced he was withdrawing his nomination that he faced the reality that at least three senators – Mitch McConnell, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski – and senator-elect John Curtis, would vote against him and block his confirmation, the people said.

From his Mar-a-Lago club, Trump said in a statement: “I greatly appreciate the recent efforts of Matt Gaetz in seeking approval to be attorney general. He was doing very well but, at the same time, did not want to be a distraction for the administration, for which he has much respect.”

Pam Bondi, Donald Trump’s new pick to lead the US justice department, was the first female attorney general of Florida but is perhaps best known in recent years as a loyalist to the former president.

Trump announced Bondi as his nominee for US attorney general on Thursday hours after Matt Gaetz, Trump’s first pick, bowed out of consideration amid growing Republican opposition following sexual misconduct allegations against him.

“I am proud to announce former Attorney General of the Great State of Florida, Pam Bondi, as our next Attorney General of the United States. Pam was a prosecutor for nearly 20 years, where she was very tough on Violent Criminals,” Trump said in a Truth Social post.

Bondi has been a chair at the America First Policy Institute, a thinktank set up by former Trump administration staffers, and served on Trump’s first transition team.

The 59-year-old has been a longtime Trump ally – she was considered during his first term as a potential candidate for the nation’s highest law enforcement role.

Trump was told by advisers that she was a good alternative to Gaetz because she has allies across the Republican party as well as inside Trump’s world, according to people familiar with the matter, the Guardian reported Thursday.

Before she became involved in national politics, Bondi spent more than 18 years as a prosecutor in the Hillsborough county state attorney’s office. She was a political unknown when she was elected as Florida’s first female attorney general in 2010 and had received an endorsement from the former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

She served as Florida’s top prosecutor from 2011 to 2019, and later as a lobbyist for US and international clients.

Bondi’s tenure as attorney general also coincided with two of the most high-profile and deadly shootings the nation has seen. In 2016, after 47 people were shot and killed and more than 50 were injured in an extremist attack on an LGBTQIA+ nightclub in Orlando, Bondi was called out on-air by CNN’s Anderson Cooper over her support for a ban on same-sex marriage in the state.

Two years later, 17 students and staff were shot and killed by a former student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school. Bondi called for the death penalty for the shooter and supported then governor Rick Scott in the passage of the state’s first gun-restriction legislation, which raised the minimum age for someone to buy a gun from 18 to 21. It also appropriates millions of dollars for expanded mental health resources in schools, to build a replacement for Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school and for heightened campus security.

Bondi’s ties to Trump go back years. While serving as Florida’s attorney general, she backed Trump in 2016 over a candidate from her home state, Marco Rubio.

In 2016, the Associated Press revealed that Bondi had personally asked Trump for a donation to her campaign three years earlier. The funds came through a Trump family foundation, which is in violation of policies around charities engaging in politics. The $25,000 donation also came as Bondi’s office was considering joining New York in an investigation of Trump’s universities, over allegations of fraud and false promises about what training and job prospects for students would look like. Once the check arrived, Bondi declined to participate in the investigation, according to the Associated Press.

Bondi did try to send the check back, the Florida Times-Union reported, but it was rejected and returned by Trump.

Bondi was then one of Trump’s attorneys during his 2019 impeachment proceedings, when he was accused – but not convicted – of trying to make military assistance to Ukraine dependent on that country’s willingness to investigate Joe Biden. And during Trump’s hush-money trial, Bondi was one of a handful of Republicans to show up to court to support him.

Bondi has harshly criticized the criminal cases against Trump as well as Jack Smith, the special counsel who charged Trump in two federal cases. She described Smith and other prosecutors who have charged Trump as “horrible” people “weaponizing our legal system”.

If she is confirmed, Bondi will join several other members of Trump’s legal team in the justice department.

The Associated Press contributed to this report

Matt Gaetz, the former Florida congressman, withdrew from consideration to serve as Donald Trump’s attorney general on Thursday, amid intense scrutiny of allegations of sexual misconduct, ending the brief nomination of one of Trump’s most controversial cabinet picks.

After meeting with senators on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, Gaetz determined that his nomination was “becoming a distraction to the critical work” of the new Trump administration, he explained on X.

“There is no time to waste on a needlessly protracted Washington scuffle, thus I’ll be withdrawing my name from consideration to serve as Attorney General. Trump’s [justice department] must be in place and ready on Day 1,” Gaetz said.

“I remain fully committed to see that Donald J. Trump is the most successful President in history. I will forever be honored that President Trump nominated me to lead the Department of Justice and I’m certain he will Save America.”

A source familiar with Gaetz’s nomination process told the Guardian that privately confirmed opposition from four senators – enough to sink the nomination if no Democrats defected – was what pushed Gaetz to decide to withdraw.

The announcement comes a little more than a week after Trump said he was nominating Gaetz to be attorney general, the chief law enforcement officer of the United States.

A staunch Trump ally disliked by some fellow Republicans in Congress, Gaetz always faced an uphill battle to be confirmed. He came under intense scrutiny last week over allegations he had sexual relations with a 17-year-old girl.

The justice department declined to charge Gaetz last year as part of a sex-trafficking investigation. But details of his encounter and relationships were beginning to seep out. Just before he announced he was withdrawing his nomination, CNN reported that the woman he is alleged to have had sex with when she was 17 told the House ethics committee there had been a second sexual encounter with Gaetz.

ABC News and the New York Times reported earlier this week on records of Venmo transactions connecting Gaetz to women who said that he paid them for sex.

Gaetz’s announcement comes one day after the House ethics committee deadlocked over releasing its report on the allegations. At least one House Democrat on the committee, Representative Sean Casten of Illinois, said on Thursday he would continue to push for the full release of the Gaetz report.

In a post on Truth Social, Trump, who had reportedly been calling senators to lobby for Gaetz’s confirmation, said that “Matt has a wonderful future”.

“I greatly appreciate the recent efforts of Matt Gaetz in seeking approval to be Attorney General,” he wrote. “He was doing very well but, at the same time, did not want to be a distraction for the Administration, for which he has much respect. Matt has a wonderful future, and I look forward to watching all of the great things he will do!”

A staunch Trump ally known for theatrics such as wearing a gas mask on the House floor, Gaetz resigned from Congress the day Trump announced his nomination. It is unclear who Trump will now pick to lead the justice department, which the president-elect has pledged to use to prosecute his enemies.

Gaetz’s withdrawal comes as Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Defense, Pete Hegseth, faces accusations of sexual assault. A police report made public this week contains allegations from a woman regarding a 2017 encounter with Hegseth in which she says he took her phone, blocked her from leaving his hotel room and sexually assaulted her. Hegseth has denied the allegations.

“Matt Gaetz was a ridiculous, horrible and dangerous AG selection. That Republican senators were not willing to rubber-stamp his nomination is a hopeful sign that a modicum of sanity persists in Washington,” said Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen, a watchdog group, in a statement. “But Gaetz was not the only Trump nomination threatening America and there’s every reason to worry about who Trump will appoint in Gaetz’s stead.”

Additional reporting from Martin Pengelly

Donald Trump decided to nominate Matt Gaetz as attorney general last Wednesday, during a flight home from Washington, where the president-elect had visited Joe Biden at the White House. The pick proved as surprising as it was controversial. Just eight days later, after a week of relentless hullabaloo, Gaetz withdrew from contention.

It was a Washington farce for the ages. But how did it happen?

Gaetz, now 42, made his name as a far-right Florida congressman, a pro-Trump publicity hound and gadfly who in October 2023 made history by bringing down a House speaker: Kevin McCarthy, the first ever ejected by his own party.

The seeds of Gaetz’s own downfall were to be found in that extraordinary episode.

Ostensibly, Gaetz moved against McCarthy in order to install a speaker more amenable to rightwing threats to shut down the federal government over arguments about funding, and less likely to seek Democrats’ help in avoiding such outcomes.

But McCarthy never believed that. He insisted Gaetz moved against him in order to block release of a House ethics committee report into allegations of sexual misconduct, illicit drug use and other offenses.

Gaetz vehemently denied – and still denies – wrongdoing but, nonetheless, when Trump nominated him for attorney general, he promptly resigned his seat in the House. According to precedent, that blocked release of the ethics report.

The report duly became the hottest property in Washington, reporters chasing it, Democrats and some skeptical Republicans eager to find out what it contained. It promised sensational reading.

Gaetz was initially investigated by the US justice department, in relation to the actions of Joel Greenberg, a Florida tax collector who in 2021 pleaded guilty to sex trafficking of a minor and agreed to cooperate in the investigation of Gaetz.

Eventually, the justice department dropped that investigation. But the House ethics committee had been investigating Gaetz too, and in June it outlined the scope of its work: it was investigating claims the congressman “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”.

Trump’s nomination of Gaetz was controversial for other reasons. There was Gaetz’s loud support for Trump supporters convicted in relation to the January 6 attack on Congress, and his promises to seek revenge against Trump’s political opponents. There was his almost complete lack of legal experience and expertise, having graduated from law school but practiced only briefly before entering politics.

But in Washington, the ethics committee report remained the holy grail.

Details began to leak, ABC News first to report that the committee had 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.

A lawyer for two women spoke to the media, saying one had been 17 – under the age of consent – when she was paid for sex with Gaetz.

The Trump camp repeatedly pointed to the justice department’s decision to drop its investigation of allegations against Gaetz, without official reason but amid reports of concerns about witness credibility.

On Wednesday, the House committee considered whether to release the report. The session ended in deadlock, five Democrats for release, five Republicans against it. In the House at large, Democrats introduced motions calling for a full vote to force the issue.

Controversy switched to the Senate. As Democrats said they had asked the FBI for its files on Gaetz, the congressman himself climbed Capitol Hill, in the company of JD Vance, to meet the vice-president-elect’s erstwhile Senate colleagues and seek to convince them that Gaetz should be confirmed.

It did not go well. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, relative Republican moderates already used to saying no to Trump, at least some of the time, were not supportive.

Gaetz found sympathy from others. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a close Trump ally, said he would “urge all of my Senate colleagues, particularly Republicans, not to join the lynch mob and give the process a chance to move forward”. But plenty of other Republicans cast doubt on Gaetz’s chances of being confirmed.

John Cornyn of Texas, a member of the judiciary committee, said any hearings for Gaetz would be like “Kavanaugh on steroids” – a reference to the tempestuous hearings in 2018 in which Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s second pick for the supreme court, angrily rejected accusations of sexual assault. In Kavanaugh’s case, the Capitol Hill circus proved controversial but survivable.

But Gaetz would not be given a chance to pull off a similar escape. On Thursday, on social media, he said: “There is no time to waste on a needlessly protracted Washington scuffle, thus I’ll be withdrawing my name from consideration to serve as attorney general.”

CNN subsequently reported that the woman who says she had sex with him when she was a minor told the ethics committee she had another sexual encounter with Gaetz, which also involved another adult woman.

“After being asked for comment for this story,” the CNN report said, “Gaetz announced he was backing out as President-elect Donald Trump’s attorney general nominee.”

However, a source familiar with Gaetz’s nomination process told the Guardian that privately confirmed opposition from four senators – enough to sink the nomination if no Democrats defected – was what pushed Gaetz to decide to withdraw, before the call from CNN.

Murkowski and Collins were opposed. So was John Curtis, the senator-elect from Utah who will succeed Mitt Romney, another Trump critic, in the new year. The fourth voice set against Gaetz was an influential one: Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the former Republican leader now beginning life back in the rank and file.

In his announcement, Gaetz proclaimed his support for “the most successful president in history” and said he would “forever be honored” that Trump nominated him for attorney general.

Elsewhere in Washington, it seemed safe to bet, politicians and reporters alike were reflecting on an extraordinary episode of near-unsurpassable Washington dishonor.

A Wisconsin man who faked his own drowning this summer so he could leave his wife and three children is living in eastern Europe and has been communicating with authorities, a sheriff said on Thursday.

Ryan Borgwardt has been talking with law enforcement since 11 November after disappearing for three months, Mark Podoll, the Green Lake county sheriff, said at a news conference. Podoll later showed a video that Borgwardt had sent the sheriff’s office that day.

“The great news is we know that he is alive and well,” Podoll said. “The bad news is we don’t know where Ryan exactly is, and he has not yet decided to return home.”

Borgwardt, wearing an orange T-shirt and not smiling, looked directly into the camera in the video, which appears to have been taken on his phone. Borgwardt said he was in his apartment and that he was “safe and secure”.

He told authorities he fled because of “personal matters”, the sheriff said.

“He was just going to try and make things better in his mind, and this was the way it was going to be,” Podoll said.

Borgwardt told authorities he traveled about 50 miles (80km) from his home in Watertown to Green Lake, where he overturned his kayak, dumped his phone in the lake and paddled an inflatable boat to shore. He told authorities he picked that lake because it’s the deepest in Wisconsin at 237ft (more than 72 meters).

After leaving the lake, he rode an electric bike about 70 miles (110km) through the night to Madison, the sheriff said. From there, he took a bus to Detroit, then boarded a bus to Canada and got on a plane there, the sheriff said.

The sheriff suggested Borgwardt could be charged with obstructing the investigation into his disappearance, but so far no counts have been filed. The search for Borgwardt’s body, which lasted more than a month, cost at least $35,000, according to the sheriff’s office. Podoll said that Borgwardt told authorities that he hadn’t expected the search to last more than two weeks.

Whether Borgwardt returns will be up to his “free will”, Podoll said. Borgwardt’s biggest concern about returning is how the community will react, the sheriff said.

“He thought his plan was going to pan out, but it didn’t go the way he had planned,” the sheriff said. “And so now we’re trying to give him a different plan to come back.”

The sheriff said authorities “keep pulling at his heartstrings” to return home, encouraging him to reunite with his children for Christmas.

Borgwardt’s disappearance was first investigated as a possible drowning after he went kayaking on Green Lake, about 100 miles (160km) north-west of Milwaukee, in August. But subsequent clues – including that he had obtained a new passport three months before he disappeared – led investigators to speculate that he had faked his death to meet up with a woman he had been communicating with in Uzbekistan, a former Soviet republic in central Asia.

The sheriff declined to comment when asked what he knew about the woman, but he said police had contacted Borgwardt “through a female that spoke Russian”.

Prior to the sheriff’s office speaking with Borgwardt last week, he had not been heard from since the night of 11 August when he texted his wife in Watertown shortly before 11pm, saying he was headed to shore after kayaking.

Deputies located his vehicle and trailer near the lake. They also found his overturned kayak with a life jacket attached to it in an area where the lake’s waters run more than 200ft (60 meters) deep. The search for his body went on for more than 50 days, with divers on several occasions exploring the lake.

In early October, the sheriff’s department learned that Canadian law enforcement authorities had run Borgwardt’s name through their databases the day after he was reported missing. Further investigation revealed that he had reported his passport lost or stolen and had obtained a new one in May.

The sheriff’s office said the analysis of a laptop revealed a digital trail that showed Borgwardt had planned to head to Europe and tried to mislead investigators.

The laptop’s hard drive had been replaced and the browsers had been cleared the day Borgwardt disappeared, the sheriff’s office said. Investigators found passport photos, inquiries about moving money to foreign banks and communication with a woman from Uzbekistan.

They also discovered that he had taken out a $375,000 life insurance policy in January, although the policy was for his family and not him, the sheriff said.

Authorities tried every phone number and email address on the laptop in “a blitz fashion”, Podoll said. They eventually reached the Russian-speaking woman, who connected them with Borgwardt. It’s unclear whether she is the woman in Uzbekistan.

A Wisconsin man who faked his own drowning this summer so he could leave his wife and three children is living in eastern Europe and has been communicating with authorities, a sheriff said on Thursday.

Ryan Borgwardt has been talking with law enforcement since 11 November after disappearing for three months, Mark Podoll, the Green Lake county sheriff, said at a news conference. Podoll later showed a video that Borgwardt had sent the sheriff’s office that day.

“The great news is we know that he is alive and well,” Podoll said. “The bad news is we don’t know where Ryan exactly is, and he has not yet decided to return home.”

Borgwardt, wearing an orange T-shirt and not smiling, looked directly into the camera in the video, which appears to have been taken on his phone. Borgwardt said he was in his apartment and that he was “safe and secure”.

He told authorities he fled because of “personal matters”, the sheriff said.

“He was just going to try and make things better in his mind, and this was the way it was going to be,” Podoll said.

Borgwardt told authorities he traveled about 50 miles (80km) from his home in Watertown to Green Lake, where he overturned his kayak, dumped his phone in the lake and paddled an inflatable boat to shore. He told authorities he picked that lake because it’s the deepest in Wisconsin at 237ft (more than 72 meters).

After leaving the lake, he rode an electric bike about 70 miles (110km) through the night to Madison, the sheriff said. From there, he took a bus to Detroit, then boarded a bus to Canada and got on a plane there, the sheriff said.

The sheriff suggested Borgwardt could be charged with obstructing the investigation into his disappearance, but so far no counts have been filed. The search for Borgwardt’s body, which lasted more than a month, cost at least $35,000, according to the sheriff’s office. Podoll said that Borgwardt told authorities that he hadn’t expected the search to last more than two weeks.

Whether Borgwardt returns will be up to his “free will”, Podoll said. Borgwardt’s biggest concern about returning is how the community will react, the sheriff said.

“He thought his plan was going to pan out, but it didn’t go the way he had planned,” the sheriff said. “And so now we’re trying to give him a different plan to come back.”

The sheriff said authorities “keep pulling at his heartstrings” to return home, encouraging him to reunite with his children for Christmas.

Borgwardt’s disappearance was first investigated as a possible drowning after he went kayaking on Green Lake, about 100 miles (160km) north-west of Milwaukee, in August. But subsequent clues – including that he had obtained a new passport three months before he disappeared – led investigators to speculate that he had faked his death to meet up with a woman he had been communicating with in Uzbekistan, a former Soviet republic in central Asia.

The sheriff declined to comment when asked what he knew about the woman, but he said police had contacted Borgwardt “through a female that spoke Russian”.

Prior to the sheriff’s office speaking with Borgwardt last week, he had not been heard from since the night of 11 August when he texted his wife in Watertown shortly before 11pm, saying he was headed to shore after kayaking.

Deputies located his vehicle and trailer near the lake. They also found his overturned kayak with a life jacket attached to it in an area where the lake’s waters run more than 200ft (60 meters) deep. The search for his body went on for more than 50 days, with divers on several occasions exploring the lake.

In early October, the sheriff’s department learned that Canadian law enforcement authorities had run Borgwardt’s name through their databases the day after he was reported missing. Further investigation revealed that he had reported his passport lost or stolen and had obtained a new one in May.

The sheriff’s office said the analysis of a laptop revealed a digital trail that showed Borgwardt had planned to head to Europe and tried to mislead investigators.

The laptop’s hard drive had been replaced and the browsers had been cleared the day Borgwardt disappeared, the sheriff’s office said. Investigators found passport photos, inquiries about moving money to foreign banks and communication with a woman from Uzbekistan.

They also discovered that he had taken out a $375,000 life insurance policy in January, although the policy was for his family and not him, the sheriff said.

Authorities tried every phone number and email address on the laptop in “a blitz fashion”, Podoll said. They eventually reached the Russian-speaking woman, who connected them with Borgwardt. It’s unclear whether she is the woman in Uzbekistan.

The former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro and some of his closest allies are among dozens of people formally accused by federal police of being part of a criminal conspiracy designed to obliterate Brazil’s democratic system through a rightwing coup d’état.

Federal police confirmed on Thursday that investigators had concluded their long-running investigation into what they called a coordinated attempt to “violently dismantle the constitutional state”.

In a statement, police said the report – which has been forwarded to the supreme court – formally accused a total of 37 people of crimes including involvement in an attempted coup, the formation of a criminal organization, and trying to tear down one of the world’s largest democracies.

The accused include Bolsonaro, a disgraced army captain turned populist politician, who was president from 2018 until the end of 2022, as well as some of the most important members of his far-right administration.

They included Bolsonaro’s former spy chief, the far-right congressman Alexandre Ramagem; the former defense ministers Gen Walter Braga Netto and Gen Paulo Sérgio Nogueira de Oliveira; the former minister of justice and public security Anderson Torres; the former minister of institutional security Gen Augusto Heleno; the former navy commander Adm Almir Garnier Santos; the president of Bolsonaro’s political party, Valdemar Costa Neto; and Filipe Martins, one of Bolsonaro’s top foreign policy advisers.

Also named is the rightwing blogger grandson of Gen João Baptista Figueiredo, one of the military rulers who governed Brazil during its 1964-85 dictatorship.

The list contains one non-Brazilian name: that of Fernando Cerimedo, an Argentinian digital marketing guru who was in charge of communications for Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, during that country’s 2023 presidential campaign. Buenos Aires-based Cerimedo is close to Bolsonaro and his politician sons.

The long-awaited conclusion of the police investigation comes just days after federal police officers made five arrests as part of a roundup of alleged members of a plot to assassinate Bolsonaro’s leftwing successor Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and his centre-right vice-president, Geraldo Alckmin, as well as the supreme court judge Alexandre de Moraes.

Shortly before police announced the end of their inquiry, Lula voiced gratitude that the attempt to poison him had failed. “I’m alive,” the 79-year-old leftist said during a speech.

Gen Mario Fernandes, one of the five people arrested over the alleged “Green and Yellow Dagger” assassination plan, was also among the 37 people named by federal police on Thursday – and like the others was formally accused of being part of a criminal coup attempt. “We are at war,” Fernandes allegedly said in one message discovered by police investigators.

Bolsonaro has previously denied involvement in an attempt to overturn the result of the 2022 election, which he lost to Lula. Speaking to a journalist from the Brazilian news site Metrópoles after he was named in the police report, the former president said he needed to see what was in the investigation. “I’m going to wait for the lawyer,” Bolsonaro added.

Braga Netto, Heleno and other prominent names on the list made no immediate comment about the accusations in the federal police report, which the police statement said was based on a large trove of evidence gathered through plea deals, searches and the analysis of financial, internet and phone records. But prominent pro-Bolsonaro politicians criticized the report, with Rogério Marinho, the leader of the opposition in the senate, attributing it to the “incessant persecution” targeting Brazil’s right. “The more they persecute Bolsonaro, the stronger he gets,” tweeted Sóstenes Cavalcante, a Bolsonarista congressman from Rio.

The alleged pro-Bolsonaro coup attempt allegedly played out during the turbulent final days of his four-year administration, which came to an end when he was narrowly defeated by Lula in the second round of the 2022 presidential election.

In the lead-up to that crunch vote, a manifesto signed by almost a million citizens warned that Brazilian democracy was facing a moment of “immense danger to democratic normality” amid widespread suspicion that plans were afoot to help Bolsonaro cling to power even if he lost.

After losing his re-election bid, Bolsonaro flew into temporary exile in the US while thousands of supporters gathered outside military bases around Brazil to demand a military intervention that never came.

The failed attempt to overturn Lula’s victory culminated in the 8 January 2023 riots in the capital, Brasília, when radicalized Bolsonaristas rampaged through the presidential palace, congress and supreme court.

Nearly two years later, Lula is in power but the far-right threat to his administration remains. Last Wednesday night, a member of Bolsonaro’s political party was killed after apparently blowing himself up with homemade explosives while attacking the supreme court.

During a search of the man’s trailer, police reportedly found a cap emblazoned with the slogan of Bolsonaro’s far-right movement: “Brazil above everything. God above all.”

​In a video statement, Paulo Pimenta, Lula’s communications minister, said the government was “utterly perplexed and outraged” by the revelations that the former president and members of the military had allegedly been plotting to bring down Brazil’s democracy “with almost unbelievable audacity”.

“These are very grave crimes [and] very serious accusations,” added Pimenta, who said Lula’s administration would now wait for the public prosecutor’s office to decide which of the 37 would be prosecuted and put on trial. Those convicted would have to pay for the crimes they had committed against democracy, against the constitution and against the Brazilian people, said Pimenta. “Bolsonaro in Jail”, the minister wrote alongside his video, echoing a call from many progressive Brazilians.

Angela Merkel’s first mistake with Donald Trump, she says in her keenly awaited new memoir, was treating him as if he were “completely normal”, but she quickly learned of his “emotional” nature and soft spot for authoritarians and tyrants.

In extracts from her more than 700-page tome, Freedom, published in the German weekly Die Zeit, the former German chancellor says she initially misread Trump during their first meeting in 2017 in the Oval Office, where he attempted to humiliate her by refusing to shake her hand before the cameras.

“Instead of stoically bearing it, I whispered to him that we should shake hands again,” she writes. “As soon as the words left my mouth, I shook my head at myself. How could I forget that Trump knew precisely what he was doing … He wanted to give people something to talk about with his behaviour, while I had acted as though I were having a conversation with someone completely normal.”

The book, which Merkel has been working on since she left office in 2021, has been kept under close wraps ahead of its publication date next Tuesday. It covers her upbringing in communist East Germany, her unlikely rise within the centre-right Christian Democratic Union and her 16 years in power in which she became known as the queen of Europe and “leader of the free world” – a label once used exclusively for US presidents.

Now unbound by diplomatic niceties, Merkel sizes up Trump as “emotional” and driven by grievance and neediness, in contrast to her “factual” approach. “It seemed that his main aim was to make the person he was talking to feel guilty … At the same time I had the impression … that he also wanted the person he was talking with to like him.”

Rather than trying to build bridges with traditional allies, Merkel writes, “Trump was apparently fascinated with the Russian president”, and she notes that “politicians with autocratic and dictatorial traits had him in their thrall”.

On the flight home after their first talks, a deflated Merkel concluded that Trump “looked at everything like the real estate developer he was before he entered politics” – as a zero-sum game. “For him, all countries were rivals in which the success of one meant the failure of another. He didn’t think that prosperity could be increased for all through cooperation.”

Only weeks later, Trump informed her that the US would leave the Paris climate accord – a crushing setback on which she sought the advice of Pope Francis.

“Without naming names, I asked him how he would approach fundamentally opposed opinions within a group of important personalities,” she writes. “He understood immediately and said simply: ‘Bend, bend, bend, but make sure it doesn’t break.’ I like this image.”

The contentious relationship with Merkel seems to have haunted Trump, who was still speaking about her on the campaign trail three years after she left office. “They [the Germans] didn’t love me because I said you gotta pay,” he told a rally in Pennsylvania this month, apparently referring to defence spending within Nato. “I said to Angela: Angela, you haven’t paid.”

Merkel notes that Trump targeted her and Germany in his successful 2016 campaign, claiming that her welcoming in of more than 1 million refugees in 2015 and 2016 had “ruined” the country and accusing Berlin of unfair trade policies and free-riding on US military investment.

In what she admits will be a belated endorsement, written before this month’s US election, Merkel declares: “I wish with all my heart that Kamala Harris … defeats her competitor and becomes president.”

History also had other plans for Vladimir Putin, another figure still shaping the world in her absence. Although Merkel, a fluent Russian speaker, found him to be manipulative and vindictive, she concedes that the Russian president had a few valid arguments in his notorious anti-western diatribe at the 2007 Munich security conference.

“There were some points that I did not regard as completely absurd. As we know, there was never any evidence of chemical weapons in Iraq,” she writes, referring to the US justification for regime change.

“I too had criticised the fact that there had been no progress on updating the treaty on conventional armed forces in Europe (CFE)”, which “should have been adapted after the dissolution of the Warsaw pact, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the accession of eastern European countries to Nato”.

Merkel chides eastern European leaders in particular for in her view pretending that their giant neighbour could simply be sidelined. “You could find all of this childish and reprehensible, you could shake your head. But it wouldn’t make Russia disappear from the map.”

Merkel indicates that Putin’s fear Kyiv could join Nato after she left office helped pave the way for his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Without specifying when he made the comments, Merkel says Putin had told her: “You won’t be chancellor for ever. And then they’ll be a Nato member. And I want to prevent that.”

Merkel left office still popular with a majority of Germans but her legacy has been tarnished by accusations that she failed to face up to Moscow’s aggressive intentions against Ukraine while making her own country too reliant on Russian gas. Critics also apportion blame for the rise of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party to Merkel’s liberal asylum policy a decade ago.

She has largely remained out of the spotlight since stepping down as chancellor but will be making a series of appearances in Germany and abroad in the coming weeks to promote the book.

Freedom by Angela Merkel (Pan Macmillan, £35). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Angela Merkel’s first mistake with Donald Trump, she says in her keenly awaited new memoir, was treating him as if he were “completely normal”, but she quickly learned of his “emotional” nature and soft spot for authoritarians and tyrants.

In extracts from her more than 700-page tome, Freedom, published in the German weekly Die Zeit, the former German chancellor says she initially misread Trump during their first meeting in 2017 in the Oval Office, where he attempted to humiliate her by refusing to shake her hand before the cameras.

“Instead of stoically bearing it, I whispered to him that we should shake hands again,” she writes. “As soon as the words left my mouth, I shook my head at myself. How could I forget that Trump knew precisely what he was doing … He wanted to give people something to talk about with his behaviour, while I had acted as though I were having a conversation with someone completely normal.”

The book, which Merkel has been working on since she left office in 2021, has been kept under close wraps ahead of its publication date next Tuesday. It covers her upbringing in communist East Germany, her unlikely rise within the centre-right Christian Democratic Union and her 16 years in power in which she became known as the queen of Europe and “leader of the free world” – a label once used exclusively for US presidents.

Now unbound by diplomatic niceties, Merkel sizes up Trump as “emotional” and driven by grievance and neediness, in contrast to her “factual” approach. “It seemed that his main aim was to make the person he was talking to feel guilty … At the same time I had the impression … that he also wanted the person he was talking with to like him.”

Rather than trying to build bridges with traditional allies, Merkel writes, “Trump was apparently fascinated with the Russian president”, and she notes that “politicians with autocratic and dictatorial traits had him in their thrall”.

On the flight home after their first talks, a deflated Merkel concluded that Trump “looked at everything like the real estate developer he was before he entered politics” – as a zero-sum game. “For him, all countries were rivals in which the success of one meant the failure of another. He didn’t think that prosperity could be increased for all through cooperation.”

Only weeks later, Trump informed her that the US would leave the Paris climate accord – a crushing setback on which she sought the advice of Pope Francis.

“Without naming names, I asked him how he would approach fundamentally opposed opinions within a group of important personalities,” she writes. “He understood immediately and said simply: ‘Bend, bend, bend, but make sure it doesn’t break.’ I like this image.”

The contentious relationship with Merkel seems to have haunted Trump, who was still speaking about her on the campaign trail three years after she left office. “They [the Germans] didn’t love me because I said you gotta pay,” he told a rally in Pennsylvania this month, apparently referring to defence spending within Nato. “I said to Angela: Angela, you haven’t paid.”

Merkel notes that Trump targeted her and Germany in his successful 2016 campaign, claiming that her welcoming in of more than 1 million refugees in 2015 and 2016 had “ruined” the country and accusing Berlin of unfair trade policies and free-riding on US military investment.

In what she admits will be a belated endorsement, written before this month’s US election, Merkel declares: “I wish with all my heart that Kamala Harris … defeats her competitor and becomes president.”

History also had other plans for Vladimir Putin, another figure still shaping the world in her absence. Although Merkel, a fluent Russian speaker, found him to be manipulative and vindictive, she concedes that the Russian president had a few valid arguments in his notorious anti-western diatribe at the 2007 Munich security conference.

“There were some points that I did not regard as completely absurd. As we know, there was never any evidence of chemical weapons in Iraq,” she writes, referring to the US justification for regime change.

“I too had criticised the fact that there had been no progress on updating the treaty on conventional armed forces in Europe (CFE)”, which “should have been adapted after the dissolution of the Warsaw pact, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the accession of eastern European countries to Nato”.

Merkel chides eastern European leaders in particular for in her view pretending that their giant neighbour could simply be sidelined. “You could find all of this childish and reprehensible, you could shake your head. But it wouldn’t make Russia disappear from the map.”

Merkel indicates that Putin’s fear Kyiv could join Nato after she left office helped pave the way for his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Without specifying when he made the comments, Merkel says Putin had told her: “You won’t be chancellor for ever. And then they’ll be a Nato member. And I want to prevent that.”

Merkel left office still popular with a majority of Germans but her legacy has been tarnished by accusations that she failed to face up to Moscow’s aggressive intentions against Ukraine while making her own country too reliant on Russian gas. Critics also apportion blame for the rise of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party to Merkel’s liberal asylum policy a decade ago.

She has largely remained out of the spotlight since stepping down as chancellor but will be making a series of appearances in Germany and abroad in the coming weeks to promote the book.

Freedom by Angela Merkel (Pan Macmillan, £35). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Poor countries may have to compromise on demands for cash to tackle global heating, a former UN climate envoy has said, as UN talks entered their final hours in deadlock.

In comments that are likely to disappoint poorer countries at the Cop29 summit, Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland and twice a UN climate envoy, said rich country budgets were stretched amid inflation, Covid and conflicts including Russia’s war in Ukraine.

“It’s finance, and it’s absolutely vital, and it’s the responsibility of the developed world,” she told the Guardian in an interview. “But you can’t squeeze what isn’t squeezable.”

Rich countries have yet to make any formal offer of finance to the poor world as of Thursday night, even as two weeks of talks stretched into their final official day on Friday. The summit is focused on finding $1tn (£790bn) a year for poor nations to shift to a low-CO₂ economy and cope with the impacts of extreme weather.

But the rich world is expected to offer only about $300bn a year at most in public finance, far less than many developing countries hoped for. The developed world is likely to argue that the remainder of the $1tn can be made up from other sources, including private sector investment, carbon trading and potential new sources such as taxes on fossil fuels.

Robinson said $300bn should be “a minimum” and developed countries must also take steps to ensure that poor countries can access private sector finance and loans much more cheaply than at present, by “de-risking” finance for them. That could include giving guarantees for loans, which costs developed countries nothing but can make a big difference to gaining access to investment for the poor.

Many poor countries are asking for a much higher proportion of the $1tn to come from rich country’s budgets, rather than from the private sector or new taxes. The least developed countries bloc, for instance, said they wanted $900bn of the total to come from public finance.

Robinson said those ideas were “fine in principle, but not in the reality of government budgets”.

She conceded that this view would be controversial. “I think probably developing countries would say that’s too low,” said Robinson. “But in my view, with the other parts – the solidarity levies [such as fossil fuel taxes], the World Bank, and the private sector, you can get up to $1tn. That’s the point.

“That’s the world we live in. Budgets are stretched. The UK is playing a really good role, but they don’t have the money. We know it, you know, we all know. There’s no point trying to squeeze what is not squeezable.”

A core of finance from public sources of about $300bn, surrounded by other sources such as new taxes, carbon trading and private sector investment, is in line with an influential academic paper published by Nicholas Stern and other leading economists last week. TheIndependent High-Level Expert Group on Climate Finance found that about $500bn a year should come from private sector investment as part of $1tn for developing countries by 2030 and $1.3tn by 2035.

Developing countries were reluctant to comment as the negotiations are entering a crucial phase. Nevertheless, several civil society groups told the Guardian that developing countries should stick to their demands for more of the money to come from public sources.

Thato Gabaitse, a climate justice advocate for the Botswana chapter of the campaign group We, the World, said: “African countries have been clear on their $1.3tn ask. Out of that, $600bn would be provision and the rest mobilisation. Global north countries are showing a willingness to tip the scales, putting even more lives at risk in the global south and eroding the goodwill of global south countries. Keeping the process alive also means delivering finance without undermining the fundamentals of the Paris agreement. There is fatigue from the global south with the lack of ambition from rich countries. It’s time for the developed countries to put a future on the table and negotiate in good faith.”

Charlene Watson, a research associate at the ODI group, said developed countries should offer at least $500bn. “While less than what developing countries are asking for, a solid commitment of $500bn in highly concessional public finance – not in grant-equivalent terms, as the draft text suggests – could be the ‘landing zone’ we need to finalise the negotiations,” she said. “$500bn is robust enough – and enough of a statement – to mobilise the remainder up to that important $1tn mark.”

Robinson also said that China and other major economies still classed as developing must also pay towards climate finance. “It’s also the responsibility of the rich so-called developing countries [such as] China to take their responsibility properly. I know China does support developing countries, mainly with loans, but it needs to become more part of the way forward … in a way that’s transparent.”

Rich countries must also fulfil their responsibilities by agreeing deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, Robinson said. Only by doing so, as well as providing clear guarantees they will deliver the cash they promise, could they rebuild trust with the poor world, she said.

Relations between rich and poor nations were also strained, she said. “The trust is very fragile at the moment. There’s an anger, because the impacts of climate are much worse in the developing world,” she said. “The impact in poor countries is so devastating.”

On Thursday morning, the host country, Azerbaijan, published draft texts covering important aspects of the talks, but they were widely criticised as inadequate. The texts on a global financial settlement, called a new collective quantified goal, did not contain vital numbers such as the amount developed countries would be willing to contribute.

Other texts failed to reaffirm a vital commitment made last year to “transition away from fossil fuels”. Saudi Arabia and some of its allies have been pushing to remove such a reaffirmation from the outcome of Cop29.

New drafts of these texts, with the finance numbers included, are not expected until Friday afternoon. This is likely to push the conclusion of the talks into the weekend and into a race against the clock, as many developing country delegations are planning to leave.

There is pressure to conclude these finance talks in Baku, because Joe Biden is still in the White House until January. When Donald Trump takes office, he is expected to be hostile to all aspects of cooperation on the climate crisis.

At least 42 people have been killed and 20 wounded after gunmen opened fire on vehicles carrying Shia Muslims in Pakistan’s restive north-west, in one of the region’s deadliest such attacks in recent years, police said.

The attack happened in Kurram, a district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province where sectarian clashes between majority Sunni Muslims and minority Shias have killed dozens of people in recent months.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the latest attack, whose victims included six women. It came a week after authorities reopened a key highway in the region that had been closed for weeks after deadly clashes.

Local police official Azmat Ali said several vehicles were travelling in a convoy from the city of Parachinar to Peshawar, the capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, when the attack began. He said at least 10 passengers were in critical condition at a hospital.

Aftab Alam, a provincial minister, said officers were investigating to determine who was behind the attack.

The interior minister, Mohsin Naqvi, called the shootings a “terrorist attack”. The prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, and president, Asif Ali Zardari, condemned the attack, and Sharif said those behind the killing of innocent civilians will not go unpunished.

Kurram resident Mir Hussain, 35, said he saw four gunmen emerge from a vehicle and start shooting at buses and cars.

“I think other people were also firing at the convoy of vehicles from nearby open farm field,” he said. “The firing continued for about 40 minutes.” He said he hid until the attackers fled.

“I heard cries of women, and people were shouting for the help,” he said.

Ibne Ali Bangash, a relative of one of the victims, described the convoy attack as the saddest day in Kurram’s history.

“More than 40 people from our community have been martyred,” he said. “It’s a shameful matter for the government.”

Baqir Haideri, a local Shia leader, denounced the assault and said the death toll was likely to rise. He accused local authorities of not providing adequate security for the convoy of more than 100 vehicles despite fears of possible attacks by militants who had recently threatened to target Shias in Kurram.

Shop owners in Parachinar announced a strike on Friday in a protest about the attack.

Shia Muslims make up about 15% of the 240 million population of Sunni-majority Pakistan, which has a history of sectarian animosity between the communities.

Although the two groups generally live together peacefully, tensions have existed for decades in some areas, especially in parts of Kurram, where Shias are the majority.

Dozens of people from both sides have been killed since July when a land dispute erupted in Kurram that later turned into widespread sectarian violence.

Pakistan is tackling violence in the north-west and south-west, where militants and separatists often target police, troops and civilians. Violence in the north-west has been blamed on the Pakistani Taliban, a militant group that is separate from Afghanistan’s Taliban but linked to them. Violence in south-western Balochistan province has been blamed on members of the outlawed Baloch Liberation Army.

A British lawyer has become the fifth person to die in a suspected mass methanol poisoning in Laos.

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) said it was “supporting the family of a British woman who has died in Laos, and we are in contact with the local authorities”.

Simone White, 28, from Orpington, south-east London, was among a number of people taken to hospital after the incident in the backpacking town of Vang Vieng last week.

Other British tourists are among those being treated in hospital after allegedly being served alcoholic drinks containing deadly methanol. Reports suggest as many as six British nationals have required treatment.

The FCDO said in a statement: “We are providing consular assistance to British nationals and their families.”

White was a lawyer with the global law firm Squire Patton Boggs, whose work involves general commercial matters and contentious and non-contentious intellectual property law issues, according to the firm’s website.

An Australian teenager, an American, and two Danish tourists aged 19 and 20 have also died after the incident in Vang Vieng, a town particularly popular among backpackers in search of partying and adventure sports.

The Australian prime minister, Anthony Albanese, told parliament that 19-year-old Bianca Jones, from Melbourne, died after being evacuated from Vang Vieng for treatment in a Thai hospital.

Thai authorities said Jones died from “brain swelling due to high levels of methanol found in her system”.

Her friend Holly Bowles, also 19, remains in hospital in Thailand. They had been staying at a hostel in Vang Vieng. Australia said “several foreign nationals” had also been victims of methanol poisoning.

The US state department said an American had died, and Denmark’s foreign ministry said two of its citizens had died in “the incident in Laos”, but neither commented directly on a link to the methanol poisoning that killed Jones.

New Zealand’s foreign ministry said one of its citizens was unwell in Laos and could be a victim of methanol poisoning.

Unlike ethanol, the key component of alcoholic drinks, methanol is toxic to humans. The incident has highlighted the dangers of methanol poisoning across south-east Asia, where it is a cultural norm to brew bootleg liquor from ingredients such as rice and sugarcane sometimes mixed with methanol as a cheaper alternative to ethanol.

Authorities in Laos are investigating the incident. Samples were sent to Thailand and verified there, said Prof Knut Erik Hovda, who advises Médecins Sans Frontières on a project to combat methanol poisoning.

Hovda said that based on the clinical features and histories of the people who were flown to Thailand for treatment, they had most likely been poisoned by methanol.

“The minute you have people drinking and getting sick in a high number and the symptoms start after a certain time, that is methanol until proven otherwise,” he said. “To me, this is no doubt caused by methanol.”

Asia has the highest prevalence of methanol poisoning globally, with incidents in Indonesia, India, Cambodia, Vietnam and the Philippines, according to MSF data.

Alastair Hay, a professor of environmental toxicology at the University of Leeds, said the risk from methanol poisoning was twofold.

“Methanol breaks down in the body to formaldehyde and then formic acid. The formic acid upsets the acid/base balance in blood and the major consequence is initially the effect on someone’s breathing,” he said. “There are effects on many other organs, the kidney being one. The disturbance of acid/base balance and disrupted breathing will eventually affect the heart and it will stop functioning.

“Formaldehyde attacks nerves, particularly the optic nerve and blindness is a potential risk. Depending on the severity of poisoning, treatment may require dialysis to remove methanol from blood whilst at the same time keeping someone mildly drunk by administering ethanol. If the poisoning is not too severe, and only blood tests will determine this, ethanol alone may suffice.”

Additional reporting by Kate Lamb

The small, unadorned church has long ranked as the oldest in the Swiss city of Lucerne. But Peter’s chapel has become synonymous with all that is new after it installed an artificial intelligence-powered Jesus capable of dialoguing in 100 different languages.

“It was really an experiment,” said Marco Schmid, a theologian with the church. “We wanted to see and understand how people react to an AI Jesus. What would they talk with him about? Would there be interest in talking to him? We’re probably pioneers in this.”

The installation, known as Deus in Machina, was launched in August as the latest initiative in a years-long collaboration with a local university research lab on immersive reality.

After projects that had experimented with virtual and augmented reality, the church decided that the next step was to install an avatar. Schmid said: “We had a discussion about what kind of avatar it would be – a theologian, a person or a saint? But then we realised the best figure would be Jesus himself.”

Short on space and seeking a place where people could have private conversations with the avatar, the church swapped out its priest to set up a computer and cables in the confessional booth. After training the AI program in theological texts, visitors were then invited to pose questions to a long-haired image of Jesus beamed through a latticework screen. He responded in real time, offering up answers generated through artificial intelligence.

People were advised not to disclose any personal information and confirm that they knew they were engaging with the avatar at their own risk. “It’s not a confession,” said Schmid. “We are not intending to imitate a confession.”

During the two-month period of the experiment, more than 1,000 people – including Muslims and visiting tourists from as far as China and Vietnam – took up the opportunity to interact with the avatar.

While data on the installation will be presented next week, feedback from more than 230 users suggested two-thirds of them had found it to be a “spiritual experience”, said Schmid. “So we can say they had a religiously positive moment with this AI Jesus. For me, that was surprising.”

Others were more negative, with some telling the church they found it impossible to talk to a machine. One local reporter who tried out the device described the answers as, at times, “trite, repetitive and exuding a wisdom reminiscent of calendar cliches”.

The feedback suggested there had been a wide disparity in the avatar’s answers, said Schmid. “I have the impression that sometimes he was really very good and people were incredibly happy and surprised and inspired,” he said. “And then there were also moments where he was somehow not so good, maybe more superficial.”

The experiment also faced criticism from some within the church community, said Schmid, with Catholic colleagues protesting at the use of the confessional while Protestant colleagues seemingly took umbrage at the installation’s use of imagery in this way.

What had most struck Schmid, however, was the risk the church had taken in trusting that the AI would not dole out responses that were illegal, explicit or offer up interpretations or spiritual advice that clashed with church teachings.

In the hope of mitigating this risk, the church had carried out tests with 30 people before the installation of the avatar. After the launch, it ensured that support was always close by for users.

“We never had the impression he was saying strange things,” said Schmid. “But of course we could never guarantee that he wouldn’t say anything strange.”

Ultimately, it was this uncertainty that had led him to decide that the avatar was best left as an experiment. “To put a Jesus like that permanently, I wouldn’t do that. Because the responsibility would be too great.”

He was swift, however, to cite the broader potential of the idea. “It is a really easy, approachable tool where you can talk about religion, about Christianity, about Christian faith,” he said, musing that it could be refashioned into a sort of multilingual spiritual guide that could answer religious questions.

For him, the experiment – and the keen interest it had generated – had shown him that people were looking to go beyond the Bible, sacraments and rituals.

Schmid said: “I think there is a thirst to talk with Jesus. People want to have an answer: they want words and to listen to what he’s saying. I think that’s one element of it. Then of course there’s the curiosity of it. They want to see what this is.”