Israeli jets have launched widespread air raids against Houthi targets in Yemen, killing at least nine people in the port city of Hodeidah.

According to Israeli media, dozens of combat jets along with fuelling and intelligence aircraft took part in the raids. There had been reports beforehand that Israel was planning to hit Yemen with force after a recent increase in Houthi attacks against Israel, including two in the past week.

The raids came after an overnight missile launch from Yemen towards Israel. The Israeli military said it was investigating whether an incomplete interception by its aerial defences had led to parts of the missile hitting a school in the area of Ramat Gan, near Tel Aviv.

The airstrikes, the third time during the current war in the region that Israel has hit Yemen, came amid warnings that Israel intended to act after more than a year of intermittent drone and missile attacks from the Iranian-backed Houthis. Houthi forces have been regularly firing long-range missiles at Israel in what they said was solidarity for Palestinians killed by Israeli strikes in Gaza.

Al-Masirah, a Houthi media channel, said a series of “aggressive raids” were launched in the Yemeni capital of Sana’a and Hodeidah.

The Houthi spokesperson Yahya Saree said the rebels had targeted “two specific and sensitive military targets” in the occupied Jaffa region near Tel Aviv, with “hypersonic ballistic missiles”, although the claim regarding the type of missile was unverified.

Israel’s military said it “conducted precise strikes on Houthi military targets in Yemen, including ports and energy infrastructure in Sana’a, which the Houthis have been using in ways that effectively contributed to their military actions”.

The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said in a statement: “After Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Assad regime in Syria, the Houthis are almost the last remaining arm of Iran’s axis of evil. The Houthis are learning, and will learn the hard way, that those who strike Israel will pay a very heavy price for it.”

In comments released by the Israeli air force’s command centre, Israel’s defence minister, Israel Katz, said: “I warn the leaders of the Houthi terrorist organisation: Israel’s long arm will reach you too.”

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) also issued a statement accusing the Houthis of “conducting attacks against Israel in contravention of international law”, adding that “the Houthi regime constitutes a threat to the region’s peace and security”.

After the Israel strikes, a Houthi official stated that the group would “respond to escalation with escalation”.

Muhammad al-Bukhaiti, a member of the Houthi political bureau, said: “The American-Israeli bombings of civilian facilities in Yemen expose the hypocrisy of the west. Our military operations to support Gaza will continue, and we will respond to escalation with escalation until the crimes of mass extermination in Gaza stop and the possibility of bringing food, medicine and fuel into the strip is allowed.”

Iran condemned as a “flagrant violation” the Israeli strikes on ports and energy sites in Yemen, where it supports the Houthi rebel group.

The foreign ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baqaei said the attacks were “a flagrant violation of the principles and norms of international law and the UN charter”.

Israel’s restriction of Gaza’s water supply to levels below minimum needs amounts to an act of genocide and extermination as a crime against humanity, a human rights report has alleged.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) investigated Israeli attacks on the water supply infrastructure in Gaza over the course of its 14-month war there.

It has accused Israeli forces of deliberate actions intended to cut the availability of clean water so drastically that the population has been forced to resort to contaminated sources, leading to the outbreak of lethal diseases, especially among children.

Israel’s actions have killed many thousands of Palestinians and constitute an act of genocide, HRW argues, citing declarations by ministers in the country’s ruling coalition that Gaza’s water supply would be cut off as evidence of intent.

The 184-page report, Extermination and Acts of Genocide, comes after an Amnesty International report this month concluded that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza.

There were provisional orders from the international court of justice earlier in the year for Israel to halt its offensive and take immediate measures to prevent genocide being committed, pending a court ruling on whether it was already committing the crime.

Israel has rejected accusations that it has committed genocide or crimes against humanity in Gaza. The country’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has called them “false and outrageous”.

His government has insisted on its right to self-defence after the shock Hamas attack on communities in southern Israel on 7 October 2023 in which 1,200 people were killed and about 250 taken hostage.

The allegations put forward by HRW are not as broad as Amnesty’s, focusing specifically on the Gaza water supply, but the organisation claims the evidence is overwhelming that Israel has used water as a weapon against the Palestinian population collectively, with lethal results.

“Human Rights Watch finds that these Israeli policies have amounted to the crime against humanity of extermination and acts of genocide,” Lama Fakih, the director of HRW’s Middle East and North Africa division, said.

She said the report showed: “Israeli authorities at the most senior level were responsible for the destruction, including the deliberate destruction, of water and sanitation infrastructure, the prevention of repairs to damaged water and sanitation infrastructure and the cutting off or severe restrictions on water, electricity and fuel.

“These acts have likely caused thousands of deaths and will likely continue to cause deaths into the future, including after the cessation of hostilities.”

There have been nearly 670,000 recorded cases of acute watery diarrhoea since the war began, and more than 132,000 cases of jaundice, a sign of hepatitis. Survivable childhood diseases have also become significantly more lethal because of the destruction of Gaza’s hospitals and health clinics.

The report cites a medical source as saying that under “normal circumstances”, 1% of children who contracted hepatitis A died of it. Now it is fatal in 5% to 10% of cases. Dehydration combined with malnutrition has also weakened the population’s immunity to disease in general.

Before the war, 80% of Gaza’s water supply came from wells down to an aquifer under the coastal strip, but that water is contaminated and unfit for human consumption.

Most of Gaza’s drinkable water came from three pipelines controlled by the Israeli water authority and desalination plants.

Those pipelines were cut at the start of the war and only partially reopened. The United Arab Emirates built a water pipeline across the border from Egypt in February, but that supply was cut by damage to the pipeline caused during the Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) assault on Rafah.

Gaza’s three main desalination plants halted operations soon after the start of the war and were only able to restart on a partial basis after Israel allowed the UN and other aid agencies to bring in limited quantities of fuel.

Satellite imagery that HRW examined showed that the solar panel arrays powering four of Gaza’s six wastewater treatment plants were razed by Israeli military bulldozers – in northern Gaza, the al-Bureij camp and the Sheikh Ejleen plants in central Gaza and Khan Younis in the south.

Satellite images also showed that 11 of Gaza’s 54 water reservoirs had been completely or largely destroyed, and 20 more showed signs of damage.

A video that appeared on social media in July 2024 showed IDF combat engineers filming themselves blowing up a reservoir in the Tal Sultan district of Rafah.

As evidence of intent, the HRW report points to declarations by Israeli ministers at the onset of the war. On 9 October 2023, the then defence minister, Yoav Gallant, ordered a “complete siege” of Gaza.

“There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed,” he stated. Gallant is the subject of an international criminal court arrest warrant for alleged war crimes.

Israel Katz, then energy minister and now defence minister, echoed the call for water, electricity and fuel supplies to Gaza to be cut off two days after Gallant’s comments.

Fakih said: “Human Rights Watch concludes that Israeli authorities have, over the past year, intentionally inflicted on the Palestinian population in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction in whole or in part.

“This amounts to an act of genocide under the convention.”

With Joe Biden reportedly considering issuing blanket pardons for top critics of Donald Trump, numerous high profile Democrats have emerged urging the president to do so on behalf of their colleagues who they worry could face legal retribution from Trump in the coming years.

Preemptive pardons would shield Trump’s political opponents from a possible barrage of legal attacks while setting a new precedent for sweeping, mass pardons, which some warn Trump will consequently pursue himself.

Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator, said Biden should “very seriously consider” the use of preemptive pardons to protect members of Congress who investigated Trump’s role in the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol. Trump has threatened to prosecute those involved in the 6 January congressional investigation and other top Democrats, including the California senator Adam Schiff, the California congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, and the former Wyoming congresswoman Liz Cheney.

“This is what authoritarianism is all about, it’s what dictatorship is all about – you do not arrest elected officials who disagree with you,” Sanders said on NBC News on 15 December.

The Massachusetts senator Ed Markey has also come out in support of blanket pardons, saying on Boston Public Radio that he believed Trump would act in a “dictatorial way, in a fascistic way” once in office and said he would recommend that Biden “provide those preemptive pardons to people, because that’s really what our country is going to need next year”.

Trump, who campaigned on a platform of purging federal employees and cracking down on his enemies, said in an 8 December appearance on Meet the Press that he thinks members of the January 6 committee “should go to jail”. He has long vowed to punish his political opponents in government, referring to them as “enemies from within”. His rhetoric about “enemies” has prompted concern about the president-elect weaponizing the judiciary against his political opponents.

Although Trump often speaks in general terms about his “enemies”, he has pointed to specific individuals he would take legal – even prosecutorial – action against if elected.

“We have a lot of bad people,” he said during a 20 October interview on Fox News. “But when you look at Shifty Schiff and some of the others, yeah, they are, to me, the enemy from within. I think Nancy Pelosi is an enemy from within. She lied. She was supposed to protect the Capitol,” he said, referring to debunked claims that Pelosi was responsible for security at the Capitol on 6 January 2021 and abdicated her duties.

Trump’s pick to lead the Federal Bureau of Investigations, Kash Patel, has echoed Trump’s calls for revenge, maintaining his own “enemies list”. Patel and Pam Bondi, Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Justice, have both projected near-total fealty to Trump – sparking worry they would willingly go along with Trump at whatever cost.

In addition to Schiff, Pelosi, and Cheney, Trump’s former chief medical advisor Anthony Fauci has also been a target of widespread anger from the right for prescribing social distancing, lockdown measures and vaccines to slow the spread of Covid-19.

Cheney has spoken against Trump’s threats. “Donald Trump’s suggestion that members of Congress who later investigated his illegal and unconstitutional actions should be jailed is a continuation of his assault on the rule of law and the foundations of our republic,” she said.

Whether those on the receiving end of Trump’s ire want, or would accept blanket pardons, is unclear. If figures like Cheney receive such clemency, they would potentially be spared years of litigation, massive legal fees and criminal convictions. On the other hand, accepting a preemptive pardon could give the impression of guilt – and offer Trump the precedent to issue mass preemptive pardons to associates accused of improprieties.

It’s even possible that Trump’s political opponents who publicly reject the possibility of a pardon would accept one anyway.

Schiff has distanced himself from the pardon talk, telling ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that he did not support the idea of a blanket pardon, which he called “unnecessary”.

“Those of us on the committee are very proud of the work we did,” he said. “We were doing vital quintessential oversight of a violent attack on the Capitol.”

Legal scholars told the Guardian that Biden would likely be within his constitutional right to enact sweeping preemptive pardons. There are limits on the presidential pardon – a president cannot pardon individuals convicted of non-federal crimes, or grant clemency for future infractions. The kind of pardons Biden could pursue would likely fall within his executive authority.

Still, typically, “you don’t receive a pardon unless you’ve done something wrong”, said Mark Osler, a law professor at University of St Thomas and an expert on sentencing and clemency policy. “The members of the J6 committee, I’m sure that their position is they’ve done nothing wrong.”

What has emerged for the outgoing administration and for possible recipients of Biden’s pardon is a kind of damned if you do, damned if you don’t scenario: without pardons, Trump’s most high-profile political opponents could face trumped-up charges and convictions.

Rachel Barkow, a law professor at New York University, added that for Biden to issue mass pardons, it would be helpful to have a comprehensive list of people who Trump could go after when he takes office.

“If the only people you pardoned ended up being the higher ups, you’re creating a potentially perverse structure where the little fish, who worked as lower level people down the chain, are the ones who find themselves being prosecuted because there is no one else to go after,” Barkow said.

“[It’s] almost the worst of all worlds,” she added. “You’re setting people up for that expensive, life-altering federal investigation who weren’t particularly high up, but they weren’t pardoned because they didn’t get the attention of the administration.”

Lost in the debate over the possible creative and expansive uses of clemency, both Osler and Barkow said, are more traditional uses of the pardon – and the people living out lengthy sentences who have expressly asked for clemency.

“We seem to be in this era with both Biden and with what Trump says he’s going to do, where the pardon power is going to be used for unconventional purposes,” said Osler. “But it’s not being used for conventional purposes – it’s not being used to show mercy to those who have truly changed their lives, who follow the rules, who filed a petition, and that’s deeply unfortunate.”

Relatives and rights groups have accused fighters from an Islamist paramilitary force aligned with the Sudanese army of executing dozens of young men on suspicion of cooperating with the Rapid Support Forces in the Khartoum area.

The alleged killings occurred in September after fighters crossed a bridge over the Nile River into the city of Khartoum North from neighbouring Omdurman after weeks of trying.

According to local people, fighters from the Al-Bara’ ibn Malik brigade arrested the men in the Halfaya neighbourhood. They said some of the men were killed immediately, while others were taken into custody at the Surkab military base in Omdurman.

The greater Khartoum area consists of the cities of Khartoum, Khartoum North and Omdurman. Most of Omdurman is under army control, but parts of the west of the city are held by the RSF, a paramilitary force. In recent months the army has launched a campaign to try to take back territory held by the RSF in Khartoum and Khartoum North.

On the day of the alleged killings, local people said Islamic jurists were seen travelling with the Al-Bara’ ibn Malik and issuing fatwas to shoot and kill men accused of cooperating with the RSF. The fatwas were based on the testimonies of two men living in the area who allegedly said the men were cooperating with the RSF.

Asmaa Mubarak* said one of her cousins had been killed. She said the 18-year-old and his immediate family, who were from Khartoum North, had fled south to the city of Wad Madani when the war between the army and the RSF broke out in April 2023. They later returned to the Khartoum tri-city area to live with relatives in Omdurman.

According to Mubarak, her cousin decided to cross into Khartoum North to guard the family house from looters on hearing the fighting there had subsided.

She said: “His father asked him to remain with them, but he insisted on going back, telling them that all his peers were there guarding their houses.” Mubarak also claimed that her cousin’s father was told by local people that if he tried to enter Halfaya to retrieve his son’s body for burial he too would be killed.

Mubarak said the family had decided to say that her cousin had died from a stray bullet because they were worried about the social stigma of rumours that he had been working with the RSF.

A South Sudanese refugee called John was killed on the same day, according to Mubarak. “John grew up in the area and his family could not flee the country, they could not afford to do so,” she said. “The Al-Bara battalion came in and accused him of working with the RSF too. He was called a slave.”

Mubarak said she was worried about people living in Shambat, another neighbourhood in Khartoum North that could fall to the army, unless “people intervene to protect those who could not flee but had to stay under the mercy of the RSF”.

Another woman said one of her brothers was killed during the army’s advance into Halfaya and another was taken to the Surkab base – both on the basis of alleged cooperation with the RSF. The woman said both were civilians and that they had not cooperated with the RSF.

The Sudan Democratic Lawyers Front, a rights group, said of the alleged killings: “We think this is a clear war crime and we demand that a comprehensive investigation is opened to find out who the perpetrators are.”

A spokesperson for the UN office of the high commissioner for human rights said last month that it was investigating reports that dozens of civilians had been killed in the greater Khartoum area. They added that the commissioner’s Sudan expert, Radhouane Nouicer, had repeatedly raised concerns about the protection of civilians with the Sudanese authorities.

The Al-Bara’ ibn Malik brigade has been involved in the Sudanese civil war since it began. It is led by young Islamist men who were part of the Islamic movement that ruled the country for 30 years under the former president Omar al-Bashir. It has been contacted for comment about the Khartoum North allegations.

Brig Gen Nabil Abdallah, a spokesperson for the Sudanese army, said army soldiers had not been involved in any alleged extrajudicial killings in Khartoum North. He also accused Tagadum – a pro-civilian-power coalition which is involved in peace negotiations – of orchestrating a smear campaign against the army and echoing RSF propaganda.

The war between the RSF and the regular army, which erupted in April 2023, has claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people, displaced millions, and left the north-east African country on the brink of famine. The army and the RSF have been accused of targeting civilians in the course of the fighting.

On Monday a high-level UN official warned that the international community had failed to grasp the seriousness of the crisis. Diplomatic efforts “are not commensurate with the needs”, said Mamadou Dian Balde, who is coordinating the UN refugee agency’s response to the Sudan crisis. He told Agence France-Presse that he didn’t think the world realises “the gravity of the Sudanese crisis”, nor its impact.

* Names have been changed

The suspect in the killing of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO will return to New York to face murder charges after agreeing to be extradited on Thursday during a court appearance in Pennsylvania, where he was arrested last week after five days on the run.

Luigi Mangione waived a preliminary hearing on the Pennsylvania charges in exchange for the prosecutor giving him a 20-page investigative report from the Altoona police department.

Mangione also waived extradition to New York.

The Blair county judge David Consiglio ordered that Mangione be turned over to the New York police department. At least a dozen uniformed NYPD officers were in the courtroom.

The 26-year-old Ivy League graduate is accused of ambushing and shooting Brian Thompson on 4 December outside a Manhattan hotel, where the head of the United States’ largest health insurer was walking to an investor conference.

Authorities have said Mangione was carrying the gun used to kill Thompson, a passport, fake IDs and about $10,000 when he was arrested on 9 December while eating breakfast at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania.

From a toadstool with teeth to a vine smelling of marzipan and a flower that has cheated its way out of having to photosynthesise, a weird and wonderful host of new plant and fungus species have been discovered in 2024.

Other plants given scientific names for the first time include beautiful new orchids, a ghostly palm and a hairy plant that appears to have stolen a gene from an unrelated family. The species are among the 172 new plants and fungi named by scientists from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and their partners.

The species come from every corner of the globe, from woods near Tunbridge Wells in Kent in England, to African sandstone cliffs in Guinea and the forests of Indonesia.

However, botanists are in a race against time to discover many plants and fungi before the continuing destruction of the natural world drives them to extinction. The loss of species does not only mean that their unique biology is gone forever, but also their potential for use as medicine, food and even as plastic recyclers. Some of the new species in 2024 already face extinction because of cement manufacturing, cinnamon farming and timber plantations.

There are 400,000 named plant species but scientists estimate there are another 100,000 yet to be identified. Every year, scientists name about 2,500 new species of plant and the same number of fungi.

“The sheer privilege of describing a species as new to science is a thrill that not many will ever get to experience,” said Dr Martin Cheek, in RBG Kew’s Africa team. “Sadly, the devastating reality is that more often than not, new species are being found on the brink of extinction and it’s a race against time to find and describe them all.”

About 40% of named plant species are threatened with extinction, as habitats are razed for farmland and other human development, and as many as 75% of the world’s undescribed plant species are thought to be threatened with oblivion.

Toadstools most often have gills or pores under the caps to disperse their spores but those from the genus Phellodon have rows of teeth-like protuberances. This year DNA analysis revealed three new species in the UK, from woodland near Tunbridge Wells and Windsor in England, and Abernethy in Scotland. These fungi are harmed by nitrate pollution from farming and are disappearing across Europe.

Other new fungi include three species of toadstool from the genus Russula – which often give off a fishy whiff – from northern Sweden and Norway, the high Rockies in the US and British Colombia in Canada.

Dr Anna Bazzicalupo, a fungi expert at RBG Kew, said: “Identifying new species of fungi is a colossal but increasingly important task as we estimate more than 2m species are waiting to be described. An overwhelming number of them are likely threatened with extinction, meaning they may disappear before they are even recognised.”

The marzipan-scented liana, a woody, long-stemmed vine named Keita deniseae was collected in the Boyboyba forest of Guinea, where the plant climbs into the canopy with strange, hooked structures and bears large, edible fruit.

Three more new lianas were found in southern China. These flower only at night and are pollinated by moths. One, Cheniella longistaminea, can grow up to 80 metres tall but all are threatened by plantations of timber and cinnamon, with the latter being a big export to the US. Another new liana in Vietnam, Chlorohiptage vietnamensis, grows in a limestone landscape that is being cleared for cement quarries. Scientists do not know what kind of insect pollinates its strange green flowers.

Botanists also revealed a new family of cheats in 2024, called Afrothismiaceae. The rare plants, found mostly in forests in Cameroon, do not use sunlight to photosynthesise sugars and have lost their green colour. Plants usually provide these sugars to mycorrhizal fungi in their roots in exchange for minerals. But the Afrothismiaceae species take all they need from their fungal partners, giving nothing in return, and only appear above ground to fruit and flower.

Another rule-breaker is a new herb from Guinea in west Africa, named Virectaria stellata, which grows on the remote sandstone cliffs of the Fouta Djallon. It has star-shaped clusters of hair, which have never been seen in this large family before. But these hairy stars do occur in the plants from an unrelated genus called Barleria. The botanists think the genes that produce the stellate hairs may have jumped from one family to the other via sap-drinking insects.

Among the most spectacular new species are a bonanza of orchids from Indonesia, which still hosts many unknown species across its 17,000 islands. A climbing palm in western Borneo was also named in 2024, Plectocomiopsis hantu. Hantu is the local word for ghost, used because the plant has grey stems and white undersides to its leaves and it is known from only three rainforest locations. Local communities, however, have long used it to make baskets and for its tasty and tender roots.

Cheek said: “Biodiversity loss is a crisis that affects us all. Every unknown species we lose could have been a potential new food or new medicine that we never even knew existed. We urgently need more funding, training and public awareness of plant and fungal taxonomy.”

From a toadstool with teeth to a vine smelling of marzipan and a flower that has cheated its way out of having to photosynthesise, a weird and wonderful host of new plant and fungus species have been discovered in 2024.

Other plants given scientific names for the first time include beautiful new orchids, a ghostly palm and a hairy plant that appears to have stolen a gene from an unrelated family. The species are among the 172 new plants and fungi named by scientists from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and their partners.

The species come from every corner of the globe, from woods near Tunbridge Wells in Kent in England, to African sandstone cliffs in Guinea and the forests of Indonesia.

However, botanists are in a race against time to discover many plants and fungi before the continuing destruction of the natural world drives them to extinction. The loss of species does not only mean that their unique biology is gone forever, but also their potential for use as medicine, food and even as plastic recyclers. Some of the new species in 2024 already face extinction because of cement manufacturing, cinnamon farming and timber plantations.

There are 400,000 named plant species but scientists estimate there are another 100,000 yet to be identified. Every year, scientists name about 2,500 new species of plant and the same number of fungi.

“The sheer privilege of describing a species as new to science is a thrill that not many will ever get to experience,” said Dr Martin Cheek, in RBG Kew’s Africa team. “Sadly, the devastating reality is that more often than not, new species are being found on the brink of extinction and it’s a race against time to find and describe them all.”

About 40% of named plant species are threatened with extinction, as habitats are razed for farmland and other human development, and as many as 75% of the world’s undescribed plant species are thought to be threatened with oblivion.

Toadstools most often have gills or pores under the caps to disperse their spores but those from the genus Phellodon have rows of teeth-like protuberances. This year DNA analysis revealed three new species in the UK, from woodland near Tunbridge Wells and Windsor in England, and Abernethy in Scotland. These fungi are harmed by nitrate pollution from farming and are disappearing across Europe.

Other new fungi include three species of toadstool from the genus Russula – which often give off a fishy whiff – from northern Sweden and Norway, the high Rockies in the US and British Colombia in Canada.

Dr Anna Bazzicalupo, a fungi expert at RBG Kew, said: “Identifying new species of fungi is a colossal but increasingly important task as we estimate more than 2m species are waiting to be described. An overwhelming number of them are likely threatened with extinction, meaning they may disappear before they are even recognised.”

The marzipan-scented liana, a woody, long-stemmed vine named Keita deniseae was collected in the Boyboyba forest of Guinea, where the plant climbs into the canopy with strange, hooked structures and bears large, edible fruit.

Three more new lianas were found in southern China. These flower only at night and are pollinated by moths. One, Cheniella longistaminea, can grow up to 80 metres tall but all are threatened by plantations of timber and cinnamon, with the latter being a big export to the US. Another new liana in Vietnam, Chlorohiptage vietnamensis, grows in a limestone landscape that is being cleared for cement quarries. Scientists do not know what kind of insect pollinates its strange green flowers.

Botanists also revealed a new family of cheats in 2024, called Afrothismiaceae. The rare plants, found mostly in forests in Cameroon, do not use sunlight to photosynthesise sugars and have lost their green colour. Plants usually provide these sugars to mycorrhizal fungi in their roots in exchange for minerals. But the Afrothismiaceae species take all they need from their fungal partners, giving nothing in return, and only appear above ground to fruit and flower.

Another rule-breaker is a new herb from Guinea in west Africa, named Virectaria stellata, which grows on the remote sandstone cliffs of the Fouta Djallon. It has star-shaped clusters of hair, which have never been seen in this large family before. But these hairy stars do occur in the plants from an unrelated genus called Barleria. The botanists think the genes that produce the stellate hairs may have jumped from one family to the other via sap-drinking insects.

Among the most spectacular new species are a bonanza of orchids from Indonesia, which still hosts many unknown species across its 17,000 islands. A climbing palm in western Borneo was also named in 2024, Plectocomiopsis hantu. Hantu is the local word for ghost, used because the plant has grey stems and white undersides to its leaves and it is known from only three rainforest locations. Local communities, however, have long used it to make baskets and for its tasty and tender roots.

Cheek said: “Biodiversity loss is a crisis that affects us all. Every unknown species we lose could have been a potential new food or new medicine that we never even knew existed. We urgently need more funding, training and public awareness of plant and fungal taxonomy.”

The Russian security council deputy head, Dmitry Medvedev, has described the editors of the Times newspaper in Britain as “legitimate military targets” in response to the newspaper’s coverage of the assassination of a Russian general.

Medvedev’s vitriolic comments on Wednesday followed a Times editorial in which the newspaper described the assassination of Lt Gen Igor Kirillov as “a legitimate act of defence” by Ukraine, which has claimed responsibility for the killing.

Kirillov, head of the military’s chemical, biological and radiological weapons unit, was killed along with his assistant when a device attached to an escooter exploded as the two men left a building in a residential area in south-east Moscow on Tuesday morning. Kirillov is the most senior Russian military official to be killed in an assassination away from the frontlines since the start of the Kremlin’s offensive in Ukraine nearly three years ago.

“Those who carry out crimes against Russia … always have accomplices. They too are now legitimate military targets. This category could also include the miserable jackals from The Times who cowardly hid behind their editorial. That means the entire leadership of the publication,” Medvedev, who served as Russia’s president between 2008 and 2012, wrote on his Telegram channel.

In a thinly veiled threat, the hawkish former president added that journalists at the Times should “be careful” as “anything goes in London”.

Responding to Medvedev’s post, the UK foreign secretary, David Lammy, wrote on X that his “gangster threat against Times journalists smacks of desperation”.

“Our newspapers represent the best of British values: freedom, democracy and independent thinking,” Lammy wrote alongside a picture of himself reading the Times.

Asked about Medvedev’s comments, the UK prime minister’s official spokesperson said they were “simply the latest in a series of desperate rhetoric coming from Putin’s government.”

The spokesperson added: “Unlike in Russia, a free press is a cornerstone of our democracy and we take any threats made by Russia incredibly seriously.”

Medvedev, who cast himself as a liberal reformer promising modernisation and democratisation upon becoming president in 2008, has reinvented himself as one of Russia’s most vocal pro-war figures.

He is now best known for his fiery anti-western tirades on Telegram, which some observers see as a desperate attempt to maintain political relevance.

Still, Medvedev remains a prominent Putin confidant and recently travelled to Beijing for talks with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, one of Russia’s key allies.

In the same post on Wednesday, Medvedev also threatened Nato officials assisting Ukraine.

“There’s a whole legion of them. There’s not even enough space to list them, but all these individuals can and should be considered legitimate military targets for the Russian state. And for all Russian patriots for that matter,” he wrote.

Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Moscow has banned dozens of British journalists, media representatives and senior UK politicians from entering the country.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has issued a one-month ban on drone operations in certain areas of New Jersey, unless operators receive special permission from the government due to “special security reasons”.

This comes as dozens of night-time drone sightings have been reported across New Jersey and other states along the eastern coast of the US over the last several weeks.

The sightings have occurred in residential areas as well as near a military research and manufacturing facility, causing panic among local residents and sparking various conspiracy theories about their origins.

The FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and other government agencies and officials have repeatedly said that there is no evidence of a threat to public safety.

On Wednesday, the FAA implemented temporary flight restrictions prohibiting drones that have not been authorized by the government in parts of New Jersey. The ban will remain in effect until 17 January and is in effect for areas including Bridgewater, Cedar Grove, North Brunswick, Metuchen, Evesham, Elizabeth, Jersey City and more.

The restrictions state that no unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) are allowed to operate within one nautical mile of the specified airspace, including from the ground up to 400ft above ground level.

Pilots who do not comply with these restrictions may be intercepted, detained, and questioned by law enforcement or security personnel, according to the Notice to Air Mission statement.

The government may also use “deadly force” against the drones if they pose an “imminent security threat” it adds.

Since reports of drones started coming in, the FBI set up a hotline to address the drone sightings, and have said that they are looking into and investigating the reports.

Federal agencies also deployed advanced detection technology to the regions where the drones are being spotted as well as trained visual observers.

Of the over 5,000 reported sightings so far, about 100 required further investigation, the federal bureau said. A Department of Homeland Security official echoed previous statements from federal agencies, stating again this week that there is no evidence of a threat to public safety.

On Tuesday, the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Defense (DoD) and FAA issued a joint statement, stating that after examining “the technical data and tips from concerned citizens” they “assess that the sightings to date include a combination of lawful commercial drones, hobbyist drones, and law enforcement drones, as well as manned fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters, and stars mistakenly reported as drones”.

The agencies noted there are over one million drones registered with the FAA in the US, and that thousands of commercial, hobbyist and law enforcement drones fly in the sky lawfully on any given day.

“We have not identified anything anomalous and do not assess the activity to date to present a national security or public safety risk over the civilian airspace in New Jersey or other states in the northeast,” the statement reads.

The agencies also addressed concerns about drone sightings over military facilities, including restricted airspace, which have sparked local worries and stirred up conspiracy theories online.

“Such sightings near or over DoD installations are not new” the agencies said. “DoD takes unauthorized access over its airspace seriously and coordinates closely with federal, state, and local law enforcement authorities, as appropriate.”

“Local commanders are actively engaged to ensure there are appropriate detection and mitigation measures in place,” they stated.

The agencies acknowledged community concerns about drone sightings and pledged to continue to support state and local authorities “with advanced detection technology and support of law enforcement”.

They also urged Congress to enact counter-drone legislation that would “extend and expand existing counter-drone authorities to identify and mitigate any threat that may emerge”.

On Wednesday, the US Senate reportedly rejected a proposal to fast-track a bill, supported by Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate majority leader, and others, that Schumer says would expand government authority to conduct drone detection among other things.

Republican senator Rand Paul blocked the measure, Reuters reported, arguing it would give the government excessive surveillance power and that Congress should not rush into legislation.

This week, Joe Biden addressed public concerns regarding the increase in reports of sightings of drones and other aerial objects in the skies, stating that there was nothing alarming about the increased reports.

“Nothing nefarious apparently, but they’re checking it all out,” the president told reporters. “We’re following this closely, but so far, no sense of danger.”

John Kirby, the White House national security communications adviser, has also said that the drones are not a national security or public safety risk.

Abdallan was the sixth to be taken.

First they came for his older brother Amafer, nabbed in broad daylight on the streets of the Mexican city of Morelia. Then they came for his other brother, Armando, grabbed on the outskirts of the capital. That same day, soldiers burst into the family home, beating his younger brothers Solón and Venustiano, as well as his father Jesús – eventually they too would be taken. Finally in October, security forces took Abdallan Guzmán himself, subjecting him to the cruelest forms of torture before tossing him in prison.

Over the course of four months in 1974, Mexican security forces detained six members of the Guzmán family, part of a crackdown on leftist rebel groups who had taken up arms against the country’s authoritarian regime during a period known as Mexico’s “dirty war”. Abdallan was eventually released, but his four brothers and his father joined the ranks of about 1,200 people disappeared by the government during the dirty war: neither dead nor alive, simply gone.

Until recently. A document began to circulate among human rights organizations, and was later published in local media which appeared to be a letter from a former army officer which included a list of 183 people who had probably been killed by the military and then thrown from planes into the Pacific, on what were known as the “death flights”. Among those named were three of Abdallan’s brothers – Amafer, Armando, Solón – and his father, Jesús.

“It filled us with such rage not being able to find them,” said Abdallan. “Now it’s clear what happened: they were thrown into the sea. But it’s also clear that the fight isn’t over, the fight continues.”

Abdallan’s brother Venustiano was not on the list of 183 death flight victims, and thus remains yet another victim in what has become a national catastrophe in Mexico. Since the dirty war ended, the practice of forced disappearance has been adopted on a major scale by the country’s violent and powerful crime factions. More than 116,000 people have vanished, leaving tens of thousands of families in a state of desperate uncertainty.

“For the families, the bits of truth that are found, no matter how terrible they may seem, are no more painful than the 50 years spent searching,” said César Contreras León, a lawyer for the Guzmáns.

After he was detained and tortured, Abdallan spent more than four years inside what was Mexico’s most notorious prison, the Black Palace of Lecumberri. When he was finally released in 1979 under a government amnesty, he expected that his brothers and his father would be freed as well. But there was no news of them at all.

The family spent months, then years, then decades searching for his brothers and father, scouring jails and morgues, going to police stations and prosecutors offices, consulting lawyers and shamans – all to no avail. Then, Abdallan was told by members of the Mexican secret police that during the dirty war, some dissidents had been killed and then tossed from planes into the ocean.

He began to wonder if maybe his relatives might have met such a fate. But with the country still in the grips of the authoritarian PRI party, there were no official channels to pursue his inquiry.

Then, in 2000, the PRI was defeated for the first time in 70 years. The triumphant conservative candidate Vicente Fox vowed to excavate Mexico’s dark past.

He launched a special prosecutor’s office to investigate crimes committed during the dirty war and local media began unearthing evidence of the death flights. News reports described how dissidents were taken to a military base near the port city of Acapulco, executed, then bundled into sacks weighed down by rocks which were then tossed into the ocean.

But the special prosecutor’s effort ultimately failed. After four years of work, it did not achieve a single conviction. Its final report was never officially released.

“The president didn’t want to cause trouble and the army just stayed quiet,” Abdallan recalled. “So in the end they did nothing.”

Abdallan and his family continued their search alone, as Mexico grew more violent, and the number of disappeared began to soar. In 2006, they filed a petition before the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights, accusing the Mexican state of forced disappearance.

Then in 2018, firebrand leftist Andrés Manuel López Obrador was swept into power promising to tackle corruption and end impunity. Three years later, he launched a new investigation into the crimes of the dirty war, and researchers interviewed survivors and their family members, including Abdallan and his relatives. But this renewed effort also floundered: last year, members of the Truth Commission accused the military of hindering their investigation by hiding, altering and destroying documents.

Still, when the Truth Commission released its final report in August, it included the list of 183 death flight victims as well as shocking new details, such as the fact that there were as many as 1,500 death flight victims – and that some may have still been alive when they were tossed out to sea.

For Abdalllan and his family, the report represented closure. After fifty years of searching, here at last was evidence of their relatives’ ultimate fate.

“You feel a mixture of joy, of sadness, of so many things,” said Abdallan. “At least now we know that they’re not hidden away somewhere, but they were killed by the Mexican state.”

Until Abdallán’s little brother Venustiano is found, however, Abdalllan says the family cannot truly be at peace.

“I have hope because he’s there, Venustiano is there in the military archives,” he says. “As the comrades say, the fight is forever.”

Reporting for this story was supported by the Alicia Patterson Foundation

Dozens of rare animals including tigers, lions and cheetahs are dying as bird flu infiltrates zoos, with potentially “grave implications” for endangered species, researchers have warned.

As a growing number of zoos report animal deaths, scientists are concerned that infected wild birds landing in enclosures could be spreading it among captive animals. In the US, a cheetah, mountain lion, Indian goose and kookaburra were among the animals that died in Wildlife World Zoo near Phoenix, according to local media reports last week. San Francisco Zoo temporarily closed its aviaries after a wild red-shouldered hawk was found dead on its grounds, and later tested positive for highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAIV). A rare red-breasted goose died at Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle, causing aviaries to close and penguin feeding for visitors to be suspended in November. These cases follow the deaths of 47 tigers, three lions, and a panther in zoos across south Vietnam over the summer.

“Given the potentially fatal consequences of an HPAIV infection in birds and in some mammals, such as big cats, these infections may have grave implications for endangered animal species refuged in zoos,” said Dr Connor Bamford, a virologist from Queen’s University Belfast.

Researchers say cases have probably emerged in zoos because of infected wild birds flying in and out of enclosures, and this tends to happen more during the migration season. A number of US states, including Louisiana, Missouri and Kansas, have reported an increase in bird flu cases, especially in geese and waterfowl. There has been a “sharp jump” of cases in Iowa, according to state authorities, after “nearly a year” with no detections of the virus.

“We need to consider how to manage this situation, either through enhancing zoo biosecurity or by vaccinating zoo animals. This instance gives us another wake-up call to the importance of HPAIV and its impacts on animals, and people,” said Bamford.

Researchers have warned for decades that this variant of bird flu could kill primates, rodents, pigs and rabbits, with reports of Bengal tigers and clouded leopards also being killed.

Infections in zoos were not unexpected, said virologist Dr Ed Hutchinson from Glasgow University. Visitors to zoos in the UK in recent years may have noticed bird enclosures being temporarily closed off or netted when the risks of infection by the H5N1 bird flu variant from wild birds were known to be high, he said. “When zoos care for animals from endangered species, taking measures to reduce the risk those animals face from H5N1, such as limiting access of wild birds to enclosures, is particularly important.”

Zoos are usually home to high densities of animals, and have varying approaches to biosecurity, health and welfare, and opportunities to be visited by wildlife. These factors affect their vulnerability, according to Prof Rowland Kao, an epidemiologist at the University of Edinburgh. “There isn’t necessarily one thing and one cannot point to a specific zoo and say ‘they did this wrong’ – but those variable factors, the many pathways this virus seems to be taking and the low viruses doses that can potentially start outbreaks, means that it will pop up in all sorts of places,” he said.

Bird flu viruses can be passed among a wide variety of animals. In 2020, a variant spread across the world, finally reaching the Antarctic in late 2023, causing millions of wild animals to die across Eurasia, Africa, North America and South America on its route. In the US, it fully adapted to cattle, increasing the risk of human infections.

The spread continues in dairy farms, especially in California – the US’s top-producing dairy state – where nearly half of the state’s 1,300 farms have now been affected, and two farm workers tested positive this month. Two indoor cats are suspected to have died in Los Angeles after drinking infected raw milk.

Prof Ian Brown, a virologist from the Pirbright Institute in Surrey, said: “There is always a risk but zoos should take additional hygiene precautions for such species – I know some zoos have confined flamingos to their house during risk periods for spread of virus.”

In some regions, such as the UK and the EU, licensed bird flu vaccines can be used on captive zoo animals. In the US this is not allowed.

Notch up another win for artificial intelligence. Researchers have used the technology to predict the notes that waft off whisky and determine whether a dram was made in the US or Scotland.

The work is a step towards automated systems that can predict the complex aroma of whisky from its molecular makeup. Expert panels usually assess woody, smoky, buttery or caramel aromas, which can help to ensure they don’t vary substantially between batches of the same product.

“The beautiful thing about the AI is that it is very consistent,” said Dr Andreas Grasskamp, who led the research at the Fraunhofer Institute for Process Engineering and Packaging in Freising, Germany.

“You have this subjectivity still in trained experts. We are not replacing the human nose with this, but we are really supporting it through efficiency and consistency.”

Nailing down a whisky’s aroma is no simple business. Most of the strongest notes in the spirit are a complex mixture of chemicals that interact in the nose and even mask one another to create a particular aromatic impression. The interactions make it extremely difficult to predict how the whisky will smell from its chemical signature.

For the latest work, the researchers obtained the chemical makeup of 16 US whiskeys and Scottish whiskies, including Jack Daniel’s, Maker’s Mark, Laphroaig and Talisker, and details of their aromas from an 11-strong expert panel. The information was used to train AI algorithms to predict the five major aromas and origin of the drinks from their molecular constituents.

One algorithm was more than 90% accurate at distinguishing the US from Scottish spirits, though the performance would be likely to drop against tipples it had not been trained on. On average, it identified the five strongest notes in each whisky more accurately and consistently than any individual on the expert panel. The details have been published in Communications Chemistry.

The compounds menthol and citronellol helped to identify US whiskeys, which often have a caramel-like note. Methyl decanoate and were important for identifying scotch, which often has a smoky or medicinal aroma.

The researchers see applications in areas beyond whisky, from detecting counterfeit products through discrepancies in their smell, to finding the best ways to blend old recycled plastics, which can develop unpleasant odours, into new products without the smell being noticeable.

Dr William Peveler, a senior lecturer in chemistry at the University of Glasgow, said the approach could provide more “stability” than a human taste panel. “The flavour notes of a whisky brand could be quickly checked from batch to batch or blend to blend based on the chemical signature alone, to try to ensure a consistent house style,” he said.

The study involved only a small number of whiskies and it is unclear how the AI would perform when faced with more, he added, and how it would deal with the flavour notes that developed with age in the cask. “The other thing with whisky is that perception of flavour is hugely influenced by the environment it’s consumed in and other external factors, so there could be some work to do on other factors that influence flavour perception and prediction in such an emotive product,” he said.