A major international crisis is “much more likely” in Donald Trump’s second term given the president-elect’s “inability to focus” on foreign policy, a former US ambassador to the United Nations (UN) has warned.

John Bolton, who at 17 months was Trump’s longest serving national security adviser, delivered a scathing critique of his lack of knowledge, interest in facts or coherent strategy. He described Trump’s decision-making as driven by personal relationships and “neuron flashes” rather than a deep understanding of national interests.

Bolton also dismissed Trump’s claims during this year’s election campaign that only he could prevent a third world war while bringing a swift end to the conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine.

“It’s typical Trump: it’s all braggadocio,” Bolton told the Guardian. “The world is more dangerous than when he was president before. The only real crisis we had was Covid, which is a long term crisis and not against a particular foreign power but against a pandemic.

“But the risk of an international crisis of the 19th century variety is much more likely in a second Trump term. Given Trump’s inability to focus on coherent decision making, I’m very worried about about how that might look.”

Bolton, 76, is a longtime foreign policy hardliner who supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq and has called for US military action against Iran, North Korea and other countries over their attempts to build or procure nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.

He was George W Bush’s UN ambassador for 16 months after serving as a state department arms negotiator and in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush. Bolton was Trump’s national security adviser from April 2018 to September 2019.

Bolton recalled: “What I believed was that, like every American president before him, the weight of the responsibilities, certainly in national security, the gravity of the issues that he was confronting, the consequences of his decisions, would discipline his thinking in a way that would produce serious outcomes.

“It turned out I was wrong. By the time I got there a lot of patterns of behaviour had already been set that were never changed and it could well be, even if I had been there earlier, I couldn’t have affected it. But it was clear pretty soon after I got there that intellectual discipline wasn’t in the Trump vocabulary.”

In a sharp departure from traditional US foreign policy, Trump has campaigned under an “America first” banner advocating isolationism, non-interventionism and trade protectionism, including significant tariffs.

Bolton agreed with “a lot” of Trump’s decisions during his first term but found they had all the coherence of “a series of neuron flashes”, he said. “He doesn’t have a philosophy, doesn’t do policy as we understand that, he doesn’t have a national security strategy.

“I said in my book his decisions are like an archipelago of dots. You can try and draw lines between them but even he can’t draw lines between them. You try and incrementally get one right decision after another. At least that’s what his advisers thought: that we could string enough decisions together. But that’s not the way he looked at it.”

The 45th president “could be charming”, Bolton acknowledged, and placed an emphasis on personal relations with autocrats such as Xi Jinping of China, Kim Jong-un of North Korea and Russia’s Vladimir Putin. But he lacked the competence required for the job and showed a blatant disregard for the national security briefing that presidents receive daily.

“He doesn’t know much about foreign policy. He’s not a big reader. He reads newspapers from time to time but briefing papers are almost never read because he doesn’t think they’re important. He doesn’t think these facts are important. He thinks he looks the other guy across the table in the eye and they make a deal and that’s what’s important.”

Trump believes he has a friendship with Putin, Bolton added. “I don’t know what Putin thinks his relationship is with Trump but he believes he knows how to play Trump, that Trump’s an easy mark. Trump doesn’t see that at all.

“If you put everything on the basis of personal relations and you don’t understand how the person you’re talking about on the other side views you, that’s a real lack of situational awareness that can only cause trouble.”

Trump has repeatedly praised authoritarians such as Putin and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and not ruled out withdrawing from Nato. Asked about Trump’s now notorious affinity with strongmen, the former national security adviser replied: “I suppose a shrink would have a better a better grasp of it but I think Trump likes being a big guy, likes other big guys.

“These other big guys don’t have pesky independent legislatures and judiciaries and they do big guy things that Trump can’t do and he just wishes he could do. It’s a lot more fun if you don’t have the kinds of constraints that constitutional governments impose.”

In recent days, Trump has again rattled diplomats by threatening to take back the Panama Canal, calling for the US to buy Greenland and suggesting that Canada become the 51st state. Kim Darroch, who was Britain’s ambassador to Washington for four years from 2016, told Sky News that Trump’s second term will be “like a 24/7 bar-room brawl”.

Bolton agrees that it could be even more erratic and disruptive than the first: “He now feels more confident in his judgement having been re-elected, which will make it even harder to impose any kind of intellectual decision-making discipline.”

Trump has said he would end Russia’s war on Ukraine within a day, prompting fears of a compromise that halts US military aid and obliges Ukraine to surrender territory. Bolton commented: “I’m very concerned that he wants this off the table. He thinks this is Biden’s war.

“He said in the campaign, if he had been president, it never would have happened which, of course, is not provable or disprovable. He wants it behind him which strongly implies he doesn’t care on what terms and I suspect he doesn’t care. And that’s very dangerous for Ukraine.”

He praised Trump’s picks of Senator Marco Rubio and Congressman Mike Waltz for the positions of secretary of state and national security adviser respectively. But he described the nominations of Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence and Kash Patel for director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as “really dangerous”, arguing that Gabbard’s opinions belong on “a different planet”.

Gabbard is a longtime critic of the hawkish foreign policy and national security establishment, famously dubbed “the blob” in 2016 by Ben Rhodes, then Barack Obama’s deputy national security adviser. Bolton, however, rejects the characterisation.

“I don’t think there’s a foreign policy blob,” he said. “There’s a liberal Democratic blob that’s pretty problematic but the Republican party remains essentially Reaganite in its outlook. Trump is an aberration and, when he leaves the political scene, the party will snap back. We’re in the grips, though, of Trump for four more years and a lot of damage could take place during that period.”

American Airlines on Tuesday lifted an hour-long ground stop of all its flights in the US due to an unspecified technical issue, a notice on the US aviation regulator’s website showed.

American Airlines flights arriving and departing Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky international airport showed short delays Tuesday morning, but it’s unclear if those are tied to this technical issue or something else.

The ground stop, ahead of the busy Christmas travel, had threatened the holiday plans of thousands.

“A technical issue is affecting American flights this morning. Our teams are working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible, and we apologize to our customers for the inconvenience,” the company had said in a statement following the ground stop.

American operates thousands of flights per day to more than 350 destinations in more than 60 countries.

Shares of the carrier clawed back lost ground and were marginally down before the bell.

The US Federal Aviation Administration in a statement referred Reuters to the airline, reiterating that the carrier had reported a technical issue.

American was responding to comments on X as numerous users posted there, as well as on Bluesky and Facebook.

“Hey, @AmericanAir just tell us whether we should go home or not. Please don’t make us wait in the airport for hours,” wrote one user.

The grounding comes months after airlines were hit by a global tech outage tied to Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform and a software issue at cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.

Two years ago, Southwest Airlines experienced a meltdown with its systems during the holidays that led to 16,900 flight cancellations and stranded 2 million passengers. It was eventually fined $140m in the largest-ever civil penalty for a travel disruption.

An award recently given to actor and director Justin Baldoni, honoring him for “courage and compassion in advocating on behalf of women and girls”, was rescinded following a complaint filed by actor Blake Lively accusing him of sexual harassment and a coordinated effort to damage her reputation.

The Voices of Solidarity Award was granted to Baldoni on 9 December by the Vital Voices Global Partnership, an international non-profit organization focused on women’s empowerment.

In a statement on 23 December, the organization said Baldoni’s alleged “abhorrent conduct” detailed in Lively’s filing are “contrary to the values of Vital Voices and the spirit of the Award”.

On 21 December, Lively filed a complaint against Baldoni, who had been her director and co-star of the film It Ends With Us. The complaint alleges Baldoni sexually harassed Lively and then coordinated efforts to damage her reputation through a “social manipulation” campaign.

Baldoni has starred and directed various films and TV shows, most notably the CW’s Jane The Virgin, and he is the the co-owner of Wayfarer Studios, the film company that produced It Ends With Us, a romantic drama film released earlier this year.

Per the complaint, Baldoni and Wayfarer CEO Jamey Heath engaged in “inappropriate misconduct” with Lively and other cast members throughout the production of the film. The conditions were allegedly so bad, the complaint states, that on 4 January, Lively and her husband Ryan Reynolds met with Baldoni, Heath and other producers to discuss a list of demands “to address the hostile work environment” that nearly derailed the production of the film.

The list included demands that Baldoni and Heath immediately stop engaging in non-consensual inappropriate and personal conversations about sex with Lively and other women on set. It also included requirements for filming sexual and intimate scenes for the film. All parties agreed to implement and follow what was discussed during the meeting.

However, prior to the film’s release, Baldoni and Heath reportedly hired a crisis public relations expert to go on the offensive against Lively. According to messages included in the complaint, they engaged in a coordinated push to damage Lively’s reputation by elevating negative stories about her on social media. The public relations effort was reportedly successful. “She was branded tone-deaf, difficult to work with, a bully,” the New York Times wrote.

In a statement to the Times, Baldoni’s attorney said Lively’s claims “are completely false, outrageous and intentionally salacious with an intent to publicly hurt and rehash a narrative in the media”.

Baldoni had previously positioned himself as a #MeToo ally during the peak of the movement, and published a book that he said challenged notions of traditional masculinity.

Following the recent news of Lively’s complaint, Baldoni’s talent agency, WME, stopped representing him. The author of the book It Ends With Us, which the film was based on, has also spoken out in support of Lively, writing on Instagram: “Blake’s ability to refuse to sit down and ‘be buried’ has been nothing short of inspiring.”

Hundreds of demonstrators took to the streets in Christian areas of Damascus early on Tuesday to protest against the burning of a Christmas tree near Hama in central Syria.

“We demand the rights of Christians,” protesters chanted as they marched through the Syrian capital towards the headquarters of the Orthodox patriarchate in the Bab Sharqi neighbourhood.

The protests come a little more than two weeks after an armed coalition led by Islamists toppled the government of Bashar al-Assad, who had cast himself as a protector of minorities in the Sunni-majority country.

A demonstrator who gave his name as Georges told AFP he was protesting over “injustice against Christians”. “If we’re not allowed to live our Christian faith in our country, as we used to, then we don’t belong here any more,” he said.

The protests erupted after a video spread on social media showing hooded fighters setting fire to a Christmas tree in the Christian-majority town of Suqaylabiyah, near Hama. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the fighters were foreigners from the Islamist group Ansar al-Tawhid.

In another video posted to social media, a religious leader from Syria’s victorious Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) addressed local people, claiming those who had torched the tree were “not Syrian” and promising they would be punished. “The tree will be restored and lit up by tomorrow morning,” he said.

The Islamist HTS movement, rooted in al-Qaida and supported by Turkey, has promised to protect minorities since its lightning offensive toppled Assad this month after years of stalemate.

According to a statement from the new administration, Syria’s de facto leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, reached an agreement on Tuesday with former rebel faction leaders to dissolve all groups and consolidate them under the defence ministry.

The prime minister, Mohammed al-Bashir, had said last week that the ministry would be restructured using former rebel factions and officers who defected from Bashar al-Assad’s army. Sharaa will face the daunting task of trying to avoid clashes between the myriad groups.

Turkey’s interior minister said on Tuesday that more than 25,000 Syrians had returned home from Turkey since Assad was ousted. Turkey is home to nearly 3 million refugees who fled the civil war that broke out in 2011, and whose presence has been an issue for President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government.

“The number of people returning to Syria in the last 15 days has exceeded 25,000,” Ali Yerlikaya told the official Anadolu news agency. Ankara is in close touch with Syria’s new leaders and focusing on the voluntary return of Syrian refugees, hoping the shift in power in Damascus will allow many of them to head home.

The US military said on Monday it conducted an airstrike in Syria that killed two Islamic State operatives and wounded one. The IS operatives were moving a truckload of weapons in Deir ez-Zor province, an area formerly controlled by the Syrian government and Russians, when they were targeted with the airstrike, US Central Command said in a statement on X.

Nasa’s Parker solar probe is attempting its closest ever flyby of the sun, passing 3.8m miles from its surface on Christmas Eve.

The spacecraft was scheduled to make the record-breaking approach, known as a perihelion, at 6.53am US eastern time (11.53 GMT).

The mission team lost contact with their ship and aren’t due to receive a “beacon tone” until Friday 27 December. On 20 December, they received a transmission indicating everything was operating normally, via Nasa’s Deep Space Network complex in Canberra, Australia.

The Parker probe was launched in August 2018 on a seven-year mission to deepen scientific understanding of the sun, as well as helping to forecast space weather events that can affect life on Earth. It is named after Eugene Parker, who pioneered scientific understanding of the sun and died in 2022 at the age of 94.

“No human-made object has ever passed this close to a star, so Parker will truly be returning data from uncharted territory,” Nick Pinkine, the probe’s mission operations manager at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, said in a statement. “We’re excited to hear back from the spacecraft when it swings back around the sun.”

The 3.8m mile distance may sound far away, but the probe will be in the sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona. If the 93m mile distance between Earth and the sun’s surface was 100 metres, the spacecraft would be 4 metres away at its closest point.

The ship’s 4.5-in thick (11.43cm) carbon-composite shield is designed to protect it from blistering temperatures of about 1,600 to 1,700F (870 to 930C), ensuring its internal instruments stay close to room temperature.

As it ventured into the unknown, the probe was flying at a staggering speed of about 430,000mph (690,000km/h), more than 550 times the speed of sound and fast enough to fly from Washington DC to Tokyo in less than a minute.

Dr Nicola Fox, Nasa’s head of science, told the BBC: “As we’re looking for planets in other solar systems that could actually harbour life, we need to understand how our star works so that we can know what kind of stars we’re looking for in other galaxies, as we search for more and more exoplanets.”

Parker was already helping to shed light on some of the sun’s biggest mysteries, from the origins of solar wind to the formation of coronal mass ejections – massive clouds of plasma flung through space – and why the corona is hotter than the sun’s surface beneath.

The spaceship has been using flybys of Venus to move it closer into the sun’s orbit, the most recent on 6 November. These have enabled it to send back new data about the planet, such as capturing visible and near-infrared light, giving scientists a new way to see through its thick clouds to the surface. Previously, that had been done only with radar and infrared imagery.

This Christmas Eve journey to the edge of the sun is the first of three record-setting flybys due to be made by the probe. The next two – on 22 March 2025 and 19 June 2025 – are expected to bring it back to a similarly close distance.

Arik Posner, the probe’s programme scientist at Nasa headquarters in Washington, said: “This is one example of Nasa’s bold missions, doing something that no one else has ever done before to answer longstanding questions about our universe.”

Agence France-Presse contributed to this report

Nasa’s Parker solar probe is attempting its closest ever flyby of the sun, passing 3.8m miles from its surface on Christmas Eve.

The spacecraft was scheduled to make the record-breaking approach, known as a perihelion, at 6.53am US eastern time (11.53 GMT).

The mission team lost contact with their ship and aren’t due to receive a “beacon tone” until Friday 27 December. On 20 December, they received a transmission indicating everything was operating normally, via Nasa’s Deep Space Network complex in Canberra, Australia.

The Parker probe was launched in August 2018 on a seven-year mission to deepen scientific understanding of the sun, as well as helping to forecast space weather events that can affect life on Earth. It is named after Eugene Parker, who pioneered scientific understanding of the sun and died in 2022 at the age of 94.

“No human-made object has ever passed this close to a star, so Parker will truly be returning data from uncharted territory,” Nick Pinkine, the probe’s mission operations manager at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, said in a statement. “We’re excited to hear back from the spacecraft when it swings back around the sun.”

The 3.8m mile distance may sound far away, but the probe will be in the sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona. If the 93m mile distance between Earth and the sun’s surface was 100 metres, the spacecraft would be 4 metres away at its closest point.

The ship’s 4.5-in thick (11.43cm) carbon-composite shield is designed to protect it from blistering temperatures of about 1,600 to 1,700F (870 to 930C), ensuring its internal instruments stay close to room temperature.

As it ventured into the unknown, the probe was flying at a staggering speed of about 430,000mph (690,000km/h), more than 550 times the speed of sound and fast enough to fly from Washington DC to Tokyo in less than a minute.

Dr Nicola Fox, Nasa’s head of science, told the BBC: “As we’re looking for planets in other solar systems that could actually harbour life, we need to understand how our star works so that we can know what kind of stars we’re looking for in other galaxies, as we search for more and more exoplanets.”

Parker was already helping to shed light on some of the sun’s biggest mysteries, from the origins of solar wind to the formation of coronal mass ejections – massive clouds of plasma flung through space – and why the corona is hotter than the sun’s surface beneath.

The spaceship has been using flybys of Venus to move it closer into the sun’s orbit, the most recent on 6 November. These have enabled it to send back new data about the planet, such as capturing visible and near-infrared light, giving scientists a new way to see through its thick clouds to the surface. Previously, that had been done only with radar and infrared imagery.

This Christmas Eve journey to the edge of the sun is the first of three record-setting flybys due to be made by the probe. The next two – on 22 March 2025 and 19 June 2025 – are expected to bring it back to a similarly close distance.

Arik Posner, the probe’s programme scientist at Nasa headquarters in Washington, said: “This is one example of Nasa’s bold missions, doing something that no one else has ever done before to answer longstanding questions about our universe.”

Agence France-Presse contributed to this report

Detained rap mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs, already facing more than 30 civil complaints alongside federal racketeering conspiracy charges, has been hit with a claim from a former “personal lackey” who claims he was forced to clean up after Comb’s “Wild King Nights” parties were finished.

Attorneys for Phillip Pines claim in a lawsuit filed in Los Angeles on Monday that between December 2019 to December 2021, Combs pressured Pines into having sex with a woman and orchestrated parties where he engaged in sex, drugs and alcohol.

Pines, who says he was given the title of senior executive assistant, was allegedly asked to set-up for Combs’ so-called “Wild King Nights”, according to the claim which was obtained by Variety.

He also claims that Combs knowingly exposed a celebrity guest to Covid-19 at his 51st birthday party, and details a disturbing incident where Combs pressured him to engage in sex with a female guest. There are also allegations he witnessed Combs violently kicking a guest in Miami.

Pines’ duties, he claims, included arranging for drugs, alcohol, and sex-related paraphernalia to be brought in and clean up after the parties concluded, including removing drug evidence and bodily stains from rooms, deleting any compromising videos from Combs’ devices, and ensuring that no one spoke about the nights.

Pines claims that he was asked on multiple occasions to set up rooms for Combs’ parties, providing “red lights, ice buckets, alcohol, marijuana joints, honey packs for male libido, baby oil, astro glide, towels, illegal drugs and power banger sex machines”.

Pines also alleges that Combs would test his loyalty, including asking him to return to work to find the TV remote, and that his party clean-up duties were assigned to avoid additional hotel cleaning fees.

Combs, who was arrested in September on racketeering and sex trafficking charges, is currently detained at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York after being denied bail on three separate occasions.

At his most recent bail hearing in November, trial judge Arun Subramanian cited evidence showing Combs to be a “serious risk” of witness tampering and proof he has tried to hide prohibited communications with third parties while incarcerated for the bail denial.

“There is compelling evidence of Combs’s propensity for violence,” Subramanian wrote in a five-page order. Earlier this month, Combs’ attorneys withdrew the bail appeal for their client.

In a statement to Variety on the latest civil claim, Combs’ representatives said: “No matter how many lawsuits are filed, it won’t change the fact that Mr Combs has never sexually assaulted or sex trafficked anyone – man or woman, adult or minor. We live in a world where anyone can file a lawsuit for any reason. Fortunately, a fair and impartial judicial process exists to find the truth, and Mr Combs is confident he will prevail in court.”

An engine room explosion sank a Russian cargo ship called Ursa Major in the Mediterranean Sea between Spain and Algeria and two of its crew are missing, the Russian foreign ministry has said.

The vessel, built in 2009, was controlled by Oboronlogistika, a company that is part of the Russian defence ministry’s military construction operations, which had previously said it was en route to the Russian far-eastern port of Vladivostok with two giant port cranes lashed to its deck.

The foreign ministry’s crisis centre said in a statement that 14 of the ship’s 16 crew members had been rescued and brought to Spain, but that two crew were still missing. It did not say what had caused the explosion.

Russia’s embassy in Spain was cited by the Russian state RIA news agency as saying it was looking into the circumstances of the sinking and was in touch with the authorities in Spain.

Oboronlogistika and SK-Yug, a company LSEG lists as part of the group and the ship’s direct owner and operator, declined to comment on the sinking. Both entities were placed under sanctions by the US in 2022 for their ties to Russia’s military as was the Ursa Major itself.

Unverified video footage of the ship heavily listing to its starboard side with its bow much lower down in the water than usual was filmed on 23 December by a passing ship and published on Russia’s Life.ru news outlet on Tuesday.

Spain’s maritime rescue service said it received a distress signal from the Ursa Major on Monday when it was located about 57 miles off the coast of Almería. It said it had contacted a ship nearby, which reported bad weather conditions, a lifeboat in the water, and said the Ursa Major was listing to the starboard side.

Two vessels and a helicopter were sent to the scene and the 14 surviving crew members taken to the Spanish port of Cartagena. The maritime rescue service cited the crew as saying the ship had been carrying empty containers as well as the two port cranes on deck. A Russian warship had later arrived on the scene, it said, and taken charge of rescue operations.

Oboronlogistika, the ship’s ultimate owner, said in a statement on 20 December that the ship, which LSEG data showed was previously called Sparta III, had been carrying specialised port cranes due to be installed at Vladivostok as well as parts for new ice-breakers.

Two giant cranes could be seen strapped to the deck in the unverified video footage. LSEG ship tracking data shows the vessel departed from the Russian port of St Petersburg on 11 December and was last seen sending a signal at 2204 GMT on Monday between Algeria and Spain.

On leaving St Petersburg it had indicated that its next port of call was the Russian port of Vladivostok, not the Syrian port of Tartous which it has called at previously.

Separately, Ukraine’s HUR military intelligence service – which tracks Russian ship movements – said in a post on its official Telegram channel on Monday that a different Russian cargo ship, called Sparta, had temporarily run into technical problems off the coast of Portugal.

HUR said in an update that the Sparta’s crew had fixed the problem and that the ship was en route for Syria to collect military equipment and ammunition after the fall of the close Russian ally Bashar al-Assad.

Reuters could not verify the HUR’s assertions about the Sparta’s destination or mission.

Hong Kong police have announced bounties of HK$1m (about £105,000) for information leading to the arrest of six democracy advocates based overseas and accused of national security crimes.

Authorities also said they would cancel the passports of seven others for whom bounties had already been issued, including the former lawmakers Ted Hui and Dennis Kwok, local media said.

Political dissent in Hong Kong has been quashed since Beijing imposed a sweeping national security law in 2020 after huge, sometimes violent pro-democracy protests the year before.

Many opposition figures fled abroad, while others have been arrested and sentenced to years in jail.

Tuesday’s announcement is the third time authorities have offered rewards of HK$1m for help capturing those alleged to have violated the city’s national security laws.

The two previous rounds of bounties in July and December last year were met with intense criticism from western countries, with Hong Kong and China in turn railing against “interference” from foreign nations.

The bounties are seen as largely symbolic given that they affect people living abroad in countries unlikely to extradite political activists to Hong Kong or China.

Five of the six people targeted on Tuesday are accused of inciting secession and collusion with a foreign country or external forces. They range from 29-year-old Carmen Lau, a former district councillor now living in Britain, to the former pollster Chung Kim-wah.

Victor Ho Leung-mau, a 69-year-old YouTuber now based in Canada, is charged with subversion. “I just learned that I am now a wanted Hong Konger,” Lau wrote on X. “In 2019, [I] was not afraid of tear gas and bullets, and now I do not and will not back down only because of an arrest warrant and a bounty.”

Hong Kong has previously cancelled the passports of other pro-democracy activists on its wanted list under its second national security law enacted in March.

China’s foreign ministry said on Tuesday it supported Hong Kong “performing its duties in accordance with the law”. “Hong Kong is a society governed by the rule of law and no one has extrajudicial privileges,” said the ministry’s spokesperson, Mao Ning.

Human Rights Watch called the bounties “a cowardly act of intimidation”. “We call on the UK and Canadian governments to act immediately to push back against the Hong Kong government’s attempts to threaten Hongkongers living in their countries,” the NGO’s associate China director, Maya Wang, said in a statement.

A deadly car-ramming attack on a Christmas market in Germany has cast a “dark shadow” over this year’s celebrations, the nation’s president said on Tuesday, as he urged people not to be driven apart by extremists.

In his traditional Christmas address German president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, sought to issue a message of healing four days after the brutal attack in the eastern city of Magdeburg killed five people and left more than 200 wounded.

“A dark shadow hangs over this Christmas,” said the head of state, pointing to the “pain, horror and bewilderment over what happened in Magdeburg just a few days before Christmas”.

He made a call for national unity as a debate about security and immigration is flaring again: “Hatred and violence must not have the final word. Let’s not allow ourselves to be driven apart. Let’s stand together.”

His words came a day after the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) held what it called a memorial rally for the victims in Magdeburg, where one speaker demanded that Germany “must close the borders”.

Nearby an anti-extremist initiative was held under the motto “Don’t Give Hate a Chance”.

Steinmeier recognised that there was a “great deal of dissatisfaction about politics” in Germany but insisted that “our democracy is and remains strong”.

A Saudi doctor, Taleb al-Abdulmohsen, 50, was arrested on Friday at the scene of the attack in which a rented SUV ploughed at high speed through the crowd. Abdulmohsen, a consultant psychiatrist, is being held in police custody on suspicion of murder, attempted murder and grievous bodily harm.

Questions are mounting in Germany about whether Friday’s attack in Magdeburg, which killed five people, might have been preventable. Reports have emerged about lapses in security, questionable immigration decisions and attempts by police to confront Abdulmohsen over threatening behaviour that were allegedly not followed through.

Days after Germany’s deadliest attack in years, a motive remains unclear.

A source close to the Saudi government told Agence France-Presse that Saudi authorities had previously requested the extradition of Abdulmohsen, who arrived in Germany in 2006 and had permanent residency. The source did not give the reason for the request, but added that Riyadh had warned he “could be dangerous”.

Holger Münch, the head of Germany’s federal criminal police office, BKA, told German television that Germany received a warning from Saudi Arabia last year but an investigation found it too vague to act upon.

Police attempted to approach Abdulmohsen for a so-called “threat analysis” discussion but apparently let the opportunity go after failing to find him at home.

Abdulmohsen has in his many online posts voiced strongly anti-Islam views, anger at German authorities and support for far-right conspiracy narratives on the “Islamisation” of Europe.

The attack has fuelled an already bitter debate on migration and security in Germany, two months before national elections and with the far-right AfD party riding high in opinion polls.

German Christmas markets have been specially secured since a jihadist attacker rammed a truck through a Berlin Christmas market in 2016, killing 13 people.

The Magdeburg event too had been shielded by barricades, but the attacker managed to exploit a five-metre gap.

In Magdeburg, where a sea of flowers and candles have been left at the site of the attack, the city of 240,000 residents is trying to come to terms with what happened.

Steinmeier offered his condolences for relatives of those injured and killed “in such a terrible way” – when the attack killed a nine-year-old boy and four women aged 45 to 75.

“You are not alone in your pain,” he said. “The people throughout our country feel for you and mourn with you.”

The Italian football federation has opened an investigation after supporters of the second division club, Juve Stabia, appeared to celebrate a goal scored by Benito Mussolini’s great-grandson with fascist salutes.

Footage captured during the team’s win at home to Cesena showed the moments after Romano Floriani Mussolini, 21, scored the only goal. As the announcer calls out “Romano” seven times, dozens of fans appeared to respond each time with the fascist salute and enthusiastic shouts of “Mussolini”.

The football federation (FIGC) said it was looking into the matter. “The federal prosecutor’s office [of the FIGC] will send a report on the incident … to the sports judge of Serie B for a ruling,” it said.

This year Italy’s top court ruled that performing the fascist salute is not a crime, unless it endangers public order or risks reviving the banned fascist party. The ruling, sparked by an incident in Milan, came days after video emerged of hundreds of men giving the fascist salute during an annual gathering in Rome.

Juve Stabia, in a statement posted to their website, rejected any connection between the gestures of its fans and fascism. “For 117 years, the club has celebrated the goals of its team,” it said. “When the name of the scoring player is announced, we raise our arms to the sky as a sign of the team that is in our heart and which represents the city. This was once again the case with this goal.”

Floriani Mussolini has played every league game for Juve Stabia this season, on loan from Lazio, where he joined the under-19 team in 2021.

The signing by Lazio was seen by some as fuelling far-right stereotypes of the club, which has long struggled with allegations of racist chanting and praising fascism. In 2021, the club suspended its falconer Juan Bernabé, tasked with flying the club’s eagle mascot before kick-off, after he was filmed at the stadium cheering for Benito Mussolini.

Floriani Mussolini has called on people to judge him on his performance. “My great-grandfather, Benito, was a very important person for Italy but we are in 2024 and the world has changed,” he told La Gazzetta dello Sport, this year.

His mother, Alessandra, a former Italian and European MP, is the granddaughter of Benito Mussolini, whose fascist regime seized power in October 1922, ruling Italy until 1943.