Joe Biden said Donald Trump should learn “decency” from Jimmy Carter’s legacy, in remarks delivered hours after the former president’s death on Sunday at age 100.

Speaking to reporters during a family vacation in the US Virgin Islands, the outgoing US president drew sharp contrasts between Carter’s character and that of his predecessor Trump, who is set to take over a second term as commander-in-chief in January.

When asked if there was anything Trump could learn from Carter, Biden replied: “Decency. Decency. Decency.”

“Can you imagine Jimmy Carter walking by someone who needed something and just keep walking?” Biden said. “Can you imagine Jimmy Carter referring to someone by the way they look or the way they talk? I can’t.”

The outgoing president spoke for nine minutes about Carter, describing him as a humanitarian, personal friend and a “remarkable leader”. He emphasized how Carter’s values reflected on America’s global standing, noting that “the rest of the world looks to us. And he was worth looking to.”

Trump, who has had public disagreements with Carter in the past, struck a more measured tone in his response. The 45th and incoming 47th US president released two statements on Sunday praising Carter as “a truly good man” for whom he had the “highest respect” – and describing him as more consequential than most holders of the Oval Office.

“While I strongly disagreed with him philosophically and politically, I also realized that he truly loved and respected our country, and all it stands for,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “He worked hard to make America a better place, and for that I give him my highest respect.”

Trump’s response to Carter’s death was a striking U-turn from recent rhetoric. In October, on Carter’s 100th birthday, Trump was campaigning Waunakee, Wisconsin, and mocked the former president as “the happiest man” because Biden’s one-term presidency made Carter’s look “brilliant” in comparison.

The relationship between Carter and Trump had long been thorny and featured digs in both directions. In 2019, Carter suggested Russian interference had handed Trump his 2016 victory, a comment Trump would dismiss at a G20 summit by calling Carter a “nice man” but a “terrible president” and the “forgotten president”. Carter would later that year warn a second Trump term would spell “disaster” and cited old age as a factor.

Trump ultimately became the oldest person to be elected president when he defeated Kamala Harris in November’s election after losing to Biden in 2020.

In a post later on X, Biden continued his praise of Carter’s life work, which included a 2002 Nobel peace prize win for his work seeking peaceful resolutions to global conflicts, advancing human rights and democracy as well as promoting economic and social development.

The president said Carter “lived a life measured not by words, but by deeds” and “lifted people up, changed lives, and saved lives all over the globe”.

“Jimmy Carter stands as a model for what it means to live a life of meaning and purpose,” Biden said. “We could all do well to be a little more like Jimmy Carter.”

Early in Mike Bartlett’s 2022 stage play, The 47th, the funeral of former US president Jimmy Carter is held at Washington National Cathedral. Joe Biden, Barack Obama, George W Bush and Bill Clinton are all in attendance. Donald Trump is not invited but turns up anyway – and late. “He’s here to pay his disrespects, and use / A funeral for self-promotion,” Kamala Harris observes.

Life – or rather death – is about to imitate art as Washington prepares to bid farewell to Carter, who died at home in Georgia on Sunday at the age of 100. He was the longest-lived president in US history and the first Democratic president to die since Lyndon Johnson more than half a century ago.

State funerals used to be nonpartisan occasions where Democrats and Republicans put their differences aside. But Carter’s passing comes at a hinge moment when division, rancour and uncertainty prevail. Biden, a fellow one-term president felled by inflation, is heading for the door. Trump, a chaos agent promising to wreak new havoc in the US and beyond, returns to power on 20 January.

“Moments like this tell us as much about ourselves as they do about the person being honoured and commemorated,” Jon Meacham, a presidential historian, told the MSNBC network. “And I think President Carter dying at this hour in the life of the republic is a reminder that we are at the end of something.”

Carter became a friend and ally of the Republican he beat, Gerald Ford, while his presidential library was opened by his Republican successor, Ronald Reagan. Meacham added: “President Biden is trying very hard to be a pillar of that dignity and decorum but it would be dishonest of us to not note that it’s getting harder and harder for dignity and decorum to carry the day in the public square.”

Carter and Trump were born only 22 years apart but may as well have come from different centuries. Carter grew up on a farm in Georgia without electricity or running water; Trump had a comfortable upbringing in the affluent neighborhood of Jamaica Estates in Queens, New York.

Carter attended the US naval academy; Trump obtained a series of deferments during the Vietnam war. As president, Carter installed solar water-heating panels on the roof of the White House; Trump called the climate crisis a “hoax” invented by China.

Carter was married to one woman, Rosalynn, for 77 years (though he did once admit to Playboy magazine that he “committed adultery in my heart many times”). The thrice-married Trump allegedly committed adultery with an adult film actor and has been accused of sexual misconduct by two dozen women.

After his presidency, Carter and Rosalynn returned to live in their humble two-bedroom house in Plains, Georgia; after his, Trump plotted his revenge amid the gaudy trappings of Trump Tower in New York and Mar-a-Lago in Florida.

For years Carter worked with Habitat for Humanity helping build homes – sometimes with his own hands – for people in need across the world; Trump built his own property empire by fraudulently overvaluing his assets, a judge found last year.

Carter biographer Jonathan Alter told the Guardian in 2020: “I sent Carter an email saying: ‘Do you think you have anything in common with Donald Trump?’ and I got back a one word response: ‘No.’ Certainly in terms of their character, achievements, sense of responsibility, Jimmy Carter and Donald Trump have nothing in common.”

And Carter, a born-again Christian, spent decades teaching Sunday school at the Maranatha Baptist church in Plains. In a statement on Sunday, Barack and Michelle Obama suggested that many of the tourists who crammed the pews were there because of Carter’s “decency”.

The word was echoed by Biden at a press conference. But it is an increasingly unfashionable one in a time of indecent politics. Trump will soon be certified as the 47th president, four years to the day after he whipped up a furious mob to storm the US Capitol in a failed bid to cling to power.

He might also attend the state funeral for Carter, as he did for George H W Bush in 2018, awkwardly greeting former presidents he had publicly denigrated. During this year’s election campaign, Trump frequently observed: “Jimmy Carter is happy now, because he will go down as a brilliant president by comparison to Joe Biden.”

At the cathedral, Biden, who, like Carter, may hope that historians are kinder than voters to his legacy, will no doubt deliver a paean to the man he called a “dear friend” and “a man of a bygone era”. But with a heavy heart, he may also find himself giving a eulogy to a political epoch gone with the wind.

South Korea has launched an emergency safety inspection of the country’s entire airline operations, and a separate check of all Boeing 737-800s, after 179 people died in a Jeju Air crash involving the aircraft on Sunday.

As shocked citizens began a second day of official mourning and flags flew at half-mast, the government said it would carry out the audit of all 101 of the aircraft in domestic operation, with US investigators, possibly including Boeing, joining the inspection.

Choi Sang-mok, who was appointed South Korea’s president two days before the disaster, said an exhaustive inspection was essential to overhaul the aviation safety system and “move toward a safer Republic of Korea”.

He was speaking as reports emerged that another passenger jet belonging to Jeju Air was forced to return to Gimpo airport in Seoul shortly after taking off on Monday, after an unspecified problem with its landing gear.

Landing gear malfunction is among the issues being targeted by the investigation into Sunday’s crash, in which the plane skidded along the runway in what the aviation industry describes as a “belly landing”.

Officials said the crash could have also been caused by a bird strike and weather conditions – or a combination of those and other factors – but the exact cause was not yet known. It was the worst civil aviation disaster on South Korean soil.

With identification of the dead proceeding slowly, Park Han-shin, a representative of the bereaved families, said they were told the bodies were so “badly damaged” that officials needed time before returning them to their families.

“I demand that the government mobilise more personnel to return our brothers and family members as intact as possible more swiftly,” he said.

Among questions that have emerged in the immediate aftermath of the accident is whether an almost 2-metre-high structure, a concrete wall located unusually close to the end of the runway, which the jet hit before exploding, exacerbated the catastrophe.

The wall, used to support a “localiser” antenna that provides landing alignment information to aircraft, is understood to be much taller than those used at other South Korean airports.

Transport ministry officials said on Monday they would look into whether the Muan airport’s localiser should have been made with lighter materials that would have broken up more easily.

Two flight attendants – a man and a woman – were rescued from the tail of the aircraft, which broke apart on impact with the wall. They were being treated at a hospital in Seoul after being transferred from hospitals near the airport, the Yonhap news agency said.

The male survivor was being treated for fractures to his ribs, shoulder blade and upper spine, said Ju Woong, the director of the Ewha Womans University Seoul Hospital. Ju said the man, whose name has not been released, told doctors he “woke up to find [himself] rescued”. Details of the female survivor were not immediately available.

The Boeing 737-800 plane operated by the South Korean budget airline Jeju Air aborted its first landing attempt and later smashed down on the runway at speed after issuing a distress call.

Video of the crash indicated that the pilots did not deploy flaps or slats on the wings to slow the aircraft, suggesting a possible hydraulic failure, and did not manage to manually lower the landing gear, possibly as they did not have time.

The plane’s flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder have been retrieved from the wreckage, but media reports said it could take longer than usual to determine the cause as the flight data recorder had been damaged in the crash.

Establishing the cause of a major air disaster typically takes months, and damage to the recorder was expected to cause further delays, Yonhap said, citing a land ministry official.

Choi declared a seven-day mourning period starting from Sunday, as he attempted to coordinate a response to a major disaster only days after he replaced his impeached predecessor, Han Duck-soo. Han, too, had been made interim leader after the impeachment in mid-December of Yoon Suk Yeol over his disastrous, and short-lived, declaration of martial law earlier in the month.

The animosity of the past month appeared to have been put to one side as senior politicians from the ruling and opposition parties attempted to console a country in mourning.

While the accident investigation will focus on the model of aircraft, there will inevitably be questions for the flight’s operator, Jeju Air.

The low-cost carrier said that about 68,000 flight reservations – over 33,000 for domestic flights and 34,000 for international routes – had been cancelled, the majority after the crash took place.

The airline said it would do all it could to support the families of the victims, including with financial aid. Its chief executive, Kim E-bae, told a televised news conference he took “full responsibility” for the crash, irrespective of the cause, and bowed deeply in apology with other senior company officials.

He said the company had not identified any mechanical problems with the aircraft after regular checkups, and that he would wait for the results of government investigations.

Local travel agencies also reported a rise in cancellations of tour packages after the crash. “We had about 40 inquiries regarding travel cancellations on Sunday alone,” one travel agent told Yonhap. “We saw about double the usual amount of cancellations and a 50% decrease in bookings.”

One day after the fatal airline disaster in South Korea, the answer as to what went wrong with Jeju Air 2216 remains elusive.

Even as experts remain puzzled by what caused the crash that killed 179 people, experts say that a bird striking the engine is unlikely to be the sole factor.

The air traffic control tower at Muan reportedly issued a bird strike warning shortly before the incident, with a South Korean transport department official telling media the pilot had told controllers the plane had suffered a bird strike before declaring mayday.

The early theory was that the bird strike led to the failure of the engine that powered the landing gear, which in turn caused the fatal belly landing.

However, Dr Sonya Brown, a senior lecturer in aerospace design at the University of New South Wales, is sceptical.

“A bird strike should be a survivable event … It should not lead to what we eventually saw, particularly because in any situation where one engine is non-functioning (as the footage suggests), there’s still plenty of power,” she says, adding that bird strikes are so common that they are factored into the design of modern planes.

On a Boeing 737 and any commercial airliner there are layers of redundancy, especially for the landing gear, which is hydraulically operated, she says.

“Even if that were to fail, it has redundancy in that it can still extend without the hydraulics system [which is] basically gravity operated, so the landing gear should still be able to extend.”

There are also dual redundancies in place for other flight control systems such as the flaps and slats – the latter of which Brown describes as a bit like a spoiler on a car – that mean these tools, which are dropped ahead of landing to increase drag and slow the aircraft down, should have been able to be activated.

“They’re running off two independent hydraulics systems, and it’s very unlikely that a bird strike would take out those two independent hydraulic systems.

“It does seem like there’s more to this incident,” she says.

Prof Doug Drury, of Central Queensland University, agrees the bird strike alone is unlikely the sole cause.

“A bird strike on one engine would not cause the complete failure of all the systems, you can fly a 737 on one engine,” says Drury, a veteran pilot who has flown commercial, military and private charter during his career.

As investigators begin to examine black box flight data and cockpit voice recordings, it may be some time before there are definitive answers.

For his part, Drury is baffled by the speed at which the plane approached the runway.

“If you were going to do a belly landing you would slow it down to just stall speed,” he says. “But this thing was scooting down the runway with a lot of energy.”

The plane also landed in the opposite direction than the runway usually operates, he says, meaning it may have landed with a tail wind. Planes normally land against such winds to help them slow down.

“Why were they going so fast,” he asks. “There are a lot more questions than answers at this point.”

• Elias Visontay is Guardian Australia’s transport and urban affairs reporter

Finnish investigators say they have found a seabed trail stretching almost 100km (about 60 miles) around the site of an underwater electricity cable that was damaged on Christmas Day in a suspected act of Russian sabotage.

The ship under suspicion of causing the damage, a vessel called the Eagle S flying the flag of the Cook Islands, is believed to be part of Russia’s so-called shadow fleet, used for transporting Russian oil products subject to embargos after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

“Our current understanding is that the drag mark in question is that of the anchor of the Eagle S,” the police chief investigator, Sami Paila, said on Sunday. “We have been able to clarify this matter through underwater research,” he told the Finnish national broadcaster Yle.

The apparent act of sabotage damaged the Estlink 2 electricity cable connecting Finland and Estonia. The cable will take months to repair, which could lead to increased electricity prices in Estonia over the winter. It is the latest in a series of suspicious incidents involving damage to underwater power and communications cables.

Paila said the “question of intent is a completely essential issue” and would be clarified during the investigation. However, a senior Estonian official said there was little doubt that the two countries were dealing with a deliberate attack.

“If you’re dragging an anchor, it can’t be that you don’t notice it, because the ship would go off course. It’s clearly not possible,” the official told the Guardian.

The Estonian official admitted it was “not easy to prove” who was behind the attack, though suspicion naturally falls on Russia, which has been conducting a campaign of sabotage against Nato countries over the past two years.

The crew of the Eagle S was made up of Georgian and Indian nationals, Finnish media reported, but the ship had recently docked in Russia and was believed to be carrying Russian oil products.

The Estonian official said that when the alarm came on Christmas Day, Finland and Estonia sent ships to the area but the Estonian vessel could not cope with the stormy seas, so the Finns took the lead. “It took a couple of hours to clarify exactly which ship was to blame, and during that time [the Eagle S] cut two communication lines as well,” said the official.

However, the ship was stopped before there was any damage to Estlink 1, a second electricity cable linking Finland and Estonia. Tallinn has launched a naval and special forces operation to protect the remaining pipeline.

The apparent sabotage comes as Estonia plans to decouple its power grid from the old Soviet network this coming spring and unite with a central European network instead. The official said these plans would go ahead but the damage to the cable would probably prove costly, citing incurred losses when the same cable was put out of action a year ago in an act not linked to sabotage.

“It was a 10% increase in cost during the months it took to repair. Altogether, Estonians paid €90m more due to that. So it’s not peanuts,” the official said.

Last month two fibre-optic cables were damaged in waters between Sweden and Denmark in an apparent act of sabotage by a Chinese ship. Repeated incidents in the Baltic Sea led the Nato secretary general, Mark Rutte, to announce on Friday that the alliance would increase its military presence in the sea.

The Estonian official said Tallinn’s own military operation would focus on monitoring the heavy traffic in the Baltic and providing a speedy response to threats. “We try to identify suspicious ships, or if we see that the anchor is in the water we will do everything to stop this ship before it reaches the cable,” the official said.

Three people have been charged with manslaughter, and two others with drug supply, in connection with the death of Liam Payne, who was allegedly seen being “dragged to his room” while unconscious moments before he fell from his balcony in Argentina earlier this year.

The 31-year-old former One Direction singer fell from the third floor of the Casa Sur hotel in Buenos Aires on 16 October.

Argentina’s public prosecutions ministry confirmed on Monday that three people had been charged with manslaughter, specifically the charge of negligent homicide.

These were Payne’s friend, Roger Nores, the manager of the hotel where he was staying, Gilda Martín, and the head of reception, Esteban Grassi.

Braian Paiz, a waiter at a restaurant in Puerto Madero, an affluent area of Buenos Aires, and Ezequiel Pereyra, an employee of the Casa Sur, were charged with supplying narcotics and detained.

Nores, described as Payne’s friend and representative during his stay in Argentina, was accused of “abandoning [Payne] to his fate, knowing that he was incapable of caring for himself” and “having full knowledge of the state of intoxication, vulnerability and helplessness in which he found himself”.

The charges state that Martín was present in the hotel lobby, where Payne was prior to his death, and that she noticed the singer was “unable to stand due to the consumption of various substances”.

They also state she “allowed for Payne to be taken to his room moments before his death” and that the balcony there “was a source of risk”. The charges allege she should have kept him “safe in an area without sources of danger, in company and until medical care was provided for him”.

Grassi is alleged to have “led a group of three people who dragged Payne to his room moments before his death”.

Judge Laura Bruniard, the head of the national criminal and correctional court No 34, said: “Bringing Payne up to room 310 in that state, where he was staying, was creating a legally unacceptable risk to his life.”

Bruniard said “it was proven by the testimonies gathered by the prosecutor that Payne had a history of addiction” and an autopsy confirmed “the presence of cocaine and alcohol in large quantities”.

He was also seen demanding cocaine and alcohol by hotel staff, she said.

The judge said the singer was seen unconscious and being dragged “by three people” and “the way he was being handled shows a state of vulnerability”.

She said Martín and Grassi could be seen outside Payne’s hotel room minutes before he was found dead on the restaurant’s patio.

“Payne’s consciousness was altered and there was a balcony in the room. The proper thing to do was to leave him in a safe place and with company until a doctor arrived,” Bruniard said. “I believe that the [manager and head of reception] did not act maliciously in relation to the singer’s death, but they were imprudent in allowing him to be taken to the room.”

Bruniard also said she believed Payne did not faint and that in his state of intoxication he tried to leave via the balcony and fell, “because the forensic experts noted that he did not lose his balance”.

Forensic experts concluded Payne fell on to the hotel restaurant’s patio “without any sign of defence”, causing multiple injuries to his body, particularly his head, after directly hitting the concrete support of an umbrella.

Bruniard said that Nores “had assumed a position of guarantor in front of the family of the deceased”, and that footage showed him leaving Casa Sur at 4.11pm, 50 minutes before Payne’s death.

She said that “at that point, given the results of the autopsy, Payne’s state of vulnerability was evident” and Nores “could not trust that the rest of the hotel staff would act appropriately”. Nores has been prevented from leaving the country prior to a trial.

She concluded that “the three people who are being prosecuted [for manslaughter] have contributed, although not in a planned manner, to creating a risk that resulted in Payne’s death, whether by action or omission”.

Pereyra is accused of delivering cocaine to Payne, for a fee, on 15 and 16 October, while Paiz is accused of delivering cocaine to the singer twice on 14 October, at one point checking in to Payne’s hotel room between 3.25am and 8.15am.

Bruniard said that “Payne asked for money at the reception desk while the defendant was in his room”. Later that morning, it is alleged Payne travelled to Paiz’s home by taxi to pick up more cocaine.

Pereyra reportedly received $100 from Payne in exchange for drugs and, on another occasion, the singer sent a car to his home to collect more.

Fernando Madeo, a lawyer acting on behalf of Paiz, said his client consumed narcotics but denied selling Payne drugs. “He stated that he met Liam on two occasions. Among several issues, which they did in a private environment, they also consumed narcotics, but it is not true that he sold him drugs,’ Madeo said.

Madeo said Paiz was a “lifelong One Direction fan” who met Payne when he dined at the restaurant where Paiz worked, after which they “got high together”, but he said Paiz “wasn’t the dealer”.

Those charged with culpable homicide face a sentence of up to five years in prison, while those charged with supplying narcotics face between four and 15 years in prison.

Payne, from Wolverhampton in the West Midlands, rose to fame in 2010 after appearing as a contestant on The X Factor where he was selected to be a member of One Direction, which went on to become one of the bestselling boybands of all time.

After One Direction announced a hiatus in 2016, Payne released his debut solo album, LP1, in December 2019.

A Belgrade court has jailed the parents of a 13-year-old boy after he shot dead nine students and a security guard at an elementary school in Serbia’s capital last year.

The killings, on 3 May 2023, deeply shocked the Balkan nation, where mass shootings have been rare despite high levels of gun ownership.

The trial was conducted solely against the teenager’s parents, Vladimir and Miljana Kecmanovic, as their son could not be criminally prosecuted due to his age.

Vladimir Kecmanovic was sentenced on Monday to 14 years and six months while Miljana Kecmanovic was jailed for three years, the Belgrade higher court said in a statement.

Prosecutors had argued the father had trained his son to shoot, had not properly secured his weapons and ammunition, and had allowed the boy to hide a handgun and 92 bullets in his backpack that he later used in the shooting.

“The accused, Vladimir Kecmanovic, was found guilty of committing the criminal offences of a grave offence against public safety and neglect and abuse of a minor. The accused, Miljana Kecmanovic, was found guilty of neglect and abuse of a minor,” the court said.

The mother was acquitted on charges of the unauthorised production, possession, carrying or trafficking of weapons.

The court also sentenced the instructor at the shooting range where, according to the indictment, Vladimir Kecmanovic took his son for target practice, to one year and three months in prison.

Both the prosecution and the defence have said they will appeal against the sentences.

The chief public prosecutor, Nenad Stefanović, announced an appeal for harsher sentences for the father and the shooting instructor, as well as against the dismissal of part of the indictment against the mother.

Lawyers for the parents and the shooting instructor also said they would appeal.

Ognjen Božović, who represented the families of the murdered children, said his clients were satisfied with the verdict. But, he added, there was no punishment that could bring justice or proper satisfaction to the families, as no one had been convicted for the massacre.

Family members of the murdered children, visibly shaken, were present at the sentencing. A group of students left flowers in front of the courthouse and stood in silence for 10 minutes to honour the victims.

Ninela Radicevic, the mother of one of the murdered girls, said the parents of the victims had expected the verdict but wanted accountability for the shooting itself. The parents are pursuing five additional private civil lawsuits against the Kecmanovic family.

The teenage boy has been placed in a psychiatric institution. He was brought out for the first time in October to testify in the case against his parents.

Although the trial was held in a regular courthouse, the boy’s testimony on 8 October was heard in a high-security courtroom typically reserved for cases involving organised crime and war crimes.

The first-instance verdict against his parents was delivered publicly, though the 11-month trial was conducted behind closed doors. Afterwards, the court ordered the father to be returned to custody, where he has been held since shortly after the shootings, but the mother remains free until the verdict becomes final.

Days after the attack, Serbia was rocked by another mass shooting when a 21-year-old armed with an automatic rifle killed nine people about 37 miles (60km) south of Belgrade.

Earlier this month, a court sentenced the attacker to 20 years in prison – the maximum penalty given his age.

The shootings sparked anti-government protests last year, which brought together tens of thousands of people demanding the resignation of some officials and an end to the glorification of violence and mafia culture in the media.

The government decided in September to designate 3-4 May as Days of Remembrance for the victims of mass shootings.

A Belgrade court has jailed the parents of a 13-year-old boy after he shot dead nine students and a security guard at an elementary school in Serbia’s capital last year.

The killings, on 3 May 2023, deeply shocked the Balkan nation, where mass shootings have been rare despite high levels of gun ownership.

The trial was conducted solely against the teenager’s parents, Vladimir and Miljana Kecmanovic, as their son could not be criminally prosecuted due to his age.

Vladimir Kecmanovic was sentenced on Monday to 14 years and six months while Miljana Kecmanovic was jailed for three years, the Belgrade higher court said in a statement.

Prosecutors had argued the father had trained his son to shoot, had not properly secured his weapons and ammunition, and had allowed the boy to hide a handgun and 92 bullets in his backpack that he later used in the shooting.

“The accused, Vladimir Kecmanovic, was found guilty of committing the criminal offences of a grave offence against public safety and neglect and abuse of a minor. The accused, Miljana Kecmanovic, was found guilty of neglect and abuse of a minor,” the court said.

The mother was acquitted on charges of the unauthorised production, possession, carrying or trafficking of weapons.

The court also sentenced the instructor at the shooting range where, according to the indictment, Vladimir Kecmanovic took his son for target practice, to one year and three months in prison.

Both the prosecution and the defence have said they will appeal against the sentences.

The chief public prosecutor, Nenad Stefanović, announced an appeal for harsher sentences for the father and the shooting instructor, as well as against the dismissal of part of the indictment against the mother.

Lawyers for the parents and the shooting instructor also said they would appeal.

Ognjen Božović, who represented the families of the murdered children, said his clients were satisfied with the verdict. But, he added, there was no punishment that could bring justice or proper satisfaction to the families, as no one had been convicted for the massacre.

Family members of the murdered children, visibly shaken, were present at the sentencing. A group of students left flowers in front of the courthouse and stood in silence for 10 minutes to honour the victims.

Ninela Radicevic, the mother of one of the murdered girls, said the parents of the victims had expected the verdict but wanted accountability for the shooting itself. The parents are pursuing five additional private civil lawsuits against the Kecmanovic family.

The teenage boy has been placed in a psychiatric institution. He was brought out for the first time in October to testify in the case against his parents.

Although the trial was held in a regular courthouse, the boy’s testimony on 8 October was heard in a high-security courtroom typically reserved for cases involving organised crime and war crimes.

The first-instance verdict against his parents was delivered publicly, though the 11-month trial was conducted behind closed doors. Afterwards, the court ordered the father to be returned to custody, where he has been held since shortly after the shootings, but the mother remains free until the verdict becomes final.

Days after the attack, Serbia was rocked by another mass shooting when a 21-year-old armed with an automatic rifle killed nine people about 37 miles (60km) south of Belgrade.

Earlier this month, a court sentenced the attacker to 20 years in prison – the maximum penalty given his age.

The shootings sparked anti-government protests last year, which brought together tens of thousands of people demanding the resignation of some officials and an end to the glorification of violence and mafia culture in the media.

The government decided in September to designate 3-4 May as Days of Remembrance for the victims of mass shootings.

A federal appeals court has upheld the $5m verdict against Donald Trump for sexually abusing and defaming the magazine writer E Jean Carroll, dealing a legal setback to the president-elect.

The three-judge panel at the second US circuit court of appeals in Manhattan rejected Trump’s arguments for a new trial, ruling that evidence including testimony from other accusers – as well as the infamous Access Hollywood tape that captured him boasting about how it was normal for him to “grab [women] by the pussy” – was properly admitted.

The May 2023 verdict found Trump liable for sexually assaulting Carroll in a New York department store dressing room in about 1996, 20 years before winning his first presidency, though the jury stopped short of calling the case a rape. The verdict included $2.02m for sexual assault and $2.98m for defaming Carroll in an October 2022 social media post where he called her allegations a “hoax”.

The appeals court said testimony from two other women who accused Trump of sexual misconduct – businesswoman Jessica Leeds as well as the former People magazine writer Natasha Stoynoff – helped establish “a repeated, idiosyncratic pattern of conduct” that aligned with Carroll’s allegations.

“Mr Trump’s statements in the [Access Hollywood] tape, together with the testimony of Ms Leeds and Ms Stoynoff, establish a repeated, idiosyncratic pattern of conduct consistent with what Ms Carroll alleged,” the opinion stated.

The ruling follows a separate $83.3m defamation verdict that Carroll won against Trump in January over his 2019 denials of her allegations. Trump is appealing that verdict.

Trump has consistently denied all allegations, claiming he never met Carroll and that she was “not my type”.

The case is expected to continue even after Trump takes office for his second presidency on 20 January 2025, as the US supreme court ruled unanimously in 1997 that sitting presidents have no immunity from civil litigation over actions predating their official duties.

The German government has accused Elon Musk of trying to meddle in the country’s election campaign with repeated endorsements of the far-right party AfD.

“It is indeed the case that Elon Musk is trying to influence the federal election,” said the government spokesperson Christiane Hoffmann after Musk’s X posts and an opinion piece published at the weekend backing the anti-Muslim, anti-migration Alternative für Deutschland.

She said at a regular media briefing that Musk had the right to free speech, adding: “After all, freedom of opinion also covers the greatest nonsense.”

Musk has often weighed in on German politics, even calling the chancellor, Olaf Scholz, a “fool” on his social media platform X last month. However, his more recent open calls for German voters to back the AfD, which federal authorities classify as a suspected extremist party, have sparked outrage and accusations of troubling interference in Europe’s top economy.

The South African-born entrepreneur, who has been named by Donald Trump to co-lead a commission aimed at reducing the size of the US federal government, wrote on X earlier this month: “Only the AfD can save Germany.”

In the post, he shared a video by a German rightwing influencer, Naomi Seibt, who criticised Friedrich Merz, the conservative frontrunner in the German election, and praised Javier Milei, Argentina’s self-styled “anarcho-capitalist” president.

He followed up at the weekend with a guest editorial in the broadsheet Welt am Sonntag arguing that Germany was teetering on the brink of economic and cultural collapse, defending the AfD against accusations of radicalism and praising the party’s approach to the economy, including regulation and tax policy.

The editor of the centre-right newspaper’s opinion section, Eva Marie Kogel, posted on X that she had submitted her resignation in protest at the decision to run the article.

Politicians from across the political spectrum criticised Musk’s attempts to put his thumb on the scales of German democracy, with the health minister, Karl Lauterbach, of Scholz’s Social Democratic party (SPD) calling his intervention “undignified and highly problematic” and Merz saying it was “intrusive and presumptuous”.

Merz told the Funke media group: “I cannot recall in the history of western democracies a comparable case of interference in the election campaign of a friendly country.”

Scholz’s centre-left-led coalition collapsed last month, prompting him to call a confidence vote in order to trigger a general election in February, seven months ahead of schedule. His SPD is widely expected to lose to Merz’s CDU/CSU bloc amid voter anger over the cost of living and meagre economic growth.

Last week, Germany’s president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, criticised X explicitly and Musk indirectly in a short speech announcing his formal decision to dissolve parliament and call the election on 23 February.

Steinmeier, whose role is largely ceremonial, warned of “outside influence” in the campaign, specifically citing recent “open and blatant” attempts on X to sway the vote. The remarks were widely interpreted as an admonishment of Musk.

Members of the AfD have been working for months to make inroads with the Trump camp. Alice Weidel, the party’s co-leader, was one of the first politicians abroad to welcome Trump’s election victory.

A small group of AfD activists posed for pictures with Trump at his private club Mar-a-Lago on US election day last month, chanting “Fight! Fight! Fight!” in English and German for the cameras.

In Musk’s endorsement in Die Welt, he cited Weidel’s “same-sex partner from Sri Lanka” as evidence that the portrayal of the AfD “as rightwing extremist is clearly false”. “Does that sound like Hitler to you? Please!” he wrote.

The AfD is polling second on about 19%, behind the CDU/CSU on 31%. A strong showing for the party could complicate coalition building after the election, requiring the winner to seek up to two partners to build a ruling majority. All mainstream parties have ruled out collaborating with the AfD at state or federal level.

Dominique Pelicot will not appeal against his conviction for drugging and raping his wife and inviting strangers to rape her, his lawyer has said.

Béatrice Zavarro said the former electrician, 72, who was jailed for the maximum 20 years this month, wished to spare his now ex-wife, Gisèle Pelicot, a new ordeal but admitted there was also the risk a new trial in front of a public jury could mean a longer prison sentence.

Pelicot and the 50 others who were all found guilty of rape or sexual assault after a three-and-a-half-month trial have until midnight on Monday to lodge an appeal. At least 17 are believed to have decided to contest their conviction and more may follow.

Gisèle Pelicot, 72, a retired logistics manager, believes she may have been raped more than 200 times by her husband and other men between 2011 and 2020, when Dominique Pelicot was finally caught after filming up the skirts of female shoppers in a supermarket near the couple’s home in the Provençal town of Mazan. Detectives subsequently found tens of thousands of videos of the abuse on his phone and a hard drive.

On Monday, Zavarro said Dominique Pelicot had decided not to appeal against his conviction because to do so would “force Gisèle into a new ordeal and new confrontations, which [he] rejects”.

Appealing against the guilty judgment, when Pelicot admitted the charges, would involve “running an unnecessary risk”, she added, as the accusations could be made more serious in the appeal court, where the case would be held in front of a public jury, potentially leading to a longer prison term.

“It is time to put an end to this judicially,” Zavarro said on Monday.

The marathon rape trial in Avignon was heard by a panel of five professional magistrates. The appeal court, which sits in the southern city of Nimes, will require a new full trial within the next year.

Gisèle Pelicot is not required to attend the appeal hearing but her lawyer, Stéphane Babonneau, indicated she was ready to do so. “She has told us she will be there. Maybe not every day but she says she will go,” he said.

She became an international feminist figurehead after insisting the trial be held in open court and the videos of her abuse shown in order that “shame changes sides”.

The trial has caused much soul-searcing in France and calls to tighten French rape laws, including introducing the concept of “consent”, which is absent. The trial also threw a spotlight on attitudes towards the rape and sexual abuse of women in France, where 94% of reported rape cases are dropped without any action.

“From Gisèle Pelicot’s point of view, there is no sentence that will give her back what she has lost,” Babonneau said. “All Gisèle Pelicot wanted is to have the accused convicted for what they did to her. As for the personal sentences, she respects the decision of the court and finds no solace in them.”

The government of Trinidad and Tobago has declared a state of emergency after a weekend of violence in the Caribbean dual-island nation took the number of murders this year to 623.

Five men were shot overnight in an estate on the outskirts of the capital, Port of Spain, a man killed outside a police station on Saturday, and a 57-year-old woman was shot dead on Friday as she collected her teenage son from hospital in San Fernando.

In a population of 1.5 million, the unprecedented tally for 2024 makes Trinidad and Tobago one of the most violent countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Under the emergency powers announced by the office of the prime minister, Keith Rowley, the police and army have widespread authority to detain individuals without charge and search properties without warrants.

In a statement, Rowley said he was disappointed in the murder tally for 2024 and appealed to the police to use their new powers to make life “uncomfortable” for criminals.

At a press conference in Port of Spain, at which Rowley’s absence was criticised by local media, the attorney general, Stuart Young, said there would be no public curfew imposed at this time.

Young said the measures had been introduced as a result of a week of “brazen acts” by criminals in the country and that there was an expectation of a wave of reprisal attacks at a “scale so extensive that it endangers public safety”.

He said there were “limited assurances” he could give to a concerned public, adding: “What we are faced with was heightened criminal activity with the use of high-velocity assault weapons in reprisal attacks between gangs.

“It’s not about culling the homicide rate, it’s about expecting brazen acts which are going to endanger the public,” he said, although he admitted that the past 10 years of the government’s tenure had seen crime rates spiral upwards.

The president, Christine Kangaloo, said in a proclamation: “I am satisfied that a public emergency has risen as a result of the occurrence of action that has been taken or is immediately threatened by a person, of such a nature and on so extensive a scale, as to be likely to endanger the public safety.”

An estimated 42.6% of the killings are gang-related, and almost all are linked to organised crime, according to the police.

The last state of emergency to be declared in Trinidad and Tobago was in 2021 to allow for restrictions during the Covid pandemic.

Talk of homicide is on the rise in films, researchers have found, in a trend they say could pose a health concern for adults and children.

A study found that over the past 50 years there had been a small but significant increase in movie characters talking about murdering or killing.

“The surprising thing is the increase occurs not just for crime genres, which you would expect because they’re violent, but also for non-crime genres,” said Brad Bushman, a professor of communication at Ohio State University, who co-authored the study.

The team suggested the rise may indicate an increase in violent behaviour in movies, and called for a promotion of “mindful consumption and media literacy” to protect vulnerable groups, especially children.

Bushman said: “Adults can make their own choices, but I’m especially concerned about children being exposed to violence in the media.”

The question of whether on-screen violence has an impact on viewers has been a topic of much debate. Some studies back the idea young people can become more aggressive after watching violent media, such as TV and video games, with children exposed to such media being more antisocial and emotionally distressed.

However, an analysis published in 2020 suggested any positive relationship between violent behaviour and violent video games is minuscule, while scientists have also suggested that whether violent movies contribute to real-life aggression depends on if the viewer is already predisposed to violence.

Writing in the journal Jama Pediatrics, Bushman and his colleagues reported how they analysed dialogue from 166,534 English-language movies produced from 1970 to 2020 using data held by the website OpenSubtitles.org.

The results revealed almost 7% of the films analysed had dialogue that included verbs with “kill” or “murder” as their root. The team excluded instances where these verbs were used in a question, negation or in a passive form, and they did not include other violence-related verbs, such as “shoot” or “stab”.

“It is a very conservative estimate of murderous verbs during the past half century,” Bushman said.

The team then calculated the percentage of verbs within the dialogue of each movie that contained the roots “kill” and “murder”, and took the average for each year.

The team found that while the percentage of such murderous verbs within movies fluctuated over time, their use generally increased over the decades – a trend that held for both male and female characters. While across all genres and characters 0.21% of verbs within dialogue used “kill” or “murder” as their root in the early 1970s, this rose to 0.37% in 2020.

When the type of film was considered, the researchers found the use of murderous verbs increased over time for both crime and non-crime movies. However, while male characters showed an increase in the use of murderous verbs in both categories, for females this was only the case in non-crime movies.

The team said their results were consistent with their previous work, which found acts of gun violence in top movies had more than doubled since 1950.

Bushman said the trend highlighted in the study was troubling, adding that exposure to violent media could have a cumulative effect and shape people’s view of the world.

“We know there are many harmful effects of exposure to violent media. It increases aggressive behaviour, but also makes people desensitised, numb, to the pain and suffering of others,” he said.

However Peter Etchells, a professor of psychology and science communication at Bath Spa University in the UK, urged caution.

“It’s a huge logical jump to go from counting the number of ‘murderous’ words in a movie, especially when that count is free of any context as to why the word is being used, to vague talk about health concerns,” he said. “This isn’t something I would really be worrying about.”