The raging wildfires that have blazed around Los Angeles for two days, killing at least five people, destroying almost 2,000 homes and buildings, and forcing the evacuation of more than 130,000 people, have spread to the hills above Hollywood Boulevard.

As firefighters battled five separate blazes, the White House announced that Joe Biden had cancelled Thursday’s visit to Italy – the final overseas trip of his presidency – to focus on directing the federal response to the fires.

The emergency began on Tuesday afternoon, when a powerful windstorm fanned the flames of a fire in the Pacific Palisades neighbourhood, prompting thousands to flee.

The blazes intensified overnight as firefighters struggled to contain the flames in the extreme winds, during what one official described as among the “most devastating and terrifying nights” in the city’s history.

Although the winds had begun to ease by Wednesday evening, and firefighters from across the state were relieving exhausted crews, the danger was far from over. As officials provided an update on the fires, a new blaze broke out in the Hollywood Hills, and evacuation orders were also extended to Santa Monica.

Human-caused climate breakdown is supercharging extreme weather across the world, causing more frequent and more deadly disasters, from heatwaves to floods to wildfires.

The region has been experiencing warmer than average temperatures in January, in part owing to recent blasts of dry air, including the notorious Santa Ana winds. Southern California has not recorded more than 0.1in (2.5mm) of rain since early May.

The LA Fire Department issued the evacuation order for people in an area within Hollywood Boulevard to the south, Mulholland Drive to the north, the 101 freeway to the east and Laurel Canyon Boulevard to the west – all notable entertainment industry addresses.

Within that area is the Dolby theatre, where the Oscars are held. Next week’s Oscar nominations announcement has been postponed by two days because of the fire, organisers said.

Though relatively small, the Sunset fire burned just above Hollywood Boulevard and its Walk of Fame. A nearby structural fire destroyed at least two homes and spread to brush in Studio City before being extinguished by more than 50 firefighters.

“This firestorm is the big one,” the mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, told a press conference after cutting short an official trip to Ghana to return to the city.

The new fire in the Hollywood Hills has brought the total number of wildfires burning in Los Angeles County to at least five.

By the early hours of Thursday, the Palisades fire on the west side of Los Angeles had consumed more than 6,960 hectares (17,200 acres) and hundreds of structures in the hills between Santa Monica and Malibu.

Aerial video by KTLA television showed block after block of smouldering homes in Pacific Palisades, the smoky grid occasionally punctuated by the orange blaze of another home still on fire.

To the east, in the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains, the Eaton fire claimed another 4,290 hectares (10,600 acres), another 1,000 structures, and killed at least five people, officials said.

Three people have been arrested for looting, according to law enforcement officials. The private forecaster AccuWeather estimated initial damage and economic loss at more than $50bn (£41bn).

“We’re facing a historic natural disaster. And I think that can’t be stated strong enough,” Kevin McGowan, the director of emergency management for Los Angeles County, told a press conference.
Reuters and the Associated Press contributed to this report

An exceptional mix of environmental conditions has created an ongoing firestorm without known historical precedent across southern California this week.

The ingredients for these infernos in the Los Angeles area, near-hurricane strength winds and drought, foretell an emerging era of compound events – simultaneous types of historic weather conditions, happening at unusual times of the year, resulting in situations that overwhelm our ability to respond.

On Wednesday, Joe Biden pledged the assistance of the Department of Defense to reinforce state and local firefighting capabilities, a rare step that highlighted the extent to which the fast-moving fires have taxed response efforts.

As of Wednesday evening, the Palisades and Eaton fires have each burned more than 10,000 acres and remain completely uncontained. About one in three homes and businesses across the vast southern California megacity were deliberately without power in a coordinated effort by the region’s major utilities to contain the risk of new fire starts due to downed power lines.

The Palisades fire now ranks as the most destructive in Los Angeles history with hundreds of homes and other structures destroyed and damage so extensive that it exhausted municipal water supplies. In Pacific Palisades, wealthy homeowners fled by foot after abandoning their cars in gridlocked neighborhoods. In Pasadena, quickly advancing fire prompted evacuations as far into the urban grid as the famous Rose Parade route.

Early estimates of the wildfires’ combined economic impact are in the tens of billions of dollars and could place the fires as the most damaging in US history – exceeding the 2018 Camp fire in Paradise, California.

Fire crews have been facing a second night of fierce winds in rugged terrain amid drought and atmospheric conditions that are exceedingly rare for southern California at any time of the year, let alone January, in what is typically the middle of the rainy season – weeks later (or earlier) in the calendar year than other historical major wildfires have occurred.

The next few days will be a harrowing test. Lingering bursts of strong, dry winds into early next week will maintain the potential for additional fires of similar magnitude to form. In a worst-case scenario, the uncontained Palisades and Eaton fires will continue to spread further into the urban Los Angeles metro, while new fires simultaneously and rapidly grow out of control – overtaking additional neighborhoods and limiting evacuation routes more quickly than firefighters can react. In conditions like these, containing a wind-driven blaze is nearly impossible.

These fires are a watershed moment, not just for residents of LA, but emblematic of a new era of complex, compound climate disaster. Conditions for a January firestorm in Los Angeles have never existed in all of known history, until they now do.

The short answer is that the greenhouse gases humans continue to emit are fueling the climate crisis and making big fires more common in California.

As the atmosphere warms, hotter air evaporates water and can intensify drought more quickly.

Melting Arctic ice creates changes in the jet stream’s behavior that make wind-driven large wildfires in California more likely. Recent studies have found that Santa Ana wind events could get less frequent but perhaps more intense in the winter months due to the climate crisis.

The more complicated answer is that these fires are an especially acute example of something climate scientists have been warning about for decades: compound climate disasters that, when they occur simultaneously, produce much more damage than they would individually. As the climate crisis escalates, the interdependent atmospheric, oceanic and ecological systems that constrain human civilization will lead to compounding and regime-shifting changes that are difficult to predict in advance. That idea formed a guiding theme of the Biden administration’s 2023 national climate assessment.

In the 16 months since the city’s first tropical storm encounter, Los Angeles has endured its hottest summer in history and received just 2% of normal rainfall to start this year’s rainy season – its driest such stretch on record. The grasses from 2023’s tropical storm deluge are still around, adding to the fuel for fires.

On its own, that would be a recipe for disaster. But add to that this week’s historic Santa Ana wind storm, which on its own has broken wind speed records across the region for any time of the year, with gusts as high as 100mph early on Wednesday. These have combined to create extreme conditions suitable for wildfire that, on their own, would tax the state’s resources even during even the heart of the summer fire season – let alone during January when many firefighters are on leave and equipment has been moved into storage.

This is how tipping points happen.

This scene is playing out all over the world, not just in fires.

The 2020 and 2021 hurricane seasons saw a combined seven major hurricanes affect Louisiana and the broader central Gulf coast, sometimes just weeks apart. A similar hurricane swarm happened last year in Florida. In 2023, wildfires burned an area of Canada more than double the previous record, sending plumes of smoke across the continent and raising public health concerns for tens of millions of people downwind.

In the weeks and months ahead, when the rainy season resumes and the next atmospheric river arrives, Los Angeles will be at an elevated risk for catastrophic flooding in the burn scars of the Palisades and Eaton fires, again compounding the disaster for local residents.

Mark Zuckerberg has “heard the message” from Donald Trump on restricting online content and his Meta platforms will intervene “less and less” on users during the president-elect’s administration, according to the whistleblower Frances Haugen.

Haugen, who revealed the Facebook and Instagram owner’s struggles with user safety in 2021, said the US president-elect thought “the right way to run social media is with no restrictions”.

Zuckerberg’s announcement on Tuesday that Meta was dropping third-party factcheckers in the US and making other moderation changes reflected this view, she added.

“The announcement from Mark is him basically saying: ‘Hey I heard the message, we will not intervene in the United States,’” said Haugen.

Announcing the changes on Tuesday, Zuckerberg said he would “work with President Trump” on pushing back against governments seeking to “censor more”, pointing to Latin America, China and Europe, where the UK and EU have introduced online safety legislation.

Haugen also raised concern over the effect on Facebook’s safety standards in the global south. In 2018 the United Nations said Facebook had played a “determining role” in spreading hate speech against Rohingya Muslims, who were the victims of a genocide in Myanmar.

“What happens if another Myanmar starts spiralling up again?” Haugen said. “Is the Trump state department going to call Facebook? Does Facebook have to fear any consequences from doing a bad job?”

The co-chair of Meta’s oversight board has told the Guardian the arms-length body will protect human rights, as it examines Meta’s controversial content moderation policy changes.

Michael McConnell, the director of the constitutional law center at Stanford law school, said that after Meta’s decision to scrap some factcheckers and loosen its “hateful conduct” policies, the oversight board was the only institution with the authority to “review high-level, controversial content moderation decisions and make impactful recommendations that enhance the user experience for billions worldwide, promote free speech, and protect human rights”.

He spoke after one his co-chairs, the former Danish prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt, admitted there were “huge problems” with Zuckerberg’s announcements, and raised concern about the rights of LGBTQ+ and trans people’s rights and the potential for real-life harm.

Zuckerberg said there was “a lot of illegal stuff” that still needed to be removed from his platforms such as child exploitation and drugs-related content, but that Meta was determined to restore “free expression”.

Also on Wednesday, the UK far-right monitoring group Hope Not Hate said it expected to see “a dramatic increase in toxic content” on Meta platforms, with the changes likely to make it easier for far-right groups to coordinate local activity of the kind that fuelled the August riots in England. It called for Labour to strengthen online safety laws after Meta’s moves, warning: “We have seen time and again [that incendiary online content] is having a really violent effect on our streets.”

Haugen, who worked on the company’s civic integrity team, which focused on issues related to elections worldwide, said Trump did not want the Maga movement’s use of social media to be curtailed by one of the internet’s most powerful companies. She cited an internal Facebook report in 2021 that said the company had failed to prevent the “Stop the Steal” movement from using the platform to discredit the 2020 presidential election result and incite the 6 January 2021 riot in Washington.

“What Trump wants is for Facebook to step back and not intervene, because Maga knows how to rile up social media. And so it’s not just about content; it’s about behaviour, too,” she said.

“Trump has made very clear that the only consequences he will bring to Facebook are for Facebook acting [on content and behaviour]. We should expect Facebook to progressively act less and less.”

On Wednesday Maria Ressa, who won the Nobel peace prize in 2021 for her work as a journalist in the Philippines, said Meta’s moderation changes meant “extremely dangerous times” lay ahead for journalism, democracy and social media users.

Haugen has launched a non-profit group dedicated to tackling social media harms and advises on social media at Issue One, a non-profit focusing on electoral and political integrity. Haugen said she did not think more content moderation at Meta was the answer, however. She said the company should focus more on adjusting the algorithms that served content to users and being transparent about how those algorithms worked.

“They’re kind of doing the worst of all worlds. They’re not doing any of those actual holistic changes, and they’re cutting what little safety systems they did have,” she said.

Meta has been contacted for comment.

Jimmy Carter’s six-day farewell to the nation is culminating on Thursday morning as the 39th president receives a state funeral at Washington National Cathedral before returning to his home town of Plains, Georgia, for burial beside his wife, Rosalynn.

The service marks the end of Carter’s lying in state at the US Capitol, where on Wednesday Vice-President Kamala Harris led tributes to a president whose legacy of humanitarian work and diplomatic achievements stretched far beyond his single term in office.

“He lived his faith, he served the people and he left the world better than he found it,” Harris said in a eulogy that highlighted Carter’s establishment of key federal agencies and diplomatic initiatives, including the Camp David accords.

The procession for America’s longest-lived president is being attended by all five living presidents, including President-elect Donald Trump.

Following the cathedral service, Carter’s remains will make their final journey back to Plains, the small Georgia town where his century-long life began and ended. An invitation-only funeral at Maranatha Baptist church, where Carter taught Sunday school well into his 90s, will precede his burial alongside Rosalynn, his wife of 77 years.

In life, Carter eschewed the traditional elder statesman role in favour of hands-on humanitarian work, including through Habitat for Humanity and his campaign to eradicate guinea worm disease. He authored more than 30 books on politics, faith and poetry, helped to negotiate a nuclear standoff with North Korea in 1994, and was awarded the Nobel peace prize in 2002.

Praise for Carter’s character and service came from both sides of the aisle. The House speaker, Mike Johnson, on Wednesday described him as having “modeled the virtues of service and citizenship as well as any other American”.

Carter’s remains will return to Plains, his home town, on Thursday, where former Secret Service agents will serve as pallbearers and the National Park Service plans to ring the old farm bell 39 times in tribute.

The former president died at his home on 29 December, aged 100, having spent his final months in hospice care surrounded by family. His passing came just over a year after that of Rosalynn, who died in November 2023 aged 96.

Greenland’s prime minister has called for unity, urging citizens not to panic, after being thrown into a geopolitical battle between the US and Denmark by Donald Trump’s interest in taking control of the territory.

Múte Egede said he understood people may be concerned after the incoming US president declined to rule out using military and economic force to gain control of Greenland, but called on his fellow citizens to “put aside differences and stand together”.

His government released a statement on Wednesday night reiterating Greenland’s right to self-determination, adding that it “looks forward to establishing contact” with the Trump administration.

The statement, issued by the minister for statehood and foreign affairs, Vivian Motzfeldt, said the government recognised Greenland’s “decisive and important role for the US’s national security interests”, which is why, it said, it houses a US military base.

It added: “Greenland looks forward to working with the incoming US administration and other Nato allies to ensure security and stability in the Arctic region.”

At a press conference on Tuesday, Trump refused to rule out using military force to take over Greenland and the Panama canal, and also suggested he intended to use “economic force” to make Canada part of the US, causing controversy around the world.

Greenland is a former Danish colony and remains part of the kingdom of Denmark, which controls its foreign and security policy.

Before Trump’s intervention, a movement in favour of independence from Denmark had been gathering steam in Greenland. Egede, who is in favour of independence, had used his new year speech to make the case that his island should break free from “the shackles of colonialism” to shape its own future and has said that after the upcoming election there must be “major steps” towards “creating the framework for Greenland as an independent state”.

In order to become an independent state, a 2009 agreement with Denmark dictates that there must be a successful referendum in Greenland.

In order to gain independence from Denmark, the Greenlandic government’s statement said it was “open to increased and constructive cooperation with our closest neighbours.”

The government added: “Greenland looks forward to discussing the possibilities for business cooperation, the development of Greenland’s mineral sector, including critical minerals and other relevant areas with the US.”

On Thursday morning, the Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said: “We are very closely watching this rather dramatic development of the situation, which is, thank God, at the level of statements so far.

“We are interested in preserving peace and stability in this zone and are ready to cooperate with any parties for this peace and stability.”

Egede was in Copenhagen on Thursday, after meeting the Danish king on Wednesday. This week, he is due to attend a meeting of the foreign, security and defence policy contact committee between Denmark, Greenland and the Faroe Islands, as well as an annual new year reception.

“I understand if citizens are concerned, it is important that we stand together and that we put all internal disagreements aside and continue our work together,” he told the Greenlandic newspaper Sermitsiaq.

“We must also remember that we have international cooperative relations and agreements that we must rely on and further develop, also to a large extent with the United States. We are allies and that is our starting point.”

Elections are due to be held in Greenland in the coming months, by 6 April at the latest. In light of this and the wider international context, Egede called for unity. “Even though we would like to show differences between the parties, I would like to appeal that we stand together for our country and our future and not panic because of the situation that has arisen.”

In Denmark, the prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, said on Wednesday night that she had met Egede earlier in the day and had spoken on the phone with several European leaders. “You can be sure that we, as a government, are doing everything we can to safeguard Denmark’s – and the Commonwealth’s – interests,” she wrote on Instagram. The US, she added, was Denmark’s closest ally.

The growing importance of the North Atlantic in what she described as “an increasingly turbulent world” meant more cooperation between allies was needed, including Nato, she said.

Frederiksen has reportedly summoned party leaders to a meeting on Thursday night to discuss the situation.

Her foreign minister, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, has said he believes Denmark should wait until Trump is in office to act on his comments about Greenland.

The UK foreign secretary, David Lammy, has said a US military seizure of Greenland is not going to happen, as he played down Donald Trump’s threats to seize the territory from Denmark.

“No Nato countries have gone to war [with each other] since the establishment of Nato, and I do not envisage that,” he said, adding: “It is not going to happen.”

Lammy’s remarks, in a round of broadcast interviews in advance of a setpiece speech on Thursday, formed part of an array of views that exposed subtle differences with the Trump administration covering defence spending targets, the scale of the threat posed to Europe by Vladimir Putin, the return of the Islamic State-linked detainee Shamima Begum to the UK and the possibility of convincing China not to throw in its lot with Russia.

The differences emerged despite Lammy insisting he was not in the business of condemning the UK’s closest ally, but they underline how taxing it may be for the Labour government to tread an independent course with a demanding Trump administration.

The foreign secretary tried to square off the differences by arguing that much of what Trump said should not be taken literally. He said: “We know from Donald Trump’s first term that the intensity of his rhetoric and the unpredictability of what he says can be destabilising.

“He did it with Nato but in practice he sent more troops to Europe, he sent more Javelins to Ukraine, under his administration.

In the case of Greenland, Lammy argued Trump was “targeting concerns about Russia and China in the Arctic and his concerns about US national economic security”. He said Trump “recognises that in the end Greenland is a kingdom of Denmark”. Asked if there was going to be a violation of Nato territory, he said: “Let us be serious, it is not going to happen.”

On Donald Trump’s call for defence spending to be set at 5% of GDP, he said: “He’s right to emphasise that we have to move, and certainly move beyond 2% now. I heard the 5%. The United States is at 3.38% of GDP, so I assume that he would set out a roadmap to get to that 5%.”

Insisting European security was on a knife-edge, he also challenged the assumptions of some around Trump by saying UK intelligence had not “seen any sense at all that Putin is ready seriously to negotiate”.

He added: “I am absolutely clear Donald Trump is an individual who wants a deal, but he is also an individual who sees himself as a winner and not a loser.”

He said: “There had been a slight pushback in Washington that a deal can be achieved on January 21. That is now unlikely and we have heard the timetable has moved to Easter.” He said the focus in the interim had to be on equipping Ukraine to survive the winter.

Lammy also opened up a difference with the Trump administration by saying the UK would challenge Beijing “not to throw in their lot with Putin”. Many Trump Conservatives see China as the senior partner in an anti-western axis of evil with Russia, Iran and North Korea, and judge there is no possibility of a fracture in that alliance.

Lammy disclosed that when he visited Beijing he handed over British evidence showing Chinese companies were supplying dual-use equipment for use by Russia in Ukraine.

He said: “It was very important for me, when I was in Beijing, making it absolutely clear to the Chinese that we see the dual-use technology that is making its way to Russia and is being used to kill troops in Ukraine …

“They said they weren’t aware of the information. They wanted the information. I provided them with the information, and then we’ve gone on to sanction the companies involved, and so we have a robust discussion with China. There are issues on which we disagree, on which we will challenge China, and which we will compete in China.”

Lammy also turned down the US administration’s call for Begum, who left the UK to join IS while at school, to be allowed to leave Syria and return to Britain.

Rejecting the call by the Trump team’s nominee for senior director for counter-terrorism, Sebastian Gorka, Lammy said: “Shamima Begum will not be coming back to the UK. It’s gone right through the courts. She’s not a UK national. We will act in our security interests. And many of those in those camps are dangerous, and radicals.”

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has urged Ukraine’s western allies “not to drop the ball” and to continue to provide long-term military support to his embattled country, once Donald Trump returns to the White House.

Speaking at a summit in Germany, Zelenskyy acknowledged that Trump’s imminent second presidency was likely to bring dramatic changes. “It’s clear that a new chapter starts for Europe and the entire world just 11 days from now,” the Ukrainian president said.

“We have to cooperate even more, rely on each other even more, and achieve greater results together,” he added, sitting alongside the outgoing US defence secretary, Lloyd Austin, and the German defence minister, Boris Pistorius.

Pulling the plug on military support “will only invite more aggression, chaos and war,” Zelenskyy warned. “We’ve come such a long way that it would honestly be crazy to drop the ball now and not keep building on the defence coalitions we’ve created.”

He continued: “No matter what’s going on in the world, everyone wants to feel sure that their country will not just be erased off the map.”

Austin praised Zelenskyy as a “leader who has made history” and announced a $500m US assistance package. It includes additional air defence missiles, more ammunition and other equipment to support Ukraine’s small fleet of F-16 fighter jets.

The US was determined to stop Moscow from defeating Kyiv, Austin suggested. “The stakes are still enormous – for all of our security. If Putin swallows Ukraine, his appetite will only grow,” he said, noting that this would lead to further international “land grabs”.

It seems unlikely, however, that Trump shares this analysis. He has promised to end the war in “24 hours” and has appointed a special envoy to Ukraine, Keith Kellogg. Kellogg this week postponed a visit to Kyiv until after Trump’s 20 January inauguration.

Vladimir Putin, however, has shown ​little interest in peace negotiations, at a time when Russian troops are advancing in the east. The Russian president’s apparent calculation is that a Trump White House will swiftly end US military assistance to Zelenskyy, leading to more Russian gains.

Thursday’s Ukraine defence contact group meeting – ​including 57 countries and all 32 Nato members – was held at Ramstein airbase. It is likely to be the last in the current format. Zelenskyy is due in Italy on Friday for talks with the country’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, a key partner.

Zelenskyy described Ukraine’s five-month offensive inside Russia’s Kursk region as “one of our biggest wins”. On Sunday, Ukrainian troops began a mini-offensive. North Korean forces fighting alongside Russian soldiers had suffered 4,000 casualties, he claimed, since joining the battle last December.

Ukraine’s president also highlighted bilateral security agreements Kyiv has signed with individual countries and called on his partners to invest in Ukraine’s defence industry, including in developing drone capabilities.

Britain and Latvia announced that they and a group of European countries would supply Ukraine with 30,000 FPV drones after placing £45m of contracts with manufacturers. Funding for the initiative, part of a drone capability coalition, comes from the two nations plus Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden.

Ukraine is making heavy use of small cheap FPV drones on the battlefield as an alternative to its lack of a conventional air force, and late last year its military said it had supplied 1.1m to the frontline during 2024.

John Healey, the defence secretary, said the Ramstein meeting “sends a clear message to Putin about the international community’s unwavering support for Ukraine”. He reiterated that the UK would spend £3bn a year on military aid for Ukraine for as long as Russian aggression continues.

In recent months the Kremlin has stepped up its bombardment of Ukrainian civilian areas. On Wednesday, 13 people were killed and 113 injured in the southern city of Zaporizhzhia. Two Russian glide bombs hit a crowded street in the middle of the afternoon. Bodies were strewn next to a tram stop.

Meanwhile, Slovakia’s pro-Russian government said it would take tough reciprocal measures against Ukraine if the problem with halted gas transit through the country was not solved. Ukraine ended all Russian gas transit on 1 January.

Slovakia’s prime minister, Robert Fico, has accused Kyiv of damaging Slovakia’s interests. He has threatened to retaliate by cutting emergency electricity supplies to Ukraine and reducing aid for refugees.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has urged Ukraine’s western allies “not to drop the ball” and to continue to provide long-term military support to his embattled country, once Donald Trump returns to the White House.

Speaking at a summit in Germany, Zelenskyy acknowledged that Trump’s imminent second presidency was likely to bring dramatic changes. “It’s clear that a new chapter starts for Europe and the entire world just 11 days from now,” the Ukrainian president said.

“We have to cooperate even more, rely on each other even more, and achieve greater results together,” he added, sitting alongside the outgoing US defence secretary, Lloyd Austin, and the German defence minister, Boris Pistorius.

Pulling the plug on military support “will only invite more aggression, chaos and war,” Zelenskyy warned. “We’ve come such a long way that it would honestly be crazy to drop the ball now and not keep building on the defence coalitions we’ve created.”

He continued: “No matter what’s going on in the world, everyone wants to feel sure that their country will not just be erased off the map.”

Austin praised Zelenskyy as a “leader who has made history” and announced a $500m US assistance package. It includes additional air defence missiles, more ammunition and other equipment to support Ukraine’s small fleet of F-16 fighter jets.

The US was determined to stop Moscow from defeating Kyiv, Austin suggested. “The stakes are still enormous – for all of our security. If Putin swallows Ukraine, his appetite will only grow,” he said, noting that this would lead to further international “land grabs”.

It seems unlikely, however, that Trump shares this analysis. He has promised to end the war in “24 hours” and has appointed a special envoy to Ukraine, Keith Kellogg. Kellogg this week postponed a visit to Kyiv until after Trump’s 20 January inauguration.

Vladimir Putin, however, has shown ​little interest in peace negotiations, at a time when Russian troops are advancing in the east. The Russian president’s apparent calculation is that a Trump White House will swiftly end US military assistance to Zelenskyy, leading to more Russian gains.

Thursday’s Ukraine defence contact group meeting – ​including 57 countries and all 32 Nato members – was held at Ramstein airbase. It is likely to be the last in the current format. Zelenskyy is due in Italy on Friday for talks with the country’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, a key partner.

Zelenskyy described Ukraine’s five-month offensive inside Russia’s Kursk region as “one of our biggest wins”. On Sunday, Ukrainian troops began a mini-offensive. North Korean forces fighting alongside Russian soldiers had suffered 4,000 casualties, he claimed, since joining the battle last December.

Ukraine’s president also highlighted bilateral security agreements Kyiv has signed with individual countries and called on his partners to invest in Ukraine’s defence industry, including in developing drone capabilities.

Britain and Latvia announced that they and a group of European countries would supply Ukraine with 30,000 FPV drones after placing £45m of contracts with manufacturers. Funding for the initiative, part of a drone capability coalition, comes from the two nations plus Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden.

Ukraine is making heavy use of small cheap FPV drones on the battlefield as an alternative to its lack of a conventional air force, and late last year its military said it had supplied 1.1m to the frontline during 2024.

John Healey, the defence secretary, said the Ramstein meeting “sends a clear message to Putin about the international community’s unwavering support for Ukraine”. He reiterated that the UK would spend £3bn a year on military aid for Ukraine for as long as Russian aggression continues.

In recent months the Kremlin has stepped up its bombardment of Ukrainian civilian areas. On Wednesday, 13 people were killed and 113 injured in the southern city of Zaporizhzhia. Two Russian glide bombs hit a crowded street in the middle of the afternoon. Bodies were strewn next to a tram stop.

Meanwhile, Slovakia’s pro-Russian government said it would take tough reciprocal measures against Ukraine if the problem with halted gas transit through the country was not solved. Ukraine ended all Russian gas transit on 1 January.

Slovakia’s prime minister, Robert Fico, has accused Kyiv of damaging Slovakia’s interests. He has threatened to retaliate by cutting emergency electricity supplies to Ukraine and reducing aid for refugees.

Eighteen assailants and one presidential guard died during a foiled attack on the presidential complex in the Chadian capital, N’Djamena, on Wednesday night, a government spokesperson has said.

The attackers attempted to storm the presidential palace while President Mahamat Déby Itno was inside, said Abderaman Koulamallah, who also serves as the foreign minister in the military-ruled, central African country.

Heavy gunfire could be heard just before 8pm (7pm GMT) on Wednesday evening in the centre of N’Djamena. A few hours later, Koulamallah appeared in a live Facebook broadcast surrounded by soldiers, saying the situation had been brought under control. “There is no fear,” he said. “The destabilisation attempt was put down.”

Koulamallah said early on Thursday that 24 assailants armed with knives and machetes had driven to the presidency in a few vehicles that seemed to break down at the entrance, before walking out and stabbing the four entrance guards, killing one and injuring two. They then walked into the presidential compound, where other guards shot at them, killing 18 and detaining six, he said.

Like other countries in the region, Chad has been attacked repeatedly for over a decade by insurgent groups linked to Islamic State, al-Qaida and Boko Haram.

However, Koulamallah said Wednesday’s attack was “probably not” a terrorist act and referred to the attackers as drunken “Pieds Nickeles”, a reference to a French comic featuring hapless crooks.

“These are people that came from a certain neighbourhood of N’Djamena that I will not name,” he said. “They did not have war weapons, their attempt was disorganised and completely incomprehensible.”

The attack came hours after China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, met government officials in N’Djamena during a visit to the country and a week after parliamentary elections that were boycotted by the main opposition party, Les Transformateurs.

Déby seized power as president of a transitional military council after rebels killed his father, Idriss Déby Itno, who had ruled Chad since a military coup in the early 1990s, in 2021. In May, he won a contested election to become president of the country, which is rich in oil resources but one of the poorest countries in Africa.

The central African country faces regular attacks by Boko Haram, especially in the western Lake Chad region that borders Cameroon, Nigeria and Niger.

In November, Chad, which hosted France’s last military bases in the region, ended a defence cooperation agreement with France. About 1,000 French military personnel were stationed in the country and are in the process of being withdrawn.

The pact with France had made Chad an important player in the fight against Islamic militants in the Sahel, a region that includes Chad, Mali, Niger and Sudan and that has lately experienced many coups.

Agence France-Presse and Reuters contributed to this story

A former EU leader on tech has accused Elon Musk of “lying like hell” by claiming the bloc was trying to stop an interview the owner of X had set up with the co-leader of the German far-right party Alternative für Deutschland.

Thierry Breton, who quit as a European commissioner in September, having overseen the passage of ambitious legislation designed to regulate big tech, said Musk had been disingenuous in claiming the EU was trying to censor his discussion with Alice Weidel, due to take place on Thursday evening.

The US billionaire claimed on Wednesday on his social media platform: “First, the EU tried to stop me from having an online conversation with president @realDonaldTrump. Now they want to prevent people from hearing a conversation with Alice Weidel, who might be the next chancellor of Germany. These guys really hate democracy.”

His tweet was a reference to a letter Breton wrote to Musk before a similar chat with Donald Trump in August. In the letter Breton reminded Musk of his obligation under the Digital Services Act (DSA) not to facilitate the “amplification of harmful content”.

After Musk announced he would be interviewing Weidel, whose anti-immigration party is polling at about 19% in the run-up to Germany’s elections next month, Breton sent a similar warning to Weidel through a post on social media, a step which appears to have prompted Musk’s accusations on Wednesday.

In an interview with the Guardian, Breton said: “Now because I sent a letter to Mrs Weidel, he [Musk] is saying the EU want to prevent people from having a conversation. We are twisting information [here].”

Asked if Musk was lying, Breton said: “He is lying like hell. Nobody tried to stop him from having a conversation with Trump, nobody is trying to stop him having one in Germany.”

The Frenchman said he had always had good and constructive face-to-face relations with Musk but that the Tesla chief had mocked and insulted him online. Recently Musk called him “annoying” and, in August, he cited a quip from the US satirical film Tropic Thunder, inviting the then commissioner to “take a big step back and literally, fuck your own face”.

X was approached for comment.

The spat is the latest in a series started by Musk in recent weeks, including hostile attacks on the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, and the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, that have provoked fury across Europe.

Breton urged leaders to be vocal about the spread of misinformation and hate. “We need leadership, especially these days. Europe is working only if we have a strong leadership,” he said.

X is under investigation by the European Commission under the DSA, partly shaped by Breton. The company has said it is “cooperating with the regulatory process” and remains “focused on creating a safe and inclusive environment for all users on our platform, while protecting freedom of expression”.

Insiders said an adjudication had been expected in autumn 2023 but the commission had needed to give X time to make its legal defence. Some suggested that conclusions would be published shortly.

Breton declined to comment on the investigation, but said he wanted to stress that the DSA had nothing to do with silencing critics or “stopping freedom of speech”, which he said was “cherished” by all democracies in Europe.

“In Europe, freedom of speech is paramount, it is extremely important in all member states for overall democracy, for the courts of justice, it is something untouchable,” he said.

But, he added, it operated within a framework of laws that also banned antisemitic speech, racist hate speech and terrorist apologists, which tech companies were obliged to heed.

“These are forbidden by law in the physical space, in the street, in the media and now also in the digital space,” he said, adding that social media companies, unlike old media, had an unprecedented power to “accelerate and amplify massively” content to audiences, and that with this power came responsibility.

A white powder in a letter that hospitalised an aide to Belgium’s prime minister, Alexander De Croo, has been identified as strychnine, a poison that can be fatal.

The Brussels prosecutor’s office revealed on Wednesday the nature of the substance that was sent last November to government buildings, including the office of De Croo.

Belgian media reported that an unnamed member of De Croo’s office had received hospital treatment after injuries to their hands after opening the letter.

It is reported to have been discovered on 22 November, two days after similar packages were found at the office of the interior minister, Annelies Verlinden, and the headquarters of the state security service. Another person was put into quarantine as a precaution, but not hurt, after these discoveries.

Strychnine, an odourless white powder, is used as a rat poison and in humans can lead to muscle spasms, cardiac arrest, organ failure and death. The dramatic convulsions it can induce in higher doses has inspired crime novelists and writers, such as HG Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie.

News of the strychnine-laced letter emerged two days after a man armed with a knife was arrested outside De Croo’s office in Brussels. Police said his motivations were not immediately clear.

On Thursday, De Croo’s spokesperson said the poisoned letters had obviously shocked the prime minister and his staff. “Our colleague is luckily doing well now and at the time all procedures were followed strictly to prevent further damage,” the spokesperson said. “But this cannot be the new normal.”

The incidents come amid an increase in threats and violence targeting elected politicians in Europe. Slovakia’s prime minister, Robert Fico, narrowly survived an assassination attempt last year, while Denmark’s prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, was assaulted on a Copenhagen square, an attack that left her suffering pain in her head, neck and shoulder and psychological shock.

Belgium’s then justice minister Vincent Van Quickenborne was placed under tight security in 2022 after police identified a plot to kidnap him that Van Quickenborne attributed to drug gangs.

In 2023, the Council of Europe warned that violence against local and regional elected representatives was on the rise, a trend it fears could deter people from entering politics.

Lebanon’s parliament has elected the army commander Joseph Aoun as the country’s new president, ending a more than two-year vacancy and increasing confidence that a ceasefire with Israel will hold.

Aoun received 99 out of 128 votes in the 13th attempt by a deeply divided parliament to elect a new head of state after the departure of the former president Michel Aoun, who is no relation, in October 2022. Aoun was the favoured candidate of international powers such as Saudi Arabia, France and the US, which enjoyed good relations with him in his role as head of Lebanon’s armed forces.

The main task for Aoun is to reassert the role of the Lebanese army, particularly in south Lebanon, where, since the late 1970s, the army’s control has been contested by groups such as the Palestinian Liberation Organisation and Hezbollah.

Speaking before parliament after his election, Aoun pledged to “confirm the state’s right to monopolise the carrying of weapons” and emphasised the army’s right to control the country’s borders.

All armed groups in Lebanon were meant to disarm under a 2004 UN resolution, but Hezbollah retained its arms under the justification that it was the only force that could protect Lebanon from Israel. The Lebanese army has historically been a weak force.

Under the terms of the Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire signed on 27 November, the Lebanese army is to deploy in south Lebanon, while Hezbollah is meant to withdraw, in what politicians and diplomats have styled as the reclaiming of Lebanese state sovereignty.

Michel Helou, the secretary general of the reformist National Bloc party, who has met Aoun several times, said: “The first priority is the ceasefire and the second is dealing with Hezbollah’s weapons. There is no clear way to disarm Hezbollah, but if [Aoun] wants to be remembered he will have to deal with them.”

The presence of a head of state was also seen as necessary to ensure the continuous implementation of the ceasefire agreement. Israeli media had reported in recent weeks that it was considering staying in south Lebanon beyond the 60-day timetable of its withdrawal from Lebanese territory as specified in the deal.

Hezbollah has dominated Lebanese politics for more than two decades, placing its members in cabinet positions and controlling key ministries. The group has been severely battered in 14 months of fighting with Israel, with its secretary general and most of its senior leadership being killed. The loss of its key regional ally, Syria’s former president Bashar al-Assad, who facilitated Iranian weapons transfers across Syria to Lebanon, was another in a series of blows to Hezbollah.

Hilal Khashan, a professor at the American University of Beirut, said: “Hezbollah today is not what it used to be two years ago … I think that the army will be able to confront Hezbollah, but neither side is interested in confrontation.”

Hezbollah’s preferred candidate for the presidency, Suleiman Frangieh, withdrew on Wednesday afternoon, endorsing Aoun. Hezbollah had repeatedly vetoed all candidates except Frangieh over the last two years.

A president can only be appointed in Lebanon with two-thirds, or 86 of parliament’s deputies’ votes. The inability of Hezbollah and rival opposition blocs, the largest of which was made up of the Maronite Christian Lebanese Forces party, to come to a consensus produced a two-year long gridlock on filling the presidential vacancy.

Aoun is seen as removed from the sectarian power-sharing system that characterises Lebanon’s political system, as the Lebanese army deliberately diversifies its sectarian makeup to maintain the institution’s neutrality in a country which experienced a bloody, inter-sect civil war from 1975-1990.

The Hezbollah-Israel war, as well as external pressure, had seemingly helped finally overcome that gridlock on Thursday. In the days before the election, a series of diplomats visited Beirut to hold talks with the main political figures.

The election of Aoun is the first step in ending Lebanon’s international isolation. The country’s 2019 financial meltdown, in which the banking sector collapsed and millions of people’s savings were confiscated by banks, laid bare the political class’s deep corruption. The international community pledged aid to the country – but only after the government made urgent economic and political changes.

The Lebanese MP Alain Aoun said: “This is a sort of reconciliation with the international community and the Gulf countries. This is the real added value of the election of Joseph Aoun – that he brings a translation of this international support.”

International powers have pledged to aid reconstruction efforts in Lebanon post-ceasefire, which had sustained billions in damages as a result of the 14 months of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah. Much of the destruction is concentrated among Hezbollah’s constituency in the southern suburbs of Beirut, south Lebanon and the Bekaa valley – which bore the brunt of Israel’s bombing campaign.

However, the election of a president is only the first step towards lifting Lebanon out of the myriad economic and political crises in which it has been mired since 2019. Aoun will inherit a six-year long economic malaise, stalled negotiations with the IMF, and the same political class which helped orchestrate the economic crisis it is meant to solve.

The power of the executive in Lebanon is limited. Besides overseeing the army, Aoun has the power to form a new government, no easy task in Lebanon’s sectarian, power-sharing system.

Lebanon has a confessional political system under which political appointments are distributed across the country’s 18 sects. Though the confessional system is an unwritten agreement and not a part of Lebanon’s constitution, it has nonetheless dictated governments’ formation since the country’s independence from France.

Joseph Aoun, as a Maronite Christian was qualified to be the country’s president, while the prime minister must be a Sunni Muslim and the speaker of the parliament a Shiite Muslim. Cabinets are filled along sectarian quotas and ministries are treated as fiefdoms of political parties, tools which Lebanon’s political parties – mostly led by civil-war era leaders – maintain their grip on the country.

The new president will next appoint a prime minister, which has to be approved by parliament. The prime minister will then suggest a list of ministers for their cabinet, which will go to a parliamentary vote.

The formation of a government is no easy task – the current cabinet, led by caretaker prime minister Najib Mikati, was only formed after 13 months of consultations.

“We will need to have a proper, solid government … We want this mandate to be a period of reconstruction and reform for Lebanon,” Helou said.

Artificial intelligence companies have run out of data for training their models and have “exhausted” the sum of human knowledge, Elon Musk has said.

The world’s richest person suggested technology firms would have to turn to “synthetic” data – or material created by AI models – to build and fine-tune new systems, a process already taking place with the fast-developing technology.

“The cumulative sum of human knowledge has been exhausted in AI training. That happened basically last year,” said Musk in an interview livestreamed on his social media platform, X.

AI models such as the GPT-4o model powering the ChatGPT chatbot are “trained” on a vast array of data taken from the internet, where they in effect learn to spot patterns in that information – allowing them to predict, for instance, the next word in a sentence.

Musk said the “only way” to counter the lack of source material for training new models was to move to synthetic data created by AI.

Referring to the exhaustion of data troves, he said: “The only way to then supplement that is with synthetic data where … it will sort of write an essay or come up with a thesis and then will grade itself and … go through this process of self-learning.”

Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, has used synthetic data to fine-tune its biggest Llama AI model, while Microsoft has also used AI-made content for its Phi-4 model. Google and OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, have also used synthetic data in their AI work.

However, Musk also warned that AI models’ habit of generating “hallucinations” – a term for inaccurate or nonsensical output – was a danger for the synthetic data process.

He told the livestreamed interview with Mark Penn, the chair of the advertising group Stagwell, that hallucinations had made the process of using artificial material “challenging” because “how do you know if it … hallucinated the answer or it’s a real answer”.

High-quality data, and control over it, is one of the legal battlegrounds in the AI boom. OpenAI admitted last year it would be impossible to create tools such as ChatGPT without access to copyrighted material, while the creative industries and publishers are demanding compensation for use of their output in the model training process.