Firefighters battling the disastrous wildfires around Los Angeles were prepared for a return of dangerous winds that could again stoke the flames as the death toll in the tragedy has hit at least 24.

Fierce gusts known as Santa Ana winds have been largely blamed for turning the wildfires into devastating infernos that leveled huge tranches of neighborhoods around America’s second-largest city, which has also been hit by drought.

The National Weather Service has issued a rare warning of a “particularly dangerous situation”, beginning overnight on Monday into Tuesday with severe fire conditions through Wednesday. There could be sustained winds of up to 40mph (64km/h) and gusts in the mountains reaching 70mph.

“We are not in the clear as of yet. We must not let our guard down,” the LA fire department chief, Kristin Crowley, said during a Monday morning news briefing.

Officials urged residents to pre-emptively make evacuation plans – and said in order to avoid gridlock people should leave when they receive evacuation warnings, rather than waiting for an order.

The Los Angeles county fire chief, Anthony C Marrone, said 70 additional water trucks had arrived to help firefighters fend off flames spread by any renewed gusts. “We are prepared for the upcoming wind event,” Marrone said.

Hundreds of national guard troops are also aiding in the response to the disaster. Crews are stationed in strategic locations around the county in preparation for the hurricane-force winds, Karen Bass, LA’s mayor, said on Monday.

In all, four fires have consumed more than 62 sq miles (160 sq km), an area larger than San Francisco. The Eaton fire near Pasadena and the Palisades fire, in a wealthy enclave along the Pacific coast, alone accounted for 59 sq miles. Early estimates suggest they could be the nation’s costliest ever, as much as $150bn, according to an AccuWeather estimate.

But even as containment increased in the worst of the fires, more bad news emerged from the ashes: the death toll surged to 24 late on Sunday after an update from the Los Angeles county medical examiner. Sixteen of the 24 deaths were attributed to the Eaton fire and eight to the Palisades fire, according to the Los Angeles county coroner’s office. The toll is expected to rise as search dogs conduct systematic searches in leveled neighborhoods.

The LA county medical examiner has formally identified two of the victims of the Eaton and Palisades fires as Victor Shaw, 66, and Charles Mortimer, 84. Relatives reported last week that Shaw had stayed to fight the fire and protect his family home. His body was later found with a garden hose in his hand. Mortimer, who appears to have been a local realtor who lived in Pacific Palisades, died in a hospital from a heart attack, smoke inhalation and burns.

As fire crews try to get the upper hand on the fires that are burning across parts of Los Angeles, more stories of people who lost their lives in the infernos are emerging. On Sunday, the county coroner told the family of the actor Dalyce Curry, affectionately known as “Mama” that the 95-year-old grandmother’s remains were found in her Altadena home, ABC 7 news reported.

Curry appeared in films including The Blues Brothers and The Ten Commandments, and, according to her granddaughter Loree Beamer-Wilkinson, was “very active: you would not think she was 95”.

Another granddaughter and Curry’s part-time caretaker Dallyce Kelley said she dropped her grandmother off at home late last Tuesday night. The next morning she awoke to the news that the power in Curry’s home went out. On Friday she was escorted to the charred remains of her grandmother’s home.

“It was total devastation,” Kelley told ABC 7. “Everything was gone except her blue Cadillac.”

At least 23 people were also missing, a number authorities said was also likely to rise. Robert Luna, the Los Angeles county sheriff, described the recovery effort as a “grim task” and said remains were being discovered daily.

“I believe we will continue to find remains,” Luna said. Many people are saying: “I just want to go look at my house and I want to see what’s left,” Luna said. “We know that but we have people literally looking for the remains of your neighbors.”

Some residents have been able to return to their homes to survey the damage.

Jim Orlandini, who lost his hardware store in Altadena, a hard-hit neighborhood next to Pasadena, said his home of 40 years survived.

“Tuesday night we didn’t sleep at all because we figured the house was gone,” he told the Associated Press. “The whole time I was thinking, I don’t know what I’m going to find when I get back here and after 40 years, you know, you got a lot of stuff you forget about that would disappear if the house burned down. So we’re thankful that it didn’t.”

Crews from California and nine other states are part of the response that includes nearly 1,400 fire engines, 84 aircraft and more than 14,000 personnel, including newly arrived firefighters from Mexico.

Looting continued to be a concern, with authorities reporting more arrests as the devastation grew. Those arrested included two people who posed as firefighters going into houses, Michael Lorenz, the Los Angeles police department captain, said.

With California national guard troops on hand to guard properties, Governor Gavin Newsom posted on X: “California will NOT allow for looting.”

Mayor Bass said she had spoken with Donald Trump’s incoming administration and expected that the president-elect would visit the city.

Bass faces a critical test of her leadership during the city’s greatest crisis in decades, but allegations of leadership failures, political blame and investigations have begun.

In response to a question about whether she owed the city an apology, Bass said her focus was on Los Angeles being prepared for the upcoming wind event.

“We could face another difficult situation for thousands of Angelenos,” she said. “When we are past this period, there will be an evaluation of everything that went on.”

Newsom on Friday ordered state officials to determine why a 117m-gallon (440m-liter) reservoir was out of service and some hydrants had run dry.

A lawsuit filed on Monday against Southern California Edison claims the utility’s equipment sparked the deadly Eaton fire burning just outside Los Angeles. Edison has acknowledged fire agencies are investigating whether its equipment may have started a smaller fire in Los Angeles that broke out the same day.

Edison said in a filing with the California Public Utilities Commission that “a downed conductor was discovered at a tower” near the start of the Hurst fire, which broke out in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Sylmar. But the utility added it “does not know whether the damage observed occurred before or after the start of the fire”. That fire burned more than a square mile and is now mostly contained.

Authorities have not determined an official cause for the Eaton or the Hurst fire.

Associated Press contributed reporting

The Los Angeles wildfires have claimed the lives of at least 24 people and have burned more than 100,000 structures. While the focus is understandably on avoiding the flames, another immediate danger lurks across the county and beyond, one more difficult to escape: smoke.

The most dangerous component of wildfire smoke is fine particle pollution, also known as PM2.5 or soot. These tiny particles, smaller than one 20th the width of a human hair, can, if inhaled, become embedded in the bloodstream and lungs. It is estimated that about one-third of all particulate matter pollution in the US now comes from wildfire smoke.

“Wildfire smoke is super toxic to the lungs, more so than ‘regular’ smoke, because of the concentrations of fine particulates,” said Don McKenzie, an assistant professor at the University of Washington’s School of Environmental and Forest Sciences.

“People with compromised lung function are at higher risk of harm,” he added. “Damage from smoke exposure of any type is cumulative, but especially with the high concentrations of the fine particulates, because they can lodge themselves in small spaces within the lungs.”

It is estimated that air pollution kills about 100,000 people in the US each year. A significant portion of these deaths come from inhaling smoke from the burning of fossil fuels, wood and other materials (including from wildfires) that release toxins into the air.

Wildfire smoke can be especially dangerous for certain populations, including those with pre-existing conditions like asthma and COPD, pregnant people, those who are low-income or unhoused who may not have access to indoor clean-air spaces, and very young children whose respiratory systems are still developing.

“While air quality index levels in LA have reached levels known to be hazardous for everyone, we’re particularly concerned about smoke exposures among a few groups who might be disproportionately exposed or more likely to experience health impacts as a result of wildfire smoke,” said Claire Schollaert, a postdoctoral scholar at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health.

In 2023, New York City saw a dramatic rise in emergency room visits, many related to asthma attacks, when smoke blew into the city from Canadian wildfires.

New York had the advantage of not needing to battle those flames, so those needing medical care could still easily access a hospital. But as buildings across Los Angeles are burning, damaged facilities and staff unable to work could cause difficulty for those seeking immediate care.

Joel Kaufman, a professor of environmental health and medicine at the University of Washington, explained why a wildfire in an urban location such as Los Angeles is particularly hard to predict in terms of air quality effects.

“What’s a little bit different in this fire is that we don’t really know the toxicity of a fire that includes so much in the way of buildings that have burned and anthropogenic materials,” Kaufman said. “What’s burning in the businesses and in all the houses are not the same things that would burn in a forest fire. Some of what’s getting in the air can have toxic effects that we don’t really know at this point.”

Those experiencing serious symptoms such as trouble breathing, chest pain or dizziness, are urged to seek medical attention. But officials are encouraging those without urgent symptoms to avoid emergency rooms in order to open up resources to those with critical cases.

Los Angeles county and surrounding areas issued a “no-burn alert”, prohibiting residents from burning wood, including in fireplaces, to help reduce the amount of smoke in the air.

The Santa Ana winds, which have reached speeds up to 70mph, have served as a double-edged sword. The powerful winds have caused flames to spread throughout Los Angeles, but they have also blown some of the smoke towards the ocean and away from residential areas.

But relying on winds to clear harmful pollution is not a sustainable strategy. Some grassroots organizations have been fighting to clean the air for several years. One of those organizations is the Moms Clean Air Force, a community of more than 1.5 million parents united against air and climate pollution to protect children’s health.

“One of the biggest things that we did over the last year was, in a joint effort with other environmental groups, petition Fema to classify wildfire smoke as a major disaster so that more funds can be available to help people who are affected by wildfire smoke,” said Elizabeth Bechard, the group’s public health manager.

Experts have found that progress combatting air pollution has been offset by wildfire smoke. As climate change exacerbates wildfires, the resulting smoke undoes the decrease in pollution from adopting cleaner energy.

“In addition to the heartbreak of all of the property loss and devastation to human lives, which obviously is the biggest concern right now, we are seeing these wildfires as this setback to all these years of progress in clearing the air in LA,” Kaufman said. “It’s disheartening.”

Fire crews are trying to get the upper hand on blazes that are tearing through Los Angeles before expected high wind gusts threaten their progress. The fires, which may become the most expensive in US history, have killed at least 24 people, displaced thousands, destroyed more than 12,000 structures and have 100,000 people under evacuation orders.

Sustained winds of up to 40mph (64km/h) and gusts in the mountains reaching 65mph (105km/h) are predicted through Wednesday, forecasters said. Winds picked up on Monday and were expected to strengthen on Tuesday, fire behavior analyst Dennis Burns said.

And as Los Angeles holds its breath in anticipation of more strong winds, more stories of victims who have lost their lives, residents who have had their homes destroyed and historic structures and businesses that have been burned down are emerging.

The fires started last Tuesday, fueled by fierce Santa Ana winds that forecasters expect to kick back up through at least midweek. Cal Fire reported that the Palisades, Eaton, Kenneth and Hurst fires have consumed about 62 sq miles (160 sq km).

The Palisades fire, along the coast, is responsible for eight deaths, while the Eaton fire, further inland, has killed 16 others, the LA county medical examiner’s office said. At least 23 people are missing, and authorities said that number is expected to rise.

Investigators are still trying to determine what sparked the fires. They could be the country’s costliest ever. Government agencies have not provided preliminary damage estimates yet, but AccuWeather, a company that provides data on weather and its impact, puts the damage and economic losses at $250bn to $275bn.

The National Weather Service issued a rare warning about a “particularly dangerous situation” related to severe fire conditions beginning overnight Monday into Tuesday.

Strong Santa Ana winds have been largely blamed for turning the wildfires into infernos that leveled entire neighborhoods in and around Los Angeles where there has been no significant rainfall in more than eight months.

LA County Recovers, a government-run program, posted interactive maps on its website that show homes and other structures that have been damaged.

The maps for the Eaton and Palisades fires allow users to click on an icon and get a description of the type of structure, such as a home or commercial building, and the type of damage, such as “major” or “destroyed”.

Addresses may be entered into a search bar to find a specific location. Users can also see photos of the damaged buildings.

Price gouging has become an issue with hotels, short-term rentals and medical supplies. Scammers are also soliciting donations for bogus relief efforts, authorities said.

The flames have threatened and burned through several highly populated neighborhoods over the past week, including Pacific Palisades, Altadena and others.

Real estate data tracker CoreLogic says the reconstruction cost value of commercial and residential properties inside areas where there are active fires could be $14.8bn. The estimate is based on more than 16,500 properties that could have been damaged in the blazes so far in the Palisades fire and the Eaton blaze burning just outside Los Angeles. The firm noted that not all properties in the areas scorched by the blazes may have necessarily been damaged or sustained damage equal to their full reconstruction cost.

Officials on Monday lowered the number of people under evacuation orders from about 150,000 to under 100,000. However, they cautioned that more evacuations could be ordered when high winds return this week.

Cal Fire reported containment of the Palisades fire at 14% and the Eaton fire at 33% as of Monday morning. Those two fires have burned a combined nearly 38,000 acres since they began last Tuesday.

The Kenneth fire, which broke out near West Hills in the San Fernando Valley, was completely contained, while the Hurst fire was 95% contained.

Gavin Newsom has accused the tech billionaire Elon Musk of “encouraging looting” in an escalation of a row over disinformation surrounding the deadly Los Angeles fires.

The California governor lashed out after Musk, who is President-elect Donald Trump’s wealthiest supporter, reposted a message on X – the social media platform he owns – that falsely accused the governor and his fellow Democrats of decriminalising looting.

“Stop encouraging looting by lying and telling people it’s decriminalized. It’s not,” Newsom wrote. “It’s illegal – as it always has been.”

The clash came amid concerns of a looting spree after owners who had been forced to abandon their homes as the flames spread later returned to find the contents had been burgled.

About 30 people have been arrested, most of them for suspected looting, since the fires threatened to engulf several Los Angeles neighbourhoods. One man was found at a fire-damaged home dressed as a firefighter and arrested. Two men were detained on Saturday outside the Los Angeles home of Kamala Harris – the vice-president whom Trump defeated in November to return to the White House – but were later released after no evidence of a burglary was found.

Newsom’s exchange with Musk was triggered by a user who posted a television interview in which the governor said there would be “zero tolerance for looters”.

Above the footage, the user wrote: “LOOTING: Newsom and California Democrats literally decriminalized looting, barring police from arresting looters and prosecutors from prosecuting them. Now he’s opposed to looting.”

Musk, who has been prominent in Republican criticism of the Democrat response to the fires, reposted the message with a clown emoji and a globe.

Trump, Musk and other leading Republicans have blamed the fires on liberal and “woke” policies they accuse the Democrats of prioritising over public safety, including measures to combat climate change. They have focused on Kristin Crowley, Los Angeles’s first female fire chief – who is gay – to portray a fire service more focused on diversity, equity and inclusion policies.

The baseless accusation that Newsom had decriminalised looting appeared to stem from his opposition to changes to Proposition 47, a 2014 ballot initiative that reduced some minor offences from felonies to misdemeanours in an effort to free up prison space for more serious crimes.

The ballot’s provisions were partly replaced by another initiative, Proposition 36, in 2024 that introduced tougher sentences for offences such as shoplifting, property damage and theft in certain instances. Neither initiative explicitly mentioned looting.

Newsom opposed Proposition 36 and initially proposed competing legislation to keep it off the ballot.

The governor extended his complaint about disinformation to include Trump, who has claimed that firefighters’ efforts to extinguish the blaze were hampered by a shortage of water in local reservoirs. Water experts say levels in Los Angeles reservoirs were at record levels when the fires started.

“The reservoirs are completely full – state reservoirs here in southern California,” Newsom told NBC. “That mis[information] and disinformation, I don’t think, advantages or aids any of us.”

Trump has hinted that he might hold back disaster aid to California after he is sworn back into the White House on 20 January amid calls from Republicans that relief funds should come with “strings attached”.

The notion of using the fire to extract political concessions from California’s ruling Democrats seemed to be given voice by John Barrasso, a Republican US senator from Wyoming, who told CBS’s Face the Nation that the fires were a result of “gross mismanagement in California by elected officials”.

“There can’t be a blank check on this … because people want to make sure that as rebuilding occurs … that these sorts of things can’t happen again,” he said, mooting the idea of an aid package with “strings attached”.

“The policies of the liberal administration out there – I believe – have made these fires worse.”

The suggestion drew an angry response from Democrats.

“This is disgraceful. Disaster aid should never come with strings attached,” Maxwell Frost, a Democrat US House member from Florida, posted on social media.

Newsom said Trump had made similar threats following fires that happened in California during his first presidency.

“He did it to California back before I was even governor, in 2018, until he found out folks in Orange county voted for him, and then he decided to give the money,” he told NBC. “We take it seriously to the extent that, in the past, it’s taken a little bit more time [to get the funds].”

Chinese officials are in preliminary talks about a potential option to sell TikTok’s operations in the United States to billionaire Elon Musk, should the short-video app be unable to avoid an impending ban, Bloomberg News reported on Monday.

Beijing officials prefer that TikTok remains under the control of parent Bytedance, the report said, citing sources.

TikTok’s US operations could either be sold through a competitive process or an arrangement by the government, the report said, suggesting that the future of the app is no longer solely in ByteDance’s control.

China’s government has a “golden share” in ByteDance, which several members of Congress have said gives the government power over TikTok.

Under one scenario, Musk’s social media platform X would take control of TikTok US and run the business together, the report said. Officials have yet to reach a consensus about how to proceed, according to Bloomberg News.

“We can’t be expected to comment on pure fiction,” a TikTok spokesperson said, responding to the report.

It remains unclear how much ByteDance is aware of the discussions, or of Musk and TikTok’s involvement, and there is no information on whether ByteDance, TikTok and Musk have engaged in any talks regarding a possible deal.

TikTok has previously said that the government’s stake “has no bearing on ByteDance’s global operations outside of China, including TikTok”.

Elon Musk, X, and China’s Cyberspace and ministry of commerce did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Last week, the supreme court seemed inclined to uphold a law that would force a sale or ban TikTok in the US by 19 January, over national security concerns about China.

In a carefully worded statement, Mark Zuckerberg announced last week that Meta was moving its trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California and that the company’s content review “is going to be based in Texas”. The thrust of these teams’ work is to ensure that Facebook and Instagram users do not encounter hate speech, pornography and violent content.

The CEO said moving the moderators to the Lone Star state “will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content”. It was part of a larger announcement that Meta was ending its factchecking program, easing content restrictions and focusing on “free expression”. Moderators are separate from Meta’s factchecking efforts, which were done by third parties.

Former Facebook employees say, however, that the move-to-Texas announcement rings hollow. That’s because Meta already has major content moderation and trust and safety operations in the state. They say the move is nothing more than a blatant appeal to Donald Trump. Facebook’s former head of content standards said he helped set up those teams in Texas more than a decade ago.

“They made a lot of hay of: ‘Oh, we’re worried about bias, we’re moving all these content moderation teams to other places,’” Dave Willner said during a Lawfare panel last week. “As far as I’ve been able to figure out, that is mostly fake.”

Three other former Facebook employees who worked on the trust and safety teams in Texas told the Guardian the same. One said many people across Meta’s various divisions did trust and safety work in the company’s Austin offices. Another said that many content moderators, including those allocated to the trust and safety teams, have been in Austin for a long time. All were granted anonymity for fear of professional reprisal.

“They’ve always had people there,” one former employee in the trust and safety division said. “They may be moving more people there, but positioning it as though they’re doing something new to address liberal California bias is laughable at best.”

The relocation of teams to Texas and the end of factchecking are clear signals that Zuckerberg has undergone an about-face transformation from his 2016 mission to tackle misinformation. He has made several moves to appeal to the incoming president, who had previously lambasted Zuckerberg for election interference and threatened him with “life in prison”. Zuckerberg reportedly met with Trump the day before his announcement and spent Friday evening at Mar-a-Lago.

Willner said Meta’s halt to factchecking, along with other major changes at the company, won’t be the end of the social media platform’s “really wild swings”.

“To me, what this inaugurates is an era of a lot of twisting in the wind,” Willner said. “I think we’re going to see this rush in one direction and we’re going to see a rush back in another direction.”

Meta has several offices in Texas, mostly clustered in Austin – a progressive city in the conservative state. The company, which owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. It did not answer questions about how many employees will be affected and if trust and safety teams are moving to Texas or simply “out of California”. Meta also didn’t respond to questions about whether the affected workers are full-time employees or contractors.

One former employee told the Guardian that Meta has been “cutting corners” on trust and safety for a while. While the company had full-time employees working on those issues in Austin for years, the former employee said that, more recently, it began outsourcing more content moderator work to contractors. Meta has long employed contractors as content moderators in Texas. One of the third-party companies it works closely with, Accenture, has several major offices there.

Thousands of full-time employees work for Meta in Texas in several different departments. More than 220 workers were laid off in the state in 2022, however, as part of a large restructuring of the social media company. In all, Meta laid off more than 11,000 employees worldwide with Zuckerberg deeming it the “year of efficiency”. Meta’s trust and safety teams were some of the hardest hit.

The late Queen Elizabeth II was not told for almost 10 years that Anthony Blunt, a surveyor of the queen’s pictures and a member of the royal household, had confessed to being a Soviet double agent, previously secret security files suggest.

Declassified MI5 documents throw intriguing new light on how the security services closely guarded news that the art historian, of the notorious Cambridge Five spy ring, had confessed in April 1964, with records indicating the queen was only informed in 1973.

Only with fears over Blunt’s health, and of ensuing negative publicity should his confession and immunity from prosecution emerge upon his death, did Edward Heath’s government request the monarch’s private secretary, Martin Charteris, fully brief her.

Charteris reported back that “she took it all very calmly and without surprise: she remembered that he had been under suspicion way back in the aftermath of the Burgess/Maclean case. Obviously somebody mentioned something to her in the early 1950s, perhaps quite soon after the succession,” MI5’s then director general, Michael Hanley, noted in March 1973.

Hanley had urged the palace four months previously to sever ties with Blunt, who remained in post and was even knighted after his confession that he had spied for the Russians while a senior MI5 officer, after being recruited as a Cambridge don in the 1930s.

Only Charteris and his deputy, Philip Moore, “know about it at the palace,” Hanley wrote in November 1972. “Charteris thought that the queen did not know and he saw no advantage in telling her about it now; it would only add to her worries.” Blunt was about to retire aged 65 from his post. Charteris “affirmed that the queen was not at all keen on Blunt and saw him rarely”.

The files, released to the National Archives, indicate the queen’s then private secretary, Michael Adeane, was informed only of MI5’s intention to question Blunt on new evidence in 1964, but was not briefed on Blunt’s actual confession until 1967. In 1971 the Home Office told Hanley of Blunt that “the Queen knew nothing about his security record”. Hanley noted wryly: “I said that on his death she might learn a good deal from the newspapers.”

The files appear to question the previous narrative in media reports and in books that the queen was made aware shortly after the confessions. According to an official history of MI5 by Prof Christopher Andrew, Heath was later informed the queen had not been entirely in the dark as she had been told “in more general terms about a decade earlier”.

If she was kept in ignorance, she was in good company. Security files have previously shown Alec Douglas-Home, who was prime minister in 1964, was not informed until the confession was made public by Margaret Thatcher in 1979. Blunt was allowed to retain his royal post because “the greater public interest is in no change becoming apparent in his overt status”.

Blunt, who died aged 75 in 1983, was one of the Cambridge Five, along with Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess and John Cairncross, who had been recruited by the Russians while at or after Cambridge University in the 1930s, and worked their way into senior positions in British intelligence, the Foreign Office and Whitehall.

The MI5 agent Arthur Martin describes in vivid detail confronting Blunt in his flat above the Courtauld Institute on 23 April 1964 with testimony from Michael Straight, an American whom Blunt recruited at Cambridge. Blunt had been under MI5 suspicion and questioned 11 times since the 1951 defections of Burgess and Maclean to Russia.

Blunt’s “right cheek was twitching a great deal” as he dismissed Straight’s account as “pure fantasy”. Martin induced Blunt with immunity from prosecution. After sitting in silence for some time, “Blunt’s answer was: ‘Give me five minutes while I wrestle with my conscience,’” Martin wrote. “He went out of the room, got himself a drink, came back and stood at the tall window looking out on Portman Square. I gave him several minutes of silence and then appealed to him again to get it all off his chest. He came back to his chair and told his story.”

As his confession unfolded Blunt’s nervousness was apparent: “Every question was followed by a long pause during which Blunt seemed to be debating with himself how he should answer it.” At the end, “he seemed to be genuinely shattered,” wrote Martin. Blunt expressed his “profound relief”.

Over the course of several interviews, Blunt described how Burgess, based at the British embassy in Washington with Philby, had suddenly returned to the UK in 1951 to warn Maclean, in the Foreign Office, he was in danger of being exposed and must get to Russia.

Burgess, a known drunkard, was in “an appalling state”, “behaving outrageously”, Blunt said, telling him the Russians “have told me I must go, too”. Blunt doubted this as it could expose Philby and himself. That was not the plan, he said. If Burgess also went, “it was really blowing everything”. Blunt believed Burgess persuaded his Russian handler, “Peter” – Yuri Modin – to let him go because he knew “his life in England was finished”.

When he came to say goodbye, Burgess was “in a state of really absolute total collapse and he’d been taking, oh all the wrong kind of drugs together with a lot of drink”, said Blunt.

Blunt then found himself “on tap” to Burgess’s handler. He only met “Peter” twice, he said, after being given instruction to find a “white chalk cross” in a particular place, which went wrong because “something that looked like a white chalk cross wasn’t.”

Blunt said that when they did meet, “Peter” said “you must go too”. Blunt said “Peter” thrust “packets of dollars and pound notes” at him, and “absolutely insane instructions” to go to Paris, then Helsinki and then Russia.

“Quite apart from the fact that I had no intention of going, it became perfectly clear to me that they simply hadn’t made any plans whatsoever,” he told Martin. He remembered being “faintly surprised” at the handler “not being more violent” when he refused to go.

The files are being released before the opening in spring of an exhibition focusing on the work of MI5 at the National Archives in Kew, south-west London. Exhibits will include a vivid report of Blunt’s interview and a first-hand account of Philby’s confession in 1963.

Cambridge spy Kim Philby said his choice was “between suicide and prosecution” in a confession shortly before the high-ranking M16 double agent fled on a Russian steamer in 1963, according to previously secret documents.

Philby, the “third man” in the Cambridge Five ring, was confronted by his friend, the MI6 officer Nicholas Elliott, who had been sent by the British security services to persuade Philby to confess.

In a transcript of their conversation, released in full to the National Archives, Elliott told Philby that he had seen information that convinced him of his friend’s treachery

“I’ve had this particular moment in mind for 28 years almost, that conclusive proof would come out,” said Philby, in the recorded conversation in Beirut where he was working for the Observer.

“The choice actually is between suicide and prosecution. This is not in any sense blackmail, but a statement of the alternatives before me.”

Philby made a typed partial confession, but fled days later on 23 January 1963 to Moscow, despite being offered immunity from prosecution. While he told Elliott over several conversations “he could now tell us everything he knew within the dictates of his conscience”, his confession was littered with lies.

He also admitted “if he had his whole life to lead again, he would probably have behaved in the same way”.

Philby’s departure was so rapid, he forgot his reading glasses. A letter to his “beloved” wife, Eleanor, written after his defection and intercepted by MI5, said he been “called away at short notice” and had left some Lebanese pounds for her in the “big Latin dictionary” among his father’s books.

“I am sorry I cannot be more explicit at the moment but my plans are somewhat vague. Don’t worry about anything. We will meet again soon. Tell everyone that I am doing a tour of the area,” he wrote. In a postscript, he added: “Please destroy this as soon as you have found the cash.”

For years, Philby had been a high-flying MI6 officer only to be forced to resign after coming under suspicion when his two fellow Cambridge spies, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess, fled to Russia in 1951. But MI5 never had enough evidence to prosecute.

Philby’s Russian handlers had encouraged him to enter journalism, first covering the Franco-Spain war, where he latterly worked for the Times, then, after his resignation from the diplomatic service, as the Middle East correspondent for the Observer.

His instructions were to send letters, “with every fifth word” to contain the hidden message, and later to write in secret ink, he said.

His confession included the admission he betrayed Konstantin Volkov – a KGB officer who tried to defect to the west, bringing with him details of traitors operating in British intelligence and the Foreign Office, which would have inevitably led to Philby’s exposure. As a result Volkov was abducted by the Russians in Istanbul, drugged, taken back to Moscow and executed.

Philby acknowledged that he had also tipped off Maclean, whom he had recruited in the 1930s. “The least thing I could do was to get him off the hook,” he said. But he insisted, falsely he’d had no contact with the Russians since 1946.

“The only major doubt actually I had in my mind is ought I … in 1946 having broken off contact, to spill the whole beans and I very nearly did and I thought to myself: ‘Oh to hell with it, why should I?’” he said.

The film star Dirk Bogarde was “clearly disturbed” and “troubled” after MI5 warned him that his name had been given to the KGB as a “practising homosexual” and he risked being compromised in a sting operation, newly declassified intelligence files show.

Bogarde, who died in 1999 and never came out publicly but lived with his life partner and manager, Anthony Forwood, was told by security services that his name was on a list of “six practising British homosexuals” given to the Russians by an unnamed source who had himself been sexually compromised during a visit to Moscow in the late 1950s.

Separately, a KGB defector code-named Kago, had also informed MI5 that a young British actor, who appeared in a film with a name like “the kingdom of something” was the subject of a Russian recruitment attempt in Moscow in 1958-9.

Bogarde starred in the film Campbell’s Kingdom, and his name was also on the KGB list. This prompted MI5 to travel to the south of France in 1971 to warn him and to discover whether he had been subjected to any approaches.

Bogarde said the report was “absurd”. “He was a man of 50 and able to behave in a responsible fashion,” wrote the MI5 officer who interviewed the actor, then living in Grasse, at the British consulate in Nice.

Bogarde had never visited Russia and was “clearly disturbed” by the report, the agent reported in files released to the National Archives. “He had committed no misdemeanours and always behaved circumspectly. For one thing, he had the greatest admiration and respect for his father … and would never do anything which would have upset his family.”

Bogarde fretted about the prospect of ever visiting Russia, “as he might be invited to visit or film there, and said that guests were usually required to drink a lot at parties and he might put his arm round another man. He had always kissed his father and he greeted male friends in the same way. I said that I thought a compromise would involve much more. Bogarde asked if this would mean a scene on a bed or a couch and I said it would.”

With Bogarde ruled out as a candidate, MI5 agents scoured magazines including Variety for other actors who may have been in Moscow. Tommy Steele, Peter Arne, Michael Craig, Stanley Baxter and Bill Travers were all noted to have reportedly visited Moscow.

The defector Kago had described the actor as “a young actor, a very nice man” and “nice looking”. That ruled out Bogarde’s co-star in Campbell’s Kingdom, James Robertson Justice, who had visited Moscow. “No one could call Justice ‘young’ – he was born in 1912 [sic]; or good looking – he wears a full beard,” read one memo.

Joe Biden has said his administration is on the brink of sealing a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas that could pause the war after more than 14 months of fighting.

In a speech in Washington meant to showcase his foreign policy achievements, the US president said on Monday that the contours of the deal matched a “proposal that I laid out in detail months ago”.

Senior Biden administration officials have said they believe the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas may still be concluded before Donald Trump’s inauguration next week as the Israeli government has also confirmed progress in the talks.

The US national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said there was a “distinct possibility” the deal could be reached before Joe Biden left office, as the “pressure is building for Hamas”.

“We are close to a deal, and it can get done this week. I am not making a promise or prediction but it is there for the taking and we are going to work to make it happen,” Sullivan said at a briefing at the White House on Monday.

“I think there’s a good chance we can close this,” he added.

The remarks came after Gideon Saar, Israel’s foreign minister, described progress in talks for a Gaza ceasefire and the release of Israeli hostages amid intensifying indirect negotiations in Qatar attended by Trump’s Middle East envoy.

Saar, speaking at a joint press conference with his Danish counterpart, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, said Israel was working hard to reach a deal.

However, Bezalel Smotrich, a far-right member of the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling coalition, decried the emerging deal as a “catastrophe for the national security of the state of Israel”.

“We will not be part of a surrender deal that would include releasing terrorist hostages, stopping the war and dissolving its achievements that were bought with much blood, and abandoning many hostages,” Smotrich wrote on X.

“This is the time to continue with all our might, to occupy and cleanse the entire Strip, to finally take control of humanitarian aid from Hamas, and to open the gates of hell on Gaza until Hamas surrenders completely and all the hostages are returned.”

Israel and Hamas have been holding indirect talks for more than a year mediated by Qatar, the US and Egypt but they have previously stalled over issues including the exchange of hostages for Palestinians held in Israeli jails, whether a ceasefire is permanent and the extent of the withdrawal of Israeli troops.

Officials on both sides stopped short of confirming that a final draft had been reached in Qatar – which would still need to be agreed by both sides to bring an end to the war – but described progress after reports of a midnight “breakthrough” in talks attended by Steve Witkoff, Trump’s envoy to the region.

There were conflicting reports on Hamas’s position. Saudi news outlet Al Hadath said it had submitted its final response “without any comments [asking for changes] on the draft of the Gaza agreement” but an official told the Associated Press that a number of issues still needed to be resolved, including details about the withdrawal of Israeli troops and the hostage-prisoner exchange.

The outgoing US president had on Sunday stressed to Netanyahu, the “immediate need” for a ceasefire and a hostage release deal, the White House said in a readout of their conversation.

Biden urged the return of the Israeli hostages still held captive in Gaza with an increase in humanitarian aid enabled by a stoppage in the fighting under the deal, it said, as US officials race to reach an agreement before Trump takes office on 20 January.

His inauguration is widely seen as a de facto deadline after Trump said there would be “hell to pay” unless hostages held by Hamas were freed by that date.

Both sides have agreed for months broadly on the principle of halting the fighting in return for the release of hostages held by Hamas and Palestinians held in Israeli prisons. Hamas has, however, always insisted the deal must lead to a permanent end to the war and an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, while Israel has said it will not end the war until Hamas is dismantled.

On Saturday, Witkoff, after meeting the Qatari prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, flew to Israel where he met Netanyahu, who, following their discussion, sent the director of the Mossad intelligence agency, David Barnea, to Qatar’s capital “in order to continue advancing a deal to release our hostages”.

The talks included Barnea, Qatar’s prime minister, as well as Witkoff and officials from the outgoing US administration.

A Palestinian official close to the talks told Reuters that information from Doha was “very promising”, adding: “Gaps were being narrowed and there is a big push toward an agreement if all goes well to the end.”

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that an Israeli official denied a final draft had been sent, although other sources confirmed that “a significant development occurred in the negotiations overnight into Monday”, adding that they believed the agreements could be finalised soon.

Just one brief ceasefire has been achieved in 15 months of war, in the earliest months of fighting.

Hamas insists that any negotiations to secure the release of hostages must form part of a comprehensive pact to end the hostilities in Gaza, while Netanyahu is seeking a more segmented agreement, aiming for a deal that would lead to the liberation of some, though not all, hostages, while simultaneously preserving Israel’s prerogative to recommence hostilities against Hamas upon the deal’s expiration.

Israeli and western intelligence services estimate that at least one-third of the remaining 95 or so Israeli captives in Gaza are dead.

Palestinian officials have indicated that Israel continues to block the release of 10 specific prisoners. These include Marwan Barghouti, the leader of Tanzim, Fatah’s armed faction, and Ahmad Saadat, the head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, who was behind the assassination of the Israeli minister Rehavam Ze’evi in 2001, among other high-ranking members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad’s military branches.

To avert a potential stalemate in the negotiations, an agreement has been reached to defer discussions on the release of these contentious figures until after the initial phase of the deal, sources who took part in the negotiations said.

The families of the hostages who have been protesting against the Israeli government for months fear the optimism for a deal that now more than ever seems close may be hindered by the far-right parties of Netanyahu’s coalition that refuse to accept an agreement until Hamas is completely defeated.

The Israeli finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, head of one of the hardline nationalist religious parties in the ruling coalition, on Monday denounced the agreement being worked out in Qatar as a “surrender” deal.

“The deal that is taking shape is a catastrophe for the national security of the state of Israel,” Smotrich said.

Conditions in Gaza, where almost all of the population of 2.3 million are living in makeshift accommodation, are deteriorating in the face of cold and wet winter weather, which has caused flooding.

Israel’s offensive in Gaza has killed more than 46,500 Palestinians and wounded 109,571 since 7 October 2023, the Palestinian territory’s health ministry said, following Hamas’s attack on Israel in which 1,200 Israelis were killed and 250 taken hostage.

Joe Biden has said his administration is on the brink of sealing a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas that could pause the war after more than 14 months of fighting.

In a speech in Washington meant to showcase his foreign policy achievements, the US president said on Monday that the contours of the deal matched a “proposal that I laid out in detail months ago”.

Senior Biden administration officials have said they believe the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas may still be concluded before Donald Trump’s inauguration next week as the Israeli government has also confirmed progress in the talks.

The US national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said there was a “distinct possibility” the deal could be reached before Joe Biden left office, as the “pressure is building for Hamas”.

“We are close to a deal, and it can get done this week. I am not making a promise or prediction but it is there for the taking and we are going to work to make it happen,” Sullivan said at a briefing at the White House on Monday.

“I think there’s a good chance we can close this,” he added.

The remarks came after Gideon Saar, Israel’s foreign minister, described progress in talks for a Gaza ceasefire and the release of Israeli hostages amid intensifying indirect negotiations in Qatar attended by Trump’s Middle East envoy.

Saar, speaking at a joint press conference with his Danish counterpart, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, said Israel was working hard to reach a deal.

However, Bezalel Smotrich, a far-right member of the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling coalition, decried the emerging deal as a “catastrophe for the national security of the state of Israel”.

“We will not be part of a surrender deal that would include releasing terrorist hostages, stopping the war and dissolving its achievements that were bought with much blood, and abandoning many hostages,” Smotrich wrote on X.

“This is the time to continue with all our might, to occupy and cleanse the entire Strip, to finally take control of humanitarian aid from Hamas, and to open the gates of hell on Gaza until Hamas surrenders completely and all the hostages are returned.”

Israel and Hamas have been holding indirect talks for more than a year mediated by Qatar, the US and Egypt but they have previously stalled over issues including the exchange of hostages for Palestinians held in Israeli jails, whether a ceasefire is permanent and the extent of the withdrawal of Israeli troops.

Officials on both sides stopped short of confirming that a final draft had been reached in Qatar – which would still need to be agreed by both sides to bring an end to the war – but described progress after reports of a midnight “breakthrough” in talks attended by Steve Witkoff, Trump’s envoy to the region.

There were conflicting reports on Hamas’s position. Saudi news outlet Al Hadath said it had submitted its final response “without any comments [asking for changes] on the draft of the Gaza agreement” but an official told the Associated Press that a number of issues still needed to be resolved, including details about the withdrawal of Israeli troops and the hostage-prisoner exchange.

The outgoing US president had on Sunday stressed to Netanyahu, the “immediate need” for a ceasefire and a hostage release deal, the White House said in a readout of their conversation.

Biden urged the return of the Israeli hostages still held captive in Gaza with an increase in humanitarian aid enabled by a stoppage in the fighting under the deal, it said, as US officials race to reach an agreement before Trump takes office on 20 January.

His inauguration is widely seen as a de facto deadline after Trump said there would be “hell to pay” unless hostages held by Hamas were freed by that date.

Both sides have agreed for months broadly on the principle of halting the fighting in return for the release of hostages held by Hamas and Palestinians held in Israeli prisons. Hamas has, however, always insisted the deal must lead to a permanent end to the war and an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, while Israel has said it will not end the war until Hamas is dismantled.

On Saturday, Witkoff, after meeting the Qatari prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, flew to Israel where he met Netanyahu, who, following their discussion, sent the director of the Mossad intelligence agency, David Barnea, to Qatar’s capital “in order to continue advancing a deal to release our hostages”.

The talks included Barnea, Qatar’s prime minister, as well as Witkoff and officials from the outgoing US administration.

A Palestinian official close to the talks told Reuters that information from Doha was “very promising”, adding: “Gaps were being narrowed and there is a big push toward an agreement if all goes well to the end.”

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that an Israeli official denied a final draft had been sent, although other sources confirmed that “a significant development occurred in the negotiations overnight into Monday”, adding that they believed the agreements could be finalised soon.

Just one brief ceasefire has been achieved in 15 months of war, in the earliest months of fighting.

Hamas insists that any negotiations to secure the release of hostages must form part of a comprehensive pact to end the hostilities in Gaza, while Netanyahu is seeking a more segmented agreement, aiming for a deal that would lead to the liberation of some, though not all, hostages, while simultaneously preserving Israel’s prerogative to recommence hostilities against Hamas upon the deal’s expiration.

Israeli and western intelligence services estimate that at least one-third of the remaining 95 or so Israeli captives in Gaza are dead.

Palestinian officials have indicated that Israel continues to block the release of 10 specific prisoners. These include Marwan Barghouti, the leader of Tanzim, Fatah’s armed faction, and Ahmad Saadat, the head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, who was behind the assassination of the Israeli minister Rehavam Ze’evi in 2001, among other high-ranking members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad’s military branches.

To avert a potential stalemate in the negotiations, an agreement has been reached to defer discussions on the release of these contentious figures until after the initial phase of the deal, sources who took part in the negotiations said.

The families of the hostages who have been protesting against the Israeli government for months fear the optimism for a deal that now more than ever seems close may be hindered by the far-right parties of Netanyahu’s coalition that refuse to accept an agreement until Hamas is completely defeated.

The Israeli finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, head of one of the hardline nationalist religious parties in the ruling coalition, on Monday denounced the agreement being worked out in Qatar as a “surrender” deal.

“The deal that is taking shape is a catastrophe for the national security of the state of Israel,” Smotrich said.

Conditions in Gaza, where almost all of the population of 2.3 million are living in makeshift accommodation, are deteriorating in the face of cold and wet winter weather, which has caused flooding.

Israel’s offensive in Gaza has killed more than 46,500 Palestinians and wounded 109,571 since 7 October 2023, the Palestinian territory’s health ministry said, following Hamas’s attack on Israel in which 1,200 Israelis were killed and 250 taken hostage.

On paper, few US presidents could boast the foreign policy bona fides of Joe Biden, a veteran statesman with nearly a half-century of experience before he even stepped into office.

But as his term comes to an end, critics have said that the president will leave a legacy of cautious and underpowered diplomacy, as even allies have conceded that the administration is still grasping for a cornerstone foreign policy success.

That hasn’t stopped the Biden administration from declaring victory in its final days – and scrambling to secure a last-minute ceasefire in Gaza that could potentially salvage that legacy before Trump steps into office.

“Thanks to our administration, the United States is winning the worldwide competition,” Biden said in a final foreign policy speech on Monday delivered at the state department. “Compared to four years ago, America is stronger, our alliances are stronger, our adversaries and competitors are weaker.”

If this is winning, many Americans may struggle to imagine what losing would look like.

Biden’s administration has spent much of its time and political capital abroad attempting to contain a series of foreign wars and crises in which it has seemed impotent to impose its will.

Ukraine remains under siege as Russia grinds down the defending army and Kyiv warily awaits a Trump administration that has demanded a negotiated peace with Vladimir Putin as quickly as possible.

“Ukraine is still a free, independent country with the potential for a bright future,” Biden said, arguing that he had left Trump with a “strong hand”. “And we laid the foundation for the next administration so they can protect the bright future of the Ukrainian people.”

In Israel, the US is involved in last-ditch talks to salvage a ceasefire deal whose general terms were first proposed by Biden more than six months ago. Diplomatic efforts mostly stalled as the Netanyahu administration expanded the war into Lebanon and continued the war in Gaza.

“I have learned in many years of public service to never, never, never, ever give up,” said Biden. The US was “pressing hard to close this”, he said, adding that Palestinians had “been through hell” and that the Palestinian people “deserved peace”.

Biden also defended his administration’s withdrawal of the US military from Afghanistan, a decision that ended one of the US’s “forever wars” but also led to the immediate collapse of the Afghan government and the return to power of the Taliban.

In his speech, Biden said he was “the first president in decades who’s not leaving a war in Afghanistan to his successor”.

Biden said his decision would be vindicated in time, in a tacit acknowledgement of the withdrawal as perhaps his most controversial decision in office.

“Ending the war was the right thing to do and I believe history will reflect that,” he said.

And in a warning to the incoming administration, Biden said that the US must accept the dangers of climate change and invest in clean technologies before it is too late.

“They don’t even believe climate change is real – I think they come from a different century,” Biden said of climate deniers in Trump’s team. “They are dead wrong. It’s the single greatest existential threat to humanity.”

As Biden exits the presidency, he will hand power back to a predecessor with a radically different view of the world and America’s place in it. While Biden’s administration has been criticised for its excessive caution, Trump has already threatened to annex Greenland and the Panama canal.

It is a return to the kind of blunt power politics that Trump has claimed are what America needs now, as opposed to the internationalist approach that has characterised Biden’s half-century in foreign policy.

The impeachment trial of South Korea’s suspended president, Yoon Suk Yeol, begins on Tuesday, with the constitutional court set to weigh whether to strip him of his presidential duties over a failed martial law bid.

Yoon’s December 3 power grab plunged South Korea into its worst political crisis in decades, after he directed soldiers to storm parliament in an unsuccessful bid to stop lawmakers voting down his suspension of civilian rule.

He was impeached soon after and suspended from duty, but has gone to ground inside the presidential residence since, refusing summonses from investigators probing him on insurrection charges and using his presidential security team to resist arrest.

Lawmakers also impeached Yoon’s stand-in last month, Han Duck-soo, plunging the country further into political instability, and the current acting president, Choi Sang-mok, has appeared unwilling to wade into the standoff, instead urging all parties to negotiate for a solution.

The trial’s first hearing – out of five lasting until 4 February – is slated to begin at 2pm. The next hearings are scheduled to take place on 16, 21 and 23 January, and 4 February.

Legal experts say the court will decide two issues, whether Yoon’s martial law declaration was constitutional and, if not, whether it amounted to insurrection.

“This impeachment case focuses solely on the martial law situation, so the facts are not particularly complex,” lawyer Kim Nam-ju told AFP.

But the court has 180 days to make its ruling, starting from 14 December, when it received the case on whether Yoon violated the constitution and the martial law act.

Yoon’s legal team said he would not appear at the first hearing over purported safety concerns, saying he would be willing to appear at a later date if security issues were ironed out.

“Concerns about safety and potential incidents have arisen. Therefore, the president will not be able to attend the trial on January 14,” lawyer Yoon Kab-keun said in a statement sent to AFP on Sunday.

The trial will continue in his absence if he does not appear.

Former presidents Roh Moo-hyun and Park Geun-hye did not appear for their impeachment trials in 2004 and 2016-2017, respectively.

Yoon’s lawyers have argued the court must utilise the full 180 days – specifically to examine what “led to the declaration of martial law”.

Separate to the trial, a joint team of investigators from the Corruption Investigation Office (CIO) – which is probing Yoon over allegations of insurrection – and police are preparing a fresh attempt to arrest Yoon.

An earlier attempt failed after Yoon’s presidential guards blocked access to investigators.

If the new warrant is executed successfully, Yoon would become the first sitting South Korean president to be arrested.

If eventually convicted in that case, Yoon faces prison or even the death penalty.

The CIO said it would “prepare thoroughly” for its second attempt to arrest Yoon and warned that anyone obstructing them could be detained.

The National Office of Investigation, a police unit, sent a note to high-ranking police officials in Seoul requesting they prepare to mobilise 1,000 investigators for the fresh attempt, the Yonhap news agency reported.

Meanwhile, Yoon’s guards have reinforced his Seoul compound with barbed wire installations and bus barricades.

Yoon’s legal team has also sought to put pressure on police to avoid being involved in the arrest attempt.

His lawyers released a statement on Tuesday saying officers would be “in violation of multiple laws” if they proceeded to execute the “illegal warrant” to detain Yoon.

“We strongly urge the police, who are not obligated to follow investigative directives from the CIO, not to degrade themselves into mere enforcers of illegal actions,” they said.

Late Sunday, the CIO sent a letter to the defence ministry and presidential security service saying anyone blocking Yoon’s potential arrest “may face criminal charges” for obstruction and abuse of authority.

Greenland’s prime minister said on Monday the Danish autonomous territory was open to closer ties with the United States, in areas such as mining, a Greenlandic broadcaster reported.

“We need to do business with the US. We have begun to start a dialogue and seek opportunities for cooperation with [Donald] Trump,” Mute Egede said at a press conference in Greenland, according to public broadcaster KNR.

He added that the territory had its “doors open in terms of mining”.

“It will be the same in the coming years. We have to trade with the US,” he said, according to KNR.

However, Egede did not give any indication the island would be open to a US takeover.

US president-elect Donald Trump, who takes office on January 20, set off alarm bells last week when he refused to rule out military intervention to bring the Panama Canal and Greenland under US control.

Vice president-elect, JD Vance, in an interview with broadcaster Fox News over the weekend, noted that the US already has “troops in Greenland”, at a military base in the northwest.

In addition to its strategic location, Greenland, which is seeking independence from Denmark, holds massive untapped mineral and oil reserves, although oil and uranium exploration are banned.

Trump’s Republican allies in the US House of Representatives are trying to build support for a bill on authorising talks for the purchase of Greenland, according to a copy of the bill circulated for co-sponsors on Monday, Reuters reported.

Trump first claimed that he wanted to buy Greenland in 2019 during his first term as president – an offer swiftly rebuffed by Greenland and Denmark.

During a visit to Denmark last week, Egede said that the Arctic territory was “entering a new era, in a new year where Greenland is in the centre of the world”.

He said that Greenland would continue to cooperate with the US, but stressed that this would be on its own terms and that it was “the Greenlandic people who decide their future”.

“We don’t want to be Danes. We don’t want to be Americans. Of course, we want to be Greenlanders,” he said.

With Agence France-Presse and Reuters

Pope Francis has said he inherited a “large white box” full of documents related to various scandals faced by the Catholic Church when he took over from his predecessor.

The pontiff makes the revelation in his much-anticipated autobiography, Spera (Hope), which is published on Tuesday.

Francis became pope in 2013 after the shock resignation of Benedict XVI, a decision that meant the Argentinian was in the almost unprecedented position of being able to have an in-person handover when he started.

Shortly after his election as pope, he recalls in his book, he visited Benedict at Castel Gandolfo, the papal summer residence south of Rome.

“He gave me a large white box,” Francis writes. “‘Everything is in here’, he told me. ‘Documents relating to the most difficult and painful situations. Cases of abuse, corruption, dark dealings, wrongdoings.’”

Benedict then told him: “I have arrived this far, taken these actions, removed these people. Now it’s your turn.”

In Hope, Pope Francis says: “I have continued along his path.”

He does not, however, specify the contents of the box or any scandals that had been addressed either by Benedict, who died in December 2022, or by himself during his almost 12-year papacy.

In February 2013, Benedict became the first pontiff in almost 600 years to resign, saying his health was deteriorating. A deeply conservative pontiff, his tenure was overshadowed by sexual abuse scandals in the church. He retired leaving a chequered reputation after a papacy that was at times divisive.

The last year of Benedict’s papacy was also tarnished by the ‘Vatileaks’ scandal, which exposed allegations of corruption, internal conflict and financial mismanagement.

Although there were reports about the existence of the white box in 2013 and in later years, the passage in Hope is the first time Pope Francis has spoken on the record about it.

The Italian publisher Mondadori has said Hope is the first autobiography published by a pope, although Francis has published other memoir-style works.

In the book, which was written with the Italian author Carlo Musso, Francis describes the process of his conclave, which is rare for a pontiff. “When my name was pronounced for the seventy-seventh time, there was a burst of applause, while reading of the votes went on,” he said. “I don’t know exactly how many votes there were in the end, I was no longer listening, the voice covered the voice of the scrutineer.”

In a passage about women, Pope Francis writes that “the Church is female – it is not male” and says there is an urgent need to “move forward” in identifying new methods and criteria to ensure “women are more fully involved and play a key role in the various spheres of social and ecclesiastical life”.

However, he rules out women becoming priests. “One of the great sins we have committed has been to ‘masculinise’ it [the church]. The church therefore needs to be ‘demasculinised’– while knowing, at the same time, that to ‘masculinise’ women would be neither human nor Christian, since the other great sin is certainly clericalism,” he writes.

In the book Francis also reveals he escaped a double suicide bombing during a visit to Iraq in 2021 after the attempts on his life were foiled by British intelligence and Iraqi police.

• Additional reporting Catherine Pepinster

Pope Francis has said he inherited a “large white box” full of documents related to various scandals faced by the Catholic Church when he took over from his predecessor.

The pontiff makes the revelation in his much-anticipated autobiography, Spera (Hope), which is published on Tuesday.

Francis became pope in 2013 after the shock resignation of Benedict XVI, a decision that meant the Argentinian was in the almost unprecedented position of being able to have an in-person handover when he started.

Shortly after his election as pope, he recalls in his book, he visited Benedict at Castel Gandolfo, the papal summer residence south of Rome.

“He gave me a large white box,” Francis writes. “‘Everything is in here’, he told me. ‘Documents relating to the most difficult and painful situations. Cases of abuse, corruption, dark dealings, wrongdoings.’”

Benedict then told him: “I have arrived this far, taken these actions, removed these people. Now it’s your turn.”

In Hope, Pope Francis says: “I have continued along his path.”

He does not, however, specify the contents of the box or any scandals that had been addressed either by Benedict, who died in December 2022, or by himself during his almost 12-year papacy.

In February 2013, Benedict became the first pontiff in almost 600 years to resign, saying his health was deteriorating. A deeply conservative pontiff, his tenure was overshadowed by sexual abuse scandals in the church. He retired leaving a chequered reputation after a papacy that was at times divisive.

The last year of Benedict’s papacy was also tarnished by the ‘Vatileaks’ scandal, which exposed allegations of corruption, internal conflict and financial mismanagement.

Although there were reports about the existence of the white box in 2013 and in later years, the passage in Hope is the first time Pope Francis has spoken on the record about it.

The Italian publisher Mondadori has said Hope is the first autobiography published by a pope, although Francis has published other memoir-style works.

In the book, which was written with the Italian author Carlo Musso, Francis describes the process of his conclave, which is rare for a pontiff. “When my name was pronounced for the seventy-seventh time, there was a burst of applause, while reading of the votes went on,” he said. “I don’t know exactly how many votes there were in the end, I was no longer listening, the voice covered the voice of the scrutineer.”

In a passage about women, Pope Francis writes that “the Church is female – it is not male” and says there is an urgent need to “move forward” in identifying new methods and criteria to ensure “women are more fully involved and play a key role in the various spheres of social and ecclesiastical life”.

However, he rules out women becoming priests. “One of the great sins we have committed has been to ‘masculinise’ it [the church]. The church therefore needs to be ‘demasculinised’– while knowing, at the same time, that to ‘masculinise’ women would be neither human nor Christian, since the other great sin is certainly clericalism,” he writes.

In the book Francis also reveals he escaped a double suicide bombing during a visit to Iraq in 2021 after the attempts on his life were foiled by British intelligence and Iraqi police.

• Additional reporting Catherine Pepinster

The South African government has launched a mission to bring to the surface potentially hundreds of people in an illegal mine who last year had supplies of food, water and medicine blocked by police in an attempt to force them out.

The government agreed to the attempt on Friday after the sister of one of those underground initiated a court case in response to letters from miners brought to the surface on Thursday.

One of the letters claimed 109 people had already died in the Buffelsfontein gold mine near Stilfontein, about 100 miles south-west of Johannesburg.

Illegal mining has flourished in South Africa in recent decades as many industrial mines have been exhausted. Analysts estimate there are about 30,000 “zama zama” illegal miners producing 10% of South Africa’s gold output in 6,000 abandoned mineshafts, often controlled by violent criminal syndicates.

In late 2023, police launched Operation Vala Umgodi (plug the hole) to crack down on the sector across South Africa’s north-eastern mining belt. In early November, they said their blockade of essential supplies around Stilfontein had forced hundreds of miners to the surface since mid-October “as a result of starvation and dehydration” although later that month they allowed some supplies to be sent down.

The blockade of the 1.2-mile deep shafts at Buffelsfontein began as far back as August, according to an affidavit by miner Clement Moeletsi, who was hauled out by locals using ropes on 9 December.

Moeletsi claimed in his affidavit that by September the miners were eating cockroaches and toothpaste mixed with salt. Another miner who was rescued by locals on 25 December and another who climbed out using a thin metal pole have alleged that some people have resorted to eating dead bodies.

Sporadic supplies were lowered into the mine in November and December.

Officials have claimed the men are hiding underground to avoid arrest, pointing out that about 1,500 people have emerged from another mine shaft in the area.

“We don’t believe they are trapped, because other ones … have come out,” said Makhosonke Buthelezi, a spokesperson for the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy.

Jessica Lawrence of Lawyers for Human Rights, which is representing NGO Mining Affected Communities United in Action (Macua), said the men at the Buffelsfontein mine shaft could not get to the other mine shaft underground. She said nine bodies have already been recovered.

One phone video shared by Macua, which they said was brought to the surface by a rescued miner on Friday, appeared to show more than 50 wrapped bodies laid out in an underground tunnel. Another showed dozens of emaciated men with protruding ribs and collarbones, one of whom pleads in English for them to be given food and rescued.

The operation is being carried out by private company Mines Rescue Services, which said on Monday afternoon it had started hoisting miners to safety. The company’s crane-winched cage can bring up six people an hour and the operation could take up to 16 days, the firm’s chief executive, Mannas Fourie, told the local Sunday Times newspaper.

Police spokesperson Athlenda Mathe said: “It is unfortunate that there is loss of life … No one should have been underground because there are dangerous and hazardous gases underground and alleged abuse of illegal miners. We will be investigating allegations that the food that was sent down was kept from illegal miners.”

Spain has announced plans to impose a tax of up to 100% on real estate bought by non-residents from countries outside the EU, such as the UK, in an aim to tackle the country’s housing crisis.

The measure was one of a dozen unveiled on Monday by the country’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, as the government seeks to quell mounting anger over housing costs that have soared far beyond the reach of many in Spain.

Sánchez sought to underline the global nature of the challenge, citing housing prices that had swelled 48% in the past decade across Europe, far outpacing household incomes.

“The west faces a decisive challenge: to not become a society divided into two classes, the rich landlords and poor tenants,” he told an economic forum in Madrid.

The proposed measures include expanding the supply of social housing, offering incentives to those who renovate and rent out empty properties at affordable prices and cracking down on seasonal rentals. In Spain just 2.5% of housing is set aside for social housing, a figure that lags drastically behind countries such as France and the Netherlands, said Sánchez.

But it was the government’s plans to crackdown on foreign, non-EU buyers that grabbed headlines around the world. Spain has long been a popular destination for non-EU holiday home buyers, with residents of the UK, US and Morocco flocking to buy properties in places such as Ibiza, Marbella and Barcelona.

Sánchez described the tax of up to 100% as “unprecedented” in Spanish history. “Just to give an idea, in 2023 alone non-European Union residents bought around 27,000 houses and flats in Spain. And they didn’t do it to live in them, they didn’t do it for their families to have a place to live, they did it to speculate, to make money from them, which we – in the context of shortage that we are in – obviously cannot allow.”

He did not offer more details on how the plan would work or when it would be finalised and sent to parliament for approval. Given his government’s longstanding struggles to pass legislation, one analyst suggested to the Financial Times that the government’s aim was to deter foreign property investors by creating “uncertainty and noise” with a proposal that has slim chances of becoming law.

The government’s slate of measures also took aim at tourist flats, which have long been blamed for shrinking the rental supply and leaving locals priced out of the market.

Sánchez said regulations on these rentals would be tightened while the taxes they pay would be hiked. “It is not fair that those who own three, four, five apartments for short-term rental pay less tax than hotels,” said Sánchez.

He argued that the measures were necessary to tackle what he described as an “unbearable” mismatch between rising housing prices and household incomes.

“We are facing a serious problem, with enormous social and economic implications, which requires a decisive response from society as a whole, with public institutions at the forefront,” he added.

Nearly 10,000 images of balls have plunged up to 90% in value after Tennis Australia appears to have walked away from its non-fungible token (NFT) program three years after it began selling the artworks to punters.

Launched at the peak of hype around NFTs, the Australian Open’s Artball program allowed keen fanatics to buy 6,776 ball artworks sold as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that are linked to 19cm x 19cm plots on the court at Melbourne Park. In 2023, the Open had an additional 2,454 NFTs on offer.

The balls in 2022 were priced at 0.067 in the ethereum cryptocurrency – about $278 at the time of minting on 22 January 2022 – and all NFTs were sold. In 2023, the balls were minted starting at 0.23ETH each – about $446 at the time.

Due to the increased value of ethereum against the Australian dollar, today those NFTs would be worth $338 and $1,162, had they retained their value.

However, customers left holding the NFT balls might have noticed a significant drop in the value of their NFT asset. The current floor price for the balls on OpenSea is 0.005ETH, equating to roughly $25. Recent NFT sales of the balls have ranged from 0.003ETH (A$15) up to 0.0175ETH (A$89) – all significantly lower than the prices at which they were minted.

Tennis Australia marketed the NFT program as similar to a frequent flyers program, offering a Discord channel for NFT holders, ground passes for finals weeks and behind-the-scenes access, as well as passes to matches the following year if the portion of the court held in the NFT was linked to the match point plot on the court.

In 2024, the Australian Open appeared not to mint any new NFTs but allowed existing owners to redeem ground passes to finals week. In 2025, there is no mention of the program from the Australian Open or any offer of redeeming passes, and sites for the Artball program remain dormant. The Discord server has been shut down.

Tennis Australia did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

In 2023, when the crypto market was volatile and the value of the NFTs had fallen by nearly $100, Ridley Plummer, then Tennis Australia’s senior manager of metaverse, NFTs, web3 and cryptocurrency defended the decision to remain in the NFT business.

“We shouldn’t just put down our tools and walk away because the market’s having its challenges,” he said. “There’s obviously a ton of external factors that come into play when you’re exploring a new technology like web3 and NFTs, and when you’re an innovative company like Tennis Australia and the AO there’s obviously challenges and rewards that come with that as well.”

Plummer’s title, according to Tennis Australia, is now senior manager of digital sales and metaverse.

The Australian Open has since turned its attention to other digital ventures, including launching a way for users to play tennis with simulated commentary in Roblox, and a challenge for young students to build the Australian Open in Minecraft.

The Age reported on Monday the Australian Open was also using facial recognition technology at the tournament site to “enhance security and patron safety”. It comes despite the Australian privacy commissioner ruling last year that Bunnings had breached customer privacy in using facial recognition technology in stores.

Several sporting venues, including the MCG, the SCG and Qudos Bank Arena have all been reported to have used facial recognition technology in their venues, but none have responded to Guardian Australia requests on whether they continue to use such technology in light of the Bunnings ruling.

The country singer Carrie Underwood is scheduled to perform at Donald Trump’s second inauguration this month.

A spokesperson confirmed to Axios that the star will be on the lineup. Underwood, who rose to fame after winning the fourth season of American Idol, will perform America the Beautiful.

The 41-year-old Oklahoma native has remained mostly apolitical but has been vocal about her feelings on animal cruelty, speaking out about a Tennessee bill in 2013 that was seen as a way of making it harder for activists to record animal cruelty and share it with the authorities.

“I feel like more people try to pin me places politically,” she said to the Guardian in 2019. “I try to stay far out of politics if possible, at least in public, because nobody wins. It’s crazy. Everybody tries to sum everything up and put a bow on it, like it’s black and white. And it’s not like that.”

She did poke fun at Trump during the 2017 Country Music Awards with a musical parody alongside Brad Paisley. A reworked version of the hit Before He Cheats referred to Trump’s Twitter habits at the time, with the pair singing that: “It’s fun to watch, yeah, that’s for sure / ’til little Rocket Man starts a nuclear war.”

Underwood has won three Grammy awards and had hits including Inside Your Heaven, Jesus, Take the Wheel and Cowboy Casanova. She recently performed during Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve with Ryan Seacrest.

Victor Willis, lead singer of the Village People, also announced that the band would “participate in inaugural activities” including an event with Trump. “We know this won’t make some of you happy to hear however we believe that music is to be performed without regard to politics,” a post on Facebook read. “Our song YMCA is a global anthem that hopefully helps bring the country together after a tumultuous and divided campaign where our preferred candidate lost.”

For Trump’s 2017 inauguration, performers included America’s Got Talent runner-up Jackie Evancho, Toby Keith and band 3 Doors Down, who faced a backlash from fans. Guitarist Chris Henderson later defended it as “a one-in-a-lifetime chance to do something for your country”.

Stars who publicly declined to perform included Moby, Kiss, Idina Menzel and Charlotte Church.

Biden’s 2021 ceremony featured stars such as Lady Gaga, Jennifer Lopez and Katy Perry.

The inauguration will take place on 20 January.