Kings and queens, presidents, prime ministers and dignitaries from 54 countries will assemble at Auschwitz on Monday to mark the 80th anniversary of the death camp’s liberation, but the world’s focus will be firmly on its few remaining survivors.

About 50 former inmates are expected to attend the ceremony at the complex in southern Poland where Nazi Germany murdered more than a million people, most of them Jews, but also Poles, Roma and Sinti, Soviet prisoners of war and gay people.

An audience including Britain’s King Charles III, King Felipe VI of Spain and King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands, as well as France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, and the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, will hear their voices.

“This year, we are focusing on the survivors and their message,” said Paweł Sawick, the Auschwitz museum spokesperson. “We all know that for the 90th anniversary, it will not be possible to have a large group. There will not be any speeches by politicians.”

Besides the survivors, only Piotr Cywiński, the director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau state museum and memorial, and Ronald Lauder, the president of the World Jewish Congress, representing key donors, are due to speak during the 90-minute ceremony.

The commemoration has added significance not just because most survivors are in their 90s and will not be able to tell their stories for much longer, but because today’s continuing wars, and increasingly polarised politics, make their testimony as vital as ever.

Nazi German authorities established the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1940 in former barracks in the Polish town of Oświęcim, using it at first to hold Polish prisoners, including Catholic priests and members of the resistance.

They later established about 40 other camps in the area, including Birkenau, used for mass killings in gas chambers. Of the estimated 1.3 million people sent to the site from 1940 to 1945, about 1.1 million were murdered there, 1 million of them Jews.

Auschwitz-Birkenau has become an abiding symbol of Nazi Germany’s genocide of 6 million European Jews, looming large in the world’s collective memory as the embodiment of where hatred, racism and antisemitism can lead.

On 17 January 1945, as Soviet troops advanced, the paramilitary SS forced 60,000 emaciated prisoners to walk west in what became known as the Death March, and over the following days the Birkenau gas chambers and crematoria were blown up.

On 27 January, Soviet troops arrived, finding 7,000 survivors. Boris Polevoy, a correspondent for the Soviet newspaper Pravda, said: “I saw people so thin that they swayed like branches in the wind, people whose ages one could not possibly guess.”

The UN has designated the day Auschwitz was liberated as Holocaust Memorial Day and the site is now a Polish state museum and memorial charged with preserving the memory of what happened there. In 2024, more than 1.83 million people visited it.

The Nazis left behind the “Arbeit Macht Frei” (work will set you free) gate as well as barracks, watchtowers, the remains of the gas chambers and the hair and personal belongings – shoes, suitcases, toothbrushes – of many of the people killed there.

If Auschwitz emerged as the leading symbol of the Holocaust, it was also because it was a forced labour camp and a relatively large number of its inmates lived to tell their stories. Eighty years on, however, only an estimated 1,000 survive.

While Germany, Austria, which was annexed by Germany in 1938, and Italy, whose dictator Benito Mussolini formed an alliance with Hitler, will all be represented at the ceremony, Russia, which had attended the annual event until 2022, will not.

Cywiński, a historian, said this month it was “inconceivable” that after Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine “a country that does not understand the value of liberty has something to do at a ceremony dedicated to the liberation” of Auschwitz.

The war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza also sparked controversy over whether Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, the subject of an international arrest warrant on suspicion of crimes against humanity and war crimes, might attend.

After a request from the Polish president, Andrzej Duda, the Polish government confirmed last month that it would not arrest Netanyahu if he were to come, but Israel is due to be represented at the event by its education minister, Yoav Kisch.

Cywiński has said present-day populist politics, and hate speech on social media, pose a “huge threat” to contemporary society and the museum is working on strategies for teaching about the Holocaust when the last survivors have gone.

A recent eight-country survey of the US, UK, France, Austria, Germany, Poland, Hungary and Romania found that majorities in all except Romania believed that something like the Holocaust could happen again.

Nevertheless, up to a fifth of respondents, especially young adults, believed the numbers of Jews killed had been exaggerated. Significant portions of 18- to 29-year-olds – 46% in France – said they had not heard, or did not think they had heard, of the Holocaust.

One of the world’s largest Holocaust archives is accessible online for the first time after a three-year digitisation of much of the collection.

Announced on Holocaust Memorial Day, the Wiener Holocaust Library’s new online platform includes more than 150,000 items collected over nine decades. Users can view letters, pamphlets and photographs that record the rise of fascism in Britain and Europe.

The director of the library, Dr Toby Simpson, said the project had been in the works for more than 10 years and he hoped it would help it find a new audience of scholars and become a “new way of bearing witness in the digital age”.

Some of the most fascinating items are Tarnschriften or “hidden writings” – anti-fascist propaganda hidden in everyday items including powder shampoo and tea leaves. Concealed in luggage and smuggled across borders into Germany, the writing was one of the few ways for Germans to become aware of the Nazis’ activities.

“They’re camouflaged anti-Nazi pamphlets,” said Simpson. “They wanted to get the message into Germany, it was impossible for people to get that literature from any other source. If anyone was caught with anti-Nazi material they could be beaten up or arrested by the Gestapo.”

He added: “The disguises were incredibly elaborate, one included instructions for how to take care of your cactus. The hope was that if your luggage was searched on the train they would hopefully just pass over it and not realise what you were carrying.”

Each year the library receives about 50 collections, which can range from a few letters donated by individuals to entire archives, such as the dozens of boxes of material it received from the Jewish Committee for Relief Abroad, an organisation that helped displaced people.

The digitisation process has given the museum a chance to review material it has long held, uncovering stories that have laid in the archive perhaps untouched for decades.

“There have been nine decades and in each of those decades society’s understanding of the Holocaust has evolved over time and this collection is a chronicle of that process,” said Simpson. “Often the story of how the material came to us is as interesting as the items themselves.”

Within the collection are items that cover the activities of British fascists, such as Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists, and the anti-fascist movement that took on the far-right threat in Britain before and after the second world war.

“We have to be a bit careful because some of these groups are still active, so there are downloading restrictions in place, but we think it’s important for people to be able to use these documents to investigate this history because it’s too little understood,” Simpson said.

There are items from the German occupation of British territory, including a reward card from one of the Nazi commandants in Jersey for anyone willing to inform on their neighbours.

“We ask ourselves what we would have done in similar circumstances and there’s something about seeing something in your own language that makes it more immediate,” said Simpson.

One of the items the library is most excited about is a logbook from the office of Thomas Cook in Lisbon, Portugal, which became a key route for Jewish refugees who fled central and eastern Europe via the Pyrenees and the Iberian peninsula.

“People who were trying to get their luggage out would deposit their items with Thomas Cook, so this logbook contains names of those who were using that route. It’s completely unique.”

The digitisation process means the logbook is easily searchable for people looking for family members they suspect may have escaped using that route.

Simpson said: “We’re just at the beginning of the connections we can make, because descendants may find out new information about what happened to their families or trace items that were lost.”

The Wiener Library was founded 90 years ago by Dr Alfred Wiener, who campaigned against nazism during the 1920s and 30s and gathered evidence about antisemitism and the persecution of Jews in Germany. It was originally called the Jewish Central Information Office and was based in Amsterdam before moving to London in 1938.

Tens of thousands of Palestinians crossed back to northern Gaza on Monday morning after Israel opened military checkpoints that had divided the strip for more than a year, ending a displacement many feared could become permanent.

In the dawn light, large crowds of people began the long walk back to their homes – or what remained of them – in columns heavy with emotion and trepidation. More than 200,000 people crossed to the north in the morning, a security official told the AFP news agency.

Many knew they would be returning to nothing more than ruins, but wanted to pitch tents on their own land after long months shifting between crowded camps for displaced people in the south of the strip.

“My heart is beating. I thought I would never come back,” said Osama, a 50-year-old public servant and father of five, as he arrived in Gaza City.

“Whether the ceasefire succeeds or not, we will never leave Gaza City and the north again, even if Israel would sent a tank for each one of us. No more displacement,” he told the Associated Press.

Some were looking for loved ones who had been unable or unwilling to leave; others hoped only to find bodies they knew were buried under rubble, to give them a dignified burial.

The return had been scheduled to start on Sunday, but was delayed for 24 hours by the first major crisis in a fragile ceasefire deal.

When the Israeli hostage Arbel Yehoud was not released on Saturday as expected, Israel accused Hamas of violating an agreement to release the remaining female civilians first, and said the checkpoints to the north would remain closed.

As the two sides traded accusations, the US president, Donald Trump, speculated about “clearing out” Gaza by moving up to 1.5 million Palestinians to neighbouring Arab countries. His comments added to fears among some in Gaza that they would never be allowed back to the north.

Far-right politicians in Israel who opposed the ceasefire deal and want to restart the war, including the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, have also been vocal advocates of Jewish settlements in Gaza and long-term Israeli rule.

Last-minute talks late into Sunday evening shored up the ceasefire deal, securing an agreement to release three hostages on Thursday – ahead of the original schedule – and open the routes north on Monday morning.

Israel said Hamas had also provided details on the status of all 26 hostages scheduled for release during this stage of the agreement, telling it that eight were dead.

Many Palestinians waited through the night at checkpoints to start their difficult journey as soon as possible on Monday morning. An Israeli military spokesperson announced overnight that the first checkpoint would open to people on foot at 5am, and vehicles would be allowed across after inspection from 9am.

“No sleep. I have everything packed and ready to go with the first light of day,” Ghada, a mother of five, told Reuters on Sunday evening. “At least we are going back home. Now I can say war is over and I hope it will stay calm.”

Families trudged along roads destroyed by fighting, past wastelands of concrete that had once been familiar shops, offices, restaurants and apartment buildings, carrying the few possessions that had survived the war in plastic bags or on makeshift carts.

The crowd included children singing and playing tambourines, an amputee heading slowly north on crutches, and elderly Palestinians in wheelchairs or inching forward supported by younger relatives. Inside Gaza City, cheering crowds waited to greet them.

The first reunions happened within hours, with one tearful embrace between a mother and son captured on video.

Israel had divided Gaza in two early in the war, with a corridor bisecting the strip. Civilians heading south were allowed to cross it, but not to return north, where Israel began its ground operation in response to the cross-border attacks by Hamas on 7 October 2023.

Hundreds of thousands of people fled the area after blanket evacuation orders, and whole swathes of buildings were bombed intensively or destroyed by Israeli military demolitions.

Not everyone was able or willing to leave, and about 400,000 people who stayed on endured even harsher conditions than in the south. Israel maintained a tighter blockade within the broader controls on Gaza that meant only a trickle of food aid entered for months at a time.

Northern Gaza was the first place where serious malnutrition took hold, and where international experts warned a famine was “imminent” during the war.

Many of those eager to return waited through the night for crossings to open, some for the second time after the delay on Sunday. On Sunday night, Israeli forces opened fire on waiting crowds, killing two and injuring nine including a child, health authorities in Gaza said.

Israel warned people to stay away from its forces, which still control a buffer zone along the border and in the Netzarim corridor. A spokesperson also told people to stay away from the sea, and avoid swimming, fishing or other marine activities in the coming days.

On Sunday the new US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, rang the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in his first call with a foreign official and a signal of Trump’s focus on the relationship. The US was fully committed to ensuring Israel “has the capacities it needs to defend itself”, Hegseth said, a day after Trump lifted a Biden-era block on shipments of 2,000lb bombs.

Israel has also agreed an extension of a deadline for its troops to withdraw from southern Lebanon, now set for 18 February. Israel said the Lebanese army had not met its commitment to secure areas south of the Litani River, which Hezbollah forces have to hand over as part of the deal.

On Sunday, Israeli forces killed at least 22 people and injured 124 when they opened fire on civilian protesters trying to return to their home villages, and soldiers who accompanied them.

Western leaders and the Belarusian opposition have denounced Alexander Lukashenko’s victory in Sunday’s stage-managed election, which will extend his ruthless three-decade grip on the country for another six years.

The German foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, called the vote a “bitter day for all those who long for freedom and democracy”.

The Polish foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski, expressed mock surprise that “only” 87.6% of the electorate appeared to have backed Lukashenko. “Will the rest fit inside the prisons?” he wrote on X, referring to Lukashenko’s repressive rule under which thousands of Belarusians have been jailed.

But the authoritarian leader received praise from his closest ally, Vladimir Putin, who congratulated him on Monday for achieving a “confident victory”.

The country’s central election commission announced on Sunday evening that preliminary results showed Lukashenko, 70, securing nearly 87% of the presidential vote, granting him a seventh term, while the runner-up received only 3%.

Lukashenko’s four challengers, all loyal to him and running merely to lend an air of legitimacy to the vote, praised the incumbent throughout the campaign.

Lukashenko, known as “Europe’s last dictator” – a nickname he embraces – has been in power since 1994 and has ruled the country of 9 million people with an iron hand.

The exiled opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya denounced the vote as a “farce”. “What in the democratic world you call elections has nothing in common with this event in Belarus,” Tsikhanouskaya said.

Tsikhanouskaya, whose husband, Sergei Tikhanovsky, has been held incommunicado for almost a year, had urged voters to cross off everyone on the ballot. She called on world leaders not to recognise the result from a country “where all independent media and opposition parties have been destroyed and prisons are filled by political prisoners”.

The election committee said 3.6% of voters followed Tsikhanouskaya’s advice and voted against all candidates.

Lukashenko, who previously maintained a delicate balance between the EU and Moscow, became increasingly reliant on Russia both economically and politically after the contested 2020 presidential election, marred by allegations of fraud and unprecedented protests that brought hundreds of thousands of Belarusians on to the streets.

The violent crackdown by Lukashenko’s security forces that followed turned him into a pariah in the west, pushing him closer to Moscow and in effect transforming Minsk into a vassal state of Russia – an alliance that proved crucial for Putin when Belarus became a launch point for his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Human rights groups estimate more than 500,000 Belarusians have left the country since 2020 – mostly to Poland and Lithuania – out of a population of 9 million.

Anti-Lukashenko demonstrations took place in cities across Europe amid the election, with people carrying the white-red-white traditional Belarusian flag – abolished by Lukashenko in 1995 – at events in different cities. They were not able to cast ballots, with Belarus having scrapped voting from abroad.

During a rambling four-hour press conference after he cast his ballot on Sunday, Lukashenko threatened to punish relatives in Belarus of those participating in protests abroad. “You’re just putting your people at risk,” Lukashenko said, addressing the opposition in exile. “And as for you, we will deal with you.”

At the same conference, Lukashenko said he would not rule out running again for president in 2030.

He said he “did not give a damn” about western condemnation though observers believe the Belarusian leader has been making careful overtures towards the west in recent months, widely seen as an effort to get relief from sanctions.

Since July, Lukashenko has granted rare pardons to 250 political prisoners, a move some view as an attempt by him to ease Belarus’s international isolation.

He has also allowed limited prison access to two of the most prominent opposition figures inside the country, Maria Kalesnikava and Viktor Babariko, who had been isolated for almost two years with no contact with the outside world.

With Donald Trump back in power in the US and growing anticipation of ceasefire talks over Ukraine, Lukashenko appeared to be manoeuvring to position himself ahead of potential geopolitical shifts across the continent, said Artyom Shraibman, a Belarusian political analyst and non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace thinktank.

“Lukashenko wouldn’t want his regime to be left out if some sort of detente starts in the region,” Shraibman said.

On Sunday, Lukashenko predicted that “there will be some kind of resolution this year” to the war in Ukraine. “We will see light at the end of the tunnel this year,” he said.

Belarusian autocrat Alexander Lukashenko said he had “no regrets” about allowing Russia to use his country to invade Ukraine, amid condemnation of the “sham” presidential vote that extended his 31 years of authoritarian rule.

Germany’s foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, said on Sunday that the vote was a “bitter day for all those who long for freedom and democracy”.

“The people of Belarus had no choice. Instead of free and fair elections and a life without fear and arbitrariness, they experience oppression, repression and human rights violations on a daily basis,” she said.

Lukashenko, who faced no serious challenge from the four other candidates on the ballot on Sunday, took 86.8% of the vote, according to initial results published on the Central Election Commission’s official Telegram account.

The EU’s chief diplomat, Kaja Kallas, said Sunday’s “sham election” had been “neither free, nor fair” and that the EU would maintain sanctions against the regime.

Lukashenko, a 70-year-old former collective farm boss, has been in power since 1994. After the last elections in August 2020, he launched a brutal crackdown in response to the largest ever anti-government protests in Belarusian history. His international isolation deepened in 2022 when he made his country a launchpad for Russian president Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Speaking on Sunday, Lukashenko said he had “no regrets” about allowing his “older brother” Putin to use Belarus to invade Ukraine. “I do not regret anything,” he said in response to a question from AFP, during an often rambling press conference with international media that ran over four hours.

He also declined to say if this would be his last election, adding that he was “not about to die”, and had no specific successor in mind. Amid rumours of a family succession, Lukashenko denied that any of his three sons would want to take over from him.

The autocrat said there could be “future presidents” among current regional governors, or members of government or parliament but not a woman, making the point in characteristically misogynistic fashion. “I’m totally against a woman doing this job. A woman can’t be a dictator but we have quite a few men who could be leaders,” he said.

He also denied that the recent release of political prisoners was motivated by an attempt to build bridges with the west.

More than 250 political prisoners have been freed since last July, although 1,250 remain in jail. Some analysts see this as an attempted rapprochement with the west, as Lukashenko vies not to be left out of any detente that could result from a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine.

But Lukashenko rejected this interpretation, saying: “I don’t give a damn about the west”.

Some of his political opponents, he said, had “chosen” prison or exile. Asked about one of Belarus’s most prominent jailed opposition figures, Maria Kolesnikova, Lukashenko said she was “fine” and that he had intervened personally to bring about a visit from her father last year. Kolesnikova, one of the leaders of the 2020 campaign to unseat Lukashenko, has been in jail since September 2020. Held in strict isolation, she was long denied visits from family or lawyers, until her father was allowed to visit her in prison last November.

Up to half a million Belarusians are thought to have fled their homeland after the brutal repression of 2020, with the largest communities of exiles in Lithuania and Poland.

Criticism of the regime is banned in Belarus. People interviewed by AFP in Minsk and other towns who voiced support for Lukashenko were afraid of giving their surnames. “I will vote for Lukashenko because things have improved since he became president,” said 42-year-old farmer Alexei in the tiny village of Gubichi in south-eastern Belarus. But, like many in Belarus, he said he wished “for there not to be a war” in neighbouring Ukraine.

Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the Belarusian opposition leader in exile, said the so-called election was “a sham designed to tighten oppression” and “a farce built on fear, repression and lies”.

She entered the 2020 contest after her husband, the opposition candidate, Syarhei Tsikhanouski, was arrested on the campaign trail. This weekend she called on Belarusians abroad to demonstrate in solidarity, with “Lukashenko to the shredder” rallies planned in Warsaw, London, Stockholm and Vienna.

Footage on social media showed people carrying the white-red-white traditional Belarusian flag – abolished by Lukashenko in 1995 – at events in different cities. Posting such footage, Tsikhanouskaya’s aide, Franak Viačorka, said the regime was threatening to “persecute the relatives who are in Belarus of those participating”.

Tsikhanouskaya was due to meet Kallas and the EU’s 27 foreign ministers on Sunday evening.

Lithuania’s prime minister, Gintautas Paluckas, suggested there would be more sanctions on Belarus, without specifying whether these would come from his government alone or the whole EU. “We will stay vocal about the regime’s repressions and involvement in Russia’s war against Ukraine, which will be both responded [to] by sanctions.”

Fighters from the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Rwanda-backed M23 rebel group claim to have taken the eastern city of Goma after a lightning advance in recent weeks that has forced thousands from their homes and risked reigniting a broader regional war.

“We urge all residents of Goma to remain calm. The liberation of the city has been successfully carried out, and the situation is under control,” the M23 spokesperson, Lawrence Kanyuka, said on X.

It was not clear on Monday morning how much of Goma, the capital of North Kivu state in eastern DRC, was controlled by the rebels, but witnesses in the city said rebel fighters could be seen in the centre. Residents said gunfire could be heard near the airport, city centre and near the border with Rwanda.

The rebels had ordered government soldiers to surrender by 3am on Monday (0100 GMT) and 100 Congolese soldiers had handed over their weapons to Uruguayan troops in the UN peacekeeping mission in DRC (Monusco), Uruguay’s military said. Monusco staff and their families were evacuating across the border to Rwanda on Monday morning, where 10 buses were waiting to pick them up.

The eastern borderlands of DRC are a tinderbox of rebel and militia fiefdoms stemming from two regional wars after Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, when Hutu extremists murdered close to 1 million Tutsis and moderate Hutus. M23 is the latest in a long line of Tutsi-led rebel movements.

On Sunday, the UN special representative Bintou Keita told the UN security council that despite peacekeepers’ support for the Congolese armed forces, M23 and Rwandan forces had entered the Munigi neighbourhood on Goma’s outskirts, “causing mass panic”. Keita said M23 fighters were advancing and using residents “as human shields” as others fled for their lives.

DRC’s foreign minister, Thérèse Kayikwamba Wagner, told the security council that Rwanda was committing “a frontal aggression, a declaration of war which no longer hides itself behind diplomatic manoeuvres”.

Rwanda’s ambassador to the UN, Ernest Rwamucyo, did not confirm or deny DRC’s claims. He blamed the country’s government, saying the crisis could have been averted if it had “demonstrated a genuine commitment to peace”.

M23 says it exists to protect the ethnic Tutsi population in DRC. The rebels briefly took over Goma in 2012, withdrawing after international donors cut aid to Rwanda over its support for the group. They resurfaced in late 2021, with increasing support from Rwanda.

M23’s offensive risks worsening one of the world’s largest humanitarian crises. More than one-third of the population of North Kivu state are displaced, according to the UN.

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report

The armed group M23 and Rwandan soldiers entered the centre of Goma on Sunday night after weeks of advancing on the main city in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s North Kivu province. The advance risks sparking a broader war between Rwanda and DRC and has intensified a humanitarian crisis in the province.

Dangerous temperatures could kill 50% more people in Europe by the end of the century, a study has found, with the lives lost to stronger heat projected to outnumber those saved from milder cold.

The researchers estimated an extra 8,000 people would die each year as a result of “suboptimal temperatures” even under the most optimistic scenario for cutting planet-heating pollution. The hottest plausible scenario they considered showed a net increase of 80,000 temperature-related deaths a year.

The findings challenge an argument popular among those who say global heating is good for society because fewer people will die from cold weather.

“We wanted to test this,” said Pierre Masselot, a statistician at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and lead author of the study. “And we show clearly that we will see a net increase in temperature-related deaths under climate change.”

The study builds on previous research in which the scientists linked temperature to mortality rates for different age groups in 854 cities across Europe. They combined these with three climate scenarios that map possible changes in population structure and temperature over the century.

In all three scenarios, they found, uncomfortable temperatures would kill more people than they do today. The scientists cautioned that the uncertainties in the data are large.

The net death toll is forecast to rise the most in hot southern Europe, particularly around the Mediterranean, with a second hotspot in central Europe that covers Switzerland, Austria and parts of southern Germany and Poland. In cooler northern Europe, meanwhile, a small decrease in deaths is expected.

“In Norway, for instance, we might see a very slight benefit,” said Masselot. “[But this] is completely overshadowed by this massive increase we see in southern countries.”

Heat and cold are silent killers that hurt the body well before they reach extremes that cause hypothermia and heatstroke. Excess deaths soar during heatwaves, particularly among people who are old or sick, as hot weather forces their bodies into overdrive and stops them from resting. Cold spells raise blood pressure and contribute to a range of heart and lung problems.

“Put bluntly, the increase in hot weather will kill more people than the decrease in cold weather will save,” said Tim Osborn, a climate scientist at the University of East Anglia, who was not involved in the research. “While this new study isn’t the final say on the matter … it does break new ground by scrutinising people’s vulnerability to extreme temperatures by age and by city to a much better level of detail than previous work.”

The analysis, which was limited to European cities, did not consider rural regions, which are less exposed to the urban heat island effect, or other parts of the planet, where heat is a more pressing problem. In total, they estimated the high heating scenario would lead to an extra 2.3 million people dying from dangerous temperatures in Europe between 2015 and 2099.

Madeleine Thomson, a climate and health expert at the research charity Wellcome, said the death toll was just one of the dangers of rising temperatures. “Extreme heat kills but it also causes a wide range of serious health problems. It has been linked to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, miscarriages and poor mental health.”

Climate science deniers have argued against cutting pollution on the grounds that global heating will save lives, because cold kills more people than heat. Scientists say the different response rates to changes in temperature mean that heat deaths will rise much faster than cold deaths will fall, particularly at higher temperatures.

“There are also legitimate arguments that this net effect is only of limited relevance,” said Erich Fischer, a climate scientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ), who was not involved in the study. “If a new drug with serious side-effects that led to countless deaths were approved, I would hardly argue that the drug saves about as many lives, or that the net effect could even be slightly positive in the short term despite the many deaths.”

The study explored how lives could be saved if people adapted to the changes in temperature and reduced their exposure to uncomfortable temperatures. In the hottest scenario, only “implausibly strong” levels of adaptation could halt the trend of rising net deaths, the study found. In scenarios that cut carbon pollution, a 50% drop in temperature exposure was enough for net deaths to drop.

“The good news is that we can adapt,” said Víctor Resco de Dios, an environmental engineer at the University of Lleida, who was not involved in the study. “Adaptation starts with relatively simple solutions – although they are not free – such as installing air conditioning or creating spaces that serve as climate shelters.”

“But we must also address more complex solutions – such as increasing green areas in cities to mitigate the urban heat island – and adapting health systems,” he added.

An investigation into the deadliest air disaster on South Korean soil has found duck remains in both engines, according to a preliminary report, suggesting the passenger jet hit birds before slamming down on the runway.

While officials have not yet determined the cause of last month’s Jeju Air crash that killed all but two of the 181 people onboard, the report released on Monday said feathers and bird bloodstains were found inside the Boeing 737-800’s engines.

“The samples were sent to specialised organisations for DNA analysis and a domestic organisation identified them as belonging to Baikal teals,” said the report from South Korea’s Aviation and Railway Accident Investigation Board.

Baikal teals are a type of migratory duck that fly to South Korea for winter in large numbers.

The pilots made an emergency call while attempting to land and warned of a bird strike. Air crashes are usually caused by several factors and bird strikes are relatively common.

The six-page report did not go beyond factual details and several questions remain, such as why the jet abandoned its first landing attempt and then turned around to land on the same runway in the opposite direction – a rare manoeuvre as pilots prefer to land into the wind, which helps with stability and braking.

The jet touched down late on the runway at high speed with no landing gear deployed and no apparent use of the wing flaps, which are lowered for landing. After sliding down the runway, the plane hit a dirt and concrete embankment built to house navigation equipment and burst into flames.

Investigators have been stymied by a lack of usable data from the black box recorders, which stopped recording about four minutes before the airliner exploded. Previously, this has occurred when there was an onboard electrical failure.

South Korean authorities will be under pressure to avoid a repeat of the aftermath of the Sewol ferry disaster in April 2014 in which more than 300 people died, mostly high school students. Many relatives of the victims complained that it took authorities too long to identify the dead and to establish the cause of the sinking.

Under global aviation guidelines, a final report is expected within a year.

Reuters and the Associated Press contributed to this report

Global technology shares have taken a hit as the emergence of a Chinese chatbot competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, DeepSeek, raised doubts about the sustainability of the US artificial intelligence boom.

Shares in companies listed in Asia and Europe fell on Monday and the tech-heavy Nasdaq index in New York was poised to open lower after investors digested the implications of AI models developed by the startup DeepSeek.

The DeepSeek AI assistant topped the Apple app store in the US and UK over the weekend, above OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Shares in AI-related companies based in the US such as Nvidia, Microsoft and Meta were expected to fall when US markets open.

DeepSeek claims to have used fewer chips than its rivals to develop its models, making them cheaper to produce and raising questions over a multibillion-dollar AI spending spree by US companies that has boosted markets in recent years.

The company developed bespoke algorithms to build its model using reduced-capability H800 chips produced by America’s Nvidia and spending less than $6m (£4.8m), according to a research paper published in December.

Nvidia’s most advanced chips, H100s, have been banned from export to China since September 2022 by US sanctions. Nvidia then developed the less powerful H800 chips for the Chinese market, although they were also banned from export to China last October.

DeepSeek’s success at building an advanced AI model without access to the most cutting-edge US technology has raised concerns about the efficacy of Washington’s attempts to stymie China’s hi-tech sector.

Marc Andreessen, a leading US venture capitalist, compared the launch of DeepSeek’s R1 model to a pivotal moment in the US-USSR space race, posting on X on Sunday that it was AI’s “Sputnik moment”.

According to DeepSeek, its R1 model outperforms OpenAI’s o1-mini model across “various benchmarks”, while research by Artificial Analysis puts it above models developed by Google, Meta and Anthropic in terms of overall quality.

The company was founded by the entrepreneur Liang Wenfeng, who runs a hedge fund, High-Flyer Capital, that uses AI to identify patterns in stock prices. Liang reportedly started buying Nvidia chips in 2021 to develop AI models as a hobby, bankrolled by his hedge fund. In 2023, he founded DeepSeek, which is based in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou.

The company is purely focused on research rather than commercial products – the DeepSeek assistant and underlying code can be downloaded for free. In an interview with Chinese media, Liang said “AI should be affordable and accessible to everyone.” Liang also said that the gap between US and Chinese AI was only one to two years.

The DeepSeek development raises doubts over the necessity for sustained investment in AI infrastructure such as chips and the market-leading role of US tech companies in AI, which in turn threatens to put American tech sector valuations under pressure.

The pan-European Stoxx 600 lost 0.75% on Monday morning, and technology stocks were down by 4.5%. The Dutch chipmaker ASML slid by 8.2%, while Germany’s Siemens Energy, which provides hardware for AI infrastructure, lost 4.1%, and France’s digital automation company Schneider Electric fell by 6.8%.

US-listed shares in Nvidia, the chipmaker at the forefront of developments in AI and the world’s most valuable listed company, with a valuation of $3.5tn, were down more than 11% in pre-market trading.

It followed losses in Asia, where the Japanese chip companies Disco and Advantest – a supplier to Nvidia – suffered declines of 1.8% and 8.6% respectively. In the US, Nasdaq 100 futures were down 2.6%, and S&P 500 futures slipped 1.4%.

Richard Hunter, the head of markets at the platform Interactive Investor, said: “It will almost certainly put the cat among the pigeons as investors scramble to assess the potential damage it could have on a burgeoning industry which has powered much of the gain seen in the main indices over the last couple of years.

“The larger question has suddenly become whether the hundreds of billions of dollar investment in AI needs re-evaluation.”

In June 1986, a pair of operatives from communist Czechoslovakia’s StB intelligence service made contact with a mysterious couple staying at a Prague hotel. The man’s passport identified him as a Syrian diplomat called Walid Wattar; his pregnant wife also had a Syrian diplomatic passport.

In fact, the man was Venezuela-born Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal, perhaps the world’s most wanted terrorist at the time. He was with his wife, Magdalena Kopp, recently released from French prison.

Ramírez Sánchez spent a lot of time behind the iron curtain and was known to receive support from the KGB and East Gemany’s Stasi. But a new book based on the archives of the Czechoslovak secret police suggests the picture of communist bloc support for him and other violent radical actors during the late cold war period is not so simple.

“There was this dramatic Reagan idea that the Soviets and all the other services were training them, giving them whatever they needed and then directing them to carry out attacks in the west,” said Daniela Richterova, a specialist in intelligence studies at King’s College London and author of the book, Watching the Jackals. “In fact, the reality was more complicated.”

In this instance, the Czechoslovak agents told Ramírez Sánchez and his wife that they knew who they really were, and that they had information that French intelligence operatives were in Prague and on a mission to “liquidate” them. The officers advised them to leave the country immediately. Within hours, Ramírez Sánchez was on a flight out.

But the supposed French plot was fictitious; the StB simply wanted Ramírez Sánchez, who with his associates had been responsible for a wave of terrorism across Europe over the previous decade, out of the country, fearful of his reputation and his methods.

Between the 1960s and the 1980s, communist Prague often acted as a haven for operatives from revolutionary and terrorist movements from across the world, who used Czechoslovakia as a safe place for meetings, planning and sometimes liaisons with the local authorities.

Richterova worked in the archive of the former Czechoslovak security service in Prague, which has made all but a handful of its communist-era documents open for viewing, giving an unprecedented insight into the links between Czechoslovakia and various violent non-state actors during the cold war.

The archives show there was a close relationship with Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organisation, and the book details the extensive relations between the PLO’s security service, led by Arafat’s No 2, Abu Iyad, and Czechoslovak authorities.

A visit by Iyad to Prague in 1981 resulted in agreement on a package that included intelligence exchange, joint operations, arms supplies and security training. Files suggest officials in the city even discussed an operation in which the Palestinians would target Czech dissidents living abroad and either assassinate or kidnap them, though the discussions came to nothing.

Though there were times when the Czechoslovaks cosied up to Middle Eastern groups, there were many more occasions when it was clear Prague was confused and alarmed by the presence of Arab operatives on its territory and struggled to keep tabs on them. While there were deep links with the PLO, the StB remained wary of more radical Palestinian groups, as well as of rogue actors such as Ramírez Sánchez.

The full story on Moscow and the KGB’s relations with these groups remains locked away in the Russian archives. But the Czechoslovak documents made it clear “there was no coordinated policy and no direction from the Soviet Union”, Richterova said.

The book also shows that the communist-era intelligence service, so feared when it came to domestic dissidents, was less than impressive when it came to tracking these foreign groups, whose members often had a whole stash of diplomatic passports under various identities issued by Middle Eastern countries.

“The StB operatives didn’t speak Arabic, they didn’t quite understand who is a member of what group, and when they put them on these persona non grata lists it didn’t work at all,” Richterova said.

The political and moral dilemmas of how to track radical groups, and to what extent to cooperate with them when certain objectives might align, has continuing relevance today. With the KGB archive in Moscow firmly closed, the Czechoslovak documents are a rare insight into the way those dilemmas were handled and discussed in the Soviet bloc. They are also more instructive than anything available in the west where, in the UK for instance, MI6 archives remain closed.

“It’s about how states use their spies to interact with dangerous individuals, some of whom they want to align with and some who they don’t. It’s always a complicated business and a difficult dance,” Richterova said.

Fifa has rejected calls for an independent monitor to assess migrant workers’ conditions in Saudi Arabia in the buildup to the 2034 World Cup.

Football’s world governing body has been urged by the African Regional Organisation of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC-Africa), a trade union organisation that represents 18 million African workers, to increase protections afforded to migrant workers as the Gulf state embarks on the massive construction programme required to deliver the tournament. In response, however, Fifa has argued measures currently in place are sufficient, claiming it mandates hosts to “uphold their respective duties and responsibilities under international human rights standards in all activities associated with the tournament”.

ITUC–Africa made the request to Fifa last month in response to what it described as Saudi Arabia’s “alarming record” on human rights and Fifa’s verdict on the same issue in assessing the Saudi bid. It called on Fifa to make a number of specific interventions, including the end of the kafala system of labour and allowing independent monitors to keep watch over workers’ conditions.

In a letter seen by the Guardian, Fifa’s general secretary, Mattias Grafström, replied to ITUC-Africa but does not engage directly with its requests. Instead he points to commitments already made by the Saudi authorities in their bid literature, including a proposal to establish, in Grafström’s words, “a workers’ welfare system to monitor compliance with labour rights standards for tournament-related workers”.

In the official Saudi bid document, the phrase “workers’ welfare system” does not appear, although the hosts do describe a “working group” formed of a number of Saudi government departments to “define a governance structure to oversee implementation of the [human rights] strategy”. The bid document also promises to “leverage the relationships from within this group and beyond to engage with key partners including the United Nations, the International Labo[u]r Organization, the Saudi National Committee of Workers Committees, and others”, although the nature of any such engagement is not made clear.

An estimated 10 million migrant workers are currently resident in Saudi Arabia and they are expected to make up the majority of the workforce needed to deliver the extensive World Cup infrastructure. The projects promised as part of winning Saudi bid include building 11 entirely new stadiums, expanded transport networks and an estimated 185,000 hotel rooms, a doubling of current capacity.

In his letter, Grafström said Fifa plans to “engage constructively” with international labour rights organisations in the lead-up to the 2034 World Cup. “The Fifa World Cup will shine a spotlight on Saudi Arabia for the years to come, which can provide an opportunity for actors within the country and beyond to promote positive change,” he wrote.