Israel’s defence minister has ordered the military to prepare plans to allow Palestinians “who wish to leave” Gaza to exit, after Donald Trump suggested the US take over the territory and resettle its residents in other countries.

Israel Katz said the military plan would include options to leave via land, air and sea. “The people of Gaza should have the right to freedom of movement and migration,” he said in a statement on X, although it was clear that the journeys would only be in one direction.

Before the war, Israel’s tight controls on movement in and out of the strip made it difficult for Palestinians to travel internationally. Restrictions got even tighter after the conflict began, and after Israeli troops began operating near the Rafah crossing last May it was impossible for Palestinians to leave.

An agreement to allow medical evacuations from Gaza was part of the ceasefire deal, and the first group of sick children left on Saturday, although two died before they could be taken out and others had become too sick to move.

Trump’s plan to turn Gaza into a “Riviera of the Middle East” led to international outrage, including a warning from the UN secretary general, António Guterres, that “it is essential to avoid any form of ethnic cleansing”.

Forced or coerced displacement is a crime against humanity, illegal under the Geneva conventions, to which Israel and the US are signatories.

In a post on Truth Social on Thursday, Trump said Israel would turn the Gaza Strip over to the US after the fighting ended and that no US soldiers would be needed there.

“The Gaza Strip would be turned over to the United States by Israel at the conclusion of fighting. The Palestinians … would have already been resettled in far safer and more beautiful communities, with new and modern homes, in the region,” Trump said in a post building on his controversial comments about Gaza’s future this week. “No soldiers by the U.S. would be needed!”

Palestinians in Gaza responded to Trump’s plans with anger and disbelief, and said they would reject any attempt to force them out.

Many have traumatic family memories of the Nakba, or catastrophe, of 1948, in which about 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes in the war surrounding Israel’s creation, a history that means they are determined to resist further displacement.

Katz also demanded that countries including Spain, Norway and Ireland allow Palestinians from Gaza to “enter their territory”.

Last year the three countries formally recognised a Palestinian state, in a move aimed at supporting a two-state solution. Their decision prompted fury in Israel, which ordered back its ambassadors and accused the trio of rewarding terrorism.

Spain’s foreign minister, José Manuel Albares, was quick to reject the demand. Palestinians who need support including urgent medical treatment would be welcomed in Spain, but “Gaza is the land of the people of Gaza”, he said in a radio interview. “It should be part of a future Palestinian state.”

Inside Israel the far right embraced Trump’s comments as vindication of their long-term call for the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza and Jewish settlement.

The legislator Limor Son Har-Melech said Trump was hailed as “original and creative” for laying out plans that had led her party leader, Itamar Ben-Gvir, to be labelled “fascist, extremist, delusional”.

In a radio interview she described a vision of Jewish Israeli children playing in Gaza, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported. Her party would only return to the coalition government, which it left over opposition to the ceasefire deal, when “we see buses coming out” of Gaza carrying its Palestinian residents, she added.

People of several nationalities were among the 11 killed at a school in Sweden’s worst mass shooting, police have said.

Anna Bergqvist, who is leading the police investigation, said people of “multiple nationalities, different genders and different ages” were among those killed by a lone gunman at Campus Risbergska, an adult education centre, in the city of Örebro on Tuesday.

Asked by reporters whether there was any evidence of racist motivation for the attack, Bergqvist said: “We are looking at all of those parts.”

The Syrian embassy in Stockholm said its citizens were among the dead. “With deep sorrow and grief, the embassy of the Syrian Arab Republic in the kingdom of Sweden expresses its strong condemnation of the criminal incident that took place in the Swedish city of Örebro, which resulted in … innocent victims,” the embassy wrote on its official Facebook page.

“It extends its sincere condolences to the families of the victims, including dear Syrian citizens, and to the friendly Swedish people, and we wish a speedy recovery to the injured.”

Among the victims was Salim Iskef, 28, who phoned his fiancee from the school and told her he had been shot. “He called me and said, “I’ve been shot, they shot us.’ He said he loves me and that’s the last thing I heard,” Kareen Elia, 24, told SVT through tears. During the video call she could see somebody lying still beside him and blood on his hand.

The couple had planned to get married on 25 July. They had booked the venue and Elia, who moved to Sweden from Syria in 2015, had tried on her wedding dress.

She still does not know what happened to him and has not received an official death notice from police.

“I still want to believe that he might come home. We can’t sleep, we stand by the window waiting for him to come home. No one wants to believe that he is dead,” she told the broadcaster. “If he is not alive, we just want to see his body.”

A police spokesperson said they were unable to confirm any of the names of those who had died because the identification process was continuing.

Until now, police had revealed little about the victims or the gunman, other than that he was believed to have acted alone.

The suspected gunman, who was among the dead, was named in media reports as Rickard Andersson, 35, a former student of the school who lived locally. He is understood to have attended some maths classes at the school a few years ago and had been unemployed for a decade.

On Thursday, police again declined to confirm his identity until they had DNA confirmation. They previously said the suspect had no known connection to criminal gangs and that there was nothing to suggest he acted on ideological grounds.

Police said the suspect had a licence for four weapons, all of which have been seized by police and three of which were next to him at the scene when officers secured him.

Bergqvist said: “What we can say is that there is information that he may in some way be connected to the school, that he may have attended this school previously.”

Police said although “the picture is starting to clear” in the investigation, they were “not ready to give detailed answers. We want to be sure before we speak”. They said they had searched the suspect’s home, examined his phones and had been scouring film and sound clips submitted by witnesses.

They said officers were met by an “inferno” when they arrived at the school about five minutes after the alarm was raised at 12.33pm on Tuesday. Lars Wirén, Örebro’s police chief, said: “They [police] tell of what can be described as an inferno with dead people, injured people, screams and smoke.”

Shortly after they entered, they could see smoke rising and thought they were being shot at by an approaching gunman, he said. “They see a perpetrator armed with a rifle-like weapon.”

Magdalena Andersson, the leader of the main opposition Social Democrats and a former Swedish prime minister, said the school was known for having a diverse student body.

“We have to wait until the police investigation is finished to know anything about motive and also when they can say who this person was,” she said. “But what is well known is that this is a school with students from many parts of the world.”

Without the fast reaction of police, witnesses told her when she visited Örebro on Wednesday, the death toll could have been considerably higher.

The election in 2022 of Sweden’s Moderates-led coalition government, which depends on the support of the far-right Sweden Democrats, has led to increased anti-immigrant policies in Sweden, contributing to racist rhetoric and social polarisation.

Andersson said: “As a Social Democrat I have spent the last two years arguing that we need to keep together in our society. We have nothing to win from more division or more polarisation in our society. When we have done best in our country is when we have been able to stick together, work together and take care of each other.”

She called for immediate reconsideration of gun laws. “What we already know is that there are too many guns that are available in our society, so we have to do something about that.”

She also called for EU action to curb social media platforms that she said served up far too much violence to young people and children. “Not only in Sweden but all over the world, there is too much material on social media platforms that are romanticising violence. And the way the algorithm works, too many of our children, young people and others meet violence every day when they open their telephone.”

Since the shooting there have been growing calls – including from the education minister, Lotta Edholm, for changes to Sweden’s culture of open schools, which can make it easy for members of the public to walk into a school without being challenged.

A new poll suggests Republican support for Elon Musk’s upending of US government systems has been shaken, even as the world’s richest man aims a wrecking ball at even more federal agencies including the labor department.

The number of Republicans who want Musk and his self-styled “department of government efficiency” (Doge) to have “a lot” of influence in the Trump administration has fallen significantly to 26%, according to the Economist/YouGov poll conducted this week, reported by the Hill.

The same poll taken in the days immediately following Trump’s November election win revealed that enthusiasm among Republicans for Musk’s role stood at 47%.

The disquiet also appears to have spread to a number of Republican senators, who have begun voicing alarm at Musk’s tightening grip. The billionaire has moved to shutter the US Agency for International Development (USAid), and accessed payment systems and workers’ personal data at the US Treasury, prompting a lawsuit and an order from justice department lawyers to back off, at least temporarily.

On Wednesday, agents of Doge spread across several more government agencies seeking access to data, the Washington Post reported, including the headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

On Wednesday night the Doge team, said to include young and inexperienced coders and engineers as young as 19, visited the US Department of Labor. Earlier in the week Doge workers entered at least two offices of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), making personnel changes and accessing IT systems.

Musk’s next big target, meanwhile, appears to be the Department of Education, which Trump has repeatedly said he wants to shut down. Similar to actions taken at other federal agencies and departments, employees were told not to come to work or placed on leave, and dozens of workers were locked out of government email accounts and other computer systems.

The Trump administration has set a Thursday night deadline for roughly 2 million employees in the federal government to surrender to buyouts or face the risk of being fired without compensation, although critics say there is no guarantee that those who accept will see any money either.

Democrats say Musk’s infiltration of the federal government, through an unofficial agency with no constitutional mandate or congressional oversight, amounts to a coup. Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate minority leader, told the chamber on Tuesday that an unelected “shadow government” was conducting a hostile takeover and usurping Trump’s authority.

“Whatever Doge is doing, it is certainly not what democracy looks like, or has ever looked like in the grand history of this country, because democracy does not work in the shadows, democracy does not skirt the rule of law,” Schumer said.

The White House, in an apparent effort to provide cover for Musk’s operations, said the SpaceX and Tesla founder had been designated an unsalaried “special government employee” at Trump’s direction to root out inefficiency and waste in government spending.

Trump himself has told reporters Musk “can’t do and won’t do anything without our approval”.

But unease has been mounting among elected officials, alongside a growing number of lawsuits. On Wednesday night, justice department attorneys agreed to an order temporarily restricting Doge staffers from accessing the treasury department’s payment system. That followed a lawsuit from union members and retirees claiming Musk’s team violated federal privacy laws.

In the House on Wednesday, the Washington Democratic congressman Mark Pocan filed legislation called the Eliminate Looting of Our Nation by Mitigating Unethical State Kleptocracy Act, AKA the Elon Musk Act.

“Elon Musk is ripping us off and like millions of Americans across the country, I’m pissed. I’m taking action [to prevent] grifters like him from getting richer while pillaging our tax dollars for himself,” Pocan said.

Delia Smith demands one minute of simmering plus six of standing with the pan lid on. Heston Blumenthal brings his to the boil from cold. Now scientists have weighed in on the perfect way to boil an egg, and the results are egg-stremely tasty.

From a materials perspective, cooking an egg within its shell is more complicated than it might at first seem. Chefs are challenged by the fact that an egg’s components: yolk and white, are made of different proteins that denature and thicken at different temperatures: 85C (185F) for the white and 65C (149F) for the yolk.

Also problematic, is that the yolk cannot be heated separately from the white, unless they are literally separated and cooked in different vessels. Because of this, the white and outer sphere of yolk are often overcooked, while the centre might be underdone.

In 2002, the French molecular gastronomist Hervé This proposed an alternative solution: cooking the egg in a water bath at 65C for at least an hour. This “sous vide” method imbues the yolk with what he claims is an unparalleled flavour and texture. However, it also means the white does not fully set.

The new approach, known as “periodic cooking”, was inspired by a technique previously developed to create layers within plastic objects. “It enables us to have one material, in one piece, but with different structures and therefore different properties,” says Ernesto Di Maio, a materials scientist at the University of Naples Federico II, whose lab invented it.

It was a friend who suggested he try applying it to food. “After all, our famous, superstar chef in Italy, Carlo Cracco, sells eggs for €80 each,” Di Maio says.

His PhD student Emilia Di Lorenzo mathematically modelled the transfer of energy through the different layers of an egg, plus their cooking dynamics, to come up with a basic method. She then refined it using computational fluid dynamics software.

The technique involves alternating an egg between a pan of boiling water kept at 100C and a bowl kept at 30C every two minutes, for 32 minutes (eight cycles in total).

By interrupting the transfer of heat from shell to centre, the yolk’s temperature never rises above 65C. “It only reaches a gel-like state,” says Di Lorenzo. The research was published in Communications Engineering.

Trying to replicate this in my own kitchen was no yoke.

I borrowed an aquarium heater from my son’s fish tank to set up the 30C water bath, but each time I reintroduced the hot eggs, the temperature rose. This meant I needed to reset the stopwatch, quickly add some additional cold water, and keep a record of how many transfers I’d done – all before the next two minute timer went off – and then transfer the eggs back to the pan, without dropping any.

As time ticked by, I grew increasingly sceptical – how on earth was the yolk going to remain soft, when my eggs had spent a total of 16 minutes in boiling water?

But science won out. My first attempt was, in fact, too liquid, which Di Maio attributed to using too large an egg. “We based these calculations on a 68g egg. If your egg is much larger, you should increase the cooking time by about 20 seconds each cycle,” he suggested.

On my second attempt, I cracked it: the white was gelatinous; the yolk a gel-like liquid. Compared with a control egg cooked the Delia way, the periodic yolk was creamier with a greater depth of flavour.

Di Lorenzo has also used nuclear magnetic resonance and high-resolution mass spectrometry to analyse the nutritional composition of periodic eggs, against sous vide and soft-boiled ones. Doing so suggested that the periodically cooked yolks contained more polyphenols – micronutrients with purported health benefits.

Di Maio says he now boils all his eggs this way, and his friends and family thank him for it: “Of course, it takes time. But I think it’s good to dedicate some time for the people you love.”

I ask Di Lorenzo if she feels the same way. She pauses, and looks a little sheepish: “I don’t really like eggs,” she says.

A run of record-breaking global temperatures has continued, even with a La Niña weather pattern cooling the tropical Pacific.

The Copernicus Climate Change Service said last month was the warmest January on record, with surface – air temperatures 1.75C above preindustrial levels.

The EU-funded Earth observation programme highlighted wetter-than-average conditions in eastern Australia and drier-than-average conditions in other parts of the country.

Samantha Burgess, the strategic lead for climate at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, said: “January 2025 is another surprising month, continuing the record temperatures observed throughout the last two years … Copernicus will continue to closely monitor ocean temperatures and their influence on our evolving climate throughout 2025.” Sea-surface temperatures remained unusually high in many ocean basins and seas.

January marked the 18th month of the past 19 to record global-average surface temperatures above the 1.5C preindustrial level. Under the Paris climate agreement, world leaders said they would try to prevent global temperatures rising by more than 1.5C – but the threshold was based on long-term multidecadal warming and not short-term monthly temperatures.

Climate scientists had expected this exceptional spell to subside after a warming El Niño event peaked in January 2024 and conditions shifted to an opposing, cooling La Niña phase.

But the heat has lingered at record or near-record levels, prompting debate about what other factors could be driving it to the top end of expectations.

Julien Nicolas, a climate scientist at Copernicus, told Agence France-Presse: “This is what makes it a bit of a surprise: you’re not seeing this cooling effect, or temporary brake at least, on the global temperature that we were expecting to see.”

La Niña is expected to be weak, and Copernicus said prevailing temperatures in parts of the equatorial Pacific Ocean suggested a slowing or stalling of the move towards the cooling phenomenon. Nicolas said it could disappear by March.

Last month, Copernicus said global temperatures averaged across 2023 and 2024 had exceeded 1.5C for the first time. This did not represent a permanent breach of the long-term 1.5C target under the Paris climate accord but it was a clear sign the limit was being tested.

Scientists say every fraction of a degree of warming above 1.5C increases the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events such as heatwaves, heavy rainfall and droughts.

Copernicus said Arctic sea ice in January hit a monthly record low. Analysis from the US this week showed it was the second-lowest in that dataset. Overall, 2025 is not expected to follow 2023 and 2024 into the history books: scientists predict it will rank the third-hottest year yet.

Copernicus said it would closely monitor ocean temperatures for hints about how the climate might behave. Oceans are an important climate regulator and carbon sink, and cooler waters can absorb greater amounts of heat from the atmosphere, helping to lower air temperatures. They also store 90% of the excess heat trapped by humanity’s release of greenhouse gases.

Nicolas said: “This heat is bound to resurface periodically. I think that’s also one of the questions: is this what has been happening over the past couple of years?”

Sea-surface temperatures were exceptionally warm in 2023 and 2024, and Copernicus said readings in January were the second highest on record. “That is the thing that is a little puzzling – why they remain so warm,” Nicolas said.

Scientists are unanimous that burning fossil fuels has driven long-term global heating, and that natural climate variability can also influence temperatures from one year to the next.

But natural warming cycles such as El Niño could not alone explain what had taken place in the atmosphere and seas, and answers were being sought elsewhere.

One theory is that a global shift to cleaner shipping fuels in 2020 accelerated warming by reducing sulphur emissions that make clouds more mirror-like and reflective of sunlight.

In December, another peer-reviewed paper looked at whether a reduction in low-lying clouds had let more heat reach the Earth’s surface. “It’s really still a matter of debate,” Nicolas said.

The EU monitor uses billions of measurements from satellites, ships, aircraft and weather stations to aid its calculations. Its records go back to 1940, but other sources of climate data – such as ice cores, tree rings and coral skeletons – enable scientists to expand their conclusions using evidence from much further in the past.

Scientists say the current period is likely to be the warmest the planet has been in 125,000 years.

A run of record-breaking global temperatures has continued, even with a La Niña weather pattern cooling the tropical Pacific.

The Copernicus Climate Change Service said last month was the warmest January on record, with surface – air temperatures 1.75C above preindustrial levels.

The EU-funded Earth observation programme highlighted wetter-than-average conditions in eastern Australia and drier-than-average conditions in other parts of the country.

Samantha Burgess, the strategic lead for climate at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, said: “January 2025 is another surprising month, continuing the record temperatures observed throughout the last two years … Copernicus will continue to closely monitor ocean temperatures and their influence on our evolving climate throughout 2025.” Sea-surface temperatures remained unusually high in many ocean basins and seas.

January marked the 18th month of the past 19 to record global-average surface temperatures above the 1.5C preindustrial level. Under the Paris climate agreement, world leaders said they would try to prevent global temperatures rising by more than 1.5C – but the threshold was based on long-term multidecadal warming and not short-term monthly temperatures.

Climate scientists had expected this exceptional spell to subside after a warming El Niño event peaked in January 2024 and conditions shifted to an opposing, cooling La Niña phase.

But the heat has lingered at record or near-record levels, prompting debate about what other factors could be driving it to the top end of expectations.

Julien Nicolas, a climate scientist at Copernicus, told Agence France-Presse: “This is what makes it a bit of a surprise: you’re not seeing this cooling effect, or temporary brake at least, on the global temperature that we were expecting to see.”

La Niña is expected to be weak, and Copernicus said prevailing temperatures in parts of the equatorial Pacific Ocean suggested a slowing or stalling of the move towards the cooling phenomenon. Nicolas said it could disappear by March.

Last month, Copernicus said global temperatures averaged across 2023 and 2024 had exceeded 1.5C for the first time. This did not represent a permanent breach of the long-term 1.5C target under the Paris climate accord but it was a clear sign the limit was being tested.

Scientists say every fraction of a degree of warming above 1.5C increases the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events such as heatwaves, heavy rainfall and droughts.

Copernicus said Arctic sea ice in January hit a monthly record low. Analysis from the US this week showed it was the second-lowest in that dataset. Overall, 2025 is not expected to follow 2023 and 2024 into the history books: scientists predict it will rank the third-hottest year yet.

Copernicus said it would closely monitor ocean temperatures for hints about how the climate might behave. Oceans are an important climate regulator and carbon sink, and cooler waters can absorb greater amounts of heat from the atmosphere, helping to lower air temperatures. They also store 90% of the excess heat trapped by humanity’s release of greenhouse gases.

Nicolas said: “This heat is bound to resurface periodically. I think that’s also one of the questions: is this what has been happening over the past couple of years?”

Sea-surface temperatures were exceptionally warm in 2023 and 2024, and Copernicus said readings in January were the second highest on record. “That is the thing that is a little puzzling – why they remain so warm,” Nicolas said.

Scientists are unanimous that burning fossil fuels has driven long-term global heating, and that natural climate variability can also influence temperatures from one year to the next.

But natural warming cycles such as El Niño could not alone explain what had taken place in the atmosphere and seas, and answers were being sought elsewhere.

One theory is that a global shift to cleaner shipping fuels in 2020 accelerated warming by reducing sulphur emissions that make clouds more mirror-like and reflective of sunlight.

In December, another peer-reviewed paper looked at whether a reduction in low-lying clouds had let more heat reach the Earth’s surface. “It’s really still a matter of debate,” Nicolas said.

The EU monitor uses billions of measurements from satellites, ships, aircraft and weather stations to aid its calculations. Its records go back to 1940, but other sources of climate data – such as ice cores, tree rings and coral skeletons – enable scientists to expand their conclusions using evidence from much further in the past.

Scientists say the current period is likely to be the warmest the planet has been in 125,000 years.

The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has accused South Africa of “anti-Americanism” and refused to attend a G20 meeting in Johannesburg later this month, as diplomatic ties sour between the two countries under Donald Trump’s administration.

Rubio made the announcement on X, where he repeated the US president’s unfounded claim that South Africa was expropriating private property.

“South Africa is doing very bad things. Expropriating private property. Using G20 to promote ‘solidarity, equality, & sustainability.’ In other words: DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] and climate change,” Rubio said in a post on X. “My job is to advance America’s national interests, not waste taxpayer money or coddle anti-Americanism.”

Elon Musk, the South African-born billionaire and Trump adviser leading a drastic attack on US government spending and staffing, including on foreign aid, replied with two American flag emojis.

Rubio’s snub of South Africa, which this year is chairing the G20 forum of large economies, the EU and African Union, comes after Trump said on Sunday without evidence that South Africa was “confiscating land” and that he was stopping US funding pending an investigation.

South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, last month signed a law allowing for land expropriation with no compensation in limited circumstances. Politicians have argued it is similar to countries including the US, where expropriating land with “just compensation” is allowed for public projects such as road building.

More than three decades after apartheid ended, land ownership remains concentrated in South Africa’s white minority. The government has bought and redistributed 7.8m hectares (19m acres), while courts have ordered a limited number of returns of land to people displaced by apartheid.

“There is no arbitrary dispossession of land/private property,” South Africa’s foreign minister, Ronald Lamola, said on X. “Our G20 Presidency, is not confined to just climate change but also equitable treatment for nations of the Global South, ensuring equal global system for all. We remain committed to engaging the government of the USA.”

The US relationship with South Africa deteriorated under the previous US president, Joe Biden, when South Africa refused to take sides in the Russia-Ukraine war but continued to play an active part in the Brics bloc, originally made up of Brazil, Russia, India and China.

The US also said South Africa’s international court of justice case against US ally Israel, accusing it of committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, was “meritless”. The case is yet to be decided.

Musk, who like other former PayPal executives and wealthy Trump allies Peter Thiel and David Sacks spent at least part of their childhood in apartheid-ruled South Africa, has accused South Africa of having “openly racist laws”.

While Musk’s Starlink internet provider operates or is due to launch in 16 African countries, it is not available in South Africa, where foreign investors must cede 30% of equity to Black shareholders to get a telecoms licence.

Nissan is preparing to pulling out of merger talks with Honda in order to try to find another partner to help with the shift towards electric vehicles.

The two Japanese automotive firms revealed in December that they were considering a £46bn merger, alongside Mitsubishi, to create the world’s third-largest carmaker in terms of annual sales. However, the talks have stuttered amid tensions over the perceived imbalance between the parties.

Nissan is looking for a new partner, as the talks with Honda have stalled, according to a person with knowledge of the company’s strategy.

Nissan’s search for partners could broaden beyond the automotive sector to technology companies. One possible option is understood to be the Chinese contract manufacturer Hon Hai Precision Industry, also known as Foxconn, which produces iPhones for Apple.

Openness to a Foxconn tie-up among some board members was first reported by the Financial Times and came after the Chinese company sparked merger talks between Honda and Nissan with an approach to buy Renault’s stake in Nissan. However, Bloomberg reported that a US tech partner would be preferred.

Nissan’s share price rose by 7.3% on Thursday. Honda’s share price fell by 4%.

The Honda-Nissan merger aimed to create a larger company capable of investing more in the transition to EV technology as traditional manufacturers in Europe and Japan raced to respond to the rising influence of China’s newer electric carmakers. However, the merger would have had to overcome several difficulties, not least the divergence of fortunes between Japan’s second- and third-largest carmakers.

Honda and Nissan both have large production operations, having produced 3.7m and 3.1m cars apiece in 2024. However, Honda is five times larger by market value. Nissan has struggled with years of turmoil and slumping profits. It has been forced to offer big discounts on its ageing product lineup to attract buyers, particularly in its key North American market.

“Nissan’s need for a strong partner remains, but its negotiating position is impaired by its weak profit outlook and stock price,” said Todd Duvick, the head of autos research at the rating agency CreditSights.

He added that it would be understandable for Honda to seek an acquisition, which would “likely lead to a lot more Nissan job losses than a merger, especially at the executive level”.

A takeover rather than a merger would also limit the scope for existing Nissan shareholders to gain from any recovery in the company’s performance. Renault’s shareholding will complicate matters further. It is a legacy of the alliance between Renault, Nissan and Mitsubishi that was masterminded by Carlos Ghosn, the former chief executive who is now living in Lebanon after fleeing arrest in Japan. Nissan endured years of chaos and infighting and chaos after his arrest.

Nissan’s chief executive, Makoto Uchida, said in November that the carmaker needed to cut 9,000 jobs globally as part of turnaround efforts.

Both Honda and Nissan are due to publish earnings on 13 February. Nissan declined to comment.

A Honda spokesperson said the companies were “advancing various discussions” in order to “establish a direction and make an announcement around mid-February”.

A French court has ruled that the seaside city of Biarritz must rename its La Negresse historic district, possibly named after a black woman, after a case brought by activists who argued it was an outdated legacy of colonialism.

The ruling caps a long-running attempt by activists to force authorities in the resort on the Atlantic coast to drop what they say are “racist and sexist” placenames.

The activists want city officials to rename the La Negresse district as well as one of the city’s streets, rue de la Negresse.

La Negresse is the feminine version of the French word for negro (negre), translating into English as “negro woman”.

In 2020, the Memoires et Partages (Memories and Sharing) association that fights legacies of slavery and colonialism asked Biarritz’s mayor, Maïder Arosteguy, to consider scrapping the names.

The town hall refused, prompting the activists to launch legal proceedings.

The district is believed to be named after a black woman, possibly a former slave, who worked in an inn there in the 19th century. Activists say the moniker is associated with a “crime against humanity that saw millions of Africans deported to work as slaves on colonial plantations”.

On Thursday, the Bordeaux administrative court of appeal sided with the association. The court said in a statement that the origin of the name was not clear.

The court said, citing historians, that the neighbourhood previously known as “Harausta hamlet” might have been named after a “very dark-skinned woman” running a local inn. Other sources attribute the origin of the name to a Gascon expression referring to clay soil found locally, the statement said.

The court ruled that, whatever the supposed origin of the name, “the term ‘La Negresse’ today evokes, in a demeaning way, the racial origin of a woman whose identity has not been formally identified.”

The term is “thus likely to undermine the dignity of the human person” and may be perceived “as being offensive to people of African origin”.

In 2023, a court in the neighbouring town of Pau initially rejected the association’s request.

The earlier ruling acknowledged the evolution of the term “towards a pejorative connotation” but said that the names could not be seen as “an attack on the principle of safeguarding human dignity”. The association then appealed.

In 2001, France formally recognised the slave trade and slavery as a crime against humanity.

A makeup artist on The Brutalist tried to remove Adrien Brody’s nose believing it to be a prosthetic, the actor has revealed.

Speaking to Jimmy Fallon earlier this week, Brody said that a new makeup artist began “busily working away with a solvent on my nose”.

Brody continued: “She’s just working away. And I said: ‘Are you trying to remove that?’ And she said: ‘Yes.’ And I said: ‘That doesn’t come off!”

The actor had been shooting scenes which occur late in the film, in which his character, a Hungarian architect, is elderly and using a wheelchair.

These scenes required considerably ageing makeup and hair dye, as well as light prosthetics. Brody said the makeup artist apologised, before adding: “This is going in my diary.”

Brody is frontrunner to win the best actor Oscar for his role in the film, 22 years after his victory for playing another Holocaust survivor, in Roman Polanski’s The Pianist.

Brady Corbet’s film The Brutalist is nominated for 10 Oscars, including best picture, best director and acting nods for Brody’s co-stars Felicity Jones and Guy Pearce.

Brody had his nose accidentally broken during a fight scene on Spike Lee’s 1999 film Summer of Sam, and has broken his nose on two other separate occasions.

The Brutalist makes frequent reference to his distinctive feature, with the suggestion that it was broken as a consequence of ill-treatment by the Nazis. Brody’s character, László Tóth, is not a real person, but Corbet took inspiration for him from the Hungarian postwar designer and architect Marcel Lajos Breuer.

Actors have frequently donned prosthetic noses the better to resemble historical figures in awards-bait biopics. A nose also loomed large in last year’s Oscars discourse: the false one worn by Bradley Cooper as Leonard Bernstein in Maestro.

Some critics felt its size was antisemitic – an accusation rejected by the conductor’s children, who collaborated on the film and said: “It happens to be true that Leonard Bernstein had a nice, big nose.”

Meryl Streep’s delicately proportioned false nose as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady helped the actor take her third Oscar in 2011. Nicole Kidman’s more substantial appendage in Virginia Woolf biopic The Hours secured Kidman her first win in 2003.

Announcing the win at the podium, presenter Denzel Washington said: “The Oscar goes to, by a nose, Nicole Kidman.”