The US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, has said “everything is on the table” to bring peace to Ukraine and suggested reducing the number of American troops in Europe could be part of any deal.

European leaders are reeling from several abrupt US moves since Wednesday in relation to the Ukraine war and the continent’s security, which has been underpinned by the US since Nato was formed at the end of the second world war.

Speaking at the end of a Nato defence ministers meeting in Brussels, his first as Pentagon chief, Hegseth insisted the US had not already given too much away when he had said on Wednesday that Ukraine could not restore its pre-2014 borders – and instead emphasised the role of the US president in talks on the country’s future.

Hegseth said Donald Trump was “the perfect dealmaker at the table” who would not rule anything out in his efforts to try to end the near three-year full-scale war that began when Russia attacked Ukraine in February 2022.

“These negotiations are led by President Trump. Everything is on the table in his conversation with Vladimir Putin and [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy,” Hegseth told a press conference at the end of the meeting. “What he decides to allow and not allow is at the purview of the leader of the free world, of President Trump.”

Trump unexpectedly announced on Wednesday he had spoken to Putin for more than an hour and would begin peace talks with Russia and Ukraine, while Hegseth ruled out Nato membership for Ukraine and the restoration of Crimea and other territories occupied by Moscow since 2014.

On Thursday the US president repeated that he was convinced Putin “wants peace”. He also called for Russia’s return to the G7 group of industrialised nations, saying its expulsion was a mistake. Russia was suspended from the group – then the G8 – in 2014, after the annexation of Crimea, and it announced its permanent withdrawal in 2017.

Hegseth had also told allies the US was no longer “primarily focused” on European security.

The Kremlin welcomed the developments on Ukraine, but the statements prompted a sharp push back from European politicians in public and private at the Nato meeting, who voiced concern that too much had been conceded by the US already and that Ukraine and Europe were at risk of being excluded from discussions.

Zelenskyy warned world leaders “against trusting Putin’s claims of readiness to end the war” and said Kyiv could not accept as an independent country “any agreements without us”. He said he had been told by Trump on Wednesday, after the US president had spoken to Putin, that he wanted to speak to the Russian and Ukrainian leaders at the same time.

But the Kremlin said Ukraine and Europe would be relegated to a parallel track in talks, and that Trump and Putin would meet in a few months, possibly in Saudi Arabia. “There will be a bilateral Russian-American track of this dialogue, and a track that will be related to Ukraine’s involvement,” said Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesperson.

Hegseth was asked whether Europe should be prepared for the US to cut the 100,000 troop numbers it has deployed on the continent, and he appeared to link deployments to negotiations about Ukraine.

“We have not said in any way we are abandoning our allies in Europe. There have been no decisions on troop levels, but that’s a discussion to be had by the commander-in-chief in these high-stakes negotiations,” Hegseth said.

Russia did demand before the invasion in December 2021 that Nato cease all military activity in eastern Europe – and is still demanding that Ukraine cede further territory, reduce its army to a token level, and be prevented from joining the western military alliance in return for peace.

About a sixth of Ukraine’s territory is occupied by Russia, including Crimea, which was annexed by Moscow in 2014, and large parts of the east and south that were mostly seized after the full-scale invasion in 2022. Kyiv’s leaders have signalled it may be willing to negotiate over territory, but Ukraine and its allies were formally committed to trying to restore its internationally recognised, pre-2014 borders.

Those present at the Nato talks said Hegseth had come under pressure on Thursday from “a chorus of voices” to ensure Ukraine was properly represented in the peace discussions – while a day earlier at a Ukraine-related meeting he was told not to halt all US military aid to Ukraine.

John Healey, the UK defence secretary, said Hegseth, a Fox News commentator, had sought to reassure allies that some degree of military aid would continue. “We know who the good guys are and who the bad guys are,” Hegseth said behind closed doors, according to Healey.

The Kremlin also said it was impressed by the US positioning now that Trump had taken over the White House and that it believed there was “political will” on both sides to reach a negotiated settlement that was absent under Joe Biden.

“The previous US administration held the view that everything needed to be done to keep the war going. The current administration, as far as we understand, adheres to the point of view that everything must be done to stop the war and for peace to prevail,” Peskov said.

The EU foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, said Ukraine and Europe needed to be part of the peace discussions. “Any deal behind our backs will not work,” she said, and warned that too much had been conceded in public by the US.

“Why are we giving them [Russia] everything that they want even before the negotiations have been started?” said Kallas, a former Estonian prime minister. “It’s appeasement. It has never worked.”

The German defence minister, Boris Pistorius, also complained that too much had been given away. “In my view it would have been better to speak about a possible Nato membership for Ukraine or possible losses of territory at the negotiating table,” Pistorius said.

The Nato secretary general, Mark Rutte, a former Dutch prime minister adept at smoothing over differences between Europe and Washington, said it was important Moscow understood that the west remained united, noting that Ukraine had never been promised that a peace deal would include Nato membership.

The German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, speaking in Berlin, said he believed the war must end but forcing a deal on Ukraine would not bring lasting peace. He said that while he supported Trump talking to Putin – and had done so himself in the past – the goal of such conversations was to make clear to the Russian leader “our expectations of a just peace in Ukraine and a return to a European security order in which borders cannot be changed by force”.

He rejected “any solution that would lead to an uncoupling of European and American security”, saying that “only one person would profit from this – President Putin”.

Closing the Nato meeting, Hegseth said he was committed to “make Nato great again” by demanding that other member countries lift their defence spending to 5% of GDP – which would require dramatic increases. The UK would have to more than double its existing spend of 2.33%.

“The peace dividend has to end,” Hegseth said, though he refused to say if the US would increase its own defence spending from 3.4% of GDP. “3.4% is a very robust investment,” Hegseth said, but added: “Ultimately we have our own budgetary considerations.”

Vladimir Putin on Wednesday achieved his most significant diplomatic breakthrough yet in a three-year war that, at times, seemed to threaten his regime.

During a 90-minute call with Donald Trump, Putin felt his long-sought vision taking shape: two great powers determining Ukraine’s fate over Kyiv’s head – and that of its European allies.

“A direct call with Trump was precisely what Putin had been waiting for,” said a source in the Russian foreign policy establishment. “It is only the start of the negotiations, but Putin has won the first round,” the source added.

Despite catastrophic setbacks at the start of his invasion, record losses, and mounting economic strain, the Russian president will feel that momentum has firmly shifted in his favour, with growing hopes in Moscow that the Trump administration could help achieve Russia’s objectives in Ukraine.

“Putin remained patient and didn’t bend. Instead, he waited for the world to change around him,” the foreign policy source said, referring to Trump’s election and his administration’s radically different foreign policy outlook.

The call between the two leaders took place just hours after the US defence secretary told officials in Brussels that Ukraine would need to abandon its ambitions of joining Nato and accept territorial losses, in effect conceding to some of Russia’s demands even before negotiations began.

Viewed as a whole, the rapidly unfolding events will probably be seen in Moscow as the culmination of Putin’s months-long diplomatic overtures to Trump, during which he lauded the president’s braveness and intelligence and echoed some of his favourite narratives, including unfounded claims that the 2020 US election was stolen from Trump.

“Now, Putin’s main focus is Trump – everyone else is irrelevant,” the foreign policy source said. “His next move is to secure a closed-door meeting with Trump, where he can further press his case,” the source added, saying they believed the two leaders could soon meet for a summit in Saudi Arabia.

The mood in Moscow’s political circles was buoyant on Thursday morning. Several pro-Kremlin observers pointed to the timing of the call between the two leaders, noting that Trump only informed Volodymyr Zelenskyy afterwards, in effect imposing the terms of the conversation on the Ukrainian president.

“Zelenskyy had repeatedly urged Trump to speak with him first before engaging with Putin. Instead, Trump did the exact opposite,” gloated Sergei Markov, a popular Russian commentator.

Many also celebrated Putin’s invitation for the US president to visit Moscow, which the Kremlin later hinted was for the 9 May Victory Day parade.

The once-unthinkable image of a US leader seated beside Putin, watching Russian soldiers who fought in Ukraine march across Red Square in the country’s grandest display of power, no longer feels so far-fetched. If it came to pass, it would deal a devastating blow to the west’s three-year effort to diplomatically isolate the Russian president.

“The promise to exchange visits is a victory for Putin. Any dictatorship sees a visit from the US president as the highest form of international legitimacy, almost a magical ritual that lifts a diplomatic curse,” said Alexander Baunov, a political analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace thinktank.

Russian officials were quick to highlight Europe’s complete exclusion from the peace talks, as European leaders struggled to come to terms with being sidelined.

“Frigid spinster Europe is mad with jealousy and rage,” said the former president Russian Dmitry Medvedev. “It’s been shown its real place; its time is over.”

Summing up the day, the state TV host Evgeny Popov declared on Wednesday that Trump was in effect doing Moscow’s job by tearing the western world apart. “We wanted to chainsaw the western world into pieces, but he decided to cut through it himself,” Popov cheered.

In a tangible sign of optimism from Moscow’s business community, the Moscow exchange surged more than 6% on Thursday, while the rouble climbed to its strongest level since the summer. Shares of big Russian companies, including Gazprom and Rostelecom, jumped by more than 8%, as businesses anticipated that a potential peace deal could reverse some of the thousands of sanctions imposed on the country.

“Investors dreamed about this scenario but did not really believe it was possible,” the Cifa Broker chief analyst, Ovanes Oganisyan, told the business newspaper Kommersant.

Still, observers in and outside Moscow believe negotiations could be drawn out and fraught with uncertainty, with Russian success far from guaranteed. In its readout on Wednesday, the Kremlin struck a sober tone while maintaining a maximalist stance, with Putin saying he had “mentioned the need to eliminate the root causes of the conflict”.

In Kremlin parlance, this signals that Putin is likely to push for greater territorial control in Ukraine beyond what Russia now holds, as well as demand regime change in Kyiv – conditions that even a Trump administration may struggle to accept.

Few believe Putin would ever agree to the prospect of tens of thousands of European peacekeeping troops on Russia’s border, a scenario proposed by Hegseth on Wednesday.

“The positions of the parties differ significantly and, at this moment, seem incompatible,” said Tatiana Stanovaya, a prominent Russian political analyst and the founder of R Politik, a political analysis company.

“For Putin, a real solution means a Ukraine that is ‘friendly’ to Russia – deprived of military capability, which has a rewritten constitution and guarantees non-membership in Nato.”

Stanovaya said Putin was “fully prepared” for the talks to collapse and to press ahead with the fighting, confident in his battlefield superiority and bolstered by Trump’s reluctance to supply Ukraine with additional weapons. “From the Kremlin’s perspective, there is nothing the west can do that would reverse Russia’s territorial gains and prevent Ukraine’s collapse in the long run,” she said.

There were also grumblings about the phone call and the possibility of peace talks from Russia’s far-right camp, which has gained significant influence over the course of the war. “Trump will ‘allow’ Russia to take what it has conquered – but no more, of course. Meanwhile, he’ll offer Ukraine some guarantees,” said the prominent Russian ultranationalist writer Zakhar Prilepin on his Telegram channel.

“He’ll plant himself right in the middle of our Ukraine. Let me remind you, all of Ukraine is ours. All of Ukraine is Russian land,” Prilepin said.

Putin has largely embraced Russia’s fiercely pro-war faction, though he has, at times, purged those who have criticised his leadership for being too lenient in prosecuting the war.

Still, for now, optimism in Moscow prevails. “At times, many in the elites questioned whether it was wise for Putin to start the war or not settle for peace earlier,” said a well-connected businessman in Moscow. “Now, few are asking that question – his gamble is starting to pay off.”

The start of the Munich security conference has a habit of being disrupted by a display of power by Vladimir Putin. In 2022, the transatlantic security establishment gathered in the knowledge that Putin was days from launching his attack on Kyiv. In February 2024, the opposition leader Alexei Navalny died in disputed circumstances in a Russian jail and this year Russia’s leader is on the brink of opening talks with Donald Trump that many analysts predict will end with Russia not just gaining Ukrainian territory but dismembering Ukraine as a sovereign independent state.

For Europe it is a humiliation. And yet little that Trump or his defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, said on Wednesday about their approach to a ceasefire including the US’s refusal to commit further resources to Ukraine could have come as a shock. Indeed Europe largely has only itself to blame.

Since the Nato meeting in Newport, Wales, in 2014 that set the target of defence spending reaching 2% of GDP, Europe collectively has had numerous wake-up calls, commissioned strategic reviews, studies of collective defence capability, and generalised warnings from across the Atlantic. Hardly a year went by without the French president, Emmanuel Macron, or the Nato secretary general reaching ever deeper into the lexicon of doom about the alliance’s brain-dead status.

After the shock of Trump’s first term, and the dawning realisation that he might return, the EU bureaucracy spoke of the need to Trump-proof Europe – yet with the steam train coming down the track the EU bureaucracy settled for one more strategic discussion and never reacted with the speed and decisiveness required. There was a collective failure of imagination.

As Europe now faces the challenge of being able to put a peacekeeping force into the field, the former MI6 chief Alex Younger admits Europe simply does not have the capabilities to operate without the US. Volodymyr Zelenskyy said as much in his Guardian interview when he said European security guarantees without the help of the US were worthless.

There are many rational explanations for this shortfall, notably the belated recognition about the scale of the Russian threat. From 1999 to 2021 the European allies of Nato increased their deterrence investment by 23.9%. In the same period the US increased its figure by 65.7%, Russia by 292% and China by 592%.

Two months after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the EU responded with the portentous Versailles declaration stating: “Russia’s war of aggression constitutes a tectonic shift in European history. At our meeting in Versailles, we discussed how the EU can live up to its responsibilities in this new reality, protecting our citizens, values, democracies, and our European model.”

The European Defence Agency was given until May 2022 to spell out the gaps in defence capabilities, and the leaders said they looked forward to the publication of the European Strategic Compass “to provide guidance for action across these security and defence dimensions to make the European Union a stronger and more capable security provider”. If European Commission photocopiers could win wars, Moscow would long ago have surrendered.

In a valedictory speech as the EU foreign affairs chief, Josep Borrell said he had tried to make the EU effectively speak the “language of power” and close the gap between “Sunday’s speeches and Monday’s actions”. To be fair he developed the European Peace Facility, and the Strategic Compass published in March 2022 listed 80 specific actions nation states needed to take.

But as Nick Witney from the European Council on Foreign Relations thinktank wrote at the time, “everyone agrees that [defence] integration is essential, but everyone wants someone else to go first”. He claimed the document was full of process-heavy gradualism, revealing the EU’s inability to intrude on national defence strategies.

When Olaf Scholz announced his €100bn investment in German defence, the first two systems he bought were American – F-35s and Chinook helicopters. European defence capacity did not exist. Germany for historical reasons has resisted joint debt, and the German deficit is the proximate cause of the upcoming German election. There is little sign that the probable next German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, is going to shift on this issue, making new forms of financing EU defence spending hard to agree.

Even now there is debate about reforming EU finance rules to release extra defence spending.

A group of 19 European countries recently co-signed a letter to the president of the European Council and the head of the European Investment Bank, urging them to relax restrictions on financing excluded activities – such as the production of ammunition, weapons, and military equipment – and to explore the possibility of issuing defence bonds.

Nathalie Tocci, the head of the Italian thinktank Istituto Affari Internazionali and a past adviser to previous EU foreign affairs chiefs, has never disguised her frustration at the inability of countries to shift position. At a recent Council on Foreign Relations discussion she said: “Conversations about money and capabilities matter but so does the parallel conversation about people and psychology, We have looked at Ukraine as indeed the good fight, but we still don’t feel it is our fight. Until and unless we do, we will keep on having these conversations about trade-offs, and if we spend a little bit more we can keep Trump happy, but it is not going to be sufficient.”

In Donald Trump’s world, everything has its price.

There is no place for sentiment in his politics. Common values cannot secure loans for military aid. And the US president does not care who controls the blood-soaked soils of east Ukraine, so long as he can access the rare earth minerals that lie beneath.

The peace Trump will negotiate is not about justice. There is no deeper moral or morality here except for who “got it done”, and Trump has signaled that he is ready to pressure Ukraine and Europe to provide concessions to entice Russia to sign on the dotted line.

All that’s left for him is to hash out a price.

“I’m just here to try and get peace,” Trump said in the Oval Office, where he riffs out policy daily. “I don’t care so much about anything other than I want to stop having millions of people killed.”

It is difficult to put into words what an about-face this is for US support for Ukraine, which for years was built on helping the country defend itself, though not win the war.

The Biden administration helped manage the symptoms of Russian aggression. Now, Trump says he’s going to provide the cure. But it is an unwelcome one: stop resisting.

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, the adage in the Oval Office had been “nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine”. Biden officials regularly said in public that Ukraine itself would decide when it was ready to negotiate.

But that was before the US election. It wasn’t the issue of Ukrainian manpower or the supply of weapons that ultimately brought us to this point; it was the price of eggs in Pennsylvania. The Biden administration’s biggest betrayal of Ukraine may have been to lose the US elections, effectively surrendering Ukraine’s second front to “America first”.

“We’re the thing that’s holding it back, and frankly, we’ll go as long as we have to go, because we’re not going to let the other happen,” said Trump, in what may be the only silver lining of his remarks on Monday, indicating he wouldn’t allow Ukraine to collapse completely. “But President Putin wants that peace now, and that’s good, and he didn’t want to have peace with Biden.”

Some Ukrainian and Russian observers may believe the US president has a deeper plan here, perhaps to consolidate Europe and then pressure Russia as a united front while sinking the oil price. But judging by his actions in Gaza, or in the United States, there is likely to be no deeper plan.

Assigning Steve Witkoff, his go-to dealmaker who negotiated the Gaza ceasefire-for-hostages deal, rather than the hawkish Gen Keith Kellogg, indicates that the process will be maximally unsentimental. Just another real estate deal.

Now, much of Europe is wondering whether Trump is about to deliver them a fait accompli on their eastern flank, seeking to commit European troops with no Nato protection to Ukraine in a security agreement negotiated exclusively between Moscow and Washington.

“What’s left to negotiate?” read one text message from a European official, who called it a “surrender”.

In fact, that was just Trump’s opening offer.

Russia has indicated it wants him to go further. In a communique, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, said he wanted the deal to address the “origins of the conflict”, which he has previously said include Ukraine’s pro-western stance and the Nato expansions of the 2000s and 1990s.

He may seek to turn back the clock, said another European official, and demand that US forces stationed in the Baltics, Poland and other former communist countries return, raising concerns about further Russian land grabs without American troops there to guarantee their defense.

Such an outcome seemed even more possible on Thursday, when Trump’s defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, told his Nato counterparts that a reduction of US troop levels in Europe could be part of any deal.

In effect, Trump is negotiating with Europe, not Russia. Europe has issued its counteroffer: treat us as a partner and give us a seat at the table.

“We shouldn’t take anything off the table before the negotiations have even started,” said Kaja Kallas, the EU’s foreign policy chief, before the Nato meeting on Thursday. “It is clear that any deal behind our backs will not work. You need the Europeans, you need the Ukrainians.”

That depends what Trump plans to do next, as Hegseth made clear. “Everything is on the table,” he said. “In his conversations with Vladimir Putin and Zelenskyy, what he decides to allow or not allow is at the purview of the leader of the free world: President Trump.”

The question is who is in that free world now, and what is the price of entry.

The Israeli government has signalled it intends to stick to the hostage release schedule agreed in the ceasefire deal with Hamas, but warned that if the anticipated three surviving hostages were not released on Saturday, it would go back to war in Gaza.

The statement from the prime minister’s office ends nearly three days of confusion after Donald Trump’s declaration that Israel should demand Hamas release all the remaining hostages, more than 70 people, by Saturday or failing that, end the ceasefire.

Since Trump’s remarks, Benjamin Netanyahu and his government had been vague on how many hostages they wanted released on Saturday, but a spokesperson, David Mencer, confirmed on Thursday that the Israeli demand was for three hostages as laid out in the timetable of the ceasefire agreement.

“There is a framework in place for the release of our hostages,” Mencer said. “That framework makes clear that three live hostages must be released by Hamas terrorists on Saturday.”

Earlier this week Hamas had suggested there might be an indefinite delay in the release of the next three hostages due to violations by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), but it backpedalled on that threat on Thursday and confirmed the timetable would remain on track.

Mencer refused to comment on Hamas’s apparent U-turn and criticised a journalist for asking about it. “Hamas is a genocidal terrorist organisation and simply throwing their quotes at me reflects badly on you, frankly,” he said, adding that Israel would wait for the three freed hostages to reach Israeli territory before making a judgment.

“If Hamas violate this agreement and do not release our hostages, the government has made clear that it has instructed our armed forces – and we have already amassed forces inside and surrounding Gaza – if Hamas does not return our hostages by Saturday noon the ceasefire will end and the IDF will resume intense fighting until the final defeat of Hamas,” Mencer said in a video press conference.

It is unclear how many of the remaining 76 hostages are still alive, but the ceasefire agreement that came into effect on 19 January accounts for both the release of live hostages and the repatriation of remains.

In the first, six-week phase of the deal, Hamas is to release 33 hostages in return for about 1,900 Palestinians held in Israel prisons. So far, Hamas has released 16 Israeli and five Thai hostages while Israel has freed about 730 Palestinian prisoners and detainees.

Meanwhile, Israeli forces have pulled back to the periphery of the Gaza Strip. In the second phase of the ceasefire, the IDF is supposed to withdraw entirely from the territory and the remaining hostages are to be released along with hundreds more Palestinians held by Israel.

Negotiations on the implementation of the second phase were due to begin last week, but so far Netanyahu has not empowered his negotiators to discuss that phase, which is intended to lead to the longer-term rebuilding of the territory.

The prospect of a broader peace agreement was thrown into doubt by Trump’s shocking suggestion last week, welcomed by Netanyahu, that the US would take possession of Gaza, and that its entire 2.2 million population would be transferred to neighbouring countries.

The ceasefire deal, agreed only after nearly 46,000 Palestinians and 1,706 Israelis had died, looked in danger of collapse this week after the Hamas announcement on Monday that it would suspend hostage releases, drawing a rapid response from Trump. “As far as I’m concerned, if all of the hostages aren’t returned by Saturday 12 o’clock – I think it’s an appropriate time – I would say cancel it and all bets are off and let hell break out,” the US president said on Monday night.

Netanyahu and his government praised Trump’s hard line, but had been vague as to whether they would take his advice or stick to the agreed timetable.

Egypt and Jordan have said they will not accept the mass transfer of Palestinians from Gaza proposed by Trump. Egypt has called an emergency Arab summit on 27 February to discuss the situation and present a “comprehensive vision” for Gaza’s future. On a visit to Washington on Tuesday, Jordan’s King Abdullah also restated the consensus that Gaza should be rebuilt without the mass expulsion of its residents, and returned to Amman on Thursday to a hero’s welcome, with thousands lining the street in support of his stance.

The flow of aid into Gaza has increased under the ceasefire but Israel has not allowed bulldozers and other construction equipment gathered on the Egyptian border with Gaza to cross into the Palestinian territory, saying that was not part of the ceasefire agreement.

Donald Trump said that he wants to restart nuclear arms control talks with Russia and China and that eventually he hopes all three countries could agree to cut their massive defense budgets in half.

Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday, Trump lamented the hundreds of billions of dollars being invested in rebuilding the nation’s nuclear deterrent and said he hopes to gain commitments from the US adversaries to cut their own spending.

“There’s no reason for us to be building brand-new nuclear weapons. We already have so many,” Trump said. “You could destroy the world 50 times over, 100 times over. And here we are building new nuclear weapons, and they’re building nuclear weapons.”

“We’re all spending a lot of money that we could be spending on other things that are actually, hopefully, much more productive,” Trump said.

While the US and Russia have held massive stockpiles of weapons since the cold war, Trump predicted that China would catch up in their capability to exact nuclear devastation “within five or six years”.

He said that if the weapons were ever called to use, “that’s going to be probably oblivion”.

Trump said he would look to engage in nuclear talks with the two countries once “we straighten it all out” in the Middle East and Ukraine.

“One of the first meetings I want to have is with President Xi of China, President Putin of Russia. And I want to say: ‘Let’s cut our military budget in half.’ And we can do that. And I think we’ll be able to.”

Trump in his first term tried and failed to bring China into nuclear arms reduction talks when the US and Russia were negotiating an extension of a pact known as New Start. Russia suspended its participation in the treaty during the Biden administration, as the US and Russia continued on massive programs to extend the lifespans of or replace their cold war-era nuclear arsenals.

Outlining his vision for a shake-up in the world order, Trump also said he would “love” to have Russia back in the G7, from which it was suspended in 2014 after Moscow annexed Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula.

“I think it was a mistake to throw him out,” Trump said, referring to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.

In his first term, Trump also called for Russia to be readmitted, but he found little support among other western countries.

Trump revealed Wednesday he expected to meet Putin separately for Ukraine peace talks, in a sudden thaw in relations.

In their first confirmed contact since Trump’s return to the White House, the US president said he had held a “highly productive” conversation with his Russian counterpart, who ordered the bloody 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Robert F Kennedy Jr has taken control of America’s vast healthcare apparatus, after the Senate voted on Thursday to confirm the controversial anti-vaccine campaigner’s nomination as health secretary.

The Senate voted 52 to 48, with all Republicans other than the veteran Kentucky senator and former majority leader, Mitch McConnell, backing the former environmental lawyer.

Kennedy was sworn in later on Thursday by US supreme court justice Neil Gorsuch.

Kennedy abandoned his independent presidential bid last year after a weak campaign and endorsed Donald Trump.

The vote installs one of America’s most prominent vaccine skeptics to run its federal health infrastructure, granting oversight of the very agencies – including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration – that he has spent years battling through lawsuits and public campaigns. Kennedy will wield sweeping authority over the nation’s $2tn health system, including drug approvals for Medicare, the government health insurance scheme for older Americans.

His path to the top crystallized after securing backing from the Republican senator Bill Cassidy, a physician who extracted what he called “unprecedented” commitments for collaboration from both Kennedy and the Trump campaign. The key moderate Senate Republicans Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski also fell in line this week, having previously expressed doubts over Trump’s nomination.

McConnell, the lone Republican defection, cited his own experience battling childhood polio as a primary reason for his vote against Kennedy.

“I’m a survivor of childhood polio,” McConnell said. “In my lifetime, I’ve watched vaccines save millions of lives from devastating diseases across America and around the world. I will not condone the re-litigation of proven cures.”

At his confirmation hearing, Kennedy equivocated and said he just wanted to ensure vaccine safety and would not stop vaccines from being available. But he has long peddled conspiracy theories and debunked claims, including that vaccinating babies against measles, mumps and rubella is linked to autism, and had previously said that “no vaccine is safe and effective”.

He also tried to persuade the US government to rescind authorization for the newly developed coronavirus vaccine in 2021, despite the world having desperately waited for the shots to be developed while millions died during the pandemic. At the hearing he said “I don’t think anybody can say that” the Covid-19 vaccines saved millions of lives.

McConnell said: “Individuals, parents, and families have a right to push for a healthier nation and demand the best possible scientific guidance on preventing and treating illness. But a record of trafficking in dangerous conspiracy theories and eroding trust in public health institutions does not entitle Mr Kennedy to lead these important efforts.”

This was the second time in as many days that McConnell has opposed one of Trump’s nominees. On Wednesday, he voted against confirming Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, again the sole Republican to do so.

Democrats – the party historically aligned with the Kennedy family legacy – have, on the other hand, totally disavowed RFK Jr as a nominee, chiefly based on his lack of subject area expertise.

“Robert F Kennedy Jr is not remotely qualified to become the next secretary of health and human services,” the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, said on the floor on Wednesday. “In fact, I might go further. Robert F Kennedy Jr might be one of the least qualified people the president could have chosen for the job.”

Most of the wider Kennedy political clan disowned RFK Jr, the son of the former US attorney general Robert F Kennedy and the nephew of US president John F Kennedy, during his presidential campaign last year.

JFK’s daughter Caroline Kennedy, the former US ambassador to Australia, wrote to lawmakers ahead of the confirmation process and called her cousin a predator, saying he had enriched himself through his anti-vaccine “crusade”, while making victims of sick children and their families. She also noted that he had vaccinated his own children, something Kennedy says he now regrets having done.

Kennedy has been at the center of numerous other controversies, including being accused of sexual misconduct, staging pranks with roadkill, including a dead bear cub, and claiming a previous illness was caused by having a worm in his brain, which prompted some opponents to call him a laughing stock. Kennedy has talked about his own recovery from heroin addiction. Through it all, Trump stuck with his nomination and on Thursday the Republican-controlled Senate acquiesced.

Kennedy has in the past, however, been admired by Democratic leaders for his environmental advocacy. He has pledged to take on the big food manufacturers to try to loosen their grip on America’s over-processed diet and has become the face of the Trump administration’s offshoot motto “Maha”, or Make American Healthy Again.

During the Senate finance committee hearing, Elizabeth Warren had raised alarm over Kennedy’s financial ties to anti-vaccine litigation, including a fee-sharing arrangement with the law firm Wisner Baum that earned him $2.5m over three years – an arrangement he initially planned to maintain while serving as secretary before amending his ethics agreement under pressure.

Post-confirmation, the Democratic senator from Massachusetts, who had her own run for president in 2020, reiterated her dismay, calling the vote in favor of the incoming secretary of health and human services “a huge mistake”.

“When dangerous diseases resurface and people can’t access lifesaving vaccines, all Americans will suffer,” Warren said in a statement. “And thanks to his serious, unresolved conflicts of interest, RFK Jr’s family could continue getting richer from his anti-vaccine crusade while he’s in office.”

The Republican senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, defended his vote for Kennedy. “Every president deserves their team,” Graham said, adding: “I look forward to working with RFK Jr to improve our quality of life and health in America.”

It has been several years since Japanese women first signalled their contempt for the long tradition of showering male colleagues with chocolates on Valentine’s Day. Now the country’s young people are slaying another sacred cow associated with Friday’s orgy of commercialised romance: one-sided gift giving.

Traditionally, women are expected to buy gift-wrapped chocolates for the men in their working lives, usually senior colleagues and others to whom they feel indebted – a tradition called giri choco, literally “obligation chocolates”.

But the age of giri choco seems well and truly over. Just 12.5% of people said they planned to give sweets to colleagues on Valentine’s Day – the lowest proportion on record – according to a survey by Nippon Life Insurance. That compares with almost a quarter in 2020, the year the coronavirus outbreak became a global pandemic. More than 70% of those surveyed said they thought the custom was “unnecessary”.

Another intriguing phenomenon has also emerged this year, with an increasing number of teenage boys viewing Valentine’s Day as an opportunity to reciprocate rather than wait until White Day on 14 March, when men are traditionally expected to return the favour.

One survey reported in the Weekly Playboy magazine found that almost a third of girls attending middle and high schools had received Valentine’s gifts from boys in recent years.

“Today’s teenagers and people in their 20s tend not to be bound by gender stereotypes or ‘romantic supremacy’, so Valentine’s Day is no longer just a day for women to confess their feelings to men,” Hikari Asahina, the president of seamint, a market research form focusing on gen Z, told the magazine.

The soaring price of cocoa beans, following poor crops in Ivory Coast and Ghana, has also blunted enthusiasm for lavishing chocolate on multiple recipients, some or all of whom may not be the object of the giver’s desires.

The average price of a chocolate bar has risen from just under ¥100 (65c) before tax in 2022 to ¥150 today, according to Intage, a market research company. “Given the continuing price hikes, we expect people this year to juggle expenses, such as by reducing the amount of ‘obligatory’ chocolates they buy,” the firm said.

Consumers spent an average of ¥3,818 ($25) on Valentine’s Day treats this year, a separate survey found – down from the ¥4,008 spent last year.

The Mainichi Shimbun newspaper reported that supermarkets have replaced more expensive department stores as the preferred place to buy Valentine’s chocolates.

In a poll of women by the market research firm Nippon Information, 31% of respondents said they would buy chocolate from a supermarket, followed by department stores on 29%, while 21% said they would make their own.

“This is just a theory, but given the soaring prices of food and daily necessities … we believe there is greater demand for supermarkets, where the prices of Valentine’s Day products tend to be lower compared to department stores,” a Nippon Information spokesperson told the Mainichi.

Giving chocolate as Valentine’s Day gifts took off commercially in Japan in 1958, when a confectionery firm held a special sales campaign at a department store in Tokyo. In 2019, the Valentine’s market was worth ¥126bn before shrinking slightly due to the pandemic.

The pressure to avoid causing offence by spending thousands of yen on chocolates for colleagues has prompted some firms to ban the practice in recent years, amid rising awareness of harassment in the workplace.

Instead, more women are buying chocolates for themselves – jibun choco – or splashing out on oshi-choko: chocolates accompanied by photos and merchandise belonging to their favourite oshi (character or idol) that they post on social media.

It has been several years since Japanese women first signalled their contempt for the long tradition of showering male colleagues with chocolates on Valentine’s Day. Now the country’s young people are slaying another sacred cow associated with Friday’s orgy of commercialised romance: one-sided gift giving.

Traditionally, women are expected to buy gift-wrapped chocolates for the men in their working lives, usually senior colleagues and others to whom they feel indebted – a tradition called giri choco, literally “obligation chocolates”.

But the age of giri choco seems well and truly over. Just 12.5% of people said they planned to give sweets to colleagues on Valentine’s Day – the lowest proportion on record – according to a survey by Nippon Life Insurance. That compares with almost a quarter in 2020, the year the coronavirus outbreak became a global pandemic. More than 70% of those surveyed said they thought the custom was “unnecessary”.

Another intriguing phenomenon has also emerged this year, with an increasing number of teenage boys viewing Valentine’s Day as an opportunity to reciprocate rather than wait until White Day on 14 March, when men are traditionally expected to return the favour.

One survey reported in the Weekly Playboy magazine found that almost a third of girls attending middle and high schools had received Valentine’s gifts from boys in recent years.

“Today’s teenagers and people in their 20s tend not to be bound by gender stereotypes or ‘romantic supremacy’, so Valentine’s Day is no longer just a day for women to confess their feelings to men,” Hikari Asahina, the president of seamint, a market research form focusing on gen Z, told the magazine.

The soaring price of cocoa beans, following poor crops in Ivory Coast and Ghana, has also blunted enthusiasm for lavishing chocolate on multiple recipients, some or all of whom may not be the object of the giver’s desires.

The average price of a chocolate bar has risen from just under ¥100 (65c) before tax in 2022 to ¥150 today, according to Intage, a market research company. “Given the continuing price hikes, we expect people this year to juggle expenses, such as by reducing the amount of ‘obligatory’ chocolates they buy,” the firm said.

Consumers spent an average of ¥3,818 ($25) on Valentine’s Day treats this year, a separate survey found – down from the ¥4,008 spent last year.

The Mainichi Shimbun newspaper reported that supermarkets have replaced more expensive department stores as the preferred place to buy Valentine’s chocolates.

In a poll of women by the market research firm Nippon Information, 31% of respondents said they would buy chocolate from a supermarket, followed by department stores on 29%, while 21% said they would make their own.

“This is just a theory, but given the soaring prices of food and daily necessities … we believe there is greater demand for supermarkets, where the prices of Valentine’s Day products tend to be lower compared to department stores,” a Nippon Information spokesperson told the Mainichi.

Giving chocolate as Valentine’s Day gifts took off commercially in Japan in 1958, when a confectionery firm held a special sales campaign at a department store in Tokyo. In 2019, the Valentine’s market was worth ¥126bn before shrinking slightly due to the pandemic.

The pressure to avoid causing offence by spending thousands of yen on chocolates for colleagues has prompted some firms to ban the practice in recent years, amid rising awareness of harassment in the workplace.

Instead, more women are buying chocolates for themselves – jibun choco – or splashing out on oshi-choko: chocolates accompanied by photos and merchandise belonging to their favourite oshi (character or idol) that they post on social media.

Elon Musk says he will abandon his $97.4bn offer to buy the non-profit behind OpenAI if the ChatGPT maker drops its plan to convert into a for-profit company.

“If OpenAI, Inc’s Board is prepared to preserve the charity’s mission and stipulate to take the ‘for sale’ sign off its assets by halting its conversion, Musk will withdraw the bid,” lawyers for the billionaire said in a filing to a California court on Wednesday. “Otherwise, the charity must be compensated by what an arms-length buyer will pay for its assets.”

Musk and a group of investors made their offer earlier this week, in the latest twist to a dispute with the artificial intelligence company that he helped found a decade ago.

OpenAI is controlled by a non-profit board bound to its original mission of safely building “better-than-human” AI for public benefit. Now a fast-growing business, it revealed plans last year to formally change its corporate structure.

Musk and his own AI startup, xAI, and a consortium of investment firms want to acquire the non-profit’s controlling stake in the for-profit OpenAI subsidiary.

OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, quickly rejected the unsolicited bid in a post on social media and told questioners at a Paris summit on AI that the company is not for sale. The chair of OpenAI’s board, Bret Taylor, echoed those remarks at an event on Wednesday.

Musk and Altman helped start OpenAI in 2015 and later competed over who should lead it before Musk resigned from the board in 2018. They have been in a long-running and bitter feud over the startup, with Musk suing, dropping his suit, and then suing again in 2024.

Musk again criticized Altman’s management on Thursday during a video call to the World Government Summit in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, describing it as akin to a non-profit aimed at saving the Amazon rainforest becoming a “lumber company that chops down the trees”. Altman has repeatedly countered that Musk’s legal challenges to OpenAI are motivated by his role as the founder of a competing startup.

Musk has asked a California federal judge to block OpenAI’s for-profit conversion on allegations ranging from breach of contract to antitrust violations. The judge has expressed skepticism about some of Musk’s arguments but hasn’t yet issued a ruling.

Mexico’s president has accused the US of harboring drug cartels and American citizens of working with organized crime groups in Mexico, in a riposte to Donald Trump’s allegation of an “intolerable alliance” between traffickers and her government.

“There is also organized crime in the United States and there are American people who come to Mexico with these illegal activities,” Claudia Sheinbaum said during her morning press conference on Thursday. “Otherwise who would distribute fentanyl in the cities of the United States?”

The Mexican president’s comments follow a report published on Monday which showed that arrests of US citizens for offenses related to organized crime had increased by more than 450% during the tenure of her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

Sheinbaum called on Washington not just to help crack down on cartels in Mexico, but for the “United States to do its job in the US, to make the arrests that need to be made in order to halt the trafficking of drugs in its own country”.

The Trump administration has repeatedly attacked Mexico for the flow of drugs northwards, particularly fentanyl, even designating certain cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.

Donald Trump also threatened to impose 25% tariffs on all goods from Mexico due to the northward flow of drugs and migrants, before Sheinbaum agreed to send an additional 10,000 national guard troops to the US-Mexico border.

Security experts say that Mexican organized crime groups in the United States are widespread, and are key to the distribution of drugs such as fentanyl across the nation.

“They’re in virtually every corner of the country, no doubt about it,” said Jack Riley, former head of the Chicago office of the Drug Enforcement Administration. “In terms of the control of the dope, the movement of narco money, I would say they’re the number one.”

But taking down such groups would require efforts from both countries, he said.

Riley also noted that American citizens have become increasingly involved in smuggling drugs across the border.

“Anybody that has dual citizenship, [or] US citizenship, can be influenced and corrupted by the cartels,” he said. “Almost all of that occurs at the border checkpoints in vehicles. It’s not the guy with the backpacks when they cross the Rio Grande.”

During her news conference, Sheinbaum also mentioned Mexico’s spat with Google Map’s decision to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, apparently at the behest of Trump, noting that the government had exchanged correspondence with the tech giant.

“If necessary, we will file a civil suit,” she said. “Even President Trump isn’t proposing that the entire Gulf of Mexico be called the ‘Gulf of America’, but only their continental shelf. So Google is wrong.”

The “extremely damaging” category five Tropical Cyclone Zelia has intensified its speed towards the Western Australian coastline, with the weather bureau warning it may bring 290km/h winds and that it is now too late to leave.

The system expanded over Thursday night, with the cyclone stretching to Wallal Downs along the coast, and inland through to Tom Price and Newman.

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It has also begun to move faster, with the system expected to make landfall earlier than expected – at around 3-4pm on Friday.

The Bureau of Meteorology has issued a series of severe weather warnings for the region, warning of very destructive wind gusts that could reach up to 300km/h.

Angus Hines, a meteorologist at the bureau, said the system was expected to be very damaging, adding that it “does not get any worse.”

“It is a category five system – just a reminder, category five is the top of the scale. It does not get any worse than that, extremely damaging and destructive winds, widespread, rain, flooding and storm surge are all expected.”

The system is also due to cross east of Port Hedland, not west as was expected on Thursday.

“It is currently moving slowly in the south-eastwards direction. It is sitting around about 100 kilometres north of Port Hedland. But that number is shrinking as this system is getting closer to the coast every hour,” Hines said.

“We’re expecting destructive winds near the crossing point, we could see wind gusts of 300km/h. It’s hard to fathom how strong that is, but it can take out trees power lines and completely destroy properties and houses.”

Port Hedland local Glen Bedford, a mechanical technical officer at BHP’s port operations, said the sky had been dark now for more than two days.

He said he remained hauled up in his home, with a toilet that has flooded through the LED light in the ceiling as 90km/h winds hit.

“The shops are empty, all water is gone, canned goods are gone and there is always a line at the bottle shop before a cyclone,” Bedford said.

“Everyone is now locked in their house, no one is allowed out on the streets and I think you get a fine if you get caught out driving around.”

“My neighbour’s tree is down already.”

The bureau warned that heavy to locally intense rainfall which may lead to flash flooding is likely across the region, with flood watches and warnings current for catchments in the Pilbara, western Kimberley and northern Gascoyne.

Up to 500mm of rain is expected to inundate the area, with 90mm of rain having already fallen on Wallal Downs in the past 24 hours.

Residents in Port Hedland and east to Wallal Downs are specifically warned of the potential of a dangerous storm tide as the cyclone centre crosses the coast, with tides likely to rise significantly above the normal high-tide mark, and damaging waves and dangerous flooding of some low-lying areas close to the shoreline.

WA’s Department of Fire and Emergency Services (DFES) issued a warning on Friday morning advising residents between Pardoo and Whim Creek to shelter indoors immediately.

“There is a threat to lives and homes. You are in danger and need to act immediately,” it said in a warning posted to Facebook.

“Shelter indoors now. It is too late to leave. Stay in the strongest, safest part of the building. Stay away from doors and windows, and keep them closed.”

The Department of Communities has opened evacuation centres in South Hedland, and Stove Hill, where people are being encouraged to bring bedding such as pillows and blankets if possible.

It comes as major roads across the area have been closed due to rising flood waters, including Port Hedland Road, parts of the Great Northern Highway, Marble Bar Road and Ripon Hills Road.

The DFES has dedicated incident management teams in the Pilbara and Kimberley who are working with local communities, stakeholders, retail suppliers and transporters to plan for resupply if needed.

More than 10,000 sandbags have been handed out in the Pilbara to help people prepare their properties, with extra personnel sent to the region to prepare for the system.

Twenty-one schools in the region have been closed, including Baller primary school, Hedland senior high school, Karratha primary school and Port Hedland primary school.

On Thursday the WA premier, Roger Cook, said Zelia was “going to be a big one”.

“This is a dangerous system. It’s big, it’s strong and it’s very unpredictable,” he said. “People in the Pilbara need to be prepared, and they need to be prepared now.”

The “extremely damaging” category five Tropical Cyclone Zelia has intensified its speed towards the Western Australian coastline, with the weather bureau warning it may bring 290km/h winds and that it is now too late to leave.

The system expanded over Thursday night, with the cyclone stretching to Wallal Downs along the coast, and inland through to Tom Price and Newman.

• Sign up for Guardian Australia’s breaking news email

It has also begun to move faster, with the system expected to make landfall earlier than expected – at around 3-4pm on Friday.

The Bureau of Meteorology has issued a series of severe weather warnings for the region, warning of very destructive wind gusts that could reach up to 300km/h.

Angus Hines, a meteorologist at the bureau, said the system was expected to be very damaging, adding that it “does not get any worse.”

“It is a category five system – just a reminder, category five is the top of the scale. It does not get any worse than that, extremely damaging and destructive winds, widespread, rain, flooding and storm surge are all expected.”

The system is also due to cross east of Port Hedland, not west as was expected on Thursday.

“It is currently moving slowly in the south-eastwards direction. It is sitting around about 100 kilometres north of Port Hedland. But that number is shrinking as this system is getting closer to the coast every hour,” Hines said.

“We’re expecting destructive winds near the crossing point, we could see wind gusts of 300km/h. It’s hard to fathom how strong that is, but it can take out trees power lines and completely destroy properties and houses.”

Port Hedland local Glen Bedford, a mechanical technical officer at BHP’s port operations, said the sky had been dark now for more than two days.

He said he remained hauled up in his home, with a toilet that has flooded through the LED light in the ceiling as 90km/h winds hit.

“The shops are empty, all water is gone, canned goods are gone and there is always a line at the bottle shop before a cyclone,” Bedford said.

“Everyone is now locked in their house, no one is allowed out on the streets and I think you get a fine if you get caught out driving around.”

“My neighbour’s tree is down already.”

The bureau warned that heavy to locally intense rainfall which may lead to flash flooding is likely across the region, with flood watches and warnings current for catchments in the Pilbara, western Kimberley and northern Gascoyne.

Up to 500mm of rain is expected to inundate the area, with 90mm of rain having already fallen on Wallal Downs in the past 24 hours.

Residents in Port Hedland and east to Wallal Downs are specifically warned of the potential of a dangerous storm tide as the cyclone centre crosses the coast, with tides likely to rise significantly above the normal high-tide mark, and damaging waves and dangerous flooding of some low-lying areas close to the shoreline.

WA’s Department of Fire and Emergency Services (DFES) issued a warning on Friday morning advising residents between Pardoo and Whim Creek to shelter indoors immediately.

“There is a threat to lives and homes. You are in danger and need to act immediately,” it said in a warning posted to Facebook.

“Shelter indoors now. It is too late to leave. Stay in the strongest, safest part of the building. Stay away from doors and windows, and keep them closed.”

The Department of Communities has opened evacuation centres in South Hedland, and Stove Hill, where people are being encouraged to bring bedding such as pillows and blankets if possible.

It comes as major roads across the area have been closed due to rising flood waters, including Port Hedland Road, parts of the Great Northern Highway, Marble Bar Road and Ripon Hills Road.

The DFES has dedicated incident management teams in the Pilbara and Kimberley who are working with local communities, stakeholders, retail suppliers and transporters to plan for resupply if needed.

More than 10,000 sandbags have been handed out in the Pilbara to help people prepare their properties, with extra personnel sent to the region to prepare for the system.

Twenty-one schools in the region have been closed, including Baller primary school, Hedland senior high school, Karratha primary school and Port Hedland primary school.

On Thursday the WA premier, Roger Cook, said Zelia was “going to be a big one”.

“This is a dangerous system. It’s big, it’s strong and it’s very unpredictable,” he said. “People in the Pilbara need to be prepared, and they need to be prepared now.”

The National Park Service eliminated all references to transgender people from its website for the Stonewall national monument on Thursday. The monument commemorates a 1969 riot outside New York City’s historic Stonewall Inn, led by trans women of color, that ignited the contemporary gay rights movement.

The move comes as federal agencies across the country seek to comply with an executive order Donald Trump signed on his first day in office, calling for the US government to define sex as only male or female.

“This blatant act of erasure not only distorts the truth of our history, but it also dishonors the immense contributions of transgender individuals – especially transgender women of color – who were at the forefront of the Stonewall Riots and the broader fight for LGBTQ+ rights,” organizers at the Stonewall Inn and the non-profit Stonewall Inn Gives Back Initiative said in a statement.

Since Trump returned to office last month, he has signed a series of executive orders targeting trans Americans, including by banning trans athletes from women’s sports, restricting healthcare for trans youth and transferring incarcerated trans women to men’s facilities; a US judge, however, temporarily blocked federal prisons from implementing the order to move trans people. Many of the orders have been framed as “defending women”.

The Stonewall national monument, located in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, has become a symbol of the LGBTQ+ rights movement. One June night in 1969, LGBTQ+ patrons of the historic gay bar resisted a police raid. Although recollections of the night vary, by many accounts a Black trans woman named Marsha P Johnson “threw the first brick”.

During the George Floyd uprisings in June of 2020, a march for Black trans lives began at the Stonewall Inn. It was followed by the largest-ever march for Black trans lives in Brooklyn later that month.

Barack Obama designated the site as a national monument in 2016.

Earlier this week, the homepage for the monument said: “Before the 1960s, almost everything about living openly as a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer (LGBTQ+) person was illegal.”

On Thursday, it said: “Before the 1960s, almost everything about living openly as a lesbian, gay, bisexual (LGB) person was illegal.”

“This is just cruel and petty,” Kathy Hochul, New York’s Democratic governor, posted on social media. “Transgender people play a critical role in the fight for LGBTQ+ rights – and New York will never allow their contributions to be erased.”

The Norwegian parliament has voted to open up protected rivers to hydropower plants, prompting fury from conservation groups who fear for the fate of fish and other wildlife.

The bill allows power plants bigger than 1MW to be built in protected waterways if the societal benefit is “significant” and the environmental consequences “acceptable”. It was voted through on Thursday as part of measures to improve flood and landslide protection.

Une Bastholm, a Green member of parliament, described the proposal as “a historic attack on Norwegian nature” when it was unveiled last week.

Environment campaigners say they believe the proposal will lead to an “endless stream” of new battles over river development. They criticised the government, who they said rushed it through without proper public consultation or environmental impact assessments.

Truls Gulowsen, head of the Norwegian Society for the Conservation of Nature, said: “We will fight for every single protected watercourse, for every river, every waterfall and every lake. We will not give up what we have won through more than a hundred years of watercourse struggle because of an ill-considered and irresponsible hasty decision.”

Norway, a Nordic country known for its dramatic fjords and pristine nature, has protected nearly 400 waterways with plans that keep them from being dammed by large power plants. Its rivers and the species in them have separately come under threat from intensive farming and the climate crisis.

Campaigners protested outside the Norwegian parliament on Tuesday and presented a petition opposing hydropower development in protected waterways that they said gathered 25,000 signatures.

Supporters of the proposal claim critics have “hyped up” the dangers to nature. The criteria for approval remains unchanged and companies seeking to build hydropower dams would still face strict assessments before being granted a permit.

The proposal was voted through on Thursday by the Conservative party, the Progress party, the Labour party and the Centre party. The Christian Democrats withdrew their support, citing uncertainty over the wording.

Pål Mugaas, a spokesperson for Norske Lakseelver (Norwegian Salmon Rivers), said: “It’s a sad day for the wild salmon and all the other species in what was supposed to be permanently protected rivers.”

Disputes over renewable energy have rocked Norwegian politics in recent months. The government collapsed at the end of January in a row over adopting the EU’s latest clean energy package.

The Norwegian electricity grid is among the cleanest on the planet – a result of its hydropower dams – and the country is a net power exporter that has long enjoyed cheap bills.

Merethe Dotterud Leiren, a political scientist at the Cicero Centre for International Climate Research, said: “This situation makes it politically harder to defend investments in renewables.”

Norway’s clean energy conflicts have so far centred on wind turbines. The refusal to dismantle a wind farm that was found to have violated the rights of indigenous Sámi reindeer herders in 2021 has attracted the support of climate campaigners around the world, including Swedish activist Greta Thunberg.

Leiren said: “In general, Norwegians are more positive to hydropower than windpower. However, there are basically no places left to build large hydroelectric power plants without building in protected nature.”

Fornybar Norge, the Norwegian renewable energy lobby group, said in a statement last week that it supported the proposal to loosen river protections.

It said: “This will, among other things, be relevant for projects that have a significant flood-reducing effect. At the same time, it is good that the decision is not a free pass for the construction of new facilities in protected watercourses.”

The Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate (NVE) has previously said there is little power to be gained from exploiting rivers without significant interventions into nature.

Kjetil Lund, the NVE director, told Norwegian broadcaster NRK on Tuesday: “There is barely any great potential for development in protected waterways, unless you want to exploit the most beautiful, most valuable nature we have.”

Denmark’s “ghetto law”, which allows the state to demolish apartment blocks in areas where at least half of residents have a “non-western” background, constitutes direct discrimination on the basis of ethnic origin, a senior adviser to the EU’s top court has found.

Danish social housing law categorises neighbourhoods on the basis of unemployment, crime, education, income and immigrant population. Those where more than 50% of residents are from a “non-western” backgrounds are labelled a “parallel society”, formerly referred to as a “ghetto”.

If, in addition to unfavourable socioeconomic conditions, a neighbourhood has also had an immigrant population of more than 50% for the last five years, it is labelled a “transformation area”, formerly known as a “hard ghetto”.

This requires the public housing association to propose a plan to cut social housing by 40% – including by selling properties, demolition or conversion and terminating the lease of the former tenants – by 2030.

The European court of justice (ECJ) said in a statement on Thursday that Tamara Ćapeta, an advocate general, had found in a non-binding legal opinion that “the division between ‘western’ and ‘non-western’ immigrants and their descendants is based on ethnic origin.”

The statement added: “She considers that, although ‘non-westerners’ are an ethnically diverse group, what unites that group is not a commonality of factors that form ‘ethnicity’ within that group, but rather the perception by the Danish legislature that this group does not possess the characteristics of the other group, the ‘westerners’.”

The ECJ follows the advice of its advocates general most of the time.

Although tenants whose leases were terminated were not selected on the basis of their non-western origin, “they nevertheless suffer direct discrimination on the basis of the ethnic criterion,” Ćapeta found, according to the statement.

She said the legislation put tenants in a vulnerable position in terms of housing that led to worse treatment than those in neighbourhoods where the majority of the population was of “western” origin.

“The ethnic criterion used by Danish legislation stigmatises the ethnic group whose structural disadvantage in their ability to integrate into Danish society was recognised, thus curtailing rather than enhancing their chances to integrate into that society,” the statement said.

The case was referred to the ECJ by Denmark’s eastern high court after tenants on the Mjølnerparken estate in Copenhagen and Schackenborgvænge estate in Slagelse challenged the legality of development plans based on Danish social housing law.

Louise Holck, the director of the Danish Institute for Human Rights, which was involved in the case, welcomed the ruling, which she said could have broad implications if it is agreed upon by the ECJ.

“Her interpretation of the directive ensures effective protection against discrimination based on ethnicity. If the court reaches the same conclusion as the advocate general, the Parallel Societies Act could be in violation of EU law,” she said.

“In that case, the state must correct the situation to ensure that citizens are not discriminated against and amend the law to comply with EU regulations. This case is both important and a matter of principle, as it could have implications for everyone who has been subjected to the same treatment.”

The “parallel societies” law, formerly known as the ghetto law, came into force in July 2018, but Denmark has had regulations targeting so-called “ghetto areas” since 2010.

The Danish minister of social affairs and housing, Sophie Hæstorp Andersen, said she had noted the advocate general’s proposal, but would not take action until the ECJ made a final decision, which is expected in the spring.

A humpback whale briefly scooped a kayaker into its mouth off the Chilean Patagonia before quickly releasing him unharmed in an incident caught on camera.

Last Saturday, Adrián Simancas was kayaking with his father, Dell, in Bahía El Águila near the San Isidro lighthouse in the Strait of Magellan when a humpback whale surfaced, engulfing Adrián and his yellow kayak for a few seconds before letting him go.

Dell, just metres away, captured the moment on video.

“Stay calm, stay calm,” he can be heard saying after his son was released from the whale’s mouth.

“I thought I was dead,” Adrián told the Associated Press. “I thought it had eaten me, that it had swallowed me.”

He described the “terror” of those few seconds and explained that his real fear set in only after resurfacing, fearing that the huge animal would hurt his father or that he would perish in the frigid waters.

Despite the terrifying experience, Dell remained focused, filming and reassuring his son while grappling with his own worry.

“When I came up and started floating, I was scared that something might happen to my father too, that we wouldn’t reach the shore in time, or that I would get hypothermia,” Adrián said.

After a few seconds in the water, Adrián managed to reach his father’s kayak and was quickly assisted. Despite the scare, both returned to shore uninjured.

Located about 1,600 miles (2,600km) south of Santiago, Chile’s capital, the Strait of Magellan is a major tourist attraction, known for adventure activities.

Its frigid waters pose a challenge for sailors, swimmers and explorers who attempt to cross it in different ways.

Although it’s summer in the southern hemisphere, temperatures in the region remain cool, with minimums dropping to 39F (4C) and highs rarely exceeding 68F (20C).

While whale attacks on humans are extremely rare in Chilean waters, whale deaths from collisions with cargo ships have increased in recent years, and strandings have become a recurring issue in the last decade.