Amsterdam police have made more than 60 arrests following violence in the Dutch capital overnight after a Europa League football match, as planes sent by Israel’s government flew in on Friday afternoon to take home fans of the losing Israeli team.

The mayor of Amsterdam, Femke Halsema, described an “outburst” of antisemitism with “hit and run” attacks on visiting supporters of Maccabi Tel Aviv.

“Men on scooters crisscrossed the city looking for Israeli football fans. It was a hit and run. I can easily understand that this brings back memories of pogroms,” Halsema said.

“Our city has been deeply damaged. Jewish culture has been deeply threatened. This is an outburst of antisemitism that I hope to never see again,” she added.

The leaders of Israel and the Netherlands condemned “antisemitic” attacks while a leading Jewish group has said the Dutch capital should be “deeply ashamed”.

Police said on Friday they had launched “a major investigation into multiple violent incidents” and that five people had been taken to hospital and 62 arrested. There was no evidence of “kidnappings or hostage takings” but police were “probing reports”.

Officials in Amsterdam said that in several places in the city, supporters were attacked, abused and pelted with fireworks and that riot police had to intervene several times to protect Israeli supporters and escort them to hotels.

There were no reports of trouble during the match at the Johan Cruyff arena, in which Ajax Amsterdam defeated Maccabi 5-0 and fans left the stadium without incident, police said..

Residents and businesses in Amsterdam were shocked by what appeared to be organised small groups of locals chasing Israeli fans in Amsterdam’s city centre after the match.

Theodoor van Boven, owner of the Condomerie, near Dam Square on the Warmoesstraat, said he saw gangs apparently hunting, and chasing, opposing fans. “What we saw here in the street in the evening and at night were groups of often Dutch groups who were out hunting, who were looking for Maccabi fans. They were on foot in groups, on scooters, riding round looking, and telephoning each other – it [seemed to be] organised.”

“They saw everyone in yellow [Maccabi Tel Aviv’s home-strip colour], they jumped on us,” a young woman identified only as Pnina, told the Dutch public broadcaster from Schipol airport. She said her group had hidden in their hotel “until it was safe to go outside”.

Ron, another departing fan, said it had been a “terrible night” and “very scary”.

A police spokesperson said there had been “incidents on both sides” on Wednesday night.

He added: “Maccabi supporters removed a flag from a facade on the Rokin and they destroyed a taxi. A Palestinian flag was set on fire on the Dam.” Unverified footage posted to social media appeared to show some Maccabi fans chanting in Hebrew: “Finish the Arabs! We’re going to win!”

One Amsterdam resident, Barbara Weenink, said she had found the behaviour of Israeli fans threatening. Weenink, who has demonstrated at pro-Palestine events, said she was warned not to go out with a keffiyeh on that evening. She did not see the events after the match but had seen Israeli football fans before it. “I saw the Israeli fans walking here before the match – I found it very threatening,” she said.

The conflict in Gaza has heightened community tensions across Europe, with soaring antisemitic abuse and attacks. Islamophobic incidents have also risen to record levels.

In a statement, the office of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, described a “planned antisemitic attack against Israeli citizens” and requested that security be increased for the Dutch Jewish community.

Netanyahu cancelled plans announced early on Friday to send two military rescue planes to Amsterdam and officials in Jerusalem said efforts would instead focus on using commercial airlines, primarily El Al, Israel’s national carrier.

El Al said on Friday morning that, following special permission from Jewish religious authorities to operate on the sabbath, a first flight would leave Amsterdam for Tel Aviv on Friday afternoon and further free flights would continue through Saturday as necessary.

The Dutch prime minister, Dick Schoof, said he was “horrified by the antisemitic attacks on Israeli civilians” that were “completely unacceptable”. He said he had spoken to Netanyahu by phone “to stress that the perpetrators will be identified and prosecuted”.

In a social media post on Friday, Geert Wilders, who leads the far-right Freedom party, the largest in the Dutch governing coalition, criticised his own government for a “lack of urgency”. He wrote: “Why is there no extra cabinet meeting? Where is the sense of urgency?”

Wilders, who is well known for his anti-Muslim positions and does not have a formal role in the government, said the Dutch authorities “will be held accountable for their failure to protect” Israeli citizens.

Leaders of Dutch Jewish organisations noted the violence had taken place on the evening the Dutch Jewish community had commemorated Kristallnacht, the 1938 state-sanctioned pogrom and murderous rampage in Nazi Germany and controlled territories that paved the way for the Holocaust.

Chanan Hertzberger, the chairman of the Central Jewish Consultation, described “antisemitic gangs who, under the guise of anti-Zionism, have been trying to make life impossible for Jews in the Netherlands for some time”.

.

The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, said she was “outraged” by “vile attacks targeting Israeli citizens in Amsterdam”, while Uefa, the governing body of football in Europe, said it strongly condemned “the incidents and acts of violence”. The UN called the violence “very troubling” while Germany’s foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, said it was “terrible” and “deeply shameful.”

In a tweet, Deborah Lipstadt, the US antisemitism envoy, said she was “deeply disturbed” by the attacks and called for an investigation.

Ajax released a brief statement condemning the violence, saying: “After a sporting football match with a good atmosphere in our stadium – for which we thank all parties involved for the good cooperation – we were horrified to learn what happened in the centre of Amsterdam last night.”

China has announced 10tn yuan in debt support for local governments and other economic measures, but stopped short of the “bazooka” stimulus package that many analysts had expected.

The fiscal package included raising debt ceilings for local governments by 6tn yuan (£646bn) over three years, so they could replace hidden debt, which authorities said stood at 14.3tn yuan by the end of 2023.

Hidden debt is borrowing for which a government is liable but is not disclosed to citizens or other creditors, according to the International Monetary Fund.

Authorities said the new measures would cut that debt to 2.3tn yuan by 2028. After the 2008 financial crisis local government in China increasingly used financing vehicles to rack up hidden debt, as many spent big on infrastructure projects, the South China Morning Post reported. But the debts ballooned and, with falling revenues local, governments cut civil servant pay or held back wages, and amassed debts with the private sector, fanning deflationary pressures.

The state broadcaster CCTV described the package as China’s “most powerful debt reduction measure in recent years”, and said it would allow local governments “to better develop the economy and protect people’s livelihood”.

However, Prof Victor Shih, an expert on the politics of Chinese banking and fiscal policies at the University of California San Diego in the US, said the debt relief package did not “come close to resolving the enormous local government debt problem”.

Shih said it was an “accounting exercise” that did not bail out local governments or address the civil servant pay arrears, but instead moved hidden debt on to the books. He added that the claim that hidden debt totalled 14.3tn yuan was “a fiction”, and the true number was likely to be about 50tn yuan or more.

The announcement came at the end of a days long meeting of the National People’s Congress standing committee, the highest lawmaking body in Chinese Communist party. Observers had been expecting bolder measures to promote increased consumer spending and bolster China’s ailing economy. Growth in gross domestic product fell to 4.6% in the third quarter of 2024, short of the 5% target.

The finance minister Lan Fo’an said that more measures were to come, but did not give details.

Beijing had possibly been waiting for the outcome of the US election, as Donald Trump had promised during his campaign to impose large tariffs on Chinese exports.

“Export has been the main engine of economic growth in China for the past four years. So without additional stimulus from the government, I think growth is going to be under pressure, if the US introduces tariffs.”

Wire agencies contributed to this report

A new book by the chief architect of Project 2025, a hugely controversial policy plan for a second Trump term, repeatedly employs imagery of fire and burning, including calling for rightwingers to “burn away the rot” of American institutions and organizations deemed opposed to conservative aims.

The news comes after a White House address on Thursday, two days after Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris in the US presidential election, when Joe Biden called on Americans to “bring down the temperature” after months of heated political battle.

Mixing classical quotes with cliche (“it is time to fight fire with fire”) and metaphors about forest fires and Smokey Bear, Kevin Roberts, president of the far-right Heritage Foundation, advocates “a long, controlled burn” of targets including the FBI, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the New York Times, “every Ivy League college” and even the Boy Scouts of America.

Roberts’s book, Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America, will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy, but the book has proved controversial already. This summer, news outlets used review copies to report violent imagery in an introduction by the Ohio senator JD Vance, Trump’s vice-presidential pick, and to highlight both Roberts’s own violent language and his work on Project 2025. Roberts’s original subtitle – Burning Down Washington to Save America – also attracted attention, as did incendiary language in promotional materials.

As Trump sought to distance himself from the book and Project 2025, including by lying about not knowing Roberts, publication was postponed until after election day. Now, with Trump victorious, Roberts’s heated rhetoric seems likely to alarm progressives all over again.

Beginning with a quote from Virgil’s Aeneid – “My spirit kindles to fire, and rises in wrath to avenge my dying land” – Roberts writes: “In 2020, our country went up in flames.

“Some of those conflagrations were intentional arson, such as the ‘mostly peaceful’ protests [for racial justice after the police murder of George Floyd] that caused more than a billion dollars in damage [a controversial claim] in some of America’s greatest cities: Others were more unintentional, such as the record-setting California wildfires that torched more than 4 million acres of our most beautiful forests.

“In fact, all those fires were connected. They spring from a conspiracy against nature – against ordered, civilized societies, against common sense and normal people – orchestrated by a network of political, corporate, and cultural elites who share a set of interests quite apart from those of ordinary Americans.

“… Be it Black Lives Matter (BLM) in the cities or the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in the countryside, the … playbook is the same: destroy the embodied institutions that define the American way of life and replace them with ideological commitments and bureaucratic imperatives.

“It is time to fight fire with fire.”

Alluding to prominent Project 2025 aims – including political purges of the federal government and legal attacks on groups including women and LGBTQ+ Americans – Roberts continues: “Fire has the potential to destroy … To escape our current darkness, restore America’s civic life and take back our country for good, conservatives can’t merely continue putting out fires; we must be brave enough to go on the offense, strike the match and start a long, controlled burn.

“There’s plenty of fuel. Like deadwood in a forest, many of America’s institutions have been completely hollowed out … Decadent and rootless, these institutions serve only as shelter for our corrupt elite. Meanwhile, they block out the light and suck up the nutrients necessary for new American institutions to grow. For America to flourish again, they don’t need to be reformed; they need to be burned. A nice start would include:

“Every Ivy League college, the FBI, the New York Times, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Department of Education, 80% of ‘Catholic’ higher education, BlackRock, the Loudoun County Public School System, the Boy Scouts of America, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum, the Chinese Communist Party, and the National Endowment for Democracy.”

Roberts does not elaborate on qualifications for his list. But it does contain one name that may jar with rightwing readers: BlackRock, a major financial firm, has been a key investor in Trump Media & Technology Group, the president-elect’s social media company. Larry Fink, BlackRock’s billionaire co-founder, has been linked to an appointment as treasury secretary under Trump.

Turning from Virgil – and the composer Gustav Mahler – to Smokey Bear, Roberts says the US Forest Service mascot might not approve of his aims. But, he insists, “any good conservationist can tell you that fire is an intrinsic part of the cycle of life … without regular controlled burns, a conflagration eventually occurs that wrecks the forest rather than renews it.”

Saying his aim is “to inspire the New Conservative Movement to rekindle the fire of the American tradition, and to empower real Americans to take back our country”, Roberts says that despite advocating burning down the FBI, he represents “the Party of Creation” against “the Party of Destruction – those who seek to abolish the existing order in the name of emancipation, freedom, and progress”.

Roberts’s fiery imagery and rhetoric does not end there. Elsewhere, he compares progressive policies to Dutch elm disease, with affected bodies needing to be “promptly burned”; says “the only way to revive” institutions “haggard with age, decay, and bloat, is to burn away the rot”; and even meditates on the nature of fire itself.

“Man’s taming of fire is the cornerstone of human culture,” Roberts muses. “That’s the funny thing about fire. It is so fleeting, a flame flickering from moment to moment, yet in its evanescence, it is eternal. Of all the elements, fire is most associated with transformation, renewal, and change. You can’t have a blaze without some kind of sacrificial transformation of fuel into fire. Yet precisely for this reason, fire demands an attention to continuity. Unlike any of the other elements, fire dies … a fire must be continually tended.”

Particularly, it seems, if it is set under the Boy Scouts of America.

Nationwide, the US election was primarily a story of Democratic underperformance rather than huge Republican gains compared to 2020 – but in the swing states that ultimately decided the victor, it was the opposite story, with Trump’s gains far outstripping Harris’s losses.

Across the US, Democrats lost more total votes overall compared with 2020 than Republicans gained: Harris attracted 1.4m fewer votes than her Democratic predecessor, Joe Biden, did, while Trump attracted 1.1m more than he did in the previous election.

The figures were calculated by looking only at counties that have 100% of their precincts reporting and at least 95% of their estimated ballots counted, and comparing the vote in those areas to 2020.

Another way of looking at the numbers is that for every 78 votes Donald Trump gained nationally compared to 2020, Kamala Harris lost 100.

But in the seven swing states – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – there was an inverse trend: the Democratic vote dropped very slightly but held up quite well compared to 2020, but Trump made enough gains to give him the White House. A large part of Democratic campaign spending was focused on the swing states, suggesting that this helped buoy up Democratic support – but not enough to overcome a wave of additional Trump voters.

At least 24 states also saw a larger drop in Democratic votes than any movement in Republican votes compared with 2020 (looking only at areas where counting was almost complete).

These included Ohio and Illinois. The Republicans lost more than 30,000 votes in both of these states, but this drop was dwarfed by the Democratic underperformance: Harris fell 200,000 votes in Ohio and nearly 150,000 votes in Illinois. In Virginia, the GOP gained one vote for every five lost by the Democrats.

Some states bucked the trend. Texas, for example, saw enthusiasm for Donald Trump outstrip the Democratic decline in support, with Trump gaining seven votes for every five lost by Harris. Michigan and South Carolina also saw larger Republican vote gains than Democratic losses.

But Democratic support dropped further than any change in Republican vote in at least 1,034 out of 2,480 counties analysed. (There were still 664 counties with more than 5% of votes yet to be counted as of 3:30am ET.)

Harris recorded a fall in 81% of counties (2,011 of 2,478). The party gained votes in just 19% of them.

Trump, meanwhile, saw a decrease in his vote total in 40% of the counties, while gaining in 60%.

The trend continued in the (relatively small) number of counties that flipped to Trump: of the 47 counties Trump won that Biden previously held, 31 were because of the drop in Democratic vote, rather than any significant change in Republican vote.

The significance of the Democratic collapse was especially apparent in Harris county, Texas. There, Democratic votes looked to be down by more than 100,000 while Republican votes increased by only about 20,000 – nowhere near enough to win the county had the Democrats not lost so much ground.

Similarly, Starr county flipped from the Democrats to Republicans, but not through a huge increase in the Republican vote (which rose from 8,247 to 9,443) but because a sharp fall in the Democrat vote (from 9,123 down to 6,845).

In total, there were 1,045 counties that recorded a drop in Democratic votes and an increase in Republican votes.

In the swing states – Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and North Carolina – the story was one of increasing Republican votes. About 303 counties had seen larger increases in the Trump vote than any major change in the numbers voting Democrat. Meanwhile, 66 counties saw outsized shrinkage of Democratic votes.

Nationally, turnout is expected to be down slightly on the record-breaking turnout recorded in 2020. But turnout in the swing states of Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada and Arizona looks likely to surpass that level – mainly caused by an increase in Trump voters.

Votes are still being counted and verified in many counties, meaning the figures in this analysis may change slightly.

The chief executive of Cop29 has been filmed apparently agreeing to facilitate fossil fuel deals at the climate summit.

The recording has amplified calls by campaigners who want the fossil fuel industry and its lobbyists to be banned from future Cop talks.

The campaign group Global Witness posed undercover as a fake oil and gas group asking for deals to be facilitated in exchange for sponsoring the event.

In the calls, Elnur Soltanov, Azerbaijan’s deputy energy minister and chief executive of Cop29, agreed to this and spoke of a future that includes fossil fuels “perhaps for ever”. Cop officials also introduced the fake investor to a senior executive at the national oil and gas company Socar to discuss investment opportunities.

Soltanov told the fake investment group: “I would be happy to create a contact between your team and their team [Socar] so that they can start discussions.” Shortly after that they received an email from Socar.

The UN framework convention on climate change (UNFCCC), the UN body that oversees Cop, says officials should not use their roles “to seek private gain” and it expects them to act “without self-interest”.

On the recording, Soltanov tells the fake oil and gas group: “There are a lot of joint ventures that could be established. Socar is trading oil and gas all over the world, including in Asia.”

He then described natural gas as a “transitional fuel”, adding: “We will have a certain amount of oil and natural gas being produced, perhaps for ever.” At Cop28 last year, the countries involved agreed to transition away from fossil fuels, and the UN body the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is clear that developing new oil and gas fields is incompatible with climate goals signed up to in the Paris agreement.

The Cop29 team also appeared willing to waive climate requirements for the company if it sponsored the event. Cop event sponsors are supposed to commit to cutting their emissions and are expected to sign a “national pledge”, promising to come up with a “credible net zero transition plan” at some point over the next two years.

However, during the negotiations, these requirements were waived and a new clause was added to give the fake investment group “meeting opportunities with key local stakeholders from the energy sector at Cop29”.

There was a similar scandal at the Cop28 talks last year in the UAE when leaked documents revealed the host planned to use climate meetings with other countries to promote deals for its national oil and gas companies. The talks were chaired by Sultan Al Jaber, the chief executive of the national oil company Adnoc and the UAE’s climate envoy.

A spokesperson for Global Witness said: “The UNFCCC urgently needs to act to clean up the Cop climate talks, starting by banning the fossil fuel industry from sponsoring them, and kicking their lobbyists out for good.

“We’ve had 29 talks with an ever-growing crowd of polluters and snake-oil salesmen present. Let’s try the next one without.”

The UNFCCC told the BBC, which first reported the story, that “the [UNFCCC] secretariat has the same rigorous standards every year, reflecting the importance of impartiality on the part of all presiding officers. Given the spiralling human and economic costs of the global climate crisis in every country, we are very focused on Cop29 delivering ambitious and concrete outcomes.”

The Guardian has contacted the UNFCCC, Socar and the Cop29 team in Azerbaijan for further comment.

Cop29 opens in Baku on Monday.

The chief executive of Cop29 has been filmed apparently agreeing to facilitate fossil fuel deals at the climate summit.

The recording has amplified calls by campaigners who want the fossil fuel industry and its lobbyists to be banned from future Cop talks.

The campaign group Global Witness posed undercover as a fake oil and gas group asking for deals to be facilitated in exchange for sponsoring the event.

In the calls, Elnur Soltanov, Azerbaijan’s deputy energy minister and chief executive of Cop29, agreed to this and spoke of a future that includes fossil fuels “perhaps for ever”. Cop officials also introduced the fake investor to a senior executive at the national oil and gas company Socar to discuss investment opportunities.

Soltanov told the fake investment group: “I would be happy to create a contact between your team and their team [Socar] so that they can start discussions.” Shortly after that they received an email from Socar.

The UN framework convention on climate change (UNFCCC), the UN body that oversees Cop, says officials should not use their roles “to seek private gain” and it expects them to act “without self-interest”.

On the recording, Soltanov tells the fake oil and gas group: “There are a lot of joint ventures that could be established. Socar is trading oil and gas all over the world, including in Asia.”

He then described natural gas as a “transitional fuel”, adding: “We will have a certain amount of oil and natural gas being produced, perhaps for ever.” At Cop28 last year, the countries involved agreed to transition away from fossil fuels, and the UN body the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is clear that developing new oil and gas fields is incompatible with climate goals signed up to in the Paris agreement.

The Cop29 team also appeared willing to waive climate requirements for the company if it sponsored the event. Cop event sponsors are supposed to commit to cutting their emissions and are expected to sign a “national pledge”, promising to come up with a “credible net zero transition plan” at some point over the next two years.

However, during the negotiations, these requirements were waived and a new clause was added to give the fake investment group “meeting opportunities with key local stakeholders from the energy sector at Cop29”.

There was a similar scandal at the Cop28 talks last year in the UAE when leaked documents revealed the host planned to use climate meetings with other countries to promote deals for its national oil and gas companies. The talks were chaired by Sultan Al Jaber, the chief executive of the national oil company Adnoc and the UAE’s climate envoy.

A spokesperson for Global Witness said: “The UNFCCC urgently needs to act to clean up the Cop climate talks, starting by banning the fossil fuel industry from sponsoring them, and kicking their lobbyists out for good.

“We’ve had 29 talks with an ever-growing crowd of polluters and snake-oil salesmen present. Let’s try the next one without.”

The UNFCCC told the BBC, which first reported the story, that “the [UNFCCC] secretariat has the same rigorous standards every year, reflecting the importance of impartiality on the part of all presiding officers. Given the spiralling human and economic costs of the global climate crisis in every country, we are very focused on Cop29 delivering ambitious and concrete outcomes.”

The Guardian has contacted the UNFCCC, Socar and the Cop29 team in Azerbaijan for further comment.

Cop29 opens in Baku on Monday.

Nearly 70% of the people killed in the ongoing Gaza conflict are women and children, according to the UN.

In a new report, the UN human rights office said it had verified 8,119 of those killed during the first six months of the war in Gaza. Of the fatalities, 3,588 were children and 2,036 were women. The youngest victim was a one-day-old boy and the oldest was a 97-year-old woman.

The number is much lower than the 43,000 deaths provided by Palestinian health authorities for the 13-month conflict, but backs the assertion that women and children represent a large proportion of those killed.

The new figures came as the secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, Jan Egeland, said people had been pushed “beyond breaking point” with families, widows and children enduring “almost unparalleled suffering”.

Of the verified figures, 7,607 were killed in residential buildings or similar housing, out of which 44% were children, 26% women and 30% men, said the report released on Friday.

Children aged five to nine represent the single biggest age category, followed by those aged 10-14, and then those aged up to and including four.

The UN said the figures indicated “a systematic violation of the fundamental principles of international humanitarian law.”

During a visit to Gaza, Egeland said he had seen “scene after scene of absolute despair”, with families torn apart and unable to bury relatives who had died. He said that Israel, with western-supplied arms, had “rendered the densely populated area uninhabitable”.

“This is in no way a lawful response, a targeted operation of ‘self-defence’ to dismantle armed groups, or warfare consistent with humanitarian law,” he said.

“The families, widows and children I have spoken to are enduring suffering almost unparalleled to anywhere in recent history,” he added. “There is no possible justification for continued war and destruction.”

Nearly two million people have been internally displaced in Gaza, according to the latest estimates from the UN relief agency for Palestinian refugees (Unrwa), and the population faces widespread shortages of food, water and medicine.

Families are still forced to move from one area to another. Areas designated by Israeli forces for evacuation and forcible relocation now cover 80% of Gaza. Palestinians are thus restricted to 20% of the strip and an Israeli brigadier general said this week that there was no intention of allowing people to return to their homes. Experts in humanitarian law have said that such actions amount to the war crime of forcible transfer.

In northern Gaza, a month-long renewed offensive and tightened siege has led to desperate conditions, with an estimated 100,000 people completely cut off from humanitarian aid.

The UN has condemned the “unlawful interference with humanitarian assistance and orders that are leading to forced displacement”.

Most aid remains blocked from leaving crossing points due to insecurity, active hostilities and widespread destruction. An average of 36 trucks a day crossed into Gaza in October, marking the lowest rate for a year.

Egeland, a humanitarian leader, former foreign minister and diplomat in Norway, said he witnessed “the catastrophic impact of strangled aid flows”; adding that people had gone for days without food and drinking water was nowhere to be found.

“There has not been a single week since the start of this war when sufficient aid was delivered in Gaza,” he said.

Last week, Israel’s parliament passed bills banning Unrwa from operating in Israel and the Palestinian territories, designating it a terror organisation, and cutting all ties between the UN agency and the Israeli government.

Egeland said the situation in Gaza was “deadly” for all Palestinians, aid workers and journalists. He said that to prevent tens of thousands of lives being lost, there should be an immediate ceasefire, the release of hostages and the start of a peace process.

“Those in power on all sides act with impunity, while millions across Gaza and the region pay a terrible price,” he said. “Humanitarians can speak out on what we are seeing, but only those in power can end this nightmare.”

Housing activists in Lisbon are to hand over a petition, signed by more than 6,600 residents, calling on city officials to agree to hold a binding referendum on banning tourist lets in residential blocks.

The effort, months in the making, is aimed at prompting decisive action in a city where the cost of housing has drastically outpaced local salaries. “Short-term rentals take most of the housing space in Lisbon’s historic centre,” said Raquel Antunes, a member the group Movement for a Housing Referendum. “We need to put the brakes on this.”

On Friday, the movement will present the petition to the head of the municipal assembly, in what Antunes said was a “first step”. From there, assembly members are obliged to have a debate. If they give the referendum the go-ahead, the questions on the ballot will have to be vetted by the country’s courts to verify that they are constitutional.

If all lines up, the referendum would be held in the first half of next year and result in a binding resolution to phase out the city’s 20,000 or so tourist flats within six months, as well as barring landlords from setting them up in residential buildings in the future.

For housing activists, it is a glimmer of hope in a house market where prices have nearly doubled since 2015. “We don’t have to give into despair, which I think in these times is very easy to do,” said Antunes.

The group began fanning out across Lisbon at the start of 2023 to collect signatures. As word spread, stories poured in from local people living alongside tourist lets.

Some spoke of not knowing anyone in their building or feeling unsafe as a steady stream of strangers traipsed in and out. Others watched anxiously as housing prices ticked relentlessly upwards.

At the heart of their stories was the question of what lies ahead for those who call Lisbon home. “People told us about what kind of city they want to see,” said Antunes. “What kind of country do we want for youth, for elderly people, for people who can’t get houses?”

Those left behind by the surging housing prices are also represented in the petition; the more than 6,600 signatures from Lisbon taxpayers are bolstered by another 4,400 who backed the call for a referendum but aren’t registered in the city. Many of these signatories are former residents pushed out of the city by rising prices, said Antunes. “Sometimes you just have to say goodbye to a city you love because you can’t afford to live there.”

As the movement prepared to hand over the petition, Antunes emphasised that the aim was not to rid the city of tourist lets. Antunes said short-term rentals could still happen, but in buildings registered for commercial use such as hotel apartments and hostels.

Ultimately, she saw the referendum as a means of giving residents an unprecedented say over how the city’s housing was used. “It would be a great step in the right direction,” she said. “Not only to listen to people but also to give them hope that we can make a city that is for everyone, not just for those who have money.”

EU leaders are gathering in Budapest for an informal summit on the bloc’s ailing competitiveness – a task given added urgency by the threat of protectionist “America first” trade policies promised by the US president-elect Donald Trump.

“Don’t ask what the US can do for you, ask what Europe should do for itself,” the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, said as the meeting got under way. “Europe must find a balance. We know what we have to do.”

European officials are alarmed by Trump’s impending return not just because of his hostility to Nato and ambivalence towards Ukraine, but also the economic consequences of his threat to make the EU “pay a big price” for not buying enough US imports.

The European parliament president, Roberta Metsola, said competitiveness was “not just a buzzword … If we’d had the same growth as the US since the turn of the century, Europe would have 11m more jobs. We cannot just react to the US elections, we must act.”

Leaders will focus on discussing a series of radical reforms proposed in a major report published in September by the former Italian prime minister and European Central Bank chief, Mario Draghi, who warned the bloc faced a “slow and agonising decline” unless it acted fast and decisively to end years of stagnation.

The EU’s response to its economic woes – and Trump’s re-election – is, however, hampered by the fact that its two biggest powers are weakened by political crises at home. Germany’s coalition government collapsed on Wednesday, while France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, has no parliamentary majority.

Saying that the Covid pandemic and Ukraine war had changed the rules of international trade to the EU’s detriment, Draghi’s report called for a massive €800bn a year in additional investment in the bloc’s economy – equivalent to about 5% of the EU’s annual economic output.

But its 170 main recommendations, outlining how the EU could boost growth while moving towards a greener and digital economy that would be competitive at a time of rising global trade tension and conflict, contained some difficult choices.

Draghi’s proposals for funding the urgently needed extra investment include more common borrowing – a prospect that is anathema to the traditionally more “frugal” nations in the bloc such as Germany and the Netherlands.

Draghi, who was due to present his report in detail to the 27 EU heads of state and government attending the summit, said on Friday the bloc could no longer stave off vital decisions, adding that the “sense of urgency today is greater” than it was a week ago.

“We have postponed too many important decisions in order to find consensus [among EU member states],” Draghi told reporters. “That consensus did not come, and as a result we have suffered lower economic growth, and now stagnation.”

He said common borrowing, first undertaken by the bloc to finance its pandemic recovery funds, would be indispensable. “But it is not the priority – that has to be a true single capital market,” he said, to get investment and savings flowing across all member states.

The summit was expected to approve a four-page “new European competitiveness deal” recognising the broad conclusions of Draghi’s report and calling for efforts to cut red tape, boost key sectors such as defence, biotech and artificial intelligence, secure a level trade playing field, and explore public and private financing options.

Diplomats and analysts saw an upside and downside to Germany’s continuing government crisis, triggered when the chancellor, Olaf Scholz, fired his liberal finance minister, Christian Lindner, collapsing the three-party coalition.

Many were heartened by the departure of the fiercely frugal Lindner. “With Lindner there, there was no way to have a discussion about a more ambitious long-term budget or strengthening defence financing on an EU level,” one diplomat said.

Others held out the hope that a new German government might prove more constructive on the European stage than the current coalition, whose constant internal disagreements and in-fighting often led Berlin to abstain on key votes.

The hope was that the next German government would be “more coherent” and “therefore finally capable of having more clearcut positions on European initiatives”, said Sylvie Matelly, of the Institut Jacques Delors thinktank.

However, with Europe’s biggest economy likely to be mired in political limbo for several months to come, there was little hope of any concrete steps being adopted to stimulate Europe’s economy in the immediate future, diplomats said.

EU leaders are gathering in Budapest for an informal summit on the bloc’s ailing competitiveness – a task given added urgency by the threat of protectionist “America first” trade policies promised by the US president-elect Donald Trump.

“Don’t ask what the US can do for you, ask what Europe should do for itself,” the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, said as the meeting got under way. “Europe must find a balance. We know what we have to do.”

European officials are alarmed by Trump’s impending return not just because of his hostility to Nato and ambivalence towards Ukraine, but also the economic consequences of his threat to make the EU “pay a big price” for not buying enough US imports.

The European parliament president, Roberta Metsola, said competitiveness was “not just a buzzword … If we’d had the same growth as the US since the turn of the century, Europe would have 11m more jobs. We cannot just react to the US elections, we must act.”

Leaders will focus on discussing a series of radical reforms proposed in a major report published in September by the former Italian prime minister and European Central Bank chief, Mario Draghi, who warned the bloc faced a “slow and agonising decline” unless it acted fast and decisively to end years of stagnation.

The EU’s response to its economic woes – and Trump’s re-election – is, however, hampered by the fact that its two biggest powers are weakened by political crises at home. Germany’s coalition government collapsed on Wednesday, while France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, has no parliamentary majority.

Saying that the Covid pandemic and Ukraine war had changed the rules of international trade to the EU’s detriment, Draghi’s report called for a massive €800bn a year in additional investment in the bloc’s economy – equivalent to about 5% of the EU’s annual economic output.

But its 170 main recommendations, outlining how the EU could boost growth while moving towards a greener and digital economy that would be competitive at a time of rising global trade tension and conflict, contained some difficult choices.

Draghi’s proposals for funding the urgently needed extra investment include more common borrowing – a prospect that is anathema to the traditionally more “frugal” nations in the bloc such as Germany and the Netherlands.

Draghi, who was due to present his report in detail to the 27 EU heads of state and government attending the summit, said on Friday the bloc could no longer stave off vital decisions, adding that the “sense of urgency today is greater” than it was a week ago.

“We have postponed too many important decisions in order to find consensus [among EU member states],” Draghi told reporters. “That consensus did not come, and as a result we have suffered lower economic growth, and now stagnation.”

He said common borrowing, first undertaken by the bloc to finance its pandemic recovery funds, would be indispensable. “But it is not the priority – that has to be a true single capital market,” he said, to get investment and savings flowing across all member states.

The summit was expected to approve a four-page “new European competitiveness deal” recognising the broad conclusions of Draghi’s report and calling for efforts to cut red tape, boost key sectors such as defence, biotech and artificial intelligence, secure a level trade playing field, and explore public and private financing options.

Diplomats and analysts saw an upside and downside to Germany’s continuing government crisis, triggered when the chancellor, Olaf Scholz, fired his liberal finance minister, Christian Lindner, collapsing the three-party coalition.

Many were heartened by the departure of the fiercely frugal Lindner. “With Lindner there, there was no way to have a discussion about a more ambitious long-term budget or strengthening defence financing on an EU level,” one diplomat said.

Others held out the hope that a new German government might prove more constructive on the European stage than the current coalition, whose constant internal disagreements and in-fighting often led Berlin to abstain on key votes.

The hope was that the next German government would be “more coherent” and “therefore finally capable of having more clearcut positions on European initiatives”, said Sylvie Matelly, of the Institut Jacques Delors thinktank.

However, with Europe’s biggest economy likely to be mired in political limbo for several months to come, there was little hope of any concrete steps being adopted to stimulate Europe’s economy in the immediate future, diplomats said.

Human rights organisations say they are gravely concerned that a young Iranian woman arrested for stripping down to her underwear could be subjected to torture after she was transferred to a psychiatric hospital by the authorities.

Amnesty International said it had found evidence that the Iranian regime used electric shocks, torture, beatings and chemical substances on protesters and political prisoners taken to state-run psychiatric institutions after being called mentally unstable. It said the situation facing the young woman was “alarming”.

Video of the young woman, who has not been formally identified, walking around a university campus in Tehran in her underwear was widely circulated on social media last week before she was seen being arrested by police officers. She is believed to have been protesting at being physically assaulted by campus security guards at the Islamic Azad University in Tehran for failing to comply with the strict dress code imposed on all Iranian women.

The Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI) called the student’s transfer to an undisclosed psychiatric facility a “kidnapping”, saying the use of forced transfer of anti-regime protesters to mental health facilities was being increasingly used to silence dissent.

“Iranian authorities systematically use involuntary psychiatric hospitalisation as a tool to suppress dissent, branding protesters as mentally unstable to undermine their credibility,” said Hadi Ghaemi, executive director of CHRI.

“Transferring individuals who participate in peaceful protests to psychiatric hospitals represents not only an act of arbitrary detention but also constitutes a form of kidnapping. This practice is a blatantly unlawful move to discredit activists by labelling them mentally unstable.”

There have been a number of other high-profile cases of protesters arrested during the Woman, Life, Freedom demonstrations who were also committed to psychiatric hospitals after their arrest.

Saman Yasin, a well-known Kurdish rapper, was taken by the authorities to Tehran’s Aminabad psychiatric hospital after his arrest at a protest in 2022, where he was allegedly tortured and coerced into a confession. He spent two years in prison before being released on medical furlough last month.

A source close to Yasin told the Guardian: “Saman was tied to the bed in the psychiatric centre in a cruciform position for a long time. They administered high-dose sedatives and despite his unconscious state, the restraints on his hands and feet were not removed.”

In October 2023, Roya Zakeri, a young Iranian woman who was filmed chanting anti-regime slogans, was called mentally unwell by state media and taken to the women’s ward of Razi psychiatric hospital. The Guardian has been told by people close to her family that she was injected with sleeping agents, physically assaulted and had her arms and feet chained.

Azam Jangravi, a human rights activist, said she was pressed by Iranian authorities to sign a statement saying she had mental health issues after photographs of her waving her hijab over her head on a Tehran street were widely circulated in 2018.

“When they interrogated me, they accused me of being a spy,” she said. “They wanted me to write a confession stating that I regretted my protest and that I did it because I was mentally unwell. I didn’t sign it … They keep taunting us during interrogations by citing the examples of former political prisoners who were sent to these psychiatric hospitals, [telling us] ‘If you don’t regret your act of protest, you’ll face the same fate.’ I fear the university student is under horrific conditions right now and we must demand her release,” she said.

The Guardian spoke to young women in Iran who said they been inspired by the video of the university student, who was rapidly hailed as a new icon of Iran’s Woman, Life, Freedom movement after the video was posted online.

“Nobody I know who protested and has called for freedom from the Islamic Republic does not support her act of protest,” said Farah*, a university student in Tehran. “This is what we are fighting for, to have the freedom to choose. We are in awe of her bravery. If it were up to the regime, all of us who protested would be branded as mentally unwell.”

Images of the young woman have also been posted by pro-regime social media accounts, which have circulated messages about her mental health and personal life.

*Name has been changed

The physical shocks caused by climate breakdown will hit global economic growth by a third, according to a risk assessment by a network of central banks.

The rise in the estimated hit to the world’s economies as a result of the shocks from flooding, droughts, temperature rises, and mitigating and adapting to extreme weather was the result of new climate modelling published this year.

The Network for Greening the Financial System, a membership body of global banks and financial organisations, said in a report this week that the huge increase in the risk from physical shocks to the economy marked a considerable change in the overall severity of the damage caused.

The report was published as the business losses alone from the devastating floods in Valencia, which killed more than 200 people, were calculated at well over €10bn (£8.3bn).

“This new study is based on the most recent climate and economic datasets,” the report said. “They offer highly granular and robust data with excellent geographic and temporal coverage. With the consequences of climate change gradually becoming more apparent, adding the most recent data makes our estimates much more robust.”

Despite the increase in risk to global economies, some experts say the analysis is a huge understatement of the impact climate breakdown will wreak on economic growth.

Sandy Trust, an actuary who works on sustainability and the climate crisis, said the small print in the report by the network of central banks revealed they had failed to take in to account the impact of climate tipping points, sea temperature rises, migration and conflict as a result of global heating, human health impacts or biodiversity loss. Climate tipping points, for example the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, and the deforestation of the Amazon, are critical thresholds that, if crossed, will lead to huge, accelerating and sometimes irreversible changes in the climate system.

Trust said: “This is a massive one-third hit from physical damage on GDP. It has increased more than five times, from about 6% to 33%.

“But while this is a much more severe damage risk, it is by no means comprehensive. The analogy I would use is a model of the Titanic where you can see the iceberg, but the modelling fails to recognise that there are not enough lifeboats on board, or that the cold water is a threat to human life. So this report is still systemically underestimating the risk.”

The NGFS is a group of global banks that provide environmental and climate risk modelling in the financial sector. Its update on climate risks using the new methodology foresees more than 30% losses due to the climate crisis by 2100 from a 3C rise in global average surface temperatures. The report said: “The new damage function does a much better job than its predecessor at representing the physical risks posed by climate change.”

This is a vast difference compared with previously used economic predictions that damages from global heating would be as low as 2% of global economic production for a 3C rise in global average surface temperature.

Yet the group warned that the future economic outlook may be significantly worse. “It cannot be excluded that the economic effects of climate change might turn out to be even more severe than visualised under the NGFS scenarios, for instance, if certain tipping points are reached,” the report said.

“Thus, users should also take into account the tail risks of climate change, along with other risks such as nature-related ones, which are not necessarily captured by these scenarios.”

Trust wrote a report last year with the University of Exeter, which said widely available climate crisis scenarios systematically underestimated the risks, and he said underestimating the impact of global heating was “extremely dangerous”.

Artificial intelligence could displace between 1m and 3m private sector jobs in the UK, though the ultimate rise in unemployment will be in the low hundreds of thousands as growth in the technology also creates new roles, according to Tony Blair’s thinktank.

Between 60,000 and 275,000 jobs will be displaced every year over a couple of decades at the peak of the disruption, estimates from the Tony Blair Institute (TBI) suggest.

It described the figure as “relatively modest” given the average number of job losses in the UK has run at about 450,000 a year over the past decade. More than 33 million people are employed in the UK.

AI, a technology that can be loosely defined as computer systems performing tasks that typically require human intelligence, has shot up the political agenda after the emergence of the ChatGPT chatbot and other breakthroughs in the field.

TBI added that it did not expect the scale of the displacement to be reflected in long-term job losses. It predicted total losses to be in the low hundreds of thousands at its peak at the end of the next decade as AI creates new demand for workers and pulls them back into the economy.

“Our best guess is that AI’s peak, impact on unemployment is likely to be in the low hundreds of thousands and for the effect to unwind over time,” said the report, titled the Impact of AI on the Labour Market. “A common lesson is that AI is likely to increase the dynamism of the labour market by prompting more workers to leave existing jobs and start new ones.”

Such a process will require an “upgrade” to the UK’s labour market infrastructure, TBI said, which could include an early warning system flagging how a worker’s job could be affected by AI.

The report estimated that deployment of AI could raise GDP – a measure of economic growth – by up to 1% over the next five years, rising to up to 6% by 2035. Unemployment, meanwhile, could rise by 180,000 by 2030. Currently, there are about 1.4 million unemployed people in the UK.

However, TBI, which has described AI as a “substantial policy challenge”, said all of these scenarios are dependent on factors such as what tools emerge over the next decade, investment decisions made by private firms and government policies that accelerate or delay implementation.

The thinktank said AI would “certainly” replace some jobs but could create more by boosting workers’ productivty, which would increase economic growth and create more job openings. It could also follow the pattern of previous technological breakthroughs by creating products and sectors that require workers to perform new tasks and roles.

TBI indicated that administrative and secretarial jobs will be the most exposed to the technology, followed by sales and customer service, and banking and finance. Those jobs will produce the greatest time savings from deploying AI, the report said.

TBI said most of the efficiencies are likely to come from products that perform cognitive tasks – such as chatbots – rather than AI-enabled hardware such as robots that carry out physical work. Thus sectors that involve complex manual work such as construction are likely to be less exposed, it said.

However, jobs involving routine cognitive tasks such as secretarial work are more likely to be affected as well as industries that generate large amounts of data, such as banking and finance, which can train AI models more easily.

TBI said it expected unemployment to rise initially as some companies take advantage of time savings from AI – the report estimates almost a quarter of the time private sector workers spend on their jobs could be saved – by letting staff go.

Madonna has expressed outrage at the re-election of Donald Trump, describing him as “a convicted felon, rapist, bigot”.

Writing on Instagram, she said: “Trying to get my head around why a convicted felon, rapist, bigot was chosen to lead our country because he’s good for the economy?” She also posted a picture of a cake with the words “Fuck Trump” etched in frosting along with the caption: “Stuffed my face with this cake last night!”

The singer has previously castigated Trump, saying at the Women’s March in Washington DC in January 2017, the day after Trump’s inauguration, that she’d thought “an awful lot about blowing up the White House”. After a backlash among Trump supporters, she said: “I do not promote violence and it’s important people hear and understand my speech in its entirety rather than one phrase.”

Billie Eilish has also expressed dismay in the wake of Trump’s election. She told a concert audience in Nashville on Wednesday: “A person who is a … let’s say convicted predator, let’s say that … someone who hates women so, so deeply is about to be the president of the United States of America.”

She made the comments prior to a performance of TV, a 2022 song with lyrics referring to the removal of the federal right to abortion access, a decision made by supreme court justices installed during the Trump presidency: “The internet’s gone wild watching movie stars on trial / While they’re overturning Roe v Wade.”

Eilish added to the audience: “I want you to know that you’re safe with me and you’re protected here and that you are safe in this room.”

Trump has not been criminally convicted of rape or predatory behaviour. However, in August 2023, a judge found in a civil claim that it was “substantially true” that Trump raped journalist E Jean Carroll in an incident in late 1995 or early 1996. In 2022, Carroll had sued Trump for battery and defamation, with a jury finding him liable for sexual abuse. Trump countersued for defamation, but that lawsuit was dismissed.

In May, Trump became the first former president to be convicted of a crime. He was found guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records, after he recorded reimbursements to his former lawyer Michael Cohen – who had paid hush money to adult film star Stormy Daniels following her claims of an affair – as “legal expenses”. Trump’s sentencing is currently scheduled for 26 November.

Other musicians expressing outrage at a second Trump presidency include Jack White, who is suing the Trump campaign over allegedly unauthorised use of the White Stripes’ Seven Nation Army. White wrote a screed on Instagram which reads in part: “Americans chose a known, obvious fascist and now America will get whatever this wannabe dictator wants to enact from here on in.”

Ariana Grande, Cardi B and Ethel Cain also lamented the election in its immediate aftermath, along with other entertainment figures such as John Cusack, Viola Davis and Jamie Lee Curtis.

“We wake up and fight,” Curtis wrote. “Fight for women and our children and their futures and fight against tyranny, one day at a time. One fight at a time. One protest at a time. That’s what it means to be an American.”