Elon Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy will lead the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, Donald Trump said on Tuesday.

Despite the name, the department will not be a government agency. Trump said in a statement that Musk and Ramaswamy will work from outside the government to offer the White House “advice and guidance” and will partner with the Office of Management and Budget to “drive large scale structural reform, and create an entrepreneurial approach to government never seen before.” He added that the move would shock government systems.

Trump said the duo “will pave the way for my administration to dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies”.

It is not clear how the organization will operate. It could come under the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which dictates how external groups that advise the government must operate and be accountable to the public.

Federal employees are generally required to disclose their assets and entanglements to ward off any potential conflicts of interest, and to divest significant holdings relating to their work. Because Musk and Ramaswamy would not be formal federal workers, they would not face those requirements or ethical limitations.

Musk had pushed for a government efficiency department and has since relentlessly promoted it, emphasizing the acronym for the agency: Doge, a reference to a meme of an expressive Shiba Inu and the name of the cryptocurrency Dogecoin, which Musk promotes. Trump said the agency will be conducting a “complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government, and making recommendations for drastic reforms”.

Trump said their work would conclude by 4 July 2026, adding that a smaller and more efficient government would be a “gift” to the country on the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Ramaswamy, meanwhile, is a wealthy biotech entrepreneur whose first time running for office was for the Republican party nomination last year. After dropping out of the race, he threw his support behind Trump. He told ABC earlier this week that he was having “high-impact discussions” about possible roles in Trump’s cabinet.

He also has no government experience, but has pushed for cost-cutting in the corporate sector. After building a stake in the struggling online media firm Buzzfeed, he urged the company in May to cut staff and hire conservative commentators like Tucker Carlson.

Musk, speaking to reporters last month, stated a goal of reducing government spending by $2tn. Practically speaking, experts say those cost cuts could result in deregulation and policy changes that would directly impact Musk’s universe of companies, particularly Tesla, SpaceX, X and Neuralink.

Trump had made clear that Musk would likely not hold any kind of full-time position, given his other commitments.

“I don’t think I can get him full-time because he’s a little bit busy sending rockets up and all the things he does,” Trump said at a rally in Michigan in September. “He said the waste in this country is crazy. And we’re going to get Elon Musk to be our cost-cutter.”

Donald Trump, president-elect of the US, announced on Tuesday that he has selected Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead the Department of Government Efficiency, with plans to reduce bureaucracy in the federal government by roughly a third.

Musk had pushed for a government efficiency department and has since relentlessly promoted it, emphasizing the acronym for the agency: Doge, a reference to a meme of an expressive Shiba Inu. Trump said the agency will be conducting a “complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government, and making recommendations for drastic reforms”.

In a video posted on X two days after the election, Trump said he would “immediately re-issue my 2020 executive order, restoring the president’s authority to remove rogue bureaucrats”. He wants to “clean out the deep state”. His promises echo his slogan on The Apprentice: “You’re fired!” And Project 2025, an influential and controversial blueprint for Trump’s second term, lays out ways to make bureaucrats fireable.

Musk has extensive experience slashing corporate spending, and he has promised to cull federal payrolls in much the same way. He cut staff at X, formerly Twitter, by 80% after buying it in 2022, a move he said prevented a $3bn shortfall, but which has not otherwise paid off. Revenue is in steep decline and advertisers have absconded, making a comeback seem unlikely. As the CEO of SpaceX, however, he has garnered a reputation for launching rockets more cheaply than competitors by negotiating with suppliers and keeping operations lean.

The billionaire does not seem to be under any illusions of what will happen after his proposed cuts, admitting that reducing spending “necessarily involves some temporary hardship”. Americans do want to spend less – of their own money. Do they want austerity and less financial assistance from the federal government? Do they want the world’s richest person admonishing them to cut their expenses?

Ramaswamy, meanwhile, is a wealthy biotech entrepreneur whose first time running for office was for the Republican nomination last year. He told ABC earlier this week that he was having “high-impact discussions” about possible roles in Trump’s cabinet. He also has no government experience, but has pushed for cost-cutting in the corporate sector. After building a stake in the struggling online media firm BuzzFeed, he urged the company in May to cut staff and hire conservative commentators like Tucker Carlson.

Musk has already asked Trump to appoint SpaceX employees to top government positions, the New York Times has reported. The president-elect promised to ban bureaucrats from taking jobs at the companies they regulate. Such a rule would seem to bar SpaceX’s lieutenants from the Pentagon’s door. But Trump has never shied away from cronyism. The two are not trying to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest: Musk’s role in the government will be structured so that he can maintain control of his companies, the Financial Times reports.

In his first term, Trump and his team struggled to fill the thousands of government appointments needed to run the federal government. Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie said the administration never fully recovered from its failure to find those appointees. Perhaps adding Musk to the equation is meant to prevent a repeat of such laggardness.

In an extreme version of the new administration, Trump and Musk simply eliminate any position for which they cannot find a friendly appointee. In John Kennedy Toole’s Pulitzer-winning 1980 novel A Confederacy of Dunces, the idiot hero, tasked with organizing an intractable pile of files at his new job, eradicates the company’s mess. Ignatius J Reilly is no genius of organization, though; he is just throwing cabinets full of records away. It is easy to imagine Trump and Musk following his example.

What will stand in Musk’s way, however, is one of his sworn enemies: labor law. Tesla is the only major US carmaker that does not employ a unionized workforce. The billionaire CEO wants to keep it that way. Federal government employees, by contrast, enjoy strong employment protections that would hinder Musk’s slash-and-burn approach to cost-cutting and possibly render it impossible.

For all the different companies he runs, Musk has little experience managing public sector employees. He may find them less pliable lions than he is used to taming.

Kira Lerner contributed to this report

Donald Trump has chosen the former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee as the next US ambassador to Israel.

Huckabee has a track record of hardline, occasionally provocative, pro-Israel rhetoric and previously said Israel has a rightful claim to the West Bank, which he refers to by its Hebrew and biblical name of Judea and Samaria.

The territory is claimed by Palestinians as part of a putative future state but is dotted multiple Israeli settlements that are not recognised under international law. Huckabee has refused to call the settlements by that name, insisting that they be called “communities” or neighbourhoods. He has also denied that the West Bank, seized by Israel from Jordan in the 1967 six-day war, is under military occupation.

Posting on his Truth Social network, Trump predicted Huckabee, an evangelical Christian, would “work tirelessly to bring about peace in the Middle East”.

“He loves Israel and the people of Israel, and likewise, the people of Israel love him,” wrote Trump, who called Huckabee “a great public servant.”

Also announced on Tuesday was Trump’s pick of former director of national intelligence John Ratcliffe as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Ratcliffe, a close ally of Trump, served as director of national intelligence at the end of his first term.

Ratcliffe was confirmed as the country’s top spy in May 2020, eight months before Trump left office. A former member of the House of Representatives and US attorney for Texas, he received no support from Senate Democrats during his confirmation.

As director of national intelligence, Ratcliffe was accused by Democrats and former intelligence officials of declassifying intelligence for use by Trump and his Republican allies to attack political opponents, including Joe Biden, then Trump’s rival for the presidency – a charge Ratcliffe’s office has denied.

Additionally, the president-elect had picked real estate investor and campaign donor Steve Witkoff to be his special envoy to the Middle East. Witkoff is a real estate investor, landlord, and founder of the Witkoff Group, which he started in 1977.

Later on Tuesday, Trump said he is nominating Fox News host, army veteran Pete Hegseth to be defense secretary.

“Pete has spent his entire life as a Warrior for the Troops, and for the Country. Pete is tough, smart and a true believer in America First. With Pete at the helm, America’s enemies are on notice – Our Military will be Great Again, and America will Never Back Down,” Trump said in a statement.

Continuing his Tuesday evening appointments, Trump announced Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota would head the homeland security department, a key role overseeing the nation’s immigration system.

Immigration enforcement has been a central focus of Trump’s agenda, with commitments to tighten border control and implement a large-scale deportation initiative across the country.

On social media, Trump described Noem as “very strong on border security”, highlighting her decision as governor to deploy national guard troops to the Texas-Mexico border.

Huckabee’s appointment is likely to signal a return to the explicitly pro-Israel posture of Trump’s first administration, when he relocated the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in a move decried by Palestinians as damaging to peace prospects.

While Israel claims Jerusalem as its indivisible capital, Palestinians lay claim to the eastern part of the city as their future capital.

Speaking to CNN in 2017, Huckabee – who has paid several visits to Israeli settlements – made his position clear.

“The only people who have ever had Yerushalayim [Jerusalem’s Hebrew name] as a capital have been the Jews,” he said. “Nobody else has ever made this city a capital, ever. So it shouldn’t even be controversial.”

He was equally uncompromising on the issue of West Bank, declining to use the term.

“I think Israel has title deed to Judea and Samaria,” he said. “There are certain words I refuse to use. There is no such thing as a West Bank. It’s Judea and Samaria. There’s no such thing as a settlement. They’re communities, they’re neighbourhoods, they’re cities. There’s no such thing as an occupation.”

Huckabee’s zealous support of Israel has occasionally offended Israelis and Jewish groups.

He drew criticism in 2015 during an abortive presidential bid after accusing Barack Obama of marching Jews “to the door of the oven” by signing a nuclear deal with Iran.

The comment drew a rebuke from Ron Dermer, Israeli ambassador to Washington at the time, and the Anti-Defamation League, an advocacy group dedicated to combating antisemitism.

Nevertheless, Huckabee was unrepentant. “The response from Jewish people has been overwhelmingly positive,” he said.

Huckabee’s daughter, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the current Arkansas governor, served as White House press secretary in Trump’s first presidency.

There is “no sign” of the transition away from burning fossil fuels that was pledged by the world’s nations a year ago, with 2024 on track to set another new record for global carbon emissions.

The new data, released at the UN’s Cop29 climate conference in Azerbaijan, indicates that the planet-heating emissions from coal, oil and gas will rise by 0.8% in 2024. In stark contrast, emissions have to fall by 43% by 2030 for the world to have any chance of keeping to the 1.5C temperature target and limiting “increasingly dramatic” climate impacts on people around the globe.

The world’s nations agreed at Cop28 in Dubai in 2023 to “transition away” from fossil fuels, a decision hailed as a landmark given that none of the previous 27 summits had called for restrictions on the primary cause of global heating. On Monday, the Cop28 president, Sultan Al Jaber, told the summit in Baku: “History will judge us by our actions, not by our words.”

The rate of increase of carbon emissions has slowed over the last decade or so, as the rollout of renewable energy and electric vehicles has accelerated. But after a year when global heating has fuelled deadly heatwaves, floods and storms, the pressure is on the negotiators meeting in Baku to finally reach the peak of fossil fuel burning and start a rapid decline.

Cop29 will focus on mobilising the trillion dollars a year needed for developing nations to curb their emissions as they improve the lives of their citizens and to protect them against the now inevitable climate chaos to come. The summit also aims to increase the ambition of the next round of countries’ emission-cutting pledges, due in February.

The new data comes from the Global Carbon Budget project, a collaboration of more than 100 experts led by Prof Pierre Friedlingstein, at the University of Exeter, UK. “The impacts of climate change are becoming increasingly dramatic, yet we still see no sign that burning of fossil fuels has peaked. Time is running out and world leaders meeting at Cop29 must bring about rapid and deep cuts to fossil fuel emissions.”

Prof Corinne Le Quéré, at the University of East Anglia, UK, said: “The transition away from fossil fuels is clearly not happening yet at the global level, but our report does highlight that there are 22 countries that have decreased their emissions significantly [while their economies grew].” The 22 countries, representing a quarter of global emissions, include the UK, Germany and the US.

The calculation of 2024 emissions is based on the data available up to October and estimates for the final months of the year, which have been accurate in the past. More than 37bn tonnes will be emitted in 2024, about 4m tonnes a minute.

Gas emissions show the biggest annual increase, 2.4%, thanks to increased use in China and elsewhere. Oil burning increased by 0.9%, driven in particular by international flights, while coal emissions are expected to rise marginally by 0.2%.

The emissions of China, the world’s biggest polluter, are expected to rise slightly. “It has had another record year of growth in renewable power, but coal power also kept growing due to even faster growth in electricity demand from hi-tech industries and residential consumption,” said Jan Ivar Korsbakken, at Center for International Climate Research (Cicero) in Norway. Emissions from oil in China have probably peaked owing to the boom in electric vehicles.

Emissions from the second biggest polluter, the US, are expected to decline slightly, with coal continuing its decline to its lowest level in 120 years, but offset by an increase in gas burning. Coal emissions are falling even faster in the European Union, driving a 3.8% drop in emissions. However, coal burning is increasing in India as its economy grows strongly, leading to a 4.6% rise.

The Global Carbon Budget also calculates the emissions from the destruction of forests, some of which are compensated for by the regrowth of trees elsewhere. These emissions have declined by about 20% over the last decade. However, they rose in 2024 because of the drying effect of El Niño, which increased droughts and wildfires in key regions.

Most of the emissions from deforestation comes from Brazil, Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. “Much of these emissions result from the export of goods to the global north, for example soya beans from South America going to China and to Europe,” said Prof Julia Pongratz, at the University of Munich, Germany.

Overall, the combined emissions from both fossil fuels and deforestation will reach another record high in 2024. “There is a feeling that a peak in global fossil CO₂ emissions is imminent, but it remains elusive,” said Dr Glen Peters, also at the Center for International Climate Research. “The world continually finds ways to burn ever more fossil fuels.”

Romain Ioualalen, at Oil Change International, said: “At Cop28, all countries pledged to transition away from fossil fuels but, on the ground, we have witnessed the opposite: new oil and gas projects are being approved around the world, in complete defiance of climate science.”

“At Cop29, we need to see countries come to the table with [commitments] that end fossil fuel expansion and accelerate renewable energy,” he said. The host of Cop29, Azerbaijan, is planning a major expansion in gas production in the next decade.

This year has been “a masterclass in human destruction”, the UN secretary general has said as he reflected on extreme weather and record temperatures around the world fuelled by climate breakdown.

António Guterres painted a stark portrait of the consequences of climate breakdown that had arisen in recent months. “Families running for their lives before the next hurricane strikes; workers and pilgrims collapsing in insufferable heat; floods tearing through communities and tearing down infrastructure; children going to bed hungry as droughts ravage crops,” he said. “All these disasters, and more, are being supercharged by human-made climate change.”

Guterres was addressing scores of world leaders and high-ranking government officials from nearly 200 countries gathered in Azerbaijan for the Cop29 UN climate summit. Over a fortnight of talks, nations will try to find ways to raise the vast sums of money needed to tackle the climate crisis.

Developing countries want guarantees of $1tn a year in funds by 2035 to help them cut greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the impacts of extreme weather.

The talks have been overshadowed by the re-election of Donald Trump, an avowed climate denier, to the US presidency. Although leaders including the UK’s Keir Starmer, Barbados’s Mia Mottley and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan addressed the summit, the heads of government of most of the world’s biggest economies stayed away.

Starmer confirmed stringent new plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions, as revealed by the Guardian, which were praised by campaigners and experts. The UK is one of the first leading economies to present such a plan, months ahead of a UN deadline of next February.

The cut, of 81% by 2035 compared with 1990 levels, will be partly met by decarbonising the electricity sector, but the government is also likely to have to add new policies to encourage public transport and walking, and a switch from gas heating to electric heat pumps.

Starmer told journalists at Cop29 that this need not involve drastic changes to people’s lifestyles, , saying: “The race is on for the clean energy jobs of the future, the economy of tomorrow. I don’t want to be in the middle of the pack, I want to get ahead of the game.”

He told reporters: “At this Cop I was pleased to announce that we are building on our reputation as a climate leader with the UK’s 2035 NDC target to reduce all greenhouse gas emissions by at least 81% on 1990 levels.”

Rebecca Newsom, a senior policy adviser at Greenpeace International, said: “Starmer’s commitment to a relatively ambitious new target for cutting emissions will inject new momentum into the talks and he is right to highlight the huge opportunity offered by the green transition to cut bills, unlock investment and create jobs across the UK. But much clearer plans are still needed – particularly more investment for those working in offshore oil and gas to transition to renewable energy.”

Governments were told at Cop they must take concerted action on reducing greenhouse gases or face economic disaster that could threaten them electorally.

Simon Stiell, the UN’s top climate official, said politics, economics and the climate were now fatally entwined. Governments may be feeling the consequences of the worst inflation for decades but far more serious consequences were in store.

“Worsening climate impacts will put inflation on steroids,” Stiell said, tuning in to some of the economic fears that have helped deliver a series of electoral victories to rightwing parties around the world in the past year.

“The climate crisis is a cost-of-living crisis, because climate disasters are driving up costs for households and businesses. Climate finance is global inflation insurance.”

Rather than being an issue of protecting future generations, tackling greenhouse gas emissions was the only way to save the global economy in the short as well as the long term, Stiell said. “There has been a seismic shift in the global climate crisis. Because the climate crisis is fast becoming an economy killer – right now, today, in this political cycle,” he said.

Ilham Aliyev, the president of the Cop’s host nation, Azerbaijan, struck a different note. Azerbaijan has been a sizeable producer of oil and gas since the mid-19th century. Fossil fuels make up 90% of the country’s export income, and the infrastructure of oil and gas extraction is everywhere in evidence around the capital, Baku: a flaring refinery lights up the city’s night-time skyline, oil wells dot the suburbs, and tankers lumber across the Caspian Sea to its port. Even the country’s national symbol is a flame.

Aliyev, whose family is thought to have made billions from the country’s natural assets, called Azerbaijan’s oil and gas “a gift from God” and made clear the extraction would continue.

“As president of Cop29, of course we will be a strong advocate for green transition, and we are doing it,” he told the event. “But at the same time, we must be realistic.”

He attacked critics of the country – an autocratic state that has been found in NGO assessments to be one of the world’s most corrupt – and defended its use of its resources. “Countries should not be blamed [for having oil and gas deposits] and should not be blamed for bringing these resources to the market, because the market needs them. The people need them,” he said.

His words contrasted with pleas from dozens of developing country leaders for urgent action to stem the rising tide of CO₂ emissions and rescue them from the consequences.

Hilda Heine, the president of the Republic of the Marshall Islands, a tiny, low-lying atoll group in the Pacific that is threatened with inundation if temperatures rise much higher, criticised rich countries for telling the poor they must cut greenhouse gas emissions while failing to provide access to the finance that would enable that.

“It is in our blood to know when a tide is turning,” she said. “And on climate, the tide is turning today.”

On Monday the talks had got off to a slow start when officials tried to clear up some technical issues before the leaders arrived on Tuesday. A resolution on the trade of carbon offsets was passed, to the relief of the hosts, but this was criticised by some civil society groups who said it was flawed and had been rushed through.

The talks will continue on Wednesday when more world leaders including Giorgia Meloni of Italy and Shehbaz Sharif of Pakistan will give addresses.

The archbishop of Canterbury is to step down amid intense pressure over his handling of one of the church’s worst abuse scandals.

Justin Welby’s decision, announced on Tuesday, comes after mounting demands from victims and members of the clergy for him to quit.

Pressure on him had intensified since the publication last week of a damning report on the Church of England’s cover-up of abuse by John Smyth in the UK in the late 1970s and early 80s, and later in Zimbabwe and, it is suspected, South Africa.

About 130 boys are believed to have been victims of Smyth, a powerful barrister who died in 2018.

The independent Makin review into the abuse concluded Smyth could have been brought to justice had the archbishop formally reported it to police a decade ago.

Welby said his decision, which came five days after the report was published, was “in the best interests of the Church of England, which I dearly love and which I have been honoured to serve”.

The announcement came hours after Keir Starmer, the prime minister, refused to publicly back him. A petition started by three members of the General Synod – the church’s parliament – had amassed more than 13,000 signatures calling for the archbishop to quit.

In a statement posted by Lambeth Palace, Welby, the spiritual leader of 85 million Anglicans worldwide, said: “Having sought the gracious permission of his majesty the king, I have decided to resign as archbishop of Canterbury.

“The Makin review has exposed the long-maintained conspiracy of silence about the heinous abuses of John Smyth. When I was informed in 2013 and told that police had been notified, I believed wrongly that an appropriate resolution would follow.

“It is very clear that I must take personal and institutional responsibility for the long and retraumatising period between 2013 and 2024.”

The king approved Welby’s resignation on Tuesday morning.

The archbishop said the exact timing of his departure was yet to be confirmed, adding: “I hope this decision makes clear how seriously the Church of England understands the need for change and our profound commitment to creating a safer church. As I step down I do so in sorrow with all victims and survivors of abuse.

“The last few days have renewed my long-felt and profound sense of shame at the historic safeguarding failures of the Church of England. For nearly 12 years I have struggled to introduce improvements. It is for others to judge what has been done.

“In the meantime, I will follow through on my commitment to meet victims. I will delegate all my other current responsibilities for safeguarding until the necessary risk assessment process is complete.”

Welby said last week he had considered resigning over his “shameful” decision not to act on reports of abuse by Smyth when he was informed of them in 2013.

But Lambeth Palace had said in a statement on Monday that Welby had “apologised profoundly both for his own failures and omissions, and for the wickedness, concealment and abuse by the church more widely”, and did not intend to resign.

Starmer is not believed to have spoken to Welby before he announced his resignation but Downing Street said the prime minister “respects the decision”.

Welby, who had public roles at the funeral of the late Queen and the coronation of King Charles, will have consulted his team of close and trusted advisers on whether or not to quit.

Key among them will have been Stephen Cottrell, the archbishop of York, whose judgment is widely respected. Welby’s personal chaplain, Tosin Oladipo, will have offered spiritual guidance.

The views of his wife, Caroline, will also have been critical in his decision-making process, it is believed.

Cottrell said on Tuesday that it was “the right and honourable thing” for Welby to have “decided to take his share of responsibility for the failures identified by the Makin review”.

The bishop of London, Dame Sarah Mullally, said the move provided “the urgent impetus we need to change the face of safeguarding”.

But Andrew Graystone, author of Bleeding for Jesus, a book about Smyth’s abuse, said the church needed “a wholesale change of culture at the top of the organisation”, with other clergy taking responsibility for failing to act.

He said: “At least 11 bishops knew about John Smyth’s abuse, but failed to stop him. In addition there were literally scores of rank and file church leaders and members who stood by, feeling it was someone else’s job to act. This is not about the incompetence of one man. It is a deep-seated cultural issue about the privilege in the church.”

Alan Collins, a partner in the sexual abuse team at the law firm Hugh James, who represents a number of Smyth’s victims, said Welby’s resignation was a side issue. He said: “The spotlight must be on how the Church of England failed its victims so dreadfully for over 40 years, and the immediate priority is the Church of England addressing the needs of its victims.”

Welby had faced calls to resign from Smyth’s victims, members of the General Synod and Helen-Ann Hartley, the bishop of Newcastle, who said his position was untenable.

James, a survivor of abuse committed by Smyth, said it was a mistake to presume that Welby’s departure would satisfy all victims. He added: “There were plenty of other senior clerics who were aware of Smyth’s abuse, from early too. Replacing the archbishop of Canterbury without a real change in culture is not enough as far as I’m concerned.”

Smyth sadistically abused private schoolboys who attended evangelical Christian holiday camps in the late 1970s and early 80s. Across five decades, he is said to have subjected as many as 130 boys and young men in the UK and Africa to traumatic physical, sexual, psychological and spiritual attacks, permanently marking their lives.

When the abuse was discovered, Smyth was allowed to move abroad with the full knowledge of church officials, where he continued to act with impunity.

He died aged 77 in Cape Town in 2018 while under investigation by Hampshire constabulary, and was “never brought to justice for the abuse”, the Makin review said.

Welby volunteered at the holiday camps in the 1970s but has denied any knowledge of concerns about Smyth. However, the report said this was “unlikely”.

It added: “[Welby] may not have known of the extreme seriousness of the abuse, but it is most probable that he would have had at least a level of knowledge that John Smyth was of some concern … It is not possible to establish whether Welby knew of the severity of the abuses in the UK prior to 2013.”

In earlier times it used to be more straightforward: archbishops of Canterbury such as Thomas Becket and William Laud used to get it in the neck from the king; or, in the case of Simon Sudbury, who was killed in the 14th-century Peasants’ Revolt, at the hands of the mob.

Now, it is more likely to be a politician. Justin Welby has resigned after having lost the confidence of the Church of England over his failure to tackle the institution’s chaotic handling of safeguarding, and his own personal culpability in failing to spot his own vulnerability, arising from his links to and knowledge of the rapacious abuser John Smyth.

The failures stem partly from the church’s institutional and constitutional position, tied to the state, and the irony is that Welby, pre-eminently an institutional figure – Eton, Cambridge and the oil trade before he saw the light – was chosen largely because of his managerial background, to sort out the Church’s administrative inertia and spiritual shortcomings and, in the C of E’s ungainly phrase, get bums on seats. He has not managed any of it.

Safeguarding of the young and vulnerable has become an issue of terrifying potential, too difficult and embarrassing for institutions based on authority and indeed authoritarianism to root out, all the more so when sexual misconduct is involved. Religions have been in denial for a long time and allowed men like Smyth to roam with impunity.

His predatory behaviour was known within the evangelical community and by the young Welby, who attended the now notorious Iwerne camps as a student in the 1970s. If he was really told to steer clear of Smyth, he might have recollected that some time ago. They weren’t called “bash camps” entirely for nothing and Smyth targeted private school boys: isolated, away from home and used to a code of omertà.

His conduct was complained about as far back as 1982 and yet he was allowed to continue and move to Africa, where he continued his wicked exploitation for decades longer.

Other churches – and doubtless synagogues and mosques too – have also been in denial. The Catholic church moved rogue priests around to new parishes, ripe for exploitation, until now. In countries such as Ireland, the institution has lost almost all its authority – that word again – ordinations have plunged and some priests say they dare not wear their dog collars in the street. Even the Jehovah’s Witnesses have started to get embarrassed by their rule that instances of abuse must be witnessed by two elders before internal disciplinary action is taken – as they must know, an almost impossible criterion.

Welby is paying for the institution’s inertia. There is a lengthening string of sexual abuse cases: Peter Ball, the supposedly saintly former bishop of Gloucester, ended up in jail for indecent assault of young men, but only 20 years after he was forced to resign his bishopric. Or what of the plight of Matthew Ineson, bullied and ignored by bishops including the former archbishop of York John Sentamu, for years after he complained that the cleric who had abused him as a teenager was still officiating? That abuser, the Rev Trevor Devamanikkam, killed himself in 2017 hours before he was finally supposed to appear in court.

It is not true to say that the Church of England has done nothing, but its complaints procedures have been glacially slow and bureaucratic and, critics would say, biased in favour of the institution. It has tried claiming that it has safeguarding in place – and indeed in the parishes it now more or less has – but the institution is so slow and ineffectual that it is difficult to see that justice is being done, for either victims or alleged perpetrators. Welby himself has been part of the problem, choosing the wrong targets and, perceptibly, the ones that are supposedly easiest. This was shown when the former bishop of Chichester George Bell, a hero to many in the church for his opposition to the area bombing of German cities during the second world war, was accused by an elderly woman almost 40 years after his death of having abused her as a child. The woman was compensated and Bell publicly condemned by Welby, before it became apparent that the incident could not have happened.

In the Church of England it has become customary for the archbishopric to alternate between evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics. Conservative evangelicals can be vociferous and a section of them made the life of Welby’s predecessor, Rowan Williams, hell over his more liberal support of gay people in the church – until he chose to resign early. Welby, from a mainstream evangelical tradition, has been conspicuously cautious and reticent over many of the issues – such as the position of gay people in the church, including whether gay marriages may be celebrated – dividing the worldwide Anglican communion of which he is the figurehead. The church, which for so long was in tune with what was going on around it, now finds itself increasingly out of step with western societies, losing influence and church-goers, but also with socially conservative and increasingly assertive Anglicans in Africa.

It may be impossible to keep the fissiparous parts together, even if that is desirable or feasible and, if Welby’s managerialism was supposed to keep the show on the road, he has not been particularly successful. It was his chief card, for he is not a deeply spiritual figure, neither a profound theologian nor an inspirational preacher, and now he has failed to grasp the safeguarding nettle. He has fallen foul of both factions in the Church of England who this week have joined temporary forces to get rid of him. He has indeed lost the confidence of his followers and, like a modern politician, had to go.

Stephen Bates is a former religious affairs correspondent of the Guardian and author of A Church at War.

The archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, has announced he will step down after facing pressure to quit over his handling of an abuse scandal.

A damning report was published last week on the Church of England’s cover-up of John Smyth’s abuse in the UK in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and later in Zimbabwe and South Africa. About 130 boys are believed to have been victims.

The independent review into the abuse concluded Smyth might have been brought to justice had the archbishop formally reported it to police a decade ago.

Lambeth Palace had said in a statement on Monday that Welby had “apologised profoundly both for his own failures and omissions, and for the wickedness, concealment and abuse by the church more widely” but did “not intend to resign”.

His resignation was announced on Tuesday afternoon.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey, the only British writer shortlisted this year, has won the 2024 Booker prize, the UK’s most prestigious prize for fiction.

Harvey’s tale of six fictional astronauts on the International Space Station was “unanimously” chosen as the winner after a “proper day” considering the six-strong shortlist, according to judging chair, the artist and author Edmund de Waal. “Our unanimity about Orbital recognises its beauty and ambition. It reflects Harvey’s extraordinary intensity of attention to the precious and precarious world we share”.

“I was not expecting that,” said Harvey in her acceptance speech. “We were told that we weren’t allowed to swear in our speech, so there goes my speech. It was just one swear word 150 times.”

She went on to dedicate her win to those who “speak for and not against the Earth, for and not against the dignity of other humans, other life, and all the people who speak for, and call for, and work for peace”.

Orbital, which was published last November and is now available in paperback, was the highest-selling book of the shortlist in the run-up to the winner announcement, with 29,000 copies sold in the UK this year. The book, which follows its characters over the course of a day as they experience 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets, is a “finely crafted meditation on the Earth, beauty and human aspiration”, wrote Alexandra Harris in her Guardian review.

At 136 pages long, Orbital is the second-shortest book to win the prize in its history; it is four pages longer than Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald, which won in 1979. Asked whether the panel’s choice is a vote in favour of short books, De Waal said “absolutely not”, adding that Orbital is “the right length of book for what it’s trying to achieve”.

Harvey said that she nearly gave up on writing Orbital because she thought: “Why on earth would anybody want to hear from a woman at her desk in Wiltshire writing about space, imagining what it’s like being in space, when people have actually been there? I lost my nerve with it, I thought, I don’t have the authority to write this book.” She said that Tim Peake, an astronaut, has read the book, and was “very nice about it”. He “wanted to know where I’d got my intel”, she said.

Orbital was bookmaker William Hill’s joint favourite to win, along with Percival Everett’s James, a reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of the enslaved Jim. James was the favourite at Ladbrokes, and critics agreed that Everett was most likely to take home the prize. With Everett being the only man on the shortlist, this year marked the first time that five women were shortlisted in the prize’s 55-year history. Taking home the £50,000 prize on Tuesday evening, Harvey has become the first woman to win the award in five years. Asked what she would spend the prize money on, Harvey said that she needs a new bike and would like to visit Japan.

Harvey was previously longlisted for the Booker prize in 2009 for her debut novel, The Wilderness. Orbital is her fifth, following All Is Song, Dear Thief and The Western Wind. She has also written a memoir on insomnia, The Shapeless Unease, which was published in 2020.

Shortlisted with Harvey and Everett were Rachel Kushner for Creation Lake, Anne Michaels for Held, Yael van der Wouden for The Safekeep and Charlotte Wood for Stone Yard Devotional.

Alongside De Waal on this year’s judging panel were novelists Sara Collins and Yiyun Li, Guardian fiction editor Justine Jordan, and musician Nitin Sawhney. “As judges we were determined to find a book that moved us, a book that had capaciousness and resonance, that we are compelled to share,” said De Waal. “We wanted everything.”

“Orbital is our book,” he added. “Everyone and no one is the subject, as six astronauts in the International Space Station circle the Earth observing the passages of weather across the fragility of borders and time zones. With her language of lyricism and acuity, Harvey makes our world strange and new for us.”

The winner was chosen from 156 books published between 1 October 2023 and 30 September 2024. To be eligible, books had to have been written originally in English by an author of any nationality, and published in the UK or Ireland. Before 2014, only books by writers from the Commonwealth, Ireland and Zimbabwe were eligible.

One of last year’s judges, the comedian Robert Webb, called the task of reading every submitted book “impossible”, adding that “you finish as many as you can and the other ones you put to one side after a respectable but undisclosed fraction has been read.” However, De Waal said this year’s judges “read every single one fully”.

Last year, Irish writer Paul Lynch took home the award for his dystopian novel Prophet Song. Other recent winners include Shehan Karunatilaka, Damon Galgut and Douglas Stuart. The last time a woman was announced as winner was in 2019, when Bernardine Evaristo and Margaret Atwood were named joint winners.

• Orbital by Samantha Harvey (Vintage Publishing, £9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey, the only British writer shortlisted this year, has won the 2024 Booker prize, the UK’s most prestigious prize for fiction.

Harvey’s tale of six fictional astronauts on the International Space Station was “unanimously” chosen as the winner after a “proper day” considering the six-strong shortlist, according to judging chair, the artist and author Edmund de Waal. “Our unanimity about Orbital recognises its beauty and ambition. It reflects Harvey’s extraordinary intensity of attention to the precious and precarious world we share”.

“I was not expecting that,” said Harvey in her acceptance speech. “We were told that we weren’t allowed to swear in our speech, so there goes my speech. It was just one swear word 150 times.”

She went on to dedicate her win to those who “speak for and not against the Earth, for and not against the dignity of other humans, other life, and all the people who speak for, and call for, and work for peace”.

Orbital, which was published last November and is now available in paperback, was the highest-selling book of the shortlist in the run-up to the winner announcement, with 29,000 copies sold in the UK this year. The book, which follows its characters over the course of a day as they experience 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets, is a “finely crafted meditation on the Earth, beauty and human aspiration”, wrote Alexandra Harris in her Guardian review.

At 136 pages long, Orbital is the second-shortest book to win the prize in its history; it is four pages longer than Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald, which won in 1979. Asked whether the panel’s choice is a vote in favour of short books, De Waal said “absolutely not”, adding that Orbital is “the right length of book for what it’s trying to achieve”.

Harvey said that she nearly gave up on writing Orbital because she thought: “Why on earth would anybody want to hear from a woman at her desk in Wiltshire writing about space, imagining what it’s like being in space, when people have actually been there? I lost my nerve with it, I thought, I don’t have the authority to write this book.” She said that Tim Peake, an astronaut, has read the book, and was “very nice about it”. He “wanted to know where I’d got my intel”, she said.

Orbital was bookmaker William Hill’s joint favourite to win, along with Percival Everett’s James, a reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of the enslaved Jim. James was the favourite at Ladbrokes, and critics agreed that Everett was most likely to take home the prize. With Everett being the only man on the shortlist, this year marked the first time that five women were shortlisted in the prize’s 55-year history. Taking home the £50,000 prize on Tuesday evening, Harvey has become the first woman to win the award in five years. Asked what she would spend the prize money on, Harvey said that she needs a new bike and would like to visit Japan.

Harvey was previously longlisted for the Booker prize in 2009 for her debut novel, The Wilderness. Orbital is her fifth, following All Is Song, Dear Thief and The Western Wind. She has also written a memoir on insomnia, The Shapeless Unease, which was published in 2020.

Shortlisted with Harvey and Everett were Rachel Kushner for Creation Lake, Anne Michaels for Held, Yael van der Wouden for The Safekeep and Charlotte Wood for Stone Yard Devotional.

Alongside De Waal on this year’s judging panel were novelists Sara Collins and Yiyun Li, Guardian fiction editor Justine Jordan, and musician Nitin Sawhney. “As judges we were determined to find a book that moved us, a book that had capaciousness and resonance, that we are compelled to share,” said De Waal. “We wanted everything.”

“Orbital is our book,” he added. “Everyone and no one is the subject, as six astronauts in the International Space Station circle the Earth observing the passages of weather across the fragility of borders and time zones. With her language of lyricism and acuity, Harvey makes our world strange and new for us.”

The winner was chosen from 156 books published between 1 October 2023 and 30 September 2024. To be eligible, books had to have been written originally in English by an author of any nationality, and published in the UK or Ireland. Before 2014, only books by writers from the Commonwealth, Ireland and Zimbabwe were eligible.

One of last year’s judges, the comedian Robert Webb, called the task of reading every submitted book “impossible”, adding that “you finish as many as you can and the other ones you put to one side after a respectable but undisclosed fraction has been read.” However, De Waal said this year’s judges “read every single one fully”.

Last year, Irish writer Paul Lynch took home the award for his dystopian novel Prophet Song. Other recent winners include Shehan Karunatilaka, Damon Galgut and Douglas Stuart. The last time a woman was announced as winner was in 2019, when Bernardine Evaristo and Margaret Atwood were named joint winners.

• Orbital by Samantha Harvey (Vintage Publishing, £9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Canada’s immigration minister has said “not everyone is welcome” in the country as officials brace for an increase of migrants when Donald Trump returns to the White House with a pledge to carry out mass deportations.

The minister’s warning, seven years after Justin Trudeau promised that “Canadians will welcome” asylum seekers, reflects a stark shift in tone amid waning support for immigration and refugee resettlement in the country, according to migration experts.

Trump has pledged to enact the country’s largest mass deportation when he takes office in January. The senior official helping to oversee the policy, Tom Homan, said Monday the incoming administration will target those living illegally in the US who they consider a public safety threat.

But the effect of these policies is widely expected to prompt many people in the US without documentation to flee north and cross unpatrolled areas of the 5,500-mile border.

Speaking to the Globe and Mail, immigration minister Marc Miller said his government would “always be acting in the national interest … to make sure that our borders are secure, that people that are coming to Canada do so in a regular pathway, and the reality that not everyone is welcome here”.

During Trump’s first term in office, tens of thousands of Haitians fled to Canada after the president ended temporary protected status for the group.

At the time, Trudeau posted on social media: “To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength #WelcomeToCanada.”

Canada’s federal police say they have plans to deal with a fresh increase in crossings that have been “several months” in the making. Deputy prime minister, Chrystia Freeland said her government “absolutely recognize[d] the importance to border security and of controlling our own border, of controlling who comes into Canada and who doesn’t”.

But migration experts said the government’s tough messaging on border security in advance of a possible humanitarian crisis reflects an abdication of its moral responsibilities and of the refugee convention.

“Canada’s first and only response to what might be persecution in a neighbouring country is, ‘How do we prevent people from escaping to our country?’ It’s certainly familiar, unsurprising and disappointing,” said Audrey Macklin, a law professor at the University of Toronto.

Under the refugee convention, a country cannot turn away an asylum seekers if they they have a well-founded fear of persecution in their country of origin. Until 2005, people attempting to claim asylum could make claims at ports of entry, but a US-Canada agreement pushed by Canada made it more difficult. That pact, the Safe Third Country Agreement, allowed Canada could send claimants back to the US and vice versa.

“The idea was, you’re not sending them back to the country where they fear persecution. You’re just sending them to the United States. Baked into agreement is idea United States is a safe country for people to seek and obtain refugee protection,” said Macklin, who previously served as a member of the Immigration and Refugee Board.

Recent changes to the agreement have made it harder to make asylum claims when travelling from the United States to Canada, meaning families will take increasingly dangerous routes – an “immense job stimulus program for smugglers”, said Macklin.

Under the current rule, a person can make an asylum claim if they remain undetected in Canada for 14 days.

“Canada and the United States have created a market for smugglers by making it impossible to ask for refugee protection at a port of entry, because if they could, if people could do that, they wouldn’t need they wouldn’t use smugglers,” said Macklin. “And now people are going to have to pay the smuggler to hide them for 14 days.”

Macklin said Canada should revisit the agreement if it wants to deter people from taking dangerous journeys north.

“If anybody actually cared about harm to asylum seekers, if anybody was absolutely concerned about their wellbeing, they wouldn’t force them into a system where they’re required to use the services of smugglers or traffickers take risky routes that risk them being injured, freezing limbs and other forms of danger, they would see the the Safe Third Country Agreement is designed to inflict harm,” she said.

“What we’re seeing now is the entirely predictable outcome of a deliberate, intentional policy that Canada pursued for decades.”

Police investigating a brazen murder at the arrivals area of Brazil’s main airport are pursuing at least three lines of inquiry in their attempt to track down the killers – and the possible masterminds of the shocking crime.

Antônio Vinicius Lopes Gritzbach, 38, was leaving São Paulo international airport on Friday afternoon when two hooded men jumped out of a car and fired a hail of bullets. The brazen attack, captured on security cameras, marked a dramatic escalation of criminal violence in the country.

Gritzbach, a former member of the First Capital Command (PCC) crime faction, was struck by 10 bullets and died on the spot.

Three bystanders were also hit. Uber driver Celso Araujo Sampaio de Novais, 41, was shot in the back and died hours later. The other two sustained less severe injuries: an employee of a contracted company remains under observation in the hospital, while a female passenger has already been discharged.

“Public executions aren’t new to the PCC,” said Renato Sérgio de Lima, the executive director of the Brazilian Forum on Public Safety. “What stood out this time was the audacity of committing such a crime in a heavily monitored area: the second largest airport in Latin America, where several law enforcement agencies are present.”

According to the public prosecutor’s office, Gritzbach, a former real estate agent, helped the criminal group launder 30m reais (£4m) from international drug trafficking through property and petrol station investments.

He also reportedly received 100m reais (£13.6m) from a PCC leader, Anselmo Becheli Santa Fausta, known as Cara Preta (Black Face), to invest in cryptocurrency. In 2021, Fausta demanded it back, but Gritzbach reportedly did not comply. That same year, Fausta and his bodyguard were murdered; prosecutors alleged Gritzbach had ordered the crime. The PCC, meanwhile, are reported to have put a bounty of 3m reais (£407,381) on his head.

Marked for death by the PCC, Gritzbach approached the public prosecutor’s office and offered to reveal details about the gang’s money-laundering operations in exchange for a plea deal. Last October 31, he expanded his testimony, claiming police oficers had taken bribes to shield gang members from investigation.

Eight days later, he was killed. The timing prompted a theory that police officers may have been involved in his death. Adding to the cloud of suspicion, Gritzbach had hired four police officers as bodyguards – something illegal under Brazilian law – but they were absent during the attack, reportedly due to a car breakdown en route to the airport.

On Tuesday, São Paulo’s public security department announced the suspension of the four officers, and four others who worked as Gritzbach’s security.

A third hypothesis is that Gritzbach was killed over a debt.

“This guy’s death suited a lot of people,” detective Osvaldo Nico Gonçalves, told the Brazilian newspaper Estadão. “We’ll follow the facts, regardless of whether they implicate members of the civil or military police,” he said.

Lima, the security expert, said the killing offered yet more proof that organised crime in Brazil has begun to reach the “scale” of Mexican cartels.

“The extent to which crime has contaminated the state and the formal economy – with money laundering in real estate, fuel networks, and cryptocurrencies – is reaching the levels of Mexico. And this is deeply concerning,” he said.

A teenager is in critical condition in a British Columbia children’s hospital, in what is believed to be Canada’s first human case of bird flu.

“This was a healthy teenager prior to this, so no underlying conditions,” said the provincial health officer Bonnie Henry in a news conference on Tuesday.

“It just reminds us that in young people this is a virus that can progress and cause quite severe illness and the deterioration that I mentioned was quite rapid.”

British Columbia health officials said on Saturday the province had detected Canada’s first human case of H5 bird flu in a teenager.

Henry said the province was still identifying the exact strain, but assumes the case is H5N1.

The World Health Organization says H5N1’s risk to humans is low because there is no evidence of human transmission, but the virus has been found in an increasing number of animals including cattle in the United States.

Henry would not disclose the teen’s gender or age but said they had first developed symptoms on 2 November and were tested on 8 November, when they were admitted to hospital. Symptoms included conjunctivitis, fever and coughing.

As of Tuesday they were hospitalized with acute respiratory distress syndrome, she said.

The teen had no farm exposure but had been exposed to dogs, cats and reptiles, Henry said. No infection source had been identified. “That is absolutely an ongoing investigation.”

More severe illness takes place when the virus binds to receptors deep in the lungs, she said.

Public health officials had identified and tested about three dozen contacts and had not found anyone infected with the virus.

There has been no evidence that the disease is easily spread between people. But if that were to happen, a pandemic could unfold, scientists have said.

Earlier in November, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention asked for farm workers exposed to animals with bird flu to be tested for the virus even if they do not have symptoms.

Bird flu has infected nearly 450 dairy farms in 15 US states since March, and the CDC has identified 46 human cases of bird flu since April.

In Canada, British Columbia has identified at least 26 affected premises across the province, Henry said on Tuesday, and numerous wild birds have tested positive. Canada has had no cases reported in dairy cattle and no evidence of bird flu in samples of milk.

A teenager is in critical condition in a British Columbia children’s hospital, in what is believed to be Canada’s first human case of bird flu.

“This was a healthy teenager prior to this, so no underlying conditions,” said the provincial health officer Bonnie Henry in a news conference on Tuesday.

“It just reminds us that in young people this is a virus that can progress and cause quite severe illness and the deterioration that I mentioned was quite rapid.”

British Columbia health officials said on Saturday the province had detected Canada’s first human case of H5 bird flu in a teenager.

Henry said the province was still identifying the exact strain, but assumes the case is H5N1.

The World Health Organization says H5N1’s risk to humans is low because there is no evidence of human transmission, but the virus has been found in an increasing number of animals including cattle in the United States.

Henry would not disclose the teen’s gender or age but said they had first developed symptoms on 2 November and were tested on 8 November, when they were admitted to hospital. Symptoms included conjunctivitis, fever and coughing.

As of Tuesday they were hospitalized with acute respiratory distress syndrome, she said.

The teen had no farm exposure but had been exposed to dogs, cats and reptiles, Henry said. No infection source had been identified. “That is absolutely an ongoing investigation.”

More severe illness takes place when the virus binds to receptors deep in the lungs, she said.

Public health officials had identified and tested about three dozen contacts and had not found anyone infected with the virus.

There has been no evidence that the disease is easily spread between people. But if that were to happen, a pandemic could unfold, scientists have said.

Earlier in November, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention asked for farm workers exposed to animals with bird flu to be tested for the virus even if they do not have symptoms.

Bird flu has infected nearly 450 dairy farms in 15 US states since March, and the CDC has identified 46 human cases of bird flu since April.

In Canada, British Columbia has identified at least 26 affected premises across the province, Henry said on Tuesday, and numerous wild birds have tested positive. Canada has had no cases reported in dairy cattle and no evidence of bird flu in samples of milk.

A federal judge on Tuesday sentenced a Massachusetts air national guard member to 15 years in prison after he pleaded guilty to leaking highly classified military documents about the war in Ukraine.

Jack Teixeira pleaded guilty earlier this year to six counts of willful retention and transmission of national defense information under the Espionage Act following his arrest in the most consequential national security case in years. He was brought into court in an orange jumpsuit and showed no visible reaction as he was sentenced by the US district judge Indira Talwani.

Earlier in the hearing he apologized before the judge.

Prosecutors had originally requested a 17-year sentence for Teixeira, saying he “perpetrated one of the most significant and consequential violations of the Espionage Act in American history”.

Defense attorneys had sought an 11-year sentence. In their sentence memorandum, they acknowledged that their client “made a terrible decision which he repeated over 14 months”. But they argued that Teixeira’s actions, though criminal, were never meant to “harm the United States”. He also had no previous criminal record.

The security breach raised alarm over the US’s ability to protect its most closely guarded secrets and forced the Biden administration to scramble to try to contain the diplomatic and military fallout.

The leaks embarrassed the Pentagon, which tightened controls to safeguard classified information and disciplined members found to have intentionally failed to take required action about Teixeira’s suspicious behavior.

Earlier in Tuesday’s hearing, the assistant US attorney Jared Dolan argued that 200 months – or a little more than 16 and half years – was appropriate given the “historic” damage caused by Teixeira’s conduct that aided adversaries of the United States and hurt the country’s allies. He also said that recommendation by prosecutors would send a message to anyone in the military who might consider similar conduct.

“It will be a cautionary tale for the men and women in the US military,” Dolan said. “They are going to be told this is what happens if you break your promise, if you betray your country … They will know the defendant’s name. They will know the sentence the court imposes.”

But Teixeira’s attorney Michael Bachrach told the judge in court on Tuesday that 11 years was sufficient.

“It is a significant, harsh and difficult sentence, one that will not be easy to serve,” Bachrach said. “It will serve as an extreme deterrent to anyone particularly young servicemen. That is enough to keep them deterred from committing serious conduct.”

Teixeira, of North Dighton, Massachusetts, had pleaded guilty in March to six counts of the willful retention and transmission of national defense information under the Espionage Act. That came nearly a year after he was arrested in the most consequential national security leak in years.

The 22-year-old admitted that he illegally collected some of the nation’s most sensitive secrets and shared them with other users on the social media platform Discord.

When Teixeira pleaded guilty, prosecutors said they would seek a prison term at the high end of the sentencing range. But the defense wrote in their sentencing memorandum earlier that the 11 years was a “serious and adequate to account for deterrence considerations and would be essentially equal to half the life that Jack has lived thus far”.

His attorneys described Teixeira as an autistic, isolated individual who spent most of his time online, especially with his Discord community. They said he never meant to “harm the United States”.

“Instead, his intent was to educate his friends about world events to make certain they were not misled by misinformation,” the attorneys wrote. “To Jack, the Ukraine war was his generation’s World War II or Iraq, and he needed someone to share the experience with.”

Prosecutors, though, had countered that Teixeira does not suffer from an intellectual disability that prevents him from knowing right from wrong. They argued that Teixeira’s post-arrest diagnosis as having “mild, high-functioning” autism “is of questionable relevance in these proceedings”.

Teixeira, who was part of the 102nd intelligence wing at Otis air national guard base in Massachusetts, worked as a cyber transport systems specialist, which is essentially an information technology specialist responsible for military communications networks. He remains in the air national guard in an unpaid status, an air force official said.

Authorities said he first typed out classified documents he accessed and then began sharing photographs of files that bore secret and top secret markings. Prosecutors also said he tried to cover his tracks before his arrest, and authorities found a smashed tablet, laptop and an Xbox gaming console in a dumpster at his house.

The leak exposed to the world unvarnished secret assessments of Russia’s war in Ukraine, including information about troop movements in Ukraine, and the provision of supplies and equipment to Ukrainian troops. Teixeira also admitted posting information about a US adversary’s plans to harm US forces serving overseas.

A driver killed 35 people and severely injured another 43 when he rammed his car into people exercising at a sports centre in the southern Chinese city of Zhuhai, police said on Tuesday.

Police had detained a 62-year-old man at the sports centre in Zhuhai after the ramming late on Monday, on the eve of an airshow by the People’s Liberation Army that is hosted annually in the city.

Police identified the man only by his family name of Fan, as is usual with the Chinese authorities. Fan was discovered in the car with a knife, with wounds to his neck thought to be self-inflicted, according to the statement. Police said he was unconscious and receiving medical care. They added that their preliminary investigation suggested he had been dissatisfied with the split of financial assets in his divorce.

On Tuesday, Xi Jinping, China’s president, urged local officials to ensure social stability and called for “all-out efforts” to treat the injured, according to state media. It was reported that Xi had dispatched a team from Beijing oversee the handling of the incident.

For almost 24 hours after the crime took place, it was unclear what the death or injury toll was. One of the four hospitals that took in people for treatment said it had more than 20 injured, state media reported on Monday. Calls made to the hospitals in the city by AP reporters went unanswered, or were directed towards other hospitals.

On Tuesday morning, searches for the incident were heavily censored on Chinese social media platforms. A search on Weibo for the sports centre turned up only a few posts, with a couple referring to the fact something had happened, without pictures or details. Articles by Chinese media about the incident from Monday night were taken down.

However, outside China’s Great Firewall, on X, videos were able to circulate. They were shared by the news blogger and dissident Li Ying, who is better known on X as Teacher Li. His account posts daily news based on user submissions. In the videos, dozens of people were lying prone on the running track in the sports centre. In one, a woman says “my foot is broken”, and a firefighter can be seen performing CPR on someone, as people are told to leave the scene. Similar images were posted on Weibo but were censored.

Chinese internet censors take extra care to scrub social media before and during big events, such as the meeting of the National People’s Congress, where the government announces its major policy initiatives for the coming year.

The incident happened on the day before China’s biggest airshow, which opened in Zhuhai on Tuesday. The new aircraft debuted at the show included the PLA Air Force’s J-35A fighter jets, which appeared in public for the first time.

The sports centre, which serves the city district of Xiangzhou, regularly attracts hundreds of people, who run on its track, play football and dance. After the incident, the centre announced it would be closed until further notice.

There have been a number of recent attacks in China in which suspects appeared to target random people, including schoolchildren. In October, a 50-year-old man was detained after he allegedly used a knife to attack children at a school in Beijing. Five people were injured. In September, three people were killed in a knife attack in a Shanghai supermarket.

Three Australian airlines have cancelled flights to and from Bali after a volcanic eruption near the Indonesian holiday spot created a dangerous ash cloud.

The groundings affected Jetstar, Qantas and Virgin Australia flights on Tuesday and Wednesday, leaving passengers stranded.

The emergency began on Sunday when Mount Lewotobi Laki-laki volcano erupted, spewing an ash column 9km high.

The event in East Nusa Tenggara province, which is about 500km from Bali, killed nine people and prompted the evacuation of more than 15,000 people close to the crater.

A Bureau of Meteorology spokesperson said the Lewotobi Volcano, has continued to erupt over the past fortnight.

Easterly winds have brought volcanic ash over Denpasar airport as well the airspace to the south of the airport, and is due to hit Bali and parts of northern Australia across Wednesday, according to the BoM.

“Volcanic ash is expected to move over Bali and adjacent maritime environment to the south including parts of northern Australian airspace until dissipating late tonight.”

“Flights in and out of Denpasar, Bali have been disrupted today due to volcanic ash currently approaching Denpasar airport and airspace. Airlines and airport operators continue to conduct their own risk assessment of the situation,” they said.

Two Qantas return flights have been delayed so far, one flight on Tuesday and one on Wednesday, scheduled to go from Australia to Denpasar.

Ten Virgin flights in and out of Indonesia on Wednesday have been cancelled, with a spokesperson citing “adverse weather.”

“The safety of our guests and crew is our highest priority. Adverse weather due to the volcano in Indonesia has resulted in Virgin Australia cancelling all flights in and out of Denpasar today (13 November).”

“We regret the inconvenience this has caused our passengers, and our team is working hard to ensure all passengers booked on our services get to their destination safely and as soon as possible.”

“Due to volcanic ash caused by Mount Lewotobi in Indonesia, it is currently not safe to operate to and from Bali,” Jetstar said on Wednesday.

All of its flights to and from Denpasar airport were cancelled until 2pm on Wednesday.

“We continue to monitor the situation closely and will provide an update on flights scheduled to operate after 1400 AEDT as soon as possible,” Jetstar said in a statement.

If the situation improves, Jetstar plans to put on two flights between Australia and Bali.

A Qantas flight was due to depart Sydney international airport around 4.30pm while Virgin still plans to operate a flight out of Sydney at 5.45pm.

On Tuesday, Qantas and Virgin Airlines cancelled up to 10 journeys in total, according to their websites.

Spain has arrested one of its top police officers after €20m (£17m) was found hidden in the walls of his house, as part of an investigation into the country’s largest-ever cocaine bust.

Óscar Sánchez Gil was until recently the head of the fraud and anti-money laundering division of Spain’s national police force in Madrid.

Officers arrested him last week along with 15 other people, including his romantic partner, who is also a police officer in the Madrid region, a police source said without naming her.

During the raid, police found the €20m, in cash, hidden in the walls and ceilings of the couple’s home in Alcalá de Henares, a town of about 195,000 inhabitants located 18 miles (30km) east of the Spanish capital.

Officers also found €1m in his office, hidden in two locked cupboards, in bills of €50-500, according to the police source.

The couple have been charged with drug trafficking, money-laundering, corruption and membership of a criminal organisation after last week appearing before a Madrid court, which remanded them in custody, a judicial source said.

Spanish media said the arrests were linked to the seizure last month of 13 tonnes of cocaine that arrived in the southern port of Algeciras from Ecuador’s largest city Guayaquil – a drug-trafficking hub – hidden among crates of bananas.

Police said the drug bust – which they only announced last week – is the largest-ever haul of cocaine in Spain and “one of the largest seizures in the world”.

The container was destined for a Spanish importer based in the south-eastern coastal town of Alicante “who had been receiving large quantities of fruit imported from Ecuador for years”, the authorities said.

Police searched several homes and offices in Madrid and Alicante after the cocaine seizure. These operations uncovered links between the importer and Sánchez Gil, according to Spanish media reports.

He was already under suspicion by his colleagues who had tapped his phone, daily newspaper El Mundo reported.

The father-of-three, who is in his 40s and lives in a brick house protected by metal gates, is suspected of having worked for the drug traffickers for “at least five years”, a source told the newspaper.

During these years, he allegedly provided them with information on the surveillance of containers in Spanish ports, which enabled them to avoid checks, according to a source close to the investigation.

While his lifestyle was not ostentatious, the large sums of money found in his home led police officers quoted by El Mundo to compare his house “to that of Pablo Escobar”, the notorious Colombian drug baron who was shot dead by police in 1993.

A nephew of Escobar once said he found a plastic bag with money worth $18m hidden in the wall of one of his uncle’s houses.

Part of the money Sánchez Gil amassed in recent years was laundered through the purchase of crypto-currencies and a large fleet of private hire vehicles registered in the name of one of his relatives, El Mundo reported.

Spain is a main entry point for drugs into Europe because of its close ties with former colonies in Latin America such as major cocaine producers Colombia and Peru, and its proximity to Morocco, a top cannabis producer.