Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the use of an experimental ballistic missile by Russia amounted to “a clear and severe escalation” in the war and called for strong worldwide condemnation, as Nato accused Vladimir Putin of seeking to “terrorise” civilians and intimidate Ukraine’s allies.

Nato spokesperson Farah Dakhlallah said: “Deploying this capability will neither change the course of the conflict nor deter Nato allies from supporting Ukraine.”

In a statement after Vladimir Putin’s address about Thursday’s strike on a military site in the city of Dnipro, Zelenskyy said the attack was “yet more proof that Russia has no interest in peace”, adding that “pressure is needed. Russia must be forced into real peace, which can only be achieved through strength.”

The Russian president threatened further attacks, saying Moscow “had the right” to strike western countries that provided Kyiv with weapons used against Russian targets.

“A regional conflict in Ukraine previously provoked by the west has acquired elements of a global character,” Putin said in an address to the nation carried by state television after 8pm in Moscow

Ukraine’s parliament reportedly postponed a Friday sitting because of “potential security issues” following the attack, public broadcaster Suspilne said, quoting sources. It reported that legislators were told to keep their families out of Kyiv’s government district and quoted parliamentarians as saying that, for the moment, the next sitting was not scheduled until December.

The new ballistic missile was called Oreshnik (the hazel), Putin said, and its deployment “was a response to US plans to produce and deploy intermediate and short-range missiles”. He said Russia would “respond decisively and symmetrically” in the event of an escalation.

The US military said the Russian missile’s design was based on the design of Russia’s longer-range RS-26 Rubezh intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). The new missile was experimental and Russia likely possessed only a handful of them, officials said.

The Pentagon said the missile was fired with a conventional warhead but added that Moscow could modify it if it wanted. “It could be refitted to certainly carry different types of conventional or nuclear warheads,” said Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh.

The spokesperson for UN secretary general António Guterres said Russia’s use of a new intermediate-range ballistic missile was “yet another concerning and worrying development”. “All of this [is] going in the wrong direction,” Stéphane Dujarric said as he called on all parties to de-escalate the conflict and “to protect civilians, not hit civilian targets or critical civilian infrastructure”.

Speaking after the attack, Zelenskyy said: “The world must respond.” He said Putin was “spitting in the face of those in the world who genuinely want peace to be restored” and that he was “testing” the world.

“Right now, there is no strong reaction from the world. Putin is very sensitive to this. He is testing you, dear partners. … He must be stopped. A lack of tough reactions to Russia’s actions sends a message that such behaviour is acceptable. This is what Putin is doing.

Jeffrey Lewis, a non-proliferation expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in California, said Putin had earlier hinted that Russia would complete the development of an intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) system after Washington and Berlin agreed to deploy long-range US missiles in Germany from 2026. “The RS-26 was always [a] prime candidate,” Lewis said.

Timothy Wright, at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said Russia’s development of new missiles might influence decisions in Nato countries regarding what air defence systems to purchase as well as which offensive capabilities to pursue.

The latest escalation follows the use by Ukraine of US Atacms missiles to target what it said was a weapons depot in Russia’s south-western Bryansk region on Monday, and fired a salvo of UK-made Storm Shadow missiles on Wednesday at a command post in Kursk, where Kyiv’s forces hold a small bridgehead of territory inside Russia.

Both sides are stepping up their military efforts in the near three-year-long war ahead of the inauguration of Donald Trump on 20 January. The Republican president-elect has said he wants to end the war, though it is unclear how he proposes to do so, and each side is hoping to improve its battlefield position before he takes office.

Russia has sent air-defence missiles and other military technology to North Korea in return for the deployment of its troops to support the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine, intelligence officials in South Korea have said.

In a TV interview on Friday, South Korea’s top security adviser, Shin Won-sik, suggested the Kremlin had started to fulfil its side of a deal to provide the regime in Pyongyang with technology and aid as “payment” for the deployment of more than 10,000 North Korean troops to Ukraine.

“It has been identified that equipment and anti-aircraft missiles aimed at reinforcing Pyongyang’s vulnerable air-defence system have been delivered to North Korea,” Shin, the national security adviser to the South’s president, Yoon Suk Yeol, told the broadcaster SBS.

Shin did not offer details of how intelligence officials had confirmed the arrival in North Korea of Russian military support, and North Korea and the Kremlin have not commented on his claims.

North Korea had also received “various forms of economic support” and may have acquired Russian technology for its troubled spy satellite programme, Shin said.

North Korea claimed it had put its first spy satellite into orbit in November last year after two failed attempts, but experts have questioned whether it is able to produce imagery that could be useful to the country’s military. Another satellite launch in May also ended in failure.

Experts believe North Korea agreed to send troops to the western Kursk border region in return for military technology, ranging from surveillance satellites to submarines, as well as possible security guarantees from Moscow.

When they met in Pyongyang in June, the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un, and the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, signed a mutual aid agreement that obliged both countries to provide military assistance “without delay” in the case of an attack on the other.

The leaders are also thought to have agreed to cooperate to oppose western sanctions targeting Russia and the North’s ballistic missile and nuclear weapons programmes.

South Korean intelligence officials told lawmakers this week they believed North Korean troops had been assigned to Russia’s airborne brigade and marine units, adding that some had already seen combat.

North Korea is thought to be eager to bolster its air defences in Pyongyang after it accused South Korea of using drones to drop propaganda leaflets over the capital in October.

The US and South Korea are most concerned about possible transfers of Russian nuclear and missile technology to the North, which has continued to develop a nuclear arsenal in defiance of decades of UN-led sanctions.

Shin did not say whether Russia had made the transfers, and experts believe the Kremlin is unlikely to agree to provide such sensitive technology while the North’s troop deployment in Ukraine is still in its early stages.

Much of the military aid appears to be moving in one direction. Last month, South Korea’s National Intelligence Service said the North had sent more than 13,000 containers of artillery, missiles and other conventional arms to Russia since August 2023.

Like Chekhov’s gun coming off the wall in Act V, it was probably only a matter of time before Vladimir Putin launched an experimental, nuclear-capable ballistic missile into Ukraine. It is hardly a coincidence that his decision comes as the war approaches a likely endgame, with both sides jockeying for position ahead of negotiations in the shadow of Donald Trump.

Neither Ukraine nor Russia quite knows what Trump will do when he takes office in January. But the escalations taking place now will set a new status quo for the day he becomes president, at which point Trump’s options range from hard-nosed horse-trading to simply throwing Ukraine under the bus.

Ukrainian officials said this week that they simply do not know what the president-elect has planned for them. And with little idea of Trump’s intentions, they are focused on optimizing their battlefield position, seeking to hold a beachhead in Russia’s Kursk region and shore up the frontlines elsewhere across the battlefield to be in as strong a position as possible before the new US administration.

US officials, similarly unsure of what their new president will do, are keen to make Ukraine as self-sufficient as possible and to prepare their European partners to increase support to Ukraine after Biden’s departure. One way some of his administration officials have described the goal is to avoid handing Trump another Afghanistan, where the country’s military collapses as soon as US ceases to provide support. Most are pessimistic that Ukraine can continue the fight indefinitely, however.

In the final months of his term, Joe Biden offered Ukraine one thing it has been clamoring for: the right to use Atacms long-range missiles against targets inside Russia. He has also given Ukraine authorisation to use landmines and the right to send US military contractors in to fix the hardware Ukraine needs to stay in the fight.

None of those are a game-changer, officials have admitted. And Biden’s caution in the months before – when they would have been more useful – was partially dictated by political concerns of a backlash ahead of the election.

Trump could reverse those decisions the first day he arrives in office. But he could also decide that they are useful currency as he goes into negotiations with Putin and, as the more optimistic observers hope, acts in the spirit of a good businessman: to never give something of value away for free.

Biden’s last spurt of support comes with a cost, however. And on Tuesday, Russia sent the west a very clear signal: we can escalate as well. With just a 30-minute warning, Russia launched an experimental missile that appears to be a variant of an older, never-deployed missile, the RS-26, which was originally designed for nuclear-weapon delivery. The missile had been criticised in the past for violating the now defunct Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty signed in the late 1980s to prevent a missile crisis in Europe – and its deployment could revive those fears.

Putin sought to look menacing as he gave a rare address on Russian national television on Thursday, threatening to strike western countries involved in the war and claiming that the US and Europe “can’t intercept such missiles”. (If he wanted to make a splash in America, he should have fired his experimental missile another day. US media were firmly focused on Matt Gaetz, Trump’s candidate for attorney general who abandoned his nomination after a series of accusations he had had sex with underage girls).

Nonetheless, the missile was meant to send a message. “I take the launch as a ‘reminder’ to the United States that the risks of nuclear escalation remain present,” said James Acton, the co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

US officials have appeared deliberately sanguine in terms of the nuclear threat in recent days. Despite suddenly closing the US embassy in Kyiv on Wednesday amid warnings of a mysterious “air attack threat”, officials had said they had seen no change in Russia’s nuclear posture. And Russian officials also appeared keen to avoid an accidental escalation with the US by providing a “pre-notification” of the launch.

“That said, Putin’s decision to inform Washington in advance of the test was clearly intended to avoid it misinterpreting the launch and to mitigate the risks of immediate nuclear escalation,” said Acton. “Indeed, I think it is very unlikely that Putin would use nuclear weapons given Trump’s election and the likelihood that the United States will cease to provide aid to Ukraine.”

US officials had warned that Russia would at least nod toward a nuclear escalation if Biden gave Ukraine permission to use Atacms. The CIA chief, Bill Burns, on a visit to London alongside the head of MI6 in September, said the US had brushed off a previous Russian nuclear scare in autumn 2022, demonstrating that threats from Moscow should not always be taken literally.

“Putin’s a bully. He’s going to continue to sabre-rattle from time to time,” Burns said. “We cannot afford to be intimidated by that sabre-rattling … we [have] got to be mindful of it. The US has provided enormous support for Ukraine, and I’m sure the president will consider other ways in which we can support them.”

Hungary’s illiberal prime minister, Viktor Orbán, has said he will invite his Israeli counterpart, Benjamin Netanyahu, to visit in defiance of an international criminal court arrest warrant, as world leaders split over the ICC’s momentous decision.

The world’s highest criminal court issued warrants on Thursday for Netanyahu, his former defence minister Yoav Gallant and the Hamas commander Ibrahim al-Masri, commonly known as Mohammed Deif, who is believed to be dead, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Orbán, whose country holds the rotating EU presidency and who has previously said he would not arrest the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, who is also wanted by the ICC, called the court’s decision “outrageously brazen” and “cynical”.

“There is no choice here, we have to defy this decision … I will guarantee Mr Netanyahu, if he comes, that the judgment will have no effect in Hungary and that we will not follow its terms,” he said on Friday.

Nations are divided over how to respond to the arrest warrants, the first ever issued by the ICC against leaders of a democratic country.

Analysts at Eurointelligence said: “For us Europeans, this warrant exposes a real dilemma between international law, which is our law, and our foreign policy, especially for those member states that are unconditionally backing Israel.”

In principle, Netanyahu and Gallant would risk arrest if they go to any of the 124 states that are members of the ICC, including the EU nations, the UK, Canada, Australia, Brazil, Japan and dozens of African, Latin American and Asia-Pacific countries.

The reality, however, is different – and Netanyahu and Gallant also remain free to travel to any of the countries that, like Israel, are not signatories to the Rome statute that established the court in 1998, including the US, China, India and Russia.

Netanyahu has denounced the warrants as antisemitic and the ICC’s accusations as “absurd and false”, while Israel’s staunchest ally, the US, said it “fundamentally rejects” the decision and was “deeply concerned” by “process errors” that it said had led to it.

Beijing did not criticise the arrest warrants directly but its foreign ministry spokesperson, Lin Jian, said on Friday that it “hopes the court will … uphold an objective and just position and exercise its powers in accordance with the law”.

Hungary signed and ratified the Rome statute during Orbán’s first term in office but it has not promulgated the associated convention for reasons of constitutionality and therefore asserts that it is not obliged to comply with ICC decisions.

Netanyahu thanked Orbàn for his “moral clarity”, adding: “Faced with the shameful weakness of those who stood by the outrageous decision against the right of the state of Israel to defend itself, Hungary [is] standing by the side of justice and truth.”

The outgoing EU foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, has said the court’s decisions must be binding. “It is not a political decision,” he said on Thursday. “It is a decision of a court, of an international court of justice. And the decision of the court has to be respected and implemented.”

Some EU member states were quick to say they would comply. Spain, long one of the bloc’s most persistent and outspoken critics of Israel’s war in Gaza, confirmed on Friday that Netanyahu would be arrested if he travelled there.

Alongside Ireland and Norway, Spain has officially recognised a Palestinian state. The Spanish labour minister, Yolanda Díaz, said on Thursday that Madrid was “always on the side of justice and international law … The genocide of the Palestinian people cannot go unpunished.”

A source in Spain’s foreign ministry said on Friday: “Spain respects the decision of the international criminal court and will fulfil its commitments and obligations with regard to the Rome statute and international law.”

Ireland’s prime minister, Simon Harris, also said in a statement on Thursday that “Ireland respects the role of the international criminal court. Anyone in a position to assist it in carrying out its vital work must now do so with urgency.”

Asked on Friday whether Ireland would arrest Netanyahu – who became the first Israeli prime minister to visit the country in 1996 – if he returned, Harris said: “Yes, absolutely. We support international courts and we apply their warrants.”

The Netherlands’ foreign minister, Caspar Veldkamp, confirmed to the Dutch parliament on Thursday that the country would “in principle” act on the warrants should the situation arise. He cancelled a scheduled visit to Israel on Friday.

Italy’s defence minister, Guido Crosetto, said on Friday that while Rome considered the ICC decision to be “wrong” in putting “on the same level” the leaders of “a criminal terrorist organisation” and those of country “trying to eradicate” it, Italy would be obliged to arrest the Israeli politicians if they visited.

“By joining the court, we must apply its judgments, it is part of the treaty,” Crosetto said. “Every state that joins would be obliged – the only way to not apply it would be to withdraw from the treaty.”

Switzerland, Finland and Portugal have also all said they would execute the warrants. However, Norway and several EU member states, including France and Germany, have been non-committal, saying they respected international law but not confirming they would act.

A French foreign ministry spokesperson, Christophe Lemoine, said on Thursday that Paris would react “in line with ICC statutes”. But Lemoine declined to say whether France would arrest the Israeli leaders if they came to the country, saying it was “a point that is legally complex”.

Germany’s foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, said Berlin was examining the warrants. Baerbock said Berlin was “bound by” the court as a country that recognises the body and respects international law, but the question of whether or not Netanyahu and Gallant would be arrested was “theoretical” for the time being.

A spokesperson for the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, said the UK “respects the independence of the ICC” but there was “no moral equivalence between Israel, a democracy, and Hamas and Lebanese Hezbollah, which are terrorist organisations”. The spokesperson did not say whether Britain would execute the warrants.

Outside Europe, the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, said Canada, a founding ICC member, “has always said it’s really important that everyone abide by international law … We stand up for international law, and we will abide by all the regulations and rulings of the international courts.”

Turkey said the ICC’s decision was “a belated but positive decision to stop the bloodshed and put an end to the genocide in Palestine”, while South Africa, which has accused Israel of genocide in Gaza at the ICC, said it was “a significant step towards justice for crimes against humanity and war crimes in Palestine”.

Argentina’s prime minister, Javier Milei, an outspoken Netanyahu ally, described the warrants as “an act that distorts the spirit of international justice”, adding: “This resolution ignores Israel’s legitimate right to defend itself against constant attacks by terrorist organisations such as Hamas and Hezbollah.”

Additional reporting by Lorenzo Tondo and Sam Jones

The sentencing in Donald Trump’s Manhattan criminal hush-money case has been postponed indefinitely while attorneys on both sides argue over its future given his recent win.

Judge Juan Merchan, who is overseeing Trump’s case, did not provide a new sentencing date in his one-page scheduling order on Friday.

Merchan said in his one-page decision that Trump’s lawyers had to file their argument for dismissal by end of business on 2 December. Prosecutors have one week to respond.

The development came in the wake of filings from prosecutors and defense lawyers over their views of how Trump’s case should proceed after he won the 2024 election against Kamala Harris.

Trump’s lawyers on Tuesday asked Merchan to throw out the case, contending that dismissal was necessary “in order to facilitate the orderly transition of executive power”.

Todd Blanche, Trump’s lead attorney and choice for deputy US attorney general, and Emil Bove, the president-elect’s pick for principal associate deputy attorney general, complained that Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s team “appears to not yet be ready to dismiss this politically motivated and fatally flawed case, which is what is mandated by the law and will happen as justice takes its course”.

They argued that the US Justice Department was on the verge of dismissing Trump’s federal cases and pointed to a departmental memo that bars prosecution of sitting presidents.

“As in those cases, dismissal is necessary here,” their filing said. “Just as a sitting president is completely immune from any criminal process, so too is President Trump as president-elect.”

They claimed that if this case proceeds, such would “be uniquely destabilizing” and could “hamstring the operation of the whole governmental apparatus, both in foreign and domestic affairs”. They asked for Merchan to give them until 20 December to file their push for dismissal.

Prosecutors previously told Merchan that they planned on fighting Trump’s expected plans for dismissal in the aftermath of his recent presidential win. Prosecutors also said that other case proceedings should be put on pause until Trump’s dismissal argument is decided.

Prosecutors disagreed that Trump’s case should be dismissed simply because appeals wouldn’t be decided before his inauguration. While they respected the presidency and understood the logistical issues, “no current law establishes that a president’s temporary immunity from prosecution requires dismissal of a post-trial criminal proceeding that was initiated at a time when the defendant was not immune from criminal prosecution, and that is based on unofficial conduct from which the defendant is also not immune.”

The prosecution said that courts must respect the varying constitutional interests – the executive branch’s need for independence, and the judicial branch’s need for integrity.

Prosecutors told Merchan that there were routes he could take other than outright dismissal, including “deferral of all remaining criminal proceedings until after the end of defendant’s upcoming presidential term”.

Trump was found guilty of 34 felony counts for falsifying business records in an effort to sway the 2016 election on 30 May. The prosecution said that Trump falsely listed reimbursements to his then-lawyer, Michael Cohen, who gave the adult film star Stormy Daniels $130,000 for her silence about an purported affair with Trump, as “legal expenses”.

The jury reached their guilty verdict in less than 24 hours. These proceedings were the first time a US president – former or sitting – stood a criminal trial, as well as a conviction.

Tributes have been paid to “beautiful, kind and loving” British tourist Simone White, one of six people to die in a suspected mass methanol poisoning in Laos.

Six people have now died after allegedly being served drinks laced with methanol in Vang Viong, a town popular with backpackers. These include the Australian teenagers Bianca Jones and Holly Bowles, both 19, an American man and two Danish women aged 19 and 20.

In a statement, White’s parents said they were “devastated by the loss of our beautiful, kind and loving daughter Simone”.

“Simone was one of a kind and had the most wonderful energy and spark for life. She was a soul who gave so much to so many and was loved by her family, friends and colleagues,” they said.

“Simone has been taken from us too soon, she will be sorely missed by her brother, grandmother and entire family. Our hearts go out to all other families who have been affected by this terrible tragedy.”

White, from Orpington in south-east London, was described as a talented lawyer with a bright future in a tribute from her employer, the global law firm Squire Patton Boggs.

“It is with deep sadness that we mourn the tragic passing of our dear friend and colleague Simone White,” the company said. “Simone was a talented colleague with a bright future ahead of her and someone who epitomised our firm values. She will be sincerely missed.”

A number of people have been detained in the case, but no charges have yet been filed, the Associated Press reported.

Canada, which expelled six Indian diplomats over allegations they were involved in a plot against Sikh separatists, has denied it had evidence Narendra Modi was linked to violence on Canadian soil.

The Canadian foreign ministry last month alleged Amit Shah, considered the number two in Modi’s government, was behind a campaign of intimidation in Canada. Ottawa says it has evidence linking Indian government agents to the 2023 murder of the Sikh separatist Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Canada.

This week, the Globe and Mail newspaper said Canadian security agencies believed the Indian prime minister knew about the violent plots and said India’s foreign minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, and national security adviser, Ajit Doval, were also in the loop.

Nathalie Drouin, intelligence adviser to the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, posted a statement of denial on a government website late on Thursday night.

“The Government of Canada has not stated, nor is it aware of evidence, linking Prime Minister Modi, Minister Jaishankar, or NSA Doval to the serious criminal activity within Canada. Any suggestion to the contrary is both speculative and inaccurate,” she said.

Four Indian nationals have been charged in Nijjar’s killing. India flatly rejects any suggestion its agents were involved in violence against Sikh separatists on Canadian soil.

Canada is home to the highest population of Sikhs outside their home state of Punjab and demonstrations in favor of a separate homeland carved out of Indian territory have irked New Delhi.

India calls the separatists “terrorists” who it says are threats to its security.

Canada, which expelled six Indian diplomats over allegations they were involved in a plot against Sikh separatists, has denied it had evidence Narendra Modi was linked to violence on Canadian soil.

The Canadian foreign ministry last month alleged Amit Shah, considered the number two in Modi’s government, was behind a campaign of intimidation in Canada. Ottawa says it has evidence linking Indian government agents to the 2023 murder of the Sikh separatist Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Canada.

This week, the Globe and Mail newspaper said Canadian security agencies believed the Indian prime minister knew about the violent plots and said India’s foreign minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, and national security adviser, Ajit Doval, were also in the loop.

Nathalie Drouin, intelligence adviser to the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, posted a statement of denial on a government website late on Thursday night.

“The Government of Canada has not stated, nor is it aware of evidence, linking Prime Minister Modi, Minister Jaishankar, or NSA Doval to the serious criminal activity within Canada. Any suggestion to the contrary is both speculative and inaccurate,” she said.

Four Indian nationals have been charged in Nijjar’s killing. India flatly rejects any suggestion its agents were involved in violence against Sikh separatists on Canadian soil.

Canada is home to the highest population of Sikhs outside their home state of Punjab and demonstrations in favor of a separate homeland carved out of Indian territory have irked New Delhi.

India calls the separatists “terrorists” who it says are threats to its security.

Developing countries have reacted angrily to an offer of $250bn a year in finance from the rich world – considerably less than they are demanding – to help them tackle the climate crisis.

The offer was contained in the draft text of an agreement published on Friday afternoon at the Cop29 climate summit in Azerbaijan, where talks are likely to carry on past a 6pm deadline.

Juan Carlos Monterrey Gómez, Panama’s climate envoy, told the Guardian: “This is definitely not enough. What we need is at least $5tn a year, but what we have asked for is just $1.3tn. That is 1% of global GDP. That should not be too much when you’re talking about saving the planet we all live on.”

He said $250bn divided among all the developing countries in need amounted to very little. “It comes to nothing when you split it. We have bills in the billions to pay after droughts and flooding. What the heck will $250bn do? It won’t put us on a path to 1.5C. More like 3C.”

According to the new text of a deal, developing countries would receive a total of at least $1.3tn a year in climate finance by 2035, which is in line with the demands most submitted before this two-week conference. That would be made up of the $250bn from developed countries, plus other sources of finance including private investment.

Poor nations wanted much more of the headline finance to come directly from rich countries, preferably in the form of grants rather than loans.

Civil society groups criticised the offer, variously describing it as “a joke”, “an embarrassment”, “an insult”, and the global north “playing poker with people’s lives”.

Mohamed Adow, a co-founder of Power Shift Africa, a thinktank, said: “Our expectations were low, but this is a slap in the face. No developing country will fall for this. It’s not clear what kind of trick the presidency is trying to pull. They’ve already disappointed everyone, but they have now angered and offended the developing world.”

The $250bn figure is significantly lower than the $300bn-a-year offer that the Guardian understands some developed countries were considering at the talks.

The offer from developed countries, funded from their national budgets and overseas aid, is supposed to form the inner core of a “layered” finance settlement, accompanied by a middle layer of new forms of finance such as new taxes on fossil fuels and high-carbon activities, carbon trading and “innovative” forms of finance; and an outermost layer of investment from the private sector, into projects such as solar and windfarms.

These layers would add up to $1.3tn a year, which is the amount that economists have calculated is needed in external finance for developing countries to tackle the climate crisis. Many activists have demanded more: figures of $5tn or $7tn a year have been put forward by some groups, based on the historical responsibilities of developed countries for causing the climate crisis.

This latest text is the second from an increasingly embattled Cop presidency. Azerbaijan was widely criticised for its first draft on Thursday.

There will now be further negotiations among countries and possibly a new or several new iterations of this draft text.

Avinash Persaud, a former adviser to the Barbados prime minister, Mia Mottley, and now an adviser to the president of the Inter-American Development Bank, said: “There is no deal to come out of Baku that will not leave a bad taste in everyone’s mouth, but we are within sight of a landing zone for the first time all year.”

The German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, will be nominated as the candidate to lead his Social Democratic party (SPD) into the February general election after his more popular defence minister, Boris Pistorius, pulled out of the race.

After weeks of calls for a change at the top of the ticket, Pistorius released a video on Thursday in which he said he was “not available” to stand as the SPD flag-bearer in the snap election triggered after Scholz sacked his finance minister, Christian Lindner, imploding the three-year-old ruling coalition.

“This is my sovereign, my personal and entirely own decision,” Pistorius said in the three-minute clip posted on the SPD’s WhatsApp channel. “I did not launch this debate, I didn’t want it and I didn’t put myself forward for anything.”

Observers noted that the 64-year-old had also not ruled himself out until reportedly pressed by Scholz and other leading Social Democrats. The decision comes after several MPs, members of the rank-and-file, and the former party leader Sigmar Gabriel had all given their support to Pistorius, dealing a crushing blow to Scholz.

The move by Pistorius, who regularly tops polls of Germany’s best-liked politicians, brings a clear but messy end to the rumblings in the country’s oldest political party in making Scholz the apparent default choice.

“We want to go into the next election battle with Olaf Scholz,” the SPD co-leader Lars Klingbeil said in advance of a leadership meeting on Monday where the 34-member board will anoint their nominee. On 30 November, the party will hold an “election victory conference” in Berlin, where Scholz is expected to lay out his campaign plans, before members gather for a party congress on 11 January to approve the candidate.

Der Spiegel magazine called Scholz, 66, now “the perhaps weakest candidate of all-time” in postwar Germany, and said the leader of the centre-right Christian Democrats (CDU), Friedrich Merz, now seemed to be a foregone conclusion as the next chancellor. The CDU, with about 32% support in the most recent opinion polls, has double that of the SPD on 16% going into the 23 February election.

Weekly Die Zeit concluded that “the wrong one stepped aside” given Scholz’s dismal popularity ratings, suspecting widespread resignation in the party to imminent defeat. It said the SPD leadership had opted for the “safe choice” of continuing with Scholz rather than the unprecedented move of removing a sitting chancellor from the ballot against his will.

It noted that Scholz’s cautious stance on weapons shipments to Ukraine versus Pistorius’s more hawkish views made the chancellor more palatable to the party’s left wing, who fear losing pacifist voters to the resurgent far-right Alternative für Deutschland and the new conservative populist Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW).

Scholz leads a lame-duck government at a fraught time for the EU’s top economic power. As Donald Trump prepares to return to the White House promising swingeing tariffs that could hit German industry, Germany’s economic health is being sapped by weak growth and a crisis in its all-important car industry.

Scholz’s many detractors say he lacked the leadership qualities to rein in his quarrelling three-way coalition with the liberal Free Democratic party (FDP) and the Greens, as well as the communication skills to sell its policy goals to voters struggling with high inflation and an uncertain economic outlook.

Scholz fired Lindner after a months-long row over how to fill a multibillion-euro hole in the national budget, after the finance minister called for strict adherence to the country’s debt brake. The other two governing parties argued that extraordinary circumstances facing the country, not least the cost of arms shipments to defend Ukraine against the Russian invasion, required immediate exceptions to the budgetary rules to allow more investment. The FDP in turn withdrew from the coalition, depriving it of a parliamentary majority.

Adding to the chorus of criticism on Friday was Angela Merkel, under whom Scholz served as vice-chancellor and finance minister. She commented on Scholz’s angry televised speech after he fired Lindner and announced he was pursuing new elections, saying it was “not exactly an object lesson in dignity”, in an interview with Der Spiegel ahead of the release of her memoir Freedom.

“My first thought was: men!” she said of the unseemly end of the current government. “Taking things personally – that’s something you should avoid at all costs in politics.”

Merkel said she had taken “tough blows” during her 16 years in power but had learned to keep her feelings in check in public. “You feel a lot of emotions, but it’s better if you shout at the wall in your office than at the German public,” she said.

China is grappling with a spate of violent rampages that have left dozens of people dead, sparking a conversation about whether “revenge against society” attacks are becoming more common.

On 19 November, a 39-year-old man drove a car into a group of people near a school in Changde, a city in central China, injuring several students. Days earlier, another car-ramming attack in the southern city of Zhuhai had killed 35 people outside a sports centre, China’s deadliest mass killing in a decade. That same week, a former student in another city stabbed to death eight people and injured 17 others at a vocational college.

Little is known about true motives and the mental states of the assailants in the recent attacks. In the Zhuhai car ramming, local police said the driver was unhappy with his financial settlement in his divorce. In the stabbing incident, authorities said the attacker had failed his exams and could not graduate, and that he was unhappy with his pay on an internship.

There are growing fears in China that the strained social safety net, high unemployment and a struggling economy are leading a small minority of people to vent their frustrations in the form of mass murder. This month’s attacks followed a series of similar incidents earlier in the year.

In October, a 50-year-old man stabbed five people, including three children, outside a primary school in Beijing. In September, a man in his 30s killed three people and injured 15, including a toddler, in a stabbing attack in a supermarket in Shanghai. Police said the man they arrested wielding knives had been experiencing “personal financial disputes”.

That incident came less than two weeks after a 10-year-old was killed in a stabbing attack near the Shenzhen Japanese school, a tragedy that raised concerns about anti-Japanese nationalism, especially as there had been another attack, in Suzhou in June, in which a Japanese woman and her child were targeted by a Chinese assailant. A Chinese woman died trying to defend them.

President Xi Jinping directly responded to the Zhuhai car attack, urging authorities “to draw lessons from the case and to strengthen their prevention and control of risks at the source”.

But in general the authorities have been quick to clamp down on any discussion or public mourning of the tragedies, with the police sharing little information beyond a basic statement. In the days after the Zhuhai incident, the official Communist party newspaper, People’s Daily, ran several articles about an airshow in Zhuhai that week but made scant mention of China’s deadliest mass violence incident in years.

Scores of Weibo posts about this week’s car ramming attack in Changde have been censored, including one by a commenter who compared Chinese society to a “pressure cooker” ready to explode.

Qin Xiaojie , a psychotherapist and founder of CandleX, a mental health support organisation in Beijing, said recent attacks reflected a “very strong sense of feeling that society is not just”.

“When you see someone who is attacking another person or society, underneath, it really reflects that they don’t have a stable self,” Qin said. High unemployment rates and patchy public services, especially when it came to support for mental health issues, meant that “people feel very desperate … like they can’t survive”.

The phenomenon has generated its own morbid internet buzzword: Xianzhongxue, or Xianzhong-ology, a reference to a Ming-era peasant called Zhang Xianzhong who was thought to have murdered large numbers of people in a rebellion in the 1600s.

One graphic, republished by the internet tracker China Digital Times, is titled “A psychoanalysis of contemporary Chinese society”. It shows a chart that plots Xianzhongxue alongside other contemporary Chinese phenomena, including tangping (lying flat) and runxue (emigration). The only way to escape the crushing forces of modern society, the chart suggests, is Xianzhong-ology.

Steve Tsang, the director of the Soas China Institute, said the attacks also reflected “a failure of the de facto social contract” between the people and the Chinese Communist party. “Those desperate people are not seeing a better tomorrow for themselves or else they would not have acted out the desperation,” he said.

Additional research by Jason Tzu-kuan Lu

An Alabama man convicted in the 1994 killing of a hitchhiker cursed at the prison warden and made obscene gestures shortly before he was put to death on Thursday evening in the nation’s third execution using nitrogen gas – as the daughter of his victim spoke out against capital punishment.

Carey Dale Grayson, 50, was executed at the William Holman correctional facility in southern Alabama. He was one of four teenagers convicted of killing Vickie DeBlieux, 37, as she hitchhiked through the state on the way to her mother’s home in Louisiana. The woman was attacked, beaten and thrown off a cliff.

The curtains to the execution room were opened shortly after 6pm ET as the capital punishment case came to conclusion with the controversial, recently adopted US option for putting people to death via nitrogen suffocation.

Strapped to a gurney with a gas mask on his face, Grayson responded with an obscenity when the warden asked if he had any final words. Prison officials turned off the microphone and any subsequent words could not he heard in the witness room, while Grayson raised both middle fingers.

It was unclear when the gas began flowing. Grayson rocked his head, shook and pulled against the gurney restraints. He clenched his fist and appeared to struggle to try to gesture again. His sheet-wrapped legs lifted off the gurney into the air at 6.14pm, the Associated Press reported. He took a periodic series of more than a dozen gasping breaths for several minutes. He appeared to stop breathing at 6.21pm, and then the curtains to the viewing room were closed at 6.27pm, with Grayson pronounced dead at 6.33pm.

The execution marked the third time Alabama had killed someone with nitrogen gas. Alabama is the only state to use the method, which involves pumping nitrogen through a mask and depriving someone of oxygen. It has been banned by veterinarians for use on most mammals across Europe and the US.

“The only lesson from this grim sequence of events is that when states use human beings as guinea pigs for lethal experiments, they are bound to suffer, whether at the point of a needle or behind a mask,” said Matt Wells, deputy director of the human rights group Reprieve US.

The first two nitrogen executions conducted by the southern state did not proceed without controversy. Alabama insisted that the first nitrogen killing in January of Kenneth Smith was “perhaps the most humane method of execution ever devised”.

That claim conflicted with eyewitness accounts, which recorded that Smith writhed and convulsed on the gurney for several minutes, as his body shook and eyes rolled back.

John Hamm, Alabama corrections commissioner, said the nitrogen flowed for 15 minutes and an electrocardiogram showed Grayson no longer had a heartbeat about 10 minutes after the gas began flowing.

Hamm said he thought some of Grayson’s initial movements – shaking and gasping on the gurney – were “all show” but maintained that other movements exhibited by Grayson and the two others executed by nitrogen gas were expected involuntary movements, including the breathing at the end.

Grayson was part of a group of four teenagers who picked up Deblieux in 1994 as she was hitchhiking, then attacked and murdered her.

Of the four, only Grayson, who was 19 at the time, went on to face execution. The other three co-defendants were 18, and had their death sentences set aside by the US supreme court as part of a prohibition of the death penalty for juveniles.

The victim’s daughter told reporters on Thursday night that her mother had her future stolen from her. But she also spoke out against the decision to execute Grayson.

“Murdering inmates under the guise of justice needs to stop,” she said, adding, “no one should have the right to take a person’s possibilities, days, and life,” Jodi Haley, who was 12 when her mother was killed, told reporters.

The execution was carried out hours after the US supreme court turned down Grayson’s request for a stay. His lawyers argued the execution method causes “conscious suffocation” and that the first two nitrogen executions did not result in swift unconsciousness and death as the state had promised.

If the names Fendi, Dior and Valentino were rubbed from the shop fronts, Milan’s Via Monte Napoleone could pass for a slightly fancier than average street in the northern Italian style capital, with the typical jostle of vans and Vespas alongside Porsches, tourists and residents.

But the 350 metre-long street has just been named the world’s most expensive shopping street, beating New York’s Fifth Avenue, London’s New Bond Street and Paris’s Champs-Élysées, and becoming the first European city to top the list in 34 years.

According to the latest Main Streets Across the World report, by the real estate group Cushman & Wakefield, the change “reflects robust rental growth on the Italian street, exceeding 30% in the last two years, further bolstered this year by the euro’s appreciation against the US dollar”.

Rent on the street, which ranked second last year behind Fifth Avenue, can reach as high as €20,000 (£17,000) a square metre annually and business is booming: in Europe’s biggest property deal for two years, the luxury conglomerate Kering, which owns Gucci, bought a prime spot on the street earlier this year. Rents on Fifth Avenue, by comparison, can hit €19,537 a square metre annually, but growth has plateaued. Tsim Sha Tsui in Hong Kong came in at number four, with annual rent per square metre reaching €15,697.

Via Monte Napoleone, which is far smaller than the other global luxury hotspots, is home to the world’s biggest high-end names. Italian heritage brands Loro Piana and Tod’s rub shoulders with buzzy Bottega Veneta, as well as perhaps the most on-the-nose Milanese of them all, Versace. Gucci sits opposite Prada in an Italian luxury face-off. All of them choose to show at Milan fashion week, rather than any of the other Big Four, which periodically injects more high-fashion buzz to the city.

The street is more low-key than nearby Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, the 19th-century glass-topped shopping mall containing many of the same names; it may be more more Instagram-worthy, but it seems the compact Via Monte Napoleone is where the real money is spent.

“Prices are exceptionally high, not only because of its prestige but also due to the lack of supply,” says Diletta Giorgolo, the head of residential at Italy Sotheby’s International Realty. “With no availability for rent or purchase, whenever a property becomes available, its price often skyrockets to incalculable levels.” In her experience, “property values have consistently risen, even during the pandemic”.

Other streets might not be in the running for the top spot just yet, but are nevertheless doing well when judged by rental growth, from Váci utca in Budapest, Omotesando in Tokyo and Midosuji in Osaka to the Design District in Miami and Indiranagar 100 Feet Road in Bengaluru.

Milan’s position does not track with overall tourist numbers, given Paris had about 50 million tourist arrivals last year, New York 60 million, Hong Kong 34 million, London 16 million and Milan 8.5 million. One explanation might be that Milan has been attracting more global big spenders since offering tax-free luxury shopping for people from outside the EU. Global-centric events have also been luring people in. “Since the Milan Expo in 2015, Milan has seen a resurgence of creativity, both homegrown and from international arrivals, and the energy it brings is palpable,” says the British journalist Scarlett Conlon, who works in the city.

Milan design week, anchored by Salone del Mobile, has been rising in popularity in recent years and brings hundreds of thousands of well-heeled design lovers to the city.

JJ Martin was born in LA but over the past 20 years has become synonymous with Milanese luxury thanks to her lifestyle brand La DoubleJ, which has a shop just off Via Monte Napoleone. “I’m thrilled for Milan for being in the news and being the centre of fashion, because it’s so deserved in terms of all the know-how, the quality, the artisans, the factories, the hundreds of, and even combined thousands of, years of experience that this country has, and the radical beauty and the passion for the highest quality possible,” she says.

Martin says she knows what makes the Milanese street so special compared with other global luxury hubs: “You get a much better plate of pasta and glass of wine nearby.”