At least 10 people have been killed and 35 injured after a vehicle drove into a crowd in New Orleans’ tourist district in the early hours of New Year’s Day, according to officials, with media reporting the driver later fired a gun.

The city’s disaster preparedness agency, Nola Ready, released a statement on a “mass casualty incident involving a vehicle that drove into a large crowd on Canal and Bourbon Street”. The area is part of city’s French Quarter, which is a popular nightlife destination.

The New Orleans police superintendent, Anne Kirkpatrick, said in a news conference Wednesday morning: “It was very intentional behavior. This man was trying to run over as many people as he possibly could. He was hellbent on creating the carnage and the damage that he did.”

The driver of the pickup truck was shot dead after exchanging gunfire with police, New Orleans police said.

A senior law enforcement source briefed on the attack told the Guardian the driver was equipped with a rifle, a helmet and body armor. The source and a separate criminal justice source said the truck had a black flag. The senior law enforcement source said it appeared it was an Islamic state flag, but investigators were still working to confirm it.

The source also said that a short-term rental linked to the suspect in New Orleans’ St Roch neighborhood, less than two miles from the scene of the incident, was on fire Wednesday morning.

An emergency management source said that numerous residents in the area surrounding the home were evacuated, because there were apparently explosives inside the home.

The owner of the home did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The FBI, which is now leading the investigation, said in a statement that “an individual drove a car into a crowd of people on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, killing a number of people and injuring dozens of others. The subject then engaged with local law enforcement and is now deceased.”

The bureau added that it is “working with our partners to investigate this as an act of terrorism”.

CBS News and CNN cited witnesses reporting that the driver had also fired a gun.

Alethea Duncan, an assistant special agent in charge of the FBI’s New Orleans field office, said officials were investigating the discovery of at least one suspected improvised explosive device (IED) at the scene.

The senior law enforcement source who spoke with the Guardian said the IED in question was in the form of an ice chest that had been abandoned at the corner of Bourbon and Orleans streets, several blocks away from the intersection of Canal. The source said that had prompted investigators to begin assessing whether the attacker had help.

The source also said that the number of dead could later be adjusted to about 15, with officials still working to verify preliminary information. The source said the slain victims died from both gunfire as well as being struck by the attacker’s vehicle.

People are advised to stay away from the area around Bourbon Street to St Ann. “We do not want anyone on Bourbon Street today,” police superintendent Kirkpatrick said, confirming that the FBI is taking over the investigation.

The police chief said two police officers had been shot and were in stable condition at an area hospital. The police chief said most of the injured are believed to be local residents, and not visitors.

“A horrific act of violence took place on Bourbon Street earlier this morning,” wrote the Louisiana governor, Jeff Landry, on X. “I urge all near the scene to avoid the area.”

As the sun began to rise over the city on New Year’s Day, law enforcement from a number of agencies had swarmed across the city’s French Quarter. Much of Bourbon Street was blocked off as police checked the area for secondary devices.

At the intersection of Bourbon Street and Canal Street, usually a bustling tourist hub, dozens of city police cars lined the streets. Yellow police tape was wrapped around the main drag and three white vans from the parish coroner’s office were parked parallel, near to where the attack took place.

One resident, who did not want to give their name, had been asleep at their home nearby when the attacks began and said he awoke to “screams of terror” and shouts of “no!”

Jay McGuffey, 28, told the Guardian she had been visiting the city from Mississippi and had been in a nightclub on Bourbon Street when the incident took place.

“We were just having fun, celebrating New Year’s, and then they told us to get out cause somebody had got shot. Then we heard that a truck had been through here, and 15 people had been shot,” McGuffey said.

The witness added that she had not been allowed into her hotel because there were still bodies on the ground. “How did this happen? There are like 100 cops out here,” she said.

CBS said one of its reporters, Kati Weis, saw people on the ground with injuries. It said witnesses had told her the driver of the vehicle had fired a weapon and that police had returned fire.

CNN quoted a witness, Kevin Garcia, 22, as saying: “All I seen was a truck slamming into everyone on the left side of Bourbon sidewalk.

“A body came flying at me,” he said, adding that he had also heard gunshots.

New Orleans is preparing for the Sugar Bowl on Wednesday evening, a major college football game between the University of Georgia and the University of Notre Dame. It is also preparing to host the NFL’s Super Bowl on 9 February.

The city hosted a parade Tuesday ahead of the Sugar Bowl, and according to CNN, the New Orleans police department had said it would be staffed “at 100%” during the festivities.

At least 10 people have been killed and 35 injured after a vehicle drove into a crowd in New Orleans’ tourist district in the early hours of New Year’s Day, according to officials, with media reporting the driver later fired a gun.

The city’s disaster preparedness agency, Nola Ready, released a statement on a “mass casualty incident involving a vehicle that drove into a large crowd on Canal and Bourbon Street”. The area is part of city’s French Quarter, which is a popular nightlife destination.

The New Orleans police superintendent, Anne Kirkpatrick, said in a news conference Wednesday morning: “It was very intentional behavior. This man was trying to run over as many people as he possibly could. He was hellbent on creating the carnage and the damage that he did.”

The driver of the pickup truck was shot dead after exchanging gunfire with police, New Orleans police said.

A senior law enforcement source briefed on the attack told the Guardian the driver was equipped with a rifle, a helmet and body armor. The source and a separate criminal justice source said the truck had a black flag. The senior law enforcement source said it appeared it was an Islamic state flag, but investigators were still working to confirm it.

The source also said that a short-term rental linked to the suspect in New Orleans’ St Roch neighborhood, less than two miles from the scene of the incident, was on fire Wednesday morning.

An emergency management source said that numerous residents in the area surrounding the home were evacuated, because there were apparently explosives inside the home.

The owner of the home did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The FBI, which is now leading the investigation, said in a statement that “an individual drove a car into a crowd of people on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, killing a number of people and injuring dozens of others. The subject then engaged with local law enforcement and is now deceased.”

The bureau added that it is “working with our partners to investigate this as an act of terrorism”.

CBS News and CNN cited witnesses reporting that the driver had also fired a gun.

Alethea Duncan, an assistant special agent in charge of the FBI’s New Orleans field office, said officials were investigating the discovery of at least one suspected improvised explosive device (IED) at the scene.

The senior law enforcement source who spoke with the Guardian said the IED in question was in the form of an ice chest that had been abandoned at the corner of Bourbon and Orleans streets, several blocks away from the intersection of Canal. The source said that had prompted investigators to begin assessing whether the attacker had help.

The source also said that the number of dead could later be adjusted to about 15, with officials still working to verify preliminary information. The source said the slain victims died from both gunfire as well as being struck by the attacker’s vehicle.

People are advised to stay away from the area around Bourbon Street to St Ann. “We do not want anyone on Bourbon Street today,” police superintendent Kirkpatrick said, confirming that the FBI is taking over the investigation.

The police chief said two police officers had been shot and were in stable condition at an area hospital. The police chief said most of the injured are believed to be local residents, and not visitors.

“A horrific act of violence took place on Bourbon Street earlier this morning,” wrote the Louisiana governor, Jeff Landry, on X. “I urge all near the scene to avoid the area.”

As the sun began to rise over the city on New Year’s Day, law enforcement from a number of agencies had swarmed across the city’s French Quarter. Much of Bourbon Street was blocked off as police checked the area for secondary devices.

At the intersection of Bourbon Street and Canal Street, usually a bustling tourist hub, dozens of city police cars lined the streets. Yellow police tape was wrapped around the main drag and three white vans from the parish coroner’s office were parked parallel, near to where the attack took place.

One resident, who did not want to give their name, had been asleep at their home nearby when the attacks began and said he awoke to “screams of terror” and shouts of “no!”

Jay McGuffey, 28, told the Guardian she had been visiting the city from Mississippi and had been in a nightclub on Bourbon Street when the incident took place.

“We were just having fun, celebrating New Year’s, and then they told us to get out cause somebody had got shot. Then we heard that a truck had been through here, and 15 people had been shot,” McGuffey said.

The witness added that she had not been allowed into her hotel because there were still bodies on the ground. “How did this happen? There are like 100 cops out here,” she said.

CBS said one of its reporters, Kati Weis, saw people on the ground with injuries. It said witnesses had told her the driver of the vehicle had fired a weapon and that police had returned fire.

CNN quoted a witness, Kevin Garcia, 22, as saying: “All I seen was a truck slamming into everyone on the left side of Bourbon sidewalk.

“A body came flying at me,” he said, adding that he had also heard gunshots.

New Orleans is preparing for the Sugar Bowl on Wednesday evening, a major college football game between the University of Georgia and the University of Notre Dame. It is also preparing to host the NFL’s Super Bowl on 9 February.

The city hosted a parade Tuesday ahead of the Sugar Bowl, and according to CNN, the New Orleans police department had said it would be staffed “at 100%” during the festivities.

Israeli strikes killed at least 12 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip on New Year’s Day, mostly women and children, officials said, as the nearly 15-month war ground on into the new year.

One strike hit a home in the Jabaliya area of northern Gaza, the most isolated and heavily destroyed part of the territory, where Israel has waged a major operation since early October. Gaza’s health ministry said seven people had been killed, including a woman and four children, and at least a dozen had been wounded.

Another strike overnight in the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza killed a woman and a child, according to the al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital, which received the bodies.

“Are you celebrating? Enjoy as we die. For a year and a half, we have been dying,” said a man carrying the body of a child amid the flashing lights of emergency vehicles.

Israel’s military said militants had fired rockets from the Bureij area overnight and that it had responded with a strike targeting a militant.

A third strike in the southern city of Khan Younis killed three people, according to the Nasser and European hospitals, which received the bodies.

The war began when Hamas-led militants attacked southern Israel on 7 October 2023, killing about 1,200 people and abducting about 250. About 100 hostages are still held in Gaza, although at least a third are believed to be dead.

Israel’s air and ground offensive has killed more than 45,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s health ministry.

The war has caused widespread destruction and displaced about 90% of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million people, many of them more than once.

Hundreds of thousands of people live in tents on the coast as winter brings frequent rainstorms and temperatures drop below 10C (50F) at night. At least six infants and another person have died of hypothermia, according to the health ministry.

Many displaced Palestinians in central Gaza rely on charity kitchens as their sole source of food as a result of aid restrictions and skyrocketing prices. AP footage showed a long queue of children waiting for rice, the only item served at the kitchen in Deir al-Balah on Wednesday.

“Some of those kitchens close because they don’t receive aid, and others distribute small amounts of food and it’s not enough,” said Umm Adham Shaheen, who is displaced from Gaza City.

Allies and aides to Donald Trump should be increasingly concerned by Elon Musk’s proximity to and influence on the US president-elect, the Yale historian and bestselling author Timothy Snyder said.

“Trump is a little guy, and Musk is a big guy when it actually comes to having money,” Snyder said. “And I think if you were a friend of Trump, you would be worried.”

The author of bestsellers including On Tyranny (2017) and On Freedom (2024) was speaking to the Guardian about issues including his work in Ukraine, where he has teamed up with the Star Wars actor Mark Hamill to raise funds to buy robots to clear landmines laid by Russian invaders.

But as Trump prepares to take power in Washington, and promises new policy on US support for Ukraine most expect to heavily favor Vladimir Putin and Russia, Snyder also considered what the coming Trump administration may mean closer to home.

Snyder expects that Trump’s soon-to-be home, the White House, will be a stage for uncomfortable and damaging discord between the president-elect and his most powerful ally, the world’s richest man.

“I think we overestimate Trump and we underestimate Musk,” Snyder said. “People can’t help but think that Trump has money, but he doesn’t. He’s never really had money. He’s never even really claimed to have money. His whole notion is that you have to believe that he has money. But he’s never been able to pay his own debts. He’s never been able to finance his own campaigns.

“Musk, with an amount of money that was meaningless to him, was able to finance Trump’s campaign, essentially.”

As owner of businesses including Tesla, SpaceX and X (the social media platform formerly known as Twitter), Musk poured millions of dollars into supporting Trump in his presidential election campaign against the Democratic nominee, the current vice-president, Kamala Harris. Musk was widely reported to have been a key influence in Trump naming the Ohio senator JD Vance as his vice-presidential pick.

Since Trump’s victory in November, from Mar-a-Lago in Florida to Notre Dame in Paris, Musk has been constantly at Trump’s side, earning the satirical nickname “first buddy” but also an appointment with the biotech investor Vivek Ramaswamy to jointly head the “department of government efficiency”, or “Doge”, a group tasked with meeting Trump’s wildly ambitious campaign promise of slashing trillions from federal spending.

Considering instances of Musk’s apparent influence over Trump as the president-elect has struggled to control congressional Republicans – an unruly party already split on how to continue funding the government they also want to defund – Snyder said: “All the threats that Trump is now going to issue – ‘I’m going to primary people, I’m going to sue people’ – Musk is going to pay for that, not Trump. And when Trump needs money for anything, he’s going to be asking Musk.

“Unless Trump breaks it off right now, he’s going to be in this kind of dependent relationship for the rest of the way, because you get used to people giving you money … and I think if you were a friend of Trump, you would be worried.”

Trump’s view of Russia has been a controversial subject ever since he entered presidential politics in 2015; won the White House in 2016 with Russian interference on his behalf; spent two years having his links to Moscow investigated by the special counsel Robert Mueller; and was widely criticized in office for appearing to defer to Vladimir Putin.

In light of such concerns, Snyder – whose 2018 book The Road to Unfreedom was in large part about Trump and Russia – discussed a name for the incoming, second Trump administration that he recently coined.

“So I thought about this dependency position,” Snyder said. “I was going to call it Muskotrumpovia, because I think Musk is a more important person, but Trumpomuskovia had a nicer ring to it.

“And also, I wanted Muskovia because I wanted the idea of Russia to be there in the background, because a lot of smart Russia hands are saying this all the time: this is kind of like the 1990s in Russia. You have the doddering, rich-but-not-very-rich president [Boris Yeltsin], surrounded by more youthful, more active, ambitious oligarchs. That’s the kind of scenario [America is] in.”

Donald Trump said Tuesday that he’s planning to attend the funeral of former president Jimmy Carter.

Asked about it as he walked into a New Year’s Eve party at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, the president-elect responded: “I’ll be there.” Pressed on whether he’d spoken to members of Carter’s family, Trump said he’d rather not say.

Funeral services honoring Carter, who died Sunday at 100, will be held in Georgia and Washington, beginning 4 January and concluding 9 January.

Trump was a frequent and fierce critic of Carter on the campaign trail ahead of November’s election, using the rising inflation rates of the 1970s to unfavorably compare Joe Biden to Carter and his administration.

But Trump was gracious about the former president in posts on his social media site after Carter’s death Sunday, writing that the nation “owed him a debt of gratitude”.

“While I strongly disagreed with him philosophically and politically, I also realized that he truly loved and respected our Country, and all it stands for,” Trump wrote of Carter. “He worked hard to make America a better place, and for that I give him my highest respect.”

Wearing a tuxedo as he entered the festivities, Trump took a few minutes of questions from reporters on various topics. He was asked about the possibility of a ceasefire in Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza, but said only: “We’re going to see what happens.”

Trump added of hostages seized more than a year ago by Hamas: “I’ll put it this way: they better let the hostages come back soon.”

Trump also said he thought 2025 would be a “great year” and “we’re going to do fantastically well as a country”.

“There’s a whole light over the whole world, not just our country. They’re a lot of happy people,” Trump said of recent weeks.

Asked about his resolutions for the new year, Trump said: “I just want everybody to be happy, healthy and well.”

Trump later took the stage to briefly address the crowd ringing in the new year at Mar-a-Lago and promised “to do a great job as your president”.

Biden, for his part, spent New Year’s Eve celebrating the wedding of his niece Missy Owens in Greenville, Delaware, followed by the reception in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. Biden and the first lady, Jill Biden, cut short their traditional holiday trip to the US Virgin Islands to attend the ceremony.

Republican state lawmakers and conservative leaders around the United States see Donald Trump’s re-election as a mandate that will help them enact rightwing policies in Republican-run states across the US.

The policies include steep tax cuts, environmental legislation, religion in schools and legislation concerning transgender medical care and education, among other hot-button social issues.

Republicans will have trifecta control – meaning both legislative bodies and the governorship in a state – in 23 states next year, while Democrats will only control the three entities in 15 states. The other states have divided government.

“Arkansans went very favorably for President Trump, and I think Arkansans feel very similarly about President Trump as they do” Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said Ryan Rose, a Republican state representative in Arkansas, where his party has the trifecta.

“That will only empower our state to continue forward with more conservative policies, putting more money back in the pockets of hard-working Arkansans with tax cuts and supporting Arkansas conservative family values.”

While that federal and state control could allow Republicans to advance their top priorities, leaders of progressive groups point to other election outcomes – such as some red states supporting abortion rights – as evidence that even if people voted for Trump, that does not necessarily mean they support what opponents describe as extreme proposals.

And they remain optimistic that they will prevail against such measures in court.

“We are in a moment right now where the incoming administration” won “by distancing themselves from these very policies that it now seems that they are seeking to accelerate”, said Skye Perryman, president of Democracy Forward, a liberal legal group that includes more than 800 lawyers and has filed legal challenges to Republican regulations and administrative actions.

Perryman added: “We are laser-focused on protecting the American people and on ensuring that people in this country have the tools to make their voices heard.”

Top priorities among Republican state lawmakers appear to concern curriculum and school choice, meaning allowing parents to use public money to send their children to private schools, which can be religious or more socially conservative than public schools.

Twenty-eighty states have at least one school choice program, such as education savings accounts, which provide public per-pupil funds to families with children who don’t attend public schools, according to Education Week.

Trump’s platform stated that he wanted “to protect the God-given right of every parent to be the steward of their children’s education” and when nominating Linda McMahon to serve as education secretary, he stated that she would “fight tirelessly to expand ‘Choice’ to every state in America”.

In Arkansas, Sanders recently released a proposal that would increase funding for such “education freedom accounts” by $90m to $187m and set aside $90m in surplus funding as a reserve for the program.

Since Trump’s election, Republicans in states such as Ohio have also introduced legislation labeled as a “Parents’ Bill of Rights” that would mandate that public school officials notify parents of a student’s mental, emotional or physical health, including “any request by a student to identify as a gender that does not align with the student’s biological sex”.

Critics of such legislation have described it as “an endangerment to all LGBTQ+ youth”.

Earlier this month, there were 129 pending anti-LGBTQ+ state bills, including proposals to prohibit doctors from prescribing to minors puberty-blocking drugs or gender reassignment surgery, according to the ACLU.

Tiffany Justice, co-founder of Moms for Liberty, a rightwing advocacy group, said that the Department of Education under Trump would help states “stop gender ideology being taught in our nation’s schools”.

Trump has also promised to eliminate the Biden administration’s efforts to address the climate crisis. The Montana state senator Tom McGillvray said he hoped Trump would mitigate or rescind recent federal environmental regulations.

“We don’t need Washington to tell us how to manage our environment,” said McGillvray.

Still, the courts could provide a way for people to combat Trump administration policies.

The Montana supreme court upheld a ruling last monththat stated that 16 young plaintiffs had a “constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment” and invalidated a law that barred regulators from considering the effects of greenhouse gas emissions when permitting fossil fuel projects.

Democracy Forward plans to use the courts to “challenge policies that are harmful and in instances where the incoming administration may be inclined to ignore the law”, said Perryman.

And even though Trump captured the popular vote and electoral college, voters in three states, including Montana, supported the Republican-passed ballot measures to protect abortion rights.

A majority of people also oppose Project 2025, a policy playbook from the Heritage Foundation, a conservative thinktank, according to polls.

During the election, Trump distanced himself from the plan, which calls for withholding federal funding from states that share data on abortion that occurred within their borders and for dismantling the Department of Education, among a long list of other ideas. But Trump has since appointed people connected to Project 2025, including Tom Homan to serve as “border czar” and Brendan Carr to serve as chair of the Federal Communications Commission.

“Some of the same architects behind the extreme federal policies also work at the state level,” said Perryman. “We are obviously monitoring the bills that are being filed in various sessions and ensuring that people at the state and local level can make their voices heard, including through using the courts.”

The fate of one of the world’s most threatened primates will be on the line in the coming months when Brazilian authorities decide whether to incorporate the pied tamarin into the urban planning policies of Manaus.

Conservationists say the inclusion is crucial not just to protect the critically endangered monkey but as an indicator of the Amazonian city’s willingness to create green spaces that will benefit the lives of its people.

The pied tamarin – which has a small, fluffy white upper body and a black, hairless face – has one of the narrowest ranges of any primate and is found only around the borders of the city.

In recent decades it has been squeezed out of much of its home by the sprawl of Manaus, which is the most densely populated metropolis in the Brazilian rainforest with more 2.2 million residents. Unregulated growth has increased the area of the city by 60% since 1985. To feed its people, nearby farms have more than doubled in size, now covering 56,000km/s. Transport systems are also expanding, and roadkill is a major threat to wildlife in this biodiversity hotspot.

The population of the pied tamarin has shrunk rapidly to an estimated 22,000 and they are predicted to lose 80% of the number in the next 20 years. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature rates it as critically endangered, which is the final category before extinction.

Various efforts have been made to save the species, including a national action plan, the federal government’s establishment of a Pied Tamarin Wildlife Refuge and rescue centres, and the construction of wildlife bridges across roads.

But with numbers continuing to decline, conservationists say a more comprehensive strategy is needed. On 21 November detailed proposals were submitted to city authorities during a public debate. Advocates of the pied tamarin are now awaiting a decision.

“This monkey’s habitat has been steamrollered. Many live in fragments of forest, where they are effectively in captivity. This creates genetic bottlenecks” said Dominic Wormell, the founder of the Tamarin Trust. “We must integrate its conservation into urban planning by creating more green spaces. This can bring public health benefits. This tiny monkey needs the lungs of the city to survive and so do the residents’ children.”

In early 2025, this will be a central topic of discussion at a series of meetings among city authorities, Manaus university biologists, conservation groups, local and state environment departments and the two main federal environment bodies – Ibama and ICMBio.

Diogo Lagroteria, chair of ICMBio’s pied tamarin species committee, says it is crucial for politicians and local government to commit to policies that preserve, restore and protect green spaces: “Children and the elderly, in particular, would benefit from a cooler, more welcoming city with opportunities to connect to nature.”

“We really need a joined-up plan,” Wormell said. “The fight to save the pied tamarin is a fight to save the Amazon rainforest itself. If we can secure a future for this tiny monkey by planting trees and showing that conservation of the forest creates a better future for us and the primates that live along side us, then maybe people will start to see how truly valuable the Amazon is to them and the whole world.”

Russian gas has ceased flowing to Europe via Ukraine, causing power cuts in parts of Moldova and concern in some EU capitals about making up the deficit.

In others, however, there was celebration over a further step towards weaning Europe off Russian energy. Poland’s foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski, called the development “a new victory” for the continent.

Russian gas has flowed through Ukraine for decades, mainly through a Soviet-built pipeline that begins in Sudzha, a town in Russia’s Kursk region currently under the control of Ukrainian forces, and ends near Uzhhorod, on Ukraine’s western border with Slovakia.

Gas continued to flow based on a 2019 agreement after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, providing revenue for both countries. Kyiv made hundreds of millions of euros a year in transit fees. Negotiations took place last year to extend the deal but came to nothing.

“Russian gas has not been supplied for transit via Ukraine since 8:00 am [Moscow time, 06:00 GMT],” Russia’s Gazprom said in a statement on Wednesday.

Ukraine’s energy minister, German Galushchenko, confirmed Ukraine had stopped transit flows, calling the move “historic” in a statement on Wednesday. “Russia is losing its markets, it will suffer financial losses,” he said.

There were some swift effects, with the breakaway Moldovan region of Transnistria losing heating and hot water on Wednesday morning.

A statement on the website of Tirasteploenergo, the local energy company, said the heating cuts took effect at 7am local time (06:00 GMT) on Wednesday. It urged residents to dress warmly, gather family members together in a single room, hang blankets or thick curtains over windows and balcony doors, and use electric heaters.

“It is forbidden to use gas or electric stoves to heat the apartment. This can lead to tragedy,” the company said.

A company employee told Reuters by phone she did not know how long the situation would last. Transnistria, a pro-Russian entity that claims independence from the rest of Moldova, was receiving its gas via Ukraine.

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the share of Russian gas on the European market has dropped from about 35% to about 8%, as European countries sought to diversify supplies.

Some countries, however, such as Slovakia, still relied heavily on Russian gas.

The country’s Russia-friendly prime minister, Robert Fico, decried the failure to renew a transit deal, claiming the move would hurt Europe more than Russia. “Halting gas transit via Ukraine will have a drastic impact on us all in the EU but not on the Russian Federation,” he wrote on Facebook.

The only Russian gas route to Europe still in operation is TurkStream, a Black Sea pipeline that sends gas to Hungary and Serbia.

Russian gas has ceased flowing to Europe via Ukraine, causing power cuts in parts of Moldova and concern in some EU capitals about making up the deficit.

In others, however, there was celebration over a further step towards weaning Europe off Russian energy. Poland’s foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski, called the development “a new victory” for the continent.

Russian gas has flowed through Ukraine for decades, mainly through a Soviet-built pipeline that begins in Sudzha, a town in Russia’s Kursk region currently under the control of Ukrainian forces, and ends near Uzhhorod, on Ukraine’s western border with Slovakia.

Gas continued to flow based on a 2019 agreement after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, providing revenue for both countries. Kyiv made hundreds of millions of euros a year in transit fees. Negotiations took place last year to extend the deal but came to nothing.

“Russian gas has not been supplied for transit via Ukraine since 8:00 am [Moscow time, 06:00 GMT],” Russia’s Gazprom said in a statement on Wednesday.

Ukraine’s energy minister, German Galushchenko, confirmed Ukraine had stopped transit flows, calling the move “historic” in a statement on Wednesday. “Russia is losing its markets, it will suffer financial losses,” he said.

There were some swift effects, with the breakaway Moldovan region of Transnistria losing heating and hot water on Wednesday morning.

A statement on the website of Tirasteploenergo, the local energy company, said the heating cuts took effect at 7am local time (06:00 GMT) on Wednesday. It urged residents to dress warmly, gather family members together in a single room, hang blankets or thick curtains over windows and balcony doors, and use electric heaters.

“It is forbidden to use gas or electric stoves to heat the apartment. This can lead to tragedy,” the company said.

A company employee told Reuters by phone she did not know how long the situation would last. Transnistria, a pro-Russian entity that claims independence from the rest of Moldova, was receiving its gas via Ukraine.

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the share of Russian gas on the European market has dropped from about 35% to about 8%, as European countries sought to diversify supplies.

Some countries, however, such as Slovakia, still relied heavily on Russian gas.

The country’s Russia-friendly prime minister, Robert Fico, decried the failure to renew a transit deal, claiming the move would hurt Europe more than Russia. “Halting gas transit via Ukraine will have a drastic impact on us all in the EU but not on the Russian Federation,” he wrote on Facebook.

The only Russian gas route to Europe still in operation is TurkStream, a Black Sea pipeline that sends gas to Hungary and Serbia.

Donald Trump’s decision to sanction the assassination of an elite Iranian commander triggered a chain of events that has revealed Iran as a paper tiger and led to the overthrow of Basher al-Assad, a former UK security minister has said.

Tom Tugendhat, now on the Conservative backbenches and intending to focus on foreign policy, also predicted the Iranian regime would collapse in a few years. He said that if handled properly, Syria could become the economic powerhouse of the Middle East within a decade.

It is unusual for a former British cabinet minister to lavish praise on what is seen by some as such a controversial act bordering on an extrajudicial killing.

His remarks were made shortly before the fifth anniversary of Qassem Suleimani’s killing in Baghdad, an anniversary that led the Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, again to claim in a speech in Tehran that the Syrian leadership would be forced to withdraw as “youth rises up” to defeat the newly installed Sunni regime.

Suleimani was instrumental in using Syria and Iraq as a base from which to drive back the Sunni Islamist group Islamic State and to entrench Iranian interests in both countries.

Tugendhat argued on the Conflicted podcast that Suleimani’s death in a drone attack had proved to be a turning point.

He said: “I’m always struck by how some people can be much more seminal, much more key, pivotal to an organisation than you realise at the time. The reality is when Qassem Suleimani was killed in January 2020, he held in his head all the relationships, all the deals for everybody around the region.

“He was replaced, but he wasn’t really, because nobody could replace the personal 20-year relationships that he held. That’s really the unpicking. So I have to say, I know it’s not popular, but President Trump, effectively, was the trigger that began the fall of the Assad regime.”

Tugendhat, a former chair of the foreign affairs select committee, also saw a crisis inside the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) due to the loss of Syria. He said: “Young members of the IRGC are saying two things. One, the old guard are corrupt and incompetent. That’s why Hezbollah has been hung out to dry and defeated. That’s why old allies like Assad have fallen. That’s one thing they’re saying.

“The second thing they’re saying is that they’re hearing rumours, I don’t know how true they are, but they’re hearing rumours that the ayatollah and the government in Tehran wants to talk to the Americans to try and find a way out of this and perhaps hang on. And they’re saying that there’s absolutely no way that anybody can talk to the killers of Qassem Suleimani.

“Now, this means that there is a really big problem within the regime itself, a really big challenge, because actually there’s no way through. These young people, the extremists in the IRGC, so the extremists of the extreme, are trying to hold the regime to a level of purity that is just now completely inconsistent with reality.”

Tugendhat was reflecting on the growing consensus in the reformist government in Tehran that direct talks with Donald Trump over a new nuclear deal should be sought, a belief that is meeting resistance from hardliners.

Tugendhat, an opponent of the initial nuclear deal in 2015 and as a security minister an advocate of proscribing the IRGC, sees the revolution in Syria as a wider turning point.

He said: “Frankly, if we get Syria right in 10 years, Syria could be absolutely not just a pole of stability but a fantastic economic powerhouse in the region, exporting stability and civilisation, as it has done for quite literally tens of thousands of years, to the rest of the world again.

“There are moments like now when the old era is dead, the old illusions are dead, and various things are killing it. And I suspect that the regime in Tehran will be gone in the next few years as well. So I think there’s a real opportunity for freedom to spread and for opportunity to spread.”

At the same time, he said, there were significant dangers in Syria, with the country divided as Kurdish groups and the radical Sunni Islamist group Hayat al-Tahrir Sham (HTS) fight for influence.

Tugendhat accused the west of having no long-term strategy in the Middle East, arguing that the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the failure of Barack Obama to act on his red lines when Assad used chemical weapons in 2013 had given an opportunity for Vladimir Putin to present himself as a reliable strongman.

At various forks in the road, Tugendhat argued, the west “demonstrated weakness, advertised fickleness”.

He said: “Putin is no more constant than we are, but he has the illusion of it. And this is the sort of complete fake strongman theory of life. It’s complete rubbish, of course, but the illusion of it appears real, and that’s enough to have brought certain decisions which have led to mass misery.”

The actor Blake Lively has sued the director of It Ends With Us, Justin Baldoni, and several others associated with the film, alleging harassment and a coordinated campaign to attack her reputation for coming forward about her treatment on the set.

The federal lawsuit was filed in New York on Tuesday, hours after Baldoni and many of the other defendants in Lively’s suit sued the New York Times for libel for its story on her allegations, saying the newspaper and the star were the ones conducting a coordinated smear campaign.

Lively’s suit alleges that Baldoni, the film’s production company Wayfarer Studios and others engaged in “a carefully crafted, coordinated, and resourced retaliatory scheme to silence her, and others, from speaking out”. She accuses Baldoni and the studio of embarking on a “multi-tiered plan” to damage her reputation after a meeting in which she and her husband, the actor Ryan Reynolds, addressed “repeated sexual harassment and other disturbing behaviour” by Baldoni and a producer, Jamey Heath, who is also named in both lawsuits.

The plan included a proposal to plant theories on online message boards, engineer a social media campaign and place news stories critical of Lively, the suit alleges.

The alleged mistreatment on set included comments from Baldoni on the bodies of Lively and other women on the set. The suit also alleges Baldoni and Heath “discussed their personal sexual experiences and previous porn addiction, and tried to pressure Ms Lively to reveal details about her intimate life”.

Baldoni’s attorney, Bryan Freedman, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Lively’s lawsuit, but he has previously called the same allegations “completely false, outrageous and intentionally salacious”.

Lively’s lawsuit comes on the same day that Baldoni and others filed their libel lawsuit against the New York Times in Los Angeles superior court seeking at least $250m (£200m) in damages. The paper said it stood by its reporting and planned to vigorously defend itself against the lawsuit.

Others who are defendants in Lively’s suit and plaintiffs in the libel suit include the Wayfarer and crisis communications expert Melissa Nathan, whose alleged text message was quoted in the headline of the 21 December story which read: “‘We Can Bury Anyone’: Inside a Hollywood Smear Machine.”

Written by Megan Twohey, Mike McIntire and Julie Tate, the story was published just after Lively filed a legal complaint with the California civil rights department, a predecessor to her federal lawsuit.

The libel lawsuit says the newspaper “relied almost entirely on Lively’s unverified and self-serving narrative, lifting it nearly verbatim while disregarding an abundance of evidence that contradicted her claims and exposed her true motives. But the Times did not care.”

A spokesperson for the New York Times, Danielle Rhoades, said in a statement that “our story was meticulously and responsibly reported”.

“It was based on a review of thousands of pages of original documents, including the text messages and emails that we quote accurately and at length in the article,” the statement said. “To date, Wayfarer Studios, Mr Baldoni, the other subjects of the article and their representatives have not pointed to a single error.”

Baldoni’s lawsuit, however, claims: “If the Times truly reviewed the thousands of private communications it claimed to have obtained, its reporters would have seen incontrovertible evidence that it was Lively, not Plaintiffs, who engaged in a calculated smear campaign.”

Lively is not a defendant in the libel lawsuit. Her lawyers said in a statement: “Nothing in this lawsuit changes anything about the claims advanced in Ms Lively’s California civil rights department complaint, nor her federal complaint, filed earlier today.”

The romantic drama It Ends With Us, an adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s bestselling 2016 novel, was released in August, exceeding box office expectations with a $50m debut. But the movie’s release was shrouded by speculation over discord between Lively and Baldoni. Baldoni took a backseat in promoting the film while Lively took centerstage along with Reynolds, who was on the press circuit for Deadpool & Wolverine at the same time.

Lively came to fame through the 2005 film The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, and bolstered her reputation on the TV series Gossip Girl from 2007 to 2012. She has since starred in films including The Town and The Shallows.

Baldoni starred in the TV comedy Jane the Virgin, directed the 2019 film Five Feet Apart and wrote Man Enough, a book pushing back against traditional notions of masculinity. He responded to concerns that It Ends With Us romanticised domestic violence, saying at the time that critics were “absolutely entitled to that opinion”.

He was dropped by his agency, WME, immediately after Lively filed her complaint and the New York Times published its story. The agency represents both Lively and Reynolds.

Freedman said in a statement on the libel suit: “The New York Times cowered to the wants and whims of two powerful ‘untouchable’ Hollywood elites.

“In doing so, they pre-determined the outcome of their story, and aided and abetted their own devastating PR smear campaign designed to revitalize Lively’s self-induced floundering public image and counter the organic groundswell of criticism amongst the online public. The irony is rich.”

Leila de Lima, one of fiercest critics of the former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte’s bloody “war on drugs” who was jailed for more than six years on baseless charges, will try to return to politics in 2025.

De Lima was one of the few politicians who criticised Duterte during his time in office, and enraged the former leader when she began investigating killings carried out during his anti-drugs crackdowns. She knew to expect retaliation, she said. “I thought it would just be regular vilification, the slut-shaming, the verbal attacks,” she said. She did not anticipate that she would spend more than six and a half years in prison.

Finally free, and vindicated by the courts in the summer, she hopes to return to national politics next year and will run as the lead party list nominee of Mamamayang Liberal, a new party formed as a wing of the once-ruling Liberal party, in midterm elections in May 2025. The party promises to champion the rights of marginalised groups, including fishers, farmers, women, youth, the poorest communities in cities, and LGBTQ+ people.

De Lima said she remained committed to ensuring justice for victims of the war on drugs. “It’s been more than seven years already, and justice for them has been so elusive,” she said of victims’ families. As many as 30,000 people, mostly men, are estimated to have been killed during the crackdowns.

Duterte, who was succeeded as president by Ferdinand Marcos Jr in 2022, is facing growing scrutiny over his anti-drug campaigns. He is the subject of an investigation by the international criminal court and inquiries by the Philippines congress.

The ICC investigation, into possible crimes against humanity, was “already at its advanced stage”, De Lima said, adding that an arrest warrant could be issued imminently.

“I knew that eventually, truth would prevail, and that is what is happening now,” she said. “Witnesses are coming out, not any more scared, telling the people, telling their testimony, what they knew about Duterte’s war on drugs.”

Duterte is not worried about domestic investigations, she added. “He feels that he could still influence them, pressure them, or even scare them.” He knows he cannot influence the ICC.

De Lima, 65, was elected to the senate in 2016 – the same year Duterte won the presidential vote after promising a deadly crackdown to rid the streets of drugs. He promised to kill so many criminals that funeral parlours would be packed.

When De Lima, who was then chair of the Senate committee on justice and human rights, began an inquiry into the killings, Duterte accused her of being an “immoral woman” who had a “very sordid personal and official life”. He accused her of facilitating the drugs trade and receiving payments from drug lords while she was justice secretary.

He also accused her driver of collecting drug payoffs and to have a sex tape of the two of them. At a rally of his supporters, he said if he were her he would hang himself.

De Lima was removed as chair of the committee investigating the drugs war and arrested in 2017.

“They wanted to make an example out of me – so that the other politicians, other public figures, would be scared,” said De Lima.

In prison she continued her senate work, handwriting notes for her staff who set up a mobile office in a car outside the prison. She kept a strict routine: prayers and bible reading, senate work, feeding stray prison cats (she adopted five upon her release), walking around the perimeter of the compound, reading and journal writing.

De Lima’s siblings never told their 92-year-old mother that she had been imprisoned, and instead said she was studying abroad. “Every time my mom is watching the TV, if it’s already the news time, they would change channels,” she said.

Witnesses that testified against her have since recanted their statements, with some saying they were pressured to falsely implicate her. The last of the three charges against her, which were all drugs-related and condemned by UN experts as politically motivated, was dropped in June.

Whether or not Duterte is prosecuted by the ICC depends on Marcos. In 2022, Marcos ran on a joint ticket with the former leader’s daughter, vice-president Sara Duterte, and always said he would not cooperate with the ICC. But there is speculation he could change his mind, as the two families are now embroiled in a fierce political war.

Over recent months, Sara Duterte has launched scathing attacks on Marcos, threatening to dig up the remains of his dictator father and throw them into the sea, and she claiming she had spoken to a hitman and instructed him to kill Marcos and his wife if she were to be killed.

The violent language – typical of her father’s political brand – is understood as an attempt shore up support among their base before next year’s midterms.

Rodrigo Duterte will run to become mayor of Davao, their family’s stronghold on the southern island of Mindanao.

“They know that their influence is diminishing,” said De Lima. “They are struggling to survive politically and in the power play [with the Marcos camp]”.

There is speculation she will run for president in 2028, though her approval ratings have fallen.

De Lima called Sara Duterte “a dangerous leader” who is becoming increasingly like her father. She is backing one of three petitions calling for her impeachment over issues including allegations related to misuse of public funds and threats against public officials. Whether this progresses will depend on how much support it receives from the House of Representatives.

Marcos has advised against impeachment. But De Lima is hopeful that he will comply with the ICC if it seeks Rodrigo Duterte’s arrest.

Marcos is reluctant to openly commit to doing so now, given the popularity of his rivals, she said. But in time she expects this will change: “I think deep inside of him, that’s what they want. That’s the best way to get rid of Mr Duterte.”

Investigators in South Korea have extracted data from one of two black boxesretrieved from a Jeju Air plane that crashed shortly after landing on Sunday, killing all but two of the 181 people onboard.

The country’s deputy minister for civil aviation, Joo Jong-wan, said initial data had been retrieved from the Boeing 737-800’s cockpit voice recorder, and that the contents were being converted into audio format.

South Korea’s transport ministry said on Wednesday that it would send the plane’s other black box, the flight data recorder, to the US for analysis. The recorder reportedly sustained external damage – a missing connector that links its data storage unit to the power supply, the Yonhap news agency said.

Authorities in South Korea and the US are hoping the devices will provide crucial clues about events leading up to the pilot’s attempt to land after the aircraft’s landing gear apparently failed to deploy.

“The damaged flight data recorder has been deemed unrecoverable for data extraction domestically,” Joo said. “It was agreed today to transport it to the United States for analysis in collaboration with the US National Transportation Safety Board.”

The plane, on a return flight from Thailand, was carrying 175 passengers and six crew when the cockpit issued a mayday call and belly-landed on the runway at Muan international airport in South Korea’s south-west.

The aircraft careered along the runway before hitting a barrier and bursting into flames, killing everyone onboard except two flight attendants who were pulled from the burning wreckage at the rear of the aircraft.

An “initial extraction [of the cockpit voice recorder] has already been completed,” Joo said. “Based on this preliminary data, we plan to start converting it into audio format,” which will enable investigators to hear the pilots’ final communications.

It could take about two days for investigators to convert the data to audio files, the transport ministry said. Transferring the damaged flight data recorder to the US could prolong efforts to get to the bottom of the worst aviation disaster on South Korean soil.

Black boxes are typically located in the tail of an aircraft – which experience suggests sustains the least damage in an accident – and are designed to survive high-speed impact and fires. They are not failsafe, however, and can sometimes be damaged or destroyed.

Several theories have been put forward as the possible cause of the crash, including a bird strike and possible mechanical failures, with local media reporting that the landing gear had deployed successfully during the plane’s first attempted landing, but failed on a second attempt moments later.

A government-ordered emergency inspection of all Boeing 737-800 models operated by South Korean carriers was examining the landing gear. The ongoing inspections were “focusing mainly on the landing gear, which failed to deploy properly in this case”, the director general for aviation safety policy, Yoo Kyung-soo, said.

Officials said the bodies were very badly damaged by the crash, which had made the work of identifying remains slow and difficult to the frustration of grieving relatives, who have spent four days at the airport.

The country’s acting president, Choi Sang-mok, called for a fair and objective investigation, adding that funeral procedures had begun after all 179 victims were formally identified.

“The most urgent matter at present is to return the victims to their families,” Choi told a meeting.

The initial onsite investigation has centred on a barrier located near the end of the runway that supported a navigation system used to help aircraft land called a localiser.

Most of the victims are thought to have died when the plane, which had been carrying mostly people back from year-end holidays in Thailand, smashed into the concrete barrier at speed, the impact causing the fuselage to break up and burst into flames.

Airport authorities set up a makeshift altar on Tuesday, and organised buses on Wednesday to take victims’ relatives to pay their respects at the crash site.

Park Han-shin, who has been liaising with airport and government authorities on behalf of the bereaved families, said about 700 family members had visited the site, where they laid chrysanthemums and bowls of rice-cake soup.

Park said 43 bodies had been listed as ready for release to their families, and asked relatives of those not on the list to be patient.

Many New Year’s Eve celebrations across South Korea were cancelled or toned down as the country marked the third of seven days of official mourning.

People with Scandinavian ancestry were in Britain long before the Anglo-Saxons or the Vikings turned up, researchers have found after studying the genetics of an ancient Roman buried in York.

The arrival of the Anglo-Saxons brought an influx of Scandinavians to ancient Britain in the fifth century, with the first major Viking raid – which targeted the monastery at Lindisfarne – occurring in AD793.

However, researchers studying a man thought to have been Roman soldier – or perhaps even a gladiator – who lived between the second and fourth century have found that 25% of his ancestry of came from Scandinavia.

“The ancestry that we thought would come in [with] Anglo-Saxons maybe in some parts was already there,” said Dr Leo Speidel, first author of the study and a group leader at Riken, a national scientific research institute in Japan.

The discovery is part of a large-scale study that has taken a new approach to analysing ancient DNA, shedding fresh light on migrations across Europe in the first millennium.

Dr Pontus Skoglund, co-author of the study from the Francis Crick Institute in London, said much of the history explored in the study was set down by the Romans about other groups of people.

“There’s some degree of historical information, but there’s so [many] things left in the dark,” he said.

While advances in extracting and analysing ancient DNA has allowed researchers to explore the mixing of very different groups – such as Neanderthals and modern humans, or even the mixing of present-day populations – the approach is more challenging in the case of groups that are very similar genetically, such as the populations that lived in different parts of Europe in the first millennium.

Writing in the journal Nature, Speidel and colleagues report how they developed a new approach to tackle the issue. Instead of considering all of the genetic differences between populations, the new method focuses on relatively recent mutations within genomes – arising, for example, in the past 30,000 years or so – allowing the relationships between genetically similar populations to be explored in greater detail.

“When we saw that it worked, it was just this amazing horizon to me that opens up where we can answer new questions,” said Skoglund.

The team applied their new approach to more than 1,500 genomes from people who lived in Europe in the first millennium.

Among other findings, the team was able to shed new light on the migration of Germanic groups early in the first millennium, revealing at least two waves of migration from northern Germany or Scandinavia into western, central and eastern Europe.

However, the team was surprised to find evidence of a later migration in the opposite direction.

“We found this previously unknown migration into Scandinavia [about] AD500 to AD800 that transforms completely the genetic makeup in the Viking age in Scandinavia,” said Speidel.

“Previously, people had noticed that they were relatively diverse, but it was kind of hard to know why. The main explanation was that these Vikings would go to places and then bring back people, perhaps.”

The study also explores the Viking expansion from Scandinavia, with highlights including the discovery that many individuals found in two late Viking-age mass graves in Britain had a genetic makeup typical for Viking-age southern Scandinavia – suggesting they could have been Vikings who met a sticky end.

While the new approach can challenge, support or add detail to the historical record – and even produce revelations – the researchers say it also offers the chance to explore the lives and movements of those overlooked in written history, a source often more biased than human remains.

“The idea is that we can now investigate history with ancient DNA,” said Speidel.