Donald Trump has vowed that the US will “take over” war-ravaged Gaza and “own it”, effectively endorsing the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, in an announcement shocking even by the standards of his norm-shattering presidency.

Trump, who has previously threatened Greenland and Panama and suggested that Canada should become the 51st state, added Gaza to his expansionist agenda, claiming that it could become the “Riviera of the Middle East”. He declined to rule out sending US troops to make it happen.

“The only reason the Palestinians want to go back to Gaza is they have no alternative,” the president told a joint press conference with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, at the White House on Tuesday evening. “It’s right now a demolition site. This is just a demolition site. Virtually every building is down.”

Arguing that Palestinians could live out their lives in “peace and harmony” elsewhere, Trump continued: “The US will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it, too. We’ll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site.

“If it’s necessary, we’ll do that, we’re going to take over that piece, we’re going to develop it, create thousands and thousands of jobs, and it’ll be something that the entire Middle East can be very proud of.”

Later, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, wrote in a post on X: “The United States stands ready to lead and Make Gaza Beautiful Again. Our pursuit is one of lasting peace in the region for all people.”

The announcement followed a surprise proposal from Trump, a property developer, earlier on Tuesday for the permanent resettlement in neighbouring countries of the 2 million Palestinians who live in Gaza.

He called for Jordan, Egypt and other Arab states to take in Palestinians from Gaza, saying they had no alternative but to abandon the coastal strip, which must be rebuilt after nearly 16 months of a devastating war between Israel and Hamas militants.

Trump said he would support resettling Palestinians “permanently”, going beyond his previous suggestions that Arab leaders have already steadfastly rejected.

But he offered no specifics on how a resettlement process could be implemented. His proposal echoed the wishes of Israel’s far right and contradicted Joe Biden’s commitment against the mass displacement of Palestinians.

At the press conference, in which hundreds of journalists crowded into the east room, the president was asked if the plan might involve US military force. “As far as Gaza is concerned, we’ll do what is necessary,” he said. “If it’s necessary, we’ll do that.”

He did not directly respond to a question of how and under what authority the US could take over the land of Gaza and occupy it in the long term.

“I do see a long-term ownership position and I see it bringing great stability to that part of the Middle East and maybe the entire Middle East,” he went on, claiming that he had spoken to regional leaders and they supported the idea. “Everybody I’ve spoken to loves the idea of the United States owning that piece of land,” he said.

“I’ve studied this very closely over a lot of months,” Trump added, describing Gaza as a “hellhole” and “symbol of death and destruction”. He said Palestinians there should be housed in “various domains” in other countries and expressed hope that the leaders of Egypt and Jordan would “open their hearts” to the idea over time.

Pressed on who would live in a redeveloped Gaza, Trump said it could become a home to “the world’s people”, adding: “I don’t want to be cute, I don’t want to be a wise guy – but the Riviera of the Middle East … This could be something that could be so valuable, this could be so magnificent.”

Netanyahu, who praised Trump as “the greatest friend Israel has ever had in the White House”, said “it’s worth paying attention to this” idea and added that it was “something that could change history”.

Trump was “thinking outside the box with fresh ideas”, Netanyahu observed, and was “showing willingness to puncture conventional thinking.”

Forced displacement of Gaza’s population would probably be a violation of international law and would be fiercely opposed not only in the region but also by America’s western allies. Some human rights advocates liken the idea to ethnic cleansing.

There was a chorus of criticism within the US. Rashida Tlaib, a Palestinian-American member of Congress, said: “Palestinians aren’t going anywhere. This president can only spew this fanatical bullshit because of bipartisan support in Congress for funding genocide and ethnic cleansing. It’s time for my two-state solution colleagues to speak up.”

Chris Van Hollen, a Democratic senator for Maryland, commented: “Trump’s proposal to push 2 million Palestinians out of Gaza and take ‘ownership’ by force, if necessary, is simply ethnic cleansing by another name.

“This declaration will give ammunition to Iran and other adversaries while undermining our Arab partners in the region. It defies decades of bipartisan American support for a two-state solution … Congress must stand up to this dangerous and reckless scheme.”

The Council on American Islamic Relations, a Muslim advocacy group, said in a statement: “Gaza belongs to the Palestinian people, not the United States, and President Trump’s call to expel Palestinians from their land is an absolute non-starter.

“If the Palestinian people were ever somehow forcibly expelled from Gaza, this crime against humanity would spark widespread conflict, put the final nail in the coffin of international law, and destroy what remains of our nation’s international image and standing.”

Paul O’Brien, the executive director of Amnesty International USA, added: “Removing all Palestinians from Gaza is tantamount to destroying them as a people. Gaza is their home. Gaza’s death and destruction is a result of the government of Israel killing civilians by the thousands, often with US bombs.”

The Saudi government stressed its rejection of any attempt to displace Palestinians from their land and said it would not establish relations with Israel without establishment of a Palestinian state. The Palestinian envoy to the United Nations said that world leaders and people should respect Palestinians’ desire to remain in Gaza.

Hamas condemned Trump’s calls for Palestinians in Gaza to leave as “expulsion from their land”.

Palestinians “must be allowed home”, Keir Starmer has said in the wake of Donald Trump’s proposal to remove people from the Gaza Strip and put the territory under US control.

The prime minister told the Commons during prime minister’s questions that Palestinians “must be allowed to rebuild and we should be with them in that rebuild on the way to a two-state solution”.

His comments come after the US president suggested the “Riviera of the Middle East” could be created and said he did not think “people should be going back” to Gaza. Trump’s idea has been widely condemned as ethnic cleansing, given it would be a breach of international law.

While Starmer did not directly criticise the US president’s plan, he said: “The most important issue on the ceasefire is obviously it’s sustained, we see it through the phases, and that means that the remaining hostages come out, and the aid that’s desperately needed gets into Gaza at speed and at the volumes that are needed.

“I have from the last few weeks two images fixed in my mind. The first is the image of Emily Damari reunited with her mother, which I found extremely moving. The second was the image of thousands of Palestinians walking, literally walking, through the rubble to try to find their homes and their communities in Gaza. They must be allowed home. They must be allowed to rebuild, and we should be with them in that rebuild on the way to a two-state solution.”

Starmer was responding to a question from the Liberal Democrat leader, Ed Davey, who asked for reassurance that the “concerns on these dangerous statements from the president will be communicated to the White House directly and firmly”.

Davey told Starmer: “Many of us were alarmed to hear President Trump speak about forcibly displacing 1.8 million people from Gaza.”

He added: “I’m glad that the foreign secretary has confirmed that the government’s position is still a two-state solution, I think that has support on all sides of the house, but will he reassure the house that this position and our concerns on these dangerous statements from the president will be communicated to the White House directly and firmly?”

It came shortly after the foreign secretary also made clear that the UK did not agree with Trump’s proposal, although David Lammy began his response to a question at a press conference by praising the US president for wanting to rebuild Gaza.

“Donald Trump is right,” Lammy said at a press conference in Kyiv, during a visit to Ukraine. “Looking at those scenes, Palestinians who have been horrendously displaced over so many months of war, it is clear that Gaza is lying in rubble.”

But he added: “We have always been clear in our view that we must see two states and we must see Palestinians able to live and prosper in their homelands in Gaza, in the West Bank. That is what we want to get to.”

Lammy’s comments emphasised the difficult position faced not only by the UK government but also by the leaders of other US allies: how to avoid offending a tariff-happy American president while making plain they could not support such an idea.

Trump, speaking on Tuesday evening at a joint press conference at the White House with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, declined to rule out sending US troops to make his plans in Gaza happen.

“The only reason the Palestinians want to go back to Gaza is they have no alternative,” the president said. “It’s right now a demolition site. This is just a demolition site. Virtually every building is down.”

Saying Palestinians could live out their lives in “peace and harmony” elsewhere, Trump added: “The US will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it, too. We’ll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site.”

From “problematic” to “a couple of kinks in that Slinky” to “a bit of a stretch”, reaction from some Republicans who weighed in on Donald Trump’s proposal to “own” Gaza was mostly muted on Wednesday, as many senior party leaders chose to remain silent.

Some of the strongest criticism came from Rand Paul, the Kentucky senator who posted his opposition to the president’s plan on X on Wednesday morning.

“The pursuit for peace should be that of the Israelis and the Palestinians. I thought we voted for America First,” Paul wrote.

“We have no business contemplating yet another occupation to doom our treasure and spill our soldiers’ blood.”

His critical comments were an outlier among Republicans, although Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina senator, said he foresaw issues if Trump moved ahead with his declared intention of making Gaza “the Riviera of the Middle East”, and sending US troops to secure the war-torn territory “if it’s necessary”.

“We’ll see what our Arab friends say about that,” Graham said, reported by Politico.

“I think most South Carolinians would probably not be excited about sending Americans to take over Gaza. I think that might be problematic, but I’ll keep an open mind.”

He said Gaza “would be a tough place to be stationed as an American”.

Also adopting a “wait and see” approach was Josh Hawley, Missouri’s Republican senator.

“I don’t know that I think it’s the best use of United States resources to spend a bunch of money in Gaza, I think maybe I’d prefer that to be spent in the US first, but let’s see what happens,” he said.

John Thune, the Senate majority leader who claimed not to have seen Trump’s remarks, said: “I think we’re obviously all interested in facilitating a solution to the Middle East, particularly with the whole situation in Gaza,” per Politico.

“How we best achieve that, it’s a subject of conversation,” he continued.

Trump’s head-spinning pronouncement appeared to catch many Republican politicians off guard, including the North Carolina senator Thom Tillis.

“There’s probably a couple of kinks in that Slinky, but I’ll have to look at the statement,” he said.

“Obviously it’s not going to happen. I don’t know under what circumstance it would make sense, even for Israel. If Israel is asking for the US to come in and provide some assistance to ensure that Hamas can never do again what they did, I’m in. But us taking over seems like a bit of a stretch.”

Mike Johnson, the House speaker, posted a noncommittal reaction to X, retweeting Trump’s statement that “the US will take over the Gaza Strip” and praising what he saw as the president’s wider efforts to secure peace in the region.

“The US stands firmly with Israel and the people of the Middle East, which haven’t experienced peace in many, many years. Violence and hatred do not have to define the region’s future,” he wrote.

“Today, President Trump took bold action in hopes of achieving lasting peace in Gaza. We are hopeful this brings much needed stability and security to the region.”

Meanwhile, two of Trump’s most vocal congressional cheerleaders, the South Carolina Representative Nancy Mace and her North Carolina colleague Richard Hudson, posted their support to X.

“Let’s turn Gaza into Mar-a-Lago,” Mace wrote, referring to Trump’s palatial Florida club and resort he likes to call his winter White House.

“President Trump will never stop working to ensure historic and lasting PEACE!” Hudson wrote.

Both are members of the House Republican Israel caucus.

Hundreds of women were raped and burned alive during the chaos after a Rwandan-backed rebel group entered the Congolese city of Goma last week.

The female inmates were attacked in their wing inside Goma’s Munzenze prison during a mass jailbreak, according to a senior UN official.

The deputy head of the UN peacekeeping force based in Goma, Vivian van de Perre, said that while several thousand men managed to escape from the prison, the area reserved for women was set on fire.

Images taken shortly after Rwandan-backed M23 rebels reached the centre of Goma reveal vast plumes of black smoke rising from the prison on the morning of 27 January.

Although details of the incident are scarce, the atrocity appears to be the worst of the recent M23-led conflict in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. UN peacekeepers, however, have been unable to visit the prison to investigate further because of restrictions imposed by the M23 rebels, meaning the identity of the perpetrators remains unclear.

On Tuesday, it emerged that about 2,000 bodies were still awaiting burial in Goma after M23 fighters seized Goma, capital of the DRC’s North Kivu province, on 27 January.

Van de Perre, who is now based in Goma with thousands of UN peacekeeping troops deployed to protect citizens, said: “There was a major prison breakout of 4,000 escaped prisoners. A few hundred women were also in that prison.

“They were all raped and then they set fire to the women’s wing. They all died afterwards.”

This week the UN office of the high commissioner for human rights (OHCHR) warned that sexual violence was being used as a weapon of war by rival armed groups in Goma.

The city, home to more than one million people, is under the total control of M23 forces. But in an unforeseen development late on Monday, the militia announced a unilateral “ceasefire”.

Until then, fears had been mounting that Rwanda was determined to take more territory from its vast neighbour, with M23 forces steadily heading south towards Bukavu, the capital of South Kivu province 120 miles (190km) from Goma.

A statement from a political-military coalition called the Alliance Fleuve Congo (Congo River Alliance) – of which M23 is a member – announced it had “no intention of taking control of Bukavu or other localities”.

Responding to news of the unexpected ceasefire. Van de Perre said: “I hope it stays that way because they [M23] were already moving in the direction of Bukavu with reinforcements and heavy weaponry, which can be seen passing [along] the streets in Goma.

“If they retreat, that’s good news. Otherwise, we’ll have a new clash with potentially thousands of additional deaths.”

She said M23 may have had a sudden rethink after reinforcements from Burundi arrived in Bukavu and a nearby airport was used by the Congolese air force.

“The Burundians have sent 2,000 extra troops to Bukavu, and they are very good fighters. I think M23 is currently rethinking their next steps.”

Despite evidence to the contrary, Rwanda denies it is backing the M23 or that its forces have crossed into eastern Congo.

However, Van de Perre, part of the UN peacekeeping force known as Monusco, said her colleagues had spotted Rwandan soldiers during patrols.

Van de Perre urged the UN security council to increase the pressure on Rwanda. “We really need to get back to the negotiating table. And that is only possible if the members of the security council and other important countries exert enough pressure on Rwanda and Congo,” she said.

Previously, another senior UN official had speculated that the DRC’s neighbour wanted to annex a chunk of DRC larger than Rwanda itself. “This is a long-term policy to get the broader Kivu area into the sphere of Rwandan influence and, later, under complete administrative control,” they said.

Speaking before the ceasefire was announced late on Monday, Van de Perre said she was anxious about reports that groups were preparing for a counter-attack. “We already have reports that in certain places people are gathering and organising,” she said.

Van de Perre said she was in “constant dialogue” with M23 officers in charge of Goma and that humanitarian conditions in the city were dire.

Crossing the city was difficult, she said. “They [the M23] allow us to bring food and water to our bases, but apart from that we can barely move around.”

Donald Trump’s pick for the head of US counterintelligence has advocated for the FBI to surveil “antifa” groups, and has lingering questions over millions of dollars in campaign finances, his employment with a shadowy military contractor and links to far-right figures.

Joe Kent, twice an unsuccessful congressional candidate in south-west Washington state and a former Green Beret and CIA operative, has also been criticized for his proximity to white nationalist activists such as Nick Fuentes, and for the revolving cast of far-right activists his campaigns employed.

If appointed as director of the National Counterterrorism Center, he will work under Trump’s director of national intelligence nominee, Tulsi Gabbard, in one of the most important intelligence roles in the administration.

The Guardian contacted Kent on a phone number and an email address identified with him by multiple data brokers, but received no response.

Kent, now resident in Yacolt, Washington, was born and raised in Sweet Home, Oregon, by his own account in podcasts and candidate interviews. He spent 20 years in the military, including serving as a US Army Green Beret in Iraq and Afghanistan during the global war on terror.

According to podcast interviews and media reports, Kent subsequently served as a “CIA paramilitary officer” and a military contractor who offered training services at Joint Base McChord in Washington state.

He ran for Congress in 2022 and 2024 in Washington’s third district, centered on Vancouver, losing both times to Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez. In his first campaign, in particular, Kent drew criticisms for multiple far-right connections.

He was a beneficiary of donations from tech figure Peter Thiel, whose largesse that cycle also saw him bankrolling campaigns by JD Vance and Blake Masters.

He was endorsed that year by Nazi-sympathizer Nick Fuentes, but later attempted to distance himself from the prominent white nationalist. Nevertheless, in an interview with a member of the Fuentes-aligned group American Virtue, Kent opined that American culture was “anti-white” and “anti-straight-white-male”.

In June 2022, he was also interviewed by Greyson Arnold, a neo-Nazi streamer. One of his many controversial campaign hires was Graham Jorgensen, a member of the far-right Proud Boys organization, who Kent retained in 2022 as a consultant.

Views on federal agencies

Kent has expressed extreme but shifting views on the investigative role and priorities of US federal agencies.

During protests following the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, Kent tweeted that the FBI should track “leaders & financiers of antifa”, defund them, and arrest their leaders. In 2022, after the FBI raided Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort to seize improperly retained classified documents, Kent posted that “We are at war” with a “shadowy leftist cabal”.

By 2023, Kent was calling the FBI a “secret domestic intelligence agency” that should be defunded.

After FBI agents killed a 74-year-old Maga supporter – who had threatened to assassinate Democrats and pointed a gun at agents – Kent falsely claimed the man was killed “for Facebook posts”.

Kent released a video articulating his defund-the-FBI platform, stating: “I really don’t know if we actually can save the FBI.”

The same year he said he would use the congressional appropriations process to “gut the FBI”, transforming it into a purely investigative body working with local sheriffs. He argued the FBI’s current structure leads to “total authoritarianism”.

He also said he would demand that the FBI prioritize targeting “ANTIFA and cartels” over “parents attending school board meetings”.

Kent’s shadowy employer

Kent’s history as both a Green Beret and a “CIA paramilitary officer” have triggered conspiracy thinking among his critics on the far right, but during his first congressional run, a mysterious employer also provoked questions from reporters and regulators.

A subsequent FEC investigation into his work at Advanced Enterprise Solutions cleared him of wrongdoing but shed little light on what the company did, and why it employed Kent.

Initial media reports just days out from the 2022 election highlighted that in FEC filings and public appearances, Kent claimed to be earning a six-figure salary from “American Enterprise Solutions”, but the company did not appear to exist.

Those reports cited the anonymously-created JoeKentIsCIA website, now preserved at the Internet Archive, which called Kent “An agent of the deep state, a CARPETBAGGER, a LIFELONG MARXIST DEMOCRAT RINO and a corrupt opportunist”, and of American Enterprise Solutions that there “is no trace of this company anywhere online, not even a website. Could this be a CIA black company? A slush fund for mega donors?”

His campaign soon released tax documents to a local public radio station seeking to clarify “the question of who pays Kent’s salary”. They showed the company was actually called Advanced Enterprise Solutions (AES), and was based in Herndon, Virginia, close to Washington DC.

At the same time, a former Kent staffer, Byron Sanford, claimed that “Kent spends most his time campaigning” and called his work for AES “a ‘phantom job’”, also telling OPB that “I really don’t think he put any actual hours into doing anything other than campaigning.”

A year later, the FEC ruled that there was insufficient evidence to indicate that he had a so-called “no-show” job with AEC, which would be a violation of campaign finance laws.

The commission also found, however, that AES’s CEO Sean Reed took a “personal interest” in Kent’s candidacy, and commissioned polling on the race.

At the time the allegations surfaced, Kent gave only vague explanations of what the company – which records showed paid him $122,110.36 in 2021 and $111,799.96 in 2020 – actually did.

OPB reported that Kent said the company “mainly works internationally” and “is often hired by governments and private companies – sometimes both – to analyze telecommunications infrastructure and provide reports detailing eventual upgrades”.

On 2 November 2022, however, the Columbian reported a phone number on AES’s benefits filings matched that of “a company called Torres Advanced Enterprise Solutions LLC, (Torres AES) a “global security, turn-key logistics, remote housing and life-support” firm.

The newspaper also reported that an address given by AES in its filings matched one given by Torres AES, and that Torres AES had changed its name in 2020 to Continuity Global Solutions (CGS).

Torres AES and Continuity Global Solutions each have registered international branches in Uganda and Panama, and LinkedIn searches indicate that dozens of locals are working for CGS as security and office staff in each of those locations.

The Guardian can reveal that Torres AES was founded by Jerry W Torres, who, like Kent, is both a former Green Beret and an unsuccessful 2022 and 2024 congressional candidate.

Reporting also reveals that Torres AES has operated as a security contractor on six continents, including in authoritarian regimes in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. The firm attracted significant controversy and the attention of US federal authorities ahead of its rebrand.

In 2020, transparency site The Black Vault obtained FBI documents via Foia that detailed a 2015 investigation into Torres AES’s execution of what then amounted to “$75 million in [Department of State] contracts for security guards and patrol services and $92 million in translation and interpretation services”. FBI Foia logs confirm that the documents were released in 2020 following a 2017 request.

The documents detail more than $109m in US government contracts for US outposts in countries including Iraq, Uganda, Panama, Peru and Ecuador. A contract for embassy security in Islamabad, Pakistan, alone stood at over $51m.

The investigation was initiated, according to the documents, for alleged breaches of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The file contains local media reports in 2014 on allegations of financial “kickbacks” made by Torres AES’s local subsidiary to ministry of justice officials, and an exchange of letters between the state department and the company about those allegations, in which Torres AES says the allegations are “politically motivated”.

The file also contains heavily redacted 2015 interview transcripts with local employees over allegations that the company paid bribes in order to obtain the local weapons permits needed in order to fulfill their US government contracts.

There’s no record of any prosecution arising from this investigation.

The Guardian sent questions via Continuity GS for Jerry Torres.

In 2010, Torres failed to appear at a hearing of the commission on wartime contracting in Iraq & Afghanistan, which was convened over concerns about the conduct of contractors during the global war on terror.

Despite all this, Torres was cited by the rightwing Heritage Foundation in their pursuit of allegations of wrongdoing by former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, in her handling of an attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012.

According to a report published by Heritage in 2017, Torres and another man, Brad Owens, “came forward with allegations that a Clinton state department official told them after the Sept 11, 2012, attack to keep silent with information they had regarding the security situation in Benghazi”.

Torres lost in the Republican primary in Florida’s 14th district in 2022. In 2024 he lost the general election for Virginia’s eighth congressional district to Democrat Donald Sternoff Beyer. Virginia’s 11th district, immediately west of the eighth, includes Herndon, where AES is headquartered.

Campaign finance questions

Lingering questions hang over millions of dollars which have flowed from Kent’s campaign committees and aligned Pacs to apparent “shell companies”. The beneficial owners of those companies are impossible to conclusively identify, but previous media reports have associated them with a long-time rightwing activist and Maga world figure who was a Kent spokesman in 2022.

Last January, the Daily Beast reported on campaign finance oddities suggesting that Kent had maintained his controversial links with a “former top aide with white nationalist ties”. The aide in question, Matt Braynard, is a long-time far-right figure who also acted as a frequent spokesman for Kent during his 2022 campaign.

Braynard was a 2016 Trump campaign operative and was an early 2020 “stop the steal” campaigner who raised nearly $700,000 for a “voter integrity project” and acted as an expert witness in Georgia, Wisconsin and Arizona election fraud lawsuits. He subsequently campaigned from 2021 for the release of January 6 rioters. On X last week, Braynard repeated his offer, first made in 2022, that his organization Look Ahead America (LAA) would assist newly-freed rioters in their search for employment.

Braynard’s white nationalist associations – including his attendance at the 2021 iteration of Nick Fuentes’s AFPAC conference – dogged Kent’s first congressional campaign, in which he also had to bat off accusations that he was close to Fuentes. For his part, Braynard as campaign spokesperson struggled to answer questions about Kent’s employment at Advanced Enterprise Solutions.

The Daily Beast’s reporting showed that as of September 2023, a significant proportion of campaign spending had been routed to companies associated with Braynard’s wife and a Republican operative, Thomas Datwyler.

Datwyler, meanwhile, was treasurer of both Kent’s campaign committee and the Joe Kent Victory Fund, a joint fundraising committee that also donated directly to Kent’s campaign. He is also treasurer of LAA, Braynard’s nonprofit, and the two also collaborated in 2024 to set up Save Our Orange county, dedicated to fighting a development in the DC-adjacent Virginia suburbs.

The Guardian can reveal that this pattern of routing money from Datwyler-helmed committees to companies apparently associated with him and Braynard continued and even accelerated as the campaign wore on.

FEC records show that Joe Kent Victory fund, paid out more than $914,000 to a Delaware-registered company, HWY 99, during the 2023-2024 election cycle. The same records indicate that this was over 20% of the campaign’s total spending; the only bigger beneficiary was Kent’s campaign committee itself, which received 37% of the Pac’s spending. Other spending on expenses like direct mail costs happened at a regular cadence throughout the campaign season; only HWY 99 received large lump sums.

The vast majority of the money to HWY 99 went out in the dying weeks of the campaign: seven payments totaling $730,000 in October included individual payments of $215,000, $200,000 and $150,000, while November saw $160,000 flow from the Pac’s coffers to the LLC.

Almost all of the payments are labeled as being for “strategy consulting”. Two payments for “strategy consulting” totaling $100,000 were made by the Pac for “strategy consulting” after the 5 November elections had concluded.

No other Pac or campaign committee has ever disbursed money to HWY 99 Pac except Joe Kent Victory Fund and Kent’s campaign committee during the last election cycle.

Kent’s own campaign committee, meanwhile, paid out over $1.25m to HWY 99 during the last election cycle. That company enjoyed windfalls from the campaign throughout the cycle, with bumper months including last July ($380,000), September ($250,000), and October ($115,000).

That represented 47.92% of the account’s total spending. Previously, HWY 99 received just over $1,000,000 from Kent’s committee during his first failed congressional bid during the 2024 mid-terms.

As The Daily Beast initially reported, while it is impossible to determine the beneficial ownership of the two companies they share a Washington DC mailing address with a number of other companies, trade marks and political committees which were registered by Datwyler, or which list him as an officer.

Brendan Fischer, deputy director of Documented, an investigative watchdog and journalism organization focused on money in politics, said the ongoing disbursement of Kent campaign funds to “shell corporations” raises “further questions about where the money was ultimately going”.

Fischer said “there appears to have been an incredible amount of money flowing to this apparent shell corporation in a very compressed period of time and the public has no idea where the money actually went.”

He added that this practice has been a growing problem, “especially after Trump”.

“This is a tactic really pioneered by the Trump campaign in 2020 when it routed most of its spending through a shell company set up by campaign operative. The problem is that the spending is ultimately dark. So we don’t know exactly what is being hidden from the voters and from the public”.

Fischer said it “has the potential of disguising any unsavory characters who might be working for the campaign”.

He asked: “Why would a campaign choose to structure their payments in this way? There’s hundreds of other line item expenditures that the campaign found it perfectly manageable to document and publicly report on FEC filings. Why is this portion of expenditures disguised from public view?”

Other unresolved questions concern $35,000 from a previous pro-Kent Pac, to QUB Consulting Inc, a company controlled by Braynard’s wife, and the fact that Heather Kent, formerly Heather Kaiser, Kent’s wife, identified herself as Kent’s campaign manager in donation forms, but no traceable payments were made to her.

Workers at the US Department of Labor are organizing a protest ahead of the scheduled meeting of Elon Musk’s staff at the “department of government efficiency” (Doge) with the management at Frances Perkins Building in Washington DC at 4pm on Wednesday.

“Lower-level IT supervisors were basically asked to plan to stay late after the 4pm meeting to assist with getting Doge folks set up on our systems,” a Department of Labor employee who requested to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation said.

The meeting comes as Elon Musk’s SpaceX is fighting in federal court against the labor department’s National Labor Relations Board, alleging the board’s makeup is unconstitutional, in response to appeals over federal labor law violations against the company.

Musk’s companies have also faced significant fines issued by divisions with the agency at Tesla, SpaceX and Boring Company.

Jordan Barab, who served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health under the Obama Administration, explained in his blog on the Doge meeting with the agency that their access incites concerns over confidential information at the department, including for whistleblowers, economic data with the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and personnel information.

“Would Elon and Trump use a takeover of BLS to cover up unfavorable economic statistics? A couple of weeks ago, that would have seemed impossible. Today is seems more than likely,” Barab said.

Musk and his staff at Doge have taken aim at several federal agencies, from shutting down the US Agency for International Development, which Musk falsely claimed was a “criminal organization”, to gaining direct access to the payment systems within the US treasury department responsible for nearly all payments by the US government.

Many of the actions by Musk and his staffers have been reported to be illegal, prompting lawsuits to block their access to federal data and servers.

This week, Doge staff have been reported at the headquarters of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) in Silver Spring, Maryland, on Tuesday.

The agency visits from Musk’s staff come after they took over the office of personnel management shortly after Donald Trump’s inauguration and have sent mass emails to all federal employees pushing for voluntary resignations amid efforts to significantly reduce the federal workforce and reclassify swaths of federal employees as political appointees without civil service protections.

The US Department of Labor has been reached for comment.

The Central Intelligence Agency offered buyouts to its entire workforce on Tuesday, citing an aim to bring the agency in line with Donald Trump’s priorities, the Wall Street Journal and CNN have reported.

The US spy agency is also freezing the hiring of job applicants already given a conditional offer, the WSJ reported, quoting an aide to CIA director John Ratcliffe.

The aide, not named in the report, said some of those frozen offers were likely to be rescinded if the applicants did not have the right background for the agency’s new goals, which include targeting drug cartels, Trump’s trade war and undermining China.

An unnamed CIA spokesperson told CNN the decision was part of Ratcliffe’s efforts to “ensure the CIA workforce is responsive to the administration’s national security priorities,” and that it is “part of a holistic strategy to infuse the agency with renewed energy”.

It is unclear who will be allowed to take up the offer, another unnamed source familiar with the matter told CNN, but some specific operations or areas of expertise may be restricted.

The agency does not disclose its budget or the number of people it employs. It did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The report of buyout offers is in line with a massive makeover of the US government embarked on by the Trump administration, which has fired and sidelined hundreds of civil servants in first steps toward downsizing the bureaucracy and installing more loyalists.

The White House last week offered two million civilian full-time federal workers an opportunity to stop working this week and receive pay and benefits through 30 September as Trump seeks to slash the size of the government.

Including the CIA in that program seems to have been a recent decision, CNN reported, citing a source who said officials had recently been trying to determine whether they would be included in the programme.

Earlier on Tuesday, unions representing US government employees filed a lawsuit to block the Trump administration’s plan to offer buyouts to federal workers.

Ratcliffe, a former member of the House of Representatives who served as director of national intelligence during Trump’s first term, was confirmed by the US Senate as director of the CIA days after Trump took office for his second term.

His aide said Trump’s CIA will have a greater focus on the western hemisphere, targeting countries not traditionally considered adversaries of the US, according to the Journal.

The US government is the nation’s largest workforce with more than 2.4 million employees, not including post office workers. Project 2025, the conservative manifesto that has guided much of Trump’s policy goals, calls for mass firings of federal workers and suggests replacing many of them with political appointees.

The gun attack that left 11 people dead in the Swedish city of Örebro was “a one-man operation”, police have said, as they worked to identify the victims of the country’s deadliest mass shooting.

The suspected gunman was among the dead and six people were hospitalised after a shooter entered Campus Risbergska, a school specialising in adult education, just after 12.30pm on Tuesday.

The Örebro police chief, Roberto Eid Forest, said at a press conference on Wednesday morning that police had not yet identified all the victims. He said there was strong evidence to suggest that the gunman shot himself.

“We still believe that it is a one-man operation. We will return to the exact motives,” he said.

Police have said there is nothing to suggest the gunman acted on ideological grounds and that the suspect, who has not been named, had no known connection to criminal gangs.

The prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, said 4 February would “for ever mark a dark day in Swedish history” as he urged the country to come together. He invited party leaders to a meeting with the justice minister and the police authority, and said the meeting would begin with a minute’s silence.

“Today, people have woken up to unimaginable sadness and pain. For those who have lost a loved one, life will never be the same again,” he said. “We are a country in mourning and we must all come together – as a nation, as fellow human beings and as leaders of the parties in the Riksdag. Together, we must help the injured and their families to bear the grief and weight of this day.”

Eid Forest said the reason it took so long to inform the public about the death toll was the size of the school premises. “It took a very long time to search and ensure that we didn’t have any more injuries,” he said.

Jonas Claesson, the director of health and medical services for the Örebro region, said five of the six people admitted to hospital had initially life-threatening gunshot wounds and were now stable after undergoing surgery. Two of them were being treated in intensive care. A sixth person had minor injuries. Four were women and two, men.

Police urged anybody who was at the school on Tuesday or had footage of the attack to come forward. They asked the public to share only confirmed information.

A meeting was held in central Örebro for relatives, where Eid Forest said they would be informed about “the continued work on, among other things, identification and how it will be done”.

Kristersson, his justice minister, Gunnar Strömmer, and King Carl Gustaf and Queen Silvia were due to visit Örebro later on Wednesday.

Johanna Sollerman, who works in crime strategy in the municipality and is a crisis manager, said: “We’re going to live with this as a mark for a very long time. However, what we are starting to see is civil society together with the municipality and police really rallying around for citizens of Örebro.”

She said they were in the process of setting up centres around the city where victims’ families and members of the community could speak to social workers, members of the Red Cross and representatives of churches and mosques. They were also in the process of making decisions about memorial places and a silence of remembrance.

She said Campus Risbergska mostly ran education courses for adults, including for those learning Swedish, training in professions such as nursing, and studying to go to university. “The school is a society of different backgrounds,” she said.

Schools in the municipality had been training and practising for how to stop such an incident, she said, because it was known to be a potential risk. “For a few years now we’ve been training on how schools should act to stop a lone actor. We’ve been training in that because we know it can happen.”

The municipality had taken a proactive approach to mapping criminals and gangs, she said, but “this kind of situation is very difficult for us to detect”.

She added: “We’ve been teaching it, practising it, but to actually go through it is unimaginable. We wouldn’t believe in a million years that Örebro would be the scene for this tragedy.”

The gun attack that left 11 people dead in the Swedish city of Örebro was “a one-man operation”, police have said, as they worked to identify the victims of the country’s deadliest mass shooting.

The suspected gunman was among the dead and six people were hospitalised after a shooter entered Campus Risbergska, a school specialising in adult education, just after 12.30pm on Tuesday.

The Örebro police chief, Roberto Eid Forest, said at a press conference on Wednesday morning that police had not yet identified all the victims. He said there was strong evidence to suggest that the gunman shot himself.

“We still believe that it is a one-man operation. We will return to the exact motives,” he said.

Police have said there is nothing to suggest the gunman acted on ideological grounds and that the suspect, who has not been named, had no known connection to criminal gangs.

The prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, said 4 February would “for ever mark a dark day in Swedish history” as he urged the country to come together. He invited party leaders to a meeting with the justice minister and the police authority, and said the meeting would begin with a minute’s silence.

“Today, people have woken up to unimaginable sadness and pain. For those who have lost a loved one, life will never be the same again,” he said. “We are a country in mourning and we must all come together – as a nation, as fellow human beings and as leaders of the parties in the Riksdag. Together, we must help the injured and their families to bear the grief and weight of this day.”

Eid Forest said the reason it took so long to inform the public about the death toll was the size of the school premises. “It took a very long time to search and ensure that we didn’t have any more injuries,” he said.

Jonas Claesson, the director of health and medical services for the Örebro region, said five of the six people admitted to hospital had initially life-threatening gunshot wounds and were now stable after undergoing surgery. Two of them were being treated in intensive care. A sixth person had minor injuries. Four were women and two, men.

Police urged anybody who was at the school on Tuesday or had footage of the attack to come forward. They asked the public to share only confirmed information.

A meeting was held in central Örebro for relatives, where Eid Forest said they would be informed about “the continued work on, among other things, identification and how it will be done”.

Kristersson, his justice minister, Gunnar Strömmer, and King Carl Gustaf and Queen Silvia were due to visit Örebro later on Wednesday.

Johanna Sollerman, who works in crime strategy in the municipality and is a crisis manager, said: “We’re going to live with this as a mark for a very long time. However, what we are starting to see is civil society together with the municipality and police really rallying around for citizens of Örebro.”

She said they were in the process of setting up centres around the city where victims’ families and members of the community could speak to social workers, members of the Red Cross and representatives of churches and mosques. They were also in the process of making decisions about memorial places and a silence of remembrance.

She said Campus Risbergska mostly ran education courses for adults, including for those learning Swedish, training in professions such as nursing, and studying to go to university. “The school is a society of different backgrounds,” she said.

Schools in the municipality had been training and practising for how to stop such an incident, she said, because it was known to be a potential risk. “For a few years now we’ve been training on how schools should act to stop a lone actor. We’ve been training in that because we know it can happen.”

The municipality had taken a proactive approach to mapping criminals and gangs, she said, but “this kind of situation is very difficult for us to detect”.

She added: “We’ve been teaching it, practising it, but to actually go through it is unimaginable. We wouldn’t believe in a million years that Örebro would be the scene for this tragedy.”

The Google owner, Alphabet, has dropped its promise not to use artificial intelligence for purposes such as developing weapons and surveillance tools.

The US technology company said on Tuesday, just before it reported lower-than-forecast earnings, that it had updated its ethical guidelines around AI, and they no longer referred to not pursuing technologies that could “cause or are likely to cause overall harm”.

Google’s AI head, Demis Hassabis, said the guidelines were being overhauled in a changing world and that AI should protect “national security”.

In a blogpost defending the move, Hassabis and the company’s senior vice-president for technology and society, James Manyika, wrote that as global competition for AI leadership increased, the company believed “democracies should lead in AI development” that was guided by “freedom, equality, and respect for human rights”.

They added: “We believe that companies, governments, and organisations sharing these values should work together to create AI that protects people, promotes global growth, and supports national security.”

Google’s motto when it first floated was “don’t be evil”, although this was later downgraded in 2009 to a “mantra” and was not included in the code of ethics of Alphabet when the parent company was created in 2015.

The rapid growth of AI has prompted a debate about how the new technology should be governed, and how to guard against its risks.

The British computer scientist Stuart Russell has warned of the dangers of developing autonomous weapon systems, and argued for a system of global control, speaking in a Reith lecture on the BBC.

The Google blogpost argued that since the company first published its AI principles in 2018, the technology had evolved rapidly. “Billions of people are using AI in their everyday lives. AI has become a general-purpose technology, and a platform which countless organisations and individuals use to build applications,” Hassabis and Manyika wrote.

“It has moved from a niche research topic in the lab to a technology that is becoming as pervasive as mobile phones and the internet itself; one with numerous beneficial uses for society and people around the world, supported by a vibrant AI ecosystem of developers.”

Alphabet’s shares fell by 8% when Wall Street opened. Tuesday’s report showed that the company made $96.5bn (£77bn) in revenues, slightly below analysts’ expectations of $96.67bn, because of slower growth in its cloud business. Google Cloud trails behind Amazon and Microsoft.

Evelyn Mitchell-Wolf, a senior analyst at eMarketer, said: “Cloud’s disappointing results suggest that AI-powered momentum might be beginning to wane just as Google’s closed model strategy is called into question by DeepSeek.”

Alphabet said it planned to spend $75bn on capital expenditure in the next year, largely to build out its AI capabilities and infrastructure.

An attorney whose lawsuit discovered the existence of emails showing how top executives at the NFL’s Saints and NBA’s Pelicans tried to help New Orleans’ Roman Catholic archdiocese soften critical news coverage about the church’s management of a clergy-abuse scandal has challenged the sports teams’ assertions that the communications were protected by a court order.

Nonetheless, an attorney for the Saints on Tuesday issued a statement doubling down on his position that the material’s disclosure to the press was “a violation of [a] court order protecting them”.

Plaintiffs’ lawyer John Denenea said on Tuesday that neither he nor any of his staff provided the emails in question to any media outlets at all, including the Guardian, WWL Louisiana or various other ones that published investigations a day earlier into the communications for the first time.

But Denenea responded to contentions from the Saints – prominently boosted on Monday by at least one popular sports website – that the materials reported on by the outlets were leaked in defiance of a court order sealing them from public access.

Denenea recounted how he obtained the New Orleans archdiocese’s correspondence with the Saints and Pelicans – including team owner Gayle Benson and spokesperson Greg Bensel – through a subpoena that he issued on behalf of a clergy-abuse survivor pursuing a civil lawsuit against the church in a local courthouse.

The subpoena was the first public indication of the emails. Denenea argued that the emails should become public, but the Saints countered that they should be protected.

The state court judge handling the case had not formally resolved that dispute when New Orleans’ archdiocese filed for federal bankruptcy protection in May 2020 in an attempt to dispense with numerous pending lawsuits stemming from the church’s decades-old, worldwide clerical child molestation scandal.

The bankruptcy not only delayed litigation against the archdiocese indefinitely – it also forced Denenea’s client’s case to be transferred to the federal courthouse in New Orleans.

At the new venue, Judge Susie Morgan granted permission to attorneys for the archdiocese to file seven evidentiary exhibits into the case record under seal, Denenea said and court documents showed. The order signed by Morgan on 4 May 2020 directs the courthouse clerk to “take all steps necessary … to ensure that the sealed components … are entered into the record in the above-captioned matter under seal”.

Eleven days later, as Denenea said and court documents show, Morgan signed an order permitting archdiocesan attorneys to file 14 additional exhibits into the case record. The order says nothing about those exhibits being sealed or maintained under any protections.

It merely directed the court clerk to “take all steps necessary to ensure that the attached … exhibits … are filed in the record of the above-captioned matter”.

The email communications involving the Saints and the archdiocese were among those 14 supplementary exhibits, Denenea said he confirmed.

Denenea said that evident error – and the fact that the Saints “were relying on the church’s lawyers to protect the [team’s] documents” – prompted him to formally notify the ball club’s lawyers in July “that these emails were not under seal or protected”.

“I put them on notice that, if they wanted to protect these documents, they needed to bring it up with the judge in a motion to seal or a motion for a protective order for those documents,” Denenea said.

A letter that Denenea sent to Saints lawyer James Gulotta cited a local rule at New Orleans’ US district courthouse which reads: “In recognition of the right of the public to access material filed with the court, no document or other tangible item, or portion thereof, may be filed under seal without the filing of a separate motion and order to seal, unless authorized by a federal statute, federal rule, or prior court order in the same case expressly authorizing the party to file certain documents (or portions thereof) under seal.”

Denenea’s letter also said a member of the court clerk’s office had confirmed that the email-related documents were “not sealed by any court order”.

Denenea said the Saints’ lawyers took no action despite his notice. “They didn’t do it then,” he said. “They haven’t done it since.”

On Tuesday, Gulotta provided the Guardian with a reply he sent to Denenea in July which contended that a protective order in state court applied to the emails and remained in effect. He also cited a 2020 ruling from the federal fifth circuit court in New Orleans reading: “In this circuit, when a case is removed from state court to federal court, the federal court takes the case and it finds and treats the state court rulings as its own.”

Gulotta’s letter to Denenea said: “There is no occasion for me, as counsel for the Saints, to file a motion in federal court to preserve the effect of the protective order restricting their disclosure.”

In a statement on Tuesday, Gulotta characterized Denenea’s arguments that the emails were unshielded as “erroneous”. His statement also said: “Any disclosure to the public or to the press of the protected documents is and would be a violation of the court order protecting them.”

Denenea on Tuesday countered: “It appears to me that the Saints and their attorneys foolishly relied on the archdiocese and its lawyers in protecting their precious documents.”

The Saints and archdiocese emails publicized on Monday mainly establish that Bensel – the team’s vice-president of communications – directly lobbied New Orleans media outlets to focus on exalting Archbishop Gregory Aymond’s courage in releasing a list of local, credibly accused clergy abusers in November 2018, which was meant as an act of conciliation and transparency amid the ongoing fallout of the church’s clerical molestation scandal.

He also solicited and frequently received feedback on – and moral support for – the messaging campaign from Benson, who is Aymond’s close personal friend, as well as the Saints and Pelicans president, Dennis Lauscha. Bensel did the same with other powerful civic figures who neither worked for the Saints nor the archdiocese.

The Saints have insisted the emails amount to nothing more than well-intended “public relations assistance” with media attention over the clergy-abuse scandal, which in April 2024 left the archdiocese faced with a child sex-trafficking investigation being conducted jointly by state and federal law enforcement.

A statement from the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests’ Louisiana chapter on Tuesday said those emails “signal that the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic church is more widespread and insidious than anyone could possibly imagine”.

But at a news conference on Monday, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell hailed the Saints as being “very involved in this community, and they are great corporate citizens”.

Ransomware payments fell by more than a third last year to $813m (£650m) as victims refused to pay cybercriminals and law enforcement cracked down on gangs, figures reveal.

The decline in such cyber-attacks – where access to a computer or its data is blocked and money is then demanded to release it – came despite a number of high-profile cases in 2024, with victims including NHS trusts in the UK and the US doughnut firm Krispy Kreme.

Ransomware payments last year fell from a record $1.25bn in 2023, said the research firm Chainalysis, which published the payment data on Wednesday. It said payments dropped off sharply in the second half of the year, reflecting the impact of action taken against cybercriminals and a refusal to pay.

The 2024 total is also lower than the $999m and $1.1bn recorded in 2020 and 2019, respectively. In ransomware attacks, criminals access their victims’ IT systems, steal data and lock up files by encrypting them. The assailants then demand a ransom payment, typically in bitcoin, to decrypt the files and return the data.

Jacqueline Burns Koven, head of cyber threat intelligence at Chainalysis, said the new figures indicated that a “ransomware apocalypse” had been averted. “For years now, the cybersecurity landscape seemed hurtling towards a so-called ransomware apocalypse, so this sharp decline, to levels even lower than those in 2020 and 2021 speaks to the effectiveness of law enforcement actions, improved international collaboration, and a growing refusal by victims to cave into attackers demands,” she said.

However, Burns Koven said the downward trend in payments was “fragile” and that ransomware attacks remained “prolific”.

In further evidence of victims refusing to meet attackers’ demands, in the second half of last year sums demanded by cyber gangs were 53% higher than the actual payouts – despite an increase in the number of ransomware attacks.

Over the same period the number of ransomware-related “on-chain” payments – the term for payments registered on a blockchain that records crypto transactions – declined, indicating fewer payments by victims.

One expert said a coordinated international operation in February last year to take down a leading ransomware gang, LockBit, appeared to have had an effect as well as the disappearance of another cybercrime outfit called BlackCat/ALPHV.

“The market never returned to the previous status quo after the collapse of LockBit and BlackCat/ALPHV,” said Lizzie Cookson, of the ransomware response firm Coveware. “The current ransomware ecosystem is infused with a lot of newcomers who tend to focus efforts on the small- to mid-size markets, which in turn are associated with more modest ransom demands.”

In the UK, ministers are considering banning schools, the NHS and local councils from making ransomware payments.

Under the proposals, payouts by private companies will have to be reported to the government and could be blocked. Reporting ransomware attacks could also be made mandatory if the government consultation leads to legal changes.

Ransomware payments fell by more than a third last year to $813m (£650m) as victims refused to pay cybercriminals and law enforcement cracked down on gangs, figures reveal.

The decline in such cyber-attacks – where access to a computer or its data is blocked and money is then demanded to release it – came despite a number of high-profile cases in 2024, with victims including NHS trusts in the UK and the US doughnut firm Krispy Kreme.

Ransomware payments last year fell from a record $1.25bn in 2023, said the research firm Chainalysis, which published the payment data on Wednesday. It said payments dropped off sharply in the second half of the year, reflecting the impact of action taken against cybercriminals and a refusal to pay.

The 2024 total is also lower than the $999m and $1.1bn recorded in 2020 and 2019, respectively. In ransomware attacks, criminals access their victims’ IT systems, steal data and lock up files by encrypting them. The assailants then demand a ransom payment, typically in bitcoin, to decrypt the files and return the data.

Jacqueline Burns Koven, head of cyber threat intelligence at Chainalysis, said the new figures indicated that a “ransomware apocalypse” had been averted. “For years now, the cybersecurity landscape seemed hurtling towards a so-called ransomware apocalypse, so this sharp decline, to levels even lower than those in 2020 and 2021 speaks to the effectiveness of law enforcement actions, improved international collaboration, and a growing refusal by victims to cave into attackers demands,” she said.

However, Burns Koven said the downward trend in payments was “fragile” and that ransomware attacks remained “prolific”.

In further evidence of victims refusing to meet attackers’ demands, in the second half of last year sums demanded by cyber gangs were 53% higher than the actual payouts – despite an increase in the number of ransomware attacks.

Over the same period the number of ransomware-related “on-chain” payments – the term for payments registered on a blockchain that records crypto transactions – declined, indicating fewer payments by victims.

One expert said a coordinated international operation in February last year to take down a leading ransomware gang, LockBit, appeared to have had an effect as well as the disappearance of another cybercrime outfit called BlackCat/ALPHV.

“The market never returned to the previous status quo after the collapse of LockBit and BlackCat/ALPHV,” said Lizzie Cookson, of the ransomware response firm Coveware. “The current ransomware ecosystem is infused with a lot of newcomers who tend to focus efforts on the small- to mid-size markets, which in turn are associated with more modest ransom demands.”

In the UK, ministers are considering banning schools, the NHS and local councils from making ransomware payments.

Under the proposals, payouts by private companies will have to be reported to the government and could be blocked. Reporting ransomware attacks could also be made mandatory if the government consultation leads to legal changes.

Researchers have peered inside an ancient scroll that was burned to a crisp in the volcanic eruption that destroyed Pompeii nearly 2,000 years ago.

The scroll is one of hundreds found in the library of a Roman mansion in Herculaneum, a town on the west coast of Italy that was wiped out when Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD79.

Excavations at the luxury villa, thought to be owned by Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, recovered a vast collection of scrolls, but the material was so charred that the black ink was unreadable and the papyri crumbled to dust when researchers tried to open them.

The papyrus, known as PHerc. 172, is one of three Herculaneum scrolls housed at the Bodleian libraries. The document was virtually unrolled on a computer, revealing multiple columns of text which scholars at Oxford have now begun to read. One word written in Ancient Greek, διατροπή, meaning disgust, appears twice within a few columns of text, they said.

“We are thrilled with the successful imaging of this scroll from the Bodleian libraries,” said Dr Brent Seales, a co-founder of the Vesuvius Challenge, a competition that has spurred dramatic progress in digitally unrolling and reading the scrolls from 3D X-ray images taken at Diamond, the UK’s national synchrotron facility in Oxfordshire. “This scroll contains more recoverable text than we have ever seen in a scanned Herculaneum scroll.”

Last year, Nat Friedman, a US tech executive and founding sponsor of the Vesuvius Challenge, announced that a team of three students, Youssef Nader in Germany, Luke Farritor in the US, and Julian Schilliger in Switzerland, had won the competition’s $700,000 (£558,000) grand prize after reading more than 2,000 Greek letters from another Herculaneum scroll.

Armed with only 3D X-rays of the works – the burned scrolls are too fragile to handle – the winners developed computer software to virtually unwrap the papyrus. They then used artificial intelligence to detect where ink was present on the papyrus fibres and ultimately read passages of the ancient text.

That scroll, thought to have been written by the epicurean philosopher Philodemus, covered sources of pleasure, from music to food, and explored whether pleasurable experiences arose from the abundant or the scarce, the minor or major constituents of a meal, for example.

The Oxford scroll was donated in the 19th century by Ferdinand IV, the king of Naples and Sicily. The ink is more visible in X-rays than that written on other scrolls, suggesting the papyrus was penned in a denser ink.

Richard Ovenden, Bodley’s librarian (the head of Oxford’s Bodleian library), said: “It’s an incredible moment in history as librarians, computer scientists and scholars of the classical period are collaborating to see the unseen. The astonishing strides forward made with imaging and AI are enabling us to look inside scrolls that have not been read for almost 2,000 years.”

Jenni Hermoso’s brother on Wednesday told the forced kiss trial of Spain’s ex-football federation chief Luis Rubiales his sister was threatened with “consequences” if she did not downplay the affair.

Rubiales sparked worldwide outrage for the kiss on Hermoso after she had just helped Spain beat England in the 2023 Women’s World Cup final in Australia.

The scandal forced Rubiales to resign in disgrace that year and has made Hermoso an icon of the fight against macho culture and sexism in sport.

Rafael Hermoso, the striker’s older brother, said former women’s national team coach Jorge Vilda asked him on the flight back to Spain to “convince” his sister to record a video with Rubiales to show she was not bothered by the kiss.

Vilda “told me that my sister was of a certain age, that she already had a career and that if she cooperated, things would go well for her”, he told the National Court just outside Madrid.

“But that if she did not cooperate, there was no way of knowing what would happen,” he continued.

“The last thing Mr Vilda said to me was that we should bear in mind the professional and personal consequences that all this could have for my sister,” he added.

Prosecutors are seeking two and a half years in prison against Rubiales, one year for sexual assault for the forced kiss and 18 months for allegedly coercing Hermoso, 34, to downplay the incident.

Rubiales, 47, has called the kiss an innocuous “peck between friends celebrating” and denied any coercion. He is scheduled to take the stand on 12 February.

Vilda and two former federation officials, Ruben Rivera and Albert Luque, are on trial alongside Rubiales.

They also stand accused of trying to coerce Hermoso with prosecutors seeking 18 months’ jail against them.

Jenni’s teammate Misa Rodriguez told the court the striker was “under a lot of pressure” and “started crying” shortly after Rubiales talked to her on the plane.

“At no point did she tell us that the kiss had been consensual,” the goalkeeper added.

A fresh round of lawsuits alleging sexual assault have been filed against Sean “Diddy” Combs, though the rapper and mogul continues to deny wrongdoing.

On Tuesday, a man filing in New York’s Southern District court anonymously as John Doe alleged that Combs coerced him into sex acts over a number of years. The man, who worked as an adult entertainer in Las Vegas, claims he was hired by Combs in 2007 to perform a strip show, and was subsequently booked on other occasions lasting until 2012 at hotel rooms and Combs residences across the US.

The lawsuit, obtained by Rolling Stone, claims Combs instructed the man “to perform acts that were outside the scope of the agreed-upon performance and limitations set by plaintiff and his agency”, including sexual intercourse with women. He alleges Combs sexually and physically assaulted him, drugged him with Viagra, and covertly filmed the sexual encounters to use as blackmail material. He also claims Combs manipulated him by promising to assist in the man’s hoped-for music career.

“Combs dehumanised plaintiff and reduced him to a mere object for Combs’ own amusement and to satisfy his own sexual fetishes,” the suit claims. “Combs gravely exploited plaintiff, effectively imprisoning him and controlling him through surreptitious surveillance and filming.”

Combs’ lawyers denied the allegations in a statement to Rolling Stone, saying: “No matter how many lawsuits are filed, it won’t change the fact that Mr Combs has never sexually assaulted or sex-trafficked anyone – man or woman, adult or minor. Fortunately, a fair and impartial judicial process exists to separate fact from fiction, and Mr Combs is confident that he will prevail in court.”

Two other women, also filing lawsuits anonymously on Tuesday, allege that they were drugged and sexually assaulted on multiple occasions at parties held by Combs during the 1990s. One alleges that an assault against her was filmed, and that Combs refused her request to delete the footage. Combs’ lawyers denied the allegations in a statement to Billboard.

On Monday, another man identifying anonymously as John Doe filed a separate lawsuit seen by Billboard regarding an alleged incident in 2015. The man, then an aspiring rapper, claimed he was given a drink by Combs at a party which caused him to lose consciousness, before waking to find Combs groping him. He alleges Combs then tried to coerce him into having sex with an unknown woman, but the man escaped the venue instead.

The man says the incident caused him “pain and suffering, mental anguish, physical impairment and emotional torment”. Lawyers for Combs issued the same aforementioned denial following the allegations.

Combs is currently being held at New York’s Metropolitan Detention Center, having been denied bail three times as he awaits trial on federal charges, separate to the dozens of civil cases he faces.

Those charges, to which he pleaded not guilty, are that he “abused, threatened, and coerced women and others, and led a racketeering conspiracy that engaged in sex trafficking, forced labour, kidnapping, arson, bribery, and obstruction of justice, among other crimes”. A start date for his trial has been set for 5 May.

LeBron James says he spent two days in disbelief after the Los Angeles Lakers traded away Anthony Davis, his close friend and teammate.

The top scorer in NBA history is finally coming to grips with the idea of forming a new partnership with Luka Dončić, who also holds a special place in James’s esteem.

“Luka has been my favorite player in the NBA for a while now,” James said on Tuesday night after scoring 26 points in the Lakers’ blowout win over the Clippers. “I’ve always just tried to play the game the right way and inspire the next generation, and Luka happens to be one of them, and now we’re teammates. So it’ll be a very seamless transition.”

Like the rest of the world, James initially assumed the Lakers’ trade with the Dallas Mavericks for Dončić – Davis was sent the other way – was a joke when he learned about it last Saturday night while at dinner with his family in New York.

“My emotions were all over the place,” James said. “The first time I heard it, I thought it was for sure fake. I thought it was a hoax. People messing around or whatever. But AD FaceTimed me, and I talked to him for quite a while. Even when I got off the phone with him, it still didn’t seem real. Pretty much didn’t seem real until I saw Luka today, and then I saw the clip of AD at the Dallas shootaround. That’s when it finally hit me, like, ‘This is real.’”

Midway through his record-tying 22nd NBA season, the 40-year-old James has often said in recent years that he’s seen everything it’s possible to experience in the NBA. This trade changed his mind.

“Ain’t never seen this,” James said. “I haven’t. I’ve seen it all, up until this one. I’ve never been a part of a transaction like that. That was different … It was shocking when I heard the news, but at the end of the day, I understand the business of basketball.”

The NBA trade deadline is Thursday, and James said he’s determined to persevere in Los Angeles even after Davis’ departure.

When asked if he was worried about the Lakers’ focus shifting to Dončić and younger players, James asked: “What’s wrong with that?”

“If I had concerns, I’d have waived my no-trade clause and got up out of here,” he added. “Listen, I’m here right now. I’m committed to the Lakers organization. I’m here to help Luka and Maxi [Kleber] make the transition as smoothly as possible.”

Clippers coach Tyronn Lue is well-positioned to understand how Dončić’s may fit in with the Lakers. Lue was James’ coach with the Cleveland Cavaliers, who won a championship with James playing alongside ballhawk guard Kyrie Irving. Lue smirked on Tuesday night when asked how he would respond to pundits and ex-players like Charles Barkley and Paul Pierce who think James and Dončić won’t work well together because they’re both ball-dominant players.

“They’re not right,” Lue said. “It’ll work. When you have LeBron James, who’s been the best player in the league for the last 15 years, and you have Luka – who’s a top-three, top-five player in the league – they’ll figure out how to make it work. LeBron can play with anybody. … I know [Lakers coach JJ Redick] will do a good job of stacking those guys so they each have their own unit, kind of like we did with Kyrie and LeBron, and then in the fourth quarter they’ll close games together. They’ll figure it out. It’s not a tough problem to have, I’ll tell you that.”

Elsewhere on Tuesday night, Irving said he was still in shock that Dončić is no longer his teammate in Dallas.

“Just really shocked,” Irving said after the Mavericks’ loss to the Philadelphia 76ers. “You just don’t imagine you’re going to get ready to go to sleep and then you find out news like that. It’s still a grieving process right now. I miss my hermano.”