The world’s largest known coral, visible from space, has been discovered in the waters of the Solomon Islands.

With a circumference of 183 metres, the gigantic multicoloured organism is an intricate network of individual coral polyps that have grown for between 300 and 500 years.

The sprawling coral was discovered in the region of the western Pacific known as the “coral triangle” by scientists belonging to the National Geographic Pristine Seas team during an expedition to the Solomon Islands.

Mostly brown, with highlights of vivid yellows, blues and reds, the Pavona clavus coral is a haven for a panoply of marine species including fish, crabs and shrimps.

“Just when we think there is nothing left to discover on planet Earth, we find a massive coral made of nearly 1bn little polyps, pulsing with life and colour,” said marine ecologist Enric Sala, explorer in residence for National Geographic and founder of Pristine Seas. “This is a significant scientific discovery, like finding the world’s tallest tree. But there is cause for alarm. Despite its remote location, this coral is not safe from global warming and other human threats.”

Unlike a coral reef, which is a network of many coral colonies, this is a standalone coral that has grown uninterrupted from polyps derived from larvae that settled on the seabed and multiplied into millions of other genetically identical polyps over the centuries.

When the team initially spotted the living organism, which is 34 metres wide, 32 metres long and more than 5 metres high, they thought it might be a shipwreck. The expedition’s underwater cinematographer dived more than 12 metres down to the coral and discovered it was a Pavona clavus. Despite its size, this individual coral had never been documented, with local fishers possibly having mistaken it for a boulder over the years.

Ronnie Posala, fisheries officer for the Solomon Islands fisheries ministry, said: “For the people of the Solomon Islands, this mega coral discovery is monumental. It reinforces the importance of our ocean, which sustains our communities, traditions and future. Such discoveries remind us of our duty to safeguard these natural wonders, not only for their ecological value but for the livelihoods and cultural identity they provide.”

Eric Brown, coral scientist for the Pristine Seas expedition, identified and measured the previous record-holding coral, located in American Samoa. “While the nearby shallow reefs were degraded due to warmer seas, witnessing this large healthy coral oasis in slightly deeper waters is a beacon of hope,” he said.

The United States’s blossoming emergence as a clean energy superpower could be stopped in its tracks by Donald Trump, further empowering Chinese leadership and forfeiting tens of billions of dollars of investment to other countries, according to a new report.

Trump’s promise to repeal major climate policies passed during Joe Biden’s presidency threatens to push $80bn of investment to other countries and cost the US up to $50bn in lost exports, the analysis found, surrendering ground to China and other emerging powers in the race to build electric cars, batteries, solar and wind energy for the world.

“The US will still install a bunch of solar panels and wind turbines, but getting rid of those policies would harm the US’s bid for leadership in this new world,” said Bentley Allan, an environmental and political policy expert at Johns Hopkins University, who co-authored the new study.

“The energy transition is inevitable and the future prosperity of countries hinges on being part of the clean energy supply chain,” he said. “If we exit the competition, it will be very difficult to re-enter.

“This was our chance to enter the race for clean technologies while everyone else, not just China but South Korea and Nigeria and countries in Europe, do the same.”

Under Biden, the US legislated the Chips Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act, all aimed in varying degrees to deal with the climate crisis while also bolstering American manufacturing.

The IRA alone, with its major incentives for clean energy, is credited with helping create around 300,000 new jobs, with the vast majority of $150bn in new manufacturing investment flowing to Republican-held districts.

Trump, however, has called this spending wasteful and vowed to erase it. “I will immediately terminate the green new scam,” the president-elect said shortly before his election win. “That will be such an honor. The greatest scam in the history of any country.”

Doing this may be politically fraught, even with Republican control of Congress, due to the glut of new jobs and factories in conservative-leaning areas. But should Trump’s plan prevail then planned US manufacturing projects would be canceled, according to the new report, leaving American firms reliant upon overseas suppliers for components.

“Without these investments and tax credits, US industry will be hobbled just as it is getting going, ceding the ground to others,” the report states.

Exports would also be hit, the analysis predicts, allowing US competitors to seize market share. “These plans suggest a complete misunderstanding of how the global economy works,” said Allan. “If we don’t have a manufacturing base, we aren’t going to get ahead.”

Trump has talked of forging “American energy dominance” that is based entirely upon fossil fuels, with more oil and gas drilling coupled with a pledge to scrap offshore wind projects and an end to the “lunacy” of electric cars subsidies. The president-elect is expected to lead a wide-ranging dismantling of environmental and climate rules once he returns to the White House.

These priorities, coming as peak global oil production is forecast and pressure mounts to avert climate breakdown, could further cement China’s leadership in clean energy production.

“China already feels puzzled and skeptical of the Inflation Reduction Act,” said Li Shuo, a climate specialist at the Asia Society Policy Institute. “Throw in Trump and you deepen Chinese skepticism. This is political boom and bust. When it comes to selling clean energy to third country markets, China isn’t sweating at all.”

But even Trump’s agenda is not expected to completely stall clean energy’s momentum. Renewables are now economically attractive and are set to still grow, albeit more bumpily. Solar, which has plummeted by 90% in cost over the past decade, was added to the American grid at three times the rate of gas capacity last year, for example.

“We will see a big effort to boost the supply of fossil fuels from the US but most drilling is at full blast anyway,” said Ely Sandler, a climate finance expert at Harvard University.

“That’s quite different from demand, which is how power is generated and usually comes down to the cheapest source of energy which is increasingly renewables. If Donald Trump eases permitting regulations, it could even lead to more clean energy coming online.”

At the UN Cop29 talks in Azerbaijan, which started on Monday, countries are again having to grapple with a bewildering swing in the US’s commitment to confront the climate crisis. The outgoing Biden administration, which is trying to talk up ongoing American action at the talks, hopes its climate policies have enough juice to outlast a Trumpian assault.

“What we will see is whether we’ve achieved escape velocity or not and how quickly the booster packs are about to fall off,” said Ali Zaidi, Biden’s top climate adviser, at the Cop summit.

The Iranian state has said that it plans to open a treatment clinic for women who defy the mandatory hijab laws that require women to cover their heads in public.

The opening of a “hijab removal treatment clinic” was announced by Mehri Talebi Darestani, the head of the Women and Family Department of the Tehran Headquarters for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. She said the clinic will offer “scientific and psychological treatment for hijab removal”.

Iranian women and human rights groups have expressed outrage at the announcement.

Sima Sabet, a UK-based Iranian journalist who was a target of an Iranian assassination attempt last year, said the move is “shameful”, adding that: “The idea of establishing clinics to ‘cure’ unveiled women is chilling, where people are separated from society simply for not conforming to the ruling ideology.”

Iranian human rights lawyer Hossein Raeesi said that the idea of a clinic to treat women who did not comply with hijab laws is “neither Islamic and nor is it aligned with Iranian law”. He also said it was alarming that the statement came from the Women and Family Department of the Tehran Headquarters for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, which falls under the direct authority of the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei.

The news has since spread among the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protest groups and female students, sparking fear and defiance.

One young woman from Iran, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said: “It won’t be a clinic, it will be a prison. We are struggling to make ends meet and have power outages, but a piece of cloth is what this state is worried about. If there was a time for all of us to come back to the streets, it’s now or they’ll lock us all up.”

The announcement about the opening of the clinic comes after state media reported that a university student who was arrested after stripping down to her underwear on a in Tehran, reportedly in protest at being assaulted by campus security guards for breaches of the hijab law, had been transferred to a psychiatric hospital. Human rights groups including Amnesty International say there is evidence of torture, violence and forced medication being used on protesters and political dissidents deemed mentally unstable by the authorities and placed in state-run psychiatric services.

Human rights groups have also expressed alarm at the crackdown on women who are considered to be in breach of Iran’s mandatory dress code, saying there has been a recent spate of arrests, forced disappearances and the shuttering of businesses linked to perceived breaches of the hijab laws.

Last week, the Center for Human Rights in Iran highlighted the case of Roshanak Molaei Alishah, a 25-year-old woman who it said was arrested after confronting a man who harassed her on the street over her hijab. The NGO said her current whereabouts is unknown.

Donald Trump’s election is a triumph for the politics of the doomsday bunker, which is bad news for the world’s environment.

This is the idea that in an age of climate disruption, nature extinction and ever wider social inequality, the best chance of survival for those who can afford it is to construct a personal shelter, where they can keep the desperate masses at bay. It is survival of the richest.

Apocalyptic thinking like this may once have been the stuff of science fiction but it has been normalised by billionaires such as the Palantir founder, Peter Thiel, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and others who have been building underground bunkers or buying superyachts and private jets to whisk themselves away to remote islands.

Tech billionaires were instrumental in Trump’s victory, particularly the Tesla boss, Elon Musk, who poured millions into the campaign and used X as a loudspeaker, and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, whose newspaper, the Washington Post, blocked its editorial staff from endorsing Kamala Harris.

Once you get into a bunker mindset, you become invested in apocalypse. Out goes any idea of looking for solutions to the cause of the world’s problems, and in comes the idea that you survive by amassing wealth and weapons, throwing up higher walls and asset-stripping the wasteland outside.

From the perspective of the global south, such thinking in the most powerful country on Earth is a disaster. Survival in the Amazon rainforest, where I live, or the African savannah or the flood plains of Asia depends on a stable climate, abundant nature and peaceful cooperation.

The first Trump administration diminished environmental protections. Trump 2 has the capacity to take this to a new level because there are fewer constraints. Voters have given Trump the authority of an emperor. This is cause for multiple alarms, not least a US exit from the global climate fight.

Polls suggest this was not high in the minds of most voters, and the climate and nature crisis barely featured in election debates and speeches. But the climate created the setting for Trump’s economy-first win: the devastating impacts of hurricanes such as Helene and Milton making the federal government seem impotent, droughts worldwide adding to food price inflation, and higher temperatures everywhere creating more stress and foreboding. Throughout the world, ever more extreme weather is sparking ever more extreme politics.

Those who think of the climate challenge solely in terms of an energy transition may be inclined to see Trump 2 as a mere four-year setback. After all, the world weathered his first term. They may believe the momentum for solar and wind is already unstoppable because these forms of power generation are now cheaper than fossil fuels. Others could ask what difference a change of president will make, given that the US under Joe Biden had already ramped up oil and gas output to record levels.

But this misses the bigger picture. Carbon Brief estimates that a Trump presidency will add 4bn tonnes to US emissions by 2030. Every extra tonne means higher temperatures, more floods, more droughts, more fires, higher food prices, more deaths and a greater risk of hitting catastrophic tipping points for ocean circulation, polar ice melt or forest die-off.

Nowhere will escape – though, as usual, the global south will suffer first and worst. This is home to the populations most vulnerable to deadly heatwaves and crop-crippling droughts. It is also where developing countries were last year promised hundreds of billions of dollars in “loss and damage” compensation payments for the climate catastrophes they have done the least to cause. If Trump goes ahead with his threat to pull the world’s richest country out of the Paris agreement and the entire UN climate process, it will become extremely difficult to persuade other wealthy nations to find this money. Environmental justice now looks a more distant prospect.

An already dire situation in regions such as the Amazon rainforest will deteriorate. Trump’s denials will not affect the physics of climate disruption, which is already drying up sections of some of the world’s once mightiest rivers such as the Solimões, Negro, Tapajós, Xingu and Madeira. But they will prolong and intensify the breakdown of this globally important ecosystem, which plays a vital role in the water cycle of South America.

Trump’s rhetoric and example will also embolden the extreme right across the world to reduce protections for nature and people. In Brazil, this will increase the likelihood of a resurgence of the forces that gathered around the former president Jair Bolsonaro, who encouraged invasions of the Amazon and oversaw a record level of deforestation. The former army captain has been banned from running for office until 2030 after attempting a Trump-esque insurrection in the wake of his 2022 election defeat, but his allies dominate Congress and will be keen to replicate their American idol’s example of overturning punishments. Money buys power. Power buys safety. That is the logic of the bunker.

This is not sustainable. Deal only with the consequences and the causes will grow worse. Those who reveal this truth, such as scientists and journalists, come under attack. This is particularly true in the field of climate. The authors of the far-right Project 2025 wishlist are encouraging Trump to break up the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, one of the world’s most important centres for climate research.

When bunkered minds also throw up walls against truth, they imply might is right. In a normal, stable world, this can be shaken off as the dangerous nonsense it is. But when old certainties about the climate start to wobble, so does everything else and frightened voters seek supposed “strongmen” leaders, such as India’s Narendra Modi, Argentina’s Javier Milei, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the growing cast of far-right figures who have emerged in Europe.

Their denialism has deadly consequences, as the world saw during the Covid crisis, and as Valencia learned when more than 200 people died in flash floods after the rightwing local authorities ignored warnings from meteorologists and voted down efforts to strengthen disaster preparations.

Those looking for positives must grasp at straws. The US retreat to the bunker may be a sign that two centuries of fossil-fuelled industrial expansion are coming to an end, that late-stage capitalism is showing its true rapaciousness, and that this will finally stir a shake-up of a status quo that was, in any case, failing to halt emissions, prevent biodiversity collapse and tackle horrendous inequality.

Those looking for alternatives point to China as the real winner of the US election because its model is proving more stable, more intelligent and more effective in transitioning away from fossil fuels. It has built up a world-leading renewables industry, achieved its 2030 climate goals six years early and is on course for emissions to peak as early as next year.

And of course, nobody should forget that almost half of US voters rejected Trump, Europe is pushing ahead with emissions reductions, South America has more progressive leaders promising changes, and many cities and companies have bold plans. Somewhere in this may be the basis for a new era of clean, cheap, peaceful energy, smart leadership and healthier relations with nature.

Maybe. But in Trump 2, the ancien regime of dirty fossil fuels now has a belligerent, newly empowered defender. The fight will be messy.

In the years ahead, the logic of the doomsday bunker threatens to become suffocating. And if we are not careful, this could easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The best antidote may be to remember what we are surviving for, why it is worth fighting for every fraction of a degree, every tonne of carbon, and to prove life is so much better outside than in.

Donald Trump’s decision to nominate the far-right Republican congressman Matt Gaetz as attorney general has sent shockwaves through Washington, including the president-elect’s own party.

Trump on Wednesday announced Gaetz as his pick to be the nation’s chief law enforcement officer in the justice department, a role that directs the government’s legal positions on critical issues, including abortion, civil rights, and first amendment cases.

Republicans were puzzled over this nomination, expressing this move was not on their “bingo card”.

“I don’t think it’s a serious nomination for the attorney general,” Republican senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, told NBC News. “We need to have a serious attorney general. And I’m looking forward to the opportunity to consider somebody that is serious. This one was not on my bingo card.”

A rightwing firebrand, Gaetz was a thorn in the side of his fellow Republican and former House speaker Kevin McCarthy, eventually leading the successful charge to oust McCarthy from his role.

He was investigated by the justice department in a sex-trafficking case, though the department ultimately declined to bring charges. And was under investigation by the House ethics committee amid allegations of sexual misconduct, illicit drug use and other alleged ethical breaches.

Gaetz has fiercely denied wrongdoing.

Amid consternation even within his own party, it’s unclear if Gaetz can win Senate approval.

Republican congressman Max Miller of Ohio told Axios that “Gaetz has a better shot at having dinner with Queen Elizabeth II than being confirmed by the Senate”.

Miller also told Politico that Gaetz is “a reckless pick” with “a zero percent shot”.

John Bolton, a former national security adviser, said Gaetz “must be the worst nomination for a cabinet position in American history”.

“Gaetz is not only totally incompetent for this job, he doesn’t have the character. He is a person of moral turpitude,” Bolton said in an interview with NBC News.

One anonymous House GOP member told Axios: “We wanted him out of the House … this isn’t what we were thinking.” Another remarked they were “stunned and disgusted”.

Democrats, too, were left astonished by the announcement. Vice-President Kamala Harris’s team said in a statement that Trump and Gaetz “will weaponize the DoJ to protect themselves and their allies”.

Congressman Ro Khanna of California argued that voters were not necessarily voting for these cabinet picks when they decided to elect Trump.

“People voted for Trump to have lower prices and a secure border. I don’t think they voted for the appointments that they’re getting,” Khanna told CBS News. “He is not moving to the center. He’s going to his Maga base, and we’ll see if he’s overreaching on the mandate he had from the American people.”

Kate Maeder, a California-based political strategist, said the announcement should not come as a surprise, but wondered whether Trump trusts Gaetz will make it through the confirmation process. “It’s not a surprise that Trump is rewarding his political loyalists,” Maeder told the Guardian. “It’s a shock to many that he’s considering Matt Gaetz for attorney general. But is this a serious pick? I don’t think so.”

“In this political climate, it’s definitely possible for Matt Gaetz to be confirmed,” she said. “But I think it’ll be difficult. Some of the more moderate Republican senators are already on record questioning this choice.”

In newly released audio, Charles Manson, the cult leader behind a string of killings during the late 1960s in California, admitted his involvement in additional killings that occurred prior to his assembly of the notorious Manson Family.

An audio recording in a teaser clip from Peacock’s latest docuseries Making Manson features Manson saying: “There’s a whole part of my life that nobody knows about.”

The cult leader, speaking on a phone call from prison, goes on to add: “I lived in Mexico for a while. I went to Acapulco, stole some cars. I just got involved in stuff over my head, man. Got involved in a couple of killings. I left my .357 Magnum in Mexico City, and I left some dead people on the beach.”

Quick Guide

A quick guide to Charles Manson

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Who was Charles Manson?

Charles Manson was one of the most notorious murderers of the 20th century. He led a cult known as the Manson Family in California, most of whom were disaffected young women. Some became killers under his messianic influence.

Murder from afar

Despite spending more than  40 years in prison for the murders of seven people in 1969, Manson did not carry out the killings. Instead he convinced members of his ‘family’ to murder. One of their victims was the actor Sharon Tate, who was married to Roman Polanski and was more than eight months’ pregnant when she was killed.

Celebrity friends

By the time of his trial in 1970, Manson had spent half of his life in correctional institutions for various crimes. He became a singer-songwriter before the Tate murders and got a break in the music industry when he met Beach Boys’ Dennis Wilson, who let him crash at his home.

Helter Skelter

It is believed that Manson intended using the murders to incite an apocalyptic race war he called Helter Skelter, taking the name from the Beatles song.

Notorious by name

The killings and the seven-month trial that followed were the subjects of fevered news coverage in the US. Manson occupied a dark, persistent place in American culture, inspiring music, T-shirts and half the stage name of musician Marilyn Manson.

Photograph: Los Angeles Times

According to Peacock, the new three-part docuseries investigates 20 years’ worth of never-before-aired conversations in which Manson talks about his crimes, his upbringing and Family, a commune and cult led by Manson from the late 1960s to early 1970s. The cult leader did not commit the murders himself, preferring to persuade his followers to do it. The group murdered at least seven people in the late 1960s.

Manson and his followers were arrested in 1969. At his trial in 1970, Manson presented himself as a demonic force, showing up with a Nazi swastika he had carved into his forehead.

At a 2012 parole hearing, which was denied, Manson was quoted as having said to one of his prison psychologists: “I’m special. I’m not like the average inmate. I have spent my life in prison. I have put five people in the grave. I am a very dangerous man.”

Manson, who died from natural causes in November 2017, served more than 40 years in a prison in Corcoran, California, for first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder over the deaths of seven people, including the actor Sharon Tate, the pregnant wife of film director Roman Polanski.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Manson committed hundreds of rules violations while at the Corcoran state prison, including assault, repeated possession of a weapon and threatening staff. Officials said he has spat in guards’ faces, started fights, tried to cause a flood and set his mattress ablaze.

Describing the new docuseries which is scheduled to premiere next Tuesday, Peacock said: “Former ‘Family’ members listen to the exclusive conversations and are taken back to the time when they ‘would do anything for Charlie’.”

“Manson recounts the early crimes that led to the murder spree in the summer of 69, laying out an explanation of loyalty and brotherhood that pushes against the accepted motive: his desire to incite Helter Skelter,” Peacock added, referring to an apocalyptic vision embraced by Manson and his cult members.

Donald Trump has announced his intention to nominate Matt Gaetz, a hard-right congressman from Florida known for inflaming tensions within the House Republican conference, as attorney general.

Gaetz, a longtime Trump loyalist, gained attention last year after leading the successful charge to oust his fellow Republican Kevin McCarthy as House speaker. Gaetz and seven other House Republicans joined Democrats in voting to remove McCarthy last October, kicking off a weeks-long scramble to find a new speaker.

McCarthy held Gaetz personally responsible for his removal and even funded an unsuccessful primary challenge against his former colleague. McCarthy suggested Gaetz pushed for his ouster because of an ethics committee investigation into allegations that Gaetz paid for and engaged in sexual relations with an underage woman.

In February 2023, the justice department declined to bring charges of sex trafficking against Gaetz, who has denied wrongdoing since the allegations first came to light.

Even before McCarthy’s removal, Gaetz had cultivated a reputation as a rightwing firebrand who did not shy away from conflict with Democrats and fellow Republicans alike.

“Florida Man. Built for the Battle,” reads Gaetz’s bio on X, formerly Twitter.

Gaetz followed his father into politics more than two decades ago. After serving in the Florida statehouse, Gaetz was elected in 2016 to represent a ruby-red chunk of the Florida Panhandle.

Like Trump, to whom he is fiercely loyal, Gaetz is more interested in sparring with political foes than in the dry business of governance, according to his critics. On Capitol Hill, he has repeatedly disrupted House proceedings, including once barging into a secure facility where Democrats were holding a deposition hearing.

In 2018, he was condemned for inviting a Holocaust denier to Trump’s State of the Union address. A year later, he hired a speechwriter who had been fired by the Trump White House after speaking at a conference that attracts white nationalists.

Months after the January 6 attack on the Capitol, Gaetz embarked on an “America First” tour with Marjorie Taylor Greene, the hard-right Georgia congresswoman, in which they amplified the former president’s false claims of fraud in the 2020 election.

After House Republicans’ worse than expected performance in the 2022 midterms, Gaetz capitalized on his conference’s wafer-thin majority to extract promises of rule changes from McCarthy, who had to endure 15 rounds of voting before becoming speaker in January 2023. Nine months later, Gaetz used those rule changes to force McCarthy out of the speaker’s chair.

More recently, Gaetz has served as an adviser to Trump as the former president successfully sought a second term. According to ABC News, Gaetz helped Trump prepare for his September debate against Kamala Harris by peppering him with questions about his potential vulnerabilities, including Trump’s multiple criminal indictments and his shifting stance on abortion access.

As attorney general, Gaetz would have a powerful perch to prosecute Trump’s political enemies, as the president-elect has promised to do. Gaetz may also attempt to purge the justice department of many longtime staffers, after Trump spread baseless claims that the federal government had been “weaponized” against him.

But before Gaetz can take on the role, he will need the approval of the Senate, where he may face a chilly reception. With Senate Republicans’ 53-seat majority, Gaetz could still be confirmed, but some early warning signs appeared immediately after Trump’s announcement.

Susan Collins, a Republican senator of Maine, told reporters on Capitol Hill that she was “shocked” by the news.

“That shows why the advice and consent process [of Senate confirmation] is so important,” Collins said, per Politico. “And I’m sure that there will be a lot of questions raised at his hearing.”

Donald Trump said he will nominate Florida congressman Matt Gaetz to be the US attorney general on Wednesday, tapping a far-right loyalist to one of the most powerful positions in US government.

Gaetz’s nomination is one of the most significant to date. As attorney general, he would be the country’s chief law enforcement officer and oversee the legal positions that the government takes on key issues, including abortion, civil rights laws, and first amendment issues. The president-elect has pledged to use the justice department to prosecute his political enemies and there is little doubt that Gaetz will help him fulfill that pledge.

First elected to Congress in 2016, Gaetz represents a ruby-red district in the Florida panhandle and has become known as one of Congress’s most showboating members. He reportedly sought a pardon from Trump over his efforts to overturn the election, and has embraced conspiracy theories about the attack on the US Capitol. Last year, he led a successful effort to oust fellow Republican Kevin McCarthy from the speakership, throwing his caucus into chaos.

Gaetz’s nomination comes a little over a year after the justice department decided not to charge him as part of a sex trafficking investigation that involved allegations he had sex with a 17-year-old girl. Joel Greenberg, a former friend and ally, pleaded guilty to sex trafficking and was sentenced to 11 years in prison. Gaetz has denied the allegations.

He also faces investigation from the House ethics committee over allegations that he “engaged in sexual misconduct and illicit drug use, accepted improper gifts, dispensed special privileges and favors to individuals with whom he had a personal relationship, and sought to obstruct government investigations of his conduct.” He has denied all wrondoing.

Meanwhile, Trump heaped praise on Gaetz.

“Matt is a deeply gifted and tenacious attorney, trained at the William & Mary College of Law, who has distinguished himself in Congress through his focus on achieving desperately needed reform at the Department of Justice,” Trump said in a statement posted to his Truth Social media account.

He added: “Few issues in America are more important than ending the partisan Weaponization of our Justice System. Matt will end Weaponized Government, protect our Borders, dismantle Criminal Organizations and restore Americans’ badly-shattered Faith and Confidence in the Justice Department.”

The nomination was immediately met with widespread criticism.

“This guy has been on the run from the law for quite some time now, so he’ll think he’s above it. He’ll be corrupt as hell,” said Olivia Troye, a former official in the Department of Homeland Security during the Trump administration who has become an outspoken critic of the former president.

Robert Weissman, the co-president of the watchdog group Public Citizen said it was “hard to imagine a worse and more unqualified candidate” than Gaetz.

“As a member of Congress, Gaetz has demonstrated contempt for the rule of law, truth and decency. He is singularly unqualified to lead an agency that enforces civil rights laws and environmental protection statutes. Under Gaetz, we’d have every reason to expect an America where corporate criminals walk free but immigrants and people of color are harassed or rounded up with minimal pretext,” he said in a statement.

In January, Republicans will take control of the US Senate, which will vote on Gaetz’s confirmation. They appear headed towards holding at least 53 seats, which would give them enough votes to confirm the Florida congressman, even if a few Republican senators vote against him.

Gaetz also has a history of making derogatory and offensive remarks towards women. “Why is it that the women with the least likelihood of getting pregnant are the ones most worried about having abortions? Nobody wants to impregnate you if you look like a thumb,” he said in 2022.

As a Florida lawmaker before he was in Congress, he opposed a revenge porn law, reportedly telling the bill’s sponsor that ex-lovers could do what they pleased with images their partners had shared with them.

“Are you not entertained?” said CNN political analyst and Trump ally Scott Jennings in the wake of the news.

Andrew Gumbel contributed reporting

The Oklahoma City police department is facing criticism following the release of body-camera footage that shows a police officer forcefully throwing an elderly man to the ground last month.

The city’s police department released body-camera footage last week from 27 October that shows a police officer violently arresting 71-year-old Lich Vu after pulling him over during a traffic stop. The officer has been identified as Joseph Gibson, according to USA Today.

Gibson pulled Vu over for an illegal U-turn on the NW 39th Expressway, according to police. In the initial minutes of the video, Vu, who is seated in his car with the door open and accompanied by his wife, can be seen communicating with Gibson amid an English language barrier.

“I didn’t U-turn,” he says.

Gibson then asks Vu to sign a citation for an improper U-turn, saying that it is not an admission of guilt but rather confirmation that Vu will take care of the ticket at a later date.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Vu replies, adding that another driver hit his car. “Me? Citation? She hit me and I got the citation?” he says. Shortly after, Vu gets out of the car and gestures to the road in an attempt to further explain the situation to Gibson. Gibson then says they are “done arguing about this”.

Vu replies, “I want to show you,” to which Gibson says, “We argue in court … If you don’t sign this, you go to jail.”

“I’m ready to go to jail,” Vu says. Gibson then says, “You’re ready to go to jail? Ridiculous.” He proceeds to head over to the other driver involved in the incident and issues her a ticket before returning to Vu.

The two men continue arguing and at one point, Vu appears to tap Gibson’s chest with the back of his hand. Vu then brings his index finger up to his mouth and says, “You shut up.” Gibson then grabs Vu’s arm and twists it before pinning him on to the ground. Separate surveillance footage from nearby businesses shows Vu’s head forcefully hitting the ground as Gibson places handcuffs on him.

KFOR reports that Vu, who has bone cancer, suffered from a brain bleed and had to undergo surgery. He has remained in the hospital since the incident and is “in and out of consciousness, but stable”, according to family members who spoke to the outlet.

Following the incident, Thuan Nguyen, president of the Vietnamese American Community of Oklahoma, called for Gibson to be terminated.

“We don’t want our police department nor our [district attorney] to take it lightly. We want justice to be served,” Nguyen told NBC, adding, “We are always the last to be heard … so no matter whether we’re the person that is at fault or not at fault, our statements are always last … And so in certain cases, that indicates implicit bias.”

In a statement on Facebook, the Oklahoma City police department said that “an investigation was immediately initiated and the officer was placed on administrative leave pending the conclusion of the investigation”.

“The Oklahoma City police department is dedicated to transparency and accountability. We want our community to know that this case is being thoroughly investigated, and the review process will take time to complete,” it added.