Debbie Nelson, the mother of rapper Eminem, whose rocky relationship with her son was known widely through his hit song lyrics, has died. She was 69.

Eminem’s longtime representative Dennis Dennehy confirmed Nelson’s death in an email on Tuesday. He did not provide a cause of death, although Nelson had battled lung cancer.

Nelson’s fraught relationship with her son, whose real name is Marshall Mathers III, has been no secret since the Detroit rapper became a star.

Eminem has disparaged his mother in songs such as the 2002 single Cleaning Out My Closet. Eminem sings: “Witnessin’ your mama poppin’ prescription pills in the kitchen. Bitchin’ that someone’s always goin’ through her purse and shit’s missin’. Goin’ through public housing systems, victim of Münchausen’s syndrome. My whole life I was made to believe I was sick when I wasn’t.”

In lyrics from his Oscar-winning hit Lose Yourself from the movie 8 Mile, his feelings seemed to have simmered, referencing his “mom’s spaghetti”. The song went on to win best rap song at the 2004 Grammy awards.

Nelson brought and settled two defamation lawsuits over Eminem’s statements about her in magazines and on radio talk shows. In her 2008 book, My Son Marshall, My Son Eminem, she attempted to set the record straight by providing details about the rapper’s early life.

The highly acclaimed rapper earlier this month won for best hip-hop act at the 2024 MTV Europe Music Awards and was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2022.

He announced last month that he was going to be a grandfather, revealing by way of a touching music video that his daughter Hailie Jade is pregnant.

The top Democrat in the US House of Representatives, Hakeem Jeffries, has called on Joe Biden to pardon some “working-class Americans” after the president faced criticism for pardoning his son Hunter.

“During his final weeks in office, President Biden should exercise the high level of compassion he has consistently demonstrated throughout his life, including toward his son, and pardon on a case-by-case basis the working-class Americans in the federal prison system whose lives have been ruined by unjustly aggressive prosecutions for nonviolent offenses,” Jeffries said in a statement.

Biden, who leaves office on 20 January, for months had said he would not pardon his son, who was found guilty of lying about being addicted to illegal drugs while buying a gun and pleaded guilty to criminal charges of failing to pay $1.4m in taxes. The sweeping pardon also applied to any other crimes “he committed or may have committed” between 1 January 2014 and 1 December this year.

The president said he believed his son had been made the target of a politically motivated prosecution. Republicans including Donald Trump condemned the move, as did some Democrats who said it eroded trust in the judicial system.

Last month, more than 60 members of Congress urged Biden to use his clemency power to confront mass incarceration and reunite families.

“Now is the time to use your clemency authority to rectify unjust and unnecessary criminal laws passed by Congress and draconian sentences given by judges,” the lawmakers, led by Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, wrote in a letter.

The letter noted that the US has disproportionately incarcerated people of color, low-income individuals, members of the LGBTQ+ community and those with disabilities, and that 90% of the federal prison population was convicted on non-violent offenses.

As of November, there were more than 12,000 bids for sentence commutations and 4,000 pardon requests on his desk.

Ed Pilkington contributed reporting

One of the cornerstones of Amazon rainforest protection – the Soy Moratorium – is under unprecedented pressure from Brazilian agribusiness organisations, politicians, and global trading companies, the Guardian has learned.

Soy is one of the most widely grown crops in Brazil, and posed a huge deforestation threat to the Amazon rainforest until stakeholders voluntarily agreed to impose a moratorium and no longer source it from the region in 2006.

The voluntary agreement brought together farmers, environmentalists and international food companies such as Cargill and McDonald’s, and decided that any detection of soy planted on areas deforested after 2008 would result in the farm being blocked from supply chains, regardless of whether the land clearance was legal in Brazil.

In the 18 years since, the moratorium has been hailed as a conservation success story that improved the reputation of global brands, enabled soy production to expand significantly without Amazon destruction and prevented an estimated 17,000 square kilometres of deforestation.

But next week the main soybean body – the Brazilian Association of Vegetable Oil Industries (ABIOVE) – will ballot its members about a reform that conservation groups say would gut its effectiveness and embarrass the government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva ahead of next year’s COP30 climate conference in Belém.

The association is proposing a change in the way the moratorium is monitored. Instead of assessing an entire farm, it breaks down the analysis to the level of individual fields, which would allow growers to pick and choose which areas of their land are in compliance.

In a statement to the Guardian, the association said it remained in favour of the moratorium, but was planning unspecified changes: “Despite all pressures from different stakeholders, in all forums, ABIOVE and its members maintain defence of the Amazon Moratorium, striving to meet the demands of both farmers and consumers, including proposing some updates to the current model.”

But conservation groups warn this reform would create a huge loophole and they have threatened to withdraw from the moratorium if it goes ahead.

“The question this raises is why the leadership of ABIOVE is pressing ahead with this vote, when it appears to undermine the commitments of its member companies,” said David Cleary, global director for agriculture in the Nature Conservancy. ‘The proposed changes to shift to a sub-farm level monitoring system make it possible for farmers to sell to moratorium companies from one part of the farm and non-moratorium companies from another. The monitoring of the moratorium has worked well since 2008. If it isn’t broken, it doesn’t need fixing.”

WWF said any move to end or weaken the soy moratorium could open up 1.1m hectares of forest for soy production and push the Amazon closer to a calamitous tipping point and emitting 300m tonnes of CO2 from deforestation. “This is not just an environmental issue but a critical economic and reputational risk for the entire Brazilian soy industry,” WWF noted in an email statement. “In addition, this could lead to an increase in land speculation, land grabbing and potential conflict in the region.”

Others noted the threat to the moratorium would introduce greater complexity and uncertainty into the supply chain, weakening enforcement mechanisms and making it more difficult to hold traders and producers to account. Jane Lino, deputy director of the non-profit Proforest Latin America, said this was part of a wider political agenda. “This movement is not just about the Soy Moratorium,” she said. “It reflects broader resistance to external pressures perceived as infringing on national sovereignty and disrespecting Brazil’s environmental laws.”

The proposals come amid moves by rightwing legislators at state and federal level to enact new laws that would also undermine the moratorium. Earlier this year, the state of Mato Grosso approved a new regulation that revoked tax incentives for companies engaged in agreements like the Soy Moratorium. Similar proposals are being put forward in other states and discussed in the national Congress. The national association of soy producers, Aprosoja, is opposed to the moratorium and is using its influence inside the powerful agribusiness lobby, which dominates domestic politics, controls Congress, influences many local governments, and frequently undermines President Lula and his environment minister Marina Silva, to diminish its influence. Brazil’s Administrative Council for Economic Defense has also been prompted to investigate producer claims that the moratorium infringes antitrust regulations.

Carlos Klink, a former deputy minister for the environment, emphasised that the political dynamics of Brazil had changed dramatically since the moratorium was introduced. “Look, then and now,” he said of the rise of the agribusiness lobby. “These sectors and these people have come to power. Remember also that the Brazilian government is not that strong.”

Part of this is a pushback against the European Union’s deforestation-free trade law, which many Brazilian farmers feel is being used to punish them and help French competitors. Most farmers, who are in compliance with the moratorium, argue they deserve compensation for going beyond the requirements of the law, and conservation groups acknowledge that most farmers are not involved in deforestation and many – now badly affected by drought and fire – should be given more encouragement and technical and financial support to conserve vegetation.

“The complaint that if you’re asking farmers to go beyond legal compliance you need to offer incentives is actually reasonable. First world governments and funders need to pay much more attention to the incentives question,” Cleary said. “A lot of Brazilian farmers are fully on board with the climate change agenda, including ending deforestation. They’re the most affected by it. But that opinion isn’t reflected in the louder producer associations, who have a different political agenda.”

Moves to weaken the moratorium could be quashed if global traders, retailers and finance institutions publicly defended it. Some such as Bunge and Louis Dreyfus Company have been strong supporters. Others have sent mixed signals. Conservation groups are concerned that Cargill may not vote to maintain the Amazon Soy Moratorium in its current form, despite a commitment to eliminate deforestation in their Brazil supply chains by the end of 2025.

Until now, the moratorium has given Brazil a reputational advantage. Many want that to remain.

With the Abiove vote still days away and the Mato Grosso governor yet to decide how the state’s new regulations will be applied, Klink said the outcome was not yet certain and urged all involved to focus on the progress that has been made.

He noted that deforestation fell dramatically in the Amazon last year, and also declined in the Cerrado savanna this year. Other state soy associations, such as that of Goias, did not agree with the Mato Grosso move, he said, and any further steps would damage the national reputation. “Ending the moratorium without anything else to replace it would not bode well for the Brazilian COP and it would create tension for civil society, and even many farmers’ associations,” he said. “I think this has a long way to go, but we have never seen this pressure.”

The son-in-law of Prince and Princess Michael of Kent killed himself after suffering adverse side-effects from antidepressants prescribed by a Buckingham Palace doctor, an inquest has found.

Thomas Kingston, 45, whose marriage to Lady Gabriella at Windsor Castle in 2019 was attended by the late Queen, died from a self-inflicted wound, the senior coroner for Gloucestershire concluded.

The financier was found dead at his parents’ home in the Cotswolds in February.

Gabriella, 43, told the inquest at Gloucestershire coroner’s court on Tuesday that the public needed to be warned about the effects of medications used to treat mental health conditions, or more people could die.

Kingston began taking antidepressants after complaining of trouble sleeping following stress at work. The medication was prescribed by a doctor at the Royal Mews surgery, a GP practice in the grounds of Buckingham Palace that is used by royal household staff, the inquest heard.

Recording a narrative conclusion, Katy Skerrett, senior coroner for Gloucestershire, said: “Mr Kingston took his own life … The evidence of his wife, family and business partner all supports his lack of suicidal intent. He was suffering adverse effects of medication he had recently been prescribed.”

In a statement read out at the inquest by Skerrett, Gabriella said: “[Work] was certainly a challenge for him over the years but I highly doubt it would have led him to take his own life, and it seemed much improved.

“If anything had been troubling him, I’m positive that he would have shared that he was struggling severely. The fact that he took his life at the home of his beloved parents suggests the decision was the result of a sudden impulse.”

She said she believed his death was “likely provoked” by an adverse reaction to the medication he had begun, and subsequently stopped taking, in the weeks leading up to his death.

He had initially been given sertraline – an anti-depressant – and zopiclone, a sleeping tablet, by a Royal Mews surgery GP, after trouble sleeping following stress at work.

Kingston complained this was not making him feel better and his doctor moved him off sertraline to citalopram, another selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor (SSRI) used as an antidepressant.

“The lack of any evidence of inclination – it seems highly likely to me that he had an adverse reaction to the pills that led him to take his life,” Gabriella said.

“I believe anyone taking pills such as these need to be made more aware of the side-effects to prevent any future deaths.

“If this could happen to Tom, this could happen to anyone.”

Gaby Hinsliff’s article (Starmer has discovered a tricky truth about the electric vehicles transition: there’s no gain without pain, 29 November) doesn’t address the key point in the analysis of car companies’ difficulties in selling enough electric vehicles (EVs). There is a lack of demand that is only partly due to the higher prices. More importantly, it is due to a failure to install the necessary infrastructure to enable mass charging.

A minority of car owners live in houses where home charging is possible. For the rest, to make EVs a possibility, never mind attractive, there need to be a huge number of charging points to accommodate millions of people. I live in a city with a very high density of tenement and other flats; at the moment there are virtually no charging points easily accessible for flat owners. In such areas, where it is not possible to install a charger in your home, it is simply not possible to run an EV.

There is no sign at all of the installation of the massive charging infrastructure required to meet the demand of mass ownership of EVs. People won’t buy these vehicles until they are confident that they will have the ability to easily access the energy necessary to drive them.
Stephen Smith
Glasgow

Gaby Hinsliff is correct to point out that the transition to net zero will be painful unless the government takes more action to alleviate the difficulties. Financial support to buy electric vehicles will be necessary until sales have reached volumes that will allow prices to come down.

But other steps on the technical front are also necessary. It makes no sense for there to be a multiplicity of charging methods – the government must commission the creation of industry standards that will ensure all electric vehicles can be charged using the same mechanism. Ease of use will greatly increase the attraction of electric cars.
Raj Parkash
London

Europe’s wolves will lose their “strict protection” status, alarming conservationists who fear for the survival of an animal brought back from the brink of local extinction.

A committee charged with saving wildlife took the wolf’s protection status down a notch on Tuesday after members voted through a proposal from the European Union that lowers the bar for shooting a wolf.

The EU, which proposed the measure to protect livestock, estimates that wolves kill 65,000 animals each year that were meant to be slaughtered for humans to eat.

The downgrade was welcomed by hunters but prompted outrage from nature groups.

“This decision is a green light to shoot wolves, given by the international community in white gloves,” said Marta Klimkiewicz, from ClientEarth.

Sofie Ruysschaert, from BirdLife Europe and Central Asia, said it risked “undoing decades of European conservation progress”.

Wolves were killed off across much of Europe in the 19th and 20th century but have returned in recent decades as governments have protected habitats and kept hunters at bay. An estimated 20,000 wolves now roam the continent, and rising tensions with farmers have sparked calls for culls in rural communities.

Laurens Hoedemaker, the president of the European Federation for Hunting & Conservation (FACE), said he welcomed news that the proposal was “positively received as an initiative to balance conservation and species management”.

European wolves have not killed anyone this century but have preyed on livestock and claimed one high-profile life. In September 2022, a male grey wolf called GW950m entered a paddock near a German farmhouse and killed a chestnut pony that belonged to Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission.

In a statement after the vote, von der Leyen said the change in wolf protection status was “important news for our rural communities and farmers … because we need a balanced approach between the preservation of wildlife and the protection of our livelihoods”.

Instead of killing wolves, conservationists have called for measures that let them coexist peacefully with people, such as getting guard dogs and putting up electric fences. They have warned that wolf culls might even harm livestock by disrupting packs and forcing lone wolves on to farms to hunt. Researchers have noticed similar unintended effects with cougars, coyotes, pumas and badgers.

Sabien Leemans, from the European branch of WWF, said: “Downgrading a species’ strict protection status for the political gain of a few, against scientific evidence, puts decades of conservation efforts at risk.”

A 2018 assessment from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) found three of nine wolf populations in the EU were “vulnerable”, and three more were “near threatened”.

More recent assessments from the Large Carnivore Initiative for Europe (LCIE) suggest five populations are near-threatened and one is vulnerable. Overall, scientists say Europe’s wolf population is healthy enough that the decision need not spell disaster for the species but warn it could prove fatal for local populations that hover near the survival threshold.

“Culling and killing a few wolves here and there is not going to harm the overall wolf population in Europe,” said Luigi Boitani, a zoologist at the Sapienza University of Rome and chair of the LCIE. “But it all depends on how it’s done and where.”

The wolf has become a symbol of rural anger against environmental rules as attacks on sheep have risen.

Switzerland tried to downgrade the wolf’s protection status with a similar proposal in 2022 but failed to gather enough support. Earlier this year, Swiss farmers dumped sheep carcasses in front of a government building to demand more action against the predators.

The proposal from the EU, which was approved by a two-thirds majority of the Council of Europe, comes after European politicians watered down a series of policies to protect nature in the aftermath of furious farmer protests this year.

The change will be enforced in three months unless at least one-third of the parties object. The EU will have to take further steps to update its habitats directive.

“If we could count on logic and rationality and scientific rigour, this decision is not dangerous,” said Boitani. “The problem is [that] out there, when we speak of wolves, there is a lot of irrationality.”

Coca-Cola has been accused of quietly abandoning a pledge to achieve a 25% reusable packaging target by 2030 in what campaigners call a “masterclass in greenwashing”.

The company has been previously found by researchers to be among the world’s most polluting brands when it comes to plastic waste.

In 2022, the company made a promise to have 25% of its drinks sold in refillable or returnable glass or plastic bottles, or in refillable containers that could be filled up at fountains or “Coca-Cola freestyle dispensers”.

But shortly before this year’s global plastics summit, the company deleted the page on its website outlining this promise, and it no longer has a target for reusable packaging.

Instead, its packaging targets now say it will “aim to use 35% to 40% recycled material in primary packaging (plastic, glass and aluminum), including increasing recycled plastic use to 30% to 35% globally”. Its previous goalpromised to “use 50% recycled material in our packaging by 2030”.

The current pledge also says the company will “help ensure the collection of 70% to 75% of the equivalent number of bottles and cans introduced into the market annually”.

When the target was announced in 2022, Elaine Bowers Coventry, the company’s chief customer and commercial officer, said: “Accelerating use of reusable packages provides added value for consumers and customers while supporting our world without waste goal to collect a bottle or can for every one we sell by 2030.”

The original pledge was removed from the company’s website at some point after 20 November, which was when the global plastics treaty negotiations began. The company’s new announcement includes no mention of its reusable commitment.

This week, nearly 200 nations failed to reach an agreement to reduce the production of plastics at a meeting in Busan, South Korea. The week of talks could not resolve deep divisions between “high-ambition” countries seeking a globally binding agreement to limit production and phase out harmful chemicals, and “like-minded” nations who want to focus on waste.

Campaigners have called on companies such as Coca-Cola to move from recycled plastic targets to reusable bottle targets, because it is single-use items that are the problem, and recycled single-use items still end up polluting the environment most of the time.

“Coke’s latest move is a masterclass in greenwashing, ditching previously announced reuse targets, and choosing to flood the planet with more plastic they can’t even collect and recycle effectively. This only reinforces the company’s reputation as the world’s top plastic polluter,” said Von Hernandez, the global coordinator of the campaign group Break Free from Plastic. “If they can’t even keep their low-bar commitments, how can they claim to be serious about addressing the global plastic crisis?”

The Coca-Cola Company has been contacted for comment. It previously told the Guardian: “We care about the impact of every drink we sell and are committed to growing our business in the right way.”

The Vietnamese property tycoon Truong My Lan has lost her appeal against the death penalty for masterminding a multibillion-dollar fraud scandal – though she could still save her life if she can repay most of the funds she embezzled.

Lan, who founded the real-estate developer Van Thinh Phat, was sentenced to death in April for embezzling $12bn (£9.95bn) from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB), in a case that shocked the country.

Lan had appealed against the sentence, asking the court to consider a more “lenient and humane approach”. However, on Tuesday judges upheld the death penalty, saying her crimes had caused grave consequences, and that there were no mitigating circumstances, according to local media.

Under Vietnamese law, Lan could still save her life if she returns three-quarters of the embezzled assets, which means she faces a desperate scramble to gather billions of dollars. If she does so, her sentence could be reduced to life imprisonment.

Lan is a prominent tycoon in Vietnam, and she and Van Thinh Phat own a shopping mall, a harbour as well as luxury housing complexes in Ho Chi Minh City.

Although Lan did not directly hold executive power at SCB, she owned 91.5% of the bank’s shares through friends, family and shell companies, it was heard at her trial earlier this year.

The court heard she had set up fake loan applications to withdraw money from the bank over a period of 11 years, from 2012 to 2022. The loans accounted for 93% of the total credit the bank has issued, according to state media. Tens of thousands of people who invested their savings lost money.

According to a report by Reuters, documents suggest Vietnam’s central bank has injected $24bn of “special loans” into SCB to try to rescue the bank.

While Lan was found guilty of embezzling $12.5bn, prosecutors said the total damages were in fact $27bn, equivalent to about 6% of the country’s GDP last year.

She was tried alongside 85 others, including former central bankers and government officials, as well as previous SCB executives.

Lan said last week she felt “pained due to the waste of national resources” and “very embarrassed to be charged with this crime”.

The case is part of a wider, national corruption crackdown known as “Blazing Furnace” led by the former secretary general of the Communist party of Vietnam, Nguyễn Phú Trọng, which has led to the indictments of thousands of people.

In a separate case, Lan was convicted of money laundering and jailed for life in October.