The London 2012 race regarded as one of the dirtiest in history has expunged yet another name from the record books after Tatyana Tomashova was stripped of her women’s Olympic 1500m silver medal. The Russian becomes the fifth out of 12 finishers in the final to be disqualified for retrospective doping offences.

The race was questioned almost immediately with Britain’s Lisa Dobriskey telling the BBC straight after the race: “I’ll probably get into trouble for saying this, but I don’t believe I’m competing on a level playing field.” History, though, has slowly proven Dobriskey correct.

Tomashova is the latest athlete to be punished after analysis of her data held in the Moscow anti-doping laboratory showed she had been taking banned drugs. The Russian had finished fourth but was moved up after the first two in the race, Turkey’s Asli Cakir Alptekin and Gamze Bulut, were banned for blood doping and had their results annulled in 2015 and 2017 respectively. Belarus’s Natallia Kareiva, who came seventh, and Russia’s Yekaterina Kostetskaya, who was ninth, were also banned for doping offences.

The loss of Tomashova’s medal was confirmed by the Athletics Integrity Unit, who said she had decided not to appeal against a 10-year ban imposed on her by the Court of Arbitration for Sport in September.

“Tomashova’s sanction stemmed from AIU charges based on historical data, showing evidence of doping in Russian athletics, from the Laboratory Information Management System at the former Moscow Laboratory,” CAS said. “The International Olympic Committee may now proceed with the reallocation of medals and the update of the IOC database.”

The Ethiopian-born Swedish athlete Abeba Aregawi, who was fifth in London, moves up to silver while the American Shannon Rowbury takes a belated bronze medal. Dobriskey and her fellow Briton Laura Weightman have been moved up to fifth and sixth respectively.

In 2016, Dobriskey, who won a world championship silver medal in 2009, remembered the hurt she felt after the race. “I wanted to cry and I needed to get out of the stadium,” she said. “It should have been a joyous moment in front of my home crowd but I felt humiliated. I just wanted the ground to swallow me up. I felt I had to apologise for my performance to my family and friends. I felt I’d let people down.”

Hundreds of lobbyists for industrial agriculture are attending the Cop29 climate summit in Baku, analysis shows.

They include representatives from some of the world’s largest agribusiness companies including the Brazilian meatpacker JBS, the animal pharmaceuticals company Elanco, and the food giant PepsiCo, as well as trade groups representing the food sector.

Overall, 204 agriculture delegates have accessed the talks this year, analysis by DeSmog and the Guardian reveals. While the total number has dropped compared with the record highs at Cop28, the figures show climate Cops remain a top priority for businesses working in agriculture, a sector that accounts for up to a third of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Food sector lobbyists remain highly influential, and have travelled to Baku as part of country delegations from Brazil, Russia and Australia, among others. This year, nearly 40% of delegates travelled to the summit with country badges, giving them privileged access to diplomatic negotiations, up from 30% at Cop28, and just 5% at Cop27.

Delegates from the meat and dairy sector sent 52 delegates to the summit this year, with 20 travelling with Brazil’s government, the analysis found. They outnumbered the delegation of the Caribbean island of Barbados, which in July was devastated by Hurricane Beryl, a disaster linked to climate breakdown.

Meat and dairy producers are coming under greater scrutiny due to increasing pollution from cattle and sheep, which emit about a third of the global output of methane. Farming also relies on synthetic fertilisers that are both fossil fuel-based and emit greenhouse gases, and drive deforestation.

But while studies point to the need for a drastic drop in meat and dairy production and a shift to climate-friendly farming, the agribusiness industry has lobbied hard against tougher environmental laws, in the EU, the US and at climate summits.

An Lambrechts, a senior campaign strategist from Greenpeace International, said there was a clear “conflict of interest” between big agriculture’s presence at the talks and the need for climate action.

“We see the same conflict of interest with the fossil fuel industry and how they act to drive the world away from the scope of actions and solutions that are needed to fight climate change and address its impacts,” she said.

Wanun Permpibul, from Climate Watch Thailand, said: “When Big Agriculture dominates the discussion, the voices of frontline communities – especially smallholder farmers, Indigenous peoples, women, and local food producers – are systematically excluded. Yet these are the people who have been living in harmony with nature for generations, using traditional knowledge to manage ecosystems, preserve biodiversity, and sustain local food systems.”

Those present on the ground from the agriculture industry include JBS, the world’s largest meat company, which sent three delegates to Baku. The world’s largest global food company, Nestlé, and the world’s second largest pesticides company, Bayer, have also sent delegates.

Brazil, the host of next year’s climate summit, was a major funnel for agricultural giants this year. That has sparked concerns over the sway agribusiness may hold over Cop30, which many see as an opportunity for ambitious food systems reform.

The Brazilian government brought in 35 agriculture lobbyists, including more than 20 representatives of the meat companies JBS, BRF and Marfrig, as well as powerful industry groups such as the Association of Brazilian Beef Exporters.

Russia brought the second largest number of big agriculture lobbyists, with 13 delegates from the fertiliser industry. Synthetic fertilisers are the leading driver of nitrous dioxide emission, a greenhouse gas that is 200 times more powerful than carbon dioxide and which is rising at unprecedented levels in the atmosphere.

Australia was next in line, with five representatives of the National Farmers Federation, which has publicly opposed measures to curb methane from animal agriculture.

Permpibul was concerned by the findings. “By bringing in a large contingent of lobbyists from Big Agriculture, Brazil is sending a message that protecting corporate interests takes precedence over addressing the climate crisis,” she said.

“The presence of these lobbyists raises serious concerns about whether the upcoming Cop will prioritise real, community-led solutions or continue to push for market-based ‘fixes’ that do little to address the root causes of climate change.”

Many of the agribusiness delegates who attend climate summits will speak on panels and hold events to promote their positions. At these side events, industry leaders from meat, dairy, pesticides and fertiliser companies promote technical solutions to bring down the sector’s emissions, although authoritative studies have found efficiency measures will only ever be able to reduce a small portion of agricultural emissions, and must be accompanied by demand-side reductions, such as lower consumption of meat in rich countries.

Pesticides and fertilisers – much of which are used to support the growth of crops for industrial animal agriculture – are often derived from fossil fuels and have had major negative impacts on biodiversity, soil and water health.

Arnold Padilla, the deputy executive director of Pesticide Action Network Asia Pacific, said big agriculture was promoting “false solutions” designed to sustain and expand harmful farming practices. Instead, he said, the focus should be on “small farming communities that champion sustainable practices that avoid climate-harming chemicals and protect biodiversity”.

“These are the real solutions that are essential for cutting greenhouse gas emissions and tackling the climate crisis,” he said.

The analysis comes amid growing concerns over the outsized access corporate lobbyists have to climate summits, which has promoted calls for reform.

Earlier this month, DeSmog also recorded a large jump in lobbyists from big food companies attending the UN biodiversity talks, which ended without a strong deal for nature on 2 November.

Last Friday, Cop veterans and leading diplomats argued that the Cop process was no longer “fit for purpose”. Food systems experts have also called for reform.

Teresa Anderson, the global lead for climate justice at the development non-profit ActionAid, said she thought Cops were swayed in favour of corporate interests.

“Big agribusiness has all the money to spend on flying, wining and dining, unlike the smallholder agroecological farmers who are busy doing the actual work of feeding communities and protecting the climate,” Anderson said. “What ends up happening is that the real answers to the climate crisis aren’t being heard over the corporate cacophony.”

The sores were unlike anything veteran anglers had seen before. Black, swollen and blister-like, they started appearing on fish being caught in the River Severn in early summer.

For anglers who spend many hours on the banks of the Severn around Shrewsbury, the blistering skin was yet another warning that the river, and its wildlife and habitats, are suffering.

Phil O’Callaghan, an angler, noticed the blisters on the first day of the season as he fished the Severn at Bicton Heath, north-west of Shrewsbury, this summer. “I have seen these sores in person and they look really nasty.

“I am not a scientist, I am just someone who has spent my life on the river, as an angler, a canoeist and a swimmer. I have seen it change for the worse; the river doesn’t clear any more, you cannot see the gravel, there is no weed, and at the near margins the bottom is covered in a horrible, black, smelly silt. These sores are just the latest thing we are seeing, and they are another cause for serious concern.”

O’Callaghan is one of an army of anglers, swimmers and river lovers who are working together in an attempt to stop the decline of the Severn. They have seen the devastating decline of the neighbouring Wye and they are trying to stop the same fate happening to the Severn as it, like the Wye, is subjected to excessive nutrient pollution from intensive poultry farming and record levels of raw sewage discharges from Severn Trent facilities.

Over the last two years, O’Callaghan has joined 68 other anglers along the river who dedicate hundreds of hours to monitoring the water. They have taken more than 970 samples from 70 sites to record phosphate, nitrate, dissolved oxygen, turbidity, ammonia and temperature, which they send to Bristol University for analysis. Images of the sores on fish have been sent to the Environment Agency.

Results of the Angling Trust’s 2024 water-quality monitoring report on the Severn have been shared with the Guardian. Glyn Marshall, who coordinates the monitoring, said: “The state of water in the catchment has not improved. If anything, it has got worse.

“My most recent phosphate sample in Worcester was one of the highest I have recorded. When there are periods of dry hot weather, I can see the algae blooms in the river and the bed of the river is still covered in the horrible brown gunge. The biodiversity of all the waterways is being totally compromised and we need to make sure that the health of the rivers and streams in the Severn catchment is improved for future generations.”

Analysis of the results from 52 sites for the report shows 61.5% had phosphate levels above the upper limit in the EU-derived Water Framework directive, part of Environment Agency regulations, compared with 42% in 2022-23.

Thirty-one areas, or almost 60%, had a mean average for nitrate exceeding 5ppm (parts per million) – considered the acceptable upper limit – an increase from 35% in 2022-23.

High levels of phosphate and nitrate pollute rivers. This triggers eutrophication, where the excessive plant and algal growth creates high levels of bacteria which reduces oxygen levels and kills plants and wildlife. Sewage pollution and agricultural runoff are both causes, their impacts varying from urban to rural areas.

On the Severn, sewage pollution has soared. In the three years to 2023, there were 53,072 discharges of raw sewage into the river, more than 48 each day, according to data compiled by the trust. Their duration was 429,365 hours, more than 392 hours a day.

In more rural areas, it is agricultural runoff from intensive farming that is considered to make up 70% of the excess phosphate going into the river.

Alison Caffyn, who lives in Shropshire, is a member of the volunteer army attempting to protect the Severn. She has become an expert in intensive poultry units (IPUs) after discovering a dearth of data on the impact of mega farms in the Severn valley.

“Over the years, intensive poultry units were cropping up all over Herefordshire and Shropshire and I realised there was nothing known about the issue and indeed very little research had been done, in the UK at least, about the wider impacts of intensive livestock units,” she said.

Caffyn spent years researching the units for a PhD, which saw her trawling back through Shropshire council planning records and then doing the same to track the scale of IPUs in Herefordshire, cross-referencing with satellite imagery and Environment Agency permit data.

When she turned to examine documents held by Powys council – to create a dataset for the main three counties in the Severn and Wye valleys – she discovered other researchers were doing similar work. Dr Christine Hugh-Jones and Margaret Tregear, both members of the council for the protection of rural Wales, had also been head down in planning records going back several years.

When the three women combined their research, they created an unprecedented and comprehensive dataset on the number of chickens being housed in industrial-style units in the three counties across the Severn and Wye valleys, which they update regularly. The latest data, shared with the Guardian, reveals more than 51m chickens are housed at any one time in intensive poultry units in Powys, Herefordshire and Shropshire.

Caffyn is using her research to bring a judicial review against Shropshire council’s decision to grant planning permission to another intensive poultry unit, housing 230,000 birds on nine hectares of land at Felton Butler, north of Shrewsbury.

The new intensive unit is 400 metres from an existing IPU, which appears to be in breach of Defra biosecurity regulations that there should be a 3km buffer zone between high-density poultry units.

Shropshire council approved the planning permission after the applicants promised they would transfer the manure to a third-party anaerobic digestion unit. But Caffyn says the processing of manure at an off-site anaerobic digestion unit will not cut nitrate and phosphate groundwater pollution. She points to research which says the digestate still contains all the nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium which was in the manure, and will have a negative impact when it is spread on farmland.

“We feel enough is enough. We simply cannot allow the creation of more of these giant clusters of polluting poultry units or, before we know it, the River Severn will be suffering the same pollution load as the neighbouring Wye,” she said.

Severn Trent said it had started a £450m programme to cut spills from storm overflows into the river, which was progressing at pace.

Neerja Upadhyay, head of river health enhancement at Severn Trent, said: “Since kicking off only a few months ago, our teams have been making some radical improvements that we’re already seeing benefits from.

“Increased storage on sites, repurposing existing parts of the network, installing valves and making network enhancements is all helping us make progress to reduce spills and improve river health, which is exactly what we and our customers want.”

Reefs across the north of the Great Barrier Reef have seen “substantial losses” of coral cover after a summer of extreme heat, two cyclones and major flooding, according to the first results of surveys from government marine scientists.

After the most widespread coral bleaching event seen on the world’s biggest reef system, the Australian Institute of Marine Science said one area around Cooktown and Lizard Island had lost more than a third of its live hard coral – the biggest annual drop in 39 years of monitoring.

Dr Mike Emslie, leader of Aims’ long-term monitoring program, described a “graveyard of corals” off Lizard Island, with Linnet Reef one of the worst-hit.

“It was pretty sobering,” he said. “Probably the worst single impact I have seen in 30 years. We saw dead standing coral colonies and the whole scene was a drab brown mess. As far as the eye could see was corals covered in algae.”

Aims revealed the results from in-water surveys of 19 reefs between Cairns and Cooktown carried out in recent months, where 12 reefs saw a drop in coral cover of between 11% and 72%.

The results are the first official assessment of the impact of last summer’s mass coral bleaching event, which came during a fourth global event that saw heat stress high enough to bleach more than 70% of the planet’s corals, affecting reefs in more than 70 countries.

Mass coral bleaching is caused by rising ocean temperatures driven mostly by the burning of fossil fuels.

Emslie said most of the coral death seen in the surveys had been caused by climate change-driven heat stress, but there were also impacts from two summer cyclones and flooding that saw freshwater run into the reef’s waters.

The hardest hit corals were the branching and plating Acroporas, he said, which had underpinned a growth in coral cover in recent years but had been identified as susceptible to bleaching.

The greatest heat stress last summer was seen in the reef’s southern section where scientists were on Tuesday returning from initial surveys.

Emslie said: “There is a feeling of trepidation of what the data might show [from the south of the reef].”

Between 80 and 100 more reefs are still to be surveyed between now and July 2025.

The world heritage committee, which has refused to put the reef on a list of sites in danger, urged the government to release data on coral mortality “as soon as possible”.

Coral cover in the Lizard Island-Cooktown section of the reef had fallen from 31% to 19%. Around Cairns, coral cover dropped by a third but reefs around Innisfail were stable.

Emslie said: “From what we have seen so far, the impact from these events is significant coral mortality in those areas hardest hit, although the level of mortality has been variable, and a few reefs escaped significant loss.”

He said some coral species appeared to have fared much better than others, and data so far suggested reefs on the outer shelf were much less affected. Most reefs now have moderate levels of coral cover of between 10% and 30%.

Emslie said mass coral bleaching events were “unheard of” before the late 1990s but were now happening “every other year” on the reef, and this would worsen as global heating continued. The 2024 mass bleaching was the fifth since 2016.

Richard Leck, head of oceans at World Wide Fund for Nature-Australia, said the results showed “our worst fears from this year’s coral bleaching event being realised”.

“The Great Barrier Reef can bounce back but there are limits to its resilience,” he said. “It can’t get repeatedly hammered like this. We are fast approaching a tipping point.

“Australia must commit to a federal emissions reduction target of at least 90% below 2005 levels by 2035, stop approving new fossil fuel projects and support the worldwide push for a global treaty to phase out all fossil fuels.”

Allies of the president-elect, Donald Trump, have lashed out angrily at Joe Biden for his decision to permit Ukraine to use long-range US missiles to launch attacks inside Russia for the first time, in what the Kremlin has termed an “escalation” in the war.

Key Trump surrogates, including his son Donald Trump Jr, hardline congressional Republicans, and other backers have accused Biden of seeking to spark “world war three” before Trump’s presidential inauguration in January.

“The Military Industrial Complex seems to want to make sure they get World War 3 going before my father has a chance to create peace and save lives,” wrote Donald Trump Jr on X, the social network formerly known as Twitter.

Richard Grenell, a former acting director of national intelligence during Trump’s first term, who was seen as a potential candidate for secretary of state, wrote: “No one anticipated that Joe Biden would ESCALATE the war in Ukraine during the transition period. This is as if he is launching a whole new war. Everything has changed now – all previous calculations are null and void.”

Other Republicans to sound off included the far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and the Utah senator Mike Lee, who said: “Joe Biden has just set the stage for World War III. Let’s all pray that it doesn’t come to this.”

A state department spokesperson, Matthew Miller, defended the decision during a press briefing on Monday, saying: “[The] American people elected Joe Biden to a four-year term, not to a term of three years and 10 months, and we will use every day of our term to pursue the foreign policy interests that we believe are in the interests of the American people.”

Discussions had been ongoing for months between the White House, the state department and European allies on whether to allow strikes into Ukraine. Currently, the decision to allow limited strikes using the US-supplied Atacms missiles would permit the Ukrainian army to target Russian military infrastructure in the Kursk region where the US has said that more than 10,000 North Korean troops have joined Russian forces preparing a counter-offensive to force Ukrainian troops out of the region.

The decision by the White House will set up a dilemma for the incoming administration on whether to immediately roll back the authorisation after Trump’s inauguration or retain it as a potential bargaining chip in the negotiations the president-elect has said he wants to hold in order to end the fighting.

While Trump and his allies have broadly denounced increasing military support and financial aid for the Ukrainian government, analysts said it was unclear whether Trump would move immediately to repeal the decision regarding long-range missiles.

“On the first day they could announce, ‘We are suspending this authorization pending a review of Ukraine policy,’” said Mark Cancian, a senior adviser with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a thinktank based in Washington. “But that would engender a lot of criticism and revive all these stories about some deals with Putin.”

He said it was not a foregone conclusion that Trump would immediately repeal the decision. “One is just the political cost isn’t worth the gain, but Trump’s also a deal-maker, and that would be to give away something without getting anything for it … to start off with a concession is just bad negotiating tactics.”

The White House decision may also prompt European allies with similar restrictions on the use of their long-range missiles in Ukraine to follow suit. The UK is expected to supply Storm Shadow missiles for use by Ukraine on targets inside Russia following the Biden decision with Keir Starmer, the prime minister, saying at the G20 summit that the UK needed to “double down” on its support for Ukraine.

Germany has maintained its position not to supply Ukraine with long-range Taurus missiles, while the French president, Emmanuel Macron, had already said Paris was open to consider greenlighting the use of its missiles to strike on Russian soil.

Theresa Fallon, the director of the Center for Russia Europe Asia Studies in Brussels, said that there were mixed reactions among European military officials, with some worried about the potential for an escalation, while others were “happy … that Ukraine could now use the equipment without one hand tied behind their back any more. But this decision came late, very late, [Ukraine] needs to be able to defend itself, and use this equipment for what it was designed to do. But we should keep in mind it is not going to be a game changer and more equipment is needed.”

“I can’t predict what Trump will do,” she said. “But … once these things are in place, there is a momentum to continue to use them. It may be hard to put it back into the box. But on the other hand, if there is not a resupply of missiles then the use of them for targets in Russia will have run its course.”

Joe Biden headed for a photo with fellow G20 leaders in Rio de Janeiro at his final summit as US president on Monday – only to find they had already taken the picture without him.

Frustrated US officials blamed “logistical issues” for the blunder which meant that Biden missed out on the shot, along with the Canadian and Italian prime ministers.

It came during a South American tour during which Biden’s counterparts have been looking past the outgoing US president in political terms – and towards his successor, Donald Trump.

Biden’s swan song on the world stage has seen the 81-year-old try to shore up his legacy before Trump potentially takes a wrecking ball to it with his isolationist “America First” foreign policy.

World leaders including the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, and French president, Emmanuel Macron, walked down a red-carpeted ramp at Rio’s stunning bayside Museum of Modern Art to the group photo set-up.

They took to a stage, chatted and joked as they gathered to pose against the backdrop of the Brazilian city’s iconic Sugarloaf Mountain. The snap was over in a second.

Biden and the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, then came in from another direction, after a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the summit – but it was too late and the other leaders had already dispersed.

The Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, also missed the picture. She, Biden and Trudeau formed a separate huddle.

“Due to logistical issues, they took the photo early before all the leaders had arrived. So a number of the leaders weren’t actually there,” a US official said on condition of anonymity.

US officials denied that Biden missed the photo – officially for the launch of the Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s alliance to curb world hunger – to avoid appearing alongside Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov.

Biden had earlier urged the G20 leaders to support Ukraine’s “sovereignty” in the face of Russia’s 2022 invasion.

President Vladimir Putin was conspicuously absent from the Rio summit. His arrest is sought by the international criminal court over the Ukraine war.

Donald Trump said on Monday that his administration would declare a national emergency and use the US military to carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.

In an early morning social media post, Trump responded “TRUE!!!” to a post by Tom Fitton, the president of the conservative group Judicial Watch, who wrote on 8 November that the next administration “will use military assets to reverse the Biden invasion through a mass deportation program”.

Since his decisive victory, Trump has said he intends to make good on his campaign promise to execute mass deportations, beginning on the first day of his presidency. But many aspects of what he has described as the “largest deportation program in American history” remain unclear.

Trump has previously suggested he would rely on wartime powers, military troops and sympathetic state and local leaders. Such a sprawling campaign – and the use of military personnel to carry it out – is almost certain to draw legal challenges and pushback from Democratic leaders, some of whom have already said they would refuse to cooperate with Trump’s deportation agenda.

Through personnel announcements, the president-elect has put together a team of loyalists and hardliners to implement a second-term immigration crackdown.

Tom Homan, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in his first administration, was named “border czar” with a wide-ranging remit. In a short social media post announcing the position, Trump said Homan would be “in charge of all Deportation of Illegal Aliens back to their Country of Origin”.

Also returning for a second term is Stephen Miller, a chief defender of the last administration’s most controversial immigration policies, including the use of family separation as a means of deterrence. Miller was named White House deputy chief of staff for policy and a homeland security adviser, giving him far-reaching influence over immigration policy.

Rounding out the team, he nominated the South Dakota governor, Kristi Noem, a loyalist with a long record as an immigration hardliner, to be his next secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.

Experts and advocates say a deportation campaign on the scale Trump has outlined would raise legal and logistical challenges, not to mention the soaring costs and infrastructure needed to detail and deport millions of people, many of whom have lived in the country for at least a decade, contribute to the workforce and share a household with US citizen family members.

Trump and Miller have described plans to federalize state national guard personnel and deploy them for immigration enforcement, including sending troops from friendly Republican-governed states into neighboring states with governors who decline to participate. Miller has also advocated for building large-scale detention “camps” and tents.

In his first post-election interview, Trump told NBC News that he had “no choice” but to implement a mass deportation plan, regardless of cost.

“It’s not a question of a price tag,” he said. “It’s not – really, we have no choice. When people have killed and murdered, when drug lords have destroyed countries, and now they’re going to go back to those countries because they’re not staying here. There is no price tag.”

According to an estimate by the American Immigration Council, deporting 1 million people a year would cost more than $960bn over a decade.

Trump at various points claimed he would deport at least 15 million – and even as many as 20 million – people who are in the US illegally, but the figure is unverified.

There were an estimated 11 million people living in the United States without authorization as of 2022, according to an analysis by Pew Research. Migration to the US border reached record levels in 2022 and 2023 before dropping dramatically in 2024, following stepped-up enforcement by Mexico and an asylum clampdown by the Biden administration.

It is unclear who the Trump administration would target for deportation. His campaign trail rhetoric often failed to distinguish between immigrants who have lawful status and those in the country illegally. And throughout the campaign, Trump claimed that immigrants crossing the US southern border in recent years were driving up crime, even though violent crime is down across the country and studies show immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than US citizens.

During the campaign, Trump’s team repeatedly refused to rule out deporting Dreamers, young adults brought to the US as children, hundreds of thousands of whom are allowed to live and work in the US under an Obama-era program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca).

Questions remain about how the raids would be conducted and where people would be detained. Civil liberties advocates have already raised concerns about people with lawful status or even US citizens being swept up in a sprawling dragnet.

Meanwhile, advocates have pushed back against Trump’s assertion that he enters office with a mandate to carry out mass raids. They point to data that has found most people do not support mass deportations, especially when respondents are informed about the potential impacts on the economy, the workforce and American families.

“The term strategy is clear, foment fear, panic and chaos into our communities, because as bullies, this is what they thrive on,” Greisa Martínez Rosas, the executive director of United We Dream Action, a network of groups that advocate for Dreamers said during a post-election debrief. She added: “Trump may be re-elected, but he does not have a mandate to come into and rip apart our communities.”

Countries meeting in Azerbaijan to discuss a new global financial settlement for tackling the climate crisis must “cut the theatrics” and get down to serious business, the UN has said.

The UK and Brazil have been drafted in to try to break a logjam at the Cop29 climate summit, which entered its second week on Monday with no agreement in sight on the key issue of how to channel at least $1tn a year to developing countries.

Poor nations need the money to cut greenhouse gas emissions and cope with the impacts of extreme weather. Rich countries stand accused of failing to come up with the cash to help them.

Officials from nearly 200 countries worked last week to draw up the text of a potential deal, but many countries have sent ministers – with decision-making powers – to the Azerbaijani capital, Baku, only for the second half of the fortnight-long meeting.

Simon Stiell, the UN’s climate chief, told the conference: “Ministers who have just arrived need to roll up their sleeves and dive into the hardest issues. Bluffing, brinksmanship and premeditated playbooks are burning up precious time. So let’s cut the theatrics and get down to the real business this week.”

He reminded rich countries that it was in their interest to help the poorest, which are suffering from the impacts of extreme weather but have done little to cause global heating. “Climate finance is not charity,” he said. “It is 100% in every nation’s interest to protect their economies and people from rampant climate impacts.”

Mukhtar Babayev, Azerbaijan’s environment minister and the president of the talks, said: “Politicians have the power to reach a fair and ambitious deal. They must deliver on this responsibility. They must engage immediately and constructively. The highest possible level of ambition is indeed difficult, and it requires courage. Colleagues, now is the time to be brave.”

The UK and Brazil will work with countries to help find a “landing zone” of agreement. Bones of contention include how much developed countries should provide from their own budgets and how much should come from the private sector; how to expand the number of contributors, from the established industrialised countries to include emerging economies such as China and petrostates such as Saudi Arabia; and by what deadline the target should be met.

Australia’s climate and energy minister, Chris Bowen, is charged with guiding the finance track of the talks. He and Yasmine Fouad of Egypt are the “ministerial pairing” in charge of the “new collective quantified goal” (NCQG) negotiations.

Bowen told the Guardian the process was like “a four-dimensional jigsaw”. The NCQG must include numbers, on the amount of finance developing countries can expect and where it should come from, including developed countries’ aid budgets, development banks such as the World Bank, and the private sector.

The structure of an agreement is also key, including deadlines for meeting the goals, and rules on which countries can access the funding and how. These factors were “intrinsically linked, so you can’t solve one without the other”, he told the Guardian.

“Those four things – the big three plus accessibility – is a jigsaw puzzle. A four-dimensional jigsaw puzzle being constructed on a tight timeline, with 198 parties,” Bowen said.

Sherry Rehman, a member of Pakistan’s senate, was the country’s environment minister when devastating floods submerged one-third of Pakistan in August 2022, displacing an estimated 8 million people and causing damage costing tens of billions of dollars.

She urged world leaders to “keep an eye on the big picture” rather than indulging in petty bickering over who was to blame. “We’re here for life and death reasons,” she told the Guardian in an interview. “We’re one of the most climate-vulnerable countries in the world. So we can’t walk away.”

Mohamed Adow, the director of the thinktank Power Shift Africa, said developed countries must take responsibility for having caused the climate crisis through more than a century and a half of reliance on fossil fuels.

“The climate finance goal needs to include both a public finance provision and a mobilisation goal of new and innovative sources,” he said. These sources could include a wealth tax, now under discussion at the G20 in Brazil, and taxes on high-carbon activities such as frequent flying.

“The public, grant-based component of the new finance goal must be big enough to give confidence to the developing countries who are currently in debt distress,” Adow added. “For them private finance, which needs to be repaid with interest, is just a recipe for more debt.”

Poor countries needed help to make their infrastructure, both physical and social, more resilient to the impacts of extreme weather. Private companies were unlikely to provide this, so governments must step in, Adow said.

“These countries can’t afford to leave Baku without assurances of public, grant-based finance to address their adaptation needs and help deal with the loss and damage caused by the climate crisis,” he said.