The government’s official climate watchdog has appointed the head of the energy industry’s trade association to lead its work helping to drive the UK’s emissions to net zero by 2050.

Emma Pinchbeck, the head of Energy UK, will take up the role of chief executive of the Climate Change Committee (CCC) from early next month after four years at the helm of the trade association.

The former deputy of RenewableUK will replace Chris Stark, who was appointed to lead the government’s “mission control centre” on clean energy, a Covid vaccine-style taskforce aimed at delivering clean and cheaper power by 2030.

Pinchbeck was tapped for the role earlier this year and told the Guardian in August that “change can be quite frightening” for rural communities likely to host renewable energy infrastructure.

Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, said Pinchbeck would join the CCC at “a pivotal point” in the UK’s journey to net zero, halfway through a “decisive decade to halt climate change”.

“Following her leadership at Energy UK, [Pinchbeck] is well placed to advise and challenge government on our net zero goals – ensuring we meet our climate commitments with ambition and urgency,” Miliband said.

He added that Pinchbeck’s “extensive experience” leading the decarbonisation of the energy industry underscores “how the economics of clean energy are now aligned with climate policy, driving both environmental protection and economic growth”.

Pinchbeck was appointed Energy UK’s chief executive in January 2020 months before the Covid-19 pandemic led to record low energy market prices that wiped billions from the market value of major energy companies. The sharp bounceback in energy prices in 2021 caused more than 30 energy suppliers to go bust. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022 pushed up energy prices across Europe further and forced the UK government to step in to subsidise bills.

Pinchbeck said: “Energy has moved from the fringes to the very centre of economic policy and I hope that I have played my part in making sure that the importance of our sector and of the energy transition is clear to government.

“I am excited to bring my experience and knowledge of a decade in energy to the challenge of decarbonising our economy at speed with tangible benefits to the people of the UK.”

Two southern California women say they were removed from a Spirit Airlines flight last week for wearing crop tops. A flight attendant instructed the friends to disembark their New Orleans-bound flight before the plane could depart from Los Angeles international airport, they told a local news station.

The friends, Tara Kehidi and Teresa Araujo, were wearing sweaters when they boarded the plane, but removed them because the air conditioning was not functioning.

“We were wearing crop tops … just like a little bit of stomach showing,” Kehidi told the ABC news affiliate KABC. When a male flight attendant told her and Araujo to “put something on”, the friend asked: “Can we see a dress code? Like, is there a policy that says we can’t wear crop tops on the plane?”

Another woman sitting in the row in front of Kehidi and Araujo told the station that the temperature on the plane had forced most of its passengers to remove their sweaters.

“I said, ‘Well, if your body is inappropriate, then so is mine because I also have a crop top under my sweater.’ And I took my sweater off and I was like: ‘So if they’re kicking you off the flight, then they’re also going to have to kick me and my toddler off of the flight,’” said Carla Hager, who was traveling with her child.

Kehidi and Araujo ultimately offered to put their sweaters back on, but the three women and Hager’s toddler were all removed from the flight with no refund.

“Everyone in the plane was looking at us,” Araujo said. She said that she and Kehidi felt like they were being “treated like criminals”.

Although the majority of airlines have a dress code, they are often vague and left up to flight attendants to enforce – leading many female passengers to point out sexist differences in that enforcement.

In a statement to KABC, Spirit Airlines said: “Our Contract of Carriage, a document all Guests agree to upon making a reservation with us, includes certain clothing standards for all Guests traveling with us. We are investigating the matter, and we are in contact with the Guests about their experience.”

The airline’s Contract of Carriage says passengers may be asked to leave a flight if they are “inadequately clothed, or whose clothing is lewd, obscene or offensive in nature”.

Kehidi and Araujo ultimately spent $1,000 rebooking on to a Delta flight to New Orleans in order to celebrate Kehidi’s 30th birthday.

They told KABC that they were interested in pursuing legal action against Spirit. The budget airline has a history of headline-making snafus: from putting an unaccompanied minor on the wrong flight to stranding thousands of passengers with cancelled and delayed flights.

The Trump administration protected Brett Kavanaugh from facing a full FBI investigation in the wake of serious allegations that he sexually assaulted two women – once in high school and once in college – during his controversial 2018 Senate confirmation to become a supreme court justice, according to a new report.

An investigation led by the Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse also found that both the Trump White House and the FBI “misled the public and the Senate” about the scope of the investigation it did conduct into the sexual assault allegations by falsely claiming that the FBI had conducted its investigation thoroughly and “by the book”.

Kavanaugh’s confirmation by the Senate seemed to be in doubt after Christine Blasey Ford, a professor at Palo Alto University, alleged he had sexually assaulted her while the two were in high school. A classmate at Yale, named Deborah Ramirez, alleged in a report published by the New Yorker that Kavanaugh had exposed himself at a drunken dormitory party. Kavanaugh denied both allegations.

The Senate judiciary committee agreed after Ford publicly testified about her allegations that the FBI conduct a supplemental background check to examine those allegations before the full Senate voted on his nomination.

In the aftermath of Kavanaugh’s ultimate confirmation by the Senate, in a 50-48 vote, Whitehouse and his staff set out on a six-year investigation to try to find answers about how the FBI conducted its investigation.

The investigation was hampered, Whitehouse said, by executive branch delays, reluctance to answer even basic questions, and often incomplete answers.

“In 2018, I pledged to Christine Blasey Ford that I’d keep digging, for however long it took, and not give up or move on from Senate Republicans and the Trump White House’s shameful confirmation process for Justice Kavanaugh,” Whitehouse said.

“This report shows that the supplemental background investigation was a sham, controlled by the Trump White House, to give political cover to Senate Republicans and put Justice Kavanaugh back on the political track to confirmation.”

The findings are significant because at least eight senators cited the FBI’s findings – that “no corroborating evidence” had been found to back up the allegations against Kavanaugh – when they voted to confirm the justice. They include the then majority leader, Mitch McConnell, Shelley Moore Capito, former senator Jeff Flake and Bob Corker, Chuck Grassley and Susan Collins.

In reality, the Whitehouse report claims the FBI’s limited supplemental background investigation involved only a “handful” of interviews of relevant witnesses, and ignored other potential sources, including Kavanaugh himself, Ford, or others who had offered to give the FBI corroborating or otherwise relevant information.

Ford was not interviewed, the report said, even though her attorney repeatedly contacted the FBI directly to request the FBI interview her.

A lawyer for Ramirez provided lists of suggested witnesses to the FBI, including a list of 20 additional witnesses likely to have relevant information who Ramirez suspected could corroborate her account.

In one case, a former classmate of Kavanaugh at Yale named Max Stier sought to come forward to report that he had once witnessed Kavanaugh with his pants down at a drunken party, and that his friends pushed the future justice’s penis into the hands of a female student.

The alleged incident was separate from others that became public during the investigation but bore similarities to the allegations made by Ramirez. Stier notified the Senate and the FBI about his account, according to media reports, but the matter was never investigated by the FBI.

The FBI director, Christopher Wray, was even personally notified by Senator Chris Coons of Delaware about Stier’s account but he was never contacted.

Stier, who runs a non-profit in Washington, has declined to discuss the matter with the Guardian. He is married to Florence Pan, who serves as a circuit judge on the US court of appeals, a post formerly held by the supreme court justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

In response to the release of the report, Debra Katz and Lisa Banks, lawyers for Ford, said in a statement: “Dr Ford performed a heroic act of public service that came at a steep personal cost for her and those close to her. We know today that Trump White House officials acted to hide the truth. They conspired, with the FBI complicit, to silence those who offered important evidence, including one college classmate who ‘saw Mr Kavanaugh with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student.’ We also know that this will likely result in no consequences for those involved, though it should.”

The FBI also declined to pursue information it received through the agency’s tip line. The tips were forwarded directly to the White House.

Mexico’s new government has been shaken by the murder of a city mayor who was attacked and beheaded days after taking office.

Alejandro Arcos Catalán was sworn in as the mayor of Chilpancingo, the capital of the southern state of Guerrero, on 30 September, a day before Mexico’s first female president, Claudia Sheinbaum, took power herself.

On Monday, less than a week into her presidency, Sheinbaum confirmed reports that the 43-year-old city leader had been slain the previous day, telling reporters: “All the necessary investigations are taking place.”

Photographs of Arcos Catalán’s bloodied head, exhibited on the roof of a white vehicle while his body lay slumped inside, spread on social media – a terrible reminder of the violence that Mexico’s organised crime conflict has inflicted on the Latin American country.

The mayor’s murder came after two close allies were shot dead in the early days of his short-lived administration. A secretary, Francisco Tapia, was gunned down on 3 October, while Ulises Hernández Martínez, a former special forces police commander who was tipped to become Arcos Catalán’s security chief, was riddled with bullets on the eve of the mayor’s inauguration.

Shocked citizens shared footage of an interview with the mayor before his death in which he said he wished to be remembered as a champion of peace and happiness. “I’ve lived here all my life … and it’s here that I want to die – but I want to die fighting for my city,” Arcos Catalán said.

The murder sparked anger and disgust, with Alejandro Moreno, the president of Arcos Catalán’s party, the Institutional Revolutionary party (PRI), denouncing what he called a grotesque “act of terror”.

Ricardo Anaya, an opposition senator, lamented the “spine-chilling” security situation in Mexico, where more than 450,000 people have been killed since President Felipe Calderón launched his doomed “war” against the drug cartels in 2006.

“The fact that they have decapitated the mayor of such an important city should make us shudder. It is utterly unacceptable and we need to do something to ensure it stops happening,” Anaya told reporters, calling for an immediate change in tack in security policy.

But Sheinbaum has promised to continue the so-called “hugs, not bullets” security policy of her predecessor and mentor, the 70-year-old nationalist Andrés Manuel López Obrador, during her six-year term.

“We will not return to Calderón’s reckless war on the narcos that did our country so much harm. It remains our conviction that security and peace are the fruits of justice,” she told thousands of supporters who packed Mexico City’s Zócalo Square for her historic inauguration last Tuesday.

Although López Obrador claimed to have achieved a modest reduction in Mexico’s murder rate in the later stages of his presidency, there is consensus among security analysts that his attempts to “pacify” the country failed. Last year Mexico suffered more than 30,000 murders. According to the Instituto Igarapé thinktank, Mexico was home to 11 of the world’s 50 most murderous cities in 2023, compared with three in 2015. Chilpancingo was one of them.

Despite that bleak reality, López Obrador, who most Mexicans know simply as Amlo, left office with approval ratings of 70%, largely as a result of his relentless focus on fighting inequality and positioning himself as a champion of the poor.

Aware that tackling violence represents one of her most daunting challenges – and under pressure after Arcos Catalán’s murder – Sheinbaum said she would set out her public security plans on Tuesday.

Another major security crisis is playing out in the north-western city of Culiacán, where an internal conflict within the Sinaloa cartel triggered by the capture of its co-founder Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada García has led to scores of killings.

Sheinbaum’s security drive will be spearheaded by the security minister, Omar García Harfuch, who served as her police chief while she was mayor of Mexico City. García Harfuch has first-hand experience of the dangers of organised crime: in 2020 he came close to death when hitmen ambushed his car on the capital’s best-known street, firing more than 400 times with assault rifles and grenade launchers.

The identity of the killers of the mayor of Chilpancingo remained unclear but in recent years the city has witnessed a bloody squabble between two criminal groups called Los Ardillos (the Squirrels) and Los Tlacos. As often happens in Mexico, local politicians have been implicated in that underworld. Arcos Catalán’s predecessor Norma Otilia Hernández was removed from office after compromising footage emerged showing her talking with a Squirrels boss in a restaurant. Hernández, who was then a member of López Obrador and Sheinbaum’s political movement, Morena, claimed it was a “chance” encounter, but was later expelled from the party.

After his election earlier this year, Arcos Catalán reportedly said he would not do deals or negotiate with criminal groups.

Many of Earth’s “vital signs” have hit record extremes, indicating that “the future of humanity hangs in the balance”, a group of the world’s most senior climate experts have said.

More and more scientists are now looking into the possibility of societal collapse, says the report, which assessed 35 vital signs in 2023 and found that 25 were worse than ever recorded, including carbon dioxide levels and human population. This indicates a “critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis”, it says.

The temperature of Earth’s surface and oceans hit an all-time high, driven by record burning of fossil fuels, the report found. Human population is increasing at a rate of approximately 200,000 people a day and the number of cattle and sheep by 170,000 a day, all adding to record greenhouse gas emissions.

The scientists identified 28 feedback loops, including increasing emissions from melting permafrost, which could help trigger multiple tipping points, such as the collapse of the massive Greenland icecap.

Global heating is driving increasingly deadly extreme weather across the world, they said, including hurricanes in the US and 50C heatwaves in India, with billions of people now exposed to extreme heat.

The scientists said their goal was “to provide clear, evidence-based insights that inspire informed and bold responses from citizens to researchers and world leaders – we just want to act truthfully and tell it like it is.” Decisive, fast action was imperative to limit human suffering, they said, including reducing fossil fuel burning and methane emissions, cutting overconsumption and waste by the rich, and encouraging a switch towards plant-based foods.

“We’re already in the midst of abrupt climate upheaval, which jeopardises life on Earth like nothing humans have ever seen,” said Prof William Ripple, of Oregon State University (OSU), who co-led the group. “Ecological overshoot – taking more than the Earth can safely give – has pushed the planet into climatic conditions more threatening than anything witnessed even by our prehistoric relatives.

“Climate change has already displaced millions of people, with the potential to displace hundreds of millions or even billions. That would likely lead to greater geopolitical instability, possibly even partial societal collapse.”

The assessment, published in the journal Bioscience, says the concentrations of CO₂ and methane in the atmosphere are at record levels. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, 80 times more powerful than CO₂ over 20 years, and is emitted by fossil fuel operations, waste dumps, cattle and rice fields.

“The growth rate of methane emissions has been accelerating, which is extremely troubling,” said Dr Christopher Wolf, formerly of OSU, who co-led the team.

While wind and solar energy grew by 15% in 2023, the researchers said, coal, oil and gas still dominated. They said there was “stiff resistance from those benefiting financially from the current fossil-fuel based system”.

The report includes the results of a Guardian survey of hundreds of senior climate experts in May, which found that only 6% believed that the internationally agreed limit of 1.5C of warming would be adhered to. “The fact is that avoiding every tenth of a degree of warming is critically important,” the researchers said. “Each tenth places an extra 100 million people into unprecedented hot average temperatures.”

The researchers said global heating was part of a wider crisis that included pollution, the destruction of nature and rising economic inequality. “Climate change is a glaring symptom of a deeper systemic issue: ecological overshoot, [which] is an inherently unstable state that cannot persist indefinitely. As the risk of Earth’s climate system switching to a catastrophic state rises, more and more scientists have begun to research the possibility of societal collapse. Even in the absence of global collapse, climate change could cause many millions of additional deaths by 2050. We need bold, transformative change.”

Among the policies the scientists recommend for rapid adoption are gradually reducing the human population through empowering education and rights for girls and women; protecting, restoring or rewilding ecosystems; and integrating climate change education into global curriculums to boost awareness and action.

The assessment concludes: “Only through decisive action can we safeguard the natural world, avert profound human suffering and ensure that future generations inherit the livable world they deserve. The future of humanity hangs in the balance.”

The world’s nations will meet at the UN’s Cop29 climate summit in Azerbaijan in November. Ripple said: “It’s imperative that huge progress is made.”

A British mountaineer and her American companion who were stranded in the Himalayas for three days without food have described the long silence between them after the bulk of their equipment plunged into a ravine.

Fay Manners, 37, and Michelle Dvorak, 31, had been climbing the Chaukhamba mountain in northern India, when they issued an SOS message on Thursday, with nothing further being heard from them.

The pair reported that they had lost their tent and climbing equipment after the items were dragged into a ravine by a rockfall.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Manners described the moment their gear vanished.

“There was a big, big, long sense of silence between us,” she said. “There weren’t too many words to begin with, to be honest, it was more just the gaze that we had between us, the look of just disappointment and disbelief.

“I think we were in silence for probably at least two or three minutes before we said anything. I think we both knew what was to come.”

The rescue operation took 80 hours and involved the Indian air force and army, the Indian news agency Ians reported.

Manners, originally from Bedford, told Radio 4 the ledge they were stranded on was big enough only to sit. She said: “It was really small. We could both sit up on the ledge but we couldn’t lay down, so it was a pretty tiny space.

“The hardest thing is we still have other equipment, and so you have to fit both your bodies and your sleeping bag on there, but you also have to fit all your other equipment. And once you’ve already lost a lot of your kit down the mountain, then you get pretty anxious about the rest of the kit that you have as well.”

Dvorak told the programme that a rescue helicopter had initially failed to spot them.

She said: “We were waving around, waving our hands around and hoping to get their attention, but they were just a bit too far away, and we were on a pretty steep and vertical face, and I think everything looked a bit the same to them from their vantage point.”

After two nights in freezing conditions, Manners said the pair decided to abseil to a more accessible point.

“We’d already had two evenings on the wall where I didn’t have any of my warm clothing because it was in the equipment bag, so I was particularly cold, and I just knew that I couldn’t spend another night pretty much shivering all night.

“So at that point, I was like, we really just have to try and get ourselves out of this situation and go down. I think I prefer to go down without the right equipment and give ourselves some sort of hope of survival, rather than just sit another night and freeze.”

They were reportedly airlifted by an Indian air force helicopter to a helipad at Joshimath, a town 21 miles south-east of Chaukhamba, at 7am local time on Sunday.

A French climbing party assisted with the rescue after the group helped them descend to the altitude from which they were airlifted, according to the air force.

A critically endangered orchid has received a late reprieve after a local environmental group threatened legal action against the Victorian government, prompting officials to cancel a planned burn of its habitat.

The bald-tip beard orchid – a species with fewer than 10 plants remaining in the Australian wild – was thought extinct until rediscovered in 1968 at a site near Whroo, in central Victoria, where the last surviving wild population has persisted.

That site was included in a 183 hectare area scheduled for controlled burns by state government agency Forest Fire Management Victoria, along with two further burns nearby in areas designated as potential orchid habitat.

But on Tuesday – after questions from Guardian Australia and a legal letter from a local conservation group – a planned fuel reduction burn at the site containing the orchids was officially removed from the schedule.

When asked, Forest Fire Management Victoria did not explain why burns were originally planned in an area containing the last known population of a critically endangered orchid.

Instead, a spokesperson for the agency said specialist staff assessed biodiversity values at each potential burn site and developed plans to protect them.

“We have experts in both fire ecology and threatened species working together to inform how and when we conduct planned burns to minimise any unintended impacts and maximise the benefit to precious threatened species,” they said.

Sue McKinnon, the president of Kinglake Friends of the Forest, said the group’s lawyer had sent a letter on Friday, asking the Victorian environment department to cancel burns in the orchid’s habitat. It stated the group’s intention to seek an urgent interim injunction under the federal Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act.

“We’re determined to save this orchid,” she said, which included taking legal action if required. The orchid’s federal recovery plan said prescribed burning had been excluded from the immediate area of the orchid population since 1980.

The species, listed as critically endangered in Victoria and endangered federally, produced flowers with reddish-brown stripes and a “beard” atop a ruler-length stem.

The consultant ecologist Karl Just, who surveyed the area near Whroo, said the planned burns would have had a “high likelihood of causing a species extinction”.

The two other locations – including areas mapped as potential orchid habitat – remained part of the fuel management program, scheduled for autumn 2025.

Curtin University’s Prof Kingsley Dixon, who has studied native orchids for about 45 years, said beard orchids were particularly sensitive to disturbance and could vanish quickly.

A precautionary approach and careful science should be applied when dealing with critically endangered orchids, including in relation to planned burns, he said.

Dixon said orchids were the “most treasured and most charismatic” plant family in Australia with the “highest number of threatened species”.

“Excessive clearing, fragmentation, weeds, pests, disease, fire, put them all together and we’ve essentially corralled orchids into ever smaller areas.”

Japan is celebrated for its exceptional levels of customer service. But the behaviour of a growing number of customers and clients leaves a lot to be desired.

The rise of the abusive consumer has prompted authorities in Tokyo to introduce the country’s first ordinance – a locally approved regulation – to protect service industry staff from kasuhara – the Japanese abbreviated form of “customer harassment”.

While the Tokyo ordinance, which will go into effect in April, does not carry penalties, experts hope the move will highlight a growing social problem and, perhaps, encourage people to think twice before taking out their frustrations on staff.

A union survey this year found that almost one in two workers in the service sector – which accounts for 75% of employees in Japan – had been subjected to customer meltdowns, ranging from verbal abuse and excessive demands to violence and doxing on social media.

In one instance, an assistant manager at a supermarket in Tokyo received a call from a shopper claiming that the tofu he had bought at the store had gone off, according to the Asahi Shimbun newspaper. When the employee visited the shopper’s home to check, he found that the tofu – a product with a short shelf life – had been bought a fortnight earlier.

Not wanting to alienate the shopper, the employee tried to remain diplomatic but was then ordered by the customer to prostrate himself and apologise.

Outbreaks of rage have crept into local government offices, with one female employee at a Tokyo ward office recounting how an elderly resident accused her of wishing she would die and invited her to drop dead instead.

“It seems that people feel they can say whatever they want when dealing with public servants because they are paying tax,” the official told the Asahi. “ I wish they could understand that employees are human beings too.”

The labour ministry is reportedly considering tightening the law further to address kasuhara across a wide range of sectors, including public transport, restaurants and call centres.

The Tokyo metropolitan assembly approved the ordinance last week under pressure from unions and industry representatives, which warned that the scourge of the disgruntled customer was spreading to other parts of the country.

Three other prefectures are considering similar measures, while some municipalities and firms now give employees the option of displaying only their given names on their ID badges. A Tokyo department store this year said it would ban troublesome customers and call the police in serious cases, while other firms, including Nintendo, have said they will not engage with abusive people.

The ordinance states that “no person shall engage in customer harassment anywhere” and that “society as a whole should try to prevent abuse”, but it recognises the value to businesses of legitimate feedback.

Writing on the Nippon.com website, Hiromi Ikeuchi, a professor of sociology at Kansai University, attributed the rise of kasuhara to several factors, including the tendency to regard customers as “gods” in the battle to stay profitable in an increasingly tough business environment – an approach that has shifted the power balance from firms to their customers.

“As Japanese society as a whole became more consumer-oriented, the tables were turned, giving some consumers an unconscious bias that has caused them to expect to be treated like gods, as well as having certain expectations of staff,” Ikeuchi wrote.

Kasuhara is one of several forms of harassment Japan has been forced to confront in recent years, along with matahara (maternity harassment), pawahara (power harassment) and jenhara (gender harassment).