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Italian police are investigating after a painting believed to be a Gustav Klimt stolen almost 23 years ago was discovered hidden in a wall of the gallery where it had previously been on display.

The location of Portrait of a Lady, one of the world’s most sought-after missing artworks, has been a mystery since it was stolen in 1997.

On Tuesday, a gardener clearing up ivy on an exterior wall of the Ricci Oddi modern art gallery, in the northern city of Piacenza, discovered a metal panel which, when opened, revealed a cavity with a painting in a bag.

The gallery is not making an official announcement until the painting’s authenticity is confirmed, but according to sources quoted by the local newspaper, Piacenza Sera, an initial expert inspection indicated the painting was the 1917 Klimt, a later work by the Austrian art nouveau painter.

The director of the gallery, Massimo Ferrari, told the Italian newspaper La Libertà that “the stamps and wax behind the picture are original”.

Jonathan Papamerenghi, a member of the Piacenza council with responsibility for culture, did not exclude the possibility that the painting had been left in the wall by thieves who wanted to return it.

“It is very strange, because, immediately after the theft, every single inch of the gallery and garden was checked with a fine-tooth comb,” he told La Repubblica. “The strangest thing is that the painting is in excellent condition. It does not seem like it has been locked under a trapdoor for 22 years.”

The theft of Portrait of a Lady was discovered on the morning of 22 February 1997 but police believed it had been removed three days earlier. Investigators at the time suspected an inside job. The investigation was reopened in 2016 following the discovery of DNA traces of a thief on the painting’s abandoned frame.

Police believe the thieves used a fishing line to hook the masterpiece off the wall and haul it up through an open skylight to the roof of the gallery, where the frame was discarded.

The Klimt is considered particularly important because shortly before its disappearance an art student realised it had been painted over another work previously believed lost – a portrait of a young lady that had not been seen since 1912 –making it the only “double” Klimt known to the art world.

“If the findings confirm the authenticity of the painting, it would be a sensational discovery and we would be ready to exhibit it in the gallery as early as January,” Papamerenghi said. “We are talking about the most sought-after stolen painting in the world after Caravaggio’s Nativity with St Francis and St Lawrence.”

Stolen in 1969 from the Oratory of San Lorenzo, in Palermo, the disappearance of Caravaggio’s Nativity with St Francis and St Lawrence is considered one of the greatest mysteries in art history. In a video interview filmed in 2001 but locked in a drawer and revealed exclusively to the Guardian in October, the oratory priest said it had been kept in the home of a powerful mafia boss who sliced off a piece of the canvas in order to convince the Catholic church to negotiate for its return.

According to the most recent stolen artworks bulletin, issued by the carabinieri, 8,405 items have gone missing in Italy in the last year alone. These include archaeological artefacts, ancient weapons and medieval texts. Statues and paintings have been taken from churches, which often have no security systems. More than 1m works are still missing.

‘She is a bright new star for her generation’

Very happy that we now have a young female PM with fresh new thoughts on how to lead our beautiful country. She is well educated, bright and does not take any BS from anybody. She is a strong independent woman and a bright new star for her generation. I’m sure she will make a good example for all the young men and women of our world. It’s the young people that need to take over as they are the ones living here long after my generation has passed. Veikko, 65, Ilomantsi, Finland

‘This is what politics is supposed to look like’

I cannot recall when politics last made me cry tears of happiness. This did. I experienced my political awakening at age 16. The power that rose from the 2015 elections four years later didn’t look like me. This, now, is what politics is supposed to look like. It is supposed to look into the future, think of the welfare of the people. Ella Kivisaari, student, Helsinki, Finland

‘She’s going to have a challenging time’

She’s going to have a challenging time finding a way to fund government spending and find a path to improving employment. She’s fresh, popular and brings a major improvement in communication skills but also needs to break her ties with her predecessor Antti Rinne to be able to avoid an impression of being a marionette of his. Ilkka Kivi, 48, works in IT, Espoo, Finland

‘Finland faces a bright future with Sanna Marin’

Best choice for prime minister. Our political party has long needed ‘fresh air’. Sanna is very good at speaking in the media and doesn’t hesitate to say her opinion. I’m very pleased. The opposition parties will have to face a lady in parliament and I’m loving it. Finland faces a bright future with Sanna Marin! Teemu Lintumaa, 35, Finland

‘Her appointment is almost like an act of desperation from her party’

She seems competent and will probably do alright, but I would say that her appointment is almost like an act of desperation from her party. The SDP is in a similar downfall such as so many former ruling parties across Europe, with their voter base leaking both to the far-right, far-left and to the greens. She is basically their only politician with star power, and they are now pulling her from the sleeve to save them from oblivion. Whether that will work is yet to be seen, but basically this appointment is about a 20th century party trying to be hip, cool and relevant in the 21st century. Mikko Damskägg, 28, student, Helsinki

‘She stood out when I met her’

I first met Sanna Marin around 10 years ago in an election panel. She stood out from the other panelists in a most positive way, with deep knowledge and formidable arguments. Over the years, she has proven herself as one of Finland’s most apt politicians. I am so very happy and proud that she is our prime minister. Jari Kallio, 46, journalist and teacher, Tampere

‘To see a young woman rise up to this position makes me really happy’

I’m super excited and happy about our new PM! I think she’s starting a whole new chapter in Finnish politics by lifting up some really important values like equality, climate change and solidarity between people. Finland has been led by more or less right-wing politicians for over 15 years and since the actual election things have started to change in Finland for the better. Sanna Marin as our new PM will surely keep our new government in order and work towards the goals set six months ago. To see a young woman rise up to this position makes me really happy. Jarkko Veijanen, 39, project manager for a telephone company, Jyväskylä, Finland

‘I’m disappointed Finns are not giving her a chance’

It’s great to see women and young women on the frontline in politics. We’ve been hailed as a very equal country but even now the comments regarding Marin’s appointment still leave me speechless. Her age, education, experience in both ‘normal jobs’ as well as politics are being questioned and I’m quite sure this wouldn’t have been the case if Antti Lindtman was appointed instead. I’m so disappointed in Finns not even giving her a chance. Tiina, 43, TV prodicer, Helsinki.

Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orban has been in power since 2010, and last year won a supermajority for the third time – but a year-long investigation by an electoral monitoring group has cast doubts on the legitimacy of his 2018 landslide.

NGO Unhack Democracy Europe claims Orban’s Fidesz party may not have its two-thirds majority in the Hungarian parliament without manipulation and fraud.

Activists from the group interviewed 170 opposition ballot counting officers, and they heard reports of a wide range of malpractice, including vote buying, intimidation, forged logs, and voters being brought in from neighbouring countries.

Garvan Walshe, the chair of Unhack Democracy Europe told Euronews: “There has been talk of pressure coming from the centre and the pattern of incidents suggests that it was not isolated cases but a national phenomenon.”

“It suggests a sustained pressure; whether this is happening out of a central direction or whether this is happening out of initiative, we don’t know, but it’s clearly happening.”

According to Zsofia Banuta, a researcher for Unhack Democracy Europethe findings “reveal a wide range of malpractice and irregularities and outright fraud across the country including vote buying, intimidation of voters and ballot counters as well.

She added they had heard of “forged voter logs, and the bussing of voters from across the border from Serbia, Ukraine and Romania”.

Their report was presented to the European Parliament in Brussels, and they recommend the EU should use their findings in the ongoing Article 7 procedure, which is looking into the rule of law in Hungary and could lead to sanctions.

Euronews has asked the Hungarian government, the national election office and Fidesz for comment.

The battle for control of UK food delivery firm Just Eat has intensified as rival bidder Prosus raised its offer to £5.1bn.

Prosus is seeking to break up the agreed merger between Just Eat and Dutch rival Takeaway.com, a deal that would create one of the world’s biggest online food delivery companies.

Prosus, the Amsterdam-listed offshoot of South African technology group Naspers, launched a rival 710p a share cash offer in October and has raised its terms to 740p a share, further above Takeaway.com’s £4.8bn offer. Prosus argued that its bid was “the only one that delivers certainty in the face of undeniable industry change”.

Just Eat said its board was studying the increased offer, and advised shareholders to take no action.

The Prosus chief executive, Bob van Dijk, said: “We have had the opportunity to listen to the views of Just Eat shareholders, share our perspective on the global food delivery sector and reflect on the unquestionable challenges Just Eat faces, as clearly seen in its third quarter results.

“We have also had extensive discussions with our own shareholders with regards to our long term strategy for food delivery and Just Eat’s role within that.”

Prosus reduced the level of acceptances required from 75% to a simple majority (50% plus one Just Eat share). Shareholders have until 1pm on 27 December to make up their minds.

Takeaway.com insisted its all-share offer remains “far superior”. Jitse Groen, its chief executive, said: “A slightly higher derisory cash bid remains a derisory cash bid.”

The board of Just Eat has continued to recommend the Dutch offer despite higher terms from Prosus.

Just Eat shares closed at 777p on Friday, valuing the company at £5.3bn, and rose to 784.4p on Monday morning.

Cat Rock, a top 10 Just Eat shareholder, is maintaining its backing for Takeaway.com’s bid, saying it would only support Prosus if its offer were raised to 925p a share.

Alex Captain, Cat Rock’s founder and managing partner, said: “Prosus continues to dramatically undervalue Just Eat.

“We think a Prosus cash bid needs to be at least five times 2020 consensus revenue, or 925p per share, in order to compete with a Takeaway.com merger that we believe could comfortably be worth 1,200p per share by the end of 2020.”

Prosus became Europe’s biggest listed consumer internet firm when it floated on the Amsterdam stock exchange with a value of more than €100bn (£84bn) in September, and is controlled by Naspers, one of Africa’s most valuable companies.

With growing competition from Uber Eats and Deliveroo, there have been a number of deals in the fast-growing online food delivery market. Just Eat bought UK rival HungryHouse in January 2018, while Takeaway.com acquired Delivery Hero’s food delivery business in Germany last December.

Prosus has a 22% stake in the DeliveryHero business outside Europe, alongside holdings in India’s Swiggy and iFood in Latin America.

The controversial 2019 Nobel literature laureate, Austrian author Peter Handke, gave his inaugural lecture on Saturday night in front of the Swedish Academy and in the face of intense criticism of his selection for the honour.

Handke, 77, who is perhaps best known for cowriting the film Wings of Desire, is accused of supporting the genocidal Serbian regime led by Slobodan Milošević and of denying the extent of Serbian terror and killing during the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia.

Since the announcement of the prize in October, international writers and human rights campaigners have called upon academicians to change their minds. Two Nobel committee members have resigned, while others, including the former permanent secretary, the historian and writer Peter Englund, refused to attend this year.

The award has been especially attacked in ethnic-Albanian majority Kosovo, which was a Serbian province until it broke away after the 1998-99 war and a place in which Serbia carried out mass atrocities.

On Saturday, the Kosova government announced it will boycott the formal ceremony on Tuesday, in which Handke will receive his SEK9m (£743,000) prize money and his medal. Kosovo’s ambassador to the US, Vlora Çitaku, has already called the choice of Handke “scandalous … a preposterous and shameful decision”.

Quoting at great length from his dramatic poem, Walk About the Villages, Handke gave the Stockholm dignitaries gathered in the city’s old town an elliptical and lyrical speech, avoiding direct reference to the row surrounding this year’s prize. He did finish his lecture, however, by referring to the time he had spent avoiding protesters in Norway when he was given the Henrik Ibsen award in 2014. He spoke with warmth of a moment when one of his bodyguards had shared some Norwegian love poetry with him on the screen of his mobile phone. In his speech accepting that prize, he had told his critics: “Go to hell, where you already are.”

His Nobel lecture, instead, drew heavily on Slovenian-Slavic religious litanies. Handke reminisced about hearing them “beneath the romanesque arches of the church” near his birthplace village of Stara Vas in Slovenia on the Austrian border .

He quoted a long rote of epithets and invocations from the Laurentian Litany to Our Lady.

His long creative career, Handke said, had been given its rhythms, and even its “oomph”, not just from books, but from paintings and films. He listed the westerns of John Ford and Yasujirō Ozu’s Easterns, as well as the music of Johnny Cash, Leonard Cohen and Bob Marley.

On Friday, Handke dismissed questions from journalists about his admiration of Milošević and his denial of the Srebrenica massacre, in which almost 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed, saying it was not the moment to answer “ignorant” queries. He added: “This is a very long story. To tell this story here, I think it’s not the moment.”

In defence of the Nobel committee’s choice of Handke, its chair, Anders Olsson, has emphasised that “the ambition is to celebrate his extraordinary literary work, not the person”. Olsson also told Mehmet Kraja, president of the Academy of Sciences and Arts in Kosovo: “It is clear that Handke is understood in different ways … When Handke is awarded the prize, the ambition is to celebrate his extraordinary literary work, not the person … We should strive to respect each other notwithstanding sharply diverging views in important matters.”

Nevertheless, a petition signed by almost 60,000 people calling on the Nobel committee to revoke the award from the “apologist for the ‘butcher of Balkans’, Milošević is due to be delivered by protesters at Tuesday’s ceremony in Stockholm.

Also giving her Nobel lecture on Saturday, just ahead of Handke, was Polish feminist writer Olga Tokarczuk, 57, who won the 2018 medal, postponed as a result of another scandal that engulfed the jury last year.

Tokarczuk’s speech did not tackle criticism of Handke head-on, but was much more forthright. Her subject was the enduring importance and power of story-telling in efforts to establish historical truth.

“A thing that happens and is not told ceases to exist and perishes. This is a fact well known to not only historians, but also (and perhaps above all) to every stripe of politician and tyrant. He who has and weaves the story is in charge,” she said, going on to refer to the new difficulties literature and history face in the age of online international communications.

“The internet, completely and unreflectively subject to market processes and dedicated to monopolists, controls gigantic quantities of data used not at all pansophically, for the broader access to information, but on the contrary, serving above all to program the behaviour of users, as we learned after the Cambridge Analytica affair,” she said.

“Instead of hearing the harmony of the world, we have heard a cacophony of sounds, an unbearable static in which we try, in despair, to pick up on some quieter melody, even the weakest beat.”

EU member states have signalled a refusal to be bounced into Boris Johnson’s fast-track timetable to strike a post-Brexit trade deal.

If he wins a majority, the prime minister has vowed to take the UK out of the EU on 31 January and agree a trade deal with the bloc within 11 months, an unprecedentedly short time for such a complex negotiation.

Johnson, who has built his election campaign around the misleading slogan “Get Brexit done”, has promised not to extend the 11-month transition period, seen by many as far too short to agree a future relationship with the EU.

EU leaders will promise to move “swiftly” to the next phase of UK negotiations, according to a leaked version of their communique to be adopted at a summit next Friday – the day after the general election.

But a reference to “making the best possible use of the limited time available” that was contained in an earlier version of the text has been dropped. EU ambassadors preparing the document have serious doubts about the 11-month timetable and opposed sending this positive signal to Johnson.

The EU’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, has said it would be possible to negotiate a basic free-trade deal with the UK in 11 months. Others are more sceptical, with one senior diplomat saying he could not imagine it in his wildest dreams.

Some diplomats are counting on Johnson to abandon his principles, encouraged by earlier U-turns, such as his broken promise to the Democratic Unionist party not to have a border in the Irish Sea, as well as his “do or die” pledge to leave the EU on 31 October.

“Of course Boris said he would rather die in a ditch; he didn’t die in a ditch, but he accepted to go beyond 31 October,” said one senior EU diplomat. “It is not unlikely that there could be an extension of the transition period.”

The diplomat added that Johnson had proved “more pragmatic than anyone expected”.

The UK can extend the Brexit transition period once for one or two years, but must agree this extension with the EU before 1 July 2020.

The latest EU text also has a reference to “the level playing field”, meaning the UK must respect core EU standards on workers’ rights, state aid, and environmental and consumer protection, to reach a deal ensuring zero tariffs and zero quotas on British goods.

The document, which may change again, is to be adopted by EU leaders at the summit in Brussels on 13 December.

The EU’s default scenario is a Johnson victory, but officials have also discussed how to respond to Jeremy Corbyn in No 10, which is seen as less likely.

The Labour leader has pledged to “get Brexit sorted” by negotiating a new deal with the EU in three months and organising a referendum within six. While EU sources see the Corbyn renegotiation timetable as doable, one former government adviser has said it “seems almost impossible” to organise a referendum in six months.

Corbyn’s pledge to remain neutral in any referendum on his revised deal “does not do much for his credibility”, the diplomat said. Nonetheless, sources say the EU would engage with a potential prime minister Corbyn, once his government filed a request to delay Brexit and revealed details of its renegotiation plan.

The Liberal Democrat MEP Luisa Porritt said: “This leak shows that, under Boris Johnson, Brexit negotiations are set to drag on and on. The chances of a no-deal Brexit at the end of 2020 are increasing dramatically.

“Unlike Boris Johnson, other European leaders are being honest about how long a free-trade negotiation takes.”

The European Space Agency is working to tackle the issue of space debris with the technological version of a big hug.

It hopes to be able to use tentacle-like mechanical arms to embrace a dead satellite and remove it from orbit.

Other options considered include casting a net over the object, using a single robotic arm or firing a harpoon.

At Esa’s ministerial council last month, the agency allocated €412m to space safety programmes, some of which will go towards a mission aimed at removing defunct satellites from orbit.

The head of Esa’s space debris office, Holger Krag, said work on developing the mission would start now with the aim of designing something that could be used again.

“The goal is to make these removal actions happen more frequently, and therefore they need to be cheap,” he said. “The technology that we will most likely use now is actually consisting of some sort of arms, like tentacles, that embrace the object because you can capture the object before you touch it.”

Space junk has become a growing concern as the debris has the potential to collide and cause damage to working satellites. Of the almost 4,500 satellites in orbit, only 1,500 are active.

The UK Space Agency has committed £374m a year with Esa to deliver international space programmes over the next five years.
This will secure its involvement in the mission to remove space junk.

Krag said Esa had a fleet of 20 spacecraft to operate, and for these spacecraft it received several hundred collision alerts a day. Almost all of them were false.

“Why are they false alerts? Because there’s a limited accuracy of the data, and we are acting based on probability. So whenever the collision probability is higher than one in 10,000, we manoeuvre. But that means in 9,999 cases there would have not been a collision if you did not manoeuvre.”

He said the manoeuvres used up fuel and interrupted missions. “If you run a very expensive science mission, in particular, and you have to interrupt the data for one hour in order to fit the manoeuvre in, you have a community of 1,000 scientists waiting for the data and that’s an economic loss that I wouldn’t even know how to put in numbers.”

Emmanuel Macron is facing the biggest strikes of his presidency, as French rail workers, air-traffic controllers, teachers and public sector staff staged walkouts and took to the streets against proposed changes to the pension system.

Rail services almost ground to a halt, with 82% of drivers on strike and at least 90% of regional trains cancelled, amid fears that the open-ended transport disruption could continue for days. In Paris, 11 out of 16 metro lines were shut, forcing commuters to scramble to hire bikes and scooters.

Many schools were closed and even some police unions warned of “symbolic” closures of certain police stations. Shops along the route of a march in Paris were advised to closed in case of violence on the edges of the demonstration.

About half of the scheduled Eurostar trains between Paris and London have been cancelled. Tourists were turned away at the Eiffel Tower because of the strike.

The standoff is a crucial test for the centrist French president, whose planned overhaul of the pensions system was a key election promise.

The government argues that unifying the pensions system – and getting rid of the 42 “special” regimes for sectors ranging from rail and energy workers to lawyers and Paris Opera staff – is crucial to keep the system financially viable as the French population ages. But unions say introducing a “universal” system for all will mean millions of workers in both the public and private sectors must work beyond the legal retirement age of 62 or face a severe drop in the value of their pensions.

The row cuts to the heart of Macron’s presidential project and his promise to deliver the biggest transformation of the French social model and welfare system since the postwar era. Since his election in 2017, Macron has leaned towards a Nordic style of “flexi-security” in which the labour market is loosened and the focus is on changing from a rigid work code to a society of individuals moving between jobs.

Pension reform is the latest step for Macron after he overhauled labour rules and changed the unemployment system, but it has always been an extremely sensitive topic in France.

Macron’s approval ratings, at about 30%, have improved since the height of last year’s gilets jaunes anti-government protests. But while many French voters agree that the pensions system should be changed, they are not sure the pro-business president can be trusted to do it. A recent Ifop poll found 76% of French people back pensions reform, but 64% do not trust the government to pull it off.

Unusually, the protest strike is going ahead before the full details of any pensions changes are known. A consultation process is still under way and parliament will not debate proposals until 2020.

Tensions are running high after months of anti-government protests by the gilets jaunes, amid a general feeling in France that life is hard and public services are declining. A poll last month by Viavoice for Libération found 89% of French people felt France was experiencing a “social crisis”.

Beyond trade unions, there is an angry grassroots base of rail-workers and other state-workers keen to put pressure on the government. It is not certain how long the transport strike will continue.

At Place de la République in central Paris, Didier Dupir from Lyon was among firefighters from the Sud trade union staging an unusual protest by sleeping outside in tents despite freezing temperatures.

He was protesting over staffing levels, remuneration and pensions. “I’ve been a firefighter for 20 years and I’ve never slept out on a demonstration like this before,” he said. “This is about getting proper recognition from the government for what firefighters do. People are very sensitive to the state of public services.”

Stewart Chau, a sociologist and consultant for Viavoice pollsters, said the public mood was of distrust rather than defiance, with people wanting pension reform but not confident in the government to carry it out.

“What’s certain is we’re in a climate of real social tension today, which goes beyond pensions. Our study in Libération found almost unanimity – 89% – of French people thinking we’re living through a social crisis, but also 64% said they felt Macron didn’t understand those social difficulties … That mood of social crisis will hang over this strike action.”

Chau said that since the gilets jaunes protests, Macron’s top-down approach to changing the French system had altered, with the government now appearing to engage in more public consultation. The challenge for the president was to balance a need for pensions changes and structural reform “while not appearing to force the changes through which could amplify the protests or generate a sense of social fracture, with different grievances joining up together”.

Carbon dioxide emissions rose weakly this year as the use of coal declined but natural gas took up the slack, a comprehensive study of the global “carbon budget” has found.

The rise in emissions was much smaller than in the last two years, but the continued increase means the world is still far from being on track to meet the goals of the Paris agreement on climate change, which would require emissions to peak then fall rapidly to reach net-zero by mid-century.

Emissions for this year will be 4% higher than those in 2015, when the Paris agreement was signed. Governments are meeting this week and next in Madrid to hammer out some of the final details for implementing the Paris deal and start work on new commitments to cut emissions by 2030. But the new report shows the increasing difficulty of that task.

Experts said it was much too early to take the slight slowdown in emissions growth this year as a sign the world was turning a corner in the climate emergency.

Joeri Rogelj, a lecturer in climate change at the Grantham Institute, Imperial College London, said: “CO₂ emissions wiggle from year to year, but it is the long-term trend that is important. The small slowdown this year is really nothing to be overly enthusiastic about. If no structural change underlies this slowdown, science tells us that emissions will simply gradually continue to increase on average.”

Such structural changes could include investment in renewable energy, low-carbon infrastructure, and plans to make buildings more energy efficient. “As long as global CO₂ emissions are not embarking on a clear downward trajectory it is clear that we are not only continuing to make climate change worse, we’re doing it at a pace faster than ever before,” said Rogelj.

Last week, a separate report found emissions would have to fall by 7.6% a year for the next 10 years to stay within the limits advised by scientists.

Corinne Le Quéré, a research professor at the University of East Anglia who contributed to the Global Carbon Budget analysis, called for stronger policies from governments to phase out fossil fuels.

“Current climate and energy policies are too weak to reverse trends in global emissions,” she said. “Policies have been successful to varying degrees in deploying low-carbon technologies, such as solar and wind power and electric vehicles. But these often add to existing demand for energy rather than displacing technologies that emit CO₂, particularly in countries where energy demand is growing.”

Emissions from coal burning dropped by about a 10th in the US and Europe, but oil use rose by about 0.9% and gas burning by about 2.6% globally.

Glen Peters, research director at the Cicero Centre for International Climate Change Research and lead author of the Global Carbon Budget papers, which are published in the journals Nature Climate Change, Environmental Research Letters, and Earth System Science Data, said: “The weak growth in carbon dioxide emissions in 2019 was due to an unexpected decline in global coal use, but this drop was insufficient to overcome the robust growth in natural gas and oil consumption.”

While coal use has declined in the US and Europe, new coal-fired power stations are still being planned in China, India and other countries; developed countries such as Japan are funding their construction overseas.

Carbon from the burning of fossil fuels, from industrial processes and from cement manufacture increased by 0.6% in 2019, according to the provisional figures for the year. It was much slower growth than in recent years but still represented an increase.

Emissions fell year-on-year by about 1.7% in the US and EU, but rose in China, the world’s biggest emitter, as well as in India and most of the rest of the world.

Taken over the last 10 years, emissions have grown by an average of 0.9% a year. That is an improvement on the 3% a year that was the average for the 2000s, and emissions fell during the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, and reached a brief plateau from 2014 to 2016.

However, broadly the pattern has still been an increase. In 2017, emissions grew by 1.5% and in 2018 by 2.1%.

European leaders will make a fresh push to agree a target for a climate neutral EU by 2050, a leaked document has shown. The EU failed to agree an EU-wide 2050 target last June, after Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Estonia refused to join 24 countries in making the pledge. Estonia has since come on board, but the three other governments have not publicly agreed to the target, although officials hope they will agree, in exchange for funding in the next EU budget to help “green” their economies.

The leaked council conclusions, seen by the Guardian, have been drafted ahead of an EU leaders’ summit next week. The document, which could change, also calls on the European commission to propose a revised EU climate target for 2030. The EU currently aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40% by 2030 (compared with 1990 levels), which campaigners say is woefully inadequate. Last week the European parliament called for a target of a 55% cut when it declared a climate emergency.

Leaked documents said by Labour to prove that the NHS was “on the table” in trade talks with the US were initially disseminated online by anonymous posters operating in a way similar to a Russian information operation known as Secondary Infektion, according to a social media research firm.

A 19-page report published on Monday by the consultancy Graphika said that while it could not conclusively prove a Russian origin to the leak, the early distribution of the cache of files via Reddit, three German-language websites and an anonymous Twitter account reflected a method of operation seen repeatedly over recent years.

There is no suggestion either that the NHS documents, produced by Jeremy Corbyn at a dramatic press conference last week, were fake, but the Graphika investigation highlights an intriguing series of efforts to get the leak picked up more widely at the end of October and beginning of November.

Ben Nimmo, the head of investigations at Graphika, said: “What we are saying is that the initial efforts to amplify the NHS leak closely resembles techniques used by Secondary Infektion in the past, a known Russian operation. But we do not have all the data that allows us to make a final determination in this case.”

Secondary Infektion is the name given to a Russian operation exposed by Facebook earlier this year, operating across six languages and dozens of platforms. Subsequent analysis by the Atlantic Council demonstrated it was behind a string of largely failed attempts to disseminate fake news, including a blatantly false story that British remainers were planning to assassinate Boris Johnson.

Graphika said that the NHS documents were first posted on Reddit by a user called Gregoriator, who made grammatical errors that matched those made by “Secondary Infektion”, for example by posting that the document cache showed that “Great Britain is practically standing on her knees” in seeking a US trade deal.

Two days later, a user called Max Ostermann posted three articles in German summarising the original leak on Reddit and on two small German language sites, meinbezirk.at and homment.com, before disappearing.

“This practice of employing single-use burner accounts on exactly the same combination of websites used by Secondary Infektion’s operators is a strong behavioural parallel,” Graphika’s report concluded.

A Twitter user using a now suspended account called @Gregoriator then tried to disseminate the leak in late October by tweeting a link to the Reddit posting to a range of public figures, including Labour and Liberal Democrat politicians and even to celebrities such Stephen Fry and Bette Midler, but again this did not appear to succeed.

It was only when Corbyn showed a redacted version of the trade talks documents during his head-to-head debate with Johnson on 21 November that the situation changed.

The redacted documents had been obtained by pressure group Global Justice Now via freedom of information, but after the debate a spokesman told the BBC the group had been emailed and alerted to the presence of the unredacted documents online.

On Monday night Labour would not say where it had obtained the NHS cache from, in the light of the Graphika report, but pointed out that no one had disputed they were genuine.

A party spokesman said: “These documents reveal the plot against our NHS. And, of course, neither the UK nor the US government have denied their authenticity. Given what they reveal, it’s not surprising that there are attempts to muddy the waters to cover up what has been exposed.”

Graphika’s report concluded: “The most pressing question is not who was behind the dissemination operation, but how the unredacted documents ended up in their hands in the first place. Public information on how the leak happened might begin to fill in the blanks on the actors behind it.”