Greenlandic minister Naaja Nathanielsen has praised European countries’ responses to Donald Trump’s tariffs. “I am amazed to witness the first responses from the targeted countries,” the minister for mineral resources said in a message posted on LinkedIn. “I am thankful and hopeful for diplomacy and allieship to prevail.”
Donald Trump’s threat to impose fresh tariffs on eight European countries – UK, Norway and six EU member states – is a wrecking ball to the carefully stitched deals he concluded with those countries last summer. The two biggest voting blocs in the European parliament, the European People’s Party (EPP) and the Socialists & Democrats (S&Ds), said on Saturday night the deal with the EU cannot be approved in the present circumstances. Trump’s threat also disregards the fact that individual member states do not have individual trade deals with the US. All EU international trade deals are conducted centrally through Brussels, as was the case last summer. The EU-US trade deal was agreed under considerable pressure from Trump at his Scottish golf course last July. However, while it has entered into force in the US, the 0% tariffs promised to the US have yet to be legally ratified in the EU. “The EPP is in favour of the EU-US trade deal, but given Donald Trump’s threats regarding Greenland, approval is not possible at this stage,” said Manfred Weber, the leader of the EPP. “The 0% tariffs on US products must be put on hold.” Kathleen Van Brempt, vice-president for trade for the S&Ds, said there could be “no trade deal under [the] given circumstances”. Later on Saturday, the liberal voting bloc Renew said it would join attempts to halt the ratification of the US trade deal. The UK’s trade deal, as it was described last May, is already in force, but applies to a limited number of products – cars, beef, aerospace, ethanol and steel – with a 10% tariff deal on other exports ranging from salmon to bone china. Both the EU and the UK are in the middle of sensitive negotiations to reduce tariffs Trump has already imposed, particularly on steel, which are rated at 25% for British exports and 50% for EU products. The latest threat will be seen as another attempt by a man – sometimes ally, sometimes adversary – desperate to win an argument, using one of his favourite weapons. It will also be seen as an attempt to divide Europe and quash their opposition to his Greenland takeover ambition. Saturday’s threat underlines the unstable nature of any deal with Trump but also seems to have fired up the EU, which many have considered weak in the face of multiple episodes of bullying by the US. An emergency meeting of EU ambassadors is expected on Sunday. Late last year the US commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, warned there would be no deal on reducing steel tariffs unless the EU rolled back on tech laws. This is despite the EU and the US’s common interest in forming a club to fight cheaper Chinese imports. The EU has consistently pushed back on any attempt to link tech with tariffs, and in particular to revise a €120m fine on Elon Musk’s X. It is unlikely to do anything other than issue a further statement on Saturday reiterating its right and strong intention to defend its sovereignty. Mikkel Runge Olesen, senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies, said Trump’s latest threat was a sign that Europe’s opposition to his threat to takeover Greenland was working. “I think it is a reaction to the European troops going to Greenland, because if you look at the tariffs they match the countries who sent troops,” he told Sky News. “We are never going to see American troops on the ground in Greenland, this is a negotiating tactic.”
Emmanuel Macron has hit back at Donald Trump’s latest threats to impose tariffs on any country opposing his Greenland takeover, warning that “no amount of intimidation” will persuade European nations to change their course on Greenland. The US president on Saturday announced 10% tariffs on eight European countries from 1 February, with a further 25% tariff from 1 June. Macron’s message was echoed by the Swedish prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, who warned the EU would not be “blackmailed” by Trump, and the Norwegian prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, who said “threats have no place among allies”. In a joint statement, EU leaders said “tariffs would undermine transatlantic relations and risk a dangerous downward spiral”. EU ambassadors are expected to meet for an emergency session on Sunday. Trump’s threats appear to have fired up the EU, which up to now has been loathe to go down a confrontational path, with MEPs threatening to pause the ratification of the US trade deal next week. Manfred Weber, the head of the European People’s party, the largest voting bloc in the institute, said they would have to pause the legal rubber stamping process. The tariffs threatened against Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the UK, the Netherlands and Finland target the countries that have been most vocal in their opposition to Trump’s intentions to take over Greenland. European leaders, in Paraguay to sign their biggest trade deal ever with the Mercosur alliance of South American countries, were taken by surprise by Trump’s latest outburst on Truth Social. “This Tariff will be due and payable until such time as a Deal is reached for the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland,” Trump said. Macron immediately called the tariff threats “unacceptable”. He said they had “no place” in a context in which Europe was trying to defend Greenland, and in which Denmark was an EU member state, Nato member and signatory to the UN charter embodying international law. “France is committed to the sovereignty and independence of nations, in Europe and elsewhere. This guides our choices. It underpins our commitment to the United Nations and our charter,” Macron said. “It is for this reason that we support and will continue to support Ukraine, and that we have built a coalition of the willing for robust and lasting peace, to defend these principles and our security. “It is also for this reason that we have decided to join the exercise decided by Denmark in Greenland. We stand by this decision, not least because it concerns security in the Arctic and at the borders of Europe. “No intimidation or threats will influence us, whether in Ukraine, Greenland or anywhere else in the world, when we are faced with such situations.” Kristersson warned: “We will not allow ourselves to be blackmailed. Only Denmark and Greenland decide on issues concerning Denmark and Greenland. I will always stand up for my country, and for our allied neighbours.” In their joint statement, the president of the European council of EU leaders, António Costa and the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, said they had “consistently underlined” the “shared transatlantic interest in peace and security in the Arctic, including through Nato”. They added that “dialogue remains essential”. “Tariffs would undermine transatlantic relations and risk a dangerous downward spiral,” the statement continued. “Europe will remain united, coordinated, and committed to upholding its sovereignty.” Denmark attempted to lower the diplomatic temperature in the growing crisis. In a statement, its foreign minister, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, referred to “constructive” talks with Marco Rubio last week and an acknowledgment that more had to be done to increase the security in the Arctic. “That is why we and Nato partners are stepping up in full transparency with our American allies,” he said. The threat of 10% tariffs in addition to the 15% tariffs that Trump imposed on EU exports last August was described as a “negotiating tactic” by Mikkel Runge Olesen, senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies. “I think it is a reaction to the European troops going to Greenland, because if you look at the tariffs they match the countries who sent troops,” he told Sky News. “We are never going to see American troops on the ground in Greenland; this is a negotiating tactic.” The EU-US tariff deal was agreed last August at Trump’s Scottish golf course but it has not yet been ratified by the European parliament. The German MEP Bernd Lange, chair of the trade parliamentary committee, said he expected MEPs to pause all progress on ratification. “In view of the threat of imposing an additional 10% tariff from 1 February, I cannot imagine that we will continue business as usual and I assume that we will suspend our continued work.” He added: “The EPP is in favour of the EU-US trade deal, but given Donald Trump’s threats regarding Greenland, approval is not possible at this stage. The 0% tariffs on US products must be put on hold.” Also pulling the plug on talks were the second-biggest voting bloc, the Socialists and Democrats, with Kathleen Van Brempt, its vice-president for trade, saying there could be “no trade deal under given circumstances”.
Keir Starmer has said Donald Trump’s decision to impose 10% tariffs on the UK and seven other European countries over Greenland was “completely wrong”. The US president said the levies would apply from 1 February to Nato members – including the UK, France and Germany – who have deployed troops to the territory in response to growing uncertainty over its future. Trump said the tariffs would rise to 25% on 1 June if a deal to buy Greenland had not been reached. In a Truth Social post, Trump said: “Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, The United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Finland have journeyed to Greenland, for purposes unknown … This is a very dangerous situation for the Safety, Security, and Survival of our Planet.” The prime minister said on Saturday evening: “Our position on Greenland is very clear – it is part of the Kingdom of Denmark and its future is a matter for the Greenlanders and the Danes. “We have also made clear that Arctic security matters for the whole of Nato and allies should all do more together to address the threat from Russia across different parts of the Arctic. “Applying tariffs on allies for pursuing the collective security of Nato allies is completely wrong. We will of course be pursuing this directly with the US administration.” Opposition politicians also condemned Trump’s threats. The Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, said: “President Trump is completely wrong to announce tariffs on the UK over Greenland. “These tariffs will be yet another burden for businesses across our country. The sovereignty of Greenland should only be decided by the people of Greenland.” Ed Davey, leader of the Liberal Democrats, said: “Starmer’s US policy lies in tatters. Trump is now punishing the UK and Nato allies just for doing the right thing. “Time for the PM to stand firm against the bully in the White House, and work with European and Commonwealth allies to make him back down from this reckless plan.” The Reform leader, Nigel Farage, said Trump’s Greenland tariffs would “hurt” the UK. He said: “We don’t always agree with the US government and in this case we certainly don’t.” Stella Creasy, the Labour MP for Walthamstow, said: “Trump’s tariffs and threats mean it’s make your mind up time. If we can’t rely on America and we don’t want to cosy up to China, the answer is to get serious about our strategic future with Europe. “Nato needs this too – the reset must be real, and it must happen quickly for all our sakes.” Lord Peter Ricketts, a former national security adviser and retired senior diplomat, told BBC Radio 4’s PM programme that “the right thing for the European countries is to react very calmly” and “go on making the case that America can have all its security interests served by working with Denmark and with Nato”. “Remember that in the cold war, America had 10,000 troops in Greenland, so it’s entirely open to the Americans to increase their military presence without going unilateral and these kind of threatening approaches,” he said. He added that European leaders could in private make clear that “this tariff business isn’t going to work – for one thing, the European Union has a single tariff, so he will find he can’t put tariffs on individual EU countries; it’s the EU as a whole”. “Rather than threatening tariffs, we need to be working together to work out the very legitimate issues about Greenland security – not that China is about to take it over, but that all of us in Nato have Arctic security as a priority,” he said. “The way to do this is to work together and in the past, I think Keir Starmer and others have been quite effective at working with President Trump privately, not taking him on in public, and I think we need to go back into that routine to get him to see that there are other ways of achieving what he wants without this sort of threatening, blustering language about tariffs.”
Israel has objected to the White House’s pick of world leaders who will join the so-called Gaza “board of peace”, meant to temporarily oversee governance and reconstruction in the strip. The White House and other sources announced a flurry of appointments and invitations to the organisation over the last two days, including Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the Egyptian president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, former UK prime minister Tony Blair and the president of Argentina, Javier Milei. Israel said that some of the appointments were “not coordinated with Israel and were contrary to its policy”, without specifying who it objected to. The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, also told the Israeli foreign minister to contact the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio. The group, described as the “greatest and most prestigious board ever assembled, at any time, any place” by Donald Trump on Thursday, is meant to temporarily govern Gaza in place of Hamas. The board is part of Trump’s 20-point plan to end the war in Gaza. Despite a ceasefire announced in October, Israel continues to kill Palestinians. At least 463 Palestinians have died in Gaza since the nominal truce was established. Israel also continues to restrict food and other forms of aid into the strip, with hunger prevailing in Gaza. Most of the population lives in substandard housing, with frayed tents providing little protection from the elements. Palestinians in Gaza have already died from hypothermia during particularly harsh cold snaps this winter. The exact makeup of the board of peace is still unclear, but two separate governing boards have been announced. The “founding executive board” will focus on investment and foreign relations, while the “Gaza executive board” will oversee another group, the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG), which will oversee day-to-day affairs in Gaza. Rubio is on the seven-member founding executive board, along with the US special envoy, Steve Witkoff, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, and Tony Blair, with Trump as its chair. Blair thanked Trump for the appointment and said that the NCAG was a “massive step forward”. “It gives hope to people in Gaza that they can have a future different from the past, and to the Israelis that they may have a neighbour which does not threaten its security,” Blair said in a statement. There was no word as to whether all the invitees had accepted their invitations to join the board of peace, with Sisi and Erdoğan not confirming their appointment. The US-drafted ceasefire plan for Gaza moved into its second phase this week, which includes several thorny issues, such as the disarmament of Hamas, reconstruction and the deployment of an international security force. Hamas has not yet committed to disarm, and the makeup of an international security force is still unknown. Israel has in the past objected to Turkey playing a role in the force. The board of peace will be tasked with not only running the administration of Gaza, but also its reconstruction. Most of the strip was destroyed by Israeli bombs and bulldozers during its more than two-year war, which killed more than 71,000 Palestinians.
On one side of Dr Ben Galton-Fenzi’s view across the vast Totten ice shelf, the sun sat low on the Antarctic horizon. On the other, a full moon. The ice shelf is “flat and white”, says Galton-Fenzi. “If there’s cloud around, you lose the horizon.” With temperatures at -20C and a wind chill threatening frostbite, Galton-Fenzi was there in the summer months of 2018-2019 to retrieve radar instruments that were checking the thickness of the ice. But Galton-Fenzi’s concern isn’t what’s happening on top of the ice. It’s what is happening almost two kilometres below his feet where the ocean meets the ice he is standing on. For Antarctic scientists, getting a handle on what’s happening under the ice shelves is urgent because the fate of the planet’s coastlines will depend on how fast they melt. Antarctica has more than 70 ice shelves that extend the continent’s vast ice sheet out over the ocean. Covering about 1.5m square kilometres, ice shelves float on the water and don’t by themselves push up global sea levels if they melt. But if global heating of the ocean melts them from underneath they could become unstable, allowing the ice sheet to slide faster into the ocean, pushing up global sea levels by several metres. The continent’s most vulnerable regions alone have enough ice to push up sea levels by about 15 metres if they all melt. Galton-Fenzi, a principal research scientist at the Australian Antarctic Division, led new research bringing together modelling work on this “basal melt rate” from nine groups around the world. “We need to know because the ocean-driven mass loss is one of the biggest uncertainties in Antarctica ice sheet projections and, therefore, in global sea level rise,” says Galton-Fenzi. Taking the nine different models together, Galton-Fenzi and colleagues estimate that over recent decades the continent’s ice shelves lost about 843bn tonnes of mass every year from melting underneath. That is the equivalent of 843 giant ice cubes – each a kilometre long, wide and deep – all melting. It is about the same amount of water that flows from the Nile River into the ocean each year. The results of the analysis – which took a decade to pull together – will help refine future modelling. Antarctica’s ice shelves lose mass when the edges calve into the ocean, but they also gain it from snowfall. Confusing matters even further, there is evidence global heating has caused higher snowfall over the continent. One comprehensive analysis of Antarctica’s entire ice sheet found that, on balance, satellite data suggested the continent lost 93bn tonnes of ice between 1992 and 2020. Galton-Fenzi says: “Knowing the role of the ocean in driving the mass loss and how that feeds back into the flow of the ice into the ocean is a key problem that a lot of nations are working on. “We do know with very high confidence what the sign of the change will be. The ice sheets will keep losing mass. It is how fast and how much is where the uncertainty is.” Coldest water on Earth At the ocean surface, seawater freezes at about -1.9C but under an ice shelf where the water can be a kilometre or more down, the pressure means the ocean water doesn’t freeze until about -2.2C. “The coldest water anywhere in the ocean is beneath the Antarctic ice shelves. There is no light,” says Dr Steve Rintoul, an oceanographer and leading Antarctic expert at the Australian government’s science agency, the CSIRO. “All our conventional tools to measure the ocean can’t reach it,” he says. “Satellites can’t reach it because it’s covered in ice. Ships can’t get in. The shelves are surrounded by heavy sea ice and they’re often heavily crevassed on the surface. Even if you could drill a hole, it’s challenging to get people there.” Only a handful of holes have been drilled and they can only provide data on what conditions look like in one place amid a vast undersea freezing landscape. But Rintoul’s team got lucky. Scientists use autonomous floating instruments known as Argo floats to measure ocean temperatures and salinity around the world. Rintoul and colleagues deployed one underneath the Totten ice shelf but it drifted away, spending nine months instead under two other ice shelves more than 300 metres thick. The float’s data showed that one of those shelves – the Denman – was being exposed to warm water that was melting it from below. Rintoul says the Denman catchment holds enough water to cause 1.5 metres of global sea level rise. “Its configuration is such that once it gets past a certain point it can retreat in an unstable way without any more [influence] from the ocean.” In the geological past when the Earth was covered by more ice than today, the glaciers of Antarctica carved giant canyons as they expanded. “They were seeding their own demise, because that’s a deep channel that the warm water can come into,” says Rintoul. Urgent questions Dr Sue Cook, a glaciologist at the University of Tasmania, says in any normal healthy ice sheet, there would be melting from below. But the relative shortage of data means there are large uncertainties about how quickly the ice shelves will change, which means some of the more extreme impacts on the planet are difficult to rule out – not just those that could alter coastlines. Cook points to another “really urgent question” around Antarctica: how the increasing amounts of meltwater could slow down major ocean circulations that could have profound impacts around the world. “That could disrupt some of the very large scale ocean currents, but we really don’t know if it will happen or not. So the models can help us to look into the future. “This ocean conveyor belt is what helps the climate to stay relatively stable. If it gets disrupted, then the consequences could be dramatic.” Cook adds: “We don’t have the full understanding that we need to predict the future changes.” Rintoul says while some of the impacts – such as extreme sea level rise – could take centuries of melting, “we commit to that ice loss much sooner than that”. “It depends how much greenhouse gas we emit. There’s a reason the international community came up with temperature targets – they came in large part because of the risk of destabilising the Antarctic ice sheet. “It changes the map and we can’t put the genie back in the bottle.”
A 27-day-old baby died in Gaza on Saturday from severe cold, bringing the number of children in the region who have died of hypothermia since the start of the current winter season to eight, according to the Palestinian health ministry. Medical sources confirmed to the news agency Anadolu that the newborn, named Aisha Ayesh al-Agha, died as a result of freezing temperatures, and that when she was brought to Nasser hospital in Khan Younis it was already too late to save her. No further details were revealed about the infant’s condition prior to her death. Two recent reports by Physicians for Human Rights, in collaboration with the Global Human Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, document how the war has led to high figures for maternal and neonatal mortality. The document reports “2,600 miscarriages, 220 pregnancy-related deaths, 1,460 premature births, over 1,700 underweight newborns and over 2,500 infants requiring neonatal intensive care” between January and June 2025. Mothers in Gaza are forced into unthinkable choices, routinely compromising their own health and survival to meet their children’s most basic needs. With maternal and newborn care dismantled by fuel shortages, blocked medical supplies, mass displacement and relentless bombardment, relocating to overcrowded tent encampments has become the only remaining option. In the first months of 2025 there were 17,000 recorded births, a 41% drop from the same period in 2022. Life in Gaza remains precarious. A Unicef spokesperson, James Elder, said more than 100 children had been killed in the territory since the ceasefire came into force in October. While airstrikes and gunfire have slowed, they have not ceased. Recent storms have compounded the crisis, causing deaths and flooding in displacement camps already stretched beyond their limits. Strong winter winds caused walls to collapse on to flimsy tents for displaced Palestinians on Tuesday, killing at least four people. The Gaza health ministry said on Tuesday that another baby, aged one, died of hypothermia overnight. At least 464 Palestinians have been killed and nearly 1,280 others injured in Israeli attacks since the ceasefire, according to the health ministry.
Yoweri Museveni, has won the Ugandan election and his seventh term with more than 70% of the vote, state election authorities have said, amid an internet shutdown and claims of fraud by his opponent. His opponent, a youthful musician known as Bobi Wine, condemned what he called “fake results” and alleged that members of polling staff were kidnapped, among other election irregularities. He called for peaceful protests to pressure the authorities to release what he called the “rightful results”. Wine also alleged that he fled his home to escape arrest by security forces who raided his house on Friday, with his political party claiming earlier that he had been taken from his home in an army helicopter. “Last night was very difficult at our home … The military and the police raided us. They switched off power and cut off some of our CCTV cameras,” Wine said in a post on X. In an earlier statement, Ugandan police said that Wine had not been arrested, but that they were restricting the area to the public to prevent unrest. Among the irregularities was the failure of biometric voter ID machines which delayed voting in cities – large bases of support for the political opposition. Pro-democracy activists had asked that the machines be used in elections to prevent any allegations of voter fraud and rigging. Electoral officials then resorted to manual lists of voters, which Wine alleged allowed for “massive ballot stuffing”, as well as claims of favouritism to the incumbent’s party. Museveni endorsed the use of the manual voter register. Despite the internet shutdown and allegations of fraud, the election largely passed with little incident, save a clash between police and opposition in central Uganda. Seven people died and three were injured after police fired in self-defence against opposition “goons”, police said, a claim disputed by MP Muwanga Kivumbi, who said security forces killed 10 people in his house. Uganda is termed as “not free” by rights monitor Freedom House, which noted that while the country holds regular elections, they are not considered credible. Museveni, 81, has been the president of the country for 40 years, making him the third-longest-serving non-royal national leader in the world. Uganda has not had a peaceful transition of power since it gained its independence from British colonialism six decades ago. Museveni has rewritten Uganda’s laws to stay in power, including by removing term and age limits from the constitution. He has also jailed opposition opponents. He has overseen a period of stability in Uganda, which has allowed the economy to grow, with growth forecasted to rise next year. Wine wore a flak jacket and helmet due to fears over his safety, as he alleged security forces harassed him and his supporters including through the use of teargas.