Emmanuel Macron has added his voice to a growing chorus of European criticism of Elon Musk, accusing the world’s richest man of intervening directly in the continent’s democratic processes, including Germany’s snap federal elections next month.

The French president joined the Norwegian and British prime ministers and a German government spokesperson on Monday in responding to a barrage of hostile posts by Musk backing far-right political parties and attacking leftwing politicians in Europe.

The owner of the social media platform X is a close ally of Donald Trump and, after spending more than $250m (£210m) to help get him re-elected, has been asked by the incoming US president to cut the federal budget as a special adviser.

“Ten years ago, who would have imagined that the owner of one of the world’s largest social networks would be supporting a new international reactionary movement and intervening directly in elections, including in Germany,” Macron said.

In a speech to French ambassadors, the French president said Trump “knows he has a strong ally in France” and refrained from mentioning Musk by name – as did Norway’s centre-left prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre.

There was no doubt, however, who either leader was talking about.

“I find it worrying that a man with enormous access to social media and huge economic resources involves himself so directly in the internal affairs of other countries,” Støre told public broadcaster NRK. “This is not the way things should be between democracies and allies.”

In response to a question about what would happen were Musk to involve himself directly in Norwegian politics, Støre added that he hoped the country’s politicians – who face a general election in September – “would warn against, and distance themselves from, such efforts”.

A German government spokesperson did mention Musk by name, insisting his influence on voters was limited. “Normal people, sensible people, decent people are in a big majority in this country,” the spokesperson told a regular press conference in Berlin.

“We act as if Mr Musk’s Twitter statements could influence a country of 84 million people with untruths or half-truths or expressions of opinion,” the spokesperson added. “This is simply not the case.”

Berlin last week accused Musk, who is also the chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, of trying to influence the country’s crunch 23 February federal elections with a controversial guest opinion piece for the Welt am Sonntag newspaper.

The billionaire is also due to take part in a livestreamed hour-long chat with the leader of the far-right, anti-immigration Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, Alice Weidel, on X later this week. In a post last month he said “only the AfD can save Germany”.

Musk has claimed the party, running second in the polls, is the “last spark of hope” for Germany. He has also called the country’s Social Democratic chancellor, Olaf Scholz, “a fool” and its president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, an “anti-democratic tyrant”.

Germany’s vice-chancellor, Robert Habeck, said on Monday that Musk’s support for the AfD was a “logical and systematic” play by the billionaire for a weaker Europe that would not be able to regulate social media and other tech firms as strongly.

Scholz himself said at the weekend in an interview with Stern magazine that he would make no efforts to engage with Musk. “I don’t believe in courting Mr Musk’s favour. I’m happy to leave that to others,” he said. “The rule is: don’t feed the troll.”

The British prime minister, Keir Starmer, on Monday defended his record after days of hostile attacks from Musk and said people spreading lies and misinformation online were not interested in supporting those affected, only in themselves.

Musk’s tirade has focused on child sexual abuse scandals that first emerged during Starmer’s tenure as director of public prosecutions, demanding a new public inquiry and calling on the Labour prime minister to resign.

Responding to a question about Musk, Starmer said he was “not going to individualise this to Elon Musk” but added “a line has been crossed” with some of the criticism. Musk later described the prime minister as “utterly despicable” in a new X post.

The US Congress will certify Donald Trump’s presidential election victory on Monday in an event heavy with symbolism four years to the day since the he incited a violent mob to disrupt a similar ceremony in an attempt to overturn his 2020 election defeat.

The vice-president, Kamala Harris, Trump’s defeated Democratic opponent in November’s election, will preside over a joint Senate and House of Representatives session to validate the result, which longstanding convention dictates should be a mere formality in the peaceful transfer of power.

However, the proceedings will take place amid unprecedented security measures from US Capitol and Washington DC police, fearful of a repeat of the tumultuous events of 6 January 2021, when Trump’s supporters tried to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s victory amid false allegations that it had been stolen.

In an op-ed published by the Washington Post on Sunday, Biden implored Americans to remember the painful lessons learned in the wake of the January 6 attack on the Capitol.

“We should be proud that our democracy withstood this assault. And we should be glad we will not see such a shameful attack again this year,” Biden wrote. “But we should not forget. We must remember the wisdom of the adage that any nation that forgets its past is doomed to repeat it. We cannot accept a repeat of what occurred four years ago.”

To prevent any potential disruption on Monday, the US Capitol police has taken additional precautions, including the deployment of new equipment and more staff, to ensure a smooth certification process.

“We cannot be taken by surprise again,” Tom Manger, chief of the US Capitol police, has said, referring to how police four years ago were outnumbered and overwhelmed by the rampaging mob.

In 2021, members of Congress and senators were forced to seek shelter as rioters ransacked offices and searched for leading congressional members, including the then House speaker, Nancy Pelosi.

Harris’s predecessor as vice-president, Mike Pence – charged with the same constitutional role of presiding over the certification – was spirited from the building by security personnel as rioters chanted “hang Mike Pence” after he refused to comply with Trump’s demand that he decline to accept the result and instead throw the election his way.

A rerun of four years ago is highly unlikely on Monday, however. Democrats have accepted Trump’s electoral college and popular vote victory without demur. They have signalled that they will not even lodge symbolic challenges to his electors, as some of them did after his 2016 victory, which he gained through the electoral college system while losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton.

This time, Trump won both the electoral college, by 312 to 226, as well as the popular vote, by a margin of about 2.5m.

“I think you’re going to have a pretty sort of normal transfer, and I think we will respect the wishes of the American people … in contrast to what happened January 6, 2021,” Joe Morelle, a representative from New York who is the ranking Democrat on the House committee charged with overseeing elections, told Politico. “I do feel like that’s worth saying over and over again.”

More than 1,500 people have been charged with offences in relation to the 2021 attack, which resulted in five deaths on the day and a further four in the days and months that followed, including police officers who killed themselves. About 1,000 participants have been convicted.

Trump has promised to issue presidential pardons to some of the January 6 attackers beginning in the “first hour” of his second term, which will start later this month, but Manger has warned that such a decision could jeopardize the safety of all US law enforcement officers.

“What message does that send?” Manger told the Washington Post on Sunday. “What message does that send to police officers across this nation, if someone doesn’t think that a conviction for an assault or worse against a police officer is something that should be upheld, given what we ask police officers to do every day?”

It sounds like one of Kipling’s Just So Stories but it is rooted in science: experts say they have a new theory for how Pluto got its largest moon.

Pluto – once considered the ninth planet of our solar system, but now classified as a “dwarf planet” – has five known moons, of which Charon is the largest with a diameter of about 754 miles, just over half that of Pluto itself.

Unlike Earth, where the moon orbits the planet, Pluto and Charon orbit each other, with the icy bodies found in the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune.

Now experts say they have unpicked how the system came to be, suggesting Charon and Pluto ended up orbiting each other after a “kiss-and-capture” event.

In this scenario Charon crashed into Pluto and the pair briefly rotated together – resembling, the researchers say, a giant snowperson – before breaking apart. This left each body largely distinct and intact, albeit with some material exchanged.

“Because Pluto is rotating rapidly prior to the collision, and because Charon lies mostly outside of their corotation zone, it is able to ‘push’ Charon off, and Charon starts to slowly migrate out,” said Dr Adeene Denton, first author of the research from the University of Arizona.

The findings pushed back against previous theories that Charon was formed when a large object collided with Pluto, causing both bodies to deform and mix like blobs in a lava lamp. It was proposed that as part of this process Charon was produced, and then captured in orbit. A similar process is thought to have led to the formation of our moon after a huge Mars-sized object smashed into Earth.

Writing in the journal Nature Geoscience, Denton and colleagues report how they made their new findings after creating computer models that included crucial information on Pluto and Charon: their strength.

This, Denton said, was previously overlooked as the models were originally created to explore collisions of galaxies, giant planets and other large bodies where strength was less important and colliding bodies could be treated as fluids.

However, the team said small bodies such as Pluto and Charon would have collided relatively slowly.

“What that means is that, because they’re made of rock and ice, they respond the way those materials would under stress, and not like fluids,” said Denton.

While Denton said further work was needed to explore whether Pluto’s smaller moons arose from debris released in the collision, she added that the event could have affected the subsequent geologic evolution of Pluto and Charon – including whether they formed and sustained subsurface oceans.

“The impact dumps a bunch of heat into Pluto, followed by more heating as Charon starts to move away, which could be the start of a new geologic era that culminates in the surface we observed from New Horizons [space probe] in 2015,” she said.

“Moreover, because eight out of 10 of the largest Kuiper Belt objects have a large satellite like Charon , kiss and capture might have been a prolific event across the Kuiper Belt as the solar system formed.”

It sounds like one of Kipling’s Just So Stories but it is rooted in science: experts say they have a new theory for how Pluto got its largest moon.

Pluto – once considered the ninth planet of our solar system, but now classified as a “dwarf planet” – has five known moons, of which Charon is the largest with a diameter of about 754 miles, just over half that of Pluto itself.

Unlike Earth, where the moon orbits the planet, Pluto and Charon orbit each other, with the icy bodies found in the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune.

Now experts say they have unpicked how the system came to be, suggesting Charon and Pluto ended up orbiting each other after a “kiss-and-capture” event.

In this scenario Charon crashed into Pluto and the pair briefly rotated together – resembling, the researchers say, a giant snowperson – before breaking apart. This left each body largely distinct and intact, albeit with some material exchanged.

“Because Pluto is rotating rapidly prior to the collision, and because Charon lies mostly outside of their corotation zone, it is able to ‘push’ Charon off, and Charon starts to slowly migrate out,” said Dr Adeene Denton, first author of the research from the University of Arizona.

The findings pushed back against previous theories that Charon was formed when a large object collided with Pluto, causing both bodies to deform and mix like blobs in a lava lamp. It was proposed that as part of this process Charon was produced, and then captured in orbit. A similar process is thought to have led to the formation of our moon after a huge Mars-sized object smashed into Earth.

Writing in the journal Nature Geoscience, Denton and colleagues report how they made their new findings after creating computer models that included crucial information on Pluto and Charon: their strength.

This, Denton said, was previously overlooked as the models were originally created to explore collisions of galaxies, giant planets and other large bodies where strength was less important and colliding bodies could be treated as fluids.

However, the team said small bodies such as Pluto and Charon would have collided relatively slowly.

“What that means is that, because they’re made of rock and ice, they respond the way those materials would under stress, and not like fluids,” said Denton.

While Denton said further work was needed to explore whether Pluto’s smaller moons arose from debris released in the collision, she added that the event could have affected the subsequent geologic evolution of Pluto and Charon – including whether they formed and sustained subsurface oceans.

“The impact dumps a bunch of heat into Pluto, followed by more heating as Charon starts to move away, which could be the start of a new geologic era that culminates in the surface we observed from New Horizons [space probe] in 2015,” she said.

“Moreover, because eight out of 10 of the largest Kuiper Belt objects have a large satellite like Charon , kiss and capture might have been a prolific event across the Kuiper Belt as the solar system formed.”

South Korea’s investigating authorities have requested an extension of a warrant to arrest the country’s impeached president, Yoon Suk Yeol.

The corruption investigation office for high-ranking officials (CIO) made the application at Seoul western district court on Monday.

On Friday the CIO had failed again to serve an arrest warrant on Yoon over his declaration of martial law on 3 December 2024 after presidential security service guards formed a human chain to prevent access to him.

The arrest warrant, the first for a sitting president, was due to expire at midnight on Monday (1500 GMT).

Yoon is under criminal investigation for possible insurrection over his brief, six-hour martial law declaration, which plunged one of Asia’s strongest democracies into uncharted territory.

Yoon’s actions drew a rare rebuke from officials in Washington, including the US secretary of state Antony Blinken’s deputy, Kurt Campbell, who has said it was “badly misjudged”.

Speaking after his meeting with the South Korean foreign minister, Cho Tae-yul, Blinken said Washington had expressed “serious concerns” to Seoul over some of the actions Yoon took over the course of his martial law declaration.

Yoon was impeached by parliament on 14 December and suspended from presidential duties. The constitutional court is trying the case to decide whether to remove him from office permanently or reinstate him.

The CIO, which is leading the criminal insurrection investigation into Yoon, has sent a notice to police requesting them to take over execution of the arrest warrant. A police official said at a news briefing that police believed there was a legal dispute over such a transfer and would discuss it with the CIO.

Yonhap news cited a police official as saying the arrest warrant would now be executed under the authority of the police joint investigation team and the CIO.

Yoon’s lawyers have argued that the CIO anti-graft force has no authority under South Korean law to investigate any case involving insurrection accusations.

On Monday, Seok Dong-hyeon, a lawyer advising Yoon, said the attempt to transfer the execution of the arrest warrant was effectively an admission by the CIO that its investigation and the warrant were “illegal”.

The unprecedented attempt to arrest an incumbent president has intensified duelling rallies by those supporting Yoon, with the “Stop the Steal” slogans popularised by Donald Trump voters, and those calling for Yoon’s punishment.

On Monday, a group of hardcore Yoon supporters led by a Christian pastor, Jun Kwang-hoon, held a news conference and described the fight for the impeached leader as an “international battle” for freedom.

“Sadly, there’s no Fox News in Korea,” it said in a statement, referring to the US cable news channel popular with Trump supporters.

Jun said Yoon supporters would continue rallies outside his residence until they “reap the results”.

Austria’s president has tasked the anti-migration, pro-Kremlin Freedom party (FPÖ) with holding talks to form a ruling coalition, potentially paving the way for the far right to lead the government for the first time since the second world war.

After meeting the FPÖ leader, Herbert Kickl, at the Hofburg palace in Vienna, Alexander van der Bellen said the party, which narrowly won the most votes in September’s general election, could begin negotiations with the conservative Austrian People’s party (ÖVP) on forming a governing alliance.

“I didn’t take this decision lightly,” said the president, who under the constitution formally names the chancellor. “I will continue to make sure that the principles and rules of our constitution are respected and upheld.”

Months-long negotiations by mainstream parties to form a coalition to block the far right collapsed at the weekend because of differences on how to revive the ailing Austrian economy and manage public finances.

The chancellor, Karl Nehammer of the ÖVP, announced his intention to resign on Saturday after the talks broke down. He had repeatedly ruled out becoming junior partner to the FPÖ with Kickl as the head of government. Some commentators said the U-turn by Nehammer’s party bordered on voter fraud.

The ÖVP said on Sunday it had nominated its general secretary, Christian Stocker, to act as interim leader. Stocker has expressed his willingness to negotiate with the FPÖ and has received his party’s blessing to do so.

The failure of the centrist parties to build an effective “firewall” against the FPÖ means Austria could soon join a growing bloc of EU countries led by the far right, including Italy, the Netherlands, Slovakia and Hungary.

It also underlined the dilemma faced by democratic forces across Europe in fighting a rising tide of extremism as anti-immigration, Eurosceptic parties splinter the vote.

Germany’s unwieldy centre-left-led coalition under the chancellor, Olaf Scholz, collapsed in November. The anti-Islam, far-right Alternative für Deutschland party is polling on 19%, second behind the opposition conservatives, ahead of a snap election next month.

The German vice-chancellor, Robert Habeck of the Greens, said developments in Austria should serve as a warning.

“If the centrist parties aren’t capable of forming coalitions and dismiss compromises as the devil’s work, it only helps the radicals,” he told the public broadcaster Deutschlandfunk.

If the coalition negotiations in Vienna between the FPÖ and the ÖVP fail, Austria will have to hold a new election.

Kickl, a firebrand whose speeches during the run-up to the September election were peppered with Nazi-era slogans, has long been denounced by centrist leaders as a conspiracy theorist and security risk.

A protege of the late FPÖ chief Jörg Haider, Kickl cites Hungary’s autocratic prime minister, Viktor Orbán, as a role model and campaigned on lifting sanctions imposed against Russia after the invasion of Ukraine.

Hundreds of anti-FPÖ protesters including Austrian Jewish leaders held a rally outside the Hofburg during the hour-long talks between Kickl and the president, chanting: “Van der Bellen, throw him out!”

Kickl did not speak as he left the meeting, but writing on Instagram on Sunday he said he deplored the “lost time” since the election and the “enormous loss of trust” in the political class. He said the FPÖ would stand for “honesty, clarity, predictability, stability and credibility” in government.

Julia Partheymüller, a political scientist at the Vienna Centre for Electoral Research, said Kickl would be a “polarising figure” as chancellor, noting that a previous stint as interior minister had been marked by “a tense relationship with the liberal state governed by the rule of law and a confrontational approach to media”.

The FPÖ’s historic 29% of the vote last September came amid a wave of voter anger over immigration and inflation, issues driving the hard right’s surge against incumbents in many western democracies. Polls suggest support for the FPÖ has grown since the election.

It marked a remarkable comeback for a party humiliated in the so-called Ibiza scandal, in which Austria’s then deputy chancellor and FPÖ leader, Heinz-Christian Strache, was caught on video at a Spanish luxury resort discussing a potential bribe from a woman purporting to be the niece of a Russian oligarch.

Partheymüller said the impact of the FPÖ leading the government would be felt far beyond Austria, which despite having a population of 9 million people has outsize influence in the EU owing to its strong alliances and role as a geographical crossroads.

Kickl has railed against immigrants with slogans such as “Fortress Austria” and “Austria First” and stoked controversy by campaigning on a slogan to become “Volkskanzler” (people’s chancellor), a moniker once used for Adolf Hitler.

The FPÖ was founded in the 1950s and first led by a former senior SS officer and Nazi lawmaker. The party has played the junior partner to the ÖVP in several governments and rules with the conservatives in five of Austria’s nine states. Security services consider some factions of the FPÖ to be extremist.

The ÖVP has adopted the FPÖ’s hard line on immigration, which nevertheless failed to prevent a double-digit slide in its share of the vote in the September election compared with the last poll in 2019.

Sugary drinks are responsible for more than 2m new cases of diabetes and 1m new cases of heart disease a year around the world, according to a new study.

Global analysis published in Nature Medicine on Monday highlights growing health inequalities. In Latin America and the Caribbean, sugary drinks contributed to almost a quarter (24%) of new diabetes cases in 2020.

In sub-Saharan Africa, the region that has seen the greatest percentage increase in cases from 1990 to 2020, sugary drinks led to more than one in five (21%) new diabetes cases and more than one in 10 (11%) new cases of heart disease.

Colombia, Mexico and South Africa have been particularly hard hit, according to the study from researchers at Tufts University in the US.

Sugary drinks were responsible for almost half (48%) of all new diabetes cases in Colombia. Nearly one-third of all new diabetes cases in Mexico were linked to sugary drinks, which were also connected to more than a quarter (27.6%) of new diabetes cases and 14.6% of cases of cardiovascular disease in South Africa.

Sugary drinks are rapidly digested, causing a spike in blood-sugar levels with little nutritional value. Drinking them regularly over time leads to weight gain, insulin resistance and a host of metabolic issues tied to type 2 diabetes and heart disease.

Dariush Mozaffarian, one of the paper’s authors and director of Tuft’s Food is Medicine Institute, said: “Sugar-sweetened beverages are heavily marketed and sold in low- and middle-income nations. Not only are these communities consuming harmful products, but they are also often less well equipped to deal with the long-term health consequences.”

About 830 million people worldwide have diabetes, the majority living in low- and middle-income countries, according to the World Health Organization. Cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of death globally, taking an estimated 17.9 million lives each year. More than three-quarters of these deaths take place in low- and middle-income countries.

Dr Catherine Kanari, a non-communicable diseases specialist for Amref Health Africa in Kenya, said: “We are seeing a rise in the popularity of sugary drinks fuelled by influencer culture online. In urban centres, young people are targeted by social media influencers that are paid to promote branded sugary drinks to them, filling an information gap left by the lack of school-based nutrition education.”

She added: “Ultimately, a rise in diabetes cases risks straining our health system to beyond its limits.”

The study’s authors call for a range of measures, including public health campaigns, regulation of sugary drink advertising and taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages. Mexico, which has one of the highest rates of sugary drink consumption in the world, introduced a tax on the beverages in 2014.

“Much more needs to be done, especially in countries in Latin America and Africa where consumption is high and the health consequence severe,” said Mozaffarian. “As a species, we need to address sugar-sweetened beverage consumption.”

Virtual employees could join workforces this year and transform how companies work, according to the chief executive of OpenAI.

The first artificial intelligence agents may start working for organisations this year, wrote Sam Altman, as AI firms push for uses that generate returns on substantial investment in the technology.

Microsoft, the biggest backer of the company behind ChatGPT, has already announced the introduction of AI agents – tools that can carry out tasks autonomously – with the blue-chip consulting firm McKinsey among the early adopters.

“We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents ‘join the workforce’ and materially change the output of companies,” wrote Altman in a blogpost published on Monday.

OpenAI is reportedly planning to launch an AI agent codenamed “Operator” this month, after Microsoft announced its Copilot Studio product and rival Anthropic launched the Claude 3.5 Sonnet AI model, which can carry out tasks on the computer such as moving a mouse cursor and typing text.

McKinsey, for instance, is building an agent to process new client inquiries by carrying out tasks such as scheduling follow-up meetings. The consulting firm has predicted that by 2030, activities accounting for up to 30% of hours worked across the US economy could be automated.

Bloomberg reported that Operator will use a computer to take actions on a user’s behalf, such as writing code or booking travel.

Last year, Microsoft’s head of AI, Mustafa Suleyman, indicated the company is moving towards agents that can make purchasing decisions, saying he had seen “stunning demos” where the agent carries out transactions independently, although there have also been “car crash moments” in development. However, an agent with these capabilities will emerge “in quarters, not years”, Suleyman said.

Before making the agent prediction, Altman also wrote in his blog that OpenAI knows how to build artificial general intelligence (AGI), a theoretical term that he has referred to in the past as “AI systems that are generally smarter than humans”.

“We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it,” he wrote, adding that OpenAI was now turning its ambitions towards “superintelligence”.

“We love our current products, but we are here for the glorious future. With superintelligence, we can do anything else,” he wrote.

“Superintelligent tools could massively accelerate scientific discovery and innovation well beyond what we are capable of doing on our own, and in turn massively increase abundance and prosperity.”

Altman also participated in a Q&A with Bloomberg published this weekend in which he predicted that Elon Musk will continue his feud with OpenAI this year, but will stop short of using his relationship with Donald Trump to hurt the company.

Altman said he expected the world’s richest person to maintain his legal battle with OpenAI, although he played down the prospect of being challenged to a cage fight with Musk, who asked Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg for a mixed martial arts bout in 2023.

“I think he’ll do all sorts of bad s***. I think he’ll continue to sue us and drop lawsuits and make new lawsuits and whatever else,” Altman told Bloomberg.

“He hasn’t challenged me to a cage match yet, but I don’t think he was that serious about it with Zuck, either, it turned out … he says a lot of things, starts them, undoes them, gets sued, sues, gets in fights with the government, gets investigated by the government. That’s just Elon being Elon.”

Musk dropped an initial lawsuit against OpenAI in June last year but returned two months later with a new complaint that has been expanded to include Microsoft, OpenAI’s biggest backer. The suit accuses OpenAI of pursuing profit over safety and “actively trying to eliminate competitors”.

Musk and Altman have a fractious history. The two co-founded OpenAI in 2015 before Musk left the company over an internal power struggle several years later. OpenAI was founded with the aim of building “safe and beneficial” AGI.

Altman added that he did not expect Musk to use his influence within the incoming Trump administration to hobble competitors such as OpenAI. Musk launched a new AI business, xAI, in 2023.

“Will he abuse his political power of being co-president, or whatever he calls himself now, to mess with a business competitor? I don’t think he’ll do that. I genuinely don’t. May turn out to be proven wrong,” he said.

The Danish king has shocked some historians by changing the royal coat of arms to more prominently feature Greenland and the Faroe Islands – in what has also been seen as a rebuke to Donald Trump.

Less than a year since succeeding his mother, Queen Margrethe, after she stood down on New Year’s Eve 2023, King Frederik has made a clear statement of intent to keep the autonomous Danish territory and former colony within the kingdom of Denmark.

For 500 years, previous Danish royal coats of arms have featured three crowns, the symbol of the Kalmar Union between Denmark, Norway and Sweden, which was led from Denmark between 1397 and 1523. They are also an important symbol of its neighbour Sweden.

But in the updated version, the crowns have been removed and replaced with a more prominent polar bear and ram than previously, to symbolise Greenland and the Faroe Islands respectively.

The move comes at a time of increased tension over Greenland and its relations with Denmark, which continues to control its foreign and security policy.

Incoming US president Trump last month said again that he wants the US to buy Greenland, and the Greenlandic prime minister, Múte Egede, recently accused Denmark of genocide in response to investigations of the forced contraceptive scandal of the 1960s and 70s. In Egede’s own new year’s address he accelerated calls for Greenlandic independence and called for the “shackles of the colonial era” to be removed.

The royal household said the coat of arms, which is used on official documents and seals and elements of which date back to the 12th century, “strengthens the prominence of the commonwealth”. The three crowns, it said, had been removed “as it is no longer relevant”.

The changes, it said, were made after a recommendation from a committee that was appointed straight after his accession on 14 January 2024.

Last week, in his first new year speech, the king said: “We are all united and each of us committed for the kingdom of Denmark. From the Danish minority in South Schleswig – which is even situated outside the kingdom – and all the way to Greenland. We belong together.”

Since 1819, the royal arms have been changed three times before now, in 1903, 1948 and 1972. But the latest changes have been met by shock in some quarters.

Ever since the peace treaty of Knäred in 1613, which ended the Kalmar war, Sweden was “forced to accept the Danish king’s rights to use the Swedish symbol of the three crowns, said Dick Harrison, a history professor at the Swedish University of Lund, making its removal from the Danish coat of arms now “a sensation”.

“The symbol survived the huge defeats in the wars against Sweden in the 1640s and the 1650s, the loss of Norway in 1814, the loss of Schleswig to Germany in 1864, the transition to modernity, the loss of Iceland and the German occupation in world war II,” he said. “Thus, from the point of view of history, the fact that King Frederik X has decided to remove the symbol is a sensation.”

But Sebastian Olden-Jørgensen, a historian at the Saxo Institute at the University of Copenhagen, said it sends clear signals about current geopolitics, especially amid Greenlandic calls for independence.

“When the Greenlanders, and in a sense also the Faroese, toy with the idea of achieving full independence, the royal house shows they support the state’s policy, which is to preserve the unity of the realm,” he told Berlingske.

Royal expert Lars Hovbakke Sørensen believes the changes reflect the king’s personal interest in the Arctic, but also send a message to the world.

“It is important to signal from the Danish side that Greenland and the Faroe Islands are part of the Danish realm, and that this is not up for discussion. This is how you mark it,” he told TV2.

The government of Greenland has been contacted for comment.