Donald Trump has said that Volodymyr Zelenskyy is likely to visit the White House on Friday to sign a rare earth minerals deal to pay for US military aid to defend against Russia’s full-scale invasion.

The announcement followed days of tense negotiations between the US and Ukraine in which Zelenskyy alleged the US was pressuring him to sign a deal worth more than $500bn that would force “10 generations” of Ukrainians to pay it back.

Media outlets reported late on Tuesday that the terms of an agreement had been reached.

“I hear that he’s coming on Friday,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “Certainly it’s OK with me if he’d like to. And he would like to sign it together with me. And I understand that’s a big deal, very big deal.”

According to the Financial Times, which first reported the deal, the new terms of the deal did not include the onerous demands for a right to $500bn in potential revenue from exploiting the resources, which include rare earth metals and Ukrainian oil and gas resources.

A framework for the deal included joint ownership of a fund to develop Ukraine’s mineral resources with certain caveats for those resources already contributing to the state budget.

It was more favourable to Ukraine than the original deal proposed by Washington, but did not include references to long-term security guarantees that Kyiv wanted to receive in the deal.

Certain details of the deal remained unclear, including the US’s ownership stake in the new fund.

Asked what Ukraine would receive in the deal, Trump said: “$350bn, military equipment and the right to fight on.

“We’ve pretty much negotiated our deal on earth and various other things,” Trump added. “We’ll be looking … general security for Ukraine later on. I don’t think that’s going to be a problem. There are a lot of people that want to do it, and I spoke with Russia about it. They didn’t seem to have a problem with it. So I think they understand they’re not going back. And once we do this, they’re not going back.”

Neither the US nor Ukrainian governments immediately responded to requests for comment from the Guardian on the terms of the deal.

The initial US proposal, which included a 100% financial interest in the fund to which revenues from the natural resource extraction would flow, had provoked outrage in Ukraine and other allies in Europe. “I am not signing something that 10 generations of Ukrainians will have to repay,” Zelenskyy said of the initial proposal. The negotiations were accompanied by a public war of words in which Trump called Zelenskyy a “dictator without elections”, a common Kremlin talking point.

The resources the US is seeking in Ukraine include key components for batteries, titanium production, and rare earth metals that are used in electronics, wind turbines, weapons and other modern products.

Ukrainian officials had said earlier this week that the deal was nearing completion.

“Ukrainian and US teams are in the final stages of negotiations regarding the minerals agreement,” Olha Stefanishyna, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister for European and Euro-Atlantic integration, said on Monday. “The negotiations have been very constructive, with nearly all key details finalised. We are committed to completing this swiftly to proceed with its signature. We hope both US and UA [Ukrainian] leaders might sign and endorse it in Washington the soonest to showcase our commitment for decades to come.”

As the US and Ukraine neared an agreement, President Vladimir Putin had also proposed a deal to develop Russia’s mineral resources, including in the Ukrainian territories under Russian occupation. Putin said Russia “undoubtedly [has], I want to emphasise, significantly more resources of this kind than Ukraine”.

A newly appointed Russian presidential envoy, Kirill Dmitriev, on Wednesday said the two countries were interested in finding joint economic projects, according to the state-run news agency Tass.

Dmitriev was named by Putin on Sunday as his special envoy on international economic and investment cooperation. He is seen as a key figure in Moscow’s efforts to improve relations with the new Trump administration.

Ukraine says it has reached a “preliminary” deal to hand revenue from some of its critical mineral resources to the US, with preparations under way for Volodymyr Zelenskyy to visit the White House to sign the agreement on Friday.

The announcement followed days of tense negotiations between Washington and Kyiv in which the Ukrainian president alleged the US was pressuring him to sign an earlier deal worth more than $500bn (£395bn) that he said would force 10 generations of his people to pay it back.

• Calls are growing for hundreds of billions in Russian government wealth frozen in the international banking system to be used in full for Ukraine’s defence. Europe and the G7 have found ways to use interest from the financial assets to help Ukraine in the war, but the capital has remained locked up since the February 2022 invasion. The British foreign secretary, David Lammy, said on Tuesday: “Europe has to act quickly, and I believe we should move from freezing assets to seizing assets. It’s not an issue on which any government can act alone. We must act with European allies.” Petr Fiala, the Czech PM, also said the west should use the money to finance military supplies for Ukraine. European leaders have so far failed to reach agreement on how to seize the money without facing legal challenges or setting a problematic international precedent.

• Ukraine received 500,000 artillery shells bought outside Europe in 2024 under an initiative run by the Czech Republic, said its prime minister, Petr Fiala. Overall, the Czechs co-ordinated the supply of about 1.5m shells in total in 2024. Eighteen countries including Canada, Germany and Portugal collected about $1.8bn by June 2024 to buy 155mm shells under the banner of the “Czech ammunition initiative”. The Czechs continue to send tens of thousands of shells a month. It marks an improvement from a European effort to send Ukraine a million shells by March 2024 – that stretched out to December 2024 because of production shortages.

• Moscow has dismissed Donald Trump’s claim that Russia would accept European peacekeeping troops in Ukraine, Pjotr Sauer writes. Addressing reporters, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said the Kremlin had nothing to add to the foreign ministry’s position on the unacceptability of Nato peacekeepers in Ukraine.

• Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, said that after he returns from seeing Donald Trump at the White House on Thursday, “I am hosting a number of countries at the weekend for us to continue to discuss how we go forward together as allies in light of the situation that we face”.

• The cost of reconstruction and recovery in Ukraine after three years of Russia’s full-scale invasion will be $524bn over the next decade, according to a report released by the Government of Ukraine, the World Bank Group, the European Commission, and the United Nations.

• A Russian drone attack injured a 19-year-old woman and set a house on fire in Kyiv oblast, said Mykola Kalashnyk, the regional governor. The city, the region surrounding it and the eastern half of Ukraine came under air raid alerts starting on Tuesday night.

• A Russian attack on the town of Kramatorsk in Ukraine’s east on Tuesday killed one person and injured at least 14, including four children, Ukrainian national police said. Russian fire hit a residential district, damaging 17 houses. Kramatorsk, part of the Donetsk region, is about 17km from the active combat line and remains a constant target of Russian military attacks.

• A Russian military court sentenced a man to 16 years in jail after he was accused of providing Ukraine with data on a military site near Moscow and preparing attacks, authorities said on Tuesday.

Donald Trump is facing a backlash on his Truth Social platform after sharing an AI-created video of him sipping cocktails with a topless Benjamin Netanyahu in Gaza, in a future imagining of the Palestinian territory devastated by Israel’s war.

The video presented a computer-generated vision of Trump’s property development plan for Gaza, under which he said he wants to “clean out” the population of about 2 million people. Named the “Riviera of the Middle East” plan, the proposal has been criticised as a blueprint for ethnic cleansing.

Footage shows the strip transformed into a Dubai-style resort with skyscrapers and luxury yachts. Children play on the beach as money rains down and bearded bellydancers gyrate on the sand.

Trump, who says he wants the US to “own” Gaza, is presented as a revered icon in the footage. A boy walks along holding a golden balloon of the president’s head and a towering, dictator-style statue of Trump overlooks a city street.

Elon Musk, Trump’s billionaire backer, appears several times, eating flatbread and later dancing as dollar bills fall from the sky. Musk’s Tesla electric cars cruise through the glossy streets.

After the 78-year-old president shared the footage – which includes the caption “Gaza 2025 … what’s next?” – he faced a backlash on his social media platform.

One Truth Social user wrote: “I could not be a bigger supporter of President Trump but this particular video is in very poor taste. Very poor taste, indeed!” Another wrote: “I hate this. I love our president, but this is horrible.”

The video might have gone down particularly badly with Trump’s Christian supporters, with several comments referencing the idolatry of the golden statue, and others lamenting a scene showing Trump in a nightclub alone with a woman dressed as a bellydancer as a crowd looks on.

“Only one deserves the glory and the honor, Mr President,” wrote another user. “The statue is a symbol of the antichrist, please humble yourself to God. Jesus is king and only Him.” Other users described the video as “sick” and “filth”.

One account, with the name Kainoa P, wrote: “You’re doing great Mr President. But don’t let it get to your head. God put you in that position for His glory, not yours.”

It was not immediately clear who had made the video, although it had been shared online previously by other accounts unrelated to the White House. Trump shared it without comment.

What appeared to be AI-generated lyrics accompanied the images: “Donald’s coming to set you free, bringing the light for all to see, no more tunnels, no more fear: Trump Gaza’s finally here.

“Trump Gaza’s shining bright, golden future, a brand new life. Feast and dance the deal is done, Trump Gaza number one.”

Israel is fighting allegations of genocide in Gaza, where it has killed nearly 50,000 people, mostly civilians, in the war that began with an attack by Hamas on 7 October 2023. The international criminal court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Hamas’s military leader, Mohammed Deif, on allegations of war crimes. Netanyahu denies war crimes, while Deif may already be dead.

Previous economic plans for Gaza failed after they were stifled by Israel, which blockaded the strip for years, and Hamas militants, who were widely accused of corruption.

Palestinian leaders were not consulted on Trump’s latest plan, while influential Middle Eastern countries, including Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, have rejected it outright.

Jeff Bezos, the self-proclaimed “hands-off” owner of the Washington Post, emailed staffers this morning about a change he is applying to the paper’s opinion section that appears to align the newspaper more closely with the political right.

“I’m writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages. We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” Bezos said.

“We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others. There was a time when a newspaper, especially one that was a local monopoly, might have seen it as a service to bring to the reader’s doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views. Today, the internet does that job.”

Bezos’s decision to inject more regular and weighty conservative theming will also see the departure of opinions editor David Shipley, although it was immediately unclear if he was fired for resisting Bezos’s direction, or chose to resign.

Shipley, who joined the Washington Post in 2022 as editorial page editor, was among the leading voices of protest when Bezos blocked the Post’s editorial board from publishing an endorsement for Kamala Harris, Donald Trump’s Democratic opponent, before last November’s presidential election.

But he defended the Post’s decision in January not to publish a satirical cartoon by Pulitzer prize-winner Ann Telnaes that depicted Bezos and other billionaire media company owners kneeling at the feet of a giant figure of Trump, offering bags of money.

Telnaes resigned, one of a growing number of departures of senior Post employees during a tumultuous time for the newspaper. It lost 250,000 subscribers after Bezos blocked the Harris endorsement, and a slew of star writers joined rival publications.

“Not every editorial judgment is a reflection of a malign force,” Shipley said at the time, adding that he had spoken with Telnaes and asked her to reconsider leaving.

“My decision was guided by the fact that we had just published a column on the same topic as the cartoon and had already scheduled another column – this one a satire – for publication.”

In his message on Wednesday, Bezos emphasized that he’s “for America, and proud to be so” and that he offered “David Shipley, whom I greatly admire, the opportunity to lead this new chapter.

“I suggested to him that if the answer wasn’t ‘hell yes,’ then it had to be ‘no.’ After careful consideration, David decided to step away. This is a significant shift, it won’t be easy, and it will require 100% commitment – I respect his decision,” he wrote, adding that the paper is now “searching for a new opinion editor to own this new direction”.

Bezos also shared the letter to staff directly on his X page.

In the aftermath of Bezos’s email, Jeff Stein, an economics reporter for the Washington Post, spoke out about the billionaire’s edict.

“Massive encroachment by Bezos into The Washington Post’s opinion section – makes clear dissenting views will not be published,” he wrote on X and Bluesky.

“I still have not felt encroachment on my journalism on the news side, but if Bezos tries interfering with the news side I will be quitting immediately and letting you know.”

More details soon …

A Wall Street Journal editorial slamming Donald Trump’s tariff plans as terrible for the US economy and auto industry prompted a broadside from the president on Wednesday followed by threats to sue the media.

In an opinion piece titled Trump’s Tariffs Will Punish Michigan, the Journal argued Trump’s tariff plans would harm “US auto workers and Republican prospects in Michigan”.

Trump has threatened to impose 25% tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada, a move the editorial argues would increase US vehicle prices, hurt auto workers and advantage Asian and European manufacturers.

“If the goal is to harm US auto workers and Republican prospects in Michigan, then by all means go ahead, Mr President,” wrote the Journal.

On his social media site, Truth Social, Trump wrote the Journal is “soooo wrong”. “The tariffs will drive massive amounts of auto manufacturing to MICHIGAN, a State which I just easily one [sic] in the Presidential Election,” he wrote.

Trump followed the rebuttal with a threat to those publishing “Fake books and stories with the so-called ‘anonymous’, or ‘off the record’, quotes” criticizing the opening month of his second presidency.

“At some point I am going to sue some of these dishonest authors and book publishers, or even media in general, to find out whether or not these ‘anonymous sources’ even exist, which they largely do not. They are made up, defamatory fiction, and a big price should be paid for this blatant dishonesty. I’ll do it as a service to our Country. Who knows, maybe we will create some NICE NEW LAW!!!,” he wrote.

The Journal’s conservative editorial board has been a persistent critic of Trump’s tariff plans, calling them “the dumbest trade war in history” earlier this month.

That editorial triggered Trump to argue that a “tariff lobby”, headed by “the Globalist and always wrong, Wall Street Journal”, was working hard to “continue the decades long RIPOFF OF AMERICA, both with regard to TRADE, CRIME, AND POISONOUS DRUGS that are allowed to so freely flow into AMERICA”.

When Elon Musk’s cost-cutting drive, the so-called “department of government efficiency (Doge), posted its “wall of receipts” boasting of major savings to the federal budget, the list was billed as the proud public interface of a radical shake-up of the US government.

Instead, like much of Musk’s unprecedented engagement with the federal bureaucracy, the initiative has been mired in errors, confusion and obfuscation.

In the latest embarrassment to befall the site, Doge has stealthily expunged all of the five largest items on the “wall of receipts” after the much-vaunted “savings” were revealed to be so much hot air.

The deletions, first reported by the New York Times, were made on Tuesday without explanation. A White House spokesperson would only say that Musk’s slash-and-burn initiative had “identified billions of dollars in savings”.

Doge is currently claiming it has succeeded in lopping $65bn from federal spending, a sharp rise from its earlier figure of $55bn. Yet the itemized savings listed on the “wall of receipts” have plummeted since the deletions from $16.6bn to $9.6bn.

The “wall of receipts” is the only element of public accountability offered by Musk, the world’s richest man who has been given virtual carte blanche by Donald Trump to probe federal government departments. The webpage is strap-lined: “The people voted for major reform.”

What the people have so far been delivered is a “saving” to the costs of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) listed on the “wall of receipts” as being worth $8bn. As the New York Times points out, the entire budget of the immigration agency is about $8bn – in fact the cost savings should have correctly been recorded at $8m.

That slip of the accounting pen has now disappeared from Doge’s site. Among the other four big-figure “savings” also deleted are three cuts of $655m each to the budget of the beleaguered US Agency for International Development, USAid.

That sounded impressive, until it was uncovered by CBS News to be a single cut, counted erroneously three times.

The largest of the five vanishing “savings” was a $1.9bn item listed as a cut at the treasury department. That was based on a contract that was cancelled last year, at a time when Joe Biden was in the White House.

Thousands of Israelis have lined the route of a funeral procession for two small children and their mother who were held hostage and died in captivity in Gaza.

The national outpouring of grief for Ariel, Kfir and Shiri Bibas came amid reports that a deal had been reached to resume the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas, with the handover of more bodies of hostages in return for the release of Palestinians held in Israeli jails due to take place later on Wednesday.

The bodies of the Bibases were handed over last week by Hamas, who claimed they had been killed by airstrikes. An Israeli autopsy report ruled the children had been murdered by their captors and then mutilated to simulate wounds from bombing.

The funeral was held in the town of Tzohar, near the border with Gaza and the kibbutz of Nir Oz, where the family lived. The ceremony was private but mourners lined the road from the central city of Rishon LeZion holding Israeli flags and yellow banners, symbol of the hostage families and supporters, to watch the cortege go by.

The children and their mother were to be buried alongside Shiri’s parents, who were killed in the Hamas attack on Nir Oz and other Israeli communities on 7 October 2023. Her husband and the boys’ father, Yarden, was also taken hostage in the Hamas attack, but was released under the ceasefire deal earlier this month, and discovered only then that his family had been killed.

The Bibas family have denounced Benjamin Netanyahu and members of his government for making public graphic details of the two boys’ deaths. “This is outright abuse of a family that has already been enduring hell for 16 months,” Ofri Bibas, Yarden’s sister, said.

Describing the funeral procession on Wednesday, she said. “Through the car window, I see a broken country; we won’t recover until the last hostage returns home.”

In her address at the funeral, Ofri was bitterly critical of the Netanyahu government for prioritising the destruction of Hamas over an earlier negotiated hostage release. “Our disaster as a people and as a family should not have happened, and it must not, must not happen again,” she said. “They could have saved you and preferred revenge.”

There had been fears that the ceasefire might collapse at the weekend, when Hamas released six Israeli hostages but Netanyahu’s security cabinet delayed freeing 602 Palestinian detainees due to be exchanged. Israel accused Hamas of violating the terms of the deal by staging propaganda ceremonies each time hostages were handed over. In response, Hamas said it would break off mediation talks and cancelled the scheduled handover of the bodies of four hostages on Thursday.

A senior Hamas official said on Wednesday that there would be no public ceremony in the latest exchange.

Overnight, Israeli officials confirmed to reporters Egyptian press reports that a deal had been done to exchange the bodies for the Palestinian prisoners, but added that the Palestinians would be transferred in stages.

Thousands of Israelis have lined the route of a funeral procession for two small children and their mother who were held hostage and died in captivity in Gaza.

The national outpouring of grief for Ariel, Kfir and Shiri Bibas came amid reports that a deal had been reached to resume the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas, with the handover of more bodies of hostages in return for the release of Palestinians held in Israeli jails due to take place later on Wednesday.

The bodies of the Bibases were handed over last week by Hamas, who claimed they had been killed by airstrikes. An Israeli autopsy report ruled the children had been murdered by their captors and then mutilated to simulate wounds from bombing.

The funeral was held in the town of Tzohar, near the border with Gaza and the kibbutz of Nir Oz, where the family lived. The ceremony was private but mourners lined the road from the central city of Rishon LeZion holding Israeli flags and yellow banners, symbol of the hostage families and supporters, to watch the cortege go by.

The children and their mother were to be buried alongside Shiri’s parents, who were killed in the Hamas attack on Nir Oz and other Israeli communities on 7 October 2023. Her husband and the boys’ father, Yarden, was also taken hostage in the Hamas attack, but was released under the ceasefire deal earlier this month, and discovered only then that his family had been killed.

The Bibas family have denounced Benjamin Netanyahu and members of his government for making public graphic details of the two boys’ deaths. “This is outright abuse of a family that has already been enduring hell for 16 months,” Ofri Bibas, Yarden’s sister, said.

Describing the funeral procession on Wednesday, she said. “Through the car window, I see a broken country; we won’t recover until the last hostage returns home.”

In her address at the funeral, Ofri was bitterly critical of the Netanyahu government for prioritising the destruction of Hamas over an earlier negotiated hostage release. “Our disaster as a people and as a family should not have happened, and it must not, must not happen again,” she said. “They could have saved you and preferred revenge.”

There had been fears that the ceasefire might collapse at the weekend, when Hamas released six Israeli hostages but Netanyahu’s security cabinet delayed freeing 602 Palestinian detainees due to be exchanged. Israel accused Hamas of violating the terms of the deal by staging propaganda ceremonies each time hostages were handed over. In response, Hamas said it would break off mediation talks and cancelled the scheduled handover of the bodies of four hostages on Thursday.

A senior Hamas official said on Wednesday that there would be no public ceremony in the latest exchange.

Overnight, Israeli officials confirmed to reporters Egyptian press reports that a deal had been done to exchange the bodies for the Palestinian prisoners, but added that the Palestinians would be transferred in stages.

Colombia risks sliding back into its violent past as armed groups exploit the stumbling peace strategy of President Gustavo Petro, the architect of its landmark 2016 peace deal has told the Guardian.

In a rare interview, former president Juan Manuel Santos warned that gains from the peace agreement with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) are quickly being undone as armed factions exploit negotiation efforts to recruit new combatants and seize control of new land.

“I’m seriously concerned about the deteriorating security situation and how armed groups are growing. They are taking advantage of the government’s disorder to strengthen themselves, fight amongst themselves and take more territory,” he said.

Santos’s peace deal with the Farc – at the time, the most powerful guerrilla insurgency in the western hemisphere – led to 7,000 combatants laying down their rifles and gave Colombians the hope of a more peaceful chapter in their country’s bloody history.

The following year was the least violent in five decades but Santos’s conservative successor, Iván Duque – who campaigned on a promise to kill off the peace process – refused to implement the accord’s agreements.

Since then, dozens of new groups have sprung up to fill territory once controlled by the Farc and are warring with each other to control the cocaine trade, illegal mining and extortion rackets.

A handful of groups have retained elements of revolutionary ideology but most are little more than local mafias.

When he was elected in 2022, Petro – Colombia’s first ever leftwing leader and a former urban guerrilla himself – pledged to launch talks with every major armed group as part of his “Total Peace” strategy.

But negotiations have yielded little progress and the government has been repeatedly forced to break off talks as rebels refuse to stop kidnapping and killing civilians.

In the past two months, Colombia has seen a wave of violence across the country, from the far southern state of Amazonas to the Pacific coast.

The worst of the violence has been concentrated near the north-eastern border with Venezuela, where Colombia’s largest armed group, the National Liberation Army (ELN) launched an offensive in January that has killed at least 80 people and displaced 85,000.

Last week a million people in the border city Cúcuta were put under curfew after ELN fighters attacked police stations and toll booths with car bombs and machine guns.

“We thought Petro was going to correct course. He promised that in the campaign, but he has not delivered. We are now worse off than we were two and a half years ago,” said Santos.

Analysts warn that armed groups are growing unchecked in the Colombia countryside as the military, confused by the government’s stop-start efforts to negotiate with each group separately, is unable to hatch an effective strategy to combat them.

Kidnapping has increased 79% since Petro came into office, child recruitment has increased 1,000% in the past four years and data from Colombia’s human rights ombudsman shows that criminal groups are seizing territory quicker than they were under Duque.

Petro broke off talks with the ELN on 17 January, and contacts with all other major groups have also either been terminated or suspended. Only one ceasefire, with a dissident Farc faction, remains active.

But although he has described the recent bloodshed as a “national failure”, Petro has insisted he will not drop the Total Peace strategy – even as members of his own cabinet have publicly asked if the peace process is unravelling.

Santos said that negotiating with armed groups requires tact, extensive research and planning, but Petro’s strategy appears to have been improvised.

“You need to know what your objectives are. You need to know what your red lines are. And you need to know what you want to achieve. None of that was present. It was improvised, there was no planning and they had no idea who they were negotiating with,” he said.

Santos said he warned Petro’s team that its ambitions to convince more than a dozen armed groups to disarm simultaneously were overly optimistic; it took four years to negotiate a deal with the Farc – which although it had more than 13,000 members had a clear top-down structure and hierarchy.

“I told them: ‘You might be Superman, you might be the most intelligent person in the world, but if you think you are able to negotiate with 14 different groups at the same time that would be a failure.’ And that is what has happened.”

And with each ceasefire, as the military eased off pressure, the armed groups have taken advantage to recruit new members and expand their control.

The country’s rights ombudsman says the number of municipalities the ELN is active in has increased 23% since 2022; for the rightwing Gulf Clan that figure is 54%

Meanwhile, the number of identified armed factions across the country has grown from 141 to 184.

Negotiating with many of the smaller non-political groups has “given them legitimacy”, Santos said.

“You cannot simply say I’m going to negotiate with every armed group because then many appear simply to take advantage of a negotiation – and that is in some ways what has happened.”

The Santos government’s peace deal with the Farc was lauded across the world, receiving lavish praise from state leaders, the UN secretary general and the pope.

Uncharacteristically for a former Colombian statesman, Santos has largely withdrawn from national politics and focuses on advocacy for global issues such as nuclear arms reduction.

The 74-year-old hinted he may regret his non-interventionist stance given how quickly his successors – in particular his immediate replacement – have squandered peace gains in the last eight years.

“We did not foresee that Duque was going to be such a disaster, unfortunately,” he said.

The sweeping agreement with the Farc was drawn up after 2,800 meetings with local communities and the final document spanned 310 pages. The plan was to transform the countryside with land reform, development and security, finally bringing the state to areas abandoned for centuries.

“These communities felt part of the process and that’s why they’re so frustrated now. The expectations were so high, they were so enthusiastic, but six years on very little has been implemented,” Santos said.

More than 300 ex-Farc combatants have been killed since the peace deal.

“I think we did what we could do with the political limitations we had,” Santos said when asked if he had any regrets given the withering peace process. “I wish I had had more time to implement the agreement during the end of my administration,” he added.

Vital Atlantic Ocean currents are unlikely to completely collapse this century, according to a study, but scientists say a severe weakening remains probable and would still have disastrous impacts on billions of people.

The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc) is a system of currents that plays a crucial role in the global climate. The climate crisis is weakening the complex system, but determining if and when it will collapse is difficult.

Studies based on ocean measurements indicate that the Amoc is becoming unstable and approaching a tipping point, beyond which a collapse will be unstoppable. They have suggested this would happen this century, but there are only 20 years of direct measurements and data inferred from earlier times bring large uncertainties.

Climate models have indicated that a collapse is not likely before 2100, but they might have been unrealistically stable compared with the actual ocean system.

The latest study is important because it uses climate models to reveal the reason that the Amoc is more stable: winds in the Southern Ocean continuing to draw water up to the surface and drive the whole system. The study does not rule out an Amoc collapse after 2100, and other modelling research suggests collapses will occur after that time.

“We found that the Amoc is very likely to weaken under global warming, but it’s unlikely to collapse this century,” said Dr Jonathan Baker at the UK’s Met Office, who led the latest study. He said it was reassuring that an abrupt Amoc crash was improbable, and that the knowledge could help governments plan better for future climate impacts. Amoc weakening would still bring major climate challenges across the globe however, with more floods and droughts and faster sea level rise, he added.

“Of course, unlikely doesn’t mean impossible,” he said. “There’s still a chance that Amoc could collapse [this century], so we still need to cut greenhouse gas emissions urgently. And even a collapse in the next century would cause devastating impacts for climate and society.”

Prof Niklas Boers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in Germany said the study delivered a substantial improvement in the understanding of Amoc. “But even a weakening that is not due to a tipping point could have similarly severe impacts on, for example, tropical rains,” he said. “One could even go as far as saying that, in the short term, it doesn’t really matter if we have a strong weakening, say 80%, or a collapse.”

The Amoc system brings warm, salty water northwards towards the Arctic where it cools, sinks, and flows back southwards. Global heating, however, is pushing water temperatures up and increasing the melting of the huge Greenland ice cap, which is flooding the area with fresh water. Both factors mean the water is less dense, reducing sinkage and slowing the currents.

The Amoc was already known to be at its weakest in 1,600 years as a result of global heating, and researchers spotted warning signs of a tipping point in 2021. The Amoc has collapsed in the Earth’s past, Baker said. “So it’s a real risk.”

A collapse of Amoc would have disastrous consequences around the world, severely disrupting the rains that billions of people depend on for food in India, South America and West Africa. It would increase the ferocity of storms and send temperatures plunging in Europe, while pushing up sea levels on the eastern coast of North America and further endangering the Amazon rainforest and Antarctic ice sheets. Scientists have previously said a collapse must be avoided at all costs.

The latest study, published in the journal Nature, used 34 state-of-the-art climate models to assess the Amoc. The researchers used extreme conditions – a quadrupling of carbon dioxide levels or a huge influx of meltwater into the North Atlantic – so that the changes in the modelled ocean currents were clear.

They found that while the Amoc slowed by between 20% and 80% this century, it did not collapse completely in any of the models. This was because winds in the Southern Ocean continued to draw water up to the surface. Balancing this, to the scientists’ surprise, were new downwelling areas in the Pacific and Indian oceans, but they were not strong enough to wholly compensate for the slowing of the Amoc, leaving it significantly weakened.

“Even just a 50% reduction in strength would result in a large drop in heat transport that would alter regional and global climates,” said Dr Aixue Hu at the Global Climate Dynamics Laboratory in Colorado, US. “There is therefore no reason to be complacent about Amoc weakening, and every effort must still be made to combat the global warming that drives it.”

Prof Stefan Rahmstorf, an Amoc expert at PIK, said the latest study considered a collapse to be the total cessation of the currents in the North Atlantic, while previous studies have termed a greatly weakened Amoc a collapse.

Amoc is partly driven by the sinking of dense water and partly by winds, and the latest study provides particular insights on the latter. “It does not, however, change the assessment of the risk and impact of future Amoc changes in response to human-caused global warming, as that is linked to the [density-driven] part of Amoc,” Rahmstorf said. His own research on post-2100 Amoc collapse, currently under review, concludes “a collapse cannot be considered a low-probability event any more”.

Despite the revelations in the latest study, the extent of future Amoc weakening and the timing of any collapse remain uncertain. “There’s a huge amount of work left to do, because there’s still a huge range across models in how much Amoc will weaken,” Baker said, with increasing the resolution of models one important requirement.

“We also show that the Southern Ocean and the Pacific Ocean are more important than we thought for Amoc, so we need better observations and modelling in those regions. That’s crucial to improving the projections so we can better inform policymakers,” he said.

Influencers are appealing to emotional narratives around health and often “fearmongering” to promote controversial medical tests on social media, a new study has found, in ways that are overwhelmingly misleading and fail to mention potential harms.

The research, led by the University of Sydney and published on Thursday in the American Medical Association’s open access journal JAMA Network Open, investigated five tests being discussed on social media despite limited evidence of their benefits for generally healthy people and concerns about overdiagnosis.

These were full-body magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans; genetic testing claiming to identify early signs of 50 cancers; blood tests for testosterone levels; the anti-Mullerian hormone (AMH) or “egg-timer” test, which surveys a woman’s egg count; and the gut microbiome test.

Researchers identified 100 posts for each test on Instagram and TikTok respectively between April 2015 and January 2024. Excluding posts from accounts with less than 100 followers and in languages other than English, they analysed the resulting 982 social media posts, from account holders with more than 194 million total followers.

The study’s lead author, Dr Brooke Nickel, said posts about these tests came from a “wide range” of account holders, from major influencers to “everyday girl-next-door” accounts, as well as news outlets, doctors and the companies making the tests. “Across the board, they were being promoted misleadingly,” she said.

Nickel said the tests were being promoted under the guise of empowerment: early screening as a way for people to take control of their own health. However, as Nickel noted: “These tests carry the potential for healthy people to receive unnecessary diagnoses, which could lead to unnecessary medical treatments or impact mental health.”

Nickel said she was struck by the “really personal narratives” being used: “Fearmongering that if you don’t do this test, you’re not taking care of your own health.”

For example, despite the science of the gut microbiome test being in its very early stages, an Instagram account with over 65,000 followers promoted the test to its followers, telling them: “You DESERVE to be healthy. It is your BIRTHRIGHT. These tests will let us know with CERTAINTY what is causing your specific health concerns.”

Researchers involved in the study found the overwhelming majority of posts (87.1%) mentioned benefits of the tests, with harms mentioned by less than 15% of posts, and only 6% mentioned overdiagnosis or overuse.

A promotional tone was used in 83.8% of posts – more than half (50.7%) encouraged viewers to take action and get the test, and 68% of account holders had financial interests involved.

Posts from doctors were more likely to mention harms and less likely to have an overall promotional tone, but Nickel said in some cases they were also “really strongly promoting the test”.

One medical doctor with more than 65,000 followers on TikTok promoted the multi-cancer early detection test to their followers, telling them: “As you get older the chance of cancer is pretty high, if you do this test yearly then you’ll pretty much catch cancer early.”

The harms of cancer overdiagnosis were most clear, Nickel said, with both the full-body MRI and multi-cancer early detection test promoted as a way to identify early forms of cancer.

Overdiagnosis refers to the diagnosis of very early forms of disease that are unlikely to cause any symptoms or problems, but knowledge of which can do more harm than good, leading to psychological stress and unnecessary treatments including major surgery.

In addition to concerns about overdiagnosis, there were the financial costs of the tests themselves (full-body MRIs cost upwards of $800 in Australia) and of costly interventions pursued as a result.

Despite egg-timer tests being unable to reliably predict a woman’s chance of conceiving, Nickel said there were concerns women who received low results may experience unnecessary anxiety, and go down the path of elective egg freezing or IVF interventions when they may not have been needed.

Nickel said the test “preys on the insecurity” of women regarding their future capacity to conceive, noting it was often promoted to younger women who might be years away from the decision.

A medical doctor with more than 70,000 TikTok followers promoted the test: “Whether you’re in your teens or 30s, empowering yourself with fertility knowledge is extremely important. For women, age is not a friend.”

The testosterone test was most closely linked to promotion of treatments or supplements, and often carried “really clear narratives around masculinity”, Nickel said.

A TikTok account with close to 100,000 followers promoted the testosterone test by telling followers: “Watch out for this scary sign of low testosterone levels … You should be waking up in the morning with a boner. If you’re not waking up in the morning with a boner there’s a large possibility you have a low testosterone level. Get it checked!”

Nickel said there were also potential dangers for men taking some testosterone supplements because of a lack of long-term evidence around safety.

She said the problem overall was that because these tests were often sold direct to consumers, they “take the middle man – the doctor – out of the equation” and the space for a person to discuss with a medical professional whether they need the test or not.

Prof Stacy Carter, the director of the Australian Centre for Health Engagement, Evidence and Values at the University of Wollongong, said the study used robust methods and “shows clearly that influential social media posts promote testing and talk up the alleged benefits of testing – even when tests are useless, or potentially harmful”.

“This study adds to the evidence that medical misinformation is common on social media, and suggests we should all think again when an influencer encourages us to get tested,” Carter said.

Nickel said stronger regulation was needed so that the onus was not on individuals to see through the misinformation.

An Australian couple have criticised Qatar Airways after a blanket-draped corpse was seated next to them during a long-haul flight.

Mitchell Ring said a passenger died part-way through the 14-hour flight from Melbourne to Doha last week.

“They tried to wheel her up towards business class, but she was quite a large lady and they couldn’t get her through the aisle,” he told Nine News this week.

“They looked a bit frustrated, then they just looked at me and saw seats were available beside me.”

Ring said he was made to wait next to the corpse even after the plane landed.

“The ambulance officers and the police came in, and the ambulance officers started pulling the blankets off the lady,” he said.

“It wasn’t nice.”

Ring and his wife, Jennifer Colin, were seated next to the corpse while travelling en-route to Venice.

“I’m not a great flier at the best of times,” said Colin.“There has to be a protocol that looks after the customers on board.”

Ring said he was seated with the body for around four hours despite other empty seats.

“They said: ‘Can you move over please’ and I just said, ‘Yes no problem’. Then they placed the lady in the chair I was in. There were a few spare seats around that I could see.”

In a statement to Australian media, Qatar Airways apologised “for any inconvenience or distress this incident may have caused”.

“First and foremost our thoughts are with the family of the passenger who sadly passed away on board our flight.”

Wealthy foreigners willing to pay about $5m, Russian oligarchs potentially among them, will soon be able to apply for a visa to live in the United States courtesy of what is being billed as the “Trump gold card”.

Donald Trump announced the new visa program from the Oval Office on Tuesday night, saying it could start in about two weeks.

“It’s going to be a route to citizenship, and wealthy people will be coming into our country by buying this card. They’ll be wealthy, and they’ll be successful, and they’ll be spending a lot of money and paying a lot of taxes,” he said.

The president was asked by reporters whether Russian oligarchs would be eligible to apply. “Yeah, possibly,” he replied. “I know some Russian oligarchs that are very nice people.”

The proposed gold card would be among the most expensive visa programs in the world. It would replace the current EB-5 immigrant investor visa program which allows individuals to reside in the US in return for job-creating investments of at least $1m or $800,000 in distressed parts of the country.

The commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, said all applicants would be thoroughly vetted to ensure they were “wonderful, world-class global citizens”.

Despite the $5m asking price, the new visas-for-sale scheme is likely to be popular among the global super rich. One possible impediment is America’s unusual tax system which makes US citizens answerable for US taxes on income earned anywhere in the world.

The new Trump gold card will be created at a time when the president is devoting much of his time to deporting millions of undocumented immigrants. It will also provide a twist on America’s traditional reputation as a refuge for hardworking poor “yearning to breathe free”.

As the political comic Jason Selvig noted, the gold card offers a rewriting of the words inscribed on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your rich, your huddled masses of oligarchs.”