Sudan is suffering from the largest humanitarian crisis globally and its civilians are continuing to pay the price for inaction by the international community, NGOs and the UN have said, as the country’s civil war enters its third year.

The UK is hosting ministers from 20 countries in London on Tuesday in an attempt to restart stalled peace talks. However, diplomatic efforts have often been sidelined by other crises, including the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.

Two years to the day since fighting erupted in Khartoum between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, hundreds of people were feared to have died in RSF attacks on refugee camps in the western Darfur region in the latest apparent atrocity of a war marked by its brutality and wide-scale humanitarian impact.

The consequences for Sudan’s 51 million people have been devastating. Tens of thousands are reportedly dead. Hundreds of thousands face famine. Almost 13 million people have been displaced, 4 million of those to neighbouring countries.

“Sudan is now worse off than ever before,” said Elise Nalbandian, Oxfam’s regional advocacy manager. “The largest humanitarian crisis, largest displacement crisis, largest hunger crisis … It’s breaking all sorts of wrong records.”

There were “massive-scale” violations of international humanitarian law in the conflict, said Daniel O’Malley, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross delegation in Sudan. “All of the civilian population, irrespective of where they are in the country, have basically been trapped between one, two or more parties. And they have been bearing the brunt of everything. The sheer numbers are just mind-boggling.”

Last month, Sudan’s military recaptured the highly symbolic presidential palace in Khartoum and it has retaken most of the capital. But in much of the country, the conflict rages on. Sources cited by the UN reported that more than 400 people had been killed in recent attacks by the RSF in Darfur, where the group is trying to seize El Fasher, the last state capital in the region not under its control.

Since late last week, the RSF has launched ground and aerial assaults on El Fasher itself and the nearby Zamzam and Abu Shouk displacement camps. A UN spokesperson told Agence France-Presse that the UN’s rights office had verified 148 killings and received reports from “credible sources” that the total number of dead exceeded 400.

Reuters reported that data from the UN’s International Organization for Migration suggested that up to 400,000 people had been displaced from the Zamzam camp alone since the weekend.

In a statement the UN rights chief, Volker Türk, said the “large-scale attacks … made starkly clear the cost of inaction by the international community, despite my repeated warnings of heightened risk for civilians in the area”.

He added: “The attacks have exacerbated an already dire protection and humanitarian crisis in a city that has endured a devastating RSF siege since May last year.”

El Fasher is one of several areas of Darfur where a famine, affecting about 637,000 people, has been declared. Almost half the 50-million population of Sudan – 24.6 million people – do not have enough food.

Leni Kinzli, the World Food Programme’s head of communications for Sudan, said the other conflicts, as well as a lack of access for journalists, and Sudan’s relative international isolation since the days of the regime of the ousted dictator Omar al-Bashir all meant Sudan was not getting the attention it needed.

“We don’t see the level of international attention on Sudan as we do for other crises,” she said. “There should not be a competition between crises. But unfortunately we’re seeing with everything going on in the world, other conflicts, other humanitarian crises and other things making headlines, that unfortunately Sudan is – I wouldn’t even call it forgotten – it’s ignored.”

The origins of the war can be traced to late 2018, when popular protests broke out against the Sudanese dictator Bashir. Sudan’s army leader, Gen Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, allied with the RSF chief, Gen Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, a former warlord known as Hemedti, to oust Bashir in a coup in April 2019.

They then allied again in 2021 to depose a civilian government meant to transition Sudan to a democracy. However, Hemedti had long coveted ultimate power for himself, and the friction between the two spiralled into full-on war less than two years later.

The RSF, a paramilitary force that grew out of the Janjaweed Arab militias accused of committing genocide in the Darfur region in the mid-2000s, made rapid gains in the first weeks and months, as the fighting spread beyond Khartoum.

In Darfur thousands of people died in the first year of the war, in well-documented attacks by the RSF and allied militias on non-Arab Masalit and other ethnic groups. Masalit refugees who had fled west to Chad recounted women and girls being targeted for gang rapes and boys shot in the street. Militia fighters said they would force women to have “Arab babies”, according to a UN report released in November 2024.

The RSF and the army have both been accused of committing war crimes in the course of the conflict.

In January of this year the US formally declared that the RSF had committed genocide, marking the second time in less than 30 years that genocide had been perpetrated in Sudan.

The United Arab Emirates has been accused of fuelling the conflict by arming the RSF. Emirati passports allegedly found on the battlefield last year point to potential covert boots on the ground. The UAE has denied all involvement in the war.

Pressure is mounting on the United Arab Emirates over its presence at a crucial conference in London aimed at stopping the war in Sudan after a leaked confidential UN report raised fresh questions over the UAE’s role in the devastating conflict.

The UAE has been accused of secretly supplying weapons to Sudanese paramilitaries via neighbouring Chad, a charge it has steadfastly denied.

However an internal report – marked highly confidential and seen by the Guardian – detected “multiple” flights from the UAE in which transport planes made apparently deliberate attempts to avoid detection as they flew into bases in Chad where arms smuggling across the border into Sudan has been monitored.

The allegations raise complications for the British foreign secretary, David Lammy, who controversially invited the UAE alongside 19 other states for Sudan peace talks at Lancaster House on 15 April.

The date marks the second anniversary of a civil war that has caused the world’s biggest humanitarian crisis, displacing more than 12 million people.

A senior diplomat, who is familiar with the leaked report but requested anonymity, said: “The UK needs to explain how it is responding to massacres of children and aid workers while hosting the UAE at its London conference.”

The 14-page report – completed last November and sent to the Sudan sanctions committee of the UN Security Council – was written by a panel of five UN experts who “documented a consistent pattern of Ilyushin Il-76TD cargo flights originating from the United Arab Emirates” into Chad, from where they identified at least three overland routes potentially used for transporting weapons into neighbouring Sudan.

They found that the cargo flights from airports in the UAE to Chad were so regular that, in effect, they had created a “new regional air bridge”.

They noted that flights demonstrated peculiarities, with planes often disappearing for “crucial segments” of their journey, a pattern that the experts said “raised questions of possible covert operations”.

However, the experts added that they could not identify what the planes were carrying or locate any evidence that the planes were transporting weapons.

The findings of numerous cargo flights from the UAE to Chad are not mentioned in the final report of the UN expert panel on Sudan, due to be published in a few days. No reference is made to the Emirates in the expert’s final 39-page report except in relation to peace talks.

Questions over the UAE’s alleged role in backing the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) arrive after a weekend that saw its fighters kill more than 200 civilians in a wave of violence against vulnerable ethnic groups in displacement camps and around the city of El Fasher, the last major city still held by the Sudanese army in Darfur, the vast western region of Sudan.

“It will be shameful if the conference does not deliver concrete civilian protection in the context of ongoing genocide,” said the diplomat.

In January the US formally declared that the RSF had committed genocide in Sudan.

The UAE states that it is committed to bringing “lasting peace“ to Sudan.

In their November update, the UN experts, investigating the possible smuggling of weapons from Chad into Darfur in possible violation of an arms embargo, identified at least 24 Ilyushin Il-76TD cargo flights landed at Amdjarass airport in Chad last year.

The flights, they noted, coincided with an escalation of fighting in El Fasher, in particular a “surge in drone activity primarily by the RSF for combat and intelligence” whose arrival in Sudan, said the experts, marked “a new technological phase in the conduct of hostilities”.

Some of the flights identified in the report were linked to operators previously connected to “military logistics and illicit arms transfers”. Two of them, said the experts, had previously been flagged for violations of the arms embargo.

Experts also examined “regular departures” into Chad from two UAE airports – in Ras Al-Khaimah emirate and Al Ain in Abu Dhabi emirate – and found that the flights frequently disappeared from radars during crucial moments.

On one occasion, the report describes how a flight “left Ras Al-Khaimah, vanished mid-flight, and later surfaced in N’Djamena [capital of Chad] before returning to Abu Dhabi”.

Crucially, however, the UN experts said they could not prove that the planes were carrying weapons because the “flights lacked evidence regarding the specific content being transported”.

Four of the five UN experts said that although the flights “marked an important new trend”, what they managed to uncover “failed to meet evidentiary standards regarding evidence of arms transfers”.

For instance, although residents of the South Darfur city of Nyala reported “cargo plane activity and informants attributed it to RSF logistical operations, further triangulated evidence to confirm the nature of the cargo transported was absent”.

Therefore, the experts said, it was “premature to infer that these flights were part of an arms transfer network”. They also added that the fact that several of the flights and cargo operators were linked to military logistics and past arms violations “did not provide proof of current arms transfers”.

It added: “Additionally, patterns and anomalies in flight paths, such as mid-flight radar disappearances and unrecorded take-offs, raised concerns but did not offer verified evidence directly linking these flights to arms shipments.”

It said “closing these investigative gaps was crucial”.

The revelations come days after the international court of justice (ICJ) in The Hague heard a case brought by Sudan accusing the UAE of being “complicit in the genocide” during the war. The ICJ has heard claims that the RSF is responsible for serious human rights violations including mass killings, rape and forced displacement in West Darfur.

The UAE has said the case is a cynical publicity stunt and a “platform to launch false attacks against the UAE”.

A UAE source pointed out that the confidential UN expert report contained the disclaimer that four of the five panel members felt that “allegations of an airbridge from the UAE to Sudan via Chad failed to meet the evidentiary standards required to establish a clear link between the documented flights and the alleged transfer of arms”.

A UAE statement added that the imminent final report from the Sudan expert panel did not reference the Emirates in relation to any flights “because the allegations against us failed to meet the panel’s evidentiary threshold. The record speaks for itself.”

It added that they had been told by the UN security council’s Sudan sanctions committee that the final report “did not make any negative findings” against them.

“The latest UN panel of experts report makes clear that there is not substantiated evidence that the UAE has provided any support to RSF, or has any involvement in the conflict,” said the statement.

Sudan’s information blackout has left relatives of those in Sudan’s Zamzam camp for those displaced by the war struggling for news of their safety after it was overrun by militiamen at the weekend.

As leaders across the globe prepared to meet for peace talks in London to pressure the backers of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the Sudanese army to agree a ceasefire, the RSF launched a deadly assault, seizing Zamzam after weeks of tightening its siege.

The UN’s migration agency, the IOM, said between 60,000 and 80,000 households had been displaced from Zamzam following the attacks. The medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières said its team at Tawila, another displacement camp near El Fasher in Darfur, had seen about 10,000 people arrive in 48 hours suffering from dehydration and exhaustion.

Campaigners said the dearth of information on the violence, which has reportedly killed hundreds of civilians, highlighted the need for the London talks to prioritise restoring communications to allow communities under attack to warn each other, to give better access to healthcare and to facilitate human rights documentation.

Altahir Hashim, whose family was living in Zamzam, said: “Zamzam as an IDP [internally displaced persons] camp no longer exists. The RSF has completely overrun the camp – killing, raping, burning and committing all kinds of atrocities. The communications are really bad and I haven’t been able to speak to my family.”

On Friday, nine medical workers from the aid organisation Relief International were killed when the RSF raided Zamzam, while the Sudanese American Physicians Association (Sapa), said the manager of a children’s health centre was also killed.

For two decades Zamzam has hosted people displaced during the 2000s in attacks by the army and the Janjaweed militias – who were later formalised into the RSF – but its population has grown to about 700,000 during the current civil war as people have fled other parts of the Darfur region.

Hashim is part of a group of Darfuris abroad who have raised funds to buy and airdrop satellite phones into Darfur as well as walkie-talkies to allow local communication during emergencies.

He said the communications blackout also made it difficult for people to receive money sent from relatives abroad through mobile banking systems.

The limited information that has emerged from Zamzam has often relied on satellite communications – whether through imagery, phones or the Starlink service, which uses satellites rather than land-based communication towers to provide internet.

But these services can be unreliable and are costly, meaning that while they are used by some activists in Darfur, others remain unable to be contacted.

One video shared by the group North Darfur Observatory for Human Rights showed people fleeing Zamzam with their belongings strapped to camels and donkeys.

Often the main source of information from Darfur has come from videos recorded by RSF fighters themselves of the atrocities and some have emerged showing their fighters entering Zamzam on pickup trucks mounted with heavy machine guns with burning buildings in the background.

Shayna Lewis, from the US-based organisation Preventing & Ending Mass Atrocities (Paema).“We have reports of civilians being hunted and executed in the streets of Zamzam, but we are unable to consistently communicate with people as the networks are off and the internet can only be accessed through Starlink access points. Starlink access is sporadic, expensive and can be turned off by the belligerents at will.”

Paema said the talks in London should prioritise restoring communications as a way to quickly relieve suffering in Sudan.

Sapa, which operates medical facilities in El Fasher, said the last message it received from its teams in Zamzam on Sunday afternoon was: “Zamzam under the control of the RSF.”

Khalid Mishain, of the Sudanese human rights group Youth Citizens Observers Network, said they had lost contact with their observers in the area since the attack. He said the communications blackout had been a impediment to human rights documentation throughout the conflict.

“People have to write the information down, keep it with them and then secretly move to areas where there is communications and send it to us,” said Mishain.

“We have civilians suffering and no one knows about it, and those who report on it have to risk their life because of the communications blackout.”

Sudan’s civil war broke out two years ago to the day, since when it has killed tens of thousands, uprooted more than 13 million and created what the International Rescue Committee has described as “the biggest humanitarian crisis ever recorded”.

Xi Jinping’s tour of South-east Asia this week is likely intended to “screw” the United States, President Donald Trump has suggested, as the Chinese leader embarks on five-day tour of some nations hardest hit by Trump’s tariffs.

China’s president arrived in Hanoi on Monday, where he met Vietnam’s top leader, To Lam, called for stronger trade ties, and signed dozens of cooperation agreements, including on enhancing supply chains.

Reacting to the meeting from the Oval Office, Trump said the discussions in Vietnam were focused on how to harm the US, even though he didn’t hold it against them.

“I don’t blame China; I don’t blame Vietnam,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “That’s a lovely meeting. Meeting like, trying to figure out, ‘how do we screw the United States of America?’”

Vietnam is among a handful of countries in South-east Asia that are reeling from some of the most punitive of Trump’s so-called “Liberation Day” tariffs, hit with a rate of 46%.

A major industrial and assembly hub, the US is Vietnam’s main export market, for which it is a crucial source of everything from footwear, apparel and electronics.

In the first three months of this year, Hanoi imported goods worth about $30bn from Beijing while its exports to Washington amounted to $31.4bn

On Tuesday, one of China’s lead officials overseeing Hong Kong hit back at the US over its trade war. Xia Baolong said in a televised speech that the dispute was “extremely shameless” and aimed to “take away Hong Kong’s life”. Hong Kong is subject to the same tariffs imposed on mainland China but has not proposed any of its own in retaliation.

China was not “afraid of trouble”, Xia said. “Let those peasants in the United States wail in front of the 5,000 years of Chinese civilisation”, possibly in reference to vice-president JD Vance’s recent criticism.

Xi’s visit to Vietnam, Cambodia, and Malaysia this week, comes as Beijing faces tariffs of 145%, and as other countries seek to negotiate reductions in their reciprocal tariffs during the 90-day reprieve.

Xi’s trip to Hanoi offers an opportunity to consolidate relations with a neighbour that has received billions of dollars of Chinese investments in recent years as China-based manufacturers moved south to avoid tariffs imposed by the first Trump administration.

Xi had planned to travel to the region prior to Trump’s tariff announcement but the visit was fortuitously timed, with the Chinese leader positing China as a stable trading partner, in contrast to the chaotic policy backflips coming out of Washington.

In an article in Nhandan, the newspaper of Vietnam’s Communist party, Xi wrote there are “no winners in trade wars and tariff wars” and protectionism “leads nowhere”.

In a later meeting with Vietnam’s prime minister, Pham Minh Chinh, Xi said the two countries should oppose unilateral bullying.

Chinese and Vietnamese state media reported on Monday that 45 agreements were signed between the two nations, including on rail links, although details were not shared.

Under pressure from Washington, Vietnam is tightening controls on some trade with China and a Trump administration official said the president and Vietnam’s Lam had agreed to “work to reduce reciprocal tariffs”.

Vietnam, and many other south-east Asian countries, are trying to maintain a delicate balancing act between the US and China, amid fears the region could be used as a potential dumping zone for Chinese exports barred from the US.

Vietnam’s economy is deeply intertwined with both China and the US, relying on supplies imported from the former, as well as the US market for its exports. Many countries in the region also value the US as a counterbalance to Chinese power in the region.

Phan Xuan Dung, research officer of the Vietnam Studies Programme at ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute, said: “If past patterns hold, it would be reasonable to expect that Vietnam might seek to balance this significant Chinese engagement with comparable diplomatic outreach to the United States or other partners in the coming months.”

Escalating tensions between the US and China have fuelled concerns about the “decoupling” of the world’s two largest economies, a fear treasury secretary Scott Bessent has sought to dispel on Monday.

“There’s a big deal to be done at some point” Bessent said when asked by Bloomberg TV about the possibility that the world’s largest economies would decouple. “There doesn’t have to be” decoupling, he said, “but there could be.”

The prospect appears to have shifted some trade war battles to other fronts. As well as conversations on his Asia tour, Xi has also sought further US-excluded cooperation with the EU.

In Latin America the US is pushing governments to reduce their financial ties with China. Bessent said he met Argentinian president Javier Milei on Monday, telling Bloomberg the Trump administration was focused on helping Latin American countries avert what he called “rapacious” agreements made with China to give up mining rights in return for aid.

Beijing’s embassy in Argentina accused Bessent of “maliciously slandering and smearing” China, and told the US to refrain from “obstructing and deliberately sabotaging” developing countries.

The White House had appeared to dial down the pressure recently, listing tariff exemptions for smartphones, laptops, semiconductors and other electronic products for which China is a major source.

But Trump and some of his top aides said Sunday the exemptions had been misconstrued and would only be temporary.

“Nobody is getting ‘off the hook’… especially not China which, by far, treats us the worst!” he posted on his Truth Social platform.

After a two-day stop in Hanoi, Xi will continue his South-east Asian trip by visiting Malaysia and Cambodia from Tuesday to Friday.

Additional reporting by Rebecca Ratcliffe

China has reportedly ordered its airlines not to take any further deliveries of Boeing jets, the latest move in its tit-for-tat trade war with the US.

The Chinese government has asked carriers to stop purchases of aircraft-related equipment and parts from American companies, according to a report from Bloomberg, which cited people familiar with the matter.

The order from Beijing reportedly came after it announced its retaliatory tariffs of 125% on US goods over the weekend.

Beijing is considering ways to support airlines that lease Boeing jets and are facing higher costs, according to the report.

About 10 Boeing 737 Max jets are being prepared to join Chinese airlines, and if delivery paperwork and payment on some of them was completed before Chinese ”reciprocal” tariffs came into effect, the planes may be allowed to enter the country, people close to the matter told Bloomberg News.

The restriction marks a serious blow for Boeing and other manufacturers trying to navigate the escalating trade war between the two biggest economies.

The group chief executive of the budget airline Ryanair, Michael O’Leary, has said his company could delay taking deliveries of Boeing aircrafts if they become more expensive.

O’Leary told the Financial Times that Ryanair was due to receive a further 25 aircraft from Boeing from August but would not need the planes until around March or April 2026.

“We might delay them and hope that common sense will prevail,” he told the FT.

Shares in Boeing have been buffeted by worries about the impact of trade tariffs, as well as complaints from some shareholders that the company has underinvested in its engineering.

The company has lost 7% of its market value since the start of the year, and in March its chief financial officer, Brian West, said tariffs could hit availability of parts from its suppliers.

The chaotic introduction of Donald Trump’s tariffs has triggered volatility in the stock market since 2 April, although there has been a tentative recovery this week after the US president suggested he would suspend planned tariffs on imports of smartphones and laptops.

The S&P 500, the American blue-chip index of stocks, ticked up by 0.8% on Monday but was still down about 8% so far this year.

There remains a great deal of uncertainty around possible tariffs on computer chips and pharmaceutical imports, with the Trump administration initiating an investigation into the impact of trade in these areas on American national security. Meanwhile, the chip designer Nvidia has announced that it will build up to $500bn (£378bn) worth of artificial intelligence infrastructure in the US over the next four years.

In Asia, Japan’s Nikkei index rose by 0.8% on Tuesday and South Korea’s Kospi by 0.9%, with strong gains for carmakers such as Honda, Suzuki and Hyundai, after Trump signalled there would be help for the industry.

On Monday the president told reporters in Washington he was “looking at something to help some of the car companies”, and added that carmakers “need a little bit of time” before they can start to build parts in the US rather than in countries such as Canada and Mexico.

The US administration previously announced a 25% tariff on all imports of foreign cars, excluding some exemptions for Mexico and Canada. Analysts at the advisory firm Telemetry predicted the move could result in 1.8m fewer car sales in the US and Canada this year.

Shares also rose in Europe, with London’s benchmark FTSE 100 index and the more domestic-focused FTSE 250 rising by 0.8% and 1% respectively after optimistic comments from the US vice-president, JD Vance, about a possible trade deal with the UK. In an interview on Tuesday with the website Unherd, Vance said he believed that both sides could come to a mutually beneficial agreement.

“We’re certainly working very hard with Keir Starmer’s government” on a trade deal, he said.

“There’s a real cultural affinity. And, of course, fundamentally, America is an Anglo country. I think there’s a good chance that, yes, we’ll come to a great agreement that’s in the best interest of both countries.”

Boeing was approached for comment.

He’s long been nicknamed “God’s architect” by those who point to his piety and the religious imagery woven through his soaring spires, colourful ceramics and undulating lines.

Now it seems the Vatican may be ready to make it official. It said on Monday that Antoni Gaudí, the Catalan architect behind Barcelona’s Sagrada Família basilica, had been put on the path to sainthood.

The Vatican said in a statement that Pope Francis had recognised Gaudí’s “heroic virtues” during the 88-year-old’s first official appointment after weeks of illness with life-threatening pneumonia.

Nearly a century after Gaudí’s death, the declaration is one of the initial steps in the long and complex process towards sainthood. The architect behind several of Barcelona’s biggest tourist attractions will have to be beatified before he can pass to the last step of canonisation.

Gaudí devotees have called for him to be named a saint for more than three decades, pointing to how the fantasy spires and intricate stonework of the Sagrada Família had convinced some to convert to Catholicism.

“There are no serious obstacles,” the architect and then-president of the Gaudí Beatification Society, José Manuel Almuzara said in 2003. He described the society as a movement of 80,000 people worldwide who prayed to Gaudí, beseeching him to perform miracles.

The church began considering the request in the early 2000s.

Construction of the Sagrada Família began in 1882. More than 140 years later, it remains the largest unfinished Roman Catholic church in the world, despite Gaudí devoting the last 12 years of his life to the project.

Pope Benedict XVI consecrated the building in 2010, when he praised “the genius of Antoni Gaudí in transforming this church into a praise to God made of stone”.

Years later it was announced that the basilica would be completed in 2026, a date that coincided with the centenary of Gaudís death. The completion date, however, was postponed indefinitely after the pandemic brought construction to a halt and reduced the tourist revenues available to fund the work.

Some of Donald Trump’s biggest campaign donors and investors, who collectively have hundreds of millions of dollars in financial ties to the US president, are positioned to potentially profit from any American takeover of Greenland, raising even more ethical questions around Trump’s controversial pursuit of the Arctic territory.

The administration is in part aiming to secure rare minerals that are essential for the US tech industry and national security, and to potentially reopen oil and gas exploration: “This is about critical minerals, this is about natural resources,” Trump’s national security adviser, Mike Waltz, recently said.

A Guardian analysis of campaign finance records and corporate filings show US tech moguls who invested in mining companies operating in Greenland, fossil fuel executives and crypto tycoons with their own set of plans for the country collectively gave at least $243m to the president’s 2024 campaign.

Meanwhile institutional investors bankrolling Greenland mining interests also amassed $314m worth of shares in Trump Media, most just ahead of the election.

“There’s a closed loop among these investors, billionaires, Trump and the crypto projects,” said Emily DiVito, a senior adviser for economic policy with the Groundwork Collaborative economic thinktank. Greenland is an example of that in action, she added.

“These donations are investments, and they were made with particular outcomes in mind, and even if they weren’t stated at the time, the money changed hands,” DiVito said.

Vice-President JD Vance recently visited Greenland, which is an autonomous territory of Denmark, in the latest installment of the unfolding dispute between the countries. Trump has vowed to acquire Greenland “one way or another”.

Among those who have invested millions in KoBold Metals, a mining company at the leading edge of Greenland’s “modern gold rush” for rare minerals essential to tech companies, are major Trump donors such as Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and other Silicon Valley moguls.

The top investor in Critical Metals Corp, which has a mining permit in Greenland, is the hedge fund Cantor Fitzgerald, which Trump’s commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, led until January. Critical Metals’ other top institutional investors include Vanguard, BlackRock, Geode Capital and State Street – companies that have amassed $314m in Trump Media stock, much of it purchased just ahead of the election.

Among the Greenland bids’ loudest supporters are crypto tycoons who poured unparalleled sums of money into 2024 Trump and Republican campaigns while labeling Greenland an “investment frontier” where data centers essential to the US artificial intelligence and crypto currency industries could be built. Some of the same donors also want to establish a largely autonomous libertarian utopian “post state” for the tech elite in Greenland that could be used to practice “terraforming” for a Mars colony.

The group behind the “state”, Praxis, labels its members “optimistic pioneers”, but critics say it is a colonialist operation aimed at plundering wealth and resources from a weak nation still linked to Denmark – its colonial power. Regardless, Praxis is already backed by $525m and includes members of or donors to the Trump administration, such as the PayPal co-founder Ken Howery, who was nominated for ambassador to Denmark.

What’s unfolding in Greenland represents the “circle of grift”, said Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen, a government transparency non-profit.

“Put money into the Trump family bank and the money comes back to you in the form of some government policy,” Weissman said. “That even includes the deployment of the empire in service of libertarians who favor a stateless society.”

The minerals found in Greenland are used in laptops, smartphones, weapons, clean energy technology, electric vehicles and elsewhere across the economy. China so far controls 70% of the rare earth market, and vital trade and military routes run through Greenland’s waters, so the administration portrays its interest as buttressing US security and industry. But Greenlanders are largely opposed to the idea.

Moreover, Greenland is a largely frozen, dark country with very little infrastructure, and it’s prone to rock slides, tsunamis and a shifting ground, said Paul Bierman, a natural resources researcher at the University of Vermont who spent four seasons working there. It is extremely difficult and expensive to extract resources, and the idea that a “gold rush” is possible is “almost completely pie in the sky”, Bierman said.

Mining industry donors and investors

The opposition from Greenlanders and unforgiving terrain has done little to tamp the tech, mining and Trump administration donor enthusiasm for a takeover.

KoBold holds permits to extract cobalt, nickel and platinum, and is now valued at $3bn. Its largest backer is the tech investment firm Andreessen Horowitz – Marc Andreessen, who has assisted the unofficial “department of government efficiency” (Doge), and Ben Horowitz each donated $2.5m to a pro-Donald Trump Super Pac, according to FEC filings, in addition to contributing or helping raise tens of millions of dollars more via other channels.

Bezos, Altman, Zuckerberg and Microsoft’s Bill Gates each donated $1m to Trump’s inauguration. Also among KoBold backers is Patrice Motsepe, a South African mining mogul who generated controversy in 2020 when he told Trump “Africa loves you!”

Lutnick, Trump’s commerce secretary, who gave $5m to the president ahead of the election, just stepped down from his position at Cantor Fitzgerald, but other Trump donors lead the company. A spokesperson pointed to a press release stating that Lutnick had divested and “does not expect any arrangement that involves selling shares on the open market”.

BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street – who are Critical Metals’ other top shareholders – are generally considered to be passive investors who have their fingers in pots across the economy. Still, the three became Trump Media’s top investors when they purchased over $175m worth of stock just ahead of the election, which was widely viewed as an investment in the president. The companies did not respond to a request for comment.

DiVito said Greenland was “littered with the corpses of mineral investors”, but some industry players including consultant Drew Horn, a former senior adviser in the previous Trump administration’s energy department, are regularly in the media cheerleading the administration’s Greenland policy and touting the riches that lie in the nation’s ground.

Horn’s company, GreenMet, leverages his administration relationships to secure political and financial backing for mining companies. GreenMet “advance[s] private sector investments and sound legislative and regulatory action to develop a resilient domestic supply chain”, the company states.

On Fox News, Horn touted the “significant opportunity for US investment in mining and energy production”, but industry observers with no financial stake remain skeptical. In the event that a mining startup doesn’t strike it rich in Greenland, Horn still receives fees for his consulting.

Bierman did not comment on Horn, but said other reports that promote Greenland mining opportunities trace back to the mining industry, not independent or Danish government sources.

“It makes me wonder: is it just self-promotion to get investment money?” Bierman said.

Cryptocurrency industry donors

Ahead of the election, the crypto tycoon Tyler Winklevoss summed up the industry’s mood: Biden had “openly declared war against crypto”, he insisted. He and his twin, Cameron Winklevoss, would each donate $1m to Trump, who would “put an end to the Biden administration’s war on crypto.”

The industry followed suit, fervently backing Trump and the Republicans. The largest crypto Pac, Fairshake, reported spending $195m in the last election cycle, with at least $148m going to the president and Republicans. Top firms reportedly poured another $10m into the president’s inaugural fund.

The crypto industry’s aims in Greenland are slightly more nebulous than mining’s, but it has fixated on the region. In part, the cold climate and easy access to renewable energy is attractive for bitcoin mining operations – Horn said it “literally is the best place in the world for data centers”. The crypto industry startup Lympid just tokenized the first property in Greenland, meaning the real estate asset is converted into coins that people can buy, giving them a stake in the company. Lympid’s co-founder Joao Lages laid out why in revealing terms.

“This isn’t just about real estate; it’s about democratizing access to one of the world’s most unique and promising investment frontiers,” Lages said. “We’re creating a bridge for global investors to participate in the region’s growth story.”

Praxis’s deep roster of tech elite includes folks such as Joe Lonsdale, a venture capitalist who co-founded the AI, drone and weapons producer Palantir and gave millions to Trump, while the company gave another $2.5m. Vance and Trump ally Peter Thiel, and Dryden Brown, a 28-year-old tech entrepreneur who “went to Greenland to try to buy it” several years ago, are also part of the group.

When Trump nominated the Praxis member and PayPal co-founder Howery as ambassador to Denmark, Praxis responded on X: “According to plan.”

Soon after Trump’s announcement, Brown tweeted that Praxis would like to “extract critical resources, terraform the land with advanced technology to make it more habitable, and build a mythical city in the North”.

Failed oil exploration

After 50 years of allowing industry to figure out – largely unsuccessfully – how to efficiently pull oil from Greenland, its government banned exploration in 2021, citing the challenges and climate change.

The Trump administration, which benefited from at least $75m in donations from industry executives ahead of the election, has regularly repeated that oil and gas exploration could be reopened if the US took over Greenland.

But some suspect this is merely an attempt to drum up support for and justify a Greenland takeover. Bierman said drilling was risky, costly and had failed to turn up the huge reserves that some speculate exist.

“The Trump administration is not always grounded in science and reality, and I think this is an example of that,” Bierman said.

Some of Donald Trump’s biggest campaign donors and investors, who collectively have hundreds of millions of dollars in financial ties to the US president, are positioned to potentially profit from any American takeover of Greenland, raising even more ethical questions around Trump’s controversial pursuit of the Arctic territory.

The administration is in part aiming to secure rare minerals that are essential for the US tech industry and national security, and to potentially reopen oil and gas exploration: “This is about critical minerals, this is about natural resources,” Trump’s national security adviser, Mike Waltz, recently said.

A Guardian analysis of campaign finance records and corporate filings show US tech moguls who invested in mining companies operating in Greenland, fossil fuel executives and crypto tycoons with their own set of plans for the country collectively gave at least $243m to the president’s 2024 campaign.

Meanwhile institutional investors bankrolling Greenland mining interests also amassed $314m worth of shares in Trump Media, most just ahead of the election.

“There’s a closed loop among these investors, billionaires, Trump and the crypto projects,” said Emily DiVito, a senior adviser for economic policy with the Groundwork Collaborative economic thinktank. Greenland is an example of that in action, she added.

“These donations are investments, and they were made with particular outcomes in mind, and even if they weren’t stated at the time, the money changed hands,” DiVito said.

Vice-President JD Vance recently visited Greenland, which is an autonomous territory of Denmark, in the latest installment of the unfolding dispute between the countries. Trump has vowed to acquire Greenland “one way or another”.

Among those who have invested millions in KoBold Metals, a mining company at the leading edge of Greenland’s “modern gold rush” for rare minerals essential to tech companies, are major Trump donors such as Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and other Silicon Valley moguls.

The top investor in Critical Metals Corp, which has a mining permit in Greenland, is the hedge fund Cantor Fitzgerald, which Trump’s commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, led until January. Critical Metals’ other top institutional investors include Vanguard, BlackRock, Geode Capital and State Street – companies that have amassed $314m in Trump Media stock, much of it purchased just ahead of the election.

Among the Greenland bids’ loudest supporters are crypto tycoons who poured unparalleled sums of money into 2024 Trump and Republican campaigns while labeling Greenland an “investment frontier” where data centers essential to the US artificial intelligence and crypto currency industries could be built. Some of the same donors also want to establish a largely autonomous libertarian utopian “post state” for the tech elite in Greenland that could be used to practice “terraforming” for a Mars colony.

The group behind the “state”, Praxis, labels its members “optimistic pioneers”, but critics say it is a colonialist operation aimed at plundering wealth and resources from a weak nation still linked to Denmark – its colonial power. Regardless, Praxis is already backed by $525m and includes members of or donors to the Trump administration, such as the PayPal co-founder Ken Howery, who was nominated for ambassador to Denmark.

What’s unfolding in Greenland represents the “circle of grift”, said Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen, a government transparency non-profit.

“Put money into the Trump family bank and the money comes back to you in the form of some government policy,” Weissman said. “That even includes the deployment of the empire in service of libertarians who favor a stateless society.”

The minerals found in Greenland are used in laptops, smartphones, weapons, clean energy technology, electric vehicles and elsewhere across the economy. China so far controls 70% of the rare earth market, and vital trade and military routes run through Greenland’s waters, so the administration portrays its interest as buttressing US security and industry. But Greenlanders are largely opposed to the idea.

Moreover, Greenland is a largely frozen, dark country with very little infrastructure, and it’s prone to rock slides, tsunamis and a shifting ground, said Paul Bierman, a natural resources researcher at the University of Vermont who spent four seasons working there. It is extremely difficult and expensive to extract resources, and the idea that a “gold rush” is possible is “almost completely pie in the sky”, Bierman said.

Mining industry donors and investors

The opposition from Greenlanders and unforgiving terrain has done little to tamp the tech, mining and Trump administration donor enthusiasm for a takeover.

KoBold holds permits to extract cobalt, nickel and platinum, and is now valued at $3bn. Its largest backer is the tech investment firm Andreessen Horowitz – Marc Andreessen, who has assisted the unofficial “department of government efficiency” (Doge), and Ben Horowitz each donated $2.5m to a pro-Donald Trump Super Pac, according to FEC filings, in addition to contributing or helping raise tens of millions of dollars more via other channels.

Bezos, Altman, Zuckerberg and Microsoft’s Bill Gates each donated $1m to Trump’s inauguration. Also among KoBold backers is Patrice Motsepe, a South African mining mogul who generated controversy in 2020 when he told Trump “Africa loves you!”

Lutnick, Trump’s commerce secretary, who gave $5m to the president ahead of the election, just stepped down from his position at Cantor Fitzgerald, but other Trump donors lead the company. A spokesperson pointed to a press release stating that Lutnick had divested and “does not expect any arrangement that involves selling shares on the open market”.

BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street – who are Critical Metals’ other top shareholders – are generally considered to be passive investors who have their fingers in pots across the economy. Still, the three became Trump Media’s top investors when they purchased over $175m worth of stock just ahead of the election, which was widely viewed as an investment in the president. The companies did not respond to a request for comment.

DiVito said Greenland was “littered with the corpses of mineral investors”, but some industry players including consultant Drew Horn, a former senior adviser in the previous Trump administration’s energy department, are regularly in the media cheerleading the administration’s Greenland policy and touting the riches that lie in the nation’s ground.

Horn’s company, GreenMet, leverages his administration relationships to secure political and financial backing for mining companies. GreenMet “advance[s] private sector investments and sound legislative and regulatory action to develop a resilient domestic supply chain”, the company states.

On Fox News, Horn touted the “significant opportunity for US investment in mining and energy production”, but industry observers with no financial stake remain skeptical. In the event that a mining startup doesn’t strike it rich in Greenland, Horn still receives fees for his consulting.

Bierman did not comment on Horn, but said other reports that promote Greenland mining opportunities trace back to the mining industry, not independent or Danish government sources.

“It makes me wonder: is it just self-promotion to get investment money?” Bierman said.

Cryptocurrency industry donors

Ahead of the election, the crypto tycoon Tyler Winklevoss summed up the industry’s mood: Biden had “openly declared war against crypto”, he insisted. He and his twin, Cameron Winklevoss, would each donate $1m to Trump, who would “put an end to the Biden administration’s war on crypto.”

The industry followed suit, fervently backing Trump and the Republicans. The largest crypto Pac, Fairshake, reported spending $195m in the last election cycle, with at least $148m going to the president and Republicans. Top firms reportedly poured another $10m into the president’s inaugural fund.

The crypto industry’s aims in Greenland are slightly more nebulous than mining’s, but it has fixated on the region. In part, the cold climate and easy access to renewable energy is attractive for bitcoin mining operations – Horn said it “literally is the best place in the world for data centers”. The crypto industry startup Lympid just tokenized the first property in Greenland, meaning the real estate asset is converted into coins that people can buy, giving them a stake in the company. Lympid’s co-founder Joao Lages laid out why in revealing terms.

“This isn’t just about real estate; it’s about democratizing access to one of the world’s most unique and promising investment frontiers,” Lages said. “We’re creating a bridge for global investors to participate in the region’s growth story.”

Praxis’s deep roster of tech elite includes folks such as Joe Lonsdale, a venture capitalist who co-founded the AI, drone and weapons producer Palantir and gave millions to Trump, while the company gave another $2.5m. Vance and Trump ally Peter Thiel, and Dryden Brown, a 28-year-old tech entrepreneur who “went to Greenland to try to buy it” several years ago, are also part of the group.

When Trump nominated the Praxis member and PayPal co-founder Howery as ambassador to Denmark, Praxis responded on X: “According to plan.”

Soon after Trump’s announcement, Brown tweeted that Praxis would like to “extract critical resources, terraform the land with advanced technology to make it more habitable, and build a mythical city in the North”.

Failed oil exploration

After 50 years of allowing industry to figure out – largely unsuccessfully – how to efficiently pull oil from Greenland, its government banned exploration in 2021, citing the challenges and climate change.

The Trump administration, which benefited from at least $75m in donations from industry executives ahead of the election, has regularly repeated that oil and gas exploration could be reopened if the US took over Greenland.

But some suspect this is merely an attempt to drum up support for and justify a Greenland takeover. Bierman said drilling was risky, costly and had failed to turn up the huge reserves that some speculate exist.

“The Trump administration is not always grounded in science and reality, and I think this is an example of that,” Bierman said.

The European Commission is considering plans that would allow European companies to break long-term Russian gas contracts without paying penalties to Moscow, it has been reported.

Citing three officials with knowledge of the plan, the Financial Times reported that the commission was studying the possibility of allowing companies to declare force majeure, which would absolve importers of their obligations to pay penalty fees for ending contracts.

The plans are reported to be part of a roadmap on how the EU will rid itself of Russian fossil fuels by 2027, a document scheduled to be published on 6 May, following repeated delays.

A commission spokesperson declined to comment.

The commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, said last month at a press conference, when asked about the delays, that she was committed to phasing out Russian gas: “This is absolute must.”

EU leaders pledged to end dependency on Russian oil and gas in 2022, amid widespread concern that these revenues were funding Russia’s war against Ukraine.

The EU imported just under 52bn cubic metres of Russian gas in 2024, compared with 150bn cubic metres in 2021, according to EU statistics. But within the most recent figures, Europe bought a record amount of Russian liquified natural gas last year, and Russian gas imports increased by 18% , according to energy thinktank Ember.

Pipeline imports also continue, despite the end of gas flows through Ukraine on 1 January 2025 when a transit deal expired. In February 2025, the EU received 56m cubic metres a day via the TurkStream pipeline, an 11% monthly increase. “These increases could threaten the 2027 Russian gas phase-out pathway,” Ember said, also referring to liquified natural gas (LNG).

The US is Europe’s biggest supplier of LNG and officials have expressed interest in buying even more of the ultra-cold shipped fuel since Donald Trump returned to the White House.

Meanwhile energy executives are openly talking about resuming Russian gas imports. “If there is a reasonable peace in Ukraine, we could go back to flows of 60bn cubic metres, maybe 70, annually, including LNG,” Didier Holleaux, executive vice-president at France’s Engie, told Reuters in an interview. The French government partly owns Engie, which used to be among the biggest buyers of Gazprom’s gas.

In Germany, businesses are also said to be interested in restarting Russian gas imports, which used to provide 55% of its supply and helped factories run at competitive prices. “Reopening pipelines would reduce prices more than any current subsidy programmes,” Christof Guenther, managing director of InfraLeuna chemical park, home to Dow Chemical and Shell, told Reuters. He added that many colleagues agreed on the need to go back to Russian gas: “It’s a taboo topic.”

The home-wrecking storms and floods that swept Europe last year affected 413,000 people, a report has found, as fossil fuel pollution forced the continent to suffer through its hottest year on record.

Dramatic scenes of cars piled up on inundated streets and bridges being ripped away by raging torrents were seen around the continent in 2024, with “high” floods on 30% of the European river network and 12% crossing the “severe” flood threshold, according to the European State of the Climate report.

The two most destructive examples were the deluges that tore through central Europe in September and eastern Spain in October, which accounted for more than 250 of the 335 flooding deaths recorded across the continent in 2024.

Previous studies have found the disasters were made stronger and more likely because of global heating, which lets clouds pummel the ground with more rain.

Celeste Saulo, director general of the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), said “every additional fraction of a degree” of temperature rise mattered, but that societies must also adapt to a hotter world.

“We are making progress but need to go further and need to go faster,” she said. “And we need to go together.”

The report, which was published on Tuesday by the EU’s Copernicus climate change service and the WMO, found the numbers of days with “strong”, “very strong” and “extreme heat stress” were all the second-highest on record.

South-eastern Europe experienced its longest heatwave on record in July 2024, searing more than half the region for 13 days in a row, while high heat across the continent contributed to destructive wildfires that affected 42,000 people, the report found. About one-quarter of Europe’s burnt area last year came from devastating wildfires in Portugal in September, which burned about 110,000 hectares in a single week.

Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London and co-lead of World Weather Attribution, who was not involved in the study, said the report “lays bare the pain Europe’s population is already suffering from extreme weather” at 1.3C of global heating above preindustrial levels.

“We’re on track to experience 3C by 2100,” she said. “You only need to cast your mind back to the floods in Spain, the fires in Portugal, or the summer heatwaves last year to know how devastating this level of warming would be.”

The report authors highlighted an “unusual” contrast between western and eastern Europe, with the west tending to be wet and cloudy and the east warm and sunny. River flows tended to be above average in western countries and below average in eastern ones. In several months last year, the Thames in the UK and the Loire in France experienced their highest flows in a 33-year record, the report found.

Glaciers in all regions had net ice loss, with those in Scandinavia and Svalbard losing more mass than ever previously recorded, according to the report. The authors also noted high temperatures north of the Arctic Circle, and the hottest sea surface temperature recorded in the Mediterranean.

Froila Palmeiro, a climate scientist at the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change, who was not involved in the report, said the extremes “not only have a direct impact on their ecosystems, but also play a role in weather patterns affecting all of Europe”.

Europe is warming twice as fast as the global average but has cut its planet-heating pollution faster than other big economies. The EU plans to hit net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, and is expected to also announce a net 90% reduction target for 2040 later this year.

Thomas Gelin, a climate campaigner at Greenpeace EU, said the report showed that politicians had failed to hold fossil fuel companies accountable and stop the expansion of their polluting businesses.

“The only parts of Europe that aren’t being boiled dry are being washed away in floods,” he said. “The EU must urgently update its climate targets to reflect the scientific reality, and put a stop to new fossil fuel projects as a first step to a full phase-out.”

Researchers from China are to be allowed access to half a million UK GP records despite western intelligence agencies’ fears about the authoritarian regime amassing health data, the Guardian can reveal.

Preparations are under way to transfer the records to UK Biobank, a research hub that holds detailed medical information donated by 500,000 volunteers. One of the world’s largest troves of health data, the facility makes its information available to universities, scientific institutes and private companies. A Guardian analysis shows one in five successful applications for access come from China.

For the past year, health officials had been assessing whether extra safeguards were needed for patient records when added to the genomes, tissue samples and questionnaire responses held by UK Biobank. Personal details such as names and dates of birth are stripped from UK Biobank data before it is shared but experts say that in some cases individuals can still be identified.

MI5, the UK Security Service, has warned that Chinese organisations and individuals granted access to UK data can be ordered by Chinese intelligence agencies “to carry out work on their behalf”. But UK Biobank told the Guardian that the NHS unit responsible for health data had in recent weeks cleared it to grant Chinese researchers access to GP records.

As Keir Starmer’s ministers court Beijing in search of economic growth, the decision avoids crossing a rising superpower that has made biotech prowess a priority. UK-China relations already face tests over the fate of a Chinese-owned steel plant in Scunthorpe and plans for new rules on foreign interference campaigns.

“Security and privacy considerations are always taken into account when UK health data is used to drive forward our understanding of diseases and advance scientific research,” a government spokesperson said. Health data was “only shared with legitimate researchers”, they added.

Chi Onwurah, a Labour MP who chairs parliament’s science and technology committee, said: “UK Biobank is an enormous success and global medical research is all the better for it.” But she added: “We need a government-wide strategy that gives people confidence that they have control of their data, that their data is only ever shared securely and responsibly, and that reflects the realities of geopolitics and the potential for bad actors to use our data for ill.”

Approving access to patient records

Of the 1,375 successful applications for access to UK Biobank data, 265 came from China, or almost 20%, second only to the US, according to a Guardian analysis of its published records. Chinese scientists have used UK Biobank data to understand the effects of air pollution and to spot biological markers that could predict dementia.

Last year, UK Biobank approved access for a research project on ageing by a unit of the Chinese genetics company BGI. The US, by contrast, has blacklisted BGI subsidiaries, barring Americans from exporting to them.

Joe Biden’s government justified the restrictions in 2023, saying it had information indicating that BGI units’ “collection and analysis of genetic data poses a significant risk of contributing to monitoring and surveillance by the government of China, which has been utilised in the repression of ethnic minorities in China”. It also claimed “the actions of these entities concerning the collection and analysis of genetic data present a significant risk of diversion to China’s military programs”.

These were “unsubstantiated allegations”, a BGI representative said. “We have never undertaken genetic surveillance of anybody. BGI does not engage in unethical practices and does not provide gene technology for surveillance. BGI does not condone and would never be involved in any human rights abuses.” The company dismissed claims the military could access data, saying its research “is undertaken for civilian and scientific purposes only”.

A UK Biobank representative said it was “continually in dialogue” with MI5 and other state agencies about the use of its data, including by BGI.

Despite objections from some GPs, in October Wes Streeting, the health secretary, gave instructions to press ahead with the transfer of patient records for consenting volunteers to UK Biobank and other research hubs.

“Access will only be for countries approved by NHS England,” Michael Chapman, a senior NHS official, told UK Biobank’s conference in December, adding that approval would be based on “security considerations” and countries’ data protection.

NHS England, the body that manages the health service and oversees the use of health data, has in recent weeks audited UK Biobank’s processes for sharing data internationally, including how it assesses applications from China, a representative of the research hub said. UK Biobank passed the audit, the representative said, so Chinese researchers would be able to apply for access to the GP records.

NHS England said: “Any approval of access to personal data from overseas territories requires data recipients to comply with their responsibilities” under UK data law “and is kept under review if circumstances change”.

China is ‘developing the world’s largest bio database’

Data troves such as UK Biobank “were set up to encourage research worldwide”, says a leaked May 2024 NHS England presentation on policing access to GP records, “but the global picture has since changed”.

Yves Moreau, a geneticist who has worked on projects using data from UK Biobank and praises it as a “world class” resource, said China’s rulers “regard genomic data and other health data as strategic”. He said it was “reasonable to worry about China vacuuming such data from around the world to strengthen its biotech sector”.

Beyond commercial advantages, intelligence sources say health data can be useful in espionage if anonymisation can be broken. Experts say it may be possible to match public information about an individual’s medical treatment with anonymised patient records to identify who they refer to. UK Biobank’s representative said it had “no evidence of anyone being identified”.

After China adopted new legislation in 2017 to enforce cooperation with the regime’s spies, MI5 warned custodians of British personal data that the national intelligence law “may affect the level of control you have over your information and assets as you engage with Chinese individuals and organisations, especially if you work in an area that is of interest to the Chinese state”.

China is “developing the world’s largest bio database”, Edward You, then a top US intelligence officer specialising in new technologies, said in 2021. “Once they have access to your genetic data, it’s not something you can change like a pin code.”

Privacy campaigners at medConfidential asked UK Biobank last year “whether Biobank continues to send British citizens’ genetic and (NHS) patient data to China or other ‘hostile states’.” They added: “No one should be satisfied that there is still no clarity on exactly what patient data Biobank has disseminated to what researchers where, despite this being a constant question for multiple years.”

Until last year, UK Biobank allowed researchers to take copies of its data. Recipients agreed to destroy it once their projects were finished but there was no way to ensure they did. In October, the Guardian revealed that a fringe group promoting racist pseudoscience claimed to have access to UK Biobank data. UK Biobank has now switched to a system where researchers access data within its own platform. Its representative said access to GP records would be through this platform only.

Prof Sir Rory Collins, UK Biobank’s chief executive, said: “All our volunteers have given explicit consent for researchers to study their de-identified health data, and many have emphasised the importance of their GP data being analysed.”

• Additional reporting: Zeke Hunter-Green, Dominic Kendrick and Olivia Lee in London

The US education department is freezing about $2.3bn in federal funds to Harvard University, the agency said on Monday.

The announcement comes as the Ivy League school has decided to fight the White House’s demands that it crack down on antisemitism and alleged civil rights violations, including shutting down diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

“Harvard’s statement today reinforces the troubling entitlement mindset that is endemic in our nation’s most prestigious universities and colleges – that federal investment does not come with the responsibility to uphold civil rights laws,” said a member of a department taskforce on combating antisemitism in a statement.

The education department taskforce on combating antisemitism said in a statement it was freezing $2.2bn in grants and $60m in multi-year contract value to Harvard.

In a letter to Harvard on Friday, the administration called for broad government and leadership reforms, a requirement that Harvard institute what it calls “merit-based” admissions and hiring policies as well as conduct an audit of the study body, faculty and leadership on their views about diversity.

The demands, which are an update from an earlier letter, also call for a ban on face masks, which appeared to target pro-Palestinian protesters; close its diversity, equity and inclusion programs, which it says teach students and staff “to make snap judgments about each other based on crude race and identity stereotypes”; and pressured the university to stop recognizing or funding “any student group or club that endorses or promotes criminal activity, illegal violence, or illegal harassment”.

The administration also demanded that Harvard cooperate with federal immigration authorities.

Harvard’s president said in a letter that the university would not comply with the Trump administration’s demands to dismantle its diversity programming and to limit student protests in exchange for its federal funding.

“No government – regardless of which party is in power – should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” Alan Garber, the university president, wrote, adding that Harvard had taken extensive reforms to address antisemitism.

Garber said the government’s demands were a political ploy.

“It makes clear that the intention is not to work with us to address antisemitism in a cooperative and constructive manner,” he wrote. “Although some of the demands outlined by the government are aimed at combating antisemitism, the majority represent direct governmental regulation of the ‘intellectual conditions’ at Harvard.”

On Monday, Barack Obama posted in support of the university: “Harvard has set an example for other higher-ed institutions – rejecting an unlawful and ham-handed attempt to stifle academic freedom, while taking concrete steps to make sure all students at Harvard can benefit from an environment of intellectual inquiry, rigorous debate and mutual respect. Let’s hope other institutions follow suit.”

The demands from the Trump administration prompted a group of alumni to write to university leaders calling for it to “legally contest and refuse to comply with unlawful demands that threaten academic freedom and university self-governance”.

“Harvard stood up today for the integrity, values, and freedoms that serve as the foundation of higher education,” said Anurima Bhargava, one of the alumni behind the letter. “Harvard reminded the world that learning, innovation and transformative growth will not yield to bullying and authoritarian whims.”

It also sparked a protest over the weekend from members of the Harvard community and from residents of Cambridge and a lawsuit from the American Association of University Professors on Friday challenging the cuts.

In their lawsuit, plaintiffs argue that the Trump administration has failed to follow steps required under Title VI before it starts cutting funds, and giving notice of the cuts to both the university and Congress.

“These sweeping yet indeterminate demands are not remedies targeting the causes of any determination of noncompliance with federal law. Instead, they overtly seek to impose on Harvard University political views and policy preferences advanced by the Trump administration and commit the university to punishing disfavored speech,” plaintiffs wrote.

Edward Helmore contributed to this report

Film-maker Chris Columbus says he has come to regard Donald Trump’s cameo in his movie Home Alone 2: Lost in New York as “an albatross” that he wishes to remove.

But, Columbus added, he fears the president’s administration would deport him if he followed through with nixing the scene from more than 30 years ago.

“It’s become this curse,” Columbus told the San Francisco Chronicle in an interview published Monday. “It’s become an albatross for me. I just wish it was gone.”

Though born and raised in the US, the San Francisco resident of Italian ancestry said he worried he would “have to go back to Italy or something” if he erased the cameo.

Columbus’s comments – made in advance of a tribute he is scheduled to receive at the 68th San Francisco international film festival on 26 April – revisited a controversy that began in 2020, toward the conclusion of Trump’s first presidency. The director of the first two Home Alone films told Business Insider that Trump’s cameo in the 1992 sequel was a condition of being able to film inside New York’s Plaza hotel, which Trump owned at the time.

Trump, best known at that time as a real-estate development tycoon, “did bully his way into the movie”, Columbus told Business Insider, describing how the cameo was on top of a fee. He claimed Trump told him: “The only way you can use the Plaza is if I’m in the movie.”

In late 2023, less than a year before he became president for the second time, Trump went on his Truth Social platform and accused Columbus of lying. He said Columbus’s team was “begging” him to make a cameo and that it ended up being “great for the movie”.

Columbus opted against immediately responding to those claims from Trump. Yet in Monday’s interview, the director made it a point to say: “I’m not lying. … There’s no world I would ever beg a non-actor to be in a movie. But we were desperate to get the Plaza hotel.”

According to Columbus, his instinct was to cut the cameo and regrets that he changed his mind after viewers at a screening in Chicago “cheered … and cheered and … thought it was hilarious”.

“I never thought that was going to be considered hilarious,” Columbus said, referring to the seven-second scene in which Trump gives star Macaulay Culkin’s character directions on the Plaza Hotel. “It’s become this thing that I wish … was not there.”

The idea of removing Trump from Home Alone – which made $359m (£280m) to become 1992’s third-highest grossing film – has been tested before.

Trump supporters complained in 2019 when a cut of Home Alone 2 screened on Canadian television removed his cameo. Then, in early 2021, Culkin himself said he was “sold” on the concept of digitally removing Trump from the film.

Columbus’s remark to the Chronicle that he fretted being ousted from the US if he did trash Trump’s cameo alluded to prominent deportation cases being pursued by the White House.

In one instance since he retook the Oval Office, Trump’s administration erroneously deported a man living in Maryland to a mega-prison in El Salvador. And immigration officials under his command have detained academic scholars around the US for deportation proceedings after their support of pro-Palestine protests.

The Trump administration has also sought to punish media figures which it considers to have crossed the president. Trump has demanded $20bn from CBS News in a lawsuit over the editing of a 60 Minutes interview with his opponent in the 2024 election, former vice-president Kamala Harris. He also sued the Des Moines Register over an Iowa election poll that turned out to be inaccurate.

ABC News recently settled a lawsuit with Trump for $15m over incorrectly saying the president had been found civilly liable for raping E Jean Carroll. A jury had actually found Trump “sexually abused” Carroll but had not raped her.

“I can’t cut it,” Columbus – whose other blockbusters include Mrs Doubtfire and the first two Harry Potter films – reportedly said of Trump’s cameo.

“If I cut it, I’ll probably be sent out of this country. I’ll be considered sort of not fit to live in the United States.”