The US and Kyiv have signed an agreement to share profits and royalties from the future sale of Ukrainian minerals and rare earths, sealing a deal that Donald Trump has said will provide an economic incentive for the US to continue to invest in Ukraine’s defense and its reconstruction after he brokers a peace deal with Russia.

The minerals deal, which has been the subject of tense negotiations for months and nearly fell through hours before it was signed, will establish a US-Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund that the Trump administration has said will begin to repay an estimated $175bn in aid provided to Ukraine since the beginning of the war.

“This agreement signals clearly to Russia that the Trump administration is committed to a peace process centered on a free, sovereign, and prosperous Ukraine over the long term,” said Scott Bessent, the US treasury secretary, in a statement.

“President Trump envisioned this partnership between the American people and the Ukrainian people to show both sides’ commitment to lasting peace and prosperity in Ukraine. And to be clear, no state or person who financed or supplied the Russian war machine will be allowed to benefit from the reconstruction of Ukraine.”

Ukraine’s first deputy prime minister, Yulia Svyrydenko, confirmed in a social media post that she had signed the agreement on Wednesday. “Together with the United States, we are creating the fund that will attract global investment into our country,” she wrote. The deal still needs to be approved by Ukraine’s parliament.

Ukrainian officials have divulged details of the agreement which they portrayed as equitable and allowing Ukraine to maintain control over its natural resources.

The Ukrainian prime minister, Denys Shmyhal, said that the fund would be split 50-50 with between the US and Ukraine and give each side equal voting rights.

Ukraine would retain “full control over its mineral resources, infrastructure and natural resources,” he said, and would relate only to new investments, meaning that the deal would not provide for any debt obligations against Ukraine, a key concern for Kyiv. The deal would ensure revenue by establishing contracts on a “take-or-pay” basis, Shmyhal added.

Shmyhal on Wednesday described the deal as “truly a good, equal and beneficial international agreement on joint investments in the development and recovery of Ukraine”.

Critics of the deal had said the White House is seeking to take advantage of Ukraine by linking future aid to the embattled nation to a giveaway of the revenues from its resources. The final terms were far less onerous for Ukraine than those proposed initially by Bessent in February, which included a clause that the US would control 100% of the revenues from the fund.

On Wednesday Trump said a US presence on the ground would benefit Ukraine. “The American presence will, I think, keep a lot of bad actors out of the country or certainly out of the area where we’re doing the digging,” he said at a cabinet meeting.

Speaking at a town hall with NewsNation after the deal had been signed, Trump said he told Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy during a recent meeting at the Vatican that signing the deal would be a “very good thing” because “Russia is much bigger and much stronger”.

Asked whether the minerals deal was going to “inhibit” Russian president Vladimir Putin, Trump said “well, it could.”

UK foreign secretary David Lammy welcomed the agreement in a post on X, adding that “the UK’s support for Ukraine remains steadfast”.

It was unclear up until the last moment whether the US and Ukraine would manage to sign the deal, with Washington reportedly pressuring Ukraine to sign additional agreements, including on the structure of the investment fund, or to “go back home”. That followed months of strained negotiations during which the US regularly delivered last-minute ultimatums while cutting off aid and other support for Ukraine in its defence against Russia.

Ukraine’s prime minister earlier had said he expected the country to sign the minerals deal with the US in “the next 24 hours” but reports emerged that Washington was insisting Kyiv sign three deals in total.

The Financial Times said Bessent’s team had told Svyrydenko, who was reportedly en route to Washington DC, to “be ready to sign all agreements, or go back home”.

Bessent later said the US was ready to sign though Ukraine had made some last-minute changes.

Reuters reported that Ukraine believed the two supplementary agreements – reportedly on an investment fund and a technical document – required more work.

The idea behind the deal was originally proposed by Ukraine, looking for ways to offer economic opportunities that might entice Trump to back the country. But Kyiv was blindsided in January when Trump’s team delivered a document that would essentially involve handing over the country’s mineral wealth with little by way of return.

Since then, there have been various attempts to revise and revisit the terms of the deal, as well as a planned signing ceremony that was aborted after a disastrous meeting between Trump and Zelenskyy at the White House in February.

Earlier this month, it was revealed that the Ukrainian justice ministry had hired US law firm Hogan Lovells to advise on the negotiations over the deal, according to filings with the US Foreign Agents Registration Act registry.

In a post on Facebook, Ukraine’s first deputy prime minister Yulia Svyrydenko gave further details of the fund, which she said would “attract global investment”.

She confirmed that Ukraine would retain full ownership of resources “on our territory and in territorial waters belong to Ukraine”. “It is the Ukrainian state that determines where and what to extract,” she said.

There would be no changes to ownership of state-owned companies, she said, “they will continue to belong to Ukraine”. That included companies such as Ukrnafta, Ukraine’s largest oil producer, and nuclear energy producer Energoatom.

Income would come from new licences for critical materials and oil and gas projects, not from projects which had already begun, she said.

Income and contributions to the fund would not be taxed in the US or Ukraine, she said, “to make investments yield the greatest results” and technology transfer and development were a “key” part of the agreement.

Washington would contribute to the fund, she said. “In addition to direct financial contributions, it may also provide new assistance – for example air defense systems for Ukraine,” she said. Washington did not directly address that suggestion.

Ukraine holds some 5% of the world’s mineral resources and rare earths, according to various estimates. But work has not yet started on tapping many of the resources and many sites are in territory now controlled by Russian forces.

Razom for Ukraine, a US nonprofit that provides medical and humanitarian aid to Ukraine and advocates for US assistance, welcomed the deal, and encouraged the Trump administration to increase pressure on Vladimir Putin to end the invasion.

“We encourage the Trump administration to build on the momentum of this economic agreement by forcing Putin to the table through sanctions, seizing Russia’s state assets to aid Ukraine, and giving Ukraine the tools it needs to defend itself,” Mykola Murskyj, director of advocacy for Razom, said in a statement.

Ukrainian and Russian civil society leaders have called for the unconditional release of thousands of Ukrainian civilians being held in Russian captivity, pushing for world leaders to make it a central part of any peace deal.

Oleksandra Matviichuk, head of the Kyiv-based Centre for Civil Liberties, which won the 2022 Nobel peace prize, said most of the discussion on ending the conflict, led by Donald Trump’s administration, focused solely on territories and potential security guarantees.

“It’s a huge problem that we lose the human dimension in this political process. Only with solving the human dimension can we find a path to sustainable peace,” she said.

On Tuesday, the Guardian and its reporting partners launched the Viktoriia project, an investigation into the death of the Ukrainian journalist Viktoriia Roshchyna in Russian custody, as well as a report on the systemic torture and mistreatment of thousands of civilian detainees seized by Russian occupying forces.

The European Commission on Wednesday condemned the killing, with foreign affairs spokesperson Anitta Hipper saying it showed life under occupation “remains a constant threat to Ukrainians”.

Jan Braathu, the media freedom representative for the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, said he was “appalled” by the evidence emerging in Roshchyna’s case. A preliminary autopsy suggests she was tortured before she died, and her brain and other body parts were removed in order to conceal the cause of death.

In a statement, Braathu said her treatment was a breach of international law, including the Geneva conventions and the UN conventions against torture – to which Russia is a signatory. “I condemn these grave abuses by the Russian Federation,” he said.

The Ukrainian parliament’s commissioner for human rights, Dmytro Lubinets, said that as of April 2024 the number of people registered as having disappeared stood at 16,000, but that calculating an exact total was impossible.

Those detained are often socially and politically active people Russia fears may resist occupation, as well as former military personnel or Ukrainian government officials. Some are simply in the wrong place in the wrong time and are pulled into a nightmare of torture and mistreatment.

Prisoners are often held incommunicado, without charge or access to legal support, and are not allowed to send and receive letters. Their fate is one of the lesser-reported aspects of Russia’s war on Ukraine.

The Guardian and its reporting partners, in a collaboration led by the French newsroom Forbidden Stories, have gathered testimonies from former detainees at one of the most notorious holding facilities, Taganrog pre-trial detention facility No 2. They show civilians and prisoners of war are being subjected to severe food rationing, with little or no medical care, and that torture including electric shocks, physical and sexual violence and waterboarding is meted out by Russian guards.

“When you hear about the conditions and the torture, there is a clear understanding that some of these people have no chance to be alive by the time the political process has ended,” said Matviichuk.

Trump met the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, on the sidelines of the pope’s funeral in Rome on Saturday, while his envoy, Steve Witkoff, met Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Friday. Trump claimed Russia and Ukraine were “very close to a deal” and has said he wants the two sides to meet soon.

A draft of the supposed US peace plan, published last week by Reuters, covers territory, economic issues and security guarantees, but says nothing about prisoners.

Karyna Malakhova-Diachuk, the co-founder of an organisation that brings together the families of civilian detainees, said she was hoping that the freeing of these prisoners would come before a deal on territories and other elements that the US wants to nail down on the way to a lasting peace.

“First, there should be an agreement to bring all the people home, and only after that they should start other negotiations. Otherwise everything will stay frozen on this issue,” she said.

During the first year of the war, civilians were frequently included in prisoner exchanges between Russia and Ukraine but it is now rare. Malakhova-Diachuk’s organisation comprises relatives of 380 detainees, and she said there had been no releases for more than a year of those linked to the group.

The emotional toll on relatives was hard to express, she said, adding that the horror stories to emerge from Russian prisons made the waiting and uncertainty all the more painful. “You see the PoWs return and they tell these horrific stories of torture and injuries and the things that happen there and there is just nothing you can do.”

A minority have been charged and given long prison terms for “terrorism” and other crimes, which could present further obstacles if Russia claims they are convicted criminals and so cannot be part of a deal.

Mykhailo Podolyak, a Zelenskyy aide, said that civilian detainees, along with prisoners of war and the Ukrainian children forcibly taken to Russia, would be a key part of Ukraine’s demands in any peace deal. He added that even those who had been given prison terms in Russia should be freed as part of a peace deal.

“These courts have no legal weight for us. We don’t consider these people to be convicted of anything. And we will do everything for our citizens to be returned to Ukraine,” he said.

The human dimension has been absent from most of the western countries’ public messaging around the push for a peace deal, with the focus instead on territories and security guarantees.

“We’ve heard nothing at all from Trump. We are knocking on different doors of different governments,” said Oleg Orlov, head of the Russian human rights organisation Memorial, which was also awarded the 2022 Nobel peace prize.

Memorial and the Centre for Civil Liberties are two of about 50 Ukrainian and Russian organisations that have created a campaign called People First, which calls for the freeing of all prisoners of war, civilian detainees and Ukrainian children taken to Russia, at an early stage in the peace process.

While the all-for-all exchange of prisoners of war is a normal part of the end of military hostilities, the mechanism to free civilians is less clear. “Russia should let them go without any conditions, but it will be very hard to achieve this,” said Orlov.

He said one solution could be for Ukraine to free citizens it had arrested on charges of collaboration with Russian occupying forces and offer them passage to Russia. “You can’t swap civilians, but there could be a possibility of a simultaneous freeing of these people with detained Ukrainian civilians,” he said.

• Kyiv and Washington have signed a deal that would share future revenues from Ukraine’s minerals, with the US to keep military aid flowing to the country, as well as US investment into its defence and reconstruction. Ukrainian prime minister Denys Shmyhal shared details of the deal, saying a new reconstruction and investment fund would be split 50-50 between Kyiv and the US, and give each side equal voting rights.

• The deal would relate only to new investments, Shmyhal said, meaning it would not provide for any debt obligations against Ukraine, a key concern for Kyiv. Ukraine would retain “full control over its mineral resources, infrastructure and natural resources,” Shmyhal added. The deal would ensure revenue by establishing contracts on a “take-or-pay” basis, Shmyhal said.

• Ukraine’s first deputy prime minister, Yulia Svyrydenko, said there would be no changes to ownership of state-owned companies, including Ukrnafta, Ukraine’s largest oil producer, and nuclear energy producer Energoatom. Income and contributions to the fund would not be taxed in the US or Ukraine, she said, “to make investments yield the greatest results”.

• Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin said some small groups of Ukrainian soldiers were still holed up in basements and hideouts in Russia’s western Kursk region. Speaking at an event in Moscow on Wednesday, the Russian president claimed radio intercepts suggested that the few Ukrainians left behind were asking commanders to evacuate them.

• The EU is preparing a “plan B” on how to keep economic sanctions against Russia should the US abandon Ukraine peace talks and seek rapprochement with Moscow, according to the bloc’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas. “We see signs that they are contemplating whether they should leave Ukraine and not try to get a deal with the Russians because it’s hard,” Kallas told the Financial Times.

• The Kremlin claimed Putin was open to peace despite its continuing aggression on Ukraine, but stressed that the conflict is so complicated that the rapid progress that Washington wants is difficult to achieve, Reuters reported.

• Russia and North Korea have begun construction of a road bridge between the two countries as part of an effort to strengthen their strategic partnership, Russia’s prime minister, Mikhail Mishustin, said. It comes after South Korean lawmakers said about 600 North Korean troops have been killed fighting for Russia against Ukraine.

Kamala Harris delivered a searing indictment of Donald Trump’s first 100 days in power, warning in her first major address since leaving office that the nation was witnessing a “wholesale abandonment of America’s highest ideals” by its president.

Speaking to an audience of Democrats in San Francisco, the former vice-president struck a defiant posture as she praised the leaders and institutions pushing back against Trump and his aggressive agenda – from the members of Congress acting boldly to the judges “who uphold the rule of law in the face of those who would jail them”, the universities defying the administration’s “unconstitutional demands”, and the everyday Americans rallying to protect social security.

The speech – her most forceful since Trump returned to power – marked a notable reemergence for Harris. The former vice-president, who now lives in Los Angeles and is weighing her next move – a possible run for California governor next year or another bid for the presidency in 2028 – has mostly kept a low profile since leaving office in January following her devastating loss to Trump in November.

In her remarks, she accused Trump of deliberately sowing fear and chaos to consolidate his own executive power, in a “high velocity” start to his presidency that hurled the country toward a constitutional crisis.

“They are counting on the notion that, if they can make some people afraid, it will have a chilling effect on others,” she said. “But what they’ve overlooked is that fear isn’t the only thing that’s contagious. Courage is contagious.”

Urging Americans to keep organizing, running for office and standing up for fundamental rights and values, she declared: “Let’s lock it in.”

Delivering the keynote address at the 20th anniversary gala for Emerge America in at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco was a poignant coda for Harris. Her early success running for San Francisco district attorney in 2003 inspired the group’s founding, and on Wednesday Harris, a Bay Area native and the nation’s first female vice-president, paid tribute to its work recruiting and training Democratic women to run for office.

“We need to get more of the alpha energy back with women,” said attendee Connie Price, referencing a quote from Michigan senator Elissa Slotkin. “We have to get less kumbaya and more solutions oriented and women are plenty capable of that.”

The crowd included Democratic donors, candidates and elected officials, among Eleni Kounalakis, the lieutenant governor of California and former California Congresswoman Katie Porter, both of whom are running for governor.

In her remarks, Harris argued that the chaotic start to Trump’s second term was by design, laid out in the conservative policy blueprint Project 2025.

“Please, let us not be duped into thinking everything is chaos,” she said. “What we are, in fact, witnessing is a vessel being used for the swift implementation of an agenda that has been decades in the making.”

During the campaign, Trump sought to distance himself from the unpopular initiative but his actions as president follow the plan closely – from his chainsaw approach to downsizing the federal government to his war on diversity, equity and inclusion policies and “gender ideology”. Trump’s “reckless” tariffs were “clearly inviting a recession”, Harris said, adding, with a subtle reference to her campaign trail warnings, “as I predicted”.

She did not, however, get more personal, despite plenty of avenues to do so.

On Tuesday, the Trump administration fired Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff and other senior Biden White House officials from the board that oversees the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Earlier this month, the law firm where Emhoff works reached a deal with the White House to avert an executive order targeting its practice. Emhoff, who was in attendance on Wednesday night, was said to have advised against acquiescing to the administration’s demands, and Harris seemed to obliquely address the situation in remarks days later when she said: “We are seeing those that are capitulating to clearly unconstitutional threats”.

But the self-described “joyful warrior” also left room for hope. She commended leaders whose dissent has galvanized the public, including Democratic senators Cory Booker, who delivered a record-breaking 25-hour speech to show resistance to Trump, and Chris Van Hollen, who secured a visit with a man wrongly deported to El Salvador by the administration, as well Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who have been drawing crowds thousands-strong on their cross-country Stop Oligarchy tour.

Yet with the Democrats out of power in Washington, and Trump pressuring the constitutional system of checks and balances with no resistance from Congress, Harris predicted that “things are probably going to get worse before they get better”.

Concluding her speech, she referenced a viral video of elephants at the San Diego Zoo captured during a 5.2-magnitude earthquake that struck California earlier this month. When the ground began to shake, they instinctively formed a protective circle around the most vulnerable in their herd, which Harris saw as a “powerful metaphor” for collective resistance.

“The lesson is don’t, don’t scatter,” she said.

Filtering out of the ballroom at the end of the evening, attendees parsed Harris’ pithy call to action.

“She was on fire,” said attendee John Glass. “I thought it was going to be more of a perfunctory speech, it was anything but that. I wish she sounded like she did tonight on the campaign.”

“It was nice to see her back” said another attendee Jennifer Wise, who was discussing the evening with Carol Horton. Harris’ speech “was a commentary for the moment”, Horton said, adding that she looks forward to a decision from Harris on whether she will join the crowded field of Democrats vying to succeed California’s term-limited governor, Gavin Newsom, or mount another bid for president in 2028.

A successful campaign to lead the country’s largest blue state would give her a prominent platform from which to challenge Trump and attacks on liberal values and ideas. The former state attorney general and US senator from California is expected to decide by the end of summer.

Japan’s busiest bullet train line was brought to a halt on Wednesday after a metre-long snake wrapped itself around a power line, shorting the electricity supply and stranding hundreds of passengers.

Shinkansen trains running between Tokyo and Osaka were brought to a standstill by the snake, with news reports showing footage of people inside trains waiting for services to resume. Power did not appear to have been cut inside trains, with lights and air conditioning still functioning, according to passengers.

The outage happened at 5.25pm between Maibara and Gifu-Hashima stations, after the snake appeared to have climbed an electricity pole, meeting its demise as it attempted to slither along the overhead line. Power was not restored until after 7pm.

The Golden Week series of national holidays began on Wednesday, with millions on the move across Japan, returning to home towns and taking family vacations. In addition, the Osaka Expo 2025, which opened mid-April and runs until October, is attracting even more people than usual to the city.

“I use the shinkansen several times a month, but this is the first time I have experienced suspensions due to a power outage,” Satoshi Tagawa, 46, who was returning to Tokyo, told Kyodo News.

The line connects Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka with more than 370 trains daily carrying an average of 430,000 passengers. Reaching speeds of up 285km per hour, it takes less than two and a half hours to Osaka from the Japanese capital.

More than 7 billion passengers have ridden the tokaido shinkansen since it opened as Japan’s first high-speed rail line just before the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. It has an exemplary safety record, with not a single injury or accident recorded, and trains running to within an average of 1.6 minutes of their scheduled times, according to operator Central Japan Railway Co. (JR Tokai).

However, it is not the first time reptiles have delayed shinkansen.

A 40cm snake inside a carriage on a Nagoya to Tokyo service in April last year caused consternation among passengers. Staff were unable to find the creature, and the carriage was replaced, resulting in a 17-minute delay.

In 2009, an electricity outage was also caused by a snake climbing on to power lines, stopping trains between Tokyo and Fukushima.

Martin Scorsese has made a documentary with the late Pope Francis that will feature conversations between the pontiff and Scorsese, including what the film-makers say was the pope’s final in-depth on-camera interview.

Aldeas – A New Story will detail the work of Scholas Occurrentes, a non-profit, international organisation founded by the pope in 2013 to promote what it termed “Culture of Encounter” among youth.

Part of that organisation’s work has included film-making, under the Aldeas initiative. The documentary will show young people in Indonesia, Gambia and Italy taking part in the program and making short films.

Aldeas Scholas Film and Scorsese’s Sikelia Productions, which announced the film on Wednesday, said the documentary would be “a testament to the enduring belief that creativity is not only a means of expression but a path to hope and transformation”.

Before his death, Pope Francis called Aldeas “an extremely poetic and very constructive project because it goes to the roots of what human life is, human sociability, human conflicts … the essence of a life’s journey”.

No release date was announced for the film.

Scorsese said: “Now, more than ever, we need to talk to each other, listen to one another cross-culturally. One of the best ways to accomplish this is by sharing the stories of who we are, reflected from our personal lives and experiences.

“It helps us understand and value how each of us sees the world. It was important to Pope Francis for people across the globe to exchange ideas with respect while also preserving their cultural identity, and cinema is the best medium to do that.”

Scorsese met numerous times with Pope Francis over the years, and their conversations sometimes informed work undertaken by the 82-year-old film-maker of The Last Temptation of Christ and Silence.

When Francis died on 21 April, Scorsese remembered him as “in every way, a remarkable human being”.

“He acknowledged his own failings,” he said. “He radiated wisdom. He radiated goodness. He had an ironclad commitment to the good.

“He knew in his soul that ignorance was a terrible plague on humanity. So he never stopped learning. And he never stopped enlightening. And, he embraced, preached and practiced forgiveness. Universal and constant forgiveness.”

He added: “The loss for me runs deep – I was lucky enough to know him, and I will miss his presence and his warmth. The loss for the world is immense. But he left a light behind, and it can never be extinguished.”

A conclave to elect a new pope is scheduled to begin on 7 May.

• Associated Press contributed to this report

Martin Scorsese has made a documentary with the late Pope Francis that will feature conversations between the pontiff and Scorsese, including what the film-makers say was the pope’s final in-depth on-camera interview.

Aldeas – A New Story will detail the work of Scholas Occurrentes, a non-profit, international organisation founded by the pope in 2013 to promote what it termed “Culture of Encounter” among youth.

Part of that organisation’s work has included film-making, under the Aldeas initiative. The documentary will show young people in Indonesia, Gambia and Italy taking part in the program and making short films.

Aldeas Scholas Film and Scorsese’s Sikelia Productions, which announced the film on Wednesday, said the documentary would be “a testament to the enduring belief that creativity is not only a means of expression but a path to hope and transformation”.

Before his death, Pope Francis called Aldeas “an extremely poetic and very constructive project because it goes to the roots of what human life is, human sociability, human conflicts … the essence of a life’s journey”.

No release date was announced for the film.

Scorsese said: “Now, more than ever, we need to talk to each other, listen to one another cross-culturally. One of the best ways to accomplish this is by sharing the stories of who we are, reflected from our personal lives and experiences.

“It helps us understand and value how each of us sees the world. It was important to Pope Francis for people across the globe to exchange ideas with respect while also preserving their cultural identity, and cinema is the best medium to do that.”

Scorsese met numerous times with Pope Francis over the years, and their conversations sometimes informed work undertaken by the 82-year-old film-maker of The Last Temptation of Christ and Silence.

When Francis died on 21 April, Scorsese remembered him as “in every way, a remarkable human being”.

“He acknowledged his own failings,” he said. “He radiated wisdom. He radiated goodness. He had an ironclad commitment to the good.

“He knew in his soul that ignorance was a terrible plague on humanity. So he never stopped learning. And he never stopped enlightening. And, he embraced, preached and practiced forgiveness. Universal and constant forgiveness.”

He added: “The loss for me runs deep – I was lucky enough to know him, and I will miss his presence and his warmth. The loss for the world is immense. But he left a light behind, and it can never be extinguished.”

A conclave to elect a new pope is scheduled to begin on 7 May.

• Associated Press contributed to this report

Scientists studying Arctic plants say the ecosystems that host life in some of the most inhospitable reaches of the planet are changing in unexpected ways in an “early warning sign” for a region upended by climate change.

In four decades, 54 researchers tracked more than 2,000 plant communities across 45 sites from the Canadian high Arctic to Alaska and Scandinavia. They discovered dramatic shifts in temperatures and growing seasons produced no clear winners or losers. Some regions witnessed large increases in shrubs and grasses and declines in flowering plants – which struggle to grow under the shade created by taller plants.

Those findings, published in Nature, fill key knowledge gaps for teams on the frontlines of a changing climate.

“Climate change is so widespread across the whole of the Arctic and we’re seeing this magnitude of warming at four times the rate than the rest of the planet. We expected to see very concrete trends and trajectories. Because in other biomes, we are,” said lead author Mariana García Criado, a postdoctoral researcher in tundra biodiversity at the University of Edinburgh. “But the Arctic is a special and often unexpected place.”

The researchers found greater species richness at lower latitudes and warmer sites, while species and the areas with the greatest growth – and loss – were in areas with the largest temperature increase.

In Canada’s western Arctic, for example, Isla Myers-Smith and her “Team Shrub” group of researchers have documented ecosystems rapidly shifting, where the tundra is “greening” at an incredible rate as shrubs such as willow push north and grow taller.

Shrubs are highly competitive: they grow taller and shade out other plants, extracting more resources in the process. As they take over, they push out the cottongrass, mosses and lichens that take hundreds – sometimes thousands – of years to grow. Higher temperatures and lengthened growing seasons mean this trend is unlikely to abate, and more broadly across the Arctic, the number and diversity of plants will keep growing.

“Often when we think about climate change impacts on the planet we think about biodiversity loss, but in the temperature-limited tundra, climate change is multi-faceted,” she said in a news release.

While an increase in biodiversity might seem like a beneficial shift for the region, experts caution those changes come with a steep cost.

“These ecosystems are so fragile and any changes to the species composition can really have strong effects on everything else. Changes start with plants, and if plants move, everything follows, said García Criado, adding that herds of caribou were among the most likely casualties, as bare spots on the tundra, favoured by the lichen that they like to eat, are overtaken by shrubs.

“This has cascading effects for Arctic animals that depend on these plants, also for food security for all the people that live in the Arctic, for local and Indigenous communities, but also for the more ecosystem function,.”

Greg Henry, a geography professor at the University of British Columbia who helped establish the study’s data collection system, said the research involved thousands of hours of fieldwork in remote locations, with teams “enduring extreme weather, clouds of biting insects and even the occasional polar bear encounter”.

But researchers didn’t have enough data to include mosses and lichens in the study. These cryptogams are critical for ecosystem function, particularly in the Arctic where there is a rich diversity in species.

García Criado said the results underscore the deep uncertainty in understanding the effects climate change has on life – and the way in which the Arctic often serves as a harbinger of changes to come.

“All these changes that we’re observing, they’re not limited to the Arctic. We may see them in the Arctic, but the consequences spread far beyond the confines of the region,” she said. “We want to understand these changes. And then we need to prepare for these changes. Because it’s not a question of if they might happen – it is a question of when.”

Spain’s environment minister has warned against attempts to blame Monday’s unprecedented blackout across the Iberian peninsula on the increasing use of renewable energy, defending the reliability of the national grid and promising a “complete audit” to establish the causes of the outage.

Speaking on Wednesday afternoon as a specially designated committee prepared to meet to investigate the blackout, Sara Aagesen pushed back at opposition parties’ claims that the socialist-led government’s drive to embrace renewable energy had compromised the grid’s stability.

She said Spain’s electricity on Monday was generated from a mix of different sources, with solar power accounting for almost 55% of the total, followed by 10% from wind power, 10% from nuclear power and almost 10% from hydraulic power.

“The system has worked to perfection with a similar demand situation and with a similar energetic mix [in the past], so pointing the finger at renewables when the system has functioned perfectly in the same context doesn’t seem very appropriate,” she said.

Opponents of the prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, have suggested over recent days that he pushed ahead with plans to prioritise renewable energy over nuclear energy without thinking of the consequences and is now trying to blame private energy companies for the blackout.

The conservative People’s party (PP) accused the prime minister of waging “an information blackout” over the incident, while Santiago Abascal, the leader of the far-right Vox party, has blamed the power cut squarely on Sánchez and his “disastrous energy policies”.

Some have seized on a recent financial report from Redeia, the parent company of Red Eléctrica, Spain’s national grid operator, which said “the high penetration of renewable generation without the necessary technical capacity to deal adequately with disturbances” could “lead to production cuts”.

It said blackouts “could become severe, even leading to an imbalance between production and demand, which would significantly affect the electricity supply”.

Aagesen insisted that renewable energy was vital if Spain was to remain a competitive and strategically autonomous power producer.

“We have native resources – the sun, the wind – in our country and we don’t have fossil fuels or uranium,” she said. “We do have sun and wind and I think a lot of businesses share our commitment to transforming our energy system and making it more and more renewable.”

Earlier on Wednesday, Red Eléctrica’s president, Beatriz Corredor, said the company knew what had caused the blackout but was still poring over a huge amount of data.

“We know the cause and we have it more or less tracked down, but the thing is there are millions of pieces of information because signals are sent every millisecond,” Corredor told Cadena Ser radio.

Corredor said she would not be resigning over the incident, adding: “To do so would be recognise that the correct actions weren’t taken, and that wasn’t the case.”

She also insisted it was incorrect to link the blackout to Spain’s increasing reliance on renewable energy. “The renewables mix is safe and it can form part of all the safety systems of the electrical operating system,” she told Cadena Ser. “Linking what happened on Monday to renewables isn’t correct. Renewables work in a stable way.”

Sánchez himself has been blunter. “Those who link this incident to the lack of nuclear power are frankly lying or demonstrating their ignorance,” he said on Tuesday, adding that nuclear power generation was no more resilient than other electricity sources.

Sánchez summoned the heads of Spain’s private energy operators – including Corredor and representatives from Iberdrola, Endesa, EDP, Acciona Energía and Naturgy – to an urgent meeting on Tuesday evening to discuss the blackout. The prime minister has said the committee will be looking into the role of private energy companies and urged them to help the government get to the bottom of the blackout as soon as possible.

Aagesen said some of the operators had already provided huge amounts of data, with the rest of the information expected over the next few days.

“As soon as we know what caused this event, we’ll put all necessary measures on the table so that it doesn’t happen again,” she said.

The investigations are focusing on what happened at 12.33pm on Monday, when, for five seconds, 15 gigawatts of the energy that was being produced – equivalent to 60% of all the energy that was being used – suddenly disappeared.

Spain aims to generate 81% of its electricity from renewables by the end of the decade. Last year, a record 56% of its electricity came from renewable sources.

The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has warned that rapidly spreading wildfires near Jerusalem could reach the city, as he declared the situation a “national emergency”.

Thick smoke billowed above highways near Jerusalem on Wednesday as firefighters rushed to control wildfires that have injured several people and prompted the military to deploy troops to help.

Israel’s Magen David Adom (MDA) rescue agency reported that hundreds of civilians were at risk from the worst fires in years.

MDA said it had provided treatment to around 23 people, 13 of whom were taken to hospital, the majority suffering from smoke inhalation and burns. Among them were two pregnant women and two infants under a year old, it added.

It said the alert level had been raised to the highest tier.

Speaking from near the city of Modiin as fires burnt on a nearby hillside, resident Yuval Aharoni, 40, said: “It’s just very sad because we knew the weather, we kind of knew that would happen and still we feel like they weren’t ready enough with the big planes that can drop large amounts of water.”

Netanyahu warned that “the western wind can push the fire easily towards the outskirts of [Jerusalem] – and even into the city itself.

“We need to bring as many fire engines as possible and create firebreaks well beyond the current fire lines … We are now in a national emergency, not just a local one,” he said in a video statement on Wednesday. “The priority right now is defending Jerusalem,” he added.

Police closed the main Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway and evacuated residents along the route as brushfires broke out again in an area ravaged by blazes a week ago. Communities housing thousands of people have been cleared out.

“A lot of police arrived, a lot of firefighters, but it didn’t really help. The fire had already completely taken over the whole area here,” student Yosef Aaron told AFP, speaking on the side of a highway with flames visible in the distance.

Fire chief Eyal Caspi warned at a televised press conference that “our aircraft can’t do anything right now due to the weather conditions… Our goal is to save lives”.

“We are apparently facing the largest fire in Israel in a decade.”

The police said on X that they had deployed in force around the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway and the Jerusalem Hills, asking the public to “avoid travelling to the area”.

An AFP journalist at the scene earlier on Wednesday said the blaze was sweeping through wooded areas near the main road between Latrun and Bet Shemesh, and that helicopters were working to extinguish the flames.

Soldiers arrived on the scene mid-afternoon, with many drivers abandoning their vehicles to flee the fire.

Communities located about 30km (19 miles) west of Jerusalem were evacuated, Israeli media reported, airing images of firefighting teams battling fierce flames.

National security minister Itamar Ben Gvir hinted that arson could be behind the fires. Police said they had arrested a resident of east Jerusalem who was caught “attempting to set fire to a field in the southern part of the city”.

There was no official declaration directly linking the two.

MDA said ambulance teams had been positioned near communities close to the fires and were ready to provide medical treatment and assist residents.

High temperatures and strong winds have allowed the fires in wooded areas to spread quickly, prompting evacuations from at least five communities, the police said in a statement.

Ben Gvir, who oversees Israel’s fire department, visited the affected area, which is prone to wildfires at this time of year.

In a video statement, he said work was being done to bring more assistance to the affected areas and evacuate stranded civilians.

The foreign ministry has contacted nearby countries including Greece, Cyprus, Croatia, Italy and Bulgaria for assistance.

Netanyahu’s office said three aircraft would arrive soon from Italy and Croatia to help fight the fires.

Ugandan opposition politicians have accused the president, Yoweri Museveni, of attempting to quash dissent by prosecuting opponents on politically motivated charges in military courts in the run-up to presidential and legislative elections next year.

The government is pushing to introduce a law to allow military tribunals to try civilians despite a supreme court ban on the practice.

In November, the opposition politician Kizza Besigye was detained in Nairobi, Kenya, alongside his aide Obeid Lutale and taken to Kampala where they were charged before a military tribunal with offences including illegal possession of firearms, threatening national security, and later treachery, which carries the death penalty. His lawyers say the charges are politically motivated.

Besigye, a four-time presidential candidate and longtime opponent of Museveni, is one of more than 1,000 civilians, including activists and other politicians, who have been charged in military courts since 2002.

In January, Uganda’s supreme court ruled that trying civilians in military courts was unconstitutional and ordered the transfer of trials involving civilians to ordinary courts. Museveni rejected the ruling as the “wrong decision” and vowed to continue using military courts.

After a 10-day hunger strike by Besigye in February, authorities moved his trial to a civilian court. But the Uganda Law Society says the government has not transferred other people’s cases.

In the latest twist, the government is planning to introduce a law to allow military tribunals to try civilians for some offences. Norbert Mao, the minister for justice and constitutional affairs, told parliament on 17 April that the draft legislation was awaiting cabinet approval before introduction in parliament.

Paul Mwiru, a politician with Bobi Wine’s National Unity Platform party, said Museveni’s administration was using state institutions to instil fear and had “made the judicial system to be inclined” in its favour.

Mwiru, a former MP, was charged in a civilian court with treason in 2018 alongside Wine and 31 other people for allegedly throwing stones at Museveni’s motorcade during chaos at a byelection campaign. Mwiru said people who went through botched court processes “come back weakened”. Their case was adjourned indefinitely after about two years.

He said amending the law to allow military prosecution of civilians would allow the government “to charge you and arraign you in the court if they have a disagreement with you”.

Uganda will go to the polls in January 2026 in what will be a seventh election featuring Museveni.

The events of the past few months have turned the spotlight on what critics deem intolerance and authoritarianism by Museveni’s administration and ignited fears of an election that may not be free and fair. “Sooner rather than later, they’ll be able to arrest any of us. If they want to deny you the opportunity to participate in the electoral process, they can do that,” said Mwiru, who plans to contest for a parliamentary seat again next year.

November was not the first time Besigye, a former army colonel, had been tried in a military court. In 2005, four years after retiring from the military and running for the first time as a presidential candidate, he was charged with terrorism and possession of firearms.

Other civilians who have been prosecuted in military courts include Wine, the musician-turned-politician who has said he will stand again next year, former opposition MP Michael Kabaziguruka and Besigye’s lawyer Eron Kiiza. The list also includes opposition supporters, as well as other political opponents and government critics.

Critics say repression extends to civilian courts too, with dissidents and government critics charged there being subjected to lengthy trials, denial of bail and detentions without trial. Besigye and Lutale were this month denied bail for their case. They remain in custody.

Government and military spokespeople have been approached for comment. Museveni has repeatedly defended using military courts for civilians, saying it was necessary for the east African country’s peace and stability. He claims civilian courts were failing to convict those accused of violent crimes.

Trials of civilians in military court go back to 2002 when Museveni created an autonomous, ad-hoc law enforcement unit to combat armed crime in reaction to the alleged failure of the civilian judicial system to prosecute and punish crimes. Later, in 2005, the state amended legislation regulating the military to create a legal framework to allow the military to court martial civilians.

Human rights activists say the practice is unjust and unlawful and frequently violates the right of accused people to a fair trial.

In many instances over the years, Ugandan courts have ruled against the practice, but the process has continued. The latest ruling by the supreme court, arising from Kabaziguruka’s challenge of his trial in military court in 2016, is a litmus test.

The government is fighting back with the planned introduction of the draft law that Mao, the justice minister, told lawmakers would define “exceptional circumstances under which a civilian may be subject to military law”.

Museveni became president in 1986 after leading rebels in a six-year guerilla war to remove President Milton Obote. He led the country to economic growth and democratic change after years of political decay.

But critics say judicial independence has eroded in the country over the years. They have also condemned his long stay in office using what they say are strongman tactics to extend it indefinitely, including by amending the constitution twice to remain in power.

The Museveni administration’s military roots influence the government’s operations, said Gerald Walulya, a senior lecturer at Makerere University in Kampala and a political analyst. “Because of their background as a government that came to power through a military kind of route, they tend to approach every aspect in a military manner,” he said.

Mwambutsya Ndebesa, a historian, said Uganda was experiencing “the curse of liberation”, which he said made leaders feel entitled to power. “Those who have liberated people from repressive regimes in Africa have taken it upon themselves that they are entitled to rule,” he said.

Ndebesa said the administration was “weaponising the justice system for political ends” to suppress political dissent, and that suppression had a “chilling effect” of creating fear in the political space.

“The purpose is not only to suppress that very individual, but also to send a message to the political sphere.” he added.

Kristi Noem, the US homeland security secretary, said that if Kilmar Ábrego García was sent back to the US, the Donald Trump administration “would immediately deport him again”.

Noem repeated White House assertions about Ábrego García, a Salvadorian man who the Trump administration has admitted was mistakenly deported from Maryland last month, in a new interview with CBS.

“[Ábrego García] is not under our control. He is an El Salvador citizen. He is home there in his country. If he were to be brought back to the United States of America, we would immediately deport him again,” Noem said of the 29-year-old who entered the US illegally around 2011 after fleeing gang violence.

Ábrego García was subsequently afforded a federal protection order against deportation to El Salvador. Despite the order, on 15 March, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials deported Ábrego García to El Salvador where he was held in the Center for Terrorism Confinement, a controversial mega-prison.

Though the Trump administration admitted that Ábrego García’s deportation was an “administrative error”, it has repeatedly cast him as an MS-13 gang member on television – a claim his wife, a US citizen, and his attorneys staunchly reject. Ábrego García has no criminal record in the US, according to court documents.

Since Ábrego García’s deportation, the Trump administration has refused to bring him back to the US – despite the supreme court unanimously ordering it to “facilitate” his release. Trump officials claim that US courts lack jurisdiction over the matter because Ábrego García is a Salvadorian national and no longer in the US.

Noem asserted the Trump administration’s claims to CBS, saying: “President Trump and his administration has adhered to the court and respects the court and its decision,” adding, “This individual is not under the United States of America’s jurisdiction and he is not one of our citizens. He is home in his home country. And that’s up to that country to decide what to do.”

Last week, a federal judge accused the White House of “bad faith” in the case, arguing that “defendants have sought refuge behind vague and unsubstantiated assertions of privilege, using them as a shield to obstruct discovery and evade compliance with this court’s orders”.

Yet, Noem maintains that the Trump administration spends “hours and hours” building cases against alleged gang members.

Upon being asked about the administration’s claims against individuals who have been deported without due process, the homeland security secretary said: “Obviously, we’re relying on the expertise of our investigators, our teams, double-checking, triple-checking, going through the paperwork, making sure that we have done everything absolutely correctly.”

Noem also accused federal judges who have issued court orders the Trump administration dislikes as “activist judges”.

“I’m sure that these judges will continue to challenge every single thing that this administration does. We have several activist judges across the country,” she said, despite some of the judges who have ruled against Trump’s immigration policies being nominated by Republicans.

Earlier this month, J Harvie Wilkinson, a Ronald Reagan-appointee and conservative appellate judge, called the Trump administration’s claims in Ábrego García’s case “shocking”, saying: “This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.”