Donald Trump has named JD Vance, the Ohio senator who has aligned himself with the populist right, as his running mate at the Republican national convention on Monday.

“After lengthy deliberation and thought, and considering the tremendous talents of many others, I have decided that the person best suited to assume the position of Vice President of the United States is Senator JD Vance of the Great State of Ohio,” wrote Trump on Truth Social.

When Trump first ran for office, Vance’s eventual nomination to run alongside him would have seemed implausible. Vance, a venture capitalist who rocketed into the public eye with his 2016 memoir turned Netflix movie Hillbilly Elegy, was once among Trump’s conservative critics.

“I’m a never-Trump guy, I never liked him,” Vance said during an October 2016 interview with Charlie Rose. Trump was, by Vance’s estimation at the time, a “terrible candidate”.

He even wondered aloud, in texts to a former roommate, whether Trump was more of “a cynical asshole like Nixon”, or worse, “America’s Hitler”.

Since then, Vance has made a dramatic transformation into a Maga power figure and close ally of the former president who has supported some of Trump’s more authoritarian impulses, like questioning the results of the 2020 election and, in a 2021 podcast interview, suggesting Trump should purge civil servants from the federal government if re-elected.

Vance’s response to the assassination attempt at a Trump rally on Saturday was also notable. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” Vance wrote on X. “That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”

Vance has already vied for Trump’s blessing once before, while campaigning for a seat representing Ohio in the US Senate. During the primary, Vance pitched himself as a Trump-style rightwing populist. He criticized “elites”, fired off contemptuous tweets about crime in New York City, promoted the racist and antisemitic “great replacement” theory on Tucker Carlson’s show and grew a beard. He faced a storm of negative ads from the conservative, free market-oriented Club for Growth, which pointed to his past identity as a “never Trumper” as proof of his phoniness.

The tech billionaire Peter Thiel, who had previously backed Vance’s venture capital startup, poured record-breaking sums of money into the race, and Trump endorsed Vance – ushering in his victory in the primary. When he beat the former Democratic congressman Tim Ryan in the November 2022 general election, it cemented his place in the Maga right.

“I think we need more people like him in politics, who are energetic, dynamic, clear-headed about their ideology,” Vivek Ramaswamy, the biotech entrepreneur who ran for president during the Republican party primaries, said of Vance. “The only negative of it – if there is a negative to point out – is he’s probably one of the best we have in the US Senate, and he’s a principled fighter.”

In office, Vance has consistently aligned with the populist right, calling into question the US’s role in foreign conflicts and backing rightwing domestic legislation. In 2023, for example, he introduced a bill that would make English the official language of the US.

In a fundraising email, Trump speculated that media outlets “will say MAGA-Patriots like YOU won’t vote for me with JD Vance on the ticket. NOW’S THE TIME FOR US TO PROVE THEM WRONG!”

Less than 48 hours after a gunman shot at Donald Trump during a Pennsylvania rally – a bullet grazing the former president and killing a spectator – Trump was formally nominated to head the Republican presidential ticket in November.

Trump also announced his running mate on Truth Social on Monday, tapping the Ohio senator JD Vance as his vice-presidential pick. Vance, who once called himself an anti-Trump Republican, has since become a fervent supporter of the former president.

Trump, who holds a marginal lead over Joe Biden in polling, was widely expected to change course this week and focus on a message of unity after the incident on Saturday, as many have called on the campaign to help bring down political tension in a year marked by threats of political violence.

Shortly after the convention opened on Monday, more transformative news broke for Trump: a US district judge in Florida agreed to dismiss the criminal case on charges of mishandling classified documents. In siding with Trump’s legal team, Judge Aileen Cannon, who was appointed to her position by Trump, found that Jack Smith, the special counsel bringing the prosecution, had been improperly appointed.

The dismissal came just two weeks after the US supreme court ruled that presidents enjoy broad immunity from criminal prosecution, throwing into question Trump’s numerous criminal cases and giving him more fodder for his campaign, during which he has consistently held that he was politically persecuted.

Just before the convention, and in the immediate aftermath of the assassination attempt, Trump appeared resolute.

“I was going to delay my trip to Wisconsin, and the Republican National Convention, by two days,” he wrote on Truth Social, “but have just decided that I cannot allow a ‘shooter,’ or potential assassin, to force change to scheduling, or anything else.”

An internal campaign memo struck a similar tone, stating: “It is our fervent hope that this horrendous act will bring our team, and indeed the nation together in unity and we must renew our commitment to safety and peace for our country,” and reiterating that the “RNC convention will continue as planned in Milwaukee”.

The failed assassination attempt, which left several rallygoers injured and two dead, including the shooting suspect, cast a pall of anxiety over the RNC. It raised tensions – already felt between the diverse, working-class and heavily Democratic city and the Republican party – which were on display from the start of the convention on Monday, when a rally held by the Coalition to March on the RNC protested against the event.

The convention will feature a lineup of conservative speakers whose remarks will highlight key issues for the Republican party and Trump campaign, including immigration, the economy and abortion.

The convention comes amid uncertainty in Biden’s campaign after a devastating debate performance raised questions within the Democratic party over the president’s fitness and ability to campaign and govern. In the wake of the shooting, the Biden campaign announced it would be pulling television ads and “pausing all outbound communications”.

The event will offer Trump an opportunity to set the tone for the Republican party following the shooting in Pennsylvania on Saturday.

Trump pumped his fist in the air several times as he descended the stairs from his plane after arriving in Milwaukee on Sunday evening.

“This is a chance to bring the whole country, even the whole world, together. The speech will be a lot different, a lot different than it would’ve been two days ago,” he told the Washington Examiner.

Speaking to the New York Post while en route to the city, Trump said he was “supposed to be dead”, adding: “The doctor at the hospital said he never saw anything like this. He called it a miracle.”

The failed assassination attempt on Donald Trump has thrown the Democrats’ presidential campaign into suspension, as they suspended attack ads, refrained from criticism of Trump – and may have halted the drive to depose Joe Biden as the party’s candidate.

A campaign that was already in disarray amid uncertainty over the US president’s fate, prompted by last month’s debate fiasco, was plunged into further confusion after the shooting. Having been set on relentlessly attacking the presumptive Republican nominee, Democrats drastically changed tack, stressing the need for national unity.

They suspended a $50m advertising blitz and quickly pulled television attack ads, in moves consistent with Biden’s plea in a Sunday night speech from the White House to “lower the temperature in our politics”.

The Biden re-election campaign also told staff members to “refrain from issuing any comments on social media or in public” and to “pause any proactive campaign communication across all platforms and in all circumstances until we know more”, NBC reported.

The changed mood seemed to offer Biden the chance to reset and to consolidate his shaky position as the Democrats’ nominee. He has asserted an above-the-fray role, in a series of authoritative statements calling for calm. At the same time, the shock of Saturday’s events seem to have at least temporarily halted the fevered speculation about the president’s candidacy, with no further elected figures publicly calling for him to step aside since.

Biden cancelled a planned speech on Monday at the Lyndon Johnson library in Austin to mark the 60th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, while Kamala Harris followed suit by postponing a Tuesday stop in Palm Beach, Florida, where she had been expected to talk about abortion.

Rather than attacking Trump in the coming days, the campaign told journalists that it would focus on Biden’s track record of condemning political violence of all kinds. A scheduled Monday prime-time interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, originally scheduled as part of the Austin visit, will go ahead but will now take place in the White House.

Though the pause in the campaign against Trump was expected to be brief, the pause in some Democrats’ campaign against Biden himself could be of greater longer-term significance. Some said the shooting may have served to strengthen Biden’s position – at least within his own party – after the 27 June debate had threatened to fatally undermine it.

After days of desperately fending off pleas that he end his campaign to avoid the possibility of a disastrous election defeat in November, Biden was able to reassert himself: first on Saturday night, when he set aside his customary enmity to Trump by telephoning and referring to him publicly as “Donald”, and then with Sunday’s address, given from behind the Resolute desk, that was notably presidential in tone.

“We cannot, we must not, go down this road in America,” Biden said in only his third public speech from the Oval Office.

“There is no place in America for this kind of violence, for any violence, ever. Period. No exceptions. We can’t allow this violence to be normalised,” Biden said.

“The power to change America should always rest in the hands of the people, not in the hands of a would-be assassin.”

The transformed circumstances prompted some Biden supporters to predict that the bid to unseat the 81-year-old president as the party’s nominee was over.

“It’s likely the effort to dislodge Biden has ended. He’s not going to voluntarily step aside in this moment,” an unnamed ally of the president told NBC.

“I think it’s over. You just lose all momentum,” another said.

Biden has stoutly resisted efforts to persuade him to stand aside following the Atlanta debate, in which he repeatedly appeared confused and sometimes unable to complete coherent arguments or even sentences, while failing to counter Trump’s stream of lies and invective.

He has since mounted a counterattack, arguing the value of his half-century of political experience to party caucuses, and staging a press conference at last week’s Nato summit that was generally viewed a relative success.

Some party strategists insisted that Saturday’s seismic events – and Biden’s response – bolstered that case.

“It helps Biden’s argument,” one party insider told The Hill. “He represents stability. He’s managing a crisis. And in a way he’s answering the argument about his mental acuity.

“And that creates a contrast with Trump. You can’t count on Trump to be stable for so long. And when Trump starts Trumping, it’s game on.”

Another told NBC: “If you’re an advocate for: ‘How do we tell the old man it’s time to go?’ – it’s really hard to have that conversation publicly. This event blocks out the sun right now.”

Not everyone was convinced. The Hill quoted another Democratic strategist as saying that Saturday’s shooting would “slow the public noise but I don’t think it slows the private conversations”.

“I’ve seen enough data to show my guy trailing. And the state-by-state numbers are really rough,” he said.

Donald Trump’s criminal case on charges that he illegally retained classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago club was dismissed on Monday after the presiding judge sided with the former president and ruled that the special counsel who brought the prosecution had been improperly appointed.

The stunning decision by Aileen Cannon, the US district judge appointed by Trump, found that the appointment of Jack Smith as special counsel violated the US constitution as he had not been named to his post by the president or confirmed by the Senate.

Cannon effectively ruled that there was no statute that authorized a special counsel to bring charges in the Trump case, and previous court rulings – including by the US supreme court in the landmark Richard Nixon case – were not binding on her decision.

“Because Special Counsel Smith’s exercise of prosecutorial power has not been authorized by law, the court sees no way forward aside from dismissal of the superseding indictment,” Cannon wrote in the 93-page decision.

The ruling cast aside previous court decisions that upheld the use of special prosecutors stretching back to the Watergate era, and removed a major legal threat to Trump on the opening day of the Republican national convention, where he is set to accept the GOP nomination for president.

Prosecutors will almost certainly challenge the ruling at the US court of appeals for the 11th circuit, and could ask the appeals court to reassign the case to a different federal judge in Florida if Cannon’s decision is overturned.

Whether the 11th circuit overturns Cannon could be as significant as the ruling itself. If Cannon’s decision is reversed and a new federal judge takes control of the case, it could breathe new life into the case even if the case may not go to trial for years.

Trump was indicted last year with retaining national security documents at Mar-a-Lago and obstructing the government’s attempts to retrieve, including by partially defying a grand jury subpoena ordering him to return any classified documents to the justice department. Trump had pleaded not guilty.

At issue is Trump’s argument that the special counsel position was not a position created by statute by the constitution, and therefore any actions he took with that prosecutorial power were not authorized by law.

Prosecutors contended in response that the judge did not need to consider whether to toss the indictment since Smith was an “officer”, deputized by the attorney general to prosecute the case as allowed under the appointments clause of the constitution.

The judge sided with Trump’s position. Cannon found that the appointments clause did not allow Garland to appoint a prosecutor effectively working as something tantamount to a US attorney, a job that requires Senate confirmation, and the only remedy was to dismiss the indictment.

“All actions that flowed from his defective appointment including his seeking of the Superseding Indictment on which this proceeding currently hinges were unlawful exercises of executive power,” Cannon wrote.

“Because Special Counsel Smith ‘cannot wield executive power except as article II provides,’ his attempts to do so are void and must be unwound. Defendants advance this very argument: ‘any actions taken by Smith are ultra vires … And the court sees no alternative course to cure the unconstitutional problem.’”

Prosecutors had argued that they were funded by the justice department’s budget, through a mechanism called the “indefinite appropriation”, which was allowed because the special counsel was authorized under the appointments clause.

But Cannon took her reasoning to its logical end to find that if Smith’s appointment was invalid, then prosecutors could not rely on the appointment to justify using the “indefinite appropriation”.

“Both sides agree that ‘other law,’ for present purposes, is the collection of statutes cited in the appointment order. For all of the reasons the court found no statutory authority for the appointment, Special Counsel Smith’s investigation has unlawfully drawn funds,” Cannon wrote.

From “breathtakingly misguided” to “unthinkable”, and “her audition for a seat on the US supreme court”, judge Aileen Cannon’s ruling to dismiss Donald Trump’s classified documents case on Monday drew a range of outrage and surprise from Democrats and law experts.

Republicans, by contrast, were almost delirious with joy, celebrating what they saw as the end of special prosecutor Jack Smith’s “illegal” pursuit of the former US president, and an opportunity for Trump himself to continue to roll out his new message of “unity” that followed Saturday’s assassination attempt.

Among the loudest voices of Democratic protest was Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, who called in a statement for the dismissal of Cannon, a Trump appointee to the federal bench in Florida.

“This breathtakingly misguided ruling flies in the face of long-accepted practice and repetitive judicial precedence,” he said.

“It is wrong on the law and must be appealed immediately. This is further evidence that Judge Cannon cannot handle this case impartially and must be reassigned.”

Several legal experts said they also expected Smith to immediately appeal the decision to the 11th circuit court of appeal, which has reversed previous rulings by Cannon in the case, including rebuking her in 2022 for appointing a special master to review the documents.

“Judge Cannon did the unthinkable. Her decision is unprecedented and extreme, and very likely to be reversed on appeal,” said Laurence Tribe, Carl M Loeb University professor and professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School, and a Guardian columnist.

“The 11th circuit has previously reversed her unanimously. When it gets to the supreme court, only Justice [Clarence] Thomas appears to have taken the view that the appointment of special counsels violates the appointments clause and the appropriations clause, so I very much doubt that even this court would agree with her.”

Tribe said he expected any Smith appeal to include a request for Cannon to be removed from the case, but added she might already be looking at a different appointment.

“Her position, among other things, the fact that she took so long to decide this issue even though it was before her four months, indicates that it’s calculated simply to serve as a kind of dress rehearsal, or job application when Justice [Samuel] Alito or Justice Thomas decided to retire from the supreme court,” he said.

“She clearly is auditioning to be the first appointment of a new Trump administration. It doesn’t speak well for her as a neutral jurist, but the ruling doesn’t exactly surprise me because she has slow-walked this case to death from the start.”

Trump, meanwhile, fired off a celebratory campaign message, hours before his appearance Monday at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.

“I won! Case dismissed! Now it’s time for us to unite the country,” he wrote.

The conciliatory tone did not last long, however. A subsequent post on his Truth Social site, calling for the dismissal of the remaining cases against him, repeated previous debunked claims that the prosecutions represented “an election interference conspiracy” directed by Joe Biden, and that Democrats had “weaponized” the justice department in a series of “witch hunts, scams, fake claims and hoaxes” against him.

In Milwaukee, convention-goers who spoke with the Guardian were unanimously welcoming of Cannon’s ruling.

“Probably never should have been a case to begin with. Like all the other cases against President Trump, they’ve fallen apart over time,” said Rick Williams, an alternate delegate from Tennessee, ignoring the former president’s May conviction on 34 felony charges for falsifying business records.

Joe Sell, an alternate delegate from Illinois, doubted the ruling will affect the election campaign because he said people had already made up their minds about Trump. Sell falsely claimed the documents case was “phoney”.

“They staged it. They put pictures of documents and said Trump had done all this stuff when it was actually the authorities that had done that,” he said. There is no evidence to support his assertion, and Trump did not deny taking the documents from the White House.

Trump’s Republican party allies also offered full-throated endorsement.

Speaker Mike Johnson, in a tweet, called it “good news for America and for the rule of law”.

“House Republicans repeatedly argued that … Smith abused his office’s authority in pursuit of President Trump, and now a federal judge has ruled Smith never possessed the authority in the first place,” he wrote.

“As we work to unify this country following the failed assassination attempt of President Trump, we must also work to end the lawfare and political witch hunts that have unfairly targeted President Trump and destroyed the American people’s faith in our system of justice.”

Ron Johnson, Wisconsin senator, said in a tweet: “It’s good to see some sanity returned to our judicial system”; and Marjorie Taylor Greene, extremist congresswoman from Georgia, said the “weaponized” justice department was dealt “a major blow”.

“The Democrats won’t stop. They are going to keep going after every single one of us who opposes their agenda,” she said.

Adam Schiff of California, a Democratic member of the House judiciary, also alleged political interference, but from an opposite perspective.

“Today’s precedent-shattering decision in Florida is further proof that the guardrails of our democracy are coming down,” he said on X, formerly known as Twitter.

“Again, a partisan judge throws out decades of precedent to reach a desired political outcome.”

Other legal experts who have followed the case say they are also unsurprised by Cannon’s ruling, and expect it to be subject of an immediate appeal by Smith.

“Maybe today,” said Carl Tobias, Williams professor of law at the University of Richmond. “She is wrong, and may well be reversed on appeal. The bottom line would be that this is just going to create more delay, so will make it impossible to ever have a trial before the election.

“This is also in striking contrast to how long it’s taken her to rule on almost everything else. It is possible Smith will skip over the 11th circuit and go directly to the Supreme Court for a ruling because of the critical importance of the matter.

“As for a reassignment [of Cannon], there’s plenty of precedent that could lead to it, but we’re not there yet. First, higher courts will have to reverse her ruling and then entertain his request for a different judge. I don’t see how all that would happen before the election in November.”

Israeli air and naval strikes continued to pummel Gaza as the UK foreign secretary, David Lammy, reiterated his demand for a ceasefire during a visit to Jerusalem.

Strikes on central Gaza followed two days of particularly deadly attacks including one in a humanitarian zone in southern Gaza that killed at least 90 people when Israeli forces targeted the head of Hamas’s military wing, Mohammed Deif.

Hamas has maintained that Deif survived the attack despite public speculation among Israeli officials, but the attempt has further strained already fragile ceasefire negotiations that have dragged for months. “There is no doubt that the horrific massacres will impact any efforts in the negotiations,” the Hamas spokesperson Jihad Taha said on Sunday.

A source close to the negotiations said Qatari mediators remained determined to overcome this latest obstacle, despite the risk that the attempt on Deif’s life could stall talks. They pointed to notable examples where Hamas was reluctant to negotiate but did not disengage entirely, including after an Israeli strike in a Gaza refugee camp last October that killed 120 people, and the assassination of the founder of Hamas’s military wing, Saleh al-Arouri, in Beirut earlier this year.

“Talks still continued then, and they’re going to continue regardless of whether one side wants to take a step back and review,” they said. A second track of negotiations to avert a war between Israel and Lebanon, they added, appeared to be proving more productive for mediators including the White House.

Negotiators from Israel’s Mossad security agency have been engaged in indirect talks with Hamas, mediated by Qatar, Egypt and the head of the CIA, in an attempt to secure the release of dozens of Israeli and dual-national hostages held by Hamas and other Palestinian factions in Gaza since 7 October.

After an initial hostage release in November, efforts to secure a second round in exchange for at least a temporary pause in fighting have proved far more challenging. Israel’s hostages and missing families forum said signs of life had been received from 33 hostages in late May, according to Amnesty International, out of an estimated 116 believed held in Gaza.

Hamas and Israeli officials remain at odds, sometimes down to the exact wording of the truce agreement. The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has doubled down on his demand that Israeli forces must be permitted to continue fighting in Gaza, while Hamas has long demanded at least a temporary truce.

Gershon Baskin, a longtime Israeli negotiator involved in the hostage exchange deal that freed the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, posted on X about the need to “make a deal now”. Israeli negotiators, he said, should secure a deal and show it to the public “so that everyone will know that the prime minister is the one who is blocking the deal”.

“The attempted elimination of Deif, or the elimination of Deif, will not advance the release of the hostages,” he said. “The military pressure of more than nine months only resulted in the killing of hostages and many Palestinian non-combatants.”

Lammy reiterated his call for a ceasefire during his second day of meetings with Israeli officials, including a meeting with the Israeli president, Isaac Herzog, as the new British foreign secretary continues a diplomatic push despite dwindling hopes of an immediate ceasefire.

Lammy met the family of British hostages and later joined Herzog to meet relatives of Tamir Adar, whose body is believed to be being held by Hamas militants in Gaza. “I hope that we see a hostage deal emerge in the coming days, and I am using all diplomatic efforts,” said Lammy. “I hope, too, that we see a ceasefire soon, and we bring an alleviation to the suffering and the intolerable loss of life that we’re now seeing also in Gaza.”

Far-right members of Netanyahu’s cabinet continue to demand the Israeli government refrain from making a deal to end the fighting in Gaza. The finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, said Monday that he opposed the release of any Palestinian prisoner as part of a ceasefire agreement, saying: “I will not agree to it, a red line must be drawn.”

He added: “I will oppose this even if it ends my political career.”

A fleet of more than one hundred lorries would take 15 years to clear Gaza of almost 40m tonnes of rubble in an operation costing between $500m (£394m) and $600m, a UN assessment has found.

The conclusions will underline the immense challenge of rebuilding the Palestinian territory after months of a grinding Israeli offensive that has led to massive destruction of homes and infrastructure.

According to the assessment, which was published last month by the UN Environment Programme, 137,297 buildings had been damaged in Gaza, more than half of the total. Of these, just over a quarter were destroyed, about a 10th severely damaged and a third moderately damaged.

Massive landfill sites covering between 250 and 500 hectares (618 to 1,235 acres) would be necessary to dump the rubble, depending on how much could be recycled, the assessment found.

In May, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) said rebuilding homes in Gaza destroyed during the war could take until 2040 in the most optimistic scenario, with total reconstruction across the territory costing as much as $40bn. That assessment, which was published as part of a push to raise funds for early planning for the rehabilitation of Gaza, also found the conflict could reduce levels of health, education and wealth in the territory to those of 1980, wiping out 44 years of development.

“The damage to infrastructure is insane … In [the southern Gaza City] Khan Younis, there is not one building untouched,” one UN official based in Gaza told the Guardian last week.

“The actual topography has changed. There are hills where there were none. The 2,000lbs [907kg] bombs dropped [by Israel] are actually altering the landscape.”

Schools, health facilities, roads, sewers and all other critical infrastructure have all suffered massive damage.

Humanitarian officials welcomed a move by Israel to increase the capacity of a key desalination plant that serves Gaza but pointed out that with most pipes damaged, distribution of water within the territory remained extremely difficult.

The UNDP said the possible price tag of reconstruction of Gaza is now twice estimates made by UN and Palestinian officials in January and was rising every day.

The mountains of rubble are full of unexploded ordnance that leads to “more than 10 explosions every week”, causing more deaths and loss of limbs, Gaza’s Civil Defence agency has said.

In April, Pehr Lodhammar, a former United Nationals Mine Action Service chief for Iraq, said that on average about 10% of weapons failed to detonate when they were fired and had to be removed by demining teams.

Sixty-five per cent of the buildings destroyed in Gaza were residential, Lodhammar said, adding that clearing and rebuilding them would be slow and dangerous work because of the threat from shells, missiles or other weapons buried in collapsed or damaged buildings.

The war began when Hamas launched a surprise attack into southern Israel in October, killing 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting 250 others. More than 38,000 people have now been killed in Israel’s offensive in Gaza, according to Palestinian officials in the territory.

The climate crisis is causing the length of each day to get longer, analysis shows, as the mass melting of polar ice reshapes the planet.

The phenomenon is a striking demonstration of how humanity’s actions are transforming the Earth, scientists said, rivalling natural processes that have existed for billions of years.

The change in the length of the day is on the scale of milliseconds but this is enough to potentially disrupt internet traffic, financial transactions and GPS navigation, all of which rely on precise timekeeping.

The length of the Earth’s day has been steadily reducing over geological time due to the gravitational drag of the moon on the planet’s oceans and land. However, the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets due to human-caused global heating has been redistributing water stored at high latitudes into the world’s oceans, leading to more water in the seas nearer the equator. This makes the Earth more oblate – or fatter – slowing the rotation of the planet and lengthening the day.

The planetary impact of humanity was also demonstrated recently by research that showed the redistribution of water had caused the Earth’s axis of rotation – the north and south poles – to move. Other work has revealed that humanity’s carbon emissions are shrinking the stratosphere.

“We can see our impact as humans on the whole Earth system, not just locally, like the rise in temperature, but really fundamentally, altering how it moves in space and rotates,” said Prof Benedikt Soja of ETH Zurich in Switzerland. “Due to our carbon emissions, we have done this in just 100 or 200 years. Whereas the governing processes previously had been going on for billions of years, and that is striking.”

Human timekeeping is based on atomic clocks, which are extremely precise. However, the exact time of a day – one rotation of the Earth – varies due to lunar tides, climate impacts and some other factors, such as the slow rebound of the Earth’s crust after the retreat of ice sheets formed in the last ice age.

These differences have to be accounted for, said Soja: “All the datacentres that run the internet, communications and financial transactions, they are based on precise timing. We also need a precise knowledge of time for navigation, and particularly for satellites and spacecraft.”

The research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, used observations and computer reconstructions to assess the impact of melting ice on the length of the day. The rate of slowing varied between 0.3 and 1.0 millisecond per century (ms/cy) between 1900 and 2000. But since 2000, as melting accelerated, the rate of change also accelerated to 1.3ms/cy.

“This present-day rate is likely higher than at any time in the past few thousand years,” the researchers said. “It is projected to remain approximately at a level of 1.0 ms/cy for the next few decades, even if greenhouse gas emissions are severely curbed.” If emissions are not cut, the slowing rate will increase to 2.6 ms/cy by 2100, overtaking lunar tides as the single biggest contributor to long-term variations in the length of days, they said.

Dr Santiago Belda of the University of Alicante in Spain, who was not part of the research team, said: “This study is a great advance because it confirms that the worrying loss of ice that Greenland and Antarctica are suffering has a direct impact on day length, causing our days to lengthen. This variation in day length has critical implications not only for how we measure time, but also for GPS and other technologies that govern our modern lives.”

Top EU officials will boycott informal meetings hosted by Hungary while the country has the EU’s rotating presidency, after Hungary’s pro-Russian prime minister Viktor Orbán held a series of rogue meetings with foreign leaders about Ukraine that angered European partners.

The highly unusual decision to have the European Commission president and other top officials of the body boycott the meetings was made “in light of recent developments marking the start of the Hungarian (EU) presidency”, commission spokesperson Eric Mamer posted on Monday on X.

Hungary took over the rotating role on 1 July and since then Orban has visited Ukraine, Russia, Azerbaijan, China, and the United States on a world tour he has touted as a “peace mission” aimed at brokering an end to Russia’s war in Ukraine. That angered many leaders in the EU, who said they had not been informed in advance of Orbán’s plans. His government is friendly with Russia and has gone against the policy of most EU countries on support for Ukraine.

Hungary’s Europe minister, János Bóka, lashed out at the commission’s decision saying the body “cannot cherrypick institutions and member states it wants to cooperate with.”

The decision by the European Commission applies to informal meetings hosted by Hungary. Senior civil servants will attend instead of top officials such as the European Commission president, currently Ursula von der Leyen.

Orbán’s government has gone against the policy of most EU countries by refusing to supply Kyiv with weapons to deter Russia’s invasion and by threatening to block financial assistance to the war-ravaged country.

The long-serving prime minister’s visits to Moscow and Beijing, where he held talks with leaders Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, angered his EU counterparts, who said they had not been informed in advance. They rushed to clarify that Orbán – whose country is currently filling the bloc’s six-month rotating presidency – was not acting on behalf of the EU.

In an interview with Hungarian newspaper Magyar Nemzet on Monday, Orbán’s political director said the prime minister had briefed the leaders of other EU countries “in writing about the negotiations, the experiences of the first phase of the peace mission and the Hungarian proposals”.

“If Europe wants peace and wants to have a decisive say in settling the war and ending the bloodshed, it must now work out and implement a change of direction,” said Balázs Orbán, who is not related to the premier. “A realistic assessment of the situation, realistic goals and the right timing – that’s our approach.”

Hungary’s government has long argued for an immediate ceasefire and peace negotiations in the conflict in Ukraine, but has not outlined what such moves might mean for the country’s territorial integrity and future security. It has exhibited an adversarial posture toward Ukraine while maintaining close ties to Moscow, even after its full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Orbán’s critics have accused him of acting against the unity and interests of the EU and Nato, of which Hungary is a member, and of pursuing an “appeasement” strategy concerning Russia’s aggression.

After Orbán’s unannounced trip to Moscow for talks with Putin on 5 July – the first such visit from an EU head of state or government in more than two years – von der Leyen accused him of trying to mollify the Russian leader, writing on X: “Appeasement will not stop Putin. Only unity and determination will pave the path to a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in Ukraine.”

Top EU officials will boycott informal meetings hosted by Hungary while the country has the EU’s rotating presidency, after Hungary’s pro-Russian prime minister Viktor Orbán held a series of rogue meetings with foreign leaders about Ukraine that angered European partners.

The highly unusual decision to have the European Commission president and other top officials of the body boycott the meetings was made “in light of recent developments marking the start of the Hungarian (EU) presidency”, commission spokesperson Eric Mamer posted on Monday on X.

Hungary took over the rotating role on 1 July and since then Orban has visited Ukraine, Russia, Azerbaijan, China, and the United States on a world tour he has touted as a “peace mission” aimed at brokering an end to Russia’s war in Ukraine. That angered many leaders in the EU, who said they had not been informed in advance of Orbán’s plans. His government is friendly with Russia and has gone against the policy of most EU countries on support for Ukraine.

Hungary’s Europe minister, János Bóka, lashed out at the commission’s decision saying the body “cannot cherrypick institutions and member states it wants to cooperate with.”

The decision by the European Commission applies to informal meetings hosted by Hungary. Senior civil servants will attend instead of top officials such as the European Commission president, currently Ursula von der Leyen.

Orbán’s government has gone against the policy of most EU countries by refusing to supply Kyiv with weapons to deter Russia’s invasion and by threatening to block financial assistance to the war-ravaged country.

The long-serving prime minister’s visits to Moscow and Beijing, where he held talks with leaders Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, angered his EU counterparts, who said they had not been informed in advance. They rushed to clarify that Orbán – whose country is currently filling the bloc’s six-month rotating presidency – was not acting on behalf of the EU.

In an interview with Hungarian newspaper Magyar Nemzet on Monday, Orbán’s political director said the prime minister had briefed the leaders of other EU countries “in writing about the negotiations, the experiences of the first phase of the peace mission and the Hungarian proposals”.

“If Europe wants peace and wants to have a decisive say in settling the war and ending the bloodshed, it must now work out and implement a change of direction,” said Balázs Orbán, who is not related to the premier. “A realistic assessment of the situation, realistic goals and the right timing – that’s our approach.”

Hungary’s government has long argued for an immediate ceasefire and peace negotiations in the conflict in Ukraine, but has not outlined what such moves might mean for the country’s territorial integrity and future security. It has exhibited an adversarial posture toward Ukraine while maintaining close ties to Moscow, even after its full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Orbán’s critics have accused him of acting against the unity and interests of the EU and Nato, of which Hungary is a member, and of pursuing an “appeasement” strategy concerning Russia’s aggression.

After Orbán’s unannounced trip to Moscow for talks with Putin on 5 July – the first such visit from an EU head of state or government in more than two years – von der Leyen accused him of trying to mollify the Russian leader, writing on X: “Appeasement will not stop Putin. Only unity and determination will pave the path to a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in Ukraine.”

The leftwing coalition that won most seats in France’s snap general election is facing division after its leading party said it was suspending negotiations with the others over a failure to agree on a prime minister.

Just one week after the election, the fragile unity within the New Popular Front (NFP) fractured on Monday when France Unbowed (LFI) accused the Socialist party (PS) of “unacceptable methods” in vetoing suggestions over who should lead any new administration.

The rift comes at the start of a crucial week in which the government will resign and new MPs will vote on Thursday to appoint a new president of the national assembly, the equivalent of the speaker of the house.

On Monday, LFI said it would not resume talks about forming a government or agreeing a possible prime minister until after the vote for president of the lower house.

In an angry statement, LFI accused the PS of playing into the hands of Macron – whose centrist alliance Ensemble pushed the far-right National Rally (RN) into third place – by putting the leftwing alliance into a “deadlock”.

“Is the PS playing for time to allow the NFP to crumble and abandoning the programme on which it was elected? We will not allow this stalemate to facilitate presidential manoeuvres,” it wrote.

Macron has said he would not work with a government led by LFI. Both LFI and RN have said they would launch a motion of no confidence in any government that included the other.

“The PS has chosen to veto any candidacy [for prime minister] from the NFP, with the sole aim of imposing its own, arguing that it would be the only one acceptable to Emmanuel Macron. It is thus making the president of the republic the decision-maker on our alliance, even though it has been formed against him and his policies,” the LFI statement said.

It added: “These methods are unacceptable. We demand an immediate agreement on a single candidate from the New Popular Front for the presidency of the national assembly … until then we will not participate in any other discussion about the forming of a government.”

The legislative election that Macron called after the RN’s success in the European elections was meant to “clarify” the French political landscape. Instead, the result just over a week ago revealed three similarly sized blocs had emerged – none of which has a majority, or the prospect of forming one.

French union leaders have accused Macron of hijacking democracy, and called for protests and strikes outside the national assembly and government offices across France at noon on Thursday.

An American tourist convicted and jailed for the murder of a police officer in Rome has been moved to house arrest, in a decision that has left the victim’s widow “totally shocked”, her lawyer said.

Gabriel Christian Natale-Hjorth and his friend Finnegan Lee Elder were given life sentences for the 2019 murder of Mario Cerciello Rega, 35, a Carabinieri police officer who was stabbed to death after a botched drug deal.

Their initial sentences were repeatedly trimmed as the case bounced around courts in Italy’s multitiered trial system, and this month an appeals court ruled that Natale-Hjorth should serve a term of 11 years and four-month term.

Natale-Hjorth did not handle the knife during the attack but was tussling with another police officer as Elder was stabbing Cerciello Rega, according to court documents. Elder eventually received a term of 15 years and two months and remains in prison.

The judicial sources said judges granted Natale-Hjorth house arrest on the request of his lawyers and he would remain under detention at his grandmother’s house in a town near Rome. There were no immediate details on the reasons for the decision.

Cerciello Rega’s widow, Rosa Maria Esilio, was “totally shocked by the news” of the house arrest, her lawyer Massimo Ferrandino said in a statement.

The two Americans, both from California, had tried to buy drugs during a holiday in Rome. They have said they were cheated and grabbed a bag belonging to an intermediary of the dealer as he tried to escape, the court documents said.

They later agreed to a meeting with the dealer to swap the bag for the money but two police officers showed up in plainclothes instead, the documents said. Italian media reported that the dealer was a police informer.

Elder and Natale-Hjorth’s lawyers argued that the two acted in self-defence because they thought the two police officers were thugs who were out to get them.

Prosecutors will be able to appeal against the latest sentences before Italy’s highest court.

US journalist and author Masha Gessen has been convicted in absentia by a Moscow court on charges of spreading false information about the military and was sentenced to eight years in prison.

The Moscow-born Gessen, a staff writer for the New Yorker and a columnist for the New York Times who lives in the US, is a prominent critic of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and an award-winning writer.

Russian police put Gessen on a wanted list in December, and Russian media reported the case was based on statements they made about atrocities in the Ukrainian town of Bucha in an interview with a popular Russian online blogger.

In the interview, which has been viewed more than 6.5m times on YouTube since September 2022, Gessen and blogger Yury Dud discussed atrocities in the Ukrainian town of Bucha earlier that year.

Ukrainian troops who retook Bucha from retreating Russian forces found at least 400 bodies of men, women and children on the streets, in homes, and in mass graves, with some showing signs of torture. Russian officials have vehemently denied their forces were responsible and have prosecuted a number of Russian public figures for speaking out about Bucha.

The prosecutions were carried out under a Russian law adopted days after the invasion of Ukraine began that effectively criminalized any public expression about the war deviating from the Kremlin narrative. Russia maintains that its troops in Ukraine only strike military targets, not civilians.

Gessen, a dual US-Russian citizen, lived in Russia until 2013, when the country passed legislation against the LGBTQ+ community.

Gessen is unlikely to face imprisonment in Russia on the conviction unless they travel to a country with an extradition treaty with Moscow.

Since the war began in February 2022, Russia has cracked down harshly on dissent and also has targeted Americans.

There have been 1,053 criminal cases in Russia against anti-war protesters, according to the OVD-Info rights group, which tracks political arrests and provides legal aid.

Also on Monday, Russian citizen Richard Rose was found guilty of spreading false information about the Russian military in Bucha, OVD-Info said. Rose also was sentenced to eight years in prison.

According to OVD-Info, he said on a video that “the massacre in Bucha will never be forgotten … Russian fascists will never be forgiven for this”.

In his final speech before the court, Rose said he considers himself to be a political prisoner and said he would not change his views, the monitoring group said.

Romania’s parliament has approved the culling of almost 500 bears this year in an effort to control the “overpopulation” of the protected species after a deadly attack on a hiker sparked nationwide outcry.

The country is home to 8,000 brown bears, according to the environment ministry, Europe’s largest brown bear population outside Russia.

Bears have killed 26 people and severely injured 274 others over the past 20 years in Romania, the ministry said this year.

After a young hiker was mauled to death on a popular trail in Romania’s Carpathian mountains last week, the prime minister, Marcel Ciolacu, summoned lawmakers back from their summer recess to attend an emergency session of parliament.

As well as adopting legislation on Monday to control the brown bear population, the parliament held a moment of silence in the 19-year-old hiker’s memory.

The new law authorises the culling of 481 bears in 2024, more than twice last year’s total of 220. Lawmakers argued that the bears’ overpopulation had led to an increase in attacks, while admitting that the law would not prevent attacks in the future.

Environmental groups denounced the measure. “The law solves absolutely nothing,” said Calin Ardelean, a World Wildlife Fund biologist, arguing that the focus should be shifted towards “prevention and intervention” as well as “problem bears”.

According to WWF Romania, culls will not remedy the problem unless measures are put in place to keep bears away from communities, such as better waste management or preventing people from feeding animals.

In 2023 about 7,500 emergency calls to signal bear sightings were recorded, more than double the number of the previous year, according to data presented last week by Romanian authorities.

Researchers have found evidence for a substantial underground cave on the moon that is accessible from the surface, making the spot a prime location to build a future lunar base.

The cave appears to be reachable from an open pit in the Mare Tranquillitatis (Sea of Tranquility), the ancient lava plain where the Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first set foot on the moon more than half a century ago.

Analysis of radar data collected by Nasa’s lunar reconnaissance orbiter (LRO) revealed that the Mare Tranquillitatis pit, the deepest known pit on the moon, leads to a cave 45 metres wide and up to 80 metres long, an area equivalent to 14 tennis courts. The cave lies about 150 metres beneath the surface.

Lorenzo Bruzzone, of the University of Trento in Italy, said the cave was “probably an empty lava tube”, adding that such features could serve as human habitats for future explorers as they were “a natural shelter against the harsh lunar environment”.

Lunar orbiters first spotted pits on the moon more than a decade ago. Many are thought to be “skylights” that connect to underground caves such as lava tubes, giant underground tunnels that form through volcanic processes.

Such caves could form the basis for a moonbase or an emergency lunar shelter because the temperature is relatively stable inside and astronauts would be naturally shielded from harmful cosmic rays, solar radiation and micrometeorites.

Previous images taken from the LRO showed that the bottom of the Mare Tranquillitatis pit was strewn with boulders up to 10 metres wide. But it was unclear whether the pit was enclosed or served as an entry point to an underground cave, such as a lava tube whose roof had collapsed.

Writing in Nature Astronomy, the scientists describe how they used LRO data and computer simulations to show that the 100 metre-wide pit, which is bordered by vertical or overhanging walls, leads to a sloping floor and a cave that extends for tens of metres westwards.

Researchers are keen to study the rocks inside such caves as they are likely to hold clues to the moon’s formation and volcanic history. The caves may also contain water ice, a resource Bruzzone said was essential for long-term lunar missions and colonisation.

At least 200 pits have been spotted on the moon and many found on lava fields could be entrances to cavernous subterranean lava tubes. “The main advantage of caves is that they make available the main structural parts of a possible human base without requiring complex construction activities,” said Leonardo Carrer, the study’s first author.

In preparation for humans returning to the moon, space agencies are already wondering how to assess the structural stability of caves and reinforce their walls and ceilings. Habitats may also need monitoring systems to warn of movement or seismic activity and have separate areas for astronauts to retreat to should sections of their cave collapse.

“Lunar cave systems have been proposed as great places to site future crewed bases, as the thick cave ceiling of rock is ideal to protect people and infrastructure from the wildly varying day-night lunar surface temperature variations and to block high energy radiation which bathes the lunar surface,” said Katherine Joy, professor in earth sciences at the University of Manchester. “However, we currently know very little about the underground structures below these pit entrances.”

Robert Wagner, a researcher at Arizona State University, said one of the biggest challenges would be access. “Getting into that pit requires descending 125 metres before you reach the floor, and the rim is a steep slope of loose debris where any movement will send little avalanches down on to anyone below,” he said. “It’s certainly possible to get in and out, but it will take a significant amount of infrastructure.”