Donald Trump 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 undergone 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 phoneyness.

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 on 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.”

Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr, celebrated the announcement on the convention floor.

“I watched JD go into sort of – let’s call it enemy territory, from a media perspective, doing the most liberal TV shows, and prosecute the case for my father and against the Democrat lunacy that we’ve seen,” he said.

Outside the floor of the convention in Milwaukee, news spread slowly on Monday that Trump had picked Vance.

“I think it’s a great choice. I like that he’s young. I like that he’s from Ohio. There’s a lot of positives about him. Future of the party,” said Nick D’Alessandro, an alternate delegate from New York.

Larry Johnson, a convention attendee from West Virginia, said he thought Vance could bring more attention to Appalachia: “I think for a long time that area has been kind of overlooked.”

Asa Hutchinson, the former Arkansas governor who was one of the most outspoken Trump critics during the Republican party said Vance was a “strategic” choice.

In an early response from the Democratic party, the Democratic National Committee chair, Jaime Harrison, wrote that the “Trump-Vance ticket would undermine our democracy, our freedoms, and our future”.

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!”

“You can’t only love the country when you win,” President Joe Biden said in a high-stakes conversation at the White House with NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt on Monday.

In a preview of the interview that will air tonight at 9pm ET, Holt asked the president about the language he has used to describe former president Donald Trump – as an “existential threat”, and that “it’s time to put Trump in the bullseye” – and the consequences to the election of the attempted assassination of his opponent, Donald Trump two days ago in Pennsylvania.

“I guess what I was talking about at the time, there was very little focus on Trump’s agenda.” Biden said, “Look, I’m not the guy that said ‘I want to be a dictator on day one.’ I’m not the guy who refused to accept the outcome of the election.”

Biden momentarily conflated the word bullseye and crosshairs, prompting Holt to correct him. Holt pressed the president on whether he had done some “soul searching” about whether his language could “incite people who are not balanced”.

“Look. How do you talk about the threat to democracy, which is real, when the president says things like he says?” Biden responded. “Do you just not say anything because you might incite somebody? Look. I have not engaged in that rhetoric. Now, my opponent has engaged in that rhetoric. He talks about there will be a bloodbath if he loses, talking about how he’s going to forgive all the … actually, I guess suspend the sentence of all that were arrested and sentenced to go jail because of what happened at the Capitol. I’m not out there making fun of … like, remember the picture of Donald Trump when Nancy Pelosi’s husband was hit with a hammer, talking about it? Joking about it?”

Biden’s one-on-one interview – a relative rarity during his time in office – comes amid continuing calls for the president to step away from his re-election run after his weak performance against Trump during a debate on 27 June raised questions about his age and fitness to serve.

Biden’s public appearances have been closely scrutinized since the debate for signs of personal weakness. ABC’s George Stephanopoulos interviewed Biden on 5 July, and asked if he would publish the results of a neurological exam. The president refused. He pointedly displayed a command of foreign policy knowledge at an hour-long press conference at the Nato summit on Friday.

The president has made increasingly forceful rejections of calls to withdraw. But that question had been expected to be at the center of the Holt interview tonight. It slipped in importance behind images of a gunman narrowly missing Trump’s skull at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, nicking Trump’s ear before being killed by Secret Service sniper fire. One spectator was killed and two others critically injured.

The Republican National Committee opened its national nominating convention this week. Biden’s interview with Holt is a bit of political counter-programming in a moment when all eyes might be expected to be on Trump.

Biden addressed the public Sunday night to call for the temperature of political rhetoric to cool, and said as much again to Holt tonight.

Democrats were quick to seize on Donald Trump’s decision to name as his running mate JD Vance, the hard-right Ohio senator whose past opposition to the former president and Republican nominee included calling him “America’s Hitler” but who now supports Trump with fiery populist rhetoric.

A Democratic party statement said: “Vance is an ultra-Maga extremist who’s ready to help Trump pass his Project 2025 agenda. Stop Trump-Vance. Vote Biden-Harris.”

Vance has praised Project 2025, a far-right blueprint for a second Trump term. Trump has tried to distance himself from the effort, which is co-ordinated by the Heritage Foundation. Democrats want to tie him to it.

Joe Biden’s campaign warned that Vance should not be trusted to put country over party, as Mike Pence did as vice-president when, on 6 January 2021, he refused to do as Trump demanded and block certification of Biden’s election win.

“Trump picked JD Vance as his running mate because he will do what Mike Pence wouldn’t on January 6: bend over backwards to enable Trump and his extreme Maga agenda, even if it means breaking the law and certainly no matter the harm to the American people,” Jen O’Malley Dillon, Biden’s campaign manager, told reporters.

On the same call, officials and surrogates highlighted Vance’s anti-choice record on abortion, accusing him of wanting to “take women back decades”.

The Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren said Vance was a faux populist whose nomination was “great news for the wealthiest Americans and lousy news for everyone else”.

“Billionaires on Wall Street and Silicon Valley are cheering but there is no joy for working people,” Warren said.

Elsewhere, Robert Garcia, a California congressman, called Vance “an extremist with views that are completely outside the mainstream” and said: “The fact that he immediately politicised the assassination attempt against former President Trump and blamed Democrats is shameful. There couldn’t be a more irresponsible pick.”

On Saturday, at a rally in Pennsylvania, Trump was shot in the ear. One person was killed and two injured. In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, Vance claimed Democratic campaign rhetoric “led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination”.

The gunman’s motive has not been determined.

Monday’s Biden campaign call marked something of a return to normal, after a pause in negative advertising. Officials said the contrast between the Trump-Vance ticket and Biden-Harris was clear.

O’Malley Dillon said: “With Trump and Vance now entering the general election, they’re facing off against the Biden-Harris ticket, and I will certainly take that matchup any day of the week – and twice on Sunday.”

Eager to turn the page on party turmoil set in motion by Biden’s disastrous debate display last month, the campaign said it had committed to a vice-presidential debate, now a televised showdown between Harris and Vance.

“She is strong. She knows what she’s talking about and she doesn’t give an inch,” Warren said of Harris. “I’m looking forward to this debate.”

Other Democrats highlighted Vance’s far-right views.

Ayanna Pressley, a Massachusetts representative and member of the high-profile “squad” of House progressives, pointed to Vance’s opposition to abortion ban exceptions for rape and incest.

“JD Vance has told us who he is,” Pressley said. “Believe him.”

Young Democrats of America, a campaign group, said Vance’s “radical attacks on the LGBTQ+ community, Bipoc Americans, and reproductive healthcare are only getting started.”

The Biden campaign pointed to remarks in which Vance called no-fault divorce “one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace”, because it allowed people to “shift spouses like they change their underwear”.

“JD Vance says women should stay in violent marriages ‘for the sake of their kids’,” a campaign tweet said.

Before entering politics, Vance was a “public affairs” marine turned venture capitalist and bestselling author, having written Hillbilly Elegy, about his upbringing in poverty-stricken Ohio.

The book was widely seen as an important portrait of the kind of area likely to back Trump. But in 2015 and 2016, as Trump surged to the presidency, Vance came out against him and on Monday, many reached for examples of such anti-Trump statements.

Shannon Watts, a leading campaigner for gun reform, was one of many to point to Vance’s description of Trump as “America’s Hitler”.

In February 2016, in a message to a friend, Vance said: “I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler. How’s that for discouraging?”

Nicholas Thompson, chief executive of the Atlantic, pointed to a piece from the same year in which Vance wrote, under the headline Opioid of the Masses: “To every complex problem, Trump promises a simple solution … He never offers details for how these plans will work, because he can’t.

“Trump’s promises are the needle in America’s collective vein.”

Vance recently told Fox News that back then, he “didn’t think [Trump] was going to be a good president. He was a great president. And it’s one of the reasons why I’m working so hard to make sure he gets a second term”.

Having won Trump’s trust, notably by supporting his election fraud lie, Vance won a US Senate seat in Ohio in 2022.

His elevation as Trump’s running mate also came after he overcame Trump’s reported aversion to beards. Nonetheless, it prompted predictions of tricky moments to come.

Anthony Michael Kreis, a constitutional law professor at Georgia State University, said: “JD Vance has said so many awful things about Donald Trump on tape, it’s going to be looped over and over and over again in every swing state.”

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 are expected to 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.

“The dismissal of the case deviates from the uniform conclusion of all previous courts to have considered the issue that the Attorney General is statutorily authorized to appoint a Special Counsel. The Justice Department has authorized the Special Counsel to appeal,” a spokesperson for Smith said in a statement.

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 charged last year with violating the Espionage Act over his retention of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago and obstructing the justice department’s attempts to retrieve them, including by partially defying a grand jury subpoena. 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.”

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.

Violent clashes at a site designated to house asylum seekers in north Dublin were described as “reprehensible” by the taoiseach, after at least 15 people were arrested.

“No person has a right to burn cars, damage property or attack members of An Garda Síochána and emergency services,” Simon Harris said on Monday.

“These actions are criminal and are designed to sow fear and division. We should not accept them being legitimised in any way by describing them as ‘protest’.”

The clashes are the latest at sites earmarked for asylum seekers, who have arrived in Ireland in growing numbers in recent years. Videos posted on social media showed machinery and construction materials on fire at the site, a former paint factory in the north of the capital.

The rioters threw bricks and launched fireworks at police, who used pepper spray to disperse the crowd of more than 100. One video showed a person, believed to be a security guard at the site, being removed from the scene on a stretcher. The site is due to be repurposed as an accommodation facility for up to 500 asylum seekers.

Videos on social media also showed a standoff between gardaí and rioters, while some demonstrators shouted abuse at officers. Masked men and youths were also at the site, while a man with a megaphone told the crowd the government was going to “change the constitution”.

The violence escalated as bricks and fireworks were thrown at officers and the fire service, and bins and mattresses were set alight.

Gardaí have charged 15 people in relation to public order incidents. They were due to appear before a special sitting of the criminal courts of justice in Dublin on Monday evening. A garda spokesperson said officers remained at the scene of a “serious public order incident”.

The violence was sparked by a provider attempting to start work, said the ministry, which is responsible for housing asylum seekers. “The [ministry] condemns all acts of criminality and intimidation of providers and their employees.”

Ireland’s justice minister, Helen McEntee, told the Irish Times she was “appalled” by the scenes and that those involved would face the “full rigours of the law”.

Since 2022, there has been a sharp increase in arson attacks on properties around the country linked to accommodating asylum seekers.

During violent riots in Dublin last November, which were sparked by unrest over increased immigration and ignited by a knife attack outside a school, rioters also targeted properties used to house asylum seekers.

Additional reporting by PA Media and AFP

Emissions of two of the most potent greenhouse gases have substantially increased in China over the last decade, a study has found.

Perfluorocarbons are used in the manufacturing processes for flat-panel TVs and semiconductors, or as by-products from aluminium smelting. They are far more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than CO2, and can persist in the Earth’s atmosphere for thousands of years, unlike CO2 which can persist for up to 200 years.

A research team led by Minde An at Massachusetts Institute of Technology examined the emissions of two specific perfluorocarbons, tetrafluoromethane and hexafluoroethane, both with atmospheric lifetimes of 50,000 and 10,000 years respectively.

By analysing atmospheric observations in nine cities across China from 2011 to 2021, they found that both gases exhibited an increase of 78% in emissions in China and, by 2020, represented 64-66% of global emissions for tetrafluoromethane and hexafluoroethane. However, while levels of fluorocarbon emissions are increasing at an alarming rate, CO2 still accounts for about 76% of total greenhouse gas emissions.

The increase in emissions from China was sufficient to account for the global emission increases over that same period, suggesting that China is the dominant driver in tetrafluoromethane and hexafluoroethane release into the atmosphere globally.

The emissions were found to mainly originate from the less populated industrial zones in the western regions of China, and are thought to be due to the role of perfluorocarbons in the aluminium industry.

China is the world’s largest producer and exporter of aluminium, with the country’s production reaching a record-high output of 41.5m tonnes last year.

With the rapid expansion of China’s aluminium and semiconductor industries, these ongoing high levels of fluorocarbon emissions could pose a particular threat to China’s carbon neutrality goal and global climate mitigation. The country is aiming to achieve “peak carbon” emission by 2030 and become “carbon neutral” by 2060.

The authors suggest that with technological innovation and incorporation of the aluminium industry into the carbon market, or a national carbon trading scheme allowing emitters to buy or sell emission credits, it is possible that these rising levels could be reduced.

While being a significant source of CO2 emissions, aluminium production is also essential in the energy transition from fossil fuels to cleaner renewable energy sources by helping produce many low-carbon technologies such as solar panels, electric vehicles and wind turbines.

Organisations such as the World Economic Forum argue that the aluminium industry must act now to find a balance between ensuring efficient production alongside mitigating the industry’s negative impacts on the climate.

Emissions of two of the most potent greenhouse gases have substantially increased in China over the last decade, a study has found.

Perfluorocarbons are used in the manufacturing processes for flat-panel TVs and semiconductors, or as by-products from aluminium smelting. They are far more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than CO2, and can persist in the Earth’s atmosphere for thousands of years, unlike CO2 which can persist for up to 200 years.

A research team led by Minde An at Massachusetts Institute of Technology examined the emissions of two specific perfluorocarbons, tetrafluoromethane and hexafluoroethane, both with atmospheric lifetimes of 50,000 and 10,000 years respectively.

By analysing atmospheric observations in nine cities across China from 2011 to 2021, they found that both gases exhibited an increase of 78% in emissions in China and, by 2020, represented 64-66% of global emissions for tetrafluoromethane and hexafluoroethane. However, while levels of fluorocarbon emissions are increasing at an alarming rate, CO2 still accounts for about 76% of total greenhouse gas emissions.

The increase in emissions from China was sufficient to account for the global emission increases over that same period, suggesting that China is the dominant driver in tetrafluoromethane and hexafluoroethane release into the atmosphere globally.

The emissions were found to mainly originate from the less populated industrial zones in the western regions of China, and are thought to be due to the role of perfluorocarbons in the aluminium industry.

China is the world’s largest producer and exporter of aluminium, with the country’s production reaching a record-high output of 41.5m tonnes last year.

With the rapid expansion of China’s aluminium and semiconductor industries, these ongoing high levels of fluorocarbon emissions could pose a particular threat to China’s carbon neutrality goal and global climate mitigation. The country is aiming to achieve “peak carbon” emission by 2030 and become “carbon neutral” by 2060.

The authors suggest that with technological innovation and incorporation of the aluminium industry into the carbon market, or a national carbon trading scheme allowing emitters to buy or sell emission credits, it is possible that these rising levels could be reduced.

While being a significant source of CO2 emissions, aluminium production is also essential in the energy transition from fossil fuels to cleaner renewable energy sources by helping produce many low-carbon technologies such as solar panels, electric vehicles and wind turbines.

Organisations such as the World Economic Forum argue that the aluminium industry must act now to find a balance between ensuring efficient production alongside mitigating the industry’s negative impacts on the climate.

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.

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 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 increasing 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 still further.

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.”

• Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Monday that Russia should be represented at a second peace summit in November, after a first summit convened by the Ukrainian president last month in Switzerland to which Moscow was not invited. Both sides have shunned direct peace talks since negotiations between Russian and Ukraine delegations fell through in the early weeks of Russia’s invasion in February 2022. But during a press conference in Kyiv after his visit to the US for a Nato defence alliance summit, Zelenskiy opened the door to direct talks with officials from Moscow. “I believe that Russian representatives should be at the second summit,” Zelensky said, describing preparations for a follow-up gathering of Ukraine’s allies.

• In the same news conference, Zelenskiy said Ukraine needs 25 Patriot air defence systems to fully defend its airspace, adding that he also wants western partners to send more F-16 warplanes than those already pledged. A six-month delay in military assistance from the US, the biggest single contributor to Ukraine, meant that Kyiv’s forces had “lost the initiative” on the frontline, Zelenskiy said.

• 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.

• US journalist and author Masha Gessen was convicted in absentia on Monday 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 Russian President Vladimir Putin and an award-winning writer.

• A Ukraine drone attack sparked a fire at a factory producing electrical devices and components in Russia’s Kursk region, the interim governor of the region bordering Ukraine said early Tuesday. “None of the workers were injured,” Alexei Smirnov, the governor, said on the Telegram messaging app.

• A Russian military court on Monday granted house arrest to a general and former commander in Moscow’s Ukraine offensive who has been charged with fraud. Major-General Ivan Popov was released from behind bars Monday after being arrested in May on suspicion of large-scale fraud, punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

• Ukraine said Monday that a military serviceman allegedly attempting to flee the country illegally had been shot dead by a border guard after being caught and detained. The State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) said four servicemen were apprehended while approaching the Moldovan border by foot in the southern Ukrainian region of Odesa on Sunday. “While trying to cross the border, border guards noticed them and detained them,” the SBI said. “One of the fugitives attacked the border guard while trying to escape. In response, he used his service weapon and shot the attacker.”

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.