Trump says US will ‘go as far as we have to’ to get control of Greenland
Win McNamee/Getty Images
(LONDON) — President Donald Trump said the U.S. will “go as far as we have to go” to get control of Greenland, ahead of a planned visit to the Arctic island by Vice President JD Vance that has prompted criticism from Greenland and Denmark.
Vance, second lady Usha Vance and Energy Secretary Chris Wright will lead the U.S. delegation to visit the Pituffik military space base in the northwest of the island, having scaled back plans for a broader and longer visit. The American group was originally planning to visit the Greenlandic capital, Nuuk, and a dog sled race.
Trump showed no indication of softening his ambition to take control of the island, which is an autonomous territory but part of the Kingdom of Denmark.
“We need Greenland for national security and international security,” Trump said, taking reporters’ questions in the Oval Office.
“So we’ll, I think, we’ll go as far as we have to go,” he continued. “We need Greenland. And the world needs us to have Greenland, including Denmark. Denmark has to have us have Greenland. And, you know, we’ll see what happens. But if we don’t have Greenland, we can’t have great international security.”
Trump added, “I view it from a security standpoint, we have to be there.”
Trump also said that he understood “JD might be going,” referring to the vice president, but did not offer any details about the trip. Vance is expected to travel to Greenland on Friday.
Greenland’s Prime Minister Mute Egede earlier this week called the upcoming visit by U.S. officials part of a “very aggressive American pressure against the Greenlandic community” and called for the international community to rebuke it. After the U.S. announced that the visit would be pared back to only include the Pituffik base, Danish Defense Minister Troels Lund Poulsen said the decision was “wise.”
Trump has repeatedly — in both his first and second terms — raised the prospect of the U.S. obtaining Greenland, whether through purchase or other means. During his March speech to a joint session of Congress, Trump said the U.S. would acquire the strategic territory “one way or the other.” Greenlandic Prime Minister Mute Bourup Egede dismissed Trump’s remarks. “Greenland belongs to the Greenlanders,” he wrote on social media.
“We are not Americans, we are not Danes because we are Greenlanders. This is what the Americans and their leaders need to understand, we cannot be bought and we cannot be ignored.”
ABC News’ Michelle Stoddart contributed to this report.
(NEW YORK) — Satellite images appear to show a new highway cutting through the rainforest in the Brazilian state set to host the 2025 United Nations Climate Change Conference.
The images, taken in by Copernicus satellites in October 2023 and October 2024, appear to show the construction of the Avenida Liberdade highway near the city of Belem, the capital of Para state, which is hosting COP30. The stretch of cleared path is surrounded by lush foliage on both sides.
The Avenida Liberdade highway is expected to measure at about 8.2 miles in length and offer two lanes of traffic in both directions, according to the Para regional government website. It will connect two existing road systems and function as a new entry and exit route for the Belém Metropolitan Region.
The work was about 20% complete as of November 2024, according to an update on the Brazilian government’s website.
Drone footage published by the BBC shows new cleared trees along an 8-mile stretch of what will become the new highway.
Brazil is looking to build highways elsewhere in the country to promote connectivity to rural and remote regions.
In northwest Brazil, officials are aiming to pave a 560-mile road connecting the Amazon-adjacent states of Amazonas and Roraima to the rest of the country. The highway, BR-319, is currently mostly dirt and is difficult for most vehicles to travel on, experts told ABC News last year.
Paving these roadways has social benefits for residents nearby, who have difficulties accessing hospitals, schools and goods, Rachael Garrett, a professor of conservation and development at the University of Cambridge, told ABC News in September.
But the construction of highways in the middle of the rainforest will likely lead to a “fishbone pattern” of deforestation extending from the roadway, Garrett said.
Environmental crimes, such as illegal logging and mining, would likely increase without proper governance in the region, as criminals would have easier access to remote areas, Nauê Azevedo, a litigation specialist for the Climate Observatory in Brazil, a network of 119 environmental, civil society and academic groups, told ABC News last year.
The Amazon rainforest is crucial to mitigating global climate change, as it can store up to 200 billion tons of carbon, according to the World Wildlife Fund. The Amazon is also vital to the global and regional water cycles, as it releases 20 billion tons of water in the atmosphere per day.
The Avenida Liberdade highway incorporates “environmental preservation measures” such as 24 wildlife crossings, cycle lanes and solar panel lights, officials said in the November 2024 update.
The purpose of the highway is to ease the traffic expected from COP30, which will involve about 50,000 delegates traveling to Belem, according to government officials. The city is situated on the Pará River, close to where the Amazon River meets the Atlantic Ocean, and serves as a key entry point for the Amazon rainforest due to its port facilities.
Andrew Tate (left) and his brother Tristan Tate are pictured inside The Court of Appeal in Bucharest, Romania, on December 10, 2024. (Photo by DANIEL MIHAILESCU/AFP v
(LONDON) — Controversial influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate have landed in Florida, after Romanian officials announced that court restrictions prohibiting them from leaving Romania while awaiting trial were lifted.
The pair were traveling aboard a private jet after being allowed to leave Romania, according to a source close to the brothers.
Their spokesperson shared a live feed of the plane arriving in Fort Lauderdale late Thursday morning.
The charges against the Tates remain in force, and they will be expected to return to Romania for court appearances, according to a statement from Romania’s Directorate for Investigating Organized Crime and Terrorism, or DIICOT.
The brothers had been confined to Romania since late 2022 when they were arrested on allegations of human trafficking, sexual abuse, money laundering and forming an organized criminal group.
They were charged in 2023 and have denied the allegations.
The Tates’ departure follows reports that Trump administration officials had lobbied Romania to lift a travel ban on them while they are awaiting trial.
A lawyer for an American woman who is one of the key alleged victims in the Romanian criminal case against Andrew Tate condemned the Trump administration after he was allowed to leave Romania.
“It seems clear the U.S. intervened in Romania to assist the Tate brothers who are being prosecuted for sex trafficking over 35 women including minors,” Dani Pinter, senior vice president at the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, said in a statement. “This is a slap in the face to all the victims of the Tate brothers especially the U.S. victim who is not being protected by her country.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said his office had no involvement in the case and found out through the media that the brothers were traveling to Florida.
“But the reality is, no, Florida is not a place where you’re welcome with that type of conduct in the air,” he said when asked by a reporter at an unrelated press conference on Thursday if Andrew Tate is welcome in Florida.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
North Korean defector Ryu Seong-hyeon in Seoul, South Korea. (ABC News)
(SEOUL) — A former sergeant in the North Korean military says that few of Pyongyang’s soldiers have been captured fighting against Ukraine because they’re told their families will be executed if they are caught alive.
“Most soldiers will kill themselves before they’re killed by the enemy, it’s the biggest shame to be captured,” the former soldier, Ryu Seong-hyeon, told ABC News.
Ryu defected to South Korea in 2019, running across a minefield in the demilitarized zone that separates the two Koreas.
Pyongyang has deployed more than 12,000 soldiers to Russia to fight in the Ukraine war, according to US estimates, with experts claiming Russian forces have also used North Korean weapons.
An estimated 300 North Korean soldiers have died in the fighting, and over 2,700 have been wounded, Seoul’s National Intelligence Service told lawmakers in a closed briefing last week.
Pyongyang has deployed more than 12,000 soldiers to Russia to fight in the Ukraine war, according to US estimates, with experts claiming Russian forces have also used North Korean weapons.
An estimated 300 North Korean soldiers have died in the fighting, and over 2,700 have been wounded, Seoul’s National Intelligence Service told lawmakers in a closed briefing last week.
South Korea’s spy agency told journalists Thursday that an unknown number of additional North Korean soldiers have been sent to the frontlines in Russia’s western Kursk region since early February, after a near month-long lull in fighting against Ukrainian troops, who launched a surprise offensive across the border last August.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced in January that his forces had captured two North Korean soldiers, marking the first time that Ukraine had captured Pyongyang’s troops alive.
In a nearly 3-minute video released by Ukraine following the capture of the two North Korean troops, one of the soldiers says he wants to remain in Ukraine when asked if he wishes to return home. The Korean translator asks, “Did you know you were fighting in a war against Ukraine?” The soldier shakes his head.
South Korean intelligence assessed that the two soldiers were with the Reconnaissance General Bureau, a key North Korean military intelligence agency.
“If the soldiers are captured and tell information to the enemy, their families will be punished, go to a political prison camp, or worse, they will be executed in front of the people,” said another North Korean defector, Pak Yusung.
‘They just die like a dog’
Pyongyang’s soldiers have struggled to adapt to the modern battlefield, the North Korean defectors suggested, as videos released by the Ukrainian military appear to show North Korean soldiers being chased down by attack drones.
Ryu and Pak defected long before the fighting that’s underway in Russia, but they said that, in their experience, most of the soldiers would not have seen a drone in their life.
“Before they go they don’t have any practice in how to defend against a drone or how to fight Ukrainians, that’s why they just die like a dog,” Ryu said. “They don’t have the skill, the language or the information.”
Pak and Ryu’s analysis lines up with information released by South Korean intelligence, which said North Korea has clearly instructed the soldiers to kill themselves to avoid being captured alive.
Seoul’s spy agency also said it attributes the “massive casualties” of North Korean soldiers to their “lack of understanding of modern warfare,” including their “useless” act of shooting at long-range drones, based on the agency’s analysis of a recent combat video.
Ryu, who was about 110 lbs. at the time of his defection, said if he were still a North Korean soldier, he would also want to go: “If I went to Ukraine, I could eat food, and I could see another country.” He said there are also big financial incentives, and the soldiers would have no idea that their chances of dying were so high.
Selling lies
Ryu and Pak said North Korean soldiers were being sold a lie. “From a young age they’re told to hate the American ‘wolves’, and now they are told they are finally killing Americans,” the defectors said.
Ryu said in his experience with the Korean air force, about 50% of the pilots were only trained in theory, and did not have experience flying a fighter jet.
Pak, who is a researcher at the North Korea Institute, said Kim would be receiving critical technology in exchange for the manpower, in what should be a deeply worrying sign for the world, Kim also gets more real combat experience in case of a war on the peninsula.
“If Russia wins the war, it will empower the dictator alliance,” Pak said.
“This is just the start. If the Ukraine war keeps going, Kim will keep sending soldiers. Inside North Korea more people will start knowing and that could be a threat to Kim.”
When asked what they could possibly do about it when living in a dictatorship controlled by fear, Pak said, “Think about it: your sons died on the battlefield and not for your own country.”
Ryu added, “You cannot send so many people to the labor camps.”
Pak and his team of four North Korean defectors, Voices of North Korean Youth, have been trying to push the international community to condemn Russia and North Korea with one voice, and also called for the International Criminal Court to hold Kim Jong Un accountable.
