US fighter jet appears to have been shot down by Iran, search and rescue underway, US officials say

(LONDON) — U.S. officials are expected to meet with Danish and Greenlandic counterparts in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, amid President Donald Trump’s continued expressions of intent to acquire the semi-autonomous Arctic territory despite collective opposition in both Copenhagen and Nuuk.

Danish Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen and Greenlandic Foreign Minister Vivian Motzfeldt are set to lead the delegation to meet with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance. Greenland is a self-governing territory within the Kingdom of Denmark.

In Denmark, “this is the big national news,” Jonas Parello-Plesner, a Danish political analyst and former diplomat, told ABC News. “If in the first Trump period the saying was, ‘You should take him seriously, but not literally,’ I think the saying this time around is, ‘You should both take him seriously and literally.'”

Trump first raised the prospect of acquiring the territory during his first term, when Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen dismissed the idea as “absurd.” Trump’s second term has seen the president speak more aggressively about the proposal.

“Even from a year ago, I see a quite stark difference in both Greenlandic and Danish attitudes that this is actually potentially really serious and life changing for the Kingdom of Denmark,” said Parello-Plesner, who is now the executive director at the Copenhagen-based nonprofit Alliance of Democracies Foundation.

Mikkel Runge Olesen, a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies, told ABC News that the furor is prompting deeper questions among Danes and Greenlanders about their long-standing ties to the U.S.

“Is this who the U.S. is now? A superpower going around, invading its small democratic allies?” he asked. “That’s scary to think of.”

“Just think of what it will do for the American alliance system worldwide,” he added. “What kind of signal it sends — if you’re allied with the U.S., you may be invaded whenever it suits the U.S.”

‘You need ownership’
Trump has repeatedly suggested that U.S. sovereignty over the world’s largest island is necessary to ensure American security and blunt Chinese and Russian influence in the Arctic region.

As a part of the Kingdom of Denmark, Greenland is covered by NATO’s collective defense clause. Greenland hosts the U.S. Pituffik Space Base and around 150 American troops, the U.S. having significantly downgraded its footprint from its high point during the Cold War.

A 1951 defense agreement grants the U.S. military access to Greenland, and Danish politicians have repeatedly expressed willingness to work with Washington to expand the American and NATO presence there.

Danish officials have also sought to head off concerns about the supposed vulnerability of the Arctic. Last year, Copenhagen announced a $6.5 billion Arctic defense package in response to U.S. criticism that it had failed to adequately protect Greenland.

But Trump and his administration appear undeterred. “One way or the other, we’re going to have Greenland,” the president told reporters aboard Air Force One this weekend.

“If we don’t take Greenland, Russia or China will and I’m not letting that happen,” Trump said, before deriding Denmark’s military strength on the island.

“Basically, their defense is two dog sleds,” Trump said. “In the meantime, you have Russian destroyers and submarines and China destroyers and submarines all over the place.”

Asked if there was a deal to be done to avoid further tensions, Trump said he would “love to” because “it would be easier.”

But when pressed, the president said, “I could put a lot of soldiers there right now if I want. But you need more than that. You need ownership.”

Ahead of this week’s meeting, Danish and Greenlandic politicians issued statements again rebuffing any suggestion of a U.S. acquisition of the island, statements which were backed by other European leaders.

“If the United States decides to attack another NATO country, then everything would stop — that includes NATO and therefore post-World War II security,” Frederiksen said in a statement.

“Greenland is part of the Kingdom of Denmark. Greenland is a member of NATO through the Commonwealth and therefore the defense of Greenland is through NATO,” the government in Nuuk said in a statement.

On Wednesday, Greenlandic Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen posted a photo to social media showing a message sent to him by Frederiksen.

“Greenland will not be owned by the United States,” the message — written in Greenlandic — said. “Greenland does not want to be ruled by the United States. Greenland does not want to be a part of the United States. We want Greenland to continue to function as part of the Kingdom.”

The leaders of all five political parties holding seats in Greenland’s parliament also released a joint statement. “We do not want to be Americans, we do not want to be Danes, we want to be Greenlanders,” they said.

Before heading to the U.S. on Tuesday, Rasmussen — the Danish foreign minister — told reporters in Copenhagen, “Our reason for seeking the meeting we have now been given was to move this whole discussion, which has not become less tense since we last met, into a meeting room where we can look each other in the eye and talk about these things.”

Appealing to ‘the deal-maker’
Olesen, of the Danish Institute for International Studies, said Trump’s most recent comments “should worry Danish politicians.” His apparent dismissal of Copenhagen’s efforts to bolster its Arctic readiness “means that either he hasn’t noticed” or “he doesn’t care. And either way, it’s pretty bad.”

Trump told The New York Times he believed U.S. ownership of Greenland “is what I feel is psychologically necessary for success.” That, too, is “problematic” for Copenhagen, Olesen said. “How do you deal with that?” he asked.

“That’s the conundrum for the Danish and the Greenlandic politicians,” Olesen said, “trying not to provoke Trump too much and trying to give him something.”

“It will be difficult to offer a compromise if all he wants is ownership,” he added.

Parello-Plesner, the former Danish diplomat, said the experiences of other nations during Trump’s second term may offer models.

Trump’s focus on Panama and perceived Chinese overreach produced a proposed deal for a U.S. firm to take control of two ports there owned by a Hong Kong conglomerate. The president described the deal as “reclaiming the Panama Canal.”

José Raúl Mulino, the president of Panama, addressed Trump’s comments about the Panama Canal in a post on X last March, saying in part: “President Trump is lying again. The Panama Canal is not in the process of being recovered, and this was certainly not a topic of discussion in our conversations with Secretary Rubio or anyone else. On behalf of Panama and all Panamanians, I reject this new affront to the truth and to our dignity as a nation.”

In Ukraine, Kyiv alleviated U.S. pressure by agreeing to a rare earth minerals sharing deal as part of the U.S.-Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund.

“There’s also a very pragmatic side to Trump — the deal maker,” Parello-Plesner said. “I think our side needs to give him something to work with,” he added.

That could mean fresh commitments on American military deployments in Greenland, a deal related to the territory’s untapped mineral wealth or a pledge to do more to block autocratic states from asserting their Arctic ambitions, Parello-Plesner said.

It is unclear what might appeal to the U.S. side, he continued. “We’ve seen for 30 years that the U.S. has just wanted to cut down on the presence up there and only uses it for limited missile defense purposes,” he said.

Regarding Greenland’s believed mineral wealth, Parello-Plesner said the U.S. government and private companies have been largely uninterested given the territory’s inhospitable weather and terrain, extraction challenges and global market forces.

A symbolic win might be enough to take the heat out of Trump’s push, Olesen said.

“It’s going to be interesting to see how far Danish and Greenlandic politicians feel they can go in order to avoid being humiliated, in order to avoid handing over the Greenlandic underground to a bully,” Olesen continued.

“But then again, the stakes are so high, so I wouldn’t rule it out, and I wouldn’t rule out that if this is something that could solve the crisis.”

In the meantime, both analysts said Copenhagen and Nuuk are likely to focus on bolstering the image of domestic unity, European solidarity, backing from the U.S. Congress and NATO-led Arctic security.

“The Trump policy line is not invulnerable,” Olesen said, noting pushback from U.S. voters and members of Congress — including prominent Republicans.

“At some point, Trump may decide that it’s not worth the bother anymore, and in that case, it would probably be wise to offer him some way to save face and get out of it,” he said.

But months of back and forth over Greenland have already done significant damage to transatlantic sentiment in Denmark, Parello-Plesner said, in a country he said has long prided itself on broad support for NATO and for close relations with the U.S. Danish forces, for example, sustained a comparable per capita casualty rate as the U.S. in the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.

That strength of feeling, he said, “has dropped tremendously.”

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(NEW YORK) — The world has entered an era of global “water bankruptcy,” as irreversible damage experienced by water systems has pushed many basins around the world beyond recovery, recent research has shown.

Some of the worst impacts include chronic groundwater depletion, overallocation of water, deforestation, pollution and degradation to land and soil, according to a report released Tuesday by the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH).

As a result, many regions around the world are experiencing a “post-crisis condition,” which entails irreversible losses of natural water capital and an inability to bounce back to historic baselines, the researchers said.

The Middle East and North Africa are among the water bankruptcy “hot spots” due to high water stress, climate vulnerability, low agricultural productivity, energy-intensive desalination, sand and dust storms and complex political economies, according to the report.

South Asia is also among the regions of concern due to groundwater-dependent agriculture and urbanization, which have produced chronic declines in water tables and local subsidence, the report noted.

In the U.S., the Southwest has also been labeled a hot spot due to the dwindling of the Colorado River and its reservoirs, which “have become symbols of over-promised water,” according to the U.N.

Of the world’s large lakes, 50% have lost water since the early 1990s, according to the report. A quarter of humanity directly depends on those lakes, the researchers said.

In addition, 50% of global domestic water is now derived from groundwater, and 40% of irrigation water is drawn from aquifers being steadily drained. Of the world’s major aquifers, 70% are showing long-term decline.

Global glacier mass has declined 30% since 1970, with entire low- and mid-latitude mountain ranges expected to lose functional glaciers within decades, according to the report.

An “overwhelming majority” of the statistics listed were caused by humans, the researchers said.

As a result, 2 billion people worldwide live on sinking ground and 4 billion people face severe water scarcity at least one month every year, according to the report.

Between 2022 and 2023, 1.8 million people were living under drought conditions.

“This report tells an uncomfortable truth: many regions are living beyond their hydrological means, and many critical water systems are already bankrupt,” Kaveh Madani, director of the UNU-INWEH and lead author of the report, said in a statement.

The researchers defined “water bankruptcy” as persistent over-withdrawal from surface and groundwater, relative to renewable inflows and safe levels of depletion, and the resulting of irreversible or prohibitively costly loss of water-related natural capital.

The impacts are so detrimental that terms like “water stressed,” which reflects high pressure that remains reversible, and “water crisis,” which describes acute shocks that can be overcome, do not adequately represent the scope of the damage to the world’s water systems, according to the report.

The authors stressed that water bankruptcy is not a series of isolated local crises, but rather a shared global risk, especially since agriculture accounts for the vast majority of freshwater use and food systems are tightly interconnected through trade and prices.

“When water scarcity undermines farming in one region, the effects ripple through global markets, political stability, and food security elsewhere,” Madani said.

The report, released ahead of the 2026 U.N. Water Conference in Dakar, Senegal, on Jan. 26, calls for a fundamental reset of the global water agenda to help ease the impacts. The authors called for water to be recognized as both a constraint and an opportunity for meeting climate, biodiversity and land commitments.

Managing water bankruptcy will require governments to focus on preventing further irreversible damage, such as wetland loss, destructive groundwater depletion and uncontrolled pollution, the report noted. It also called for transforming water-intensive sectors, such as agriculture and industry, through crop shifts, irrigation reforms and more efficient urban systems.

The peer-reviewed paper will be published in the journal of Water Resources Management.

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(LONDON) — More than 2,500 people have died during nationwide protests in Iran over the past 17 days, activists said Wednesday, as U.S. President Donald Trump expressed his support for demonstrators and hinted at potential American intervention against the government in Tehran.

The Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) said it had verified a total of 2,571 deaths — and is reviewing reports of 779 other deaths — since the protests began on Dec. 28.

The confirmed deaths include 2,403 adult protesters, 12 protesters under the age of 18, 147 government-affiliated personnel and nine non-protesting civilians, HRANA said.

Another 1,134 protesters have been seriously injured, HRANA said, with at least 18,137 people arrested.

The HRANA data relies on the work of activists inside and outside the country. ABC News cannot independently verify these numbers. The Iranian government has not provided any civilian death tolls related to the ongoing protests.

As casualties mounted, Trump wrote on social media on Tuesday, “Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING — TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!! Save the names of the killers and abusers. They will pay a big price.”

“I have cancelled all meetings with Iranian Officials until the senseless killing of protesters STOPS. HELP IS ON ITS WAY,” Trump added.

When later pressed by a reporter during a visit to Michigan on Tuesday on what he meant by help is on its way, Trump responded, “You’re gonna have to figure that one out, I’m sorry.”

Trump said he thought it was “a good idea” for Americans to evacuate from Iran. The State Department on Tuesday said that all U.S. citizens should leave the country.

Trump said he hasn’t been given an accurate number of how many people have been killed so far in the protests, but said “one is a lot.”

“I think it’s a lot. It’s too many, whatever it is,” he said.

Later Tuesday, he told reporters that he will be receiving “accurate numbers” on how many protesters have been killed in Iran soon and “we’ll act accordingly.”

Trump on Monday announced a 25% tariff on any country doing business with Iran. The president and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt suggested other options are also still under discussion.

One U.S. official told ABC News that among the options under consideration are new sanctions against key regime figures or against Iran’s energy or banking sectors.

Members of Trump’s national security team — including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and CIA Director John Ratcliffe — met Tuesday morning to discuss Iran, according to Leavitt. Trump did not attend the meeting, nor was he scheduled to, she said. 

Vice President JD Vance also led an Iran strategy meeting on Tuesday afternoon with the National Security Council principals committee, a source with direct knowledge of the meeting confirmed to ABC News.

Iranian officials have threatened retaliatory strikes against U.S. and Israeli targets in the event of any outside intervention.

Protests have been spreading across the country since late December. The first marches took place in downtown Tehran, with participants demonstrating against rising inflation and the falling value of the national currency, the rial.

As the protests spread, they have taken on a more explicitly anti-government tone.

Government forces have responded with a major security crackdown. A sustained national internet outage has also been in place across the country. Online monitoring group NetBlocks said on Wednesday that the blackout had surpassed 132 hours.

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and top Iranian officials have said they are willing to engage with the economic grievances of protesters, though have framed the unrest as driven by “rioters” and “terrorists” sponsored by foreign nations — prime among them the U.S. and Israel — and supported by foreign infiltrators.

The head of Iran’s judiciary, Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei, suggested Wednesday that there would be expedited trials and executions for those who have been arrested in the nationwide protests.

“If we want to do a job, we should do it now. If we want to do something, we have to do it quickly,” Mohseni-Ejei said in a video shared online by Iranian state television, according to The Associated Press.

“If it becomes late, two months, three months later, it doesn’t have the same effect,” Mohseni-Ejei said.

On Wednesday, President Masoud Pezeshkian was quoted by state media telling a meeting with Economy Ministry officials that if economic conditions were improved, “we wouldn’t be witnessing their protests on the streets.”

Dissident figures abroad have urged Iranians to press the protests and topple the government in Tehran.

Iran’s exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi — who from his base in the U.S. has become a prominent critic of the Iranian government — on Monday appealed to Trump to act in support of the protesters.

On Tuesday, Pahlavi called on members of the Iranian military to join the protests. “You are the national military of Iran, not the military of the Islamic Republic,” he wrote on X.

“You have a duty to protect the lives of your compatriots,” Pahlavi added. “You do not have much time. Join them as soon as possible.”

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