Economy
EU pledges $232M in Greenland investments amid Trump pressure
EU chief Ursula von der Leyen unveiled plans on Monday for some 200 million euros ($232 million) in Greenland investments amid a push for closer ties with the Danish Arctic territory, which U.S. President Donald Trump had earlier insisted should belong to the United States.
Von der Leyen arrived in Greenland on Sunday for a two-day visit serving as a show of support for the governments of Greenland and Denmark, which have strongly rebuffed Trump’s campaign to acquire the world’s largest island.
The head of the 27-nation European Union’s executive body said the EU money would focus on sectors including critical minerals, satellite communications and renewable energy in Greenland, a semi-autonomous part of the Danish realm.
“The EU stands in full solidarity with the Kingdom of Denmark and the people of Greenland,” von der Leyen told a news conference.
“We will continue to do so.”
Von der Leyen’s visit reflects the increasing geopolitical importance of the Arctic to major powers, such as the U.S., Russia, China and Europe, as melting ice opens new shipping routes to make the region’s mineral wealth more accessible.
Trump’s push to acquire Greenland sparked crisis
The European Commission chief, who took a boat trip on Sunday in a fjord scattered with chunks of ice, had earlier posted on X how she was struck by Greenland’s stunning landscapes, but aware of the “visible scars of climate change.”
“As the ice melts, a new reality is taking shape,” she wrote.
U.S. President Trump sparked a crisis in U.S.-European ties and turmoil within the transatlantic NATO military alliance this year when he stepped up his demands for the U.S. to control Greenland, arguing that fellow NATO member Denmark could not defend it.
European officials stressed Greenland is part of NATO territory, meaning it is covered by the alliance’s mutual defense pact, and that the U.S. already has the right to increase its military presence there under a long-standing treaty.
Tensions lowered after Trump and NATO boss Mark Rutte agreed in Davos in January that the U.S., Denmark and Greenland would begin talks to resolve their differences and NATO would step up its role in Arctic security.
However, the trilateral talks have yet to yield an agreement and at a NATO summit in Türkiye in July, Trump restated his insistence that the U.S. should control Greenland.
‘Tectonic plates of geopolitics collide’
Von der Leyen said Greenland’s future was for the people of Greenland and Denmark to decide and no one else.
“The Arctic has become one of the places where the tectonic plates of geopolitics collide. We have a direct stake in what happens here,” she said, adding that her Commission would set out a new EU Arctic strategy in the coming months.
While Denmark is a member of the EU, Greenland left the bloc in 1985. But its people, as Danish citizens, are also citizens of the EU.
The EU has long provided funding to Greenland, mainly to pay for fishing rights and support its education system. The €200 million package represents not only a big increase in funding but a broadening of the sectors that will receive EU cash, according to EU officials.
The Commission has also proposed more than doubling EU funding for Greenland from 225 million euros in its current seven-year budget to 530 million euros for the period between 2028 and 2034.
The European Union said Monday it was “looking into” an incident revealed last week during which thousands of autonomous AI agents built by OpenAI defied their instructions and took over a German website.
The agents – AI programs that work on their own, without a person guiding each step – left about 18,000 messages on DSEwiki, a German-language site for programmers that anyone can edit, much like Wikipedia.
They used it to swap answers to test questions and to share tricks for slipping the digital fences meant to contain them, according to research released Friday.
The EU is “fully aware of the incident,” said the bloc’s digital spokesperson Thomas Regnier.
“We have indeed received an incident report,” he told reporters. “We’re looking into it, but we remain, in any case, in very close contact with the company.”
“We have seen many losses of control recently. We take this extremely seriously, and we’re monitoring the situation closely,” Regnier said.
Under the EU’s AI rules, providers must assess and mitigate the risks stemming from their systems, and since August, regulators have the power to impose fines for breaches.
The latest incident comes after OpenAI said in July that two of its models escaped their confined testing environment and gained access to the internet, where they found and attacked Hugging Face, a site that AI developers use to store and share code.
Canada confirmed Monday that retaliatory tariffs on U.S. imports will take effect early Tuesday, marking a fresh escalation in the deepening trade dispute between the neighboring countries.
Canada’s Finance Ministry confirmed the measures in response to an enquiry from dpa.
Tariffs of up to 50% will apply to U.S. imports worth C$27.6 billion ($20 billion), including steel and aluminium products, household appliances, agricultural equipment, pulp and paper products, and electronics.
The move follows the breakdown of trade talks between Washington and Ottawa.
In August, the United States imposed tariffs of up to 50% on around $20 billion worth of Canadian goods, including ice hockey sticks, furniture, honey and wine, prompting Canada to announce retaliatory measures.
Latvia’s government announced plans to impose a tariff of up to staggering 300% on grain arriving from Russia and Belarus, according to the country’s Prime Minister Andris Kulbergs on Monday.
Officials in Latvia and neighboring Lithuania last week said they considered ending shipments of Russian grain through their ports after Moscow stepped up the transits in response to attacks by Ukraine on its Baltic ports.
Russian exporters are moving grain via Latvia, an EU and NATO member, to other markets, analysts and traders have said.
A ban or high tariffs could cut off a key alternative at a time when Black Sea and Azov Sea routes have been paralyzed by Ukrainian drone strikes.
Russia exported 46.3 million metric tons of grain via ports in the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea in the last exporting season covering the period from July 2025 to June this year, which accounted for 90% of total Russian seaborne grain exports, industry data shows.
The U.S. embargo on Cuba resulted in a “record” loss of over $8 billion for the battered island between March last year and February this year, according to a government report presented Monday as the country is going through a severe economic crisis.
Cuba has been under a U.S. trade embargo since 1962, with President Donald Trump piling on pressure on top of the decades-old measure since early this year.
The damages set out in the report exceed last year’s peak by 7%, said Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez.
The figure “does not include the damage from the energy blockade” imposed by Washington in January “nor the damage from secondary sanctions” imposed on Cuban entities in May, the minister added.
“The blockade does not punish a government; it punishes the daily life of a people in all its aspects,” Rodriguez said.
Havana blames the crisis on an array of U.S.-imposed punitive measures, while Washington attributes the hardship to poor internal management.
Living conditions on the island are severe, with residents enduring regular rolling blackouts and chronic food and fuel shortages on a daily basis.
Rodriguez pointed to an increase in infant mortality, from four per 1,000 births in 2018 to 9.9 in 2025, as evidence of deteriorating standards.
He ruled out declaring a humanitarian crisis, however, and praised what he called Cuban solidarity in the face of difficulty.
The minister said Cuban authorities remain in contact with the U.S. State Department but ruled out any normalization of ties.
Cuba remains willing to continue engaging in dialogue “despite the lack of progress” and “lack of willingness” on the part of the U.S., he said.
Adidas Arabia, a regional branch of the German sportswear giant Adidas issued on Monday a written apology after an advertising campaign featuring a former Israeli soldier sparked an online backlash and renewed calls for a boycott of the brand.
The company featured Shalev Biton, who lost his left leg after being wounded while serving in the Israeli army in 2021, in a campaign promoting its Single Shoe service.
“We recognize that an image used in a recent local campaign has raised concerns and strong reactions,” Adidas Arabia said in a statement.
“It was never our intent in any way to cause offense, and we apologize to everyone affected by this,” it said, adding they were treating the reactions “with the utmost seriousness.”
Biton was one of 11 disabled athletes featured on posters displayed at Adidas stores in Israel.
Pro-Palestinian activists criticized the decision to include a former Israeli soldier in a campaign centered on amputees, contrasting the promotion with the thousands of Palestinians who have lost limbs during Israel’s war on Gaza.
According to estimates published in May by the World Health Organization (WHO), Gaza has recorded more than 5,000 traumatic limb amputations and over 22,000 major extremity injuries since October 2023. Up to a quarter of those with life-changing injuries were children.
Türkiye said on Monday it had signed a memorandum of understanding with Danish nuclear tech developer Copenhagen Atomics to explore the use of the country’s thorium resources in next-generation atomic technologies.
The agreement was signed by the Türkiye Energy, Nuclear and Mineral Research Agency (TENMAK), an affiliated institution of the Energy and Natural Resources Ministry.
The cooperation will focus on developing technologies that can use thorium, including the domestic production of thorium compounds, the ministry said in a statement.
Thorium is heavily researched as a cleaner, safer alternative to uranium in nuclear reactors. It is said to be roughly three to four times more abundant in the Earth’s crust than uranium.
The agreement also aims to bring Turkish industrial and technology companies, as well as researchers, into efforts to develop high-value nuclear technologies based on the country’s thorium resources.
One of the main areas of work will be research and development and project design for producing thorium in Türkiye in a form suitable for use in next-generation nuclear reactors, particularly molten salt reactors.
The parties aim to produce thorium compounds domestically that meet nuclear fuel standards and eventually establish Türkiye as an internationally competitive supplier in the field, the ministry said.
Copenhagen Atomics is conducting research and development on molten salt reactors, a fourth-generation reactor technology that can enable thorium to be used in the nuclear fuel cycle.
The Danish company is focused on a modular molten salt reactor concept called “Onion Core.” Under the agreement with TENMAK, it will assess the technology in terms of Türkiye’s research infrastructure, human resources and industrial capabilities.
Could eliminate dependence on foreign fuel
Türkiye seeks to expand nuclear generation alongside renewable energy as it pursues its net-zero emissions goals.
In addition to the four-reactor Akkuyu, its first nuclear plant under construction, the government plans to build large-scale power stations in Sinop on the Black Sea coast and in the Thrace region.
Türkiye targets 15 gigawatts (GW) of conventional nuclear capacity, while also aiming to install 5 GW of small modular reactor (SMR) capacity by 2050. Akkuyu will have a combined installed capacity of 4,800 MW.
Energy and Natural Resources Minister Alparslan Bayraktar said SMRs, alongside large-scale reactors, were developing rapidly as part of what he described as a new era for nuclear energy.
“Türkiye is also engaged in significant activities in this area, with many projects progressing in parallel,” Bayraktar said, adding that investors and public institutions were working together on several projects.
He said government incentives had generated significant interest in SMR technologies and that Türkiye was examining how different technologies could be brought into the country.
“Over the next few years, it will become clear which of these technologies can advance further and actually be commercialized,” Bayraktar said.
He said the TENMAK-Copenhagen Atomics agreement was distinctive because thorium was a prominent fuel option in the Danish company’s SMR technology.
“Thorium is very abundant in our country, and a technology based on it is therefore particularly important because we believe it could eliminate dependence on foreign fuel,” Bayraktar said.
Thorium-based fuel cycles are said to produce less long-lived radioactive waste, cannot suffer traditional meltdowns, and are harder to weaponize.
Bayraktar added that he hoped the cooperation would produce results and that the work could eventually lead to a commercial product.
“The fact that it involves a different fuel, particularly thorium, makes this cooperation important,” Bayraktar said.
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