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US set to send airborne troops to Middle East as Trump claims talks with Iran taking place

The US is poised to deploy airborne troops to the Middle East as strikes intensified across the region on Tuesday and Donald Trump claimed the US was in “very good” talks with Iran to end the war. Early on Wednesday, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said it had launched a new wave of attacks against locations in Israel including Tel Aviv and Kiryat Shmona, as well as US bases in Kuwait, Jordan and Bahrain. Drones hit a fuel tank and sparked a fire at Kuwait international airport, the Gulf state’s civil aviation authority said. In Lebanon, state media reported Israeli strikes had killed at least six people in a town and a Palestinian refugee camp in the southern Sidon area, and three more in another town. An Iranian military spokesperson mocked the 15-point framework plan for peace that Trump has claimed is being discussed, saying on Wednesday that the Americans were negotiating only with themselves. There has been much speculation as to what Trump’s latest claimed plan contains, and how much of it has been updated from the now outdated document the US presented to the Iranians in May last year. Lt Col Ebrahim Zolfaghari, a spokesperson for the Iranian military’s Khatam Al-Anbiya central headquarters, said on state media: “Have your internal conflicts reached the point where you are negotiating with yourselves? “Our first and last word has been the same from day one, and it will stay that way: Someone like us will never come to terms with someone like you,” he said. On Tuesday, Iranian barrages targeted Israel, Gulf Arab states and northern Iraq, while Israeli and US warplanes continued to carry out strikes across Tehran and on other targets in the Islamic Republic. Israel indicated that it planned to occupy control over swaths of southern Lebanon in what one Hezbollah official told Reuters was an “existential threat” to the Lebanese state. The US on Tuesday appeared poised to send a combat team to the Middle East comprising up to 3,000 troops from the Army’s elite 82nd Airborne Division, which can deploy anywhere in the world in under 24 hours, according to the Wall Street Journal. The paratroopers would join thousands of US marines already heading for the Gulf, where Trump could order them to wrest control of the strait of Hormuz or storm or blockade Iran’s oil hub on Kharg Island. The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said the war would continue “unabated” even as she said Trump was exploring the “possibility” of diplomacy. Speaking in the Oval Office on Tuesday, Trump did not give specific details of the supposed talks with Iran but said “they’re going to make a deal”. Tehran had offered the US a “very specific prize” related to the flow of oil and gas through the strait of Hormuz, he said. It had given Washington a “very big present worth a significant amount of money” that proved “we’re dealing with the right people”. Trump also claimed Iran “agreed they will never have a nuclear weapon”. He told reporters: “It all starts with they cannot have a nuclear weapon … I don’t want to say in advance, but they’ve agreed they will never have a nuclear weapon. They’ve agreed to that.” He said the US vice-president, JD Vance, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and his envoy Jared Kushner were involved in the ongoing talks. However, he said that his defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, was “quite disappointed” by the prospect of the US negotiating a ceasefire with Iran. “Pete didn’t want it to be settled,” he said, adding that Hegseth and Gen Dan Caine, the chair of the joint chiefs of staff, were the “only two people that were quite disappointed”. “They were not interested in settlement,” he said. “They were interested in just winning this thing.” While the human and economic toll from the joint US-Israeli invasion mounts and the conflict enters its fourth week, the White House’s claims of last-ditch negotiations to end the war have not been confirmed by intermediaries or the Iranian government. Iran’s UN ambassador said that at least 1,348 civilians had been killed in the country since the start of the war. Official sources in Tehran have denied that any talks are under way. Tehran distrusts any US offer of negotiations in part because it was in talks with the US before the surprise attack that started the war and killed the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and dozens of senior officials. Iran was also in talks last year when the US and Israel attacked its nuclear facilities, starting a 12-day war. “We must think wisely,” Esmail Kowsari, a member of the Iranian parliament’s national security and foreign policy committee, was quoted as saying by the semi-official Fars news agency. “Their nature is to sow discord so that they can make people distrust officials and believe that such actions have taken place, whereas no such action has occurred.” However, potential intermediaries including Pakistan, Oman, Egypt and others have confirmed tentative efforts to establish channels of communication between Washington and Tehran. Analysts point out that there are deep divisions among surviving senior officials in Tehran, which could explain some of the defiant Iranian reaction. Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, has been talking about the war in recent days with his counterparts in Azerbaijan, Egypt, Oman, Pakistan, Russia, South Korea, Turkey and Turkmenistan, his office said. In Islamabad, officials raised the prospect of a meeting between Iranian officials and Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy, Kushner and JD Vance. A European official told Reuters that while there had been no direct negotiations between the two nations, Egypt, Pakistan and Gulf states were relaying messages. Trump reposted an offer from the Pakistani prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, to host US-Iran talks in Islamabad on his Truth Social platform. The activity came after the US and Iran traded threats over the weekend of strikes that could have cut electricity to millions in Iran and around the Gulf and knocked out desalination plants that provide many desert nations with drinking water. On Monday, Trump delayed a deadline for Iran to open the strait of Hormuz for shipping or see its power stations targeted by airstrikes, briefly driving down oil prices and boosting stocks. The deadline will now expire on Friday. The New York Times reported on Tuesday that the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin-Salman, had been quietly lobbying Trump to push for regime change in Iran by destroying the country’s hardline government. Publicly, Saudi Arabia had been more restrained, decrying Iranian missile and drone launches but initially opposing the joint US-Israeli strikes. Iranian media reported, meanwhile, that Israeli-US strikes targeted two gas facilities and a pipeline, hours after Trump stepped back from his threat to attack power infrastructure. The facilities in central Iran were “partially damaged”, said the Fars news agency, which did not provide a source and was Iran’s only news outlet to report the incident. It said an attack also targeted the gas pipeline of the Khorramshahr power plant, in the country’s south-west. Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel would continue to strike Iran and Lebanon, where its offensive targets Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Islamist militant movement, even as the US considers a ceasefire. “There’s more to come,” the Israeli prime minister said. Iran fired several waves of missiles at Israel early on Tuesday, and there were reports of an impact in the country’s north. In Tel Aviv, a missile with a 100kg (220lb) warhead escaped Israeli defences to slam into a street in the centre of the city, blowing out windows of a neighbouring apartment building and sending smoke billowing. Earlier in the day, Israel pounded Beirut’s southern suburbs, saying it was targeting infrastructure used by Hezbollah. A strike on a residential apartment south-east of the Lebanese capital killed at least two people, according to the Lebanese health ministry. In Kuwait, power lines were hit from air defence shrapnel, causing electricity outages. Missile alert sirens sounded in Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia’s defence ministry said it had destroyed 19 Iranian drones targeting its oil-rich Eastern province.

No Israel prosecutions for killing Palestinian civilians in occupied West Bank since start of decade

Israel has not prosecuted its citizens for killing Palestinian civilians in the occupied West Bank since the start of this decade, , a Guardian analysis of legal data and public records show, creating impunity for a campaign of violence. Attacks have spurred former prime minister Ehud Olmert to call for an intervention by the international criminal court (ICC), to “save the Palestinians and us [Israelis]” from state-backed settler violence, carried out with the complicity and sometimes participation of the police and military. “I have decided not only to not remain silent, but to draw the attention of the ICC in The Hague so that it may take enforcement measures and issue arrest warrants,’” Olmert said in written comments to the Guardian. The former Israeli security commanders demanded urgent action to stop “almost daily” attacks on Palestinians. In a public letter to the country’s current military chief they warned that failure to tackle “Jewish terrorism” poses an existential threat. This month Israeli settlers and police have killed 10 Palestinian civilians in the occupied West Bank, including brothers aged five and seven and their parents who were all shot in the head as the family returned from a Ramadan shopping trip. “We are no longer talking about a handful of lawbreaking hooligans. This is organised activity, which sometimes includes those wearing uniforms, who shoot at innocent people and burn the property and homes of civilians,” the letter said. Signatories to the letter, which has not been previously reported, included two former heads of Israel’s military – one of whom also served as defence minister – five chiefs of the Mossad and Shin Bet intelligence agencies and four former police commissioners. Their call to enforce the law ascribed past military success to the “moral strength” of the Israeli armed forces and said it was vital for future victories. “Without it, we have no right to exist,” they said. Since 2020 Israeli soldiers and settlers have killed at least 1,100 Palestinian civilians in the occupied West Bank, at least a quarter of whom were children, UN data shows. No one has been charged over any of these deaths. The last deadly attack by Israeli security forces in the occupied West Bank that led to an indictment was in 2019, public records and data from legal rights group Yesh Din shows. The last killing by an Israeli civilian that led to an indictment was in 2018. An Israeli court ruled this week that the defendant threw a rock that hit Aisha Rabi. Israeli security forces are responsible for the majority of Palestinians killed in the occupied West Bank, but violence by Israeli civilians intensified after the 7 October 2023 Hamas-led attacks, as Israel waged a war in Gaza which a UN commission, rights groups and genocide scholars say is genocide. Murders, arson, theft and other crimes by Israeli settlers, including incidents caught on camera and alleged sexual assault, have gone almost entirely unpunished. Between 2020 and 2025, over 96% of police investigations into settler violence in the occupied West Bank concluded without an indictment, Yesh Din said. Out of 368 cases only eight, or 2% of the total, ended with full or partial convictions. Olmert called for international prosecutions of violent settlers who are “assisted, supported and inspired by government circles” as they wage a campaign of ethnic cleansing. Pogroms in Palestinian villages are reminiscent of those “once directed against Jews in Europe”, he said. “If law enforcement authorities in Israel do not fulfil their duty, perhaps international legal authorities will do what is necessary to save the Palestinians and us from the criminal acts being committed by Jewish terrorists right in front of all our eyes.”. The Israeli settler population in the occupied West Bank has increased steadily for several decades, including when Olmert and the security elite now speaking out about violence held positions of command or political power. “Palestinians might welcome this Israeli criticism, but they have not forgotten that many of these former officials facilitated the expansion of the settlement enterprise, and with it settler and military violence,” said Amjad Iraqi, senior Israel/Palestine analyst at the International Crisis Group. “Such Israeli critics often give the impression that settler violence could be tamed by simply ousting the (current) far right government. That would certainly have an effect, but it doesn’t recognise that the settlements are a project of the state that was shaped and led across the political spectrum.” Many Israelis also seek to draw a distinction between settler attacks and use of force by the Israeli police and army. Olmert called for ICC intervention only over civilian violence, although he said there were “too many” incidents where Israelis in uniform killed Palestinian civilians. From 2020 to 2024, the most recent year for which data is available, Israeli security forces were less likely than settlers to face charges for harming Palestinians. Palestinians submitted 1,746 complaints about harm caused by Israeli soldiers in the occupied West Bank in that period, including over 600 about killings, Yesh Din said. Less than 1% ended in indictments. “The Israeli law-enforcement systems, both civil and military, function less as mechanisms for justice and more as shields for perpetrators,” said Yesh Din director Ziv Stahl. “They repeatedly produce stalled investigations and closed cases, effectively prioritising immunity over the rule of law.” For years, Israel’s legal establishment considered the cases that reached court a key defence for Israel in international tribunals. When a robust national legal system prosecutes crimes, international courts are less likely to have jurisdiction. “The system is programmed to manufacture impunity, not accountability. ” said Michael Sfard, a Israeli human rights lawyer. “But it was smart enough to also have very rare occasions of accountability, that could be referred to as examples of how law enforcement was working.” In recent years, however, judges and prosecutors faced intense pressure over false accusations that these cases were part of a system stacked against Israeli defendants, and prosecution of violence against Palestinians has largely stopped. “It is too costly [for the Israeli judicial system],” Sfard said. “We’re not paying a price internationally for the impunity. And they are paying a price internally for this performance of accountability, which is anyway a lie.” In February two former justice ministers from prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party signed a letter accusing the current Israeli government of allowing the “active and horrific ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. “The ultimate legal and moral responsibility for stopping this campaign of terror lies with the Israeli government. It is not doing so,” said the letter, which has also not been previously reported in the international press. It was signed by more than 20 prominent legal figures, including Dan Meridor and Meir Sheetrit, who both served as justice minister for Likud. “Anyone who lends a hand to these [settler attacks], by deed or omission, bears responsibility, including soldiers and especially commanders in the regular and reserve forces. Orders to carry out or allow these attacks are clearly illegal.” Israel’s military chief, Eyal Zamir, last week also demanded action against settler violence, calling on “all authorities in the country to act against this phenomenon and stop it before it is too late”. Israel’s military have sovereignty over occupied territory. Beyond the occupied West Bank, there have been two indictments of Israeli security forces for killing Palestinian civilians since 2020. An Israeli border police officer who shot an autistic man in East Jerusalem in 2021 was acquitted of charges of “reckless killing” two years later. In 2023 a lieutenant was charged over the 2021 death of farmer Hasan Sami Al-Borno, who was killed by Israeli tank fire in Gaza. He has not stood trial. The Israeli police did not respond to requests for comments on failure to investigate or prevent settler violence. Quique Kierszenbaum contributed reporting

Middle East crisis live: Iran launches strikes on US bases in Gulf; oil prices drop after Trump ‘peace plan’ report

An Iranian military spokesperson mocked US attempts at a ceasefire deal on Wednesday, insisting Americans were only negotiating with themselves, Associated Press reported. In a prerecorded video aired on state television Lt. Col. Ebrahim Zolfaghari said the US’s strategic power had turned into “strategic failure”. The one claiming to be a global superpower would have already gotten out of this mess if it could. Don’t dress up your defeat as an agreement. Your era of empty promises has come to an end. Have your internal conflicts reached the point where you are negotiating with yourselves? Zolfaghari’s statement came shortly after the Trump administration sent a 15-point ceasefire plan to Iran through Pakistan. “Our first and last word has been the same from day one, and it will stay that way: Someone like us will never come to terms with someone like you,” Zolfaghari said. “Not now, not ever.”

Fire at Kuwait airport after drone attack – as it happened

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Ukraine war briefing: Moldova declares emergency after Russian attack cuts key power line

Moldova declared a state of emergency in the energy sector after a key power line with Europe was disconnected following Russian strikes in Ukraine. The declaration comes into effect on Wednesday and lasts for 60 days. Prime minister Alexandru Munteanu appealed to people to “avoid unnecessary consumption, especially during peak hours” and “stay united”, according to a statement from parliament. The former Soviet republic imports electricity from neighbouring European Union member Romania, mostly via a power cable that passes through southern Ukraine. Moldovan authorities said crashed drones had been identified in Ukraine near the line and that “demining operations” were needed before repairs could be done. Restoring the power line itself is expected to take up to seven days, energy minister Dorin Junghietu was quoted by Moldovan media outlet Ziarul de Garda as saying. “Russia alone bears responsibility,” Moldovan president Maia Sandu wrote on X, while the foreign ministry also condemned the Russian attacks. Russia has frequently targeted Ukraine’s energy infrastructure since it invaded its neighbour in 2022. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has accused Russia of “absolute depravity” after Moscow fired an unprecedented daytime barrage across Ukraine, including on the historical centre of the western city of Lviv. “Iranian ‘shaheds’ [attack drones], modernised by Russia, are striking a church in Lviv – this is absolute depravity, and only someone like [Vladimir] Putin could find this appealing,” Zelenskyy said in his daily address. “The scale of this attack makes it abundantly clear that Russia has no intention of actually ending this war,” Zelenskyy added, vowing that Ukraine “will certainly respond to any attacks.” Moscow appears to be stepping up a spring offensive intended to break Ukrainian resistance, writes Pjotr Sauer. Ukrainian officials said Moscow fired nearly 400 long-range drones and 23 cruise missiles overnight, followed by another 556 drones in an unusual daytime assault on Tuesday, hitting cities across the west of the country and killing at least seven people. Taken together, the barrage marks one of the largest aerial bombardments of Ukraine since the start of the full-scale invasion more than four years ago. One Russian drone struck the Bernardine monastery, a 16th-century church in Lviv’s Unesco-listed medieval centre, causing damage, local authorities said. North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un said his country would always support Russia in a thankyou letter to his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin. Ties between the two have grown closer since Putin began the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, with Pyongyang sending ground troops and weapons systems to aid Russia’s war effort. “I express my sincere thanks to you for sending warm and sincere congratulations first on my reassumption of the heavy duty as president of the state affairs,” Kim said in the message on Tuesday, the official Korean central news agency said. “Today the DPRK and Russia are closely cooperating to defend the sovereignty of the two countries,” Kim said, using the initials of the North’s official name. “Pyongyang will always be with Moscow. This is our choice and unshakable will,” he added. South Korean and western intelligence agencies have estimated that the North has sent thousands of soldiers to Russia, primarily to the Kursk region, along with artillery shells, missiles and long-range rocket systems. Analysts say the assistance has been provided in exchange for Russia’s provision of food and weapons technologies.

More young people want to vote in New Zealand’s Māori electorates. What are they and how do they work?

More young people have signed up to vote in Māori electorates, new figures from the electoral commission show, as New Zealand prepares for an election this year. The rise comes after years of tense relations between Indigenous New Zealanders and the centre-right coalition government. The latest figures show 58% of eligible 18- to 24-year-olds have registered for the Māori roll, up from 50% in 2023. What are the Māori electorates? How do they work – and how certain is their future in the New Zealand political landscape? What are the Māori electorates? There are seven Māori electorates – or seats – in New Zealand’s 120-seat parliament. You need to be Māori to vote in these electorates, but anyone can stand in these seats. The electorates tend to be geographically huge, spanning multiple tribes and districts. The seat of Te Tai Tonga, for example, covers the entire South Island, Rakiura/Stewart Island and much of Wellington city – about 151,723 sq km (58,580 sq miles). When anyone of Māori descent registers to vote, they choose whether to be on the Māori roll or the general roll. The electoral commission said 54% of eligible voters had registered as of March for the Māori roll – up from 51% in 2023 when the last election was held. Like everybody else, people who are registered on the Māori roll get only two votes: one for their preferred political party and another for their constituency MP. They cannot vote for a general electorate MP. How long have Māori electorates been around? When New Zealand first held elections in 1853, only men who owned land were able to vote. But Māori owned land communally, which rendered them ineligible. As a temporary workaround, four special Māori seats, divided into geographic districts, were introduced in 1867. The number remained fixed until the mid-1990s, when they increased to five, and then the current seven in 2002. In the 1980s, a royal commission proposed abolishing the seats if New Zealand moved to an electoral system of proportional representation, which it did in the 1990s. It suggested the influx of new parties under a proportional system would increase Māori representation. But after a strong campaign from many Māori organisations, the seats were retained when New Zealand adopted its new system – mixed-member proportional representation (MMP) – which was established to stop the horse race between the two major parties and more fairly distribute seats to smaller parties based on their share of the votes. However, the minor populist party New Zealand First, in arguing for the seats’ abolition, says Māori representation has grown to record levels with MMP: the current parliament has 33 MPs of Māori descent. How do the Māori seats tend to swing? The Māori electorates have tended to lean towards leftwing parties, but they have hardly been a safe zone for Labour. When the Labour government passed controversial land legislation in the early 2000s, Māori outrage saw the birth of the Māori party, Te Pāti Māori, in 2005. Te Pāti Māori went on to support the National government after 2008. Its support withered away until it was ejected from parliament completely in 2017, when all of the seats were claimed by Labour. Since then, the seats have largely been a jostle between Te Pāti Māori and Labour. The other major party, centre-right National, has tended to struggle in the seats, refusing to run candidates at all between 2002 and 2023, although it has said it plans to stand candidates in the seats again this year. Why do the Māori electorates divide opinion? Debate over the existence of the Māori seats has existed for about as long as the seats themselves, and it’s a question that flares during most elections. But with Māori making up less than 20% of the New Zealand population, putting them to a referendum would mean their future would be largely decided by non-Māori. That has raised questions similar to those heard during the Voice referendum in Australia, over whether the rights of a minority should be put to a vote by the majority. In 2014, the former National prime minister John Key, when asked by the New Zealand Herald whether he would abolish the seats, said it was an issue he wouldn’t go near. “Do you really want to rip a country apart?” he said. NZ First’s leader and foreign affairs minister, Winston Peters, first campaigned for a Māori seat in 1975. After the 1996 election, NZ First represented all the Māori seats. But in recent years, Peters has turned instead to calling for their abolition. “If the Māori seats have enough people who support them then they could be retained. But the fact is, we currently have a record number of Māori in parliament and in cabinet,” Peters said in February. Another partner in the governing coalition, Act, also supports getting rid of Māori seats. But the prime minister, Christopher Luxon, said it had not been discussed by his caucus. Opposition parties have condemned the proposal, with the Labour MP Kieran McAnulty calling it “a cheap and cynical attempt to try and get some cheap votes”, before adding that it should be Māori who decide the future of the seats.

Mette Frederiksen’s leftwing bloc fails to win majority in Danish election

Mette Frederiksen’s Social Democrats and Denmark’s other left-leaning parties appear to have failed to win enough votes to gain a clear mandate to form a government in an election fought amid geopolitical tensions with the US over Greenland. With 100% of the vote counted in the early hours of Wednesday morning, the prime minister’s party won the most votes but performed worse than expected, with nearly 22% of the vote, leaving the Social Democrats and the other left-leaning parties that form the “red bloc” with 84 seats short of a majority in the 179-seat parliament. But the right-leaning parties of the “blue bloc” also fell short, with 77 seats, putting the foreign minister, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, the leader of the non-aligned centre-right Moderates, in the spotlight as kingmaker with 14 seats. Denmark now faces weeks of coalition talks, after which a centre-left coalition appears likely to emerge. Having reportedly spent much of the night smoking his pipe, Rasmussen emerged at the Moderates party late into the night to give a speech to jubilant supporters. He urged Frederiksen and Troels Lund Poulsen, the leader of Denmark’s Liberal party, with whom he has been in coalition for more than three years, to “come down from the trees” and join him in the centre ground. “What is clear – with all conceivable reservations – I think is that there is no red majority to the left of us, and there is no black-blue majority to the right of us,” he said to cheers. Arriving at Christiansborg at about midnight, Poulsen said he was still a candidate for prime minister and ruled out forming a coalition with the Social Democrats. He told supporters: “We need a new government. And that’s also why I’m happy that Venstre [Denmark’s liberal party] has become the largest blue party.” Frederiksen’s prospects for a third term as prime minister were not looking good after disastrous municipal elections in November, when her party took a severe hit nationally and lost control of Copenhagen for the first time in more than 100 years. The 48-year-old called an early election last month hoping to benefit from a “Greenland bounce” in the polls in response to her robust handling of Donald Trump’s threats in January to invade the largely autonomous territory that is part of the Danish kingdom. Discussions between the US, Nuuk and Copenhagen are still taking place but tensions have receded. The crisis appears to have had a lasting effect on Danish voters nevertheless. “I know that sometimes I express myself a bit bluntly,” the prime minister said during a recent campaign event. “But given the times we live in, it is perhaps very good that there are some things that cannot be misunderstood: that Russia should not be allowed to win or that Greenland is not for sale.” On Tuesday the Greenlandic prime minister, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, described the vote as the most important for the Danish parliament in the Arctic island’s history. “We are in a time where we have a superpower trying to acquire us, take us, control us,” Nielsen told AFP. “They have a desire to do it, so we are still in a very tense situation.” Frederiksen met Greenlandic people living in Aalborg on Tuesday and said she could never have imagined that as prime minister she would become involved in “defending you against anyone from outside”. She added: “For all of us who have been involved in this, whether as Greenlanders who have felt threatened or as Danes who have felt a strong sense of solidarity – or, in my own case, as the one who had to stand at the forefront – we will never forget the time we have been through together.” She said Greenland had been subjected to “completely unreasonable and unacceptable pressure” by the US. “But you stood firm, and you did so with a grace, determination and strength that the rest of the world greatly admires.” Although it grabbed the international headlines, the Greenland issue did not dominate the election, which was largely fought on domestic issues, including a Social Democrat pledge for a “wealth tax” to fund smaller class sizes in primary schools, as well as the cost of living crisis, the tightening of Denmark’s already hardline immigration laws, animal rights and clean drinking water. The wealth tax, a 0.5% tax on assets held by an individual worth more than 25m kroner (nearly £3m), was welcomed by many on the left but went down badly with Denmark’s super-rich. Henrik Andersen, the chief executive of the wind turbine firm Vestas, declared “enough is enough” and suggested he may leave the country if it was introduced. The shipping magnate Robert Mærsk Uggla, who is the chair of the board of directors of Maersk and the chief executive of AP Møller Holding, said the tax would be “harmful to Denmark”. In the coming weeks the role of Rasmussen is likely to be critical. On the eve of the election, Rasmussen said he did not want to be prime minister, a job he has already held twice, but that he would like the role of “royal investigator”, which entails helping to form a government and is usually held by the person who goes on to become prime minister. A veteran of the political scene, Rasmussen nonetheless cultivates an image as a man of the people, recently telling Euroman magazine that he sometimes used hand soap instead of toothpaste and liked to smoke his pipe in bed “if I have a sore throat or am sick”.

Danish PM’s leftwing bloc wins most votes but fails to secure majority – Europe live

… and on that note, it’s a wrap for today! Denmark’s left-wing bloc headed by Social Democrat prime minister Mette Frederiksen won Denmark’s general election but failed to secure a majority (00:28). The “red bloc” secured 84 seats in the new parliament, as the “blue bloc” got 77 seats, both short of the 90 seats required for majority. Former prime minister and current foreign minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen, the leader of the non-aligned centre-right Moderates, has emerged as the likely kingmaker with 14 seats which will probably decide the next administration (12:43, 20:37, 22:40, 23:26, 23:45). Denmark now faces weeks of coalition talks, but the outgoing defence minister and Liberal Party’s leader Troels Lund Poulsen appeared to rule out the continuation of the current three-party arrangement (00:22). We will be back in the morning for more reactions as the dust begins to settle on today’s hectic election day. But for now, good night! If you have any tips, comments or suggestions, email me at jakub.krupa@theguardian.com. I am also on Bluesky at @jakubkrupa.bsky.social and on X at @jakubkrupa.