Rachel Reeves’s plan to cut almost £2 billion from the foreign aid budget has sparked a Cabinet backlash, The Telegraph can reveal.

David Lammy, the Foreign Secretary, is among ministers demanding she announce more money for the aid budget and warning about the damage the cuts will cause.

However, the Chancellor is preparing to let spending on aid fall to 0.5 per cent of gross national income (GNI) after two years when it had been boosted above that level by Jeremy Hunt, the former Tory chancellor.

Aid organisations, including the UK arm of the charity run by David Miliband, have warned that Ms Reeves’s plans will see the aid budget fall to a 17-year low and are lobbying ministers over the issue.

The row is just one of a series of stand-offs over the Budget as Cabinet ministers rail against the spending efficiencies demanded by the Treasury ahead of Oct 30.

The health and education departments have been ordered to find savings of at least £1 billion each, despite their secretaries of state vowing no return to austerity.

Cabinet ministers have been taking their complaints directly to Darren Jones, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, this week in face-to-face meetings.

‘Iron grip’ on spending

Multiple government insiders have told The Telegraph that ministerial tensions on spending cuts demanded by Ms Reeves are much bigger than the supposed No 10 rifts making headlines.

“She is holding an iron grip on spending”, said one Whitehall source.

The negotiations are the backdrop for what Sir Keir Starmer and Ms Reeves have warned the public will be a “painful” Budget, with tough decisions on spending, taxation and welfare.

The Treasury is expected to launch a tax raid to generate extra revenue, but Ms Reeves has also been demanding savings in departmental budgets.

She has told ministers she wants £3 billion of efficiencies found, even as she looks to raise overall public spending to avoid real-terms cuts for government departments.

The clash over foreign aid comes after Rishi Sunak abandoned Lord Cameron’s promise to spend 0.7 per cent of GNI on overseas development assistance during Covid, spending 0.5 per cent instead.

Labour has stuck to the same position, which involves promising a return to 0.7 per cent when the public finances have stabilised. No date has been put on hitting that promise.

However, in the last years of the Tory government, Andrew Mitchell and Jeremy Hunt – respectively foreign minister and chancellor, and both supporters of overseas aid – increased the aid budget.

They agreed an extra £2.5 billion for overseas aid in 2022 for two years, but that additional spending boost will end this financial year.

As a result, foreign aid spending is forecasted to drop from £15.3 billion, or 0.58 per cent of GNI, in 2023 to £13.6 billion, or 0.50 per cent of GNI, in 2024. That is a fall of £1.7 billion. The exact figure depends on the size of the economy this year.

The fall is accentuated by the fact that more than a quarter of the aid budget has been spent in recent years on looking after asylum-seekers who have arrived in the UK, including spiralling hotel bills.

The spending officially counts as overseas aid, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development definition, but critics say that it breaks the spirit of the pledge.

Mr Lammy and Anneliese Dodds, the development minister, are understood to be pushing the Treasury for more aid money.

Spokesmen for the Foreign Office and the Treasury did not dispute there was a stand-off over aid spending. No comment was issued by either department, with live Budget negotiations cited.

International Rescue Committee UK, the British arm of the refugee charity run by Mr Miliband – the former foreign secretary once tipped for the Labour leadership – signed a private letter protesting against the cuts last month.

Mr Mitchell, who has long championed higher aid spending, called on the Treasury to approve more money, warning about the impact on poor children if there is no change.

He told The Telegraph: “The huge cost of first-year asylum seekers falls within the definition of the international development budget, but it is a colossal amount of money.

“That is why Jeremy Hunt as chancellor and the Treasury were persuaded to give us an extra £2.5 billion over the past two years.

“Since then, the costs have risen even further. The Treasury must help with this.

“If Rachel Reeves does not provide additional money, the effect will be that thousands of children in the developing world will suffer egregiously.”

Romilly Greenhill, the chief executive of Bond, the UK network for organisations working in international development, said the country had a “moral duty” to help those suffering abroad.

The organisation produced an analysis last month that showed if UK asylum seeker spending was removed, the foreign aid budget would fall to its lowest level since 2007.

Ms Greenhill said: “We’re concerned that the UK aid budget will drop to its lowest in 17 years if the Government doesn’t act in the autumn Budget.

“With global crises like climate change, conflict and food insecurity worsening, the Government must stop diverting UK aid to fund the UK’s failing asylum system.

“We need separate, dedicated funding to support these marginalised groups here in the UK. The UK has a moral duty to ensure millions worldwide can still access vital services and support they need to stay safe in their own countries.”

The crimes of Lucy Letby and Harold Shipman are proof that NHS workers cannot be trusted to act in patients’ interests if assisted dying becomes legal, a bishop has said.

The Bishop of St Albans, the Rt Rev Alan Smith, warned that a bill set to be debated by MPs would risk empowering future medical serial killers.

The comments by Bishop Smith, who as Convenor of the Lords Spiritual is a spokesman for the bishops in the House of Lords, suggest they are likely to oppose any change in the law.

He said: “When you look at Harold Shipman and you look at Lucy Letby, there’s a tiny minority of people who are criminals, who appear to get some sort of thrill from killing people.

“So you’ve certainly got to have strong safeguards around this. And, of course, it won’t stop them. Whatever safeguards we have, there are going to be some people like that in society.

“The danger is that legalising assisted dying can muddle things, allowing that tiny minority of people to make the argument that their victim told me that’s what they really wanted’. And, of course, they’re dead by that point.

“It’s not that common, but it certainly could happen. You can’t presume on the inherent goodness of everyone who works in the NHS. I think that would be extraordinarily naive.”

On Oct 16, Labour MP Kim Leadbeater will table legislation to legalise assisted dying after her Private Member’s Bill was selected for debate.

Her decision to propose the law change means there could be a free vote by MPs before Christmas.

A separate Assisted Dying Bill in the House of Lords introduced by Lord Falconer, a former justice secretary, is expected to be debated next month.

Ms Leadbeater’s bill is expected to give eligible adults nearing the end of their lives the right to choose to shorten their deaths if they wish.

Backers of a change in the law say that it is inhumane to keep the terminally ill alive if they are experiencing unbearable suffering.

A change would also end the practice of terminally ill people travelling abroad to end their lives, often separated from their friends and families.

If he were to speak in the next debate on assisted dying, Bishop Smith said he would argue against legislative change from various perspectives, based on the theological position that “traditionally Christians have started with the assumption that life is a gift, we receive it, and, historically, to take life has always being seen as less than good, indeed sinful”.

He said when the issue had been debated in the Lords previously, “some of the people most worried about it are the lawyers because they’ve been involved in cases where it’s been in their interest of a family to ‘let granny die’ because they had financial challenges and there’s some inheritance coming”.

He also said that “many disabled people are deeply, deeply concerned, because they feel value judgments already made on them all the time, and people talk over them and don’t treat them equally, and they feel this legislation could be dangerous”.

The House of Lords contains 26 Church of England archbishops and bishops known as the “Lords Spiritual”.

The bishops are not affiliated with any particular political party and do take a Whip.

Instead, as Convenor of the Lords Spiritual, Bishop Smith is responsible for coordinating the work of the bishops in the House and the bishops vote independently.

The bishop’s opposition reflects that of the General Synod. In July 2022, its members voted to reaffirm the Church of England’s opposition to a change in the law on assisted suicide.

The last time the Lords voted on assisted dying was in March 2022. Lord Forsyth of Drumlean proposed an amendment to the government’s healthcare bill, it was rejected 179 to 145, with four bishops among the dissenters.

The Bishop of London, Sarah Mullally, the joint lead bishop on health care for the Church of England, echoed Bishop Smith’s concern.

She said: “No amount of safeguards could ensure the safety of the most vulnerable in society, should there be a change in the law allowing for assisted suicide”

Bishop Mullally, a former chief nursing officer for England, said: “I worked for many years as a nurse in the NHS, including as a cancer specialist, and I understand first-hand the crucial importance of compassionate care and dignity for all patients, including those who are most vulnerable and reaching the end of their lives.

“In the Church of England, we are backing urgent calls for adequate funding and resourcing of palliative care services, to ensure the highest possible standards of care for all. This should include action to ensure that our hospices receive the level of state funding that they are so badly lacking at present.”

She said that: “We believe that there would be unintended, serious and fundamental consequences for the whole of society, especially for those who are at the most vulnerable point of their lives, and for those who love and care for them.”

Lord Alli laid on hospitality for Labour more than 20 times in the year running up to the general election, The Telegraph can reveal.

The peer at the centre of the row over donations provided the party with hospitality on 23 occasions at the same time the party was carrying out a charm offensive with businesses.

Data from the Electoral Commission show that Lord Alli provided non-cash hospitality donations worth £55,000 between June 2023 and May this year.

While Lord Alli is a long-standing Labour backer, having given the party £700,000, he only started providing hospitality donations last year, according to records which go back to 2001.

Labour refused to answer questions about what hospitality was provided but a series of donations in September 2023 coincided with the timing of pre-election strategy meetings at Lord Alli’s townhouse in Soho.

In a recent book, Taken as Red, Anushka Asthana, ITV’s deputy political editor, described how key Labour aides and shadow ministers including Pat McFadden, now the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, and Morgan McSweeney, Labour’s campaign director, were meeting at the Georgian property.

“McFadden and McSweeney gathered close colleagues at the central London office of party donor and Labour peer Lord Waheed Alli, a traditional Soho townhouse decorated with antique furniture”, the book says.

Key figures “covering strategy, operations, communications and policy” were present, where Mr McFadden would stand with a flip chart and a black marker pen as they discussed plans for the election.

They worked from the property for several days, according to the book, before taking a strategy pitch to Sir Keir and Sue Gray.

Lord Alli also loaned Sir Keir the use of an £18 million penthouse in Covent Garden, where he watched election night.

The peer is under investigation from the House of Lords’ standards commissioner over potential breach of the code of conduct for alleged “non registration of interests”.

It is understood the investigation is not linked to donation or any of the recent headlines about Lord Alli.

There is no suggestion of any wrongdoing and all donations have been declared within the rules and all relevant declarations have been made to the Electoral Commission.

Sir Keir is battling to contain a row over “freebies” which began after he was accused of cronyism for giving Lord Alli a temporary pass to No 10, which was later given back, despite the peer having no official central government role.

Lord Alli gave the Prime Minister £32,000 to pay for clothing, as well as thousands of pounds for designer clothing for his wife Victoria, and work clothing to Angela Rayner, the Deputy Prime Minister.

Sir Keir initially failed to declare around £5,000 in designer clothing given to Lady Starmer by the peer, although he will not face a parliamentary standards investigation.

Earlier this week, Sir Keir said he would pay back £6,000 worth of gifts and hospitality since taking office including free tickets to Taylor Swift and a loan of clothing to his wife.

Labour declined to comment and Lord Alli’s office was contacted for comment.

The Northern Lights could be visible from Britain this weekend, and shine even brighter than the aurora in May, following a massive solar flare.

The European Space Agency sent out an alert that an X9.0 coronal mass ejection had been picked up around 1pm on Thursday afternoon – the strongest detected since the current solar cycle began in December 2019.

Where will the Northern Lights be visible?

The wave of charged particles is likely to hit Earth’s atmosphere on Saturday, with an aurora expected if the skies are clear.

That is most likely in the North, East and South of Britain on Saturday evening although more cloud and some rain is expected in the west.

In May, the Northern Lights were seen across much of Britain following a series of powerful solar storms which peaked with a flare of magnitude X8.7. However, Friday’s flare was even stronger.

What time will the Northern Lights be visible?

Silvia Dalla, a professor of Solar Physics at the University of Central Lancashire, said: “Solar flares and fast coronal mass ejections (CMEs) are large expulsions of plasma and magnetic fields. This strong geomagnetic activity results in breathtaking displays of the Northern Lights.

“If we get a repeat of the solar situation we saw in mid-May, we will potentially see more spell-bounding auroral activity across the UK skies.

“Finding a good spot to view the Northern Lights can be challenging, and conditions can change quickly. Aurora-hunting is a late-night activity, and the optimum time to view the spectacle is usually from 11pm to 12am onwards.

“To maximise your chances of viewing the aurora, the sky needs to be as clear as possible. Look northwards and try to find a place with dark skies, ideally away from a city where light pollution can interfere with the view.”

Auroras occur when solar particles excite molecules in Earth’s upper atmosphere, causing them to glow, the colour depending on what chemicals are hit.

Red and pink light is produced from collisions with nitrogen molecules at low altitudes while green is produced by oxygen molecules higher up.

The sun’s magnetic field goes through a cycle approximately every 11 years and is set to peak in July 2025.

The current solar cycle began in December 2019 and is expected to continue ramping up over the next year, increasing the chance of solar flares and plasma bubbles which send charged particles shooting towards Earth.

Solar cycles occur because the sun’s magnetic poles flip periodically, with activity peaking just as the North and South Poles swap places.

Although the Northern Lights are often visible in the North of England and Scotland during the winter months, it is rare for activity in the sun to be strong enough to reach further south.

The peak flare in May led to radio blackouts and there are fears this weekend may also cause problems.

The European Space Agency said: “The coronal mass ejection is predicted to arrive from late on October 5 with the potential to trigger moderate to strong geomagnetic disturbances.”

Chris Hadfield, a Nasa astronaut, added: “The sun has been hyperactive and Earth’s deflector shields are up. Watch for good aurorae.”

A spokesman for the Met Office said: “There’s a potential for aurora sightings over the next few nights, especially in the north on Saturday night underneath any clear spells.”

The largest solar storm ever recorded, the Carrington Event in 1859, knocked out telegraph systems and even set fire to paper in offices.

Extreme space weather has already caused widespread disruption, with a geomagnetic storm leaving six million people without power in 1989, while Apollo astronauts narrowly missed being exposed to deadly radiation in 1972, and solar flares in 2003 forced the crew of the International Space Station to take cover.

The donations controversy that has engulfed Sir Keir Starmer makes it impossible for him to award honours to Labour’s financial backers, Dale Vince, the green energy tycoon, has said.

This week, Mr Vince, 63, faced allegations from his estranged wife in divorce court that he was likely to get a knighthood or peerage after donating £5 million to Labour.

His lawyers rejected the claims, and in an interview with The Telegraph, he said: “Anyone who thinks that’s remotely possible isn’t reading the room right now, isn’t reading the news right now.

“Have you seen where Labour and Keir are in terms of scandals around things for – or just gifts from donors, let alone giving things back from donors?

“I mean come on, read the room.”

Mr Vince’s wife, Kate, has alleged that he is rushing through a divorce in an attempt to deny her the right to use any title he receives.

But Mr Vince, a former financial backer of Just Stop Oil, insisted he had not discussed a potential peerage with anyone in the Labour Party.

When pressed on whether he would accept a peerage, he said: “Honestly, I don’t know.

“I think it’s presumptuous to… you know, kind of have those considerations and to say those things. I haven’t thought about it and I don’t know.”

It follows weeks of controversy over donations to the Prime Minister and other Cabinet members by Lord Alli, a longstanding Labour supporter.

It has been revealed that Lord Alli paid for suits for Sir Keir, as well as giving him the use of an £18 million London penthouse in the run-up to the election. He also allowed Angela Rayner, the Deputy Prime Minister, to stay in his New York flat.

Mr Vince said he thought it was “wrong” for Sir Keir to have initially declared some clothes as a financial contribution towards his private office, a move that was within the rules but has been criticised for lacking transparency.

‘Fuss about nothing’

He said: “I understand why there’s something here to talk about. I think it’s being overdone, but to a degree, I think maybe the way it’s been responded to has fed that.

“But I think right now, Labour are in a position where they can’t do right.

“Keir Starmer did declare the clothes, I think, as office expenses. That was wrong.

“Then he declared them as clothes. He did that himself, voluntarily – that caused the story.

“And now he’s said that he’ll pay the money back, and that’s caused another scandal.”

Mr Vince added: “I just think it’s an awful lot of fuss about nothing, it’s a big distraction, it’s really unfortunate and at some point we’ll be past it and talking about what’s happening in the country.”

He suggested that Lord Alli’s donations “came from a good place” and added: “Lord Alli is a stylish kind of guy and it was a pre-election makeover for Keir in terms of clothes.

“He doesn’t want for anything in this world, Lord Alli, he wasn’t after anything and it was just a gift to a friend.”

Mr Vince and his wife, a former director of his company Ecotricity, separated nearly four years ago. She applied for divorce in 2022.

In documents submitted to the family court, Mrs Vince’s lawyers wrote: “[Mr Vince’s] likelihood of getting an honour is not just born of his work as an eco-warrior but also from his role as the largest donor to the Labour Party.

“Donors are habitually rewarded with honours – nearly a quarter of all peerages awarded in the last decade were given to people who also happened to be significant donors (albeit very few have given on the scale of [Mr Vince].”

However, he said such claims were made to “generate headlines”.

Under Tony Blair’s premiership, Mr Vince was made an OBE in the 2004 New Year Honours for services to the environment and the electricity industry.

Boris Johnson declined to say who his children take after when he was asked about his family this week but, in terms of appearance, the answer is already clear.

Pictures of his children with his third wife Carrie show that their four-year-old son Wilfred is like a mini version of his father, complete with a bushy mop of blond hair.

Their daughter Romy, who will be three in December, appears to take more after her mother, while youngest son Frank, who is 14 months, does not appear in the photographs.

Mr Johnson, who usually makes a rule of keeping his children separate from his public life, decided to include pictures from the family album in his memoir, Unleashed, which is published on Oct 10.

One of the earliest pictures, taken when Mr Johnson was still prime minister, shows Wilfred as a toddler next to a helicopter that has landed on the lawn of what appears to be Chequers while the family dog Dilyn plays underneath the aircraft.

Another picture from Chequers shows Mr Johnson and his wife with Wilfred and Romy, then a baby, sitting on the lawn in front of Chequers in the summer sunshine.

The couple’s two oldest children are also pictured sitting on a bed, Romy now old enough to sit up on her own, her hair much browner than her brother’s.

Romy is also pictured sitting in one of the prime ministerial red boxes that normally contain official papers, beaming a gummy smile at the camera.

In a picture taken shortly before Mr Johnson left Downing Street, Wilfred and Romy are sitting on the doorstep outside No 10, Wilfred in a sailor suit and Romy, bare-footed, in a spotted dress.

Mr Johnson has eight children by three different women. He has four children with his second wife Marina, born between 1993 and 1999, a daughter from a relationship with art consultant Helen Macintyre, born in 2009, and his three children with current wife Carrie.

Wilfred was named after Mr Johnson’s grandfather, with the middle names Lawrie, after Mrs Johnson’s grandfather, and Nicholas, after two doctors called Nick who helped save Mr Johnson’s life when he was hospitalised with Covid in 2020.

Romy is named after Mrs Johnson’s aunt Rosemary, and Frank is named, in part, after Frank Johnson, the former Telegraph journalist, who was one of Mr Johnson’s inspirations as a young reporter.

When The Telegraph asked him this week whom the children take after, he replied: “Oh God, I think I had better defer to their mother on that one.”

Javier Milei, the president of Argentina, copied a script from TV series The West Wing for a speech to the United Nations.

Mr Milei appears to have lifted dialogue from Josiah Bartlett, the fictional US president, almost verbatim and used it for his maiden address to the General Assembly in New York.

La Nacion newspaper reported that Santiago Caputo, Mr Milei’s communication advisor, is a huge fan of The West Wing, which ran for seven seasons from 1999, and said the similarities were unlikely to be a coincidence.

“We believe in freedom of speech for all; we believe in freedom of worship for all; we believe in freedom of trade for all and we believe in limited governments, all of them,” Mr Milei said at the end of his 15-minute speech.

“And because in these times what happens in one country quickly impacts others, we believe that all peoples should live free from tyranny and oppression, whether it takes the form of political oppression, economic slavery or religious fanaticism. 

“That fundamental idea must not remain mere words; it has to be supported by deeds, diplomatically, economically and materially.”

In the 15th episode of the fourth season of the show, the US president, played by Martin Sheen, addresses his aides in the Oval Office of the White House.

He said: “We are for freedom of speech everywhere. We are for freedom of religion everywhere. We are for the freedom to learn… for everyone. And because in our time, you can build a bomb in your country and bring it into mine, what happens in your country is my business.”

“So we are for freedom from tyranny, everywhere, whether it comes in the guise of political oppression, Toby, or economic slavery, Josh, or religious fanaticism, CJ. That fundamental idea cannot be met simply by our support. It must be met with our force. Diplomatically, economically, and materially.”

La Nacion said Mr Caputo’s love for the show was well known.

“A fan of screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, Caputo watched the entire series The West Wing between seven and nine times,” the newspaper said.

“He also suggested to the top brass at Move Group [the consulting firm he founded] that anyone who wanted to join the company had to watch the series as an essential condition.”

The fictional president Bartlet is, like Mr Milei, an economist and university professor who made the leap into politics.

But while Martin Sheen’s character is a Left-leaning Democrat, Mr Milei is a radical populist with a penchant for waving chainsaws and belting out rock songs to his supporters.

It is not the first time that Milei-watchers have spotted echoes of Mr Sorkin’s work in the president’s speeches.

Inauguration speech

In his Dec 10 inaugural speech, Mr Milei said: “The challenges we face are enormous, but so is our ability to overcome them.”

In one famous West Wing scene, Bartlet declared: “Whenever we think we have reached our capacity to meet a challenge, we look up and remember that that capacity may well be unlimited.”

In an April speech, Mr Milei said: “The era of the present state is over.” Some detected echoes of a scene during which Bartlet’s spin doctor tells him that “the era of big government is over”.

Since he was elected in December, the Milei administration has used a lectern when addressing Congress, which had fallen out of fashion in Argentina.

La Nacion suggested that this was also a nod to the West Wing’s aesthetic.

In November, Mr Milei and Mr Caputo met with members of the Biden administration. After the meetings, they posed for a selfie at the door of the West Wing of the White House.

Iranian missiles hit a hangar and caused craters at Israel’s Nevatim air base, according to satellite imagery.

The Planet Labs image, published by the Associated Press, suggests Israel remains vulnerable to aerial attack from Iran, despite its state-of-the-art air defence systems and protection from the US military.

The satellite image shows four potential impacts at the base in southern Israel, one of three military facilities the Iranians claimed to have targeted.

Analysis of video imagery from Tuesday’s attack suggests the two other bases, one north of Tel Aviv, one south, may also have been hit or come close to being hit, say geo-location specialists. 

Nevatim is reported to be home to the Israeli Air Force’s most advanced aircraft, including US-produced F-35 Lightning II stealth fighter jets.

The image shows serious damage to the roof of an aircraft hangar, with a hole torn through it. Another impact appears to have hit a road on the base.

Aircraft are parked in the open and it does not seem from the image that any were damaged in the strike.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) acknowledged that Nevatim was hit in a statement on Wednesday, but denied significant harm was caused.

The missiles damaged “office buildings and other maintenance areas” at air bases, the IDF said, but described the impacts as “ineffective.”

No soldiers, weapons or aircraft were hit, the IDF said.

Yet there is little doubt Tuesday’s missile strike by Iran caused some surprise in Israel.

Although the US warned it was coming several hours in advance, it was not telegraphed by days like Iran’s first drone and missile barrage in April.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said it had used Fattah missiles for the first time, which it claimed were “hypersonic” and therefore harder to shoot down.

This is refuted by the Israeli authorities but there is no doubt the missiles arrived quicker than many expected.

The IDF would not reveal on Wednesday what the missile interception rate was, saying this would aid Iran. However, it did say that the country’s air defences had “operated impressively, with high rates of interception”.

Nevertheless it seems unlikely Israel’s air defence system would have allowed the apparent impacts at or near Nevatim and the other two bases if it could have prevented them.
 

An Israeli military source who has worked in the Ministry of Defence for over a decade, told The Telegraph Iran struck the US by targeting the Nevatim base: “The air base isn’t just Israeli. The new one was built by the Americans and it often hosts US deployments as well as the Israelis. So, when the Iranians attack Nevatim, it’s like they’re attacking the USA.” 

He added that sophisticated fighter jets were unlikely to have been hit as, during his time at the base, they were kept in “underground in facilities”.

Israel has resolved to strike back at Iran for Tuesday’s attack and is consulting with the US which provides much of the country’s long-range air defence infrastructure on what that should look like.

On Wednesday evening Joe Biden, the US president, ruled out a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, saying that it would be disproportionate but has pledged to respond.

Although Israel has talked about “degrading Iran’s economy” by targeting oil export facilities and the country’s fragile power and water infrastructure, that may also be deemed an unacceptable escalation by the White House.

Iran’s missiles targeted Israeli military sites, suggesting a “proportionate” Israeli response would target similar facilities in Iran, say analysts.

Israel is also aware Iran could up the stakes further, using the same rapid ballistic missiles fired on Tuesday to target Israel’s densely packed cities.

“We have a big question mark about how the Iranians are going to respond to an attack, but we take into consideration the possibility that they would go all in, which will be a whole different ball game,” an Israeli official told Axios news service on Wednesday.

A Yazidi woman who was kidnapped by Islamic State as a child before being sent to Hamas in Gaza has been rescued after more than a decade in captivity.

Fawzia Amin Sido was just 11 when she was forced to marry a Palestinian IS fighter before being trafficked to Gaza, where she faced repeated torture.

Ms Sido, originally from Iraq, is now 21 and returned home this week after escaping from Gaza in an operation involving the US, Jordan and Iraq.

Her rescue came after four months of failed attempts due to Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, according to the Iraq foreign ministry.

But it is believed her escape was then made easier after her captor was “presumably killed” during Israeli strikes on Gaza, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said.

The strikes reportedly allowed Ms Sido to escape captivity and hide elsewhere, before being rescued.

“The young girl was extracted from the Gaza Strip in recent days in a secret operation through the Kerem Shalom crossing,” the IDF said.

“After crossing into Israel, she was taken to Jordan via the Allenby Crossing and then on to her family in Iraq.”

Ms Sido is in good physical condition, but suffering from intense trauma after spending 10 years in captivity and witnessing the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza, Silwan Sinjaree, chief of staff of Iraq’s foreign minister, said.

Steve Maman, a Jewish Canadian philanthropist who devotes his time to rescuing Yazidis held in captivity, shared a video which showed Ms Sido reuniting with her family.

“I made a promise to Fawzia, the Yazidi who was hostage of Hamas in Gaza, that I would bring her back home to her mother in Sinjar,” Mr Maman said after she was freed.

“To her, it seemed surreal and impossible but not to me, my only enemy was time. Our team reunited her moments ago with her mother and family in Sinjar.”

He went on to say it was one of the “most difficult” rescue operations he had ever taken part in.

“I must thank the US government, my contacts in the US, Iraq, Jordan and Israel,” he told the Jerusalem Post.

A state department spokesman said the US on Tuesday “helped to safely evacuate from Gaza a young Yazidi woman to be reunited with her family in Iraq”.

More than 6,000 Yazidis were captured by IS militants from the Sinjar region in Iraq in 2014. 

Many were sold into sexual slavery or trained as child soldiers and taken across borders, including to Turkey and Syria.

Over the years, more than 3,500 have been rescued or freed, according to Iraqi authorities, with around 2,600 still missing.

A Kremlin propaganda ploy to deflect criticism away from a “drunk” front-line commander renowned for ordering soldiers on suicide missions has backfired.

Vladimir Solovyov, the host of state TV Rossiya-One’s daily chat show, last month described soldiers’ widows as liars for accusing Col Alexei Ksenofontov of being drunk and then sending their husbands to their deaths.

He told his audience that he personally knew Col Ksenofontov, who was made a “Hero of Russia” in April.

“Alexei is a normal commander, a thinking commander capable of competently preparing and carrying out a task,” he said.

“They have slandered a hero.”

But instead of silencing the mourning women, Mr Solovyov’s intervention has heaped more embarrassment onto the Kremlin by triggering new accusations and given ordinary Russians a rare glimpse of the medieval techniques used by their military commanders.

Astra, the Russian opposition Telegram news channel that published the original complaints, said it had received dozens of messages in the past few weeks from angry women.

“After his [show], dozens of relatives of the military contacted the editorial office responding to Solovyov,” it said this week, before posting several more accusations on its Telegram channel.

Some of these criticisms were also posted directly on social media channels.

One woman wrote on the Kremlin-controlled VK social media website that she wanted Col Ksenofontov, whose call sign is “Tiger”, to die as her husband had.

“Solovyov, interview all of us. Look how many women are cursing your Ksenofontov. Talk to the women who wish death to the Tiger,” she wrote.

Criticising the Russian army comes at great risk for people living in Russia. Police arrest people for the slightest indiscretion and charge them with “discrediting the Russian army”, which carries a prison sentence.

Mothers and wives of soldiers in Russia were considered to have some leeway for criticising the government, but earlier this year, police detained several women and have now classified a group that had pushed for men mobilised into the army in 2022 to be given a break as a “foreign agent”. This is a derogatory term and makes it far harder for the group to operate.

Even so, in new comments published this week by Astra, Alina Bolvinova described how a drunk Col Ksenofontov had ordered her husband on a suicide mission near the town of Avdiivka in February without ammunition for his rifle.

“They were sent out as cannon fodder,” she said. “Can a mentally healthy person give such orders? A person who does not enjoy killing. I think not.”

The Kremlin has deployed mass infantry tactics over the past few months to push forward its front line, suffering more than 1,000 casualties every day.

The Russian military leadership has been heavily criticised throughout the war for its barbaric methods.

Last month, two Russian drone operators posted a video accusing their commander of ordering them on a suicide mission in revenge for an argument. Another video showed an enraged Russian commander punching young soldiers in the face.

The world’s longest-running treasure hunt has been solved 31 years after a “Golden Owl” was buried somewhere in France.

The hunt for the Chouette d’Or – an owl statuette made from gold, silver and precious stones – has prompted such passion, even obsession, over the years that it is said to have led to financial ruin, divorce and even madness.

On Thursday, the man in charge of the hunt announced that the Owl, or at least a buried replica, has finally been found and that organisers are verifying the validity of the solution provided.

“We can confirm that the Golden Owl countermark was unearthed last night, at the same time as a solution was sent to the online verification system,” announced Michel Becker, the artist who designed the Golden Owl and who now runs the hunt and publishes the book of enigmas hunters must crack to find it.

“There is therefore no need to go digging at the location you assume to be the cache… we are checking the validity of the proposed solution,” he wrote on the game’s discord forum, in a message published at 8.26am on Thursday morning.

The hunt for the Chouette d’Or was launched in April 1993 when a French businessman who had adopted the alias Max Valentin said he had buried a bronze statue of an owl somewhere in France, and published a book of 11 enigmas as clues to its location.

The finder would be able to exchange the bronze bird for a statuette made from three kilos of gold, seven kilos of silver and diamonds on its head estimated at the time to be worth one ­million francs, the equivalent of €150,000 today, Valentin said.

Régis Hauser, the real name of the hunt creator, died in April 2009, sixteen years to the day after the countermark was buried.

Now in charge, Mr Becker has faced various lawsuits and claims by some disgruntled hunters that the riddles are impossible to solve. Earlier this year, he sued Yvon Crolet, a retired engineer who spent 20 years trying to solve the riddles before announcing that the whole thing was a fraud.

“When you study the evidence, you have to conclude there is nothing buried at all,” said Mr Crolet.

Mr Becker said: “He thought he’d found the solution but when he went there, he dug a hole that was empty. The plain fact is that his solution was wrong.”

After years of legal wrangling with Mr Hauser’s heirs, Mr Becker was able to recover the solutions in the early 2020s. But the mystery deepened when they sent him a floppy disk and he visited the spot where the statue should have been buried. Instead, in a hole 80cm below the surface, he found a plastic supermarket bag and inside it, a rusting bird made of ferrous metal but not bronze.

Perplexed, Mr Becker placed a new bronze owl marked 2/8 in the spot, so the game could go on.

While the winner has not yet been announced, the news sent shockwaves among “chouetteurs” – dedicated Owl hunters, who are said to number 200,000 – who logged on to the forum in their hundreds when the announcement was made.

Beyond learning the winner’s identity, they are now desperate for the publication of the solutions after decades of fruitless searching.

The book consists of eleven double-page spreads, each of which is a riddle composed of a title, text, and a painting. Each pair of pages is numbered with a wavelength associated with its colours, and with an owl face.

One enigma considered perhaps the easiest called OPENING, had already been solved:

There have been many armchair treasure hunts organised around the world ever since Kit Williams, the British artist, gave birth to the genre with Masquerade, his best­selling picture book of riddles in 1979.

However, few have prompted such passion as Sur la Trace de la Chouette d’Or (On the Trail of the Golden Owl) – the official name of the French hunt.

Some have dedicated so much time searching that their spouses have divorced them, it is said. Others have spent a fortune on travels across France. At least one is believed to have ended up in an asylum.

According to its creator, one hunter wanted to blow up a chapel after deciding the treasure was underneath. Another turned up in a bank with a pneumatic drill, convinced the owl was beneath the floor. A third was said to have located the treasure under a lake.

Last year, the mayor of one village in eastern France called Dabo issued a plea for hunters to stop digging holes around its chapel on a rock where many believed the treasure was buried.

Before his death, Valentin created more than twenty other treasure hunts, all of which have been resolved. To help hunters, he offered a few extra clues, such as the importance of maps and the existence of a final, hidden riddle that uses all previous ones to lead to the cache that contains the owl.

In 2021, Mr Becker launched another armchair haunt, this time to find the two halves of a key to a £650,000 golden casket celebrating the 1904 Entente Cordiale agreements between the UK and France, which sealed the end of almost 1,000 years of conflict between the two old foes.

Mr Becker said he bought the solid-gold casket at an auction and has had it authenticated by the jewellers who wrought it. The two halves are said to be buried in the UK and France.

One well-known “chouetteur” known only as Kaspius, 45, and who has spent 20 years hunting the owl statuette around France, said its discovery marks the end of an era.

“Régis Hauser’s riddles were brilliant, superbly written, a work of art in themselves. We won’t reach that level again… there may be other hunts, but this one will remain legendary,” he told France 3.

“It’s a relief, and at the same time a source of great frustration.”

Kaspuis, who has broadcast many videos on social media about the hunt, said he was convinced the replica was found at Les Bornes Saint Martin, near Dabo in Moselle, eastern France. “That’s where the solutions to the riddles converge… I was there last time in May. Today, I’ve been caught short and I’m a bit sorry, but it was a great quest.”

A police force has apologised after putting down a family’s pet XL bully dog by mistake.

Lancashire Constabulary said it had given the family an “unreserved apology” for euthanising the seized dog, named Bruno, while the owners were in the process of applying for an exemption to keep him.

In a statement, the force said Bruno was put down due to an “administration error”.

“In August we seized an XL bully dog from an address in Morecambe as part of our powers under the Dangerous Dogs Act as XL bully dogs are a banned breed,” the statement said.

“A file was being prepared for consideration of the owner being prosecuted for the relevant offences.

“However, unfortunately, due to an administration error the dog was subsequently euthanised before the court hearing.”

A ‘never event’

The force added that it has introduced a process “to ensure the same mistake cannot be made again”.

Lizzi Collinge, MP for Morecambe and Lunesdale, told the BBC that she is demanding answers over the incident.

“This should be a ‘never event’ and I have taken this issue up directly with the police,” she said.

Ms Collinge added: “I was shocked to see that a much-loved pet dog, Bruno, was wrongly euthanised while in police care.

“Processes should have been in place to ensure this never happened.

“There is a legal process when dogs are under police care and it appears this hasn’t been followed.

“I will continue to support the family and I appeal to the police to disclose how they are changing their practices so that this is something that can never happen again.”

As Boris Johnson’s book, Unleashed, is soon to hit the bookshelves, here are 10 new things his autobiography reveals.

Biden refused to board the pride and joy of the British naval fleet

Joe Biden refused to board the UK’s new £3.3 billion aircraft carrier because it had too many steps for him, Unleashed claims.

The “vast” HMS Prince of Wales had been “proudly stationed” in Carbis Bay, Cornwall, as Mr Johnson, the prime minister at the time, and the US president held a meeting before the G7 summit in 2021.

After questioning whether Mr Biden was “really as elderly-seeming as his detractors sometimes said”, Mr Johnson explained how the president’s first foreign trip did indeed raise questions about his health.

“His staff told us that he would not in fact be boarding our vast aircraft carrier – which we had proudly stationed in the bay – because it had so many steps; and we wondered what that meant about his physical fitness,” Mr Johnson wrote.

His fears that Mr Biden would fall asleep during meetings proved unfounded, in part because he appeared to “take a bit of shine” to Mr Johnson’s new wife, Carrie.

Mr Biden, who attended the summit with his wife, Jill, admitted that both he and Mr Johnson had “married above ourselves” before suggesting he and Carrie have a secluded walk on the beach.

“‘Why don’t you and I go down to the beach,’ he said to Carrie a bit later, while Jill Biden rolled her eyes, ‘and leave this guy here?’”

Afghan tribesmen offered to shoot dead strangers to welcome Biden

When Mr Biden went on a fact-finding mission to a remote settlement in Afghanistan, local tribesmen offered to shoot some passersby as a mark of respect for their American visitor.

Mr Johnson recalled how the US president had told of a trip to a “remote mountain fastness” in 2009 when Mr Biden was vice president.

The American said the local tribe was “thrilled to welcome such an important guest” and tried to find a suitable way to “honour him”.

Apparently they spotted “some distant people” on the far side of a valley before “taking out their six-foot jezzails” [weapons] and offering to shoot “these stick-like figures as a mark of respect”.

Mr Biden was appalled and successfully urged restraint.

Prince Andrew wanted to demolish Battersea Power Station

As London Mayor, Mr Johnson was summoned to a meeting with Prince Andrew in his “cluttered” apartment in Buckingham Palace.

In 2009, Battersea Power Station had “loomed uselessly for decades over the London skyline” and was good for just a “final shoot-out-and-torture scene” in a “noir-ish” gangster movie.

“The prince had another idea. ‘Why don’t you just tear it down?’ he said.”

Sir Simon Milton, the deputy mayor who attended the meeting, replied: “Why don’t we just knock down Buckingham Palace? There is a huge old space here. We could build loads of affordable housing.”

Mr Johnson recalled how the “duke/prince/Randy Andy” simply “goggled” at his colleague.

Johnson cornered as John Kerry urges UK to row back on Brexit

Boris Johnson defended Brexit by telling John Kerry, the US secretary of state at the time, that leaving the European Union was no different to the American Revolution rejecting foreign rule.

As the then foreign secretary, Mr Johnson was taken on a boat trip into Boston Harbour by Mr Kerry, along with their counterparts from France, Germany and Italy.

“We did Afghanistan, we did Syria, and then the subject of Brexit came up. Kerry turned to look at me and said, with a sudden air of conspiracy, ‘Can’t you walk that thing back?’”

Explaining how “all eyes” focused on him, “it occurred to me that this might in fact be the purpose of the gathering.”

He wrote that he “had to make it absolutely clear” to Mr Kerry that he was “deluded” if the referendum decision was going to be reversed.

Mr Johnson gestured towards the harbourfront explaining how in 1773 the Americans “threw our tea into the sea”, a reference to the Boston Tea Party, adding how “you guys… decided that you did not want to be ruled from overseas by a government over which you had no control”.

He concluded it was a “pretty sizzling return serve”, which meant his fellow guest “goggled” at him.

He later wrote how the UK must be more American, asking: “How dare the Americans tell us to keep limping along in the slow lane, with the EU, when they have a wholly different approach?”

He concluded that it was time to talk to Trump, who was beginning to dominate the US political landscape.

Xi Jinping security guard boards Queen’s Gold State Coach

The British Government “kow-towed so abjectly” to China during a state visit that Xi Jinping’s personal security guard managed to “scramble uninvited” into the Queen’s Gold State Coach.

In 2015, Xi Jinping, China’s president, made his first state visit to the UK while David Cameron was prime minister.

For the first time in the 260-year history of the Gold State Coach being used by the monarchy for special events, the Chinese leader’s “personal security guard” managed to “defeat all the equerries, to elude the royal protection squad and to scramble uninvited into the Gold State Coach”.

However, Mr Johnson notes how the Queen was “made of sterner stuff”, explaining how the “goon was ejected” after she said: “Get orff.”

China’s determination to obtain an economic grip in the UK saw them even offer to rebuild Crystal Palace, what Mr Johnson described as a “super-colossal greenhouse, once the greatest wonder of Victorian Britain.”

Mr Johnson concluded: “It was going to be a gigantic effulgent symbol of the new China, and the tables had now been turned on Britain.”

Dominic Cummings and Dilyn the Downing Street dog

Dominic Cummings leaked stories about the “morals and habits” of Dilyn the Downing Street dog, Mr Johnson claims.

The Jack Russel was adopted by Mr Johnson and Carrie in 2019 but newspaper stories began to reveal that Dilyn was proving a handful.

Mr Johnson said the canine, who was in the habit of “sniffing away at senior advisers, including [Dominic] Cummings”, “didn’t deserve” one “well-sourced attack” in The Times.

“I discovered to my amazement that Cummings, my senior adviser, and [Lee] Cain, the media spokesman, had actually been to see the editorial staff of The Times the previous day.”

When he asked Mr Cummings if he had been the source, his adviser replied “loud and clear” that he was not.

“Funny, I thought; it must be a coincidence,” Mr Johnson says in the book which features a number of family photographs of him with his wife and children.

He claims Mr Cummings was the source of speculation that he was “too knackered” to do his job as prime minister after suffering Covid.

He records how the “genial fox-hunting baronet” Sir Humphry Wakefield, Mr Cummings’ father-in-law, was quoted in Tatler as telling a guest to his Northumberland castle that Mr Johnson would step down in six months after suffering Covid.

“If you put a horse back to work when it is injured, it will never recover,” the baronet said.

Mr Johnson is convinced “he was surely only repeating what he thought he had been told, on good authority by his son-in-law viz my advisor Dom Cummings.”

The London 2012 Olympics

As the Mayor of London, Mr Johnson reveals that he was “mortified” as a number of international Olympic teams struggled to navigate the transport network at the London 2012 summer Olympics.

He reveals how the Australian team “got lost, because the bus driver had never been to London before and didn’t know how to use a satnav”. Then, the American team “took four hours to get from Heathrow to Stratford” before eventually arriving “thoroughly out of sorts” after the driver confused Stratford with Southend.

An unlikely alliance: Boris Johnson and his friend Piers Corbyn

Mr Johnson was “on friendly terms with the Marxist conspiracist Piers Corbyn” who claimed climate change was a hoax.

He explains how he even visited Mr Corbyn’s Weather Action meteorological unit in Bermondsey, East London.

He explained that despite his green credentials, he temporarily “strayed” as he believed climate change was a hoax, in part down to his conversations with Piers Corbyn, the brother of Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour leader.

He said he gave Mr Corbyn “airtime” in his Telegraph columns before going on to collaborate with “sceptics and climate deniers in making fun of green power.”

A young Boris was knocked down in playground fight with girl

While at primary school, a young Mr Johnson decided that his unique skill may have been his impressive physical strength.

He described himself as a “pre-pubescent Chuck Norris”, the US martial arts expert and actor. As a result, he decided “insanely” to challenge fellow pupils to fights.

Although most children laughed at him, an older child called Tracy, who had “large and knobbly” fists, took up his offer.

Before Mr Johnson, whose hero was Muhammad Ali, had time to clench his fists, he was lying on his back “legs waving feebly in the air” as Tracy loomed triumphantly over him.

He said he learned the important lesson that “we are not as good as we think we are, and other people often turn out to be better at something than you predict”.

Public service is not popularity contest, Queen says

In his afterword, Mr Johnson encourages would-be politicians not to be deterred by the threat of the very personal attacks that can come with the job, particularly during the age of social media.

“Don’t be fooled into thinking that any of it is personal. It’s part of the job,” he writes. “As her Majesty the Queen once said to me in one of our sessions: ‘It’s not about being popular, it’s about being useful.’”

He claims the useful things he has done during his “15 years at or near the top of UK politics” include introducing hire bikes, levelling up and creating new nuclear reactors, new bridges and new railways.

Unleashed by Boris Johnson will be published by William Collins on 10th October (£30); books.telegraph.co.uk

A planning row has erupted in a Georgian conservation area after the council ordered an orange and blue shopfront to be repainted.

Peters’ Cleaner in Stamford, Lincolnshire was given the bold makeover in October 2022 in an attempt to make it “stand out”.

Vicky Whiter, its owner, has since been locked in a battle with South Kesteven district council because she did not apply for planning permission before the “unacceptable” paint job.

Conservation rules in her area of Stamford, which has been dubbed “Britain’s most picturesque” town, mean that any repainting of shopfronts needs to be approved by the council.

Ms Whiter said that she was unaware of the rules when she had it painted the shopfront and that she cannot afford to pay to have it changed, which she estimates would cost as much as £5,000.

She said: “I budget to re-decorate the shop front every four years and will happily adhere to all planning when I plan to re-decorate in the summer of 2026.”

“At this time however I cannot put the survival of my business at risk by spending now.”

Ms Whiter’s shop was previously painted dark blue, which she said made it hard to identify.

The new colours were introduced along with a vinyl orange screen covering the top of the front window which Ms Whiter said was necessary to protect her and her employees from the sun which shines into the shop for most of the day.

Several other shops in Stamford have eye-catching shades, including Oliver Bonas, which stands out in pink in the High Street, and Joules, which sports yellow.

Ms Whiter said she fears that she will be taken to court by the council if her request for more time to repaint the shopfront is refused.

According to the Stamford Shopfront Design Guide, a document drawn up by the district council to ensure that the heritage is retained, the maximum penalty for breaking the rules is two years in prison and an unlimited fine.

The rules include a recommendation to use white or neutral colours on slender shopfronts, and a single colour for all the major elements of the design.

But there is no indication of what colours are and are not allowed.

“This bullish attitude is unfathomable,” Ms Whiter said.

“Stamford’s independent shops are the heart and soul of the town and are what makes it special.”

She added: “I very much hope the council will take a pragmatic and supportive stance and work with small independent retailers to ensure that by improving the look of the high street they don’t immeasurably damage it by driving independents out of business.”

A spokesman for South Kesteven district council said any changes to the shop were subject to conservation area and listed building rules.

They said: “Listing ensures that the architectural and historic interests of buildings are carefully considered separately from the merits of any development proposals and before any alterations, either external or internal, are agreed.

“Listed building consent is required for any changes that would alter their special character.

“No advice or guidance was sought prior to the painting of these premises but council officers have since suggested alternative paint colours that would be appropriate and are happy to continue to work with the applicant to agree both these and a timescale for the repainting of the shopfront.”

A former police officer is under criminal investigation following the wrongful conviction of Andrew Malkinson, who spent 17 years in jail over a rape he did not commit.

The police watchdog has announced four retired officers from Greater Manchester Police (GMP) are being investigated for gross misconduct.

The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) said one of the officers had also been placed under criminal investigation for misconduct in a public office and perverting the course of justice.

Mr Malkinson, 58, was jailed for rape in 2004 until his conviction was quashed by the Court of Appeal last year.

The IOPC is now investigating complaints by Mr Malkinson about GMP and its investigation leading to his imprisonment.

The watchdog is examining whether police followed the appropriate processes during the identification of Mr Malkinson as a suspect – whether witnesses were offered any incentive to provide evidence, the alleged failure to disclose information that may have helped Mr Malkinson’s defence at his trial and the handling and disposal of items of evidence.

Catherine Bates, the regional director of the IOPC, said: “Mr Malkinson is a victim of one of the worst miscarriages of justice in British history.

“We continue to work hard to ensure his complaints are thoroughly and independently investigated.

“Following a detailed review of evidence spanning a period of more than 20 years, we have now informed four retired GMP officers that they are under investigation for potential gross misconduct.

“One of the officers has also been notified that they are under criminal investigation for potential misconduct in public office and perverting the course of justice in relation to their actions during the police investigation and subsequent trial.

“Our investigation team continues to work hard to conclude our investigation as soon as reasonably possible while ensuring our inquiries do not prejudice separate criminal matters linked to the crime Mr Malkinson was wrongly convicted of.

“We will continue to keep Mr Malkinson and GMP updated on our progress.”

The IOPC added that serving an officer with notice they are under investigation does not necessarily mean that disciplinary proceedings or criminal charges will follow.

At the end of its investigation, it will determine whether there is an indication that anyone serving with the police may have breached the standards of professional behaviour or if the case should be referred to the Crown Prosecution Service.

Before his conviction was quashed in July 2023, Mr Malkinson twice applied for his case to be referred for appeal by the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), but was turned down.

Mr Malkinson was eventually released from prison in December 2020.

Thousands of convictions are now being reviewed in the wake of his case.

The CCRC has been told to look back over all cases which have the “possibility of DNA opportunities”.

A review found delays and failings in Mr Malkinson’s case, which spanned years. It said they demonstrated a “deep-seated, system-wide, cultural reluctance, which starts right at the top in the Court of Appeal, to acknowledge our criminal justice system will on occasion make mistakes, that entirely innocent defendants will sometimes be convicted”.

The CCRC admitted to failing Mr Malkinson and offered an “unreserved apology”.

A hunt saboteur was punched in the head while he watched a meet from his car.

Philip Walters had been observing the Pytchley Hunt in Cottesbrooke, Northamptonshire, in March last year when he was attacked.

Marc Birney, 43, was fined at Northampton magistrates’ court on Thursday after being convicted of assault by beating.

Birney approached the car as animal activists from North London Hunt Saboteurs monitored the hunt and banged on Mr Walters’s door window, shouting: “Knock, knock”.

When he wound down his window, Birney reached in, snatched his sunglasses and punched him twice in the side of his face.

The court heard that Birney only stopped the assault when other saboteurs intervened.

He then got back into his own car with another man and a woman and drove away from the scene on March 18 last year.

Mr Walters suffered minor injuries. Birney, of Pipewell, Northamptonshire, pleaded not guilty but was convicted following a trial.

On Thursday, he was fined £300, ordered to pay the victim £200 compensation and ordered to pay other costs totalling £320.

However, the lead investigator into the incident from Northamptonshire Police branded the sentence “disappointing”.

Pc Chloe Gillies, from the force’s rural crime team, said: “I am pleased Marc Birney was found guilty of this offence at court as this type of behaviour is totally unacceptable and there is never an excuse to assault someone.

“Although the sentence is disappointing, I understand the limitations which resulted in it and I hope the victim in this case feels some sense of justice at Birney being convicted of his crime.

“This was an unprovoked attack on the victim and Birney is fortunate that his actions didn’t have more serious consequences.

“Violence is not tolerated and as a force, we will always pursue criminal action against any offender.”

Giving evidence during the trial, Mr Walters told how he was attacked while monitoring the hunt on the last day of the hunting season.

He said: “I was parked up on the left-hand side of the road sat in the driver’s seat, listening to the radio.

“A car pulled up in front of us with a masked man. Mr Birney got out of the car.

“He walked around to the driver’s door. He knocked on the window and said: ‘Knock, knock’. He then knocked my wing mirror back.

“I wound the window down to move it back. He snatched my sunglasses off my head and made contact with my head.

“Then he punched me twice in my jaw, here [pointing to the right-hand side of his face]. I felt a sharp pain and the area swelled up 24 hours afterwards.”

A spokesman for the North London Hunt Saboteurs said after the case: “We have this to say to Mr Birney – despite your lenient sentence today, we have won.

“We are happy to put you on our mantlepiece next to the other useful idiots we have secured convictions against.

“Our member would like to thank our supporters and other saboteur groups we work with.

“We will never be intimidated away from protecting defenceless animals by the likes of Marc Birney.”

A police force has apologised after putting down a family’s pet XL bully dog by mistake.

Lancashire Constabulary said it had given the family an “unreserved apology” for euthanising the seized dog, named Bruno, while the owners were in the process of applying for an exemption to keep him.

In a statement, the force said Bruno was put down due to an “administration error”.

“In August we seized an XL bully dog from an address in Morecambe as part of our powers under the Dangerous Dogs Act as XL bully dogs are a banned breed,” the statement said.

“A file was being prepared for consideration of the owner being prosecuted for the relevant offences.

“However, unfortunately, due to an administration error the dog was subsequently euthanised before the court hearing.”

A ‘never event’

The force added that it has introduced a process “to ensure the same mistake cannot be made again”.

Lizzi Collinge, MP for Morecambe and Lunesdale, told the BBC that she is demanding answers over the incident.

“This should be a ‘never event’ and I have taken this issue up directly with the police,” she said.

Ms Collinge added: “I was shocked to see that a much-loved pet dog, Bruno, was wrongly euthanised while in police care.

“Processes should have been in place to ensure this never happened.

“There is a legal process when dogs are under police care and it appears this hasn’t been followed.

“I will continue to support the family and I appeal to the police to disclose how they are changing their practices so that this is something that can never happen again.”

Rachel Reeves’s plan to cut almost £2 billion from the foreign aid budget has sparked a Cabinet backlash, The Telegraph can reveal.

David Lammy, the Foreign Secretary, is among ministers demanding she announce more money for the aid budget and warning about the damage the cuts will cause.

However, the Chancellor is preparing to let spending on aid fall to 0.5 per cent of gross national income (GNI) after two years when it had been boosted above that level by Jeremy Hunt, the former Tory chancellor.

Aid organisations, including the UK arm of the charity run by David Miliband, have warned that Ms Reeves’s plans will see the aid budget fall to a 17-year low and are lobbying ministers over the issue.

The row is just one of a series of stand-offs over the Budget as Cabinet ministers rail against the spending efficiencies demanded by the Treasury ahead of Oct 30.

The health and education departments have been ordered to find savings of at least £1 billion each, despite their secretaries of state vowing no return to austerity.

Cabinet ministers have been taking their complaints directly to Darren Jones, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, this week in face-to-face meetings.

‘Iron grip’ on spending

Multiple government insiders have told The Telegraph that ministerial tensions on spending cuts demanded by Ms Reeves are much bigger than the supposed No 10 rifts making headlines.

“She is holding an iron grip on spending”, said one Whitehall source.

The negotiations are the backdrop for what Sir Keir Starmer and Ms Reeves have warned the public will be a “painful” Budget, with tough decisions on spending, taxation and welfare.

The Treasury is expected to launch a tax raid to generate extra revenue, but Ms Reeves has also been demanding savings in departmental budgets.

She has told ministers she wants £3 billion of efficiencies found, even as she looks to raise overall public spending to avoid real-terms cuts for government departments.

The clash over foreign aid comes after Rishi Sunak abandoned Lord Cameron’s promise to spend 0.7 per cent of GNI on overseas development assistance during Covid, spending 0.5 per cent instead.

Labour has stuck to the same position, which involves promising a return to 0.7 per cent when the public finances have stabilised. No date has been put on hitting that promise.

However, in the last years of the Tory government, Andrew Mitchell and Jeremy Hunt – respectively foreign minister and chancellor, and both supporters of overseas aid – increased the aid budget.

They agreed an extra £2.5 billion for overseas aid in 2022 for two years, but that additional spending boost will end this financial year.

As a result, foreign aid spending is forecasted to drop from £15.3 billion, or 0.58 per cent of GNI, in 2023 to £13.6 billion, or 0.50 per cent of GNI, in 2024. That is a fall of £1.7 billion. The exact figure depends on the size of the economy this year.

The fall is accentuated by the fact that more than a quarter of the aid budget has been spent in recent years on looking after asylum-seekers who have arrived in the UK, including spiralling hotel bills.

The spending officially counts as overseas aid, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development definition, but critics say that it breaks the spirit of the pledge.

Mr Lammy and Anneliese Dodds, the development minister, are understood to be pushing the Treasury for more aid money.

Spokesmen for the Foreign Office and the Treasury did not dispute there was a stand-off over aid spending. No comment was issued by either department, with live Budget negotiations cited.

International Rescue Committee UK, the British arm of the refugee charity run by Mr Miliband – the former foreign secretary once tipped for the Labour leadership – signed a private letter protesting against the cuts last month.

Mr Mitchell, who has long championed higher aid spending, called on the Treasury to approve more money, warning about the impact on poor children if there is no change.

He told The Telegraph: “The huge cost of first-year asylum seekers falls within the definition of the international development budget, but it is a colossal amount of money.

“That is why Jeremy Hunt as chancellor and the Treasury were persuaded to give us an extra £2.5 billion over the past two years.

“Since then, the costs have risen even further. The Treasury must help with this.

“If Rachel Reeves does not provide additional money, the effect will be that thousands of children in the developing world will suffer egregiously.”

Romilly Greenhill, the chief executive of Bond, the UK network for organisations working in international development, said the country had a “moral duty” to help those suffering abroad.

The organisation produced an analysis last month that showed if UK asylum seeker spending was removed, the foreign aid budget would fall to its lowest level since 2007.

Ms Greenhill said: “We’re concerned that the UK aid budget will drop to its lowest in 17 years if the Government doesn’t act in the autumn Budget.

“With global crises like climate change, conflict and food insecurity worsening, the Government must stop diverting UK aid to fund the UK’s failing asylum system.

“We need separate, dedicated funding to support these marginalised groups here in the UK. The UK has a moral duty to ensure millions worldwide can still access vital services and support they need to stay safe in their own countries.”

International crime fighting teams including British officers are to be deployed against people smuggling gangs in migration hotspots under a new G7 “action” plan announced on Friday.

At a three-day meeting in Italy, Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, and her G7 counterparts agreed to establish a network of law enforcement officers based in source countries from which the migrants originate and in “transit” nations through which they travel to stem the flow and crackdown on the gangs.

The officers would be responsible for collecting and sharing intelligence on the gangs and co-ordinating joint operations involving border and law enforcement agencies from the G7 to identify and combat the criminals trafficking migrants.

It will include UK National Crime Agency (NCA) and Border Force officers.

The move reflects increased efforts by the UK and other EU nations to tackle the problem “upstream” before migrants reach southern Europe or the Channel by turning them back at sea in the Mediterranean and disrupting the gangs’ supply chains for small boats.

Britain has already deployed more Border Force and NCA officers to Europol as well as “transit” countries such as northern France, Italy, Romania, Bulgaria, Austria and Albania and “source” countries in Africa and south-east Asia.

The moves are part of a five-point “action” plan agreed by the G7 interior ministers from the UK, France, Germany, Italy, the US, Canada and Japan – with EU representatives also present.

It also includes commitments to negotiate more returns agreements so that illegal migrants can be deported once they reach G7 countries and get social media companies to do more to remove adverts by organised crime gangs promoting their smuggling services.

Ms Cooper said: “Criminal smuggling gangs who organise small boat crossings undermine our border security and put lives at risk. Our new government is rapidly accelerating cooperation with other countries to crack down on these dangerous gangs.

“Today’s newly agreed G7 action plan provides an important focus on international law enforcement and reflects our determination to work with global partners on these shared challenges.

“New international joint investigative teams will help coordinate cross-border action and supplement the measures we have already taken to set up the UK Border Security Command and back it with new funding.

“The plan will help to increase both voluntary and enforced returns of migrants to countries of origin. It aims to offer migrants more choices and improve the overall management of migration flows.”

Channel crossings resume

The move came as migrants were brought to shore on Friday after crossing the English Channel, the first arrivals following a spell of bad weather.

Pictures showed people wearing life jackets arriving in Dover on a Border Force vessel on Friday, the first crossings since Sunday, when 59 people were recorded as arriving in one boat.

Some 25,244 migrants have so far crossed the Channel this year, 0.3 per cent on this time last year (25,330) and 25 per cent lower than the same period in 2022 (33,611).

‘Follow the money’

The agreement, signed in Rome, tasked law enforcement officers from the G7 to launch joint investigative actions against “high value targets” including organised crime gangs as well as creating a “network of liaison officers” in transit and source countries.

This included sharing expertise on the seizure and confiscation of criminal proceeds by taking a “follow the money” approach.

It also committed to “exploring equitable and mutually beneficial partnerships and bilateral or multilateral instruments with countries of origin, transit, and destination, aimed at cooperation in the field of combating smuggling of migrants, trafficking in persons and border security.”

One in 50 Albanians in the UK is in jail, according to analysis revealing the first league table of criminality by nationality.

More than 1,200 Albanians have been sent to prison from a migrant population of nearly 53,000 Albanians living in the UK who do not have UK citizenship, according to a Telegraph analysis of official data.

They top a table of more than 130 nationalities ranked on the number of prisoners per 10,000 of the population in the UK from their countries. Albanians are followed by Kosovans, Vietnamese, Algerians, Jamaicans, Eritreans, Iraqis and Somalis.

The analysis suggests that the overall imprisonment rate of foreign nationals is 27 per cent higher than for British citizens. It shows 18.2 inmates per 10,000 migrants compared with the UK’s 14 per 10,000. German, Italian, Indian, Greek, US, Sri Lankan, French and Chinese nationals are the least likely to be jailed.

It is the first time such an analysis has been carried out amid claims that there has been an “institutional cover-up” over the publication of migrant crime rates.

Senior Tory MPs have urged both the Conservative and Labour governments to publish data like Denmark and some US states that would enable league tables of the crime rates of each nation’s migrants to be compiled.

While data on nationalities among the prison population reveals the scale of serious crimes committed by non-UK nationals, information about offences committed by migrants for which they are not jailed is not published.

A backbench amendment to Rishi Sunak’s Sentencing Bill would have required the Government each year to present a report to Parliament detailing the nationality, visa and asylum status of every offender convicted in English and Welsh courts in the previous 12 months. The Bill was ditched due to the election.

Supporters including Tory leadership contender Robert Jenrick and former minister Neil O’Brien argue such data would enable the Home Office to toughen up visa and deportation policies for nationalities linked to higher rates of crime in the UK.

Mr O’Brien said it was a “fascinating” analysis by The Telegraph which revealed “enormous variations” between nationalities. 

“It is shameful that the Government refuses to publish so much of the information which it holds about this subject. It should be available to the public so we can have an informed debate,” he said.

“The Home Office knows the immigration status of prisoners and whether they were here legally or illegally, but it does not publish this. It knows about the offending history of overseas nationals in our prisons and whether they are committing multiple offences but it does not publish this.

“Across the board, the migration debate is hampered by a lack of data which the Government could easily publish but chooses not to on things like the impact on public services and spending. The data the Government is refusing to disclose on criminal justice is a particularly bad example of this.”

Mr Jenrick said: “This analysis confirms what the public will have sensed for a long time: some nationalities are more likely to go on to commit serious crimes than others. It once again points to the need for a far more tightly controlled immigration system, including more rigorous security checks for nationalities linked to criminality in the UK.”

 The Telegraph compiled the league table by taking data from the Ministry of Justice which shows there are 10,435 foreign nationals in jails in England and Wales compared with 76,866 British nationals. Nations with fewer than 20 people in UK jails were excluded because of the low sample size.

This was cross-referenced with Office for National Statistics 2021 census data, from which was extracted the number of foreign nationals from each country who have not got a UK passport. There may be some margin for error as some foreign nationals could have been granted citizenship but not applied for a passport.

The Albanian imprisonment rate was 232.33 per 10,000 people – or one in 50. This was calculated based on the census data showing  68,672 foreign-born Albanians lived in the UK. Excluding the 15,860 without a UK passport leaves some 52,000. With 1,227 in jail, it equates to two per cent of Albanians.

The analysis is likely to have underestimated the size of the Albanian population as it does not take into account illegal migrants including more than 12,000 who reached the UK in small boats across the Channel in 2022. Some estimates have put it as high as 140,000, which would make it just under one in 100 in jail.

At the time the census was conducted in 2021, there were 300 more Albanians in prison than there are now, meaning the proportion would be even higher than current estimates.

The Albanians are followed by Kosovans with an imprisonment rate of 150.23 per 10,000, Vietnamese (148.88), Algerians (124.41), Jamaicans (110.77), Eritreans (110.7), Iraqis (104.43) and Somalis (100.37). All have more than one in 100 of their respective populations in jail.

They are at least 25 times more likely to be in jail than foreign nationals with the lowest rates of imprisonment and at least seven times the rate of British citizens at 14.27 per 100,000 of the population.

Germany had the fewest, at 4.68 per 10,000 (one in 2,000), followed by Italy (4.96), India (6.24), Greece (6.36), US (7.27), Sri Lanka (8.17), France (8.64) and China (9.39).

A government spokesman said: “This Government is committed to delivering justice for victims and safer streets for our communities. Foreign nationals who commit crime should be in no doubt that the law will be enforced and, where appropriate, we will pursue their deportation.”

Sir Keir Starmer has refused to rule out ending British control of Gibraltar and the Falklands, amid an ongoing backlash over his Chagos Islands deal.

Asked on Friday to guarantee that no other British overseas territory would be signed away by the Government, the Prime Minister avoided the question, telling reporters that securing the use of the military base on Diego Garcia, a part of the Chagos Islands, was his focus.

He said: “The single-most important thing was ensuring that we had a secure base, the joint US-UK base; hugely important to the US, hugely important to us.”

The Prime Minister’s evasive answer raised fears about not only Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands, which are wanted by Spain and Argentina, respectively, but a series of other dependencies.

He announced on Thursday his decision to authorise the handover of the strategically important Chagos Islands to Mauritius.

The Telegraph can reveal that the controversial agreement will cost the taxpayer hundreds of millions of pounds and will see the UK paying Mauritius until as late as 2164 – much longer than the 99 years that have been made public.

The Chagos Islands have been British since 1814, but their sovereignty will be handed to Mauritius in the deal that the Government claimed would safeguard global security by ending a long-running dispute.

However, it also means that for the first time in more than 200 years, the sun will finally set on the British Empire.

The location of the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean meant that at any point of the day, at least part of Britain or its territories would be in daylight. When the islands are finally handed over, this will no longer be true.

Under the deal to give the islands to Mauritius, Britain will send money to the Indian Ocean nation every year for 99 years, with the possibility of an extension by another 40 years, to allow access to the island of Diego Garcia, the site of a naval base.

But the naval base will still be operated by the US and Washington will pay nothing to the Mauritian government or to the UK.

Assuming the deal is ratified next year, it would mean the UK likely pays Mauritius until the year 2164.

A government source said that even though hundreds of millions would be paid out over that period, it was still a “deal worth doing”.

‘This reckless deal’

But Grant Shapps, the former defence secretary, said: “Keir Starmer is not just giving away a vital military asset: he’s paying for the privilege, and keeping the cost hidden from the public.

“This is taxpayers’ money, and the country deserves to know exactly how much this giveaway will cost us. Is it an annual fee? Is it tied to inflation? This reckless deal has serious consequences, and the public deserves answers.”

On Friday, Downing Street said: “Chagos does not change our policy or approach to other overseas territories.”

However, Argentina has already welcomed the deal, calling it a “step in the right direction”.

Diana Mondino, the foreign minister, promised the country would gain “full sovereignty” of the Falkland Islands.

Rupert Lowe, the Reform UK MP, wrote on X: “Starmer must immediately guarantee that Labour will not surrender any other British overseas territories. I have asked the Foreign Office to urgently confirm this in writing.”

Mr Shapps said: “Keir Starmer might have a penchant for free gifts, but that should not include giving away Britain’s international assets.

“His Chagos capitulation not only jeopardises the sovereignty of a vital military base but sets a dangerous precedent for other overseas territories.

“Will Labour hand over our bases in Cyprus next? Or throw in Ascension Island and Bermuda for good measure? Pandering to his Left-wing supporters who want to see Britain shrink from the world, shouldn’t come at the cost of Britain’s global defence capabilities.”

‘Against British interests’

The UK has two sovereign bases in Cyprus, Akrotiri and Dhekelia, which it has held since the island was given independence from Britain in 1960, and are thought to be vital to surveillance-gathering efforts in the Mediterranean and the Middle East.

There is also a base on Ascension Island, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Its existence proved vital for the 1982 recapture of the Falklands.

Andrew Rosindell, the Tory MP and chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on crown dependencies and overseas territories, said: “There are major concerns here. The Labour Party has a record of showing disregard to the wishes of the people of the overseas territories. The last Labour government suggested joint UK and Spanish sovereignty of Gibraltar.

“The Chagos decision is against British interests, human rights and self-determination, which is what decolonisation was meant to be based on.

“Instead we are acting as a colonial power handing over the land to a foreign government without anyone having any say. Democracy has been completely trashed.

“The precedent is now set that if Labour does not feel it needs to keep an overseas territory, it will just hand it over.

“I think Labour’s aim is for all overseas territories to go. It’s all about Britain in retreat. I think all the overseas territories are at risk.”

‘Sheer political correctness’

On Friday, Boris Johnson claimed Sir Keir had decided to hand over the islands out of “sheer political correctness”.

The former prime minister accused the Government of ceding sovereignty over the archipelago, at a strategic waypoint in the Indian Ocean, in order to “look like the good guys”.

Speaking to Camilla Tominey on GB News, Mr Johnson claimed the Government had ceded the territory to give the impression the UK was “unbundling the last relics of our Empire”.

“Get out your maps, get out your atlases, check out the Chagos Islands, see where they are, see where Mauritius is. A long way away,” he said.

“What is this claim? It’s nonsense, it’s total nonsense. Why are we doing this? Sheer political correctness, desire to look like the good guys, a desire to look as though we are unbundling the last relics of our Empire. It’s nonsense.”

However, the deal means that for the first time in more than 200 years, the sun will finally set on the British Empire.

The Chagos Islands were Britain’s most easterly overseas territory but Sir Keir’s decision means that UK territory in Cyprus is now its furthest to the east.

The British statesman Earl Macartney’s famous words – “this vast Empire on which the sun never sets” – was most prominently used in the 18th and 19th centuries – when the Empire was at its largest – but they fell out of favour as it began to fall apart.

Some experts claimed that the phrase was no longer correct after Hong Kong was transferred to the People’s Republic of China in 1997.

Since the days of Galileo, science and faith have frequently been at odds with each other. But inside Professor Liberato De Caro’s laboratory, they seem to be in union.

Nestled in an unprepossessing, modern office block on a busy road in the Italian town of Bari, on the Adriatic coast of Puglia, his team of scientists have come up with evidence which they say dispels centuries of speculation on the most disputed holy relic in Christendom. In fact, they claim to have produced evidence which proves what the faithful have long believed – that the Turin Shroud did indeed once cover the body of Christ.

Measuring 4.3 metres (14 feet 3 inches) long and 1.1 metres (3 feet 7 inches) wide, the cloth bears the image, eerily reversed like a photographic negative, of a crucified man whom the faithful insist is Christ. It appears to show the back and front of a gaunt, bearded man with long hair and sunken eyes, his arms crossed on his chest. There appear to be blood stains emanating from wounds in his wrists, feet and side.

For hundreds of years it has been regarded by many as a mediaeval hoax. But De Caro’s team have cast new light on the artefact, indicating it dates back 2,000 years after all, to the days of the New Testament.

The hallelujah moment was reached in the humble surroundings of their small, third-floor laboratory, which belongs to the Institute of Crystallography (part of the state-funded Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, or National Research Council). It is here that a tiny fibre plucked from the Turin Shroud – which is kept under lock and key in the royal chapel of the Cathedral of San Giovanni Battista in Turin – was placed in an apparatus called an X-ray micro-imaging machine.

The contraption consists of a long steel tube connected to wires, sensors and an ominous looking emergency red light. It also features an incongruous mascot: a tiny soft toy monkey dangling from a key ring. “He’s our lucky charm,” says Rocco Lassandro, the lab’s chief technician. “We’ve had him for years.”

Scientists led by Professor Liberato De Caro decided to subject the tiny Shroud sample, which at 0.5 mm × 1 mm is smaller than a grain of rice, to a new dating method called Wide-Angle X-ray Scattering (WAXS) which measures the structural degradation and ageing of ancient materials.

“It’s a sort of radiography, similar to the type of scan that you would do on a bone to see if there is a fracture. But this X-ray penetrates the material very deeply to analyse it at a microscopic level,” Prof De Caro says.

“Over time, the structure of the material degrades. We can tell from that how much time has passed and therefore date the object.”

Cinzia Giannini, the director of the institute, likens the approach to using “a tiny laser beam”. “It is a technique that has a huge range of applications. But this is the first time that it’s been used on a sample from the Shroud,” she says.

When the fibre was analysed by the powerful X-ray machine, the scientists were astounded at the result that emerged. The Shroud did not originate, as has long been thought, in the 13th century, but from 1,300 years earlier.

In age, it matched a similarly minute shred of linen that came from the Siege of Masada in AD73, when a band of Jews who had sought sanctuary on a sheer-sided outcrop in the desert were besieged by a Roman army. Rather than wait to be chopped to pieces by the swords of the advancing legions, who built a giant ramp so that they could access the cliff-top fortress, they took their own lives en masse. The scrap of cloth from Masada has been dated to 55–74AD.

“There was a sense of joy, of shock,” says Prof De Caro. “Why? Because we had verified that it could be authentic. We know for sure that the sample from the fortress of Masada is 2,000 years old. The results from the Turin Shroud sample were highly compatible. The direct comparison verified that the Turin Shroud sample is 2,000 years old.”

The scientists used slightly more sober language when they announced their extraordinary findings in the peer-reviewed journal Heritage in August. “The degree of natural aging of the cellulose that constitutes the linen of the investigated sample, obtained by X-ray analysis, showed that the Turin Shroud fabric is much older than the seven centuries proposed by the 1988 radiocarbon dating. The experimental results are compatible with the hypothesis that the Turin Shroud is a 2000-year-old relic, as supposed by Christian tradition.”

The provenance and authenticity of the Turin Shroud have divided opinion for centuries. It first emerges in the historical record in 1354 in mediaeval France. In a tale that could have come straight from the pages of a Dan Brown novel, a knight named Geoffroi de Charny presented it to a church in Lirey near Nantes in northern France. Nobody knows how he acquired it.

Not long afterwards, in 1389, the bishop of Troyes denounced the Shroud as a forgery. Pope Clement VII declared that it was a man-made religious icon rather than a relic. In 1453, the royal House of Savoy acquired the cloth, moving it to a chapel in Chambery, where it was damaged in a fire in 1532. Nearly 50 years later, in 1578, it was moved to Turin, the new Savoyard capital, where it has been ever since. It is exhibited only rarely.

For sceptics, the main scientific evidence that it must be a mediaeval fake came in 1988, when snippets were subjected to radiocarbon dating by laboratories in Oxford, Zurich and Tucson, Arizona. The results suggested that the linen cloth dated from sometime between 1260 and 1390AD. They confirmed what many sceptics had long believed – that the Shroud was an ingenious hoax, a manufactured relic that would have been a cash cow for the mediaeval pilgrimage business.

Since then, however, many experts have called into question the accuracy of the dating. They say it was skewed by contamination – either from past restorations that used contemporary materials to repair the cloth, or from microbes, or even from damage caused by the 1532 fire, which could have altered its chemical composition.

It was not the radiocarbon techniques that were at fault, but the fact that the parts of the Shroud that were tested were contaminated, said Jean-Christian Petitfils, a French historian who has studied the relic for more than 40 years.

“Traces of fungus and calcium carbonate were found,” Mr Petitfils, the author of The Shroud of Turin: The Definitive Investigation, told the National Catholic Register. “The sample area corresponded to a darned area: modern threads were inserted in the 16th century, in order to repair this area that had been worn away. The carbon-14 experiment (of 1988) is null and void.”

Prof De Caro also believes that the results of the 1988 analysis are wrong. “The Shroud has been the centre of attention for centuries. It was touched by countless people, displayed during parades, affected by smoke from candles. There was a great deal of contamination. That is why the carbon dating gave a result that suggested that it dated from mediaeval times,” he says.

He points out that tests conducted in 1999 found pollen on the Shroud that were consistent with pollen from plants found in and around Jerusalem. And he suggests that if the Shroud was a medieval forgery, surely it would be easy to replicate? Yet no one has managed to come up with a replica, faithful to every detail.

“With all the technology that we have in the third millennium, we still have not been able to reproduce it. Science has not been able to explain how the image was formed. There is no known physical or chemical process that would enable a corpse to generate an image like this. It’s a total mystery.”

It seems particularly fitting that the research has been carried out in Bari. For centuries, pilgrims flocked here en route to the Holy Land. The labyrinth of alleys and tiny piazzas in the old town are replete with shrines and white-stoned medieval churches, resembling a miniature Jerusalem. The 12th century Basilica of St Nicholas holds the remains of the saint – the inspiration for Santa Claus – and is a focus of devotion both for Roman Catholics and Orthodox Christians.

Inevitably, the question poses itself. Are the scientists religious? Prof De Caro is. As a young man he was an atheist, but says the wonders of the natural world convinced him that there must be some grand plan behind the creation of the Universe. He is now a committed Catholic and a deacon in his local church.

Personally, he thinks the Shroud is genuine. “If I had to be a judge in a trial, weighing up all the evidence that says the Shroud is authentic and the little evidence that says it is not, in all good conscience I could not declare that the Turin Shroud is mediaeval. It would not be right, given the enormous quantity of evidence in favour of it. It correlates with everything that the Gospels tell us about the death of Jesus of Nazareth.”

Prof Giannini, on the other hand, is not a firm believer. She says she believes in some sort of spiritual dimension to the world, but does not go to church.

Either way, the scientists insist that whatever the outcome of their X-ray examination, they would have published the results anyway, in the interests of academic rigour. “As scientists there are certain standards that we adhere to,” says Prof De Caro.

So having lobbed a grenade into the world of Shroud research, what happens next? 

The team in Bari is keen for independent tests to be carried out by other laboratories around the world, so that their findings can be subject to scrutiny. The two samples – the one from the Shroud, the other from the scrap of linen found at Masada – are currently kept at the University of Padua in northern Italy. There they wait to be examined afresh.

“The technique we used is non-destructive, which is a huge advantage. It means the tests could be conducted again by another laboratory,” says Prof De Caro. The X-ray analysis may suggest that the Shroud is 2,000 years old. But, remarkable as the findings may be, they still don’t definitively prove it is the cloth that covered Christ.

“Science can take us only to a certain point,” says Prof De Caro. “Everything beyond that is a matter of faith.”

Joe Biden has suggested that Israel could be attempting to interfere in the U.S. election by refusing to agree to ceasefires in Lebanon and Gaza.

The President did not definitively rule out the possibility that Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, was trying to influence the contest, when challenged by reporters on Friday afternoon.

“No administration has helped Israel more than I have – none, none, none,” Mr. Biden said.

“And I think Bibi [Mr. Netanyahu] should remember that, and whether he’s trying to influence the election, I don’t know, but I’m not counting on that.”

Israel ignored a U.S.-led initiative for a 21-day ceasefire in Lebanon before launching a ground invasion aimed at rooting out Hezbollah targets across the border.

Issue of Israel politically charged

The issue of Israel has become politically charged for Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, who is courting voters who both want to punish Israel for the Gaza war and stand by the Jewish state.

Jewish voters are also seen as critical in U.S. elections, with religious communities able to swing the election results if they vote in the same way.

Mr. Trump has recently argued that Jewish-American voters would be partly to blame if he loses the November 5 election.

The Republican candidate has attempted to frame his opponent’s support for a ceasefire in Gaza as an existential threat to Israel.

“If I don’t win this election – and the Jewish people would really have a lot to do with that if that happens because if 40 percent, I mean, 60 percent of the people are voting for the enemy – Israel, in my opinion, will cease to exist within two years,” he told the Israeli-American Council National Summit in Washington two weeks ago.

Harris seen as attempting to dodge issue

Ms. Harris has championed Israel’s right to defend itself against aggressors in the Middle East but has also called for an end to the fighting in Gaza and Lebanon, in line with Mr. Biden’s policy.

In recent weeks, the vice president has been seen as attempting to dodge the issue on the campaign trail to avoid ambushes by pro-Palestine activists.

In August, she was heckled at a Democratic Party rally by activists shouting they wouldn’t vote for “genocide.”

She accused her potential Democratic Party voters of handing Trump the victory by refusing to back her over her support for Israel.

There had been hope Ms. Harris could have shifted her party’s policy to become more pro-Palestine, but she has maintained Mr. Biden’s “ironclad” support for Israel, while treading a fine line.