Donald Trump has taken aim at Ukraine after its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, said it was a “surprise” that his country was not invited to peace talks in Saudi Arabia to end the Ukraine war.

Trump said he was “disappointed” by Ukraine’s reaction and appeared to blame Ukraine for starting the war – saying the country “could have made a deal”.

The war in Ukraine was sparked by a full-scale Russian invasion almost three years ago.

His comments came after Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said his country won’t accept peacekeeping forces from Nato countries in Ukraine under any peace deal, following talks with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Saudi Arabia.

Russia and the US said they had agreed to appoint teams to start negotiating the end of the war.

Speaking to reporters at Mar-a-Lago, Trump was asked by the BBC what his message was to Ukrainians who might feel betrayed.

“I hear that they’re upset about not having a seat, well, they’ve had a seat for three years and a long time before that. This could have been settled very easily,” he said.

“You should have never started it. You could have made a deal,” he later added.

“I could have made a deal for Ukraine,” he said.

“That would have given them almost all of the land, everything, almost all of the land – and no people would have killed, and no city would have been demolished.”

After the meeting between US and Russian officials in Saudi Arabia, Trump said he was “much more confident”.

“They were very good. Russia wants to do something. They want to stop the savage barbarianism.”

“I think I have the power to end this war,” he said.

Asked about the prospect of European countries sending troops to Ukraine, he said: “If they want to do that, that’s great I’m all for it.”

The meeting in Riyadh was the first time since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine that Russian and American delegations are known to have met face-to-face.

At the talks were US Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff and US National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, as well as Russian presidential aide Yury Ushakov and the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, Kirill Dmitriev.

Afterwards, Lavrov said that Moscow will not accept peacekeeping forces from Nato countries in Ukraine under any peace deal.

“Any appearance by armed forces under some other flag does not change anything. It is of course completely unacceptable,” he said.

He said the US and Russia would appoint ambassadors to each other’s countries as soon as possible and create conditions to “restore co-operation in full”.

“It was a very useful conversation. We listened to each other, and we heard each other,” he said.

He reiterated Russia’s previous position that any expansion of the Nato defence alliance – and Ukraine joining it – would be a “direct threat” to Russia.

Rubio meanwhile said he was “convinced” Russia was “willing to begin to engage in a serious process” to end the conflict.

“There has to be concessions made by all sides. We’re not going to predetermine what those are.”

“Today is the first step of a long and difficult journey, but an important one”, he added.

• Europe’s leaders divided over their tactics with Trump

• Who was at the table at US-Russia talks in Saudi Arabia?

• How much do Nato members spend on defence?

• Ukrainecast: How pleased is Putin?

European leaders held a hastily arranged meeting in Paris on Monday to discuss their response to the apparent rapprochement between Russia and the US under President Trump – but did not agree a unified position.

UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said any Ukraine deal would require a “US backstop” to deter Russia from attacking its neighbour again and said he would consider deploying UK troops to Ukraine.

But Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz, a key Nato ally, said for his part, discussing sending troops to Ukraine at present was “completely premature”.

Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk also said he does not intend to send troops, and Italy’s Giorgia Meloni – the only European leader to attend Trump’s inauguration – expressed doubts.

She told the meeting in Paris that deploying European troops would be “the most complex and the least effective” way of securing peace in Ukraine.

In Riyadh, Rubio said the European Union was going to “have to be at the table at some point because they have sanctions as well that have been imposed”.

On the absence of Ukraine at the meeting, he insisted “no-one is being sidelined”.

“Everyone involved in that conflict has to be OK with it, it has to be acceptable to them,” he added.

Ukraine’s leader looked visibly tired and upset when he gave his reaction to the meeting during a news conference in Turkey.

“We want everything to be fair and so that nobody decides anything behind our back,” Zelensky said.

“You cannot make decisions without Ukraine on how to end the war in Ukraine.”

He will be alarmed by all the smiles on both American and Russian faces in Riyadh, but he will know that he can do little to change whatever they agree on over his head.

The Ukrainian president will also know that his country’s chances of resisting – let alone defeating – Russian troops without American help are very slim.

Asha Roy, 17, was excited to take part in a women’s football tournament, but her hopes were dashed as Islamists forced the organisers to cancel the match in northern Bangladesh.

Shortly before the game began earlier this month, the Islami Andolan Bangladesh group announced a protest rally against the event in Rangpur region, saying it was un-Islamic.

Fearing trouble, local police stepped in and the women’s team members were asked to return to their home for their safety.

“I was frustrated and frightened. We had never faced such a situation before. It was disappointing that we came back without playing,” Ms Roy told the BBC.

Bangladesh, a Muslim-majority nation, is currently undergoing a political transition after widespread protests ousted its authoritarian government last year.

An interim administration is currently in charge but there are concerns that Islamist groups, which had been pushed to the fringes, have become emboldened again.

The women’s football match was the third to be cancelled in northern Bangladesh in less than two weeks due to the objections of religious hardliners.

In the Dinajpur area, roughly 70km (43 miles) west of Rangpur, Islamists protesting against a game clashed with locals who supported it, leaving four people injured.

• Is once-in-a-generation chance lost for Bangladesh’s women?
• Sheikh Hasina: The pro-democracy icon who became an autocrat

For girls such as Asha Roy, who come from rural areas, football and other sports are a source of female empowerment and a way out of poverty. Those who shine can be selected to play for sponsored teams and some go on to represent Bangladesh internationally.

Many girls have been inspired to take up football thanks to the success of the national women’s team, who are considered heroes after winning two consecutive South Asia Football Championships in recent years.

Ms Roy’s teammate, Musammat Tara Moni, said she would not stop playing despite the threats.

“It’s my dream to represent our national team. My family supports me, so I am not losing hope,” the 16-year-old said.

For their coach Nurul Islam, the objections came as a surprise. “I have taken the team to many tournaments for the past seven years, but it’s the first time we have faced a situation like this,” he said.

The Islamists insist that the match they stopped was against their religious values and say that they are determined to prevent any future football games.

“If women want to play football, they should cover their entire body, and they can play only in front of female spectators. Men cannot watch them play,” Maulana Ashraf Ali, the leader of the Islami Andolan Bangladesh in the Taraganj area of Rangpur, told the BBC.

Mr Ali also insisted that the group “definitely” want hard-line Islamic Sharia law in Bangladesh.

The cancellation of the women’s football matches caused an uproar on social media, leading the authorities to reorganise one of them. They have also launched an investigation into the incidents but say the fear of radicalism is exaggerated.

“There is no truth in the allegations that the government is pandering to Islamists,” Shafiqul Alam, press secretary to interim leader Muhammad Yunus, told the BBC.

Mr Alam pointed out that hundreds of women’s sports matches were held as part of a national youth festival in January, and that they were played across the country without any trouble.

Some people are not reassured. Samina Luthfa, assistant professor of sociology in the University of Dhaka, told the BBC the cancellation of the women’s football matches was “definitely alarming”.

“The women of Bangladesh will not stop playing football and will not stop from going to work or doing their things,” she said, adding that “everyone will fight” efforts to remove women from public spaces.

Other decisions made by the interim government since it assumed power in August in relation to Islamist extremism have also raised concerns.

They include revoking a ban on the country’s largest Islamist party, Jamaat-e-Islami, which was introduced in the last days of former prime minister Sheikh Hasina’s government.

Jashimuddin Rahmani, the leader of banned Islamist militant group Ansarullah Bangladesh (ABT) – now known as Ansar al Islam – was released in August after a court granted him bail. He was sentenced to five years in prison in connection with the killing of a secular blogger in 2013, but had been kept behind bars because of other pending cases.

According to local media reports, several other people accused of having links with extremist groups have also been given bail in the past few months.

“Though security forces say they will monitor those released, it will be difficult for them to put everybody under surveillance given the limitations,” says Dr Tawohidul Haque, a crime analyst from the University of Dhaka.

While most Bangladeshis practise moderate Islam and secular values dominate society, Islamic extremism is not a new phenomenon in the country. A decade ago, religious zealots targeted secular bloggers, atheists, minorities, foreigners and others in a spate of attacks – killing dozens and sending others fleeing abroad.

In one such incident, a group of Islamist gunmen stormed the Holey Artisan Bakery in Dhaka in 2016, killing 20 people.

It is not just women’s football games that have been targeted recently either. Last week, dozens of Islamist students vandalised a book stall at Dhaka’s famous Ekushey Book Fair.

The protesters were angry over the display a book by the exiled feminist author Taslima Nasrin, who has in the past received death threats from Islamist groups for what they say are her blasphemous writings.

Muhammad Yunus condemned the incident saying the attack “shows contempt for both the rights of Bangladeshi citizens and for the laws of our country.” The police are investigating.

Meanwhile, one of the country’s best-known actors, Pori Moni said she was stopped from inaugurating a department store in the northern town of Tangail after reported objections from religious groups.

“Now I’m really feeling helpless, as well as insecure. It’s part of my job to take part in opening a showroom or a similar event. No one has stopped me all these years,” Ms Moni told the BBC Bengali service.

Similar events involving two other actors, Apu Biswas and Mehazabien Chowdhury, have also been cancelled following threats by Islamists.

Minority groups like the Sufi Muslims say they are also witnessing increasing attacks on their places of worship. Islamist extremists view Sufism as heretical.

“About a hundred of our shrines [mazars] and centres have been attacked in the past six months,” Anisur Rahman Jafri, Secretary General of the Sufism Universal Foundation, told the BBC.

“We have not seen this kind of sudden extremist attack on us since the country’s independence in 1971,” he added, warning that the country was at risk of “Talibanisation” if the situation continued.

Police said only 40 shrines were damaged and that they had stepped up security around religious sites.

The authorities have also been struggling to maintain law and order in the wake of Sheikh Hasina’s departure. Earlier this month, thousands of protesters vandalised homes and buildings connected to Hasina and senior leaders of her Awami League party.

People from other groups and parties, including Islamists, joined in other demonstrations in the capital, Dhaka, and across the country.

The authorities have defended the security forces for not intervening, saying doing so would have cost lives.

Rights groups have expressed concern over the security situation.

“If the government fails to act, then Islamists are going to feel emboldened. There will be more self-censorship for women and girls, they will be more intimidated participating in public events,” Shireen Huq, a prominent women’s rights activist, told the BBC.

“I am still optimistic that this phenomenon will not sustain,” she added.

The Russians and Americans are talking again, as European leaders and diplomats contemplate the hard choices forced on them by US President Donald Trump.

Without question, Trump’s diplomatic ultimatum to Ukraine and America’s Western European allies has cracked the transatlantic alliance, perhaps beyond repair.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky looks rattled by the abrupt change of attitude coming from the White House, though some of his many critics at home say he should have seen it coming. Well before he won re-election, Donald Trump made it clear that he was not going to continue Joe Biden’s policies.

As he arrived in Turkey on his latest trip, Zelensky deplored the fact that negotiations to end the war were happening “behind the back of key parties affected by the consequences of Russian aggression”.

But it feels like a long way from the air-conditioned room in Saudi Arabia where the Russian and American delegations faced each other across a broad and highly polished mahogany table, to the bitter cold of north-eastern Ukraine.

In dug-outs and military bases here in the snow-bound villages and forests on the border with Russia, Ukrainian soldiers are getting on with business as usual – fighting the war.

In an underground bunker at a base in the forest somewhere near Sumy, a Ukrainian officer told me he didn’t have much time to follow the news. As far as he was concerned, Donald Trump’s decision to talk to Russia’s president Vladimir Putin was “just noise”.

The commander, who asked to be referred to only by his call sign “White” has more pressing matters to consider.

Ignoring the diplomatic bombshell that has rattled Western leaders, as well as his own president, is probably the right thing to do for a battlefield officer preparing to lead his men back into the fight. Soon they will cross back into Kursk, to rejoin the fight to keep the land Ukraine has seized from Russia.

As a condition of access to Ukrainian soldiers, we agreed not to disclose precise locations or identities, except to say they are in the borderlands around the town of Sumy, and all part of Ukraine’s continuing fight in Kursk.

In a small room in a workshop tucked away in a village there was a formidable display of killing power on shelves made of planks from the sawmill propped up by wooden ammunition boxes.

On the shelves were hundreds of drones, all made in Ukraine. Each one costs around £300 ($380). The soldiers who were checking them before packing them into cardboard boxes to send them into the Kursk battlefields said that when they are armed – and flown by a skilled pilot – they could even destroy a tank.

One of them, called Andrew, was a drone pilot until his leg was blown off. He said he hadn’t thought too hard about what had been said far from here by the Americans – but none of them trusted President Vladimir Putin.

Their drones a few hours earlier had destroyed a Russian armoured unit advancing in broad daylight across a frozen snow-covered field. They showed us the video. Some of the vehicles they hit were flying the red banner of the Soviet Union instead of the Russian flag.

Sumy is busy enough during the day, with shops open and well-stocked. But once it gets dark the streets are almost deserted. Air raid alerts come frequently.

Anti-aircraft guns fire tracer into the sky for hours, aimed at the waves of Russian drones that cross the border near here to attack targets much deeper inside Ukraine – and sometimes in Sumy itself.

A big block of flats has a hole three storeys high ripped out of it. Eleven people were killed here in a Russian drone attack a fortnight or so ago. Since then, the block has been evacuated as engineers fear it is so badly damaged it might collapse.

It is part of a housing estate of identical monumental blocks built during the Soviet era. Residents still living next to the wrecked and unsafe building were going about their business, walking to the shops or their cars, swaddled against the intense cold.

Mykola, a man of 50, stopped to talk as he was walking home with his young son. He lives in the next block to the one the Russians destroyed.

I asked him what he thought of Donald Trump’s idea of peace in Ukraine.

“We need peace,” he said. “It’s necessary because there is no point in war. War doesn’t lead to anything. If you look at how much territory Russia has occupied so far, for the Russians to eventually get to Kyiv, they’ll have to keep fighting for 14 years. It’s only the people who are suffering. It needs to end.”

But no deal worth having, Mykola believed, would emerge from Putin and Trump sitting together without Zelensky and the Europeans.

Yuliia, 33, another neighbour, was out walking her Jack Russell. She was at home when the Russians attacked the block of flats next door.

“It all happened just past midnight, when we were about to go to bed. We heard a loud explosion, and we saw a massive red flash through our window. We saw this horror. It was very scary.

“Many people were outside. And I remember there was a woman hanging out – she was screaming for help – we couldn’t see her immediately but eventually she was saved from the debris.”

Peace is possible, she believes, “but they need to stop bombing us first. There can only be peace when they stop doing that. It needs to come from their side because they started this horror.

“Of course, you can’t trust Putin.”

As the last rays of the sun disappeared, Borys, a spry and upright retired colonel of 70 who served 30 years in the Soviet army stopped on his way to his car. His son and grandson, he said, are both in uniform fighting for Ukraine.

“Peace is possible,” he said. “But I don’t really believe in it. I think that justice will prevail for Ukraine. You have to be cautious.

“While Putin is there, you cannot trust Russians. Because they believe in him as if he is a religion. You won’t change them. It needs time.”

So what’s the answer – keep fighting or a peace deal?

“Ukraine needs to think about peace. But we shouldn’t surrender. I don’t see any point. We will resist until we are stronger. Europe seems like they are ready to help us. There is just no point in surrendering.”

Donald Trump, a man who seems convinced that the principles of a real-estate deal can be applied to ending a war will discover that making peace is much more complicated than just getting a ceasefire and deciding how much land each side keeps.

President Putin has made very clear that he wants to break Ukraine’s sovereignty and destroy its ability to act as an independent nation.

Whether or not Ukraine’s President Zelensky has a seat at President Trump’s conference table, he won’t agree to that. Making a peace that lasts, if it’s possible, will be a long and slow process.

If Donald Trump wants a quick peace dividend, he should look elsewhere.

More than 60 false killer whales have died and authorities are trying to save dozens more after a mass stranding on a remote Australian beach.

Tasmania’s Department of Natural Resources and Environment said a pod of 157 had beached near Arthur River, in the island’s north west.

About 90 of the animals – which witnesses say include juveniles – are still alive, with conservation experts and veterinarians at the site evaluating whether any can be returned to the sea.

Tasmania has seen a series of mass whale strandings in recent years – including the country’s worst-ever in 2020 – but false killer whales haven’t mass stranded there in over 50 years.

False killer whales are technically one of the largest dolphin species, like their orca namesakes, and can grow up to 6m and 1.5t.

Authorities says the pod has been stranded at the site – about 300km from the city of Launceston – for 24 to 48 hours, and it will be an uphill battle to save any of them.

“Initial assessments indicate that refloating the whales will be difficult due to the inaccessibility of the site, ocean conditions and the challenges of getting specialised equipment to the remote area,” department spokesman Brendon Clarke told media.

While rescuers have successfully saved whales at other recent stranding events on the west coast, the complexity of this incident means the same techniques can’t be used.

Teams on site are triaging the whales with the best chance of survival and trying to keep them alive and comfortable while rescue options are discussed.

Animal welfare is a priority, but there are concerns about the safety and wellbeing of rescue teams to consider too.

“We have… surging tidal waters and breaking surf, and so to try and refloat the animals directly back into that surf would be challenging, and then, of course, that would also present some enormous safety risk for our staff and personnel.”

“Because the fact that these are large animals, potentially in their death throes, and they could be writhing and moving around on beaches, [there’s a] likelihood of somebody being injured.”

Sharks are also a concern.

Authorities have asked members of the public to avoid the site, with bushfires burning nearby and limited road access.

Local resident Jocelyn Flint told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation she had travelled to the site on Wednesday morning after her son noticed the pod while out shark fishing overnight.

“There are babies… There’s just families of them. Their eyes are open, they’re looking at me, like ‘help’.”

“It’s just absolutely horrific. They’re all struggling.”

More than 80% of Australian whale strandings take place in Tasmania – often on its west coast.

Around 470 pilot whales were stranded further south at Macquarie Harbour in 2020 and about 350 of them died despite rescue efforts. Another 200 become stranded in the same harbour in 2022.

Whales are highly social mammals and are well known for stranding in groups because they travel in large, close-knit communities which rely on constant communication.

There are a range of theories for why beachings occur. Some experts say the animals can become disoriented after following fish they hunt to the shore.

Others believe that one individual can mistakenly lead whole groups to shore.

Pope Francis has developed pneumonia in both his lungs and his condition remains “complex”, the Vatican says.

The 88-year-old has been suffering from a respiratory infection for more than a week and was admitted to Rome’s Gemelli hospital on Friday.

“The follow-up chest CT scan which the Holy Father underwent this afternoon… demonstrated the onset of bilateral pneumonia, which required additional drug therapy,” the Vatican said.

It said lab tests, a chest X-ray and the Pope’s clinical condition “continue to present a complex picture”.

Despite this, the Vatican said the pontiff remained in “good spirits” and spent the day “reading, resting and praying”.

Pope Francis also expressed his gratitude to well-wishers and asked them to “pray for him”.

Before his admission last week, the Pope had bronchitis symptoms for several days and had delegated officials to read prepared speeches at events.

He had been due to lead several events over the weekend for the 2025 Catholic Holy Year which runs through to next January, however all public events on the Pope’s calendar have been cancelled through to Sunday.

On Monday, the Vatican said that doctors had changed the Pope’s drug therapy for the second time during his hospital stay to tackle what at the time was thought to be a “polymicrobial infection of the respiratory tract”.

The Pope is especially prone to lung infections due to developing pleurisy as an adult and having part of one of his lungs removed at age 21.

During his 12 years as leader of the Roman Catholic church, the Argentine has been hospitalised several times including in March 2023 when he spent three nights in hospital with bronchitis.

KFC, the fast-food restaurant chain formerly known as Kentucky Fried Chicken, is moving its corporate headquarters in the US from Louisville in Kentucky to Plano in Texas, according to a statement from its parent company, Yum Brands.

About 100 corporate employees and dozens more remote workers will be required to move and will receive relocation support.

The decision by Yum Brands is part of a plan to have two headquarters for its main brands — KFC and Pizza Hut will be headquartered in Plano, while Taco Bell and Habit Burger & Grill will remain in Irvine, California.

In recent years, many companies have relocated to Texas attracted by the state’s lower taxes and business-friendly policies.

“These changes position us for sustainable growth and will help us better serve our customers, employees, franchisees and shareholders,” said David Gibbs, the chief executive of Yum Brands in the company’s statement.

Yum also expressed hope the plan will boost collaboration between its employees and brands.

The statement added that Yum will be maintaining it corporate offices as well as the KFC Foundation in Louisville.

The governor of the state of Kentucky, Andy Beshea, has criticised the move to relocate KFC’s headquarters, according to a statement given to the Associated Press.

“I am disappointed by this decision and believe the company’s founder would be, too,” Mr Beshear reportedly said.

“This company’s name starts with Kentucky, and it has marketed our state’s heritage and culture in the sale of its product.”

KFC’s history in the state dates back to the 1930s, when its founder Colonel Harland Sanders began selling fried chicken at a service station in Corbin.

Today, Sanders’ face is emblazoned on the shop fronts of more than 24,000 KFC restaurants in over 145 countries and territories around the world.

Since the pandemic, many US companies have moved their headquarters. According to a report by real estate services firm CBRE, Austin and other Texan cities have been particularly successful due to the state’s business-friendly environment.

Two years after ChatGPT took the world by storm, China’s DeepSeek has sent ripples through the tech industry by collapsing the cost for developing generative artificial intelligence applications.

But as the global race for AI supremacy heats up, India appears to have fallen behind, especially in creating its own foundational language model that’s used to power things like chatbots.

The government claims a homegrown equivalent to DeepSeek isn’t far away. It is supplying startups, universities and researchers with thousands of high-end chips needed to develop it in under 10 months.

A flurry of global AI leaders have also been talking up India’s capabilities recently.

After being initially dismissive, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman this month said India should be playing a leading role in the AI revolution. The country is now OpenAI’s second largest market by users.

Others like Microsoft have put serious money on the table – committing $3bn (£2.4bn) for cloud and AI infrastructure. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang also spoke of India’s “unmatched” technical talent as a key to unlocking its future potential.

With 200 startups working on generative AI, there’s enough entrepreneurial activity under way too.

But despite having key ingredients for success in place, India risks lagging behind without basic structural fixes to education, research and state policy, experts say.

China and the US already have a “four to five year head-start”, having invested heavily in research and academia and developed AI for military applications, law enforcement and now large language models, technology analyst Prasanto Roy told the BBC.

Though in the top five globally on Stanford’s AI Vibrancy Index – which ranks countries on metrics such as patents, funding, policy and research – India is still far behind the two superpowers in many key areas.

China and the US were granted 60% and 20% of the world’s total AI patents between 2010 and 2022 respectively. India got less than half a percent.

India’s AI startups also received a fraction of the private investment that US and Chinese companies got in 2023.

India’s state-funded AI mission, meanwhile, is worth a trifling $1bn compared with the staggering $500bn the US has earmarked for Stargate – a plan to build massive AI infrastructure in the US – or China’s reported $137bn initiative to become an AI hub by 2030.

While DeepSeek’s success has demonstrated that AI models can be built on older, less expensive chips – something India can take solace from – lack of “patient” or long-term capital from either industry or government is a major problem, says Jaspreet Bindra, founder of a consultancy that builds AI literacy in organisations.

“Despite what has been heard about DeepSeek developing a model with $5.6m, there was much more capital behind it.”

Lack of high-quality India-specific datasets required for training AI models in regional languages such as Hindi, Marathi or Tamil is another problem, especially given India’s language diversity.

But for all its issues, India punches far above its weight on talent – with 15% of the world’s AI workers coming from the country.

The issue though, as Stanford’s AI talent migration research shows, is that more and more of them are choosing to leave the country.

This is partly because “foundational AI innovations typically come from deep R&D in universities and corporate research labs”, Mr Bindra says.

And India lacks a supporting research environment, with few deep-tech breakthroughs emerging from its academic and corporate sectors.

The enormous success of India’s payments revolution was due to strong government-industry-academia collaboration – a similar model, he says, needs to be replicated for the AI push.

The Unified Payment Interface (UPI), a digital payment system developed by a government organisation, has revolutionised digital payments in India, allowing millions to transact at the click of a button or by scanning a QR code.

Bengaluru’s $200bn outsourcing industry, home to millions of coders, should have ideally been at the forefront of India’s AI ambitions. But the IT companies have never really shifted their focus from cheap service-based work to developing foundational consumer AI technologies.

“It’s a huge gap which they left to the startups to fill,” says Mr Roy.

He’s unsure though whether startups and government missions can do this heavy lifting quickly enough, adding that the 10-month timeline set by the minster was a knee-jerk reaction to DeepSeek’s sudden emergence.

“I don’t think India will be able to produce anything like DeepSeek at least for the next few years,” he adds. It is a view many others share.

India can, however, continue to build and tweak applications upon existing open source platforms like DeepSeek “to leapfrog our own AI progress”, Bhavish Agarwal, founder of one of India’s earliest AI startups Krutrim, recently wrote on X.

In the longer run though, developing a foundational model will be critical to have strategic autonomy in the sector and reduce import dependencies and threats of sanctions, say experts.

India will also need to increase its computational power or hardware infrastructure to run such models, which means manufacturing semiconductors – something that’s not taken off yet.

Much of this will need to fall in place before the gap with the US and China is narrowed meaningfully.

Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has been charged by the country’s chief prosecutor with attempting a coup after he was defeated in the 2022 presidential election.

The 69-year-old was handed five charges over the alleged bid to prevent President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva from taking office after a bitter election race.

The prosecutor’s advice will now be considered by the Supreme Court. If accepted, Bolsonaro and 33 others will be formally charged and will have to face trial.

Bolsonaro denies wrongdoing and says he’s the victim of political persecution.

He was banned from running for office for eight years after being accused of undermining Brazilian democracy by falsely claiming that electronic ballots used in the October 2022 poll were vulnerable to hacking and fraud.

The bitterly fought election was won by an extremely narrow margin by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – known more commonly as Lula.

Bolsonaro never publicly acknowledged his defeat and left Brazil for the US two days before Lula was sworn in as president.

On 8 January 2023, his supporters stormed government buildings in the capital Brasilia. Parts of the buildings were ransacked and police arrested 1,500 of the rioters.

Three months ago, the federal police released a report accusing Bolsonaro of playing a lead role in planning and organising an attempted coup – including by proposing the idea to key figures in the military – to stop Lula taking power.

The document charging Bolsonaro says the responsibility for acts that were harmful to democratic order lies with a criminal organisation led by Bolsonaro himself.

In practice, this means legal proceedings are beginning and Bolsonaro will likely face a trial.

One of the charges is for the crime of “armed criminal organisation”, allegedly led by Bolsonaro and his vice-presidential candidate Walter Braga Netto.

“Allied with other individuals, including civilians and military personnel, they attempted to prevent, in a coordinated manner, the result of the 2022 presidential elections from being fulfilled,” Attorney General Paulo Gonet Branco said in a statement.

Brazilian media reports that the Supreme Court is expected to proceed with the trial later this year.

Reaction to the prosecutor’s decision shows that the divisions that have marked Brazilian politics for the past decade remain as deep as ever.

Government supporters are celebrating and saying the former president belongs in jail, while the opposition insist he’s innocent.

The focus now is on the impact the Supreme Court decision will have on next year’s presidential election. Recent opinion polls show record levels of rejection for President Lula.

Despite being banned from running for office, Bolsonaro remains a strong political force in Brazil and could use the trial as a platform for his agenda.

Rapper A$AP Rocky has been found not guilty of firing a gun at a former friend.

A jury in Los Angeles acquitted the musician, whose legal name is Rakim Mayers, on two felony assault charges that carried up to 24 years in prison.

Terell Ephron claimed the Grammy-nominated hip-hop star opened fire at him during an argument on a Hollywood street on 6 November 2021, grazing his knuckles with one of the shots.

Mr Mayers, who is also a fashion mogul and the longtime partner of pop star Rihanna, denied the charges, arguing that the weapon was a prop gun and that his former friend, who calls himself A$AP Relli, was only after money.

As the first not-guilty verdict was read on Tuesday, the court rang with screams and clapping. Mr Mayers rushed towards his family and partner Rihanna, who were seated behind him. He dived over a wooden barrier to embrace them.

He hugged his lawyers and appeared to have tears in his eyes as the second not-guilty verdict was read.

“Thank God for saving my life,” Mr Mayers said aloud. He thanked members of the 12-person jury.

The rapper was arrested on the two felony assault charges after a heated argument with his former friend in the heart of Hollywood.

Mr Mayers and Mr Ephron have known each other since high school in New York and were part of the A$AP Mob hip-hop collective.

Their friendship cooled as A$AP Rocky’s career took off.

Authorities said Mr Ephron met Mr Mayers on 6 November 2021, a day after the pair had a disagreement, outside a hotel about a block from the iconic Hollywood Walk of Fame.

An altercation ensued.

Mr Mayers was alleged to have whipped out a gun from his waistband and pointed it at Mr Ephron, telling him: “I’ll kill you right now.”

“He looked me in my eyes and pointed the gun at me,” Mr Ephron testified.

Mr Ephron said he told the rapper to fire the weapon, but Mr Mayers started walking away.

As he left, Mr Ephron followed, shouting at him.

Prosecutors alleged that at this point, Mr Mayers once again pulled out the gun and fired multiple shots, with one bullet said to have grazed Mr Ephron’s knuckles.

Much of the trial hinged on whether the firearm in question was a harmless prop gun, as Mr Mayers’s defence said, or a real weapon capable of causing harm, as Mr Ephron and prosecutors alleged.

The weapon has not been recovered by authorities.

Jurors were able to watch some footage of the altercation because parts were captured on surveillance video, including audio of gunfire, but no video evidence directly showed any shooting.

Mr Ephron took two days before reporting the incident to authorities and brought shell casings he said he had retrieved from the scene.

But police who responded to reports of a shooting in the area did not locate any shell casings. Mr Ephron, who said he returned with his girlfriend hours later, said he knew exactly where to look, but no surveillance footage corroborates his account.

He was not admitted to hospital in Los Angeles and instead went for medical treatment after flying back to New York.

Attorneys for Mr Mayers suggested that Mr Ephron had planted the shell casings to frame the rapper.

The trial was marked by emotional and combative exchanges, particularly when Mr Ephron – the trial’s star witness – took the stand.

At one point, Mr Ephron called Mr Tacopina – a defence attorney for Mr Mayers – “annoying”, which led to a reprimand from the judge.

Another witness, A$AP Twelvyy, was asked by prosecutors about a photograph showing Mr Mayers’s bed with the letters “AWGE” emblazoned on the furniture.

When asked what that stood for, Mr Mayers unexpectedly interrupted the proceedings and yelled, “Don’t say!” Twelvyy ultimately refused to elaborate.

Outbursts from defendants during trials are uncommon, especially in front of a jury.

However, for a criminal suspect on trial to interject and instruct a witness not to answer a prosecutor’s question during cross-examination is something nearly unheard of in a court.

The rapper is set to release his first solo album in nearly a decade and is scheduled to co-headline Los Angeles’ Rolling Loud festival in March 2025.

In May, he is set to co-chair the 2025 Met Gala alongside big names like Anna Wintour, British race car driver Lewis Hamilton, singer Pharrell Williams and basketball superstar LeBron James.

Additionally, he stars alongside Denzel Washington in Spike Lee’s upcoming film “Highest 2 Lowest,” slated for a summer release.

His longtime partner, singer Rihanna, has attended court intermittently. She was in the courtroom on Tuesday as the verdict was read.

Heshima winces in pain as he tries to shift his weight, sweat beading on his face. The slight 13-year-old sits on a bed in a tent in the grounds of an overcrowded hospital in Goma city in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Heshima’s left leg is a bandaged stump, his stomach is streaked with burn marks, and both of his parents have been killed.

A relative, Tantine, tells us who is to blame: M23 rebels – backed by Rwanda and battling the Congolese army, known as the FARDC. The rebels now control the two largest cities in this mineral-rich area, which borders Rwanda.

“It was a Sunday,” she says. “There was fighting between them and the FARDC. They dropped the bomb, and I lost six members of my family.”

The M23 portray themselves as freedom fighters, bringing peace and order to a failed state, and a failed leader in Congolese President Félix Tshisekedi.

The rebel group, mainly comprised of ethnic Tutsis, has been on the march since early 2022, seizing swathes of territory – with the help of up to 4,000 Rwandan troops.

That is according to UN experts who say Rwanda has “de facto control” over the group – claims Kigali and Rwandan President Paul Kagame deny.

• What’s the fighting in DR Congo all about?
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The price of the M23’s gains can be counted at Ndosho Hospital, where Heshima is being treated.

Doctors are struggling to clear a backlog of civilians and soldiers wounded at the end of January, when the rebels took Goma. The M23 say they “liberated” the city.

The death toll in the fighting was close to 3,000 people, according to a UN estimate.

Four operating rooms are in use – simultaneously – throughout the day and sometimes at night.

“It’s been a terrible situation for the doctors,” says Myriam Favier of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which supports the hospital.

The medics have been sleeping in the operating theatres, she says.

“Our medical supplies were looted at the very beginning of the escalation of the conflict. And we had an influx that was unseen before – between 100 and 150 patients a day for weeks.”

That is now down to about 10 admissions per day, according to Ms Favier, and “right now people are just trying to live again”.

Drive around Goma and the streets hum with motorbikes. Many shops are open, and pavement sellers are back with their piles of onions and avocados and tomatoes.

There is little sign of well-armed M23 fighters. They do not stand on street corners. They don’t need to. Everyone knows they are in charge.

People would accept the devil here, one local man said, if they thought he would bring peace.

Others are more wary. A journalist said many in the media are “self- censoring” what they report, waiting to gauge how the new rulers will behave.

One activist told me many were “living in a big silence” because of fear of reprisals by the rebels.

“This is the most worrying period of Goma’s history,” he said. “I am afraid, the future is very uncertain.”

Not according to the M23.

“Expect peace, security, development, job creation… a future with zero refugees, zero corruption, zero hunger,” Willy Manzi, a newly appointed M23 vice governor who has recently returned from Canada, posted on the social media platform X.

But a different message was delivered to tens of thousands of people who have sought refuge from fighting in recent years in a network of camps in Goma.

They were given 72 hours to go. The M23 want the camps erased, along with any rival armed groups hiding in them.

“They came and told us, ‘You have three days to leave,'” says Divine, 19, who has one child on her hip, and another at her feet.

“We were very scared because we have nowhere to go. Our houses have been destroyed. Hunger is killing us here, but how we can go home to nothing?”

As she speaks a crowd gathers around us. There are silent nods and worried faces.

“They were our enemies and now they are our neighbours,” says one man, who asks not to be named.

Home for Divine is Bulengo camp – an expanse of scrappy white tents, perched on dark volcanic rock, surrounded by green hills.

Many of the shelters are little more than scraps of tarpaulin. But the camp was something to cling to – until the M23 ultimatum.

When we visited many were already packing up, salvaging bits of wood and plastic, and rolling up bedding.

After ordering people out the camps the M23 later said they were “encouraging voluntary returns”.

It does not feel voluntary to many of the displaced.

Human rights groups say it fits a pattern of abuses by the rebels who they accuse of indiscriminate shelling, gang rape and summary executions.

They level the same accusations at the Congolese army and their allies.

The decades long conflict has its roots – in part – in the Rwanda genocide of 1994, when around 800,000 people, mostly Tutis, were killed by Hutu extremists.

Afterwards many Hutus fled into DR Congo, including some involved the genocide. Rwanda says they remain a threat.

Critics say Kigali has its eye on DR Congo’s vast mineral wealth, crucial for much of the world’s technology including laptops and mobile phones.

There are growing fears that the scramble for control of these riches could trigger a new regional war, with implications far beyond Africa.

Either way – if history is any guide – the treasures beneath the soil are unlikely to benefit the people here.

Back at Bulengo camp we met Alphonsine, who was leaving with her extended family, bent double with the weight of belongings tied to her back.

She said it would be a two day walk to reach her area, and there was nothing to go back to. Her home had been destroyed.

“How will you survive?” I asked.

“I came from suffering,” she said, “and I leave in suffering.”

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Hamas says it will hand over the bodies of four hostages on Thursday, including the two youngest people held by the Palestinian armed group.

The group’s negotiator Khalil al-Hayya said the bodies to be released would include those of the Bibas family – Shiri and her young children Kfir and Ariel, who were aged nine months and four years when Hamas kidnapped them during the 7 October 2023 attack.

Hamas alleges that the three were killed in Israeli bombardment. Israel has not confirmed this.

The children’s father Yarden was released by Hamas earlier this month.

Al-Hayya said Hamas would also release six living hostages on Saturday – double the number originally planned.

In exchange, Israel will free all women and those under the age of 19 arrested since last October and is allowing some rubble-clearing equipment into Gaza through the border with Egypt.

In a statement, al-Hayya said the group agreed “handing over four bodies of the occupation prisoners on Thursday 20 February, including the bodies of the Bibas family.”

Hamas claimed in November 2023 they had been killed in an Israeli air strike, without providing evidence. The Israeli military has not confirmed the report. Israeli officials have said only that they are gravely concerned for their lives.

An Israeli official told Reuters that deceased hostages would undergo identification in Israel before being named.

In a statement, the Bibas family said it was aware of the Hamas statement.

“In the past few hours, we have been in turmoil following Hamas spokesperson’s announcement about the planned return of our Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir this Thursday as part of the hostages’ remains release phase,” the statement said.

“We want to make it clear that while we are aware of these reports, we have not yet received any official confirmation regarding this matter.

“Until we receive definitive confirmation, our journey is not over.

Hamas has named two of the six Israelis to be released on Saturday.

They are Avera Mengistu and Hisham al-Sayed, who were seized in 2014 and 2015 respectively after they crossed into Gaza on their own. The Israeli government has said both suffered from mental health issues at the time.

The families of several hostages have said that their loved ones are among those due to be released on the same day.

They are Omer Shem Tov, 22, Eliya Cohen, 27 and Omer Wenkert, 23, who were taken from the Nova Festival on 7 October 2023, and 40-year-old Tal Shoam who was kidnapped from Kibbutz Be’eri.

Under the first phase of the ceasefire agreement, Hamas agreed to release 33 hostages. In exchange, Israel agreed to release about 1,900 Palestinian prisoners.

Talks on progressing to the second phase of the deal – under which the remaining living hostages would be released and the war would end permanently – were due to start earlier this month but have not yet begun.

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said the talks would begin “this week”.

He said Israel would “not accept the continued presence of Hamas or any other terrorist organisation in Gaza” but that Israel could prolong the ceasefire if discussions were productive.

“If we will see there is a constructive dialogue with a possible horizon of getting to an agreement (then) we will make this time-frame work longer,” Saar said.

A total of 73 hostages are currently being held in Gaza – a mixture of Israeli soldiers and civilians both dead and alive. This also includes Thai and Nepalese nationals.

Some 251 hostages were taken by Hamas when it attacked Israel on 7 October 2023, killing about 1,200 people.

Israel responded with a 15-month military offensive that killed 47,460 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry, and devastated the coastal enclave.

The sight of senior Russian and American officials back around a giant negotiating table is extraordinary.

For many, most of all Ukrainians, it will have been very hard to take.

In Saudi Arabia, Moscow achieved something major: after three years of all-out war on its neighbour and isolation by the West, it was back at the “top table” of global diplomacy.

Not only that, Russia looked for all the world like it was the one calling the shots.

Even as air raid sirens continue to sound across Ukraine, that’s exactly the image Moscow wants to project.

This was not a defeated Russia, forced to the negotiating table. It was more like the US inviting the aggressor to set out its terms.

True, US officials went into the process saying they wanted to feel out Russia, check whether it’s serious about peace.

But Donald Trump had already drawn his conclusions. Last week, after he spoke to Vladimir Putin by phone, he announced that the Russian leader “wants to see people stop dying”.

Trump could have responded by telling him to withdraw all his troops.

Instead, he clearly wants to cut a deal with Moscow to end the war, as he promised voters, and move on.

• Russia won’t accept Nato troops in Ukraine, Lavrov says after talks with US
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After more than four hours of talks in Riyadh, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio emerged to the press and announced the first steps towards negotiations had been agreed, with teams to be formed on both sides.

He’d concluded that Russia was ready to engage in a “serious process” to end the war.

But why was he so sure?

Across the table was Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, still under sanctions for what the US Treasury called Russia’s “brutal war of choice”.

When Lavrov met the Russian media, he told them the US had proposed a moratorium on attacking energy infrastructure.

“We explained that we have never endangered the civilian energy supply and only target what directly serves Ukraine’s military,” was the minister’s reply.

That’s not true.

I have personally walked through the ruins of civilian power plants that have been directly targeted by Russian missiles.

This is the country that the US is attempting to engage with, although there is ample evidence that it can’t be trusted.

Russia has also shown zero sign of conceding any ground: why would it, when the Trump administration has already agreed that Ukraine will never join Nato, as Moscow demands, and won’t get its occupied land back?

That’s why, for Ukraine’s allies, it won’t only be the image of US and Russian officials seated at the shiny Saudi table that jarred. It’s also how they talked.

“Laying the ground” for future investment sounds like a promise of dropping sanctions: no reckoning for Russia’s war of aggression, then, just reward.

These are, of course, the earliest of early days.

But in Moscow, officials and state media sense the start of Russia’s return to where it believes it belongs: face to face with the US, as an equal.

The British Army has said it is ready to deploy to Ukraine if requested by the government.

This week, 2,500 UK troops from the Army’s high readiness force, the First Division, have been taking part in a large Nato exercise in Romania – on a training area just 16 miles (25km) from the border with Ukraine.

Although mobile phones have been banned on the exercise, most soldiers are aware that there are now initial discussions to send troops to Ukraine itself.

Brigadier Andy Watson, who is commanding the British contribution to the Nato exercise, says his brigade “is absolutely ready” should they receive orders to deploy to Ukraine.

Earlier this week Keir Starmer said that he was ready and willing to send British troops to Ukraine to help guarantee its security, should there be a ceasefire.

But so far he too is unclear as to what they might be asked to do.

In terms of numbers of troops that might be needed, Brigadier Watson said “clearly what the force package would look like would be dependent on what the prime minister and the Ministry of Defence would like”.

But he said “it’s absolutely not” something the UK could do on its own. “I think the prime minister has been very clear that the UK would contribute to efforts, but absolutely not doing it on our own,” says Brigadier Watson.

Exercise Steadfast Dart is Nato’s largest exercise this year and meant to demonstrate how quickly allies can come to the defence of an ally under attack. But while it’s meant to demonstrate Nato’s readiness, it also highlights its limitations too.

The UK has shown it can move large numbers of troops and equipment, including more than 700 military vehicles, 1,400 miles (2,253 km) across Europe at relatively short notice as part of Nato’s new Allied Reaction Force.

And that it can operate alongside allies. More than 10,000 military personnel are taking part in the exercise from eight European nations.

But that is just 10% of the number that most military experts believe might be required for any peacekeeping operation inside Ukraine which might require a force of more than 100,000.

Some of the nations taking part, like Spain and Italy, have not even met Nato’s own spending target for defence of 2% of GDP, set more than a decade ago. Many, including the UK, have experienced recent cuts in the size of their armed forces.

When British forces were sent to Helmand in 2009, the British Army had more than 100,000 regular troops.

Now it is at its smallest since the Napoleonic wars, at just over 70,000. Even before the cuts, the British Army was stretched sending a force of 9,000 troops.

It required additional defence spending for urgent operational equipment, as well as a rolling deployment of fresh troops every six months. A regular Army of around 73,000 would now struggle to do something on a similar scale.

Steadfast Dart is meant to show that Nato’s European allies can respond to a crisis.

Unusually, for a large Nato military exercise, US forces are not directly involved. But America remains Nato’s most powerful and largest military member and its absence from any plan to guarantee Ukraine’s security would leave a gaping hole.

That’s why Keir Starmer and his Defence Secretary John Healey are calling for the US to be involved, despite the Trump administration’s insistence that there will be no US boots on the ground.

Healey said on Tuesday that European nations would have to play a leading role but he added that “it is only the US that can provide the deterrence to Putin that will prevent him attacking again”.

Nato’s intervention in Libya in 2011 illustrated how European nations struggled without their biggest partner.

The US was supposed to take a back seat in the bombing campaign but was still heavily relied on for logistics – air-to-air refuelling – and providing intelligence and surveillance.

Back at Exercise Steadfast Dart, Colonel Gordon Muir, who commands 4 Scots troops and previously fought alongside the US in Afghanistan, said “there’s a famous Highland saying – that friends are good on the day of battle”. He said there are few circumstances when you want to go it alone.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine should have been the wake-up call that European nations needed. Most of its members are now spending 2% of their GDP on defence.

But Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte now says that is not enough and is pushing for more than 3%.

The Trump administration says it should be more like 5% of GDP. The UK government has still not set a date for its new spending target of 2.5%. Europe has also been slow to ramp up defence production.

But Exercise Steadfast Dart shows that some lessons are being learned from the war in Ukraine. There is an emphasis on trench and urban warfare as well as combatting drones.

We watch British and Romanian troops repeat drills of clearing a recently excavated zigzag of snow-covered trench lines.

Many of the British troops taking part in this training have also recently been helping train their Ukrainian counterparts in the UK.

Corporal Richard Gillin, of 4 Scots, told me, “we’re definitely ready for Ukraine”.

Though they do not know whether such a deployment would happen – or what role they might be asked to perform – any operation in Ukraine would give the British Army a new sense of purpose and help with its recruitment crisis.

Lance Corporal Lewis Antwis, of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards, said “people have joined the Army for a purpose…so yeah, I think the boys would be ready”.

French President Emmanuel Macron got straight on the phone to Donald Trump and, separately, to Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky on Monday night, after fellow leaders of Europe’s biggest military powers left the glittering Élysée Palace in Paris.

What achievements could the French president boast? Was his emergency security summit a success?

What frustrates Europe’s detractors is there’s rarely a clear answer. Different European nations speak with different voices, though they share many values and goals.

But in the current climate of black-and-white thinking prevalent in Washington and Moscow, where the world is divided into the powerful and the weak, European nuance can count as weakness.

Under that unforgiving spotlight, Monday’s meeting failed.

Leaders had raised expectations. The summit dominated headlines as soon as it was called.

The head of the West’s defence alliance Nato, European Union chiefs and leaders of Europe’s most influential military nations scrambled together at speed.

They wanted to hijack Donald Trump’s attention. To impress him. To elbow themselves a seat at the negotiating table at the peace talks he plans with Russia’s Vladimir Putin to discuss the future of Ukraine.

Europe was – it still is – smarting at being sidelined.

Ukraine is a European nation. Its fate will impact the whole continent.

Depending how bullish President Putin emerges from any peace talks, Europe’s security services fear he could turn his attention to upending the sovereignty of other nations.

The Baltic states that neighbour Russia feel particularly exposed.

But leaders didn’t help their case on Monday.

Yes, they say they’ll spend more on their own defence, as Donald Trump demands. Despite domestic concerns about limited government budgets and a cost of living crisis.

The Paris meeting even discussed the possibility of sending European troops to Ukraine to oversee an eventual ceasefire – unthinkable even a few weeks ago for Europe.

That’s what the US president wants.

But ultimately those leaders in Paris failed to deliver a strong, united, sum-it-up-in-a-line-tweet response, that might have made the impatient businessman-cum-US president sit up and really take notice.

The reasons for this are many, despite the sense of urgency in Europe about Ukraine and European security more broadly.

A number of Europe’s leaders are furious at feeling they have to dance to Donald Trump’s tune.

The frustration that poured out of the mouth of the normally phlegmatic German Chancellor Olaf Scholz was palpable when he left the Paris meeting.

“It is completely premature and a completely wrong time to have this discussion [on sending European troops to Ukraine] now. I’m even a little irritated by these debates.”

He insisted that there must be equal division between the US and Europe on responsibilities in Ukraine.

Scholz is likely to be out of a job soon. There are elections in Germany on Sunday, which he is widely expected to lose.

He’s had a couple of uncharacteristically emotional outbursts at home too of late, presumably under the strain.

Still, it’s important to note that he is far from alone amongst European leaders, who suspect Donald Trump is in a hurry to wash his hands of Ukraine and pivot his attention elsewhere. Perhaps China?

They worry too that the US president not only intends to deplete the defence umbrella his country has offered its European allies since the end of World War Two, but that Europe may now need to defend itself against him and his policies.

The tone the UK prime minister struck after the Paris meeting was in stark contrast to these darker European broodings.

He is openly keen to use the “special relationship” the UK hopes it still has with Washington as a bridge between Europe and the US.

One that Sir Keir Starmer is determined not to burn, telling voters at home that European security was in their national interest.

He appeared determinedly unfazed at Russia’s face-to-face preparation talks with the US in Saudi Arabia.

No date for that big-ticket summit between Trump and Putin has yet been set.

Sir Keir hopes to grab a window of opportunity to press Europe’s case when he heads to Washington for a meeting of his own with the US president next week.

The US must stay by its allies’ side, the prime minister has declared.

If it doesn’t, Europe’s leaders will have to keep meeting untill they can agree a way forward for Ukraine and their common security.

Should they fail again, long shadows over the stability of this continent will grow.

Three Americans and two Russians made up the two teams at the talks in Saudi Arabia that have underscored an end to Western isolation of Moscow.

The men described the meeting as preparing the groundwork for broader “high-level” talks and agreed to reset their countries’ diplomatic relations.

Who are they and what significance will they play in the rapprochement between the two powers?

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio had already spoken to his veteran Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov over the phone three days before the talks took place. He said after Tuesday’s meeting he was convinced Russia was ready for a “serious process” to end the war and the two countries would resume diplomatic relations.

Rubio has long sought an end to the war in Ukraine and voted against a $6bn US military aid package in 2024. He sees China as America’s biggest adversary and believes Beijing is happy for the US to be “bogged down in Europe”.

He has cautioned that “one meeting is not going to solve [the war]” and made clear that both Ukraine and Europe will have to be involved too: “No-one is being sidelined here.”

National Security Adviser Mike Waltz spoke after the talks of pushing for a permanent, not a temporary end to the war. But he suggested at the weekend that US deserves “some type of payback” for the billions it has paid out to Ukraine since it began.

He does not just believe that Europeans have to “own this conflict” in terms of future security guarantees. He also thinks Ukraine should share its mineral wealth in partnership with the US “in terms of their rare earths, their natural resources, and their oil and gas”.

Steve Witkoff is more of an unknown quantity. Although these were the first official talks between Russia and the US for almost two years, Witkoff was the man Donald Trump chose to send to Moscow only last week for talks with Vladimir Putin.

Ostensibly, he’s Trump’s Middle East envoy, but clearly the president’s former golf partner is far more significant than that and he is being seen as the president’s loyal and favoured dealmaker.

He was part of talks on forging Israel’s ceasefire with Hamas but was then sent to Russia to help with the exchange of US prisoner Marc Fogel for a Russian, Alexander Vinnik, in jail in America.

Russia chose two top diplomats for this initial exchange of views.

Both are veterans and know the US well: Putin foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov and Sergei Lavrov, foreign minister since 2004.

They have helped Putin steer his foreign policy during three years of war, and it has been up to Lavrov to convey Moscow’s message.

Lavrov did it again on Tuesday. Explaining that the US delegation had proposed a halt to attacks on energy facilities, Lavrov said Russia had never targeted Ukraine’s civilian supply. A cruel denial of the truth when Russian attacks on the national grid have made power outages a common feature of Ukrainian life.

When he took part in doomed ceasefire talks with Ukraine shortly after the full-scale war began, Lavrov even denied there had been an invasion.

As former ambassador to the US, 77-year-old Yuri Ushakov has a good idea of how to talk to Washington. Within days of Donald Trump’s return to the White House he made clear Russia was ready for talks if the US sent “relevant signals”.

Days before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he accused the Biden administration of peak “hysteria” in suggesting Russian troops were preparing to go to war.

A third Russian was not in the room, but Kirill Dmitriev’s presence in the delegation is a mark of just how important Vladimir Putin sees the economic potential of the Saudi talks.

Dmitriev, 49, is head of Russia’s Direct Investment Fund and told reporters he would focus on future economic relations with the US: “We also need to make joint projects, including, for example, in the Arctic Region, and in other areas.”

Significantly, Dmitriev played a key role in working with Steve Witkoff in the prisoner exchange that preceded Trump’s phone-call with Putin last week, along with Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman.

Dmitriev has close connections to Putin’s family – his wife is close to one of Putin’s daughters.

And few Russians know America’s finance and business sector better than Dmitriev, as a former investment banker at Goldman Sachs and a graduate of Harvard Business School.

Although he is adamant Russia’s economy is doing well, 43% of the budget is going on the war and internal security, inflation is just under 10% and interest rates have hit 21%.

The two Saudi hosts chaired the start of the meeting but did not stay in the room.

Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan has played an active role as top Saudi diplomat this year, visiting Lebanon and Europe and hosting an international meeting aimed at lifting sanctions on Syria.

Saudi national security adviser Musaed al-Aiban has also played a prominent part in promoting Saudi ties with Syria’s new leader Ahmed al-Sharaa.

Although Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman takes the lead on foreign policy, these two men are regularly by his side.

“I was crying,” says Alya, when she saw news of last week’s Munich attack that left a toddler and her mother dead.

“Why should someone do something like that? Why? I can’t understand it.”

An Afghan man’s in custody after what was the latest in a series of attacks in German cities where the suspect has been an asylum seeker.

Last Thursday it was a mother and daughter in Munich; last month another child and an adult were killed in Aschaffenburg.

Alya came here a decade ago from Syria with her baby son. Now 10, he and his mother welcome me into their home.

They were among a record 1.2 million people who applied for asylum in Germany from 2015-16, many of them from Syria but also from countries including Afghanistan and Iraq.

The attacks have put security and migration front and centre of an election campaign, days before Germans vote on their next government on 23 February.

Alya despairs of those who commit violence in a country that, she says, has “given us everything”.

The BBC first heard their story a decade earlier when they were filmed at a refugee centre in the city of Oberhausen.

Rami looks at a photo of himself from 2015. He’s tiny, enveloped in a life jacket from when his mother fled war-torn Syria.

“How could I go with him in that boat?” she asks herself, remembering how they crossed the Aegean Sea with 60 others, packed in a small boat.

“I didn’t know I’d gone through that,” says Rami. It scares him to see it now.

Ten years on, Alya has trained in elderly care and re-married. She is looking for work, while Rami goes to a local school and is a passionate football fan.

They both speak German: Rami has grown up with the language and Alya has studied it.

They’re grateful to their adopted country and plan to stay; Rami has dreams of becoming a doctor, policeman or footballer.

Mother and child have, unsurprisingly, changed in the past 10 years.

So has Germany.

Back in 2015, there were scenes of sweets being handed out to refugees arriving at Munich train station, as an unparalleled number of people fled to Europe due to conflict, instability or poverty.

German or Welcoming Culture, was encapsulated when the then chancellor, Angela Merkel, declared: “We can manage this.”

For her supporters, it was a pragmatic and compassionate reaction; for her critics, one of her most unforgivable mistakes.

A decade later and anyone I have spoken to agrees that attitudes have hardened, in society and politically.

Alya says she has “lots of German friends” but has detected the broader change in mood in Germany and mentions hearing the phrase – foreigners out.

However she is “very sad” about refugees and migrants who don’t learn German or, in her view, have failed to properly integrate.

“The key to this country is the language,” she says, while adding: “There’s also a positive side that a lot of people have learned the language and they’ve started to work.”

Near Oberhausen’s main park, Georg, 66, says he gets on with people from all backgrounds but worries about cases of “radicalisation.”

He has lived in the city most of his life and used to work as a car mechanic and tiler. He mourns what he sees a general decline in Oberhausen, pointing to because of ageing infrastructure and a lack of investment.

Many in Germany also talk of a wish for greater public safety and a disillusionment with the parties that have governed the country since reunification.

Germany’s outgoing government has reimposed border controls as it tries to bring down the number of asylum seekers, and opposition parties want to go further.

Georg says it’s a difficult issue but believes there needs to be security: “No matter who’s in charge. Not like it is right now. It has to change.”

Before Europe’s migration crisis, Oberhausen was already a multicultural city.

Local government figures show that in 2010, 22% of people in Oberhausen were either not born as German citizens or had one immigrant parent.

By 2016, that figure had risen to 28% while the latest figure, from 2023, was up to 37%.

Walking through the centre, the strained nature of Germany’s migration debate becomes quickly evident.

Around one corner, there’s a demonstration against the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party which has embraced the concept of “remigration”; a phrase widely understood to mean mass deportations.

On the main street, an AfD party stand has been put up, but it soon attracts shouts of “Nazis.”

Two men of colour end up in a heated argument with party activists which we are openly filming.

We hear one of the AfD campaigners, who we’d been speaking to earlier, say: “Go back to your (homeland) if you don’t like this here.”

When I challenge this man, Jörg Lange, afterwards, he denies the remark was racist.

A city councillor, he tells me voters will have their say and voices scepticism that one of the men grew up here, despite their fluency in the language.

“Would you have said the same thing to a white person?” I ask.

“No, of course not,” Mr Lange replies – but again denies it’s racist.

“He personally attacked me,” says Mr Lange. “He said ‘you’re a Nazi’. And then of course you have to say that if something doesn’t suit you here in Germany then you can go back. Then leave us alone here.”

Police arrive, during which time I talk with the two men involved in the argument, Kwame and Prathep, who are both in their thirties.

“He told us to go back!” says Kwame while Prathep says going “back” would mean going about, “Three streets away from here.”

“We went to school over here, we grew up over here… we have kids here,” they tell me. “We pay taxes, we pay a lot of taxes!”

I ask the pair about whether their role in the altercation is adding to the rising temperature of political debate.

Kwame, who used the term “Nazis” in the argument, says the “derogatory” language he hears about people of colour “triggers” him. “We feel like, wow, are we still in the same place right now?”

A dance choreographer, he tells me he came to Germany from Ghana aged 13 while Prathep describes how he was born in the city.

“I’m a German,” says Prathep. “I’m proud of this city,” chimes in Kwame. “Wherever I go in the world [I say] I’m from Oberhausen.”

Both think their community has become “drastically” more divided in recent years.

The political climate, which includes consistently strong polling for the AfD, has led to a toughening of language by some of Germany’s main political parties.

The conservative Christian Democrats who lead the polls have called for a “border ban” on anyone entering Germany without the right papers, even if they’re seeking protection.

The Social Democrats have pledged to speed up asylum procedures and boost deportations.

The AfD want to close Germany’s borders and leave the common European asylum policy.

Alya hopes that Germany will keep its doors open to refugees: “There’s still war everywhere. And the people need this… maybe there are very good people running away from war.”

The future of Germany’s migration policy will depend on which parties form a coalition after this election, and what they can agree on.

But a rightward shift is already underway, in reality and rhetoric.

Japan says it will increase its reliance on nuclear energy in a major policy shift as it seeks to meet growing demand from power-hungry sectors like AI and semiconductors.

An energy plan approved by the cabinet on Tuesday called for “maximising the use of nuclear energy” and dropped reference to “reducing reliance on nuclear energy”.

The energy plan, written by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry says that by 2040, nuclear energy should account for 20% of Japan’s grid supply in 2040, more than double the 8.5% share in 2023.

It comes as the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster from 14 years ago continues to hang over the country, conjuring painful memories.

In March 2011, a 9.0-magnitude earthquake near Japan’s north-east coast spawned a tsunami that killed more than 18,000 people, wiping out entire towns and flooding the reactors of the Fukushima Daiichi plant.

Japan now operates 14 commercial nuclear reactors, compared to 54 before the Fukushima disaster when 30% of the country’s energy was from nuclear sources.

The plan still needs approval by parliament, where it will be discussed in the coming months.

The country, which imports 90% of its fuel, needs to look to nuclear sources as part of its plan to cut back on carbon and be self-reliant on energy, said Daishiro Yamagiwa, an MP who was part of a government advisory committee on the energy plan.

“Because of the conflict in Ukraine and the war in the Middle East, even fossil fuels have become difficult to buy,” he told the BBC. “Japan is a country without energy resources, so we must use whatever is available in a balanced way.”

Yamagiwa added that energy burdens are growing because of demand from AI data processing centres and semiconductor factories around the country.

But experts say increasing reliance on nuclear energy will be both risky and costly.

Japan will need to import uranium, which is expensive and will make the country reliant on other countries, said Professor Kenichi Oshima at the faculty of policy science at Ryukoku University.

Prof Oshima told the BBC the main concern is that increasing the number of nuclear power plants also raises the risk of potentially disastrous accidents.

He cited the 2024 New Year’s Day earthquake in the Noto peninsula, where two decades ago, a plan to build a nuclear plant was scrapped because locals opposed it.

“If there had been a nuclear power plant there, it is quite clear that it would have caused a major accident,” he said.

In Japan, any mention of nuclear energy inevitably brings back difficult memories of the nuclear meltdown at the Daiichi power plant.

“We all had such a terrible experience at the time of the Fukushima quake,” Tokyo resident Yuko Maruyama told the BBC.

“How could I support it [the nuclear energy plan]? I want the government to rely on other sources of energy,” she added.

“As a mother I think of the children, of their safety. I cannot help but think about what would happen in the future.”

The meltdown at Fukushima is considered the world’s worst since that of Chernobyl in 1986.

It stirred fresh controversy in 2023, when Japan started releasing treated water from the site of the Fukushima plant. This drew protests from Japan’s neighbours, including China, over safety concerns.

The United Nations atomic energy regulator IAEA said the waste water was safe and would have a “negligible” impact on people and the environment.

In response to the new energy plan announced this week, Greenpeace said promoting nuclear energy is “outrageous” when the fallout from Fukushima is still ongoing.

“There is no justification for continuing to rely on nuclear energy, which remains toxic for tens of thousands of years, produces radioactive waste that requires long-term management, and carries risks like earthquakes and terrorism,” the group said.

To meet the government’s goal, experts say 33 reactors must be put back online, but the current pace of safety checks as well as residents’ objections in some areas will make this difficult.

Many of these nuclear plants are old and will need to be refitted with new technology for them to function safely.

“That most difficult problem is that each nuclear power plant is in a different location and will need its own safety protocol and infrastructure,” Yamagiwa said.

“We must check each of them carefully. It still takes time.”

In recent months, regulators have given several old reactors approval to keep operating.

In October 2024 Japan’s oldest reactor, Takahama nuclear power plant, was given the go-ahead to continue operations, making it the first reactor in the country to get approval to operate beyond 50 years.

Two years after ChatGPT took the world by storm, China’s DeepSeek has sent ripples through the tech industry by collapsing the cost for developing generative artificial intelligence applications.

But as the global race for AI supremacy heats up, India appears to have fallen behind, especially in creating its own foundational language model that’s used to power things like chatbots.

The government claims a homegrown equivalent to DeepSeek isn’t far away. It is supplying startups, universities and researchers with thousands of high-end chips needed to develop it in under 10 months.

A flurry of global AI leaders have also been talking up India’s capabilities recently.

After being initially dismissive, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman this month said India should be playing a leading role in the AI revolution. The country is now OpenAI’s second largest market by users.

Others like Microsoft have put serious money on the table – committing $3bn (£2.4bn) for cloud and AI infrastructure. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang also spoke of India’s “unmatched” technical talent as a key to unlocking its future potential.

With 200 startups working on generative AI, there’s enough entrepreneurial activity under way too.

But despite having key ingredients for success in place, India risks lagging behind without basic structural fixes to education, research and state policy, experts say.

China and the US already have a “four to five year head-start”, having invested heavily in research and academia and developed AI for military applications, law enforcement and now large language models, technology analyst Prasanto Roy told the BBC.

Though in the top five globally on Stanford’s AI Vibrancy Index – which ranks countries on metrics such as patents, funding, policy and research – India is still far behind the two superpowers in many key areas.

China and the US were granted 60% and 20% of the world’s total AI patents between 2010 and 2022 respectively. India got less than half a percent.

India’s AI startups also received a fraction of the private investment that US and Chinese companies got in 2023.

India’s state-funded AI mission, meanwhile, is worth a trifling $1bn compared with the staggering $500bn the US has earmarked for Stargate – a plan to build massive AI infrastructure in the US – or China’s reported $137bn initiative to become an AI hub by 2030.

While DeepSeek’s success has demonstrated that AI models can be built on older, less expensive chips – something India can take solace from – lack of “patient” or long-term capital from either industry or government is a major problem, says Jaspreet Bindra, founder of a consultancy that builds AI literacy in organisations.

“Despite what has been heard about DeepSeek developing a model with $5.6m, there was much more capital behind it.”

Lack of high-quality India-specific datasets required for training AI models in regional languages such as Hindi, Marathi or Tamil is another problem, especially given India’s language diversity.

But for all its issues, India punches far above its weight on talent – with 15% of the world’s AI workers coming from the country.

The issue though, as Stanford’s AI talent migration research shows, is that more and more of them are choosing to leave the country.

This is partly because “foundational AI innovations typically come from deep R&D in universities and corporate research labs”, Mr Bindra says.

And India lacks a supporting research environment, with few deep-tech breakthroughs emerging from its academic and corporate sectors.

The enormous success of India’s payments revolution was due to strong government-industry-academia collaboration – a similar model, he says, needs to be replicated for the AI push.

The Unified Payment Interface (UPI), a digital payment system developed by a government organisation, has revolutionised digital payments in India, allowing millions to transact at the click of a button or by scanning a QR code.

Bengaluru’s $200bn outsourcing industry, home to millions of coders, should have ideally been at the forefront of India’s AI ambitions. But the IT companies have never really shifted their focus from cheap service-based work to developing foundational consumer AI technologies.

“It’s a huge gap which they left to the startups to fill,” says Mr Roy.

He’s unsure though whether startups and government missions can do this heavy lifting quickly enough, adding that the 10-month timeline set by the minster was a knee-jerk reaction to DeepSeek’s sudden emergence.

“I don’t think India will be able to produce anything like DeepSeek at least for the next few years,” he adds. It is a view many others share.

India can, however, continue to build and tweak applications upon existing open source platforms like DeepSeek “to leapfrog our own AI progress”, Bhavish Agarwal, founder of one of India’s earliest AI startups Krutrim, recently wrote on X.

In the longer run though, developing a foundational model will be critical to have strategic autonomy in the sector and reduce import dependencies and threats of sanctions, say experts.

India will also need to increase its computational power or hardware infrastructure to run such models, which means manufacturing semiconductors – something that’s not taken off yet.

Much of this will need to fall in place before the gap with the US and China is narrowed meaningfully.

A couple in north-east Pakistan has been detained on suspicion of murdering a 13-year-old girl who worked for them as a maid, for allegedly stealing chocolates.

The girl who goes only by one name, Iqra, succumbed to multiple injuries in hospital last Wednesday. A preliminary police investigation said she had been tortured.

The case in Rawalpindi has sparked widespread outrage and posts with the hashtag #JusticeforIqra having garnered tens of thousands of views, and reignited a debate over child labour and the mistreatment of domestic workers.

Laws pertaining to child labour can vary across the country, but children under the age of 15 cannot be employed as domestic workers in the province of Punjab.

“I felt completely shattered inside when she died,” Iqra’s father, Sana Ullah, told the BBC.

He said that he had received a call from the police about Iqra last Wednesday. When he rushed to the hospital, he saw Iqra lying on a bed, unconscious. She died minutes later.

Iqra began working as a maid from the age of eight. Her father, a 45-year-old farmer, said he had sent her to work because he was in debt.

After working for a few employers, she went to work for the couple two years ago, who have eight children of their own. She was earning about £23 ($28) per month.

Police said Iqra had been accused of stealing chocolates from her employers, adding that a preliminary investigation showed that Iqra had been tortured.

Police also say there was evidence of frequent abuse. Pictures and videos obtained by the BBC showed multiple fractures in her legs and arms, as well as a serious injury to her head.

An autopsy is being conducted to assess the full extent of her injuries, and the police has told the BBC that they were still awaiting the final medical report.

“My heart cries tears of blood. How many… are subjected to violence in their homes every day for a trivial job of a few thousand?” activist Shehr Bano wrote on X. “How long will the poor continue to lower their daughters into graves in this way?”

Others have pointed out that her murder was allegedly triggered by something so minor.

“She died over chocolate?” asked one Pakistani user on X.

“This is not just a crime, it’s a reflection of [a] system that enables [the] rich to treat [the] poor as disposable,” another said.

Iqra’s employers, Rashid Shafiq and his wife Sana, have been arrested, along with a Quran teacher, who worked for the family. The teacher had brought Iqra to the hospital and left after telling hospital staff that the girl’s father had died and her mother was not around.

Police told the BBC it was unclear if she believed this to be the truth.

Iqra’s father says he wants to see “those responsible for my daughter’s death punished”.

Despite the public outrage such cases usually garner, they are typically settled out of court and it’s rare for suspects to be successfully prosecuted.

In 2018, a judge and his wife were sentenced to three years in jail for torturing their then 10-year-old maid in what had been a highly publicised case that sparked outrage across the country. But they later had their sentences reduced to one year.

Tayyaba was found with severe injuries, which the Pakistan Institute of Medical Science said included burns to her hands and feet. Pictures of the girl also showed cuts and bruising to her face, along with a swollen left eye. She told prosecutors she was beaten for losing a broom.

Under Pakistani law, victims or their families have the right to forgive suspects in a number of serious crimes. To do so, they have to state in court that they forgive a suspect “in the name of God”.

In reality, legal observers say that the primary motive for that “forgiveness” is normally financial, and paying victims is not illegal.

About 3.3 million children in Pakistan are engaged in child labour, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef). Moreover, women and young girls make up the vast majority of Pakistan’s 8.5 million domestic workers, according to the International Labour Organisation (ILO).

Depending on how you read it, New Zealand’s latest tourism tagline can be a well-meaning plea for people to visit – or a threat to kick Kiwis out.

“Everyone Must Go!” reads a slogan printed across posters of people in New Zealand’s majestic landscapes – part of a NZ$500,000 ($285,000; £227,000) campaign unveiled on Sunday.

But what was meant as a catchy call to action aimed at Australian tourists has been accused of being tone-deaf, as New Zealand deals with record emigration rates and unemployment.

The government has defended the campaign, with Prime Minister Christopher Luxon saying he “[appreciates] there’s lots of chat about whether everyone loves the slogan or not”.

“The fact that we’re talking about it is a good thing. It’s a great thing,” he added.

Cushla Tangaere-Manuel, tourism spokesperson for the opposition Labour Party, told local news outlet Radio New Zealand (RNZ) that the new slogan “makes New Zealand sound like we’re in a clearance bin at a sale”.

“The irony of that messaging is, that’s how Aotearoa New Zealanders are feeling right now,” she said, pointing to the “many cuts” that residents have experienced.

Job cuts to the public sector over the past year, as part of the government’s austerity push, have affected thousands of people.

Meanwhile, people are moving out of the country in record numbers. Official figures show that there were nearly 130,000 departures last year – though that was offset by the arrival of nearly 160,000 immigrants.

“New Zealanders are voting with their feet, leaving in record high numbers,” Labour MP Barbara Edmonds wrote on X on Monday. “Is their real tourism plan ‘Everyone Must Go’ – for Kiwis?”

Others associated the slogan with demand for lavatories.

“I think ‘Everyone Must Go’ might refer to the need for toilets in some of our high-tourist spots. I mean, the queues are ridiculous,” Green Party MP Celia Wade-Brown told RNZ.

“They don’t go kayaking, they don’t go diving, but, my goodness, they queue at the toilets.”

Tourism minister Louise Upston said in a statement on Sunday that “the campaign tagline of ‘Everyone must go’ lets Australia know that New Zealand is a ‘must visit’ destination, and that we’re ready and waiting to welcome them now”.

New Zealand’s tourism numbers have yet to bounce back to pre-pandemic levels, and authorities are channelling efforts into attracting visitors from neighbouring Australia, its largest source of tourists.

Last year, New Zealand welcomed more than 1.2 million visitors from Australia. But Upston said visitors numbers were only 88% of that in 2019.

Luxon said he hoped the latest campaign would boost Australian visitor numbers by 5%.

“It would be totally and utterly tragic if those Australians don’t get here before they do die,” he said.

The month-long tourism campaign is set to start on Thursday.

Donald Trump has taken aim at Ukraine after its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, said it was a “surprise” that his country was not invited to peace talks in Saudi Arabia to end the Ukraine war.

Trump said he was “disappointed” by Ukraine’s reaction and appeared to blame Ukraine for starting the war – saying the country “could have made a deal”.

The war in Ukraine was sparked by a full-scale Russian invasion almost three years ago.

His comments came after Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said his country won’t accept peacekeeping forces from Nato countries in Ukraine under any peace deal, following talks with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Saudi Arabia.

Russia and the US said they had agreed to appoint teams to start negotiating the end of the war.

Speaking to reporters at Mar-a-Lago, Trump was asked by the BBC what his message was to Ukrainians who might feel betrayed.

“I hear that they’re upset about not having a seat, well, they’ve had a seat for three years and a long time before that. This could have been settled very easily,” he said.

“You should have never started it. You could have made a deal,” he later added.

“I could have made a deal for Ukraine,” he said.

“That would have given them almost all of the land, everything, almost all of the land – and no people would have killed, and no city would have been demolished.”

After the meeting between US and Russian officials in Saudi Arabia, Trump said he was “much more confident”.

“They were very good. Russia wants to do something. They want to stop the savage barbarianism.”

“I think I have the power to end this war,” he said.

Asked about the prospect of European countries sending troops to Ukraine, he said: “If they want to do that, that’s great I’m all for it.”

The meeting in Riyadh was the first time since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine that Russian and American delegations are known to have met face-to-face.

At the talks were US Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff and US National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, as well as Russian presidential aide Yury Ushakov and the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, Kirill Dmitriev.

Afterwards, Lavrov said that Moscow will not accept peacekeeping forces from Nato countries in Ukraine under any peace deal.

“Any appearance by armed forces under some other flag does not change anything. It is of course completely unacceptable,” he said.

He said the US and Russia would appoint ambassadors to each other’s countries as soon as possible and create conditions to “restore co-operation in full”.

“It was a very useful conversation. We listened to each other, and we heard each other,” he said.

He reiterated Russia’s previous position that any expansion of the Nato defence alliance – and Ukraine joining it – would be a “direct threat” to Russia.

Rubio meanwhile said he was “convinced” Russia was “willing to begin to engage in a serious process” to end the conflict.

“There has to be concessions made by all sides. We’re not going to predetermine what those are.”

“Today is the first step of a long and difficult journey, but an important one”, he added.

• Europe’s leaders divided over their tactics with Trump

• Who was at the table at US-Russia talks in Saudi Arabia?

• How much do Nato members spend on defence?

• Ukrainecast: How pleased is Putin?

European leaders held a hastily arranged meeting in Paris on Monday to discuss their response to the apparent rapprochement between Russia and the US under President Trump – but did not agree a unified position.

UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said any Ukraine deal would require a “US backstop” to deter Russia from attacking its neighbour again and said he would consider deploying UK troops to Ukraine.

But Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz, a key Nato ally, said for his part, discussing sending troops to Ukraine at present was “completely premature”.

Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk also said he does not intend to send troops, and Italy’s Giorgia Meloni – the only European leader to attend Trump’s inauguration – expressed doubts.

She told the meeting in Paris that deploying European troops would be “the most complex and the least effective” way of securing peace in Ukraine.

In Riyadh, Rubio said the European Union was going to “have to be at the table at some point because they have sanctions as well that have been imposed”.

On the absence of Ukraine at the meeting, he insisted “no-one is being sidelined”.

“Everyone involved in that conflict has to be OK with it, it has to be acceptable to them,” he added.

Ukraine’s leader looked visibly tired and upset when he gave his reaction to the meeting during a news conference in Turkey.

“We want everything to be fair and so that nobody decides anything behind our back,” Zelensky said.

“You cannot make decisions without Ukraine on how to end the war in Ukraine.”

He will be alarmed by all the smiles on both American and Russian faces in Riyadh, but he will know that he can do little to change whatever they agree on over his head.

The Ukrainian president will also know that his country’s chances of resisting – let alone defeating – Russian troops without American help are very slim.

The Russians and Americans are talking again, as European leaders and diplomats contemplate the hard choices forced on them by US President Donald Trump.

Without question, Trump’s diplomatic ultimatum to Ukraine and America’s Western European allies has cracked the transatlantic alliance, perhaps beyond repair.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky looks rattled by the abrupt change of attitude coming from the White House, though some of his many critics at home say he should have seen it coming. Well before he won re-election, Donald Trump made it clear that he was not going to continue Joe Biden’s policies.

As he arrived in Turkey on his latest trip, Zelensky deplored the fact that negotiations to end the war were happening “behind the back of key parties affected by the consequences of Russian aggression”.

But it feels like a long way from the air-conditioned room in Saudi Arabia where the Russian and American delegations faced each other across a broad and highly polished mahogany table, to the bitter cold of north-eastern Ukraine.

In dug-outs and military bases here in the snow-bound villages and forests on the border with Russia, Ukrainian soldiers are getting on with business as usual – fighting the war.

In an underground bunker at a base in the forest somewhere near Sumy, a Ukrainian officer told me he didn’t have much time to follow the news. As far as he was concerned, Donald Trump’s decision to talk to Russia’s president Vladimir Putin was “just noise”.

The commander, who asked to be referred to only by his call sign “White” has more pressing matters to consider.

Ignoring the diplomatic bombshell that has rattled Western leaders, as well as his own president, is probably the right thing to do for a battlefield officer preparing to lead his men back into the fight. Soon they will cross back into Kursk, to rejoin the fight to keep the land Ukraine has seized from Russia.

As a condition of access to Ukrainian soldiers, we agreed not to disclose precise locations or identities, except to say they are in the borderlands around the town of Sumy, and all part of Ukraine’s continuing fight in Kursk.

In a small room in a workshop tucked away in a village there was a formidable display of killing power on shelves made of planks from the sawmill propped up by wooden ammunition boxes.

On the shelves were hundreds of drones, all made in Ukraine. Each one costs around £300 ($380). The soldiers who were checking them before packing them into cardboard boxes to send them into the Kursk battlefields said that when they are armed – and flown by a skilled pilot – they could even destroy a tank.

One of them, called Andrew, was a drone pilot until his leg was blown off. He said he hadn’t thought too hard about what had been said far from here by the Americans – but none of them trusted President Vladimir Putin.

Their drones a few hours earlier had destroyed a Russian armoured unit advancing in broad daylight across a frozen snow-covered field. They showed us the video. Some of the vehicles they hit were flying the red banner of the Soviet Union instead of the Russian flag.

Sumy is busy enough during the day, with shops open and well-stocked. But once it gets dark the streets are almost deserted. Air raid alerts come frequently.

Anti-aircraft guns fire tracer into the sky for hours, aimed at the waves of Russian drones that cross the border near here to attack targets much deeper inside Ukraine – and sometimes in Sumy itself.

A big block of flats has a hole three storeys high ripped out of it. Eleven people were killed here in a Russian drone attack a fortnight or so ago. Since then, the block has been evacuated as engineers fear it is so badly damaged it might collapse.

It is part of a housing estate of identical monumental blocks built during the Soviet era. Residents still living next to the wrecked and unsafe building were going about their business, walking to the shops or their cars, swaddled against the intense cold.

Mykola, a man of 50, stopped to talk as he was walking home with his young son. He lives in the next block to the one the Russians destroyed.

I asked him what he thought of Donald Trump’s idea of peace in Ukraine.

“We need peace,” he said. “It’s necessary because there is no point in war. War doesn’t lead to anything. If you look at how much territory Russia has occupied so far, for the Russians to eventually get to Kyiv, they’ll have to keep fighting for 14 years. It’s only the people who are suffering. It needs to end.”

But no deal worth having, Mykola believed, would emerge from Putin and Trump sitting together without Zelensky and the Europeans.

Yuliia, 33, another neighbour, was out walking her Jack Russell. She was at home when the Russians attacked the block of flats next door.

“It all happened just past midnight, when we were about to go to bed. We heard a loud explosion, and we saw a massive red flash through our window. We saw this horror. It was very scary.

“Many people were outside. And I remember there was a woman hanging out – she was screaming for help – we couldn’t see her immediately but eventually she was saved from the debris.”

Peace is possible, she believes, “but they need to stop bombing us first. There can only be peace when they stop doing that. It needs to come from their side because they started this horror.

“Of course, you can’t trust Putin.”

As the last rays of the sun disappeared, Borys, a spry and upright retired colonel of 70 who served 30 years in the Soviet army stopped on his way to his car. His son and grandson, he said, are both in uniform fighting for Ukraine.

“Peace is possible,” he said. “But I don’t really believe in it. I think that justice will prevail for Ukraine. You have to be cautious.

“While Putin is there, you cannot trust Russians. Because they believe in him as if he is a religion. You won’t change them. It needs time.”

So what’s the answer – keep fighting or a peace deal?

“Ukraine needs to think about peace. But we shouldn’t surrender. I don’t see any point. We will resist until we are stronger. Europe seems like they are ready to help us. There is just no point in surrendering.”

Donald Trump, a man who seems convinced that the principles of a real-estate deal can be applied to ending a war will discover that making peace is much more complicated than just getting a ceasefire and deciding how much land each side keeps.

President Putin has made very clear that he wants to break Ukraine’s sovereignty and destroy its ability to act as an independent nation.

Whether or not Ukraine’s President Zelensky has a seat at President Trump’s conference table, he won’t agree to that. Making a peace that lasts, if it’s possible, will be a long and slow process.

If Donald Trump wants a quick peace dividend, he should look elsewhere.

More than 60 false killer whales have died and authorities are trying to save dozens more after a mass stranding on a remote Australian beach.

Tasmania’s Department of Natural Resources and Environment said a pod of 157 had beached near Arthur River, in the island’s north west.

About 90 of the animals – which witnesses say include juveniles – are still alive, with conservation experts and veterinarians at the site evaluating whether any can be returned to the sea.

Tasmania has seen a series of mass whale strandings in recent years – including the country’s worst-ever in 2020 – but false killer whales haven’t mass stranded there in over 50 years.

False killer whales are technically one of the largest dolphin species, like their orca namesakes, and can grow up to 6m and 1.5t.

Authorities says the pod has been stranded at the site – about 300km from the city of Launceston – for 24 to 48 hours, and it will be an uphill battle to save any of them.

“Initial assessments indicate that refloating the whales will be difficult due to the inaccessibility of the site, ocean conditions and the challenges of getting specialised equipment to the remote area,” department spokesman Brendon Clarke told media.

While rescuers have successfully saved whales at other recent stranding events on the west coast, the complexity of this incident means the same techniques can’t be used.

Teams on site are triaging the whales with the best chance of survival and trying to keep them alive and comfortable while rescue options are discussed.

Animal welfare is a priority, but there are concerns about the safety and wellbeing of rescue teams to consider too.

“We have… surging tidal waters and breaking surf, and so to try and refloat the animals directly back into that surf would be challenging, and then, of course, that would also present some enormous safety risk for our staff and personnel.”

“Because the fact that these are large animals, potentially in their death throes, and they could be writhing and moving around on beaches, [there’s a] likelihood of somebody being injured.”

Sharks are also a concern.

Authorities have asked members of the public to avoid the site, with bushfires burning nearby and limited road access.

Local resident Jocelyn Flint told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation she had travelled to the site on Wednesday morning after her son noticed the pod while out shark fishing overnight.

“There are babies… There’s just families of them. Their eyes are open, they’re looking at me, like ‘help’.”

“It’s just absolutely horrific. They’re all struggling.”

More than 80% of Australian whale strandings take place in Tasmania – often on its west coast.

Around 470 pilot whales were stranded further south at Macquarie Harbour in 2020 and about 350 of them died despite rescue efforts. Another 200 become stranded in the same harbour in 2022.

Whales are highly social mammals and are well known for stranding in groups because they travel in large, close-knit communities which rely on constant communication.

There are a range of theories for why beachings occur. Some experts say the animals can become disoriented after following fish they hunt to the shore.

Others believe that one individual can mistakenly lead whole groups to shore.

A driver murdered a cyclist by deliberately ramming him with his car to teach him a lesson for pulling a wheelie, police said.

Victim Liam Jones, 22, died at the scene after Abdirahman Ibrahim drove into him twice as he rode his electric bike in Sheldon, Birmingham.

Ibrahim, 21, of Bonham Grove, Birmingham, struck Mr Jones before driving off when the cyclist was fatally injured crashing into a bollard, West Midlands Police said.

The defendant was convicted on Monday after a trial at Birmingham Crown Court, and is due to be sentenced on 26 March.

Police said Ibrahim’s brother, Abdullahi, was a passenger in his car when the crash happened.

Abdullahi Ibrahim, 21, of Acacia Close in Lewisham, London, pleaded guilty to assisting an offender at a hearing last April and is also due to be sentenced at the same hearing.

Abdirahman Ibrahim first came across Mr Jones and a friend when they were riding their bikes late at night on Coventry Road on 1 August 2023, police said.

He started to follow them in his Seat Leon and CCTV footage showed the car close behind Mr Jones, who was performing a “stand-up wheelie”, the force said.

The driver kept pursuing the riders and drove into Mr Jones twice on Moat Lane in Sheldon, shortly before midnight. Mr Jones was confirmed dead at the scene.

He then drove away and parked his car in another neighbourhood, while his brother called for a taxi to take them home, police said.

Det Insp Nick Barnes said Abdirahman Ibrahim was “intent on causing harm” to Mr Jones and “menacingly” pursued him.

“We believe he was angered by Liam’s showboating and wanted to teach him a lesson,” he said.

“Tragically, Liam lost his life and Ibrahim will now spend many years of his own young life in prison.”

Three Americans and two Russians made up the two teams at the talks in Saudi Arabia that have underscored an end to Western isolation of Moscow.

The men described the meeting as preparing the groundwork for broader “high-level” talks and agreed to reset their countries’ diplomatic relations.

Who are they and what significance will they play in the rapprochement between the two powers?

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio had already spoken to his veteran Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov over the phone three days before the talks took place. He said after Tuesday’s meeting he was convinced Russia was ready for a “serious process” to end the war and the two countries would resume diplomatic relations.

Rubio has long sought an end to the war in Ukraine and voted against a $6bn US military aid package in 2024. He sees China as America’s biggest adversary and believes Beijing is happy for the US to be “bogged down in Europe”.

He has cautioned that “one meeting is not going to solve [the war]” and made clear that both Ukraine and Europe will have to be involved too: “No-one is being sidelined here.”

National Security Adviser Mike Waltz spoke after the talks of pushing for a permanent, not a temporary end to the war. But he suggested at the weekend that US deserves “some type of payback” for the billions it has paid out to Ukraine since it began.

He does not just believe that Europeans have to “own this conflict” in terms of future security guarantees. He also thinks Ukraine should share its mineral wealth in partnership with the US “in terms of their rare earths, their natural resources, and their oil and gas”.

Steve Witkoff is more of an unknown quantity. Although these were the first official talks between Russia and the US for almost two years, Witkoff was the man Donald Trump chose to send to Moscow only last week for talks with Vladimir Putin.

Ostensibly, he’s Trump’s Middle East envoy, but clearly the president’s former golf partner is far more significant than that and he is being seen as the president’s loyal and favoured dealmaker.

He was part of talks on forging Israel’s ceasefire with Hamas but was then sent to Russia to help with the exchange of US prisoner Marc Fogel for a Russian, Alexander Vinnik, in jail in America.

Russia chose two top diplomats for this initial exchange of views.

Both are veterans and know the US well: Putin foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov and Sergei Lavrov, foreign minister since 2004.

They have helped Putin steer his foreign policy during three years of war, and it has been up to Lavrov to convey Moscow’s message.

Lavrov did it again on Tuesday. Explaining that the US delegation had proposed a halt to attacks on energy facilities, Lavrov said Russia had never targeted Ukraine’s civilian supply. A cruel denial of the truth when Russian attacks on the national grid have made power outages a common feature of Ukrainian life.

When he took part in doomed ceasefire talks with Ukraine shortly after the full-scale war began, Lavrov even denied there had been an invasion.

As former ambassador to the US, 77-year-old Yuri Ushakov has a good idea of how to talk to Washington. Within days of Donald Trump’s return to the White House he made clear Russia was ready for talks if the US sent “relevant signals”.

Days before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he accused the Biden administration of peak “hysteria” in suggesting Russian troops were preparing to go to war.

A third Russian was not in the room, but Kirill Dmitriev’s presence in the delegation is a mark of just how important Vladimir Putin sees the economic potential of the Saudi talks.

Dmitriev, 49, is head of Russia’s Direct Investment Fund and told reporters he would focus on future economic relations with the US: “We also need to make joint projects, including, for example, in the Arctic Region, and in other areas.”

Significantly, Dmitriev played a key role in working with Steve Witkoff in the prisoner exchange that preceded Trump’s phone-call with Putin last week, along with Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman.

Dmitriev has close connections to Putin’s family – his wife is close to one of Putin’s daughters.

And few Russians know America’s finance and business sector better than Dmitriev, as a former investment banker at Goldman Sachs and a graduate of Harvard Business School.

Although he is adamant Russia’s economy is doing well, 43% of the budget is going on the war and internal security, inflation is just under 10% and interest rates have hit 21%.

The two Saudi hosts chaired the start of the meeting but did not stay in the room.

Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan has played an active role as top Saudi diplomat this year, visiting Lebanon and Europe and hosting an international meeting aimed at lifting sanctions on Syria.

Saudi national security adviser Musaed al-Aiban has also played a prominent part in promoting Saudi ties with Syria’s new leader Ahmed al-Sharaa.

Although Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman takes the lead on foreign policy, these two men are regularly by his side.

Passengers have described their amazement after most of them escaped unscathed from a plane that crash landed in Toronto on Monday afternoon.

The Delta flight skidded along the runway in flames before flipping over and coming to a dramatic halt upside down, losing its tail and an entire wing in the process.

Some of the 80 people on board were then left hanging upside down while still strapped to their seats, before they scrambled over luggage to escape onto the snowy runway.

No deaths have been reported after the incident, which is under investigation.

Analysts have suggested the harsh winter weather may be to blame, or that the plane landed badly. They have also credited the plane’s safety features with saving lives.

The incident took place shortly after 14:00 local time on Monday (19:00 GMT).

It involved a model CRJ-900 plane, operating as Delta Air Lines flight DL4819.

The aircraft arrived at Toronto from the US city of Minneapolis and was carrying 76 passengers and four crew members.

As it landed, the plane appears to have struck the runway, slid for some distance and then flipped over, observed Dan Ronan, a journalist and pilot licensed by the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) who spoke to BBC News.

Footage obtained by TMZ showed part of the aircraft bursting into flames as the landing happened. Firefighters rushed to put these out.

Passenger Pete Carlson told broadcaster CBC it was “a very forceful event”, recalling the sound of “concrete and metal” at the moment of impact.

He and others on board were suspended upside down in their seats, and had to release themselves onto the cabin ceiling before leaving the inverted aircraft.

All 80 people on board survived. On Tuesday morning, Delta said 21 injured passengers were initially transported to local hospitals – with 19 later released.

Delta has promised to give more updates.

• All passengers survive crash landing in Toronto
• Witnesses recount lucky escape
• Did you witness the plane crash? Contact us

BBC Verify has analysed recordings of communications between the plane and air traffic control.

At no point in discussions was there anything to suggest trouble was anticipated with the landing.

This was confirmed by Marco Chan, a former pilot and a senior lecturer at Buckinghamshire New University in the UK, and plane crash investigator Ismo Aaltonen, who also listened to the audio recording.

Mr Chan also said the plane appeared to have made a hard landing – involving an unusually high rate of descent.

It seems to have touched down with one wheel first, Mr Chan told the BBC, which might have caused the landing gear to collapse on impact. This could have lead to the right wing hitting the runway and in turn causing the plane to roll.

The weather may also have been significant. The airport fire chief stated that the runway was dry at the time of the incident.

Airport authorities had said earlier that although recent heavy snow had stopped, “frigid temperatures and high winds [were] moving in”.

As the plane came in to land, air traffic controllers told the pilots of 38mph (61km/h) gusts and the possibility of a “slight bump in the glide path”, CNN reported.

The pilots appear to have attempted what is known as a crab manoeuvre, Mr Ronan said. This involves turning a plane into the wind, and then directly onto the runway at the last moment.

“The sheer survivability of this is really amazing,” Mr Ronan told the BBC, pointing out that the aeroplane’s fuselage (body) had stayed intact.

Other commentators hailed the craft’s safety features. CNN analyst and former FAA inspector David Soucie said the plane had broken apart as it had meant to, with the detachment of the wings stopping the fuselage ripping apart.

Graham Braithwaite, professor of safety and accident investigation at the UK’s Cranfield University, said planes were also designed so that air passengers involved in an accident did not hit things likely to cause injury.

“Even the design of the seat back or the tray table is all part of how we consider making that survivable space,” he told the BBC. “And the seatbelt that people have is so important – that is the ultimate thing that stops people being thrown around the cabin like this,” he added.

The flight attendants have also been praised for getting everyone off the flipped aeroplane quickly. Emergency crews on the ground were labelled “heroic” by the airport chief after reaching the crash site in a matter of minutes.

Mr Carlson said the passengers themselves had worked together very effectively. “What I saw was everyone on that plane suddenly became very close in terms of how to help one another, how to console one another,” he said.

Mr Ronan highlighted the importance of the plane’s high-impact 16g seats, which he said were “designed to absorb a great deal of punishment”.

The seats can withstand deceleration of 16 times the force of gravity, and must pass rigorous testing using human dummies to model crash dynamics.

The seat legs, attached to a track on the floor, must be able to pitch down 10 degrees on one side and roll 10 degrees on the other side so that they do not break, said Kevin Campbell, founder of Aviation Consulting & Engineering Solutions, who is FAA-authorised to approve seats that are required to comply with the regulations.

In previous accidents, the FAA had seen seats piled up in the fronts of aircrafts, with bodies still attached in many cases, Mr Campbell said.

Mr Ronan said the regulations keep “the seat in place and bolted to the floor, so you have a higher degree of survivability in your seat itself and you have less likelihood that the seat is going to become detached, where you’re now strapped into a moving object that’s being bounced around the cabin.”

The regulations also require a passenger to be able to withstand hitting their head and legs on the seat in front of them, and seats help absorb weight in their spine so that they do not break their back. Seatbelts are also less stretchy than they used to be so the restraint is more secure.

“As a result of that aircrafts are much, much safer,” Mr Campbell said, and those factors were “absolutely” at play in improving safety in this crash.

“It really is remarkable that the seats did exactly what they were supposed to do, they stayed intact… the seatbelts worked just as they were supposed to, and the seats did not become detached from the floor,” Mr Ronan said.

“Think of how many head injuries we would have had, spinal injuries we would have had, if the seat became detached.”

This marks the fourth major air crash in North America in less than a month, and other recent incidents remain under investigation.

• All 67 people on board a passenger aeroplane and military helicopter died after the two aircraft collided in mid-air near Washington DC on 29 January
• Seven people were killed on 1 February when a medical transportation plane carrying six people crashed in Philadelphia. Another person was killed on the ground
• All 10 people were killed when a small plane came down in Alaska on 6 February

Those incidents followed another high-profile crash in South Korea in December, in which 179 people were killed.

Despite these, experts say air travel remains overwhelmingly safe – and increasingly so.

The US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) accident dashboard says there were 257 fatal accidents globally in 2024, compared with 362 in 2014.

French President Emmanuel Macron got straight on the phone to Donald Trump and, separately, to Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky on Monday night, after fellow leaders of Europe’s biggest military powers left the glittering Élysée Palace in Paris.

What achievements could the French president boast? Was his emergency security summit a success?

What frustrates Europe’s detractors is there’s rarely a clear answer. Different European nations speak with different voices, though they share many values and goals.

But in the current climate of black-and-white thinking prevalent in Washington and Moscow, where the world is divided into the powerful and the weak, European nuance can count as weakness.

Under that unforgiving spotlight, Monday’s meeting failed.

Leaders had raised expectations. The summit dominated headlines as soon as it was called.

The head of the West’s defence alliance Nato, European Union chiefs and leaders of Europe’s most influential military nations scrambled together at speed.

They wanted to hijack Donald Trump’s attention. To impress him. To elbow themselves a seat at the negotiating table at the peace talks he plans with Russia’s Vladimir Putin to discuss the future of Ukraine.

Europe was – it still is – smarting at being sidelined.

Ukraine is a European nation. Its fate will impact the whole continent.

Depending how bullish President Putin emerges from any peace talks, Europe’s security services fear he could turn his attention to upending the sovereignty of other nations.

The Baltic states that neighbour Russia feel particularly exposed.

But leaders didn’t help their case on Monday.

Yes, they say they’ll spend more on their own defence, as Donald Trump demands. Despite domestic concerns about limited government budgets and a cost of living crisis.

The Paris meeting even discussed the possibility of sending European troops to Ukraine to oversee an eventual ceasefire – unthinkable even a few weeks ago for Europe.

That’s what the US president wants.

But ultimately those leaders in Paris failed to deliver a strong, united, sum-it-up-in-a-line-tweet response, that might have made the impatient businessman-cum-US president sit up and really take notice.

The reasons for this are many, despite the sense of urgency in Europe about Ukraine and European security more broadly.

A number of Europe’s leaders are furious at feeling they have to dance to Donald Trump’s tune.

The frustration that poured out of the mouth of the normally phlegmatic German Chancellor Olaf Scholz was palpable when he left the Paris meeting.

“It is completely premature and a completely wrong time to have this discussion [on sending European troops to Ukraine] now. I’m even a little irritated by these debates.”

He insisted that there must be equal division between the US and Europe on responsibilities in Ukraine.

Scholz is likely to be out of a job soon. There are elections in Germany on Sunday, which he is widely expected to lose.

He’s had a couple of uncharacteristically emotional outbursts at home too of late, presumably under the strain.

Still, it’s important to note that he is far from alone amongst European leaders, who suspect Donald Trump is in a hurry to wash his hands of Ukraine and pivot his attention elsewhere. Perhaps China?

They worry too that the US president not only intends to deplete the defence umbrella his country has offered its European allies since the end of World War Two, but that Europe may now need to defend itself against him and his policies.

The tone the UK prime minister struck after the Paris meeting was in stark contrast to these darker European broodings.

He is openly keen to use the “special relationship” the UK hopes it still has with Washington as a bridge between Europe and the US.

One that Sir Keir Starmer is determined not to burn, telling voters at home that European security was in their national interest.

He appeared determinedly unfazed at Russia’s face-to-face preparation talks with the US in Saudi Arabia.

No date for that big-ticket summit between Trump and Putin has yet been set.

Sir Keir hopes to grab a window of opportunity to press Europe’s case when he heads to Washington for a meeting of his own with the US president next week.

The US must stay by its allies’ side, the prime minister has declared.

If it doesn’t, Europe’s leaders will have to keep meeting untill they can agree a way forward for Ukraine and their common security.

Should they fail again, long shadows over the stability of this continent will grow.

The sight of senior Russian and American officials back around a giant negotiating table is extraordinary.

For many, most of all Ukrainians, it will have been very hard to take.

In Saudi Arabia, Moscow achieved something major: after three years of all-out war on its neighbour and isolation by the West, it was back at the “top table” of global diplomacy.

Not only that, Russia looked for all the world like it was the one calling the shots.

Even as air raid sirens continue to sound across Ukraine, that’s exactly the image Moscow wants to project.

This was not a defeated Russia, forced to the negotiating table. It was more like the US inviting the aggressor to set out its terms.

True, US officials went into the process saying they wanted to feel out Russia, check whether it’s serious about peace.

But Donald Trump had already drawn his conclusions. Last week, after he spoke to Vladimir Putin by phone, he announced that the Russian leader “wants to see people stop dying”.

Trump could have responded by telling him to withdraw all his troops.

Instead, he clearly wants to cut a deal with Moscow to end the war, as he promised voters, and move on.

• Russia won’t accept Nato troops in Ukraine, Lavrov says after talks with US
• Who was at the table at US-Russia talks in Saudi Arabia?
• Europe’s leaders divided over their tactics with Trump

After more than four hours of talks in Riyadh, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio emerged to the press and announced the first steps towards negotiations had been agreed, with teams to be formed on both sides.

He’d concluded that Russia was ready to engage in a “serious process” to end the war.

But why was he so sure?

Across the table was Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, still under sanctions for what the US Treasury called Russia’s “brutal war of choice”.

When Lavrov met the Russian media, he told them the US had proposed a moratorium on attacking energy infrastructure.

“We explained that we have never endangered the civilian energy supply and only target what directly serves Ukraine’s military,” was the minister’s reply.

That’s not true.

I have personally walked through the ruins of civilian power plants that have been directly targeted by Russian missiles.

This is the country that the US is attempting to engage with, although there is ample evidence that it can’t be trusted.

Russia has also shown zero sign of conceding any ground: why would it, when the Trump administration has already agreed that Ukraine will never join Nato, as Moscow demands, and won’t get its occupied land back?

That’s why, for Ukraine’s allies, it won’t only be the image of US and Russian officials seated at the shiny Saudi table that jarred. It’s also how they talked.

“Laying the ground” for future investment sounds like a promise of dropping sanctions: no reckoning for Russia’s war of aggression, then, just reward.

These are, of course, the earliest of early days.

But in Moscow, officials and state media sense the start of Russia’s return to where it believes it belongs: face to face with the US, as an equal.

Depending on how you read it, New Zealand’s latest tourism tagline can be a well-meaning plea for people to visit – or a threat to kick Kiwis out.

“Everyone Must Go!” reads a slogan printed across posters of people in New Zealand’s majestic landscapes – part of a NZ$500,000 ($285,000; £227,000) campaign unveiled on Sunday.

But what was meant as a catchy call to action aimed at Australian tourists has been accused of being tone-deaf, as New Zealand deals with record emigration rates and unemployment.

The government has defended the campaign, with Prime Minister Christopher Luxon saying he “[appreciates] there’s lots of chat about whether everyone loves the slogan or not”.

“The fact that we’re talking about it is a good thing. It’s a great thing,” he added.

Cushla Tangaere-Manuel, tourism spokesperson for the opposition Labour Party, told local news outlet Radio New Zealand (RNZ) that the new slogan “makes New Zealand sound like we’re in a clearance bin at a sale”.

“The irony of that messaging is, that’s how Aotearoa New Zealanders are feeling right now,” she said, pointing to the “many cuts” that residents have experienced.

Job cuts to the public sector over the past year, as part of the government’s austerity push, have affected thousands of people.

Meanwhile, people are moving out of the country in record numbers. Official figures show that there were nearly 130,000 departures last year – though that was offset by the arrival of nearly 160,000 immigrants.

“New Zealanders are voting with their feet, leaving in record high numbers,” Labour MP Barbara Edmonds wrote on X on Monday. “Is their real tourism plan ‘Everyone Must Go’ – for Kiwis?”

Others associated the slogan with demand for lavatories.

“I think ‘Everyone Must Go’ might refer to the need for toilets in some of our high-tourist spots. I mean, the queues are ridiculous,” Green Party MP Celia Wade-Brown told RNZ.

“They don’t go kayaking, they don’t go diving, but, my goodness, they queue at the toilets.”

Tourism minister Louise Upston said in a statement on Sunday that “the campaign tagline of ‘Everyone must go’ lets Australia know that New Zealand is a ‘must visit’ destination, and that we’re ready and waiting to welcome them now”.

New Zealand’s tourism numbers have yet to bounce back to pre-pandemic levels, and authorities are channelling efforts into attracting visitors from neighbouring Australia, its largest source of tourists.

Last year, New Zealand welcomed more than 1.2 million visitors from Australia. But Upston said visitors numbers were only 88% of that in 2019.

Luxon said he hoped the latest campaign would boost Australian visitor numbers by 5%.

“It would be totally and utterly tragic if those Australians don’t get here before they do die,” he said.

The month-long tourism campaign is set to start on Thursday.

Rapper A$AP Rocky has been found not guilty of firing a gun at a former friend.

A jury in Los Angeles acquitted the musician, whose legal name is Rakim Mayers, on two felony assault charges that carried up to 24 years in prison.

Terell Ephron claimed the Grammy-nominated hip-hop star opened fire at him during an argument on a Hollywood street on 6 November 2021, grazing his knuckles with one of the shots.

Mr Mayers, who is also a fashion mogul and the longtime partner of pop star Rihanna, denied the charges, arguing that the weapon was a prop gun and that his former friend, who calls himself A$AP Relli, was only after money.

As the first not-guilty verdict was read on Tuesday, the court rang with screams and clapping. Mr Mayers rushed towards his family and partner Rihanna, who were seated behind him. He dived over a wooden barrier to embrace them.

He hugged his lawyers and appeared to have tears in his eyes as the second not-guilty verdict was read.

“Thank God for saving my life,” Mr Mayers said aloud. He thanked members of the 12-person jury.

The rapper was arrested on the two felony assault charges after a heated argument with his former friend in the heart of Hollywood.

Mr Mayers and Mr Ephron have known each other since high school in New York and were part of the A$AP Mob hip-hop collective.

Their friendship cooled as A$AP Rocky’s career took off.

Authorities said Mr Ephron met Mr Mayers on 6 November 2021, a day after the pair had a disagreement, outside a hotel about a block from the iconic Hollywood Walk of Fame.

An altercation ensued.

Mr Mayers was alleged to have whipped out a gun from his waistband and pointed it at Mr Ephron, telling him: “I’ll kill you right now.”

“He looked me in my eyes and pointed the gun at me,” Mr Ephron testified.

Mr Ephron said he told the rapper to fire the weapon, but Mr Mayers started walking away.

As he left, Mr Ephron followed, shouting at him.

Prosecutors alleged that at this point, Mr Mayers once again pulled out the gun and fired multiple shots, with one bullet said to have grazed Mr Ephron’s knuckles.

Much of the trial hinged on whether the firearm in question was a harmless prop gun, as Mr Mayers’s defence said, or a real weapon capable of causing harm, as Mr Ephron and prosecutors alleged.

The weapon has not been recovered by authorities.

Jurors were able to watch some footage of the altercation because parts were captured on surveillance video, including audio of gunfire, but no video evidence directly showed any shooting.

Mr Ephron took two days before reporting the incident to authorities and brought shell casings he said he had retrieved from the scene.

But police who responded to reports of a shooting in the area did not locate any shell casings. Mr Ephron, who said he returned with his girlfriend hours later, said he knew exactly where to look, but no surveillance footage corroborates his account.

He was not admitted to hospital in Los Angeles and instead went for medical treatment after flying back to New York.

Attorneys for Mr Mayers suggested that Mr Ephron had planted the shell casings to frame the rapper.

The trial was marked by emotional and combative exchanges, particularly when Mr Ephron – the trial’s star witness – took the stand.

At one point, Mr Ephron called Mr Tacopina – a defence attorney for Mr Mayers – “annoying”, which led to a reprimand from the judge.

Another witness, A$AP Twelvyy, was asked by prosecutors about a photograph showing Mr Mayers’s bed with the letters “AWGE” emblazoned on the furniture.

When asked what that stood for, Mr Mayers unexpectedly interrupted the proceedings and yelled, “Don’t say!” Twelvyy ultimately refused to elaborate.

Outbursts from defendants during trials are uncommon, especially in front of a jury.

However, for a criminal suspect on trial to interject and instruct a witness not to answer a prosecutor’s question during cross-examination is something nearly unheard of in a court.

The rapper is set to release his first solo album in nearly a decade and is scheduled to co-headline Los Angeles’ Rolling Loud festival in March 2025.

In May, he is set to co-chair the 2025 Met Gala alongside big names like Anna Wintour, British race car driver Lewis Hamilton, singer Pharrell Williams and basketball superstar LeBron James.

Additionally, he stars alongside Denzel Washington in Spike Lee’s upcoming film “Highest 2 Lowest,” slated for a summer release.

His longtime partner, singer Rihanna, has attended court intermittently. She was in the courtroom on Tuesday as the verdict was read.

Russian authorities have released an American national who was arrested at a Moscow airport this month for cannabis possession, the US state department has confirmed.

Kalob Byers, 28, was stopped at Vnukovo International Airport on 7 February after marijuana-laced sweets were discovered in his luggage, Russian state media reported.

The 28-year-old from Ohio is now back on US soil, according to the BBC’s US partner CBS News. A spokesperson for the state department told the BBC his release was a “welcome gesture” by Russia.

The department also reiterated its “strong warnings about the risk of detention for US citizens in Russia”.

“US citizens residing or travelling in Russia should depart immediately, as stated in our Level 4 Do Not Travel Advisory for Russia,” the statement said.

A report by Russia’s Tass news agency last week said a US national arrived in Moscow from Istanbul on 7 February.

The man, now identified as Mr Byers, told airport officials the cannabis sweets found in his luggage had been prescribed by an American doctor.

He was facing 5-10 years in prison on drug smuggling charges as well as a fine of one million roubles ($10,900; £8,600), state media said.

In a post on Facebook, Tonya Shuler, who says she is Mr Byers’ mother, said he has epilepsy and takes cannabis as medication to help control his seizures.

“He’s a severe epileptic and took seizure medications for his disease. One of those were marijuana/THC/CBD to help control his seizures,” she said, adding that he had been without the medication for eight days while detained.

She said Mr Byers had been travelling from Istanbul to Moscow with his fiancee, who is a Russian national.

Russian state media identified her as Naida Mambetova, and said she had also been placed in pre-trial detention on the same charges.

In an update on Facebook on Tuesday, Ms Shuler said Ms Mambetova had also been freed and all charges dropped. The BBC has not been able to verify this.

Mr Byers was freed only hours before talks between US and Russian officials over the war in Ukraine were set to begin in Saudi Arabia.

Asked about Mr Byers at a news conference on Monday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Moscow expected “to discuss restoring the entire complex of Russian-American relations” at the talks in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, “so certain events can be viewed in this context”.

The state department has expressed hope that Moscow would also consider the release of detained US nationals, Stephen Hubbard and Ksenia Khavana. Both have been detained on charges related to the war in Ukraine.

In recent years, Russia has detained a number of US citizens on various charges, with some Western officials suggesting the Kremlin is “hoarding” Americans to trade for allies and operatives imprisoned abroad.

Last week, American national Marc Fogel, who was arrested in 2021 and was serving a 14-year prison sentence, was freed in a prisoner exchange with jailed Russian national Alexander Vinnik.

Other US nationals freed in recent years include basketball star Brittney Griner, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and former US Marine Paul Whelan.

At least 10 Americans remain in prison in Russia, including:

• Gordon Black – a US Army staff sergeant who flew to Vladivostok to see his girlfriend and was then accused of stealing from her
• Robert Woodland, who was adopted from Russia as a child and was working as an English teacher when he was convicted of drug offences

Passengers have described their amazement after most of them escaped unscathed from a plane that crash landed in Toronto on Monday afternoon.

The Delta flight skidded along the runway in flames before flipping over and coming to a dramatic halt upside down, losing its tail and an entire wing in the process.

Some of the 80 people on board were then left hanging upside down while still strapped to their seats, before they scrambled over luggage to escape onto the snowy runway.

No deaths have been reported after the incident, which is under investigation.

Analysts have suggested the harsh winter weather may be to blame, or that the plane landed badly. They have also credited the plane’s safety features with saving lives.

The incident took place shortly after 14:00 local time on Monday (19:00 GMT).

It involved a model CRJ-900 plane, operating as Delta Air Lines flight DL4819.

The aircraft arrived at Toronto from the US city of Minneapolis and was carrying 76 passengers and four crew members.

As it landed, the plane appears to have struck the runway, slid for some distance and then flipped over, observed Dan Ronan, a journalist and pilot licensed by the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) who spoke to BBC News.

Footage obtained by TMZ showed part of the aircraft bursting into flames as the landing happened. Firefighters rushed to put these out.

Passenger Pete Carlson told broadcaster CBC it was “a very forceful event”, recalling the sound of “concrete and metal” at the moment of impact.

He and others on board were suspended upside down in their seats, and had to release themselves onto the cabin ceiling before leaving the inverted aircraft.

All 80 people on board survived. On Tuesday morning, Delta said 21 injured passengers were initially transported to local hospitals – with 19 later released.

Delta has promised to give more updates.

• All passengers survive crash landing in Toronto
• Witnesses recount lucky escape
• Did you witness the plane crash? Contact us

BBC Verify has analysed recordings of communications between the plane and air traffic control.

At no point in discussions was there anything to suggest trouble was anticipated with the landing.

This was confirmed by Marco Chan, a former pilot and a senior lecturer at Buckinghamshire New University in the UK, and plane crash investigator Ismo Aaltonen, who also listened to the audio recording.

Mr Chan also said the plane appeared to have made a hard landing – involving an unusually high rate of descent.

It seems to have touched down with one wheel first, Mr Chan told the BBC, which might have caused the landing gear to collapse on impact. This could have lead to the right wing hitting the runway and in turn causing the plane to roll.

The weather may also have been significant. The airport fire chief stated that the runway was dry at the time of the incident.

Airport authorities had said earlier that although recent heavy snow had stopped, “frigid temperatures and high winds [were] moving in”.

As the plane came in to land, air traffic controllers told the pilots of 38mph (61km/h) gusts and the possibility of a “slight bump in the glide path”, CNN reported.

The pilots appear to have attempted what is known as a crab manoeuvre, Mr Ronan said. This involves turning a plane into the wind, and then directly onto the runway at the last moment.

“The sheer survivability of this is really amazing,” Mr Ronan told the BBC, pointing out that the aeroplane’s fuselage (body) had stayed intact.

Other commentators hailed the craft’s safety features. CNN analyst and former FAA inspector David Soucie said the plane had broken apart as it had meant to, with the detachment of the wings stopping the fuselage ripping apart.

Graham Braithwaite, professor of safety and accident investigation at the UK’s Cranfield University, said planes were also designed so that air passengers involved in an accident did not hit things likely to cause injury.

“Even the design of the seat back or the tray table is all part of how we consider making that survivable space,” he told the BBC. “And the seatbelt that people have is so important – that is the ultimate thing that stops people being thrown around the cabin like this,” he added.

The flight attendants have also been praised for getting everyone off the flipped aeroplane quickly. Emergency crews on the ground were labelled “heroic” by the airport chief after reaching the crash site in a matter of minutes.

Mr Carlson said the passengers themselves had worked together very effectively. “What I saw was everyone on that plane suddenly became very close in terms of how to help one another, how to console one another,” he said.

Mr Ronan highlighted the importance of the plane’s high-impact 16g seats, which he said were “designed to absorb a great deal of punishment”.

The seats can withstand deceleration of 16 times the force of gravity, and must pass rigorous testing using human dummies to model crash dynamics.

The seat legs, attached to a track on the floor, must be able to pitch down 10 degrees on one side and roll 10 degrees on the other side so that they do not break, said Kevin Campbell, founder of Aviation Consulting & Engineering Solutions, who is FAA-authorised to approve seats that are required to comply with the regulations.

In previous accidents, the FAA had seen seats piled up in the fronts of aircrafts, with bodies still attached in many cases, Mr Campbell said.

Mr Ronan said the regulations keep “the seat in place and bolted to the floor, so you have a higher degree of survivability in your seat itself and you have less likelihood that the seat is going to become detached, where you’re now strapped into a moving object that’s being bounced around the cabin.”

The regulations also require a passenger to be able to withstand hitting their head and legs on the seat in front of them, and seats help absorb weight in their spine so that they do not break their back. Seatbelts are also less stretchy than they used to be so the restraint is more secure.

“As a result of that aircrafts are much, much safer,” Mr Campbell said, and those factors were “absolutely” at play in improving safety in this crash.

“It really is remarkable that the seats did exactly what they were supposed to do, they stayed intact… the seatbelts worked just as they were supposed to, and the seats did not become detached from the floor,” Mr Ronan said.

“Think of how many head injuries we would have had, spinal injuries we would have had, if the seat became detached.”

This marks the fourth major air crash in North America in less than a month, and other recent incidents remain under investigation.

• All 67 people on board a passenger aeroplane and military helicopter died after the two aircraft collided in mid-air near Washington DC on 29 January
• Seven people were killed on 1 February when a medical transportation plane carrying six people crashed in Philadelphia. Another person was killed on the ground
• All 10 people were killed when a small plane came down in Alaska on 6 February

Those incidents followed another high-profile crash in South Korea in December, in which 179 people were killed.

Despite these, experts say air travel remains overwhelmingly safe – and increasingly so.

The US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) accident dashboard says there were 257 fatal accidents globally in 2024, compared with 362 in 2014.

Japan says it will increase its reliance on nuclear energy in a major policy shift as it seeks to meet growing demand from power-hungry sectors like AI and semiconductors.

An energy plan approved by the cabinet on Tuesday called for “maximising the use of nuclear energy” and dropped reference to “reducing reliance on nuclear energy”.

The energy plan, written by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry says that by 2040, nuclear energy should account for 20% of Japan’s grid supply in 2040, more than double the 8.5% share in 2023.

It comes as the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster from 14 years ago continues to hang over the country, conjuring painful memories.

In March 2011, a 9.0-magnitude earthquake near Japan’s north-east coast spawned a tsunami that killed more than 18,000 people, wiping out entire towns and flooding the reactors of the Fukushima Daiichi plant.

Japan now operates 14 commercial nuclear reactors, compared to 54 before the Fukushima disaster when 30% of the country’s energy was from nuclear sources.

The plan still needs approval by parliament, where it will be discussed in the coming months.

The country, which imports 90% of its fuel, needs to look to nuclear sources as part of its plan to cut back on carbon and be self-reliant on energy, said Daishiro Yamagiwa, an MP who was part of a government advisory committee on the energy plan.

“Because of the conflict in Ukraine and the war in the Middle East, even fossil fuels have become difficult to buy,” he told the BBC. “Japan is a country without energy resources, so we must use whatever is available in a balanced way.”

Yamagiwa added that energy burdens are growing because of demand from AI data processing centres and semiconductor factories around the country.

But experts say increasing reliance on nuclear energy will be both risky and costly.

Japan will need to import uranium, which is expensive and will make the country reliant on other countries, said Professor Kenichi Oshima at the faculty of policy science at Ryukoku University.

Prof Oshima told the BBC the main concern is that increasing the number of nuclear power plants also raises the risk of potentially disastrous accidents.

He cited the 2024 New Year’s Day earthquake in the Noto peninsula, where two decades ago, a plan to build a nuclear plant was scrapped because locals opposed it.

“If there had been a nuclear power plant there, it is quite clear that it would have caused a major accident,” he said.

In Japan, any mention of nuclear energy inevitably brings back difficult memories of the nuclear meltdown at the Daiichi power plant.

“We all had such a terrible experience at the time of the Fukushima quake,” Tokyo resident Yuko Maruyama told the BBC.

“How could I support it [the nuclear energy plan]? I want the government to rely on other sources of energy,” she added.

“As a mother I think of the children, of their safety. I cannot help but think about what would happen in the future.”

The meltdown at Fukushima is considered the world’s worst since that of Chernobyl in 1986.

It stirred fresh controversy in 2023, when Japan started releasing treated water from the site of the Fukushima plant. This drew protests from Japan’s neighbours, including China, over safety concerns.

The United Nations atomic energy regulator IAEA said the waste water was safe and would have a “negligible” impact on people and the environment.

In response to the new energy plan announced this week, Greenpeace said promoting nuclear energy is “outrageous” when the fallout from Fukushima is still ongoing.

“There is no justification for continuing to rely on nuclear energy, which remains toxic for tens of thousands of years, produces radioactive waste that requires long-term management, and carries risks like earthquakes and terrorism,” the group said.

To meet the government’s goal, experts say 33 reactors must be put back online, but the current pace of safety checks as well as residents’ objections in some areas will make this difficult.

Many of these nuclear plants are old and will need to be refitted with new technology for them to function safely.

“That most difficult problem is that each nuclear power plant is in a different location and will need its own safety protocol and infrastructure,” Yamagiwa said.

“We must check each of them carefully. It still takes time.”

In recent months, regulators have given several old reactors approval to keep operating.

In October 2024 Japan’s oldest reactor, Takahama nuclear power plant, was given the go-ahead to continue operations, making it the first reactor in the country to get approval to operate beyond 50 years.

The US State Department has dropped a statement from its website which stated that Washington does not support Taiwan’s independence – a move which has sparked anger in China.

China said the revision “sends a wrong… signal to separatist forces advocating for Taiwan independence”, and asked the US to “correct its mistakes”.

The department’s fact sheet on Taiwan-US relations earlier included the phrase “we do not support Taiwan independence” – this was removed last week as part of what it said was a “routine” update.

A US spokesperson was quoted as saying that it remains committed to the “One China” policy, it said, where US recognises and has formal ties with China rather than Taiwan.

China sees self-governed Taiwan as a breakaway province that will eventually be part of the country, and has not ruled out the use of force to achieve this.

But many Taiwanese consider themselves to be part of a separate nation, although most are in favour of maintaining the status quo where Taiwan neither declares independence from China nor unites with it.

As well as dropping the phrase, the factsheet, which was updated last Thursday, also says the US will support Taiwan’s membership in international organisations “where applicable”.

Commenting on the changes, a spokesperson at the American Institute in Taiwan – the US’ de facto embassy on the island – told local media that the fact sheet had been “updated to inform the general public about [the US’] unofficial relationship with Taiwan”.

“We have long stated that we oppose any unilateral changes to the status quo from either side.”

On Sunday, Taiwan’s Foreign Minister Lin Chia-lung thanked the US for what he called “positive, Taiwan-friendly wordings”.

But in their regular press conference on Monday, Beijing’s foreign ministry slammed the move, calling the revision a “serious regression” in the US’ stance on Taiwan.

“This sends a wrong and serious signal to separatist forces advocating for Taiwan independence and is another example of the U.S. stubbornly persisting with its wrong policy of using Taiwan to contain China,” said Chinese spokesperson Guo Jiakun.

“We urge the US to immediately correct its mistakes [and] earnestly adhere to the One China principle.”

Argentine President Javier Milei has denied promoting a newly launched cryptocurrency which collapsed shortly after he mentioned it in a social media post on Friday.

The cryptocoin $Libra quickly rose in value before nosediving, causing severe losses for the majority of people who had invested in it.

A judge will now determine if the president should face fraud charges over the incident.

On Monday, Milei said he had acted “in good faith” and dismissed investors’ complaints, comparing their actions to people who gamble: “If you go to a casino and lose money, what’s there to complain about when you knew the risks?”

President Milei spoke about the $Libra incident in an interview with Argentine TV channel Todo Noticias on Monday, after a weekend during which he had stayed unusually quiet on social media.

He insisted that his post on X, which contained a link to a site selling $Libra, did not constitute an endorsement.

“I didn’t promote it, I merely shared it,” he told Todo Noticias’ Jonny Viale.

Milei’s post, which he deleted after just a few hours, drew heavy criticism not just from his political rivals in Argentina but also from those who had invested in the cryptocurrency.

Some have argued the $Libra launch resembled a “rug pull” – where promoters draw in buyers, only to stop trading activity and make off with the money raised from sales.

The presidential office insisted that Milei was in no way involved in the development of $Libra and announced that the Anti-Corruption Office would determine if the president had acted improperly.

Milei himself defended deleting his post, saying that at the time he did not know “the details of the project and after learning about it, I decided not to continue promoting it”.

Opposition politicians, however, have not been placated by the statements, threatening to start impeachment proceedings against Milei.

While political analysts point out that the opposition is unlikely to get the votes needed for an impeachment trial to go ahead, the scandal threatens to divert Milei’s attention away from his radical reform agenda.

A federal judge has been tasked with deciding whether fraud allegations brought against the president by a number of plaintiffs should go ahead.

In his TV interview, Milei appeared combative, stressing that he had “nothing to hide”.

He also said that those who had invested in $Libra had done so “voluntarily” and knew of the risks.

“It’s like playing Russian roulette and getting the bullet.”

Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, has announced a new identity for her lifestyle brand, which will be called As Ever.

Despite the social media teasers showing celebrities with pots of jam from Meghan, the previous brand name American Riviera Orchard seems to have reached a sticky end.

On a social media post, Meghan said the newly-named product range would be a joint project with Netflix, which is showing her cooking and lifestyle series, With Love, Meghan next month.

“‘As ever’ means ‘as it’s always been’ or some even say ‘in the same way as always,'” said Meghan’s post.

The recorded message, delivered in close-up by Meghan, emphasises the continuity with her former, pre-royal, lifestyle blog, the Tig.

She said that the new venture would be “beautifully weaving together everything I cherish – food, gardening, entertaining, thoughtful living, and finding joy in the everyday”.

Prince Harry, who has been at the Invictus Games in Canada, is heard briefly off-camera in the background of the recording of the Instagram posting. Their three-year-old daughter Lilibet is also seen in the distance, against a sunny Pacific sky, on the accompanying As Ever website.

The previous name American Riviera Orchard had been a reference to the part of California where she lives with Prince Harry – and Meghan said it “limited me to things which were manufactured and grown in this area”.

That name had been promoted since April 2024, when celebrities published pictures on Instagram of jars of strawberry jam, in a launch that tried to preserve a sense of mystery.

But there had also been reports of delays because of trademark problems with the original title.

If this latest announcement means the lid is going to come off a new jam war, the Californian contender will be up against Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle Strawberry Preserve, both at £7 and Highgrove Organic Preserve at £6.95.

The new As Ever brand will be a partnership with Netflix, with reports that the TV company is going to open shopping outlets which will sell merchandising connected to its shows.

“Of course there will be fruit preserves, I think we’re all clear at this point that jam is my jam,” said Meghan.

“But there’s so many more products that I just love that I use in my home and now it’s time to share it with you, so I can’t wait for you to see it.”

The launch of Meghan’s TV show was delayed by the wildfires in California, with the US state the backdrop for the series, which is expected to be a mix of cooking, hosting tips and celebrity friends and is due to run on Netflix from 4 March.

It is five years since Meghan and Prince Harry stepped down as working royals, becoming financially independent in the United States. Meghan says in her social media post, she has “poured my heart into” this forthcoming product range.

Meghan divides public opinion, with strong reactions on social media from supporters and opponents. Her fans have saluted her independence and creativity, while her opponents have already labelled the brand as “whatever”.

Appropriately, she signed off her own post: “As ever, Meghan.”

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New York Governor Kathy Hochul has called a crisis meeting on Tuesday to weigh whether to remove Mayor Eric Adams from office following a series of overlapping scandals.

A top prosecutor in Manhattan last week alleged the New York City mayor had asked the Trump administration to drop a corruption case against him in exchange for his cooperation on immigration enforcement.

Four of Adams’ top deputies, including the first deputy mayor, resigned on Monday after the Justice Department filed a motion to dismiss the criminal case against Adams.

The “alleged conduct at City Hall that has been reported over the past two weeks is troubling and cannot be ignored”, Hochul said in a statement.

“In the 235 years of New York State history, these powers have never been utilized to remove a duly-elected mayor; overturning the will of the voters is a serious step that should not be taken lightly,” Hochul said.

Adams was indicted last year for allegedly accepting gifts totalling more than $100,000 (£75,000) from Turkish citizens in exchange for favours. He denies the charges. The trial is scheduled for April.

His administration has been plagued by staff departures and scandals since the charges against him were first announced. A number of figures in his orbit have also been charged as a part of the investigation.

• Prosecutors ask to drop corruption case against NYC Mayor Eric Adams
• Foreign bribes, cheap flights: What is Eric Adams accused of?

The governor’s meeting with “key leaders” on Tuesday follows the resignations of four of Adams’ top deputies – First Deputy Mayor Maria Torres-Springer; Deputy mayor for Health and Human Services Anne Williams-Isom; the deputy mayor for operations, Meera Joshi; and the deputy mayor for public safety, Chauncey Parker.

“I am disappointed to see them go, but given the current challenges, I understand their decision and wish them nothing but success in the future,” Adams said in a statement after accepting the resignations on Monday.

In a joint statement, Torres-Springer, Joshi and Williams-Isom explained their decision to resign.

“Due to the extraordinary events of the last few weeks and to stay faithful to the oaths we swore to New Yorkers and our families, we have come to the difficult decision to step down from our roles,” they said.

Last week, the former US attorney for the Southern District of New York, Danielle Sassoon, resigned over pressure from the Justice Department to drop the Adams case.

Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove argued that the case against Adams had “restricted” the mayor’s ability to address “illegal immigration and violent crime” – two of President Donald Trump’s key priorities.

Ms Sassoon said dropping the case would set a “breathtaking and dangerous precedent”.

Seven other Justice Department officials left before prosecutors eventually filed a motion to drop the case. New York Judge Dale Ho still needs to sign off on the request.

During an interview alongside Trump’s border czar Tom Homan last week, Adams denied he had proposed the Justice Department drop the case in exchange for immigration measures, a move Ms Sassoon said amounted to a “quid pro quo”.

Adams said the allegations were “silly”.

Hochul faced calls to remove Adams after the indictment against him was first unsealed last September, but she did not move to do so then.