London’s Heathrow airport has been closed until midnight on Friday after a fire at an electrical substation supplying the airport caused a “significant power outage” and left thousands of homes without power.

In a statement on its website and shared on social media, Heathrow airport said all passengers were advised not to travel to the airport.

“To maintain the safety of our passengers and colleagues, Heathrow will be closed until 23h59 on 21 March,” the statement said.

An airport spokesperson said: “We will provide an update when more information on the resumption of operations is available. We know this will be disappointing for passengers and we want to reassure that we are working as hard as possible to resolve the situation.”

The fire at an electrical substation in west London has left more than 16,000 homes without power, and forced more than 100 people to evacuate.

The London fire brigade said a transformer within the substation was alight, with 10 fire engines and about 70 firefighters on the scene at Nestles Avenue in Hayes.

About 150 people have been evacuated from surrounding properties and a 200-metre cordon has been put in place as a precaution.

Assistant commissioner Pat Goulbourne said: “This is a highly visible and significant incident, and our firefighters are working tirelessly in challenging conditions to bring the fire under control as swiftly as possible.

“The fire has caused a power outage affecting a large number of homes and local businesses, and we are working closely with our partners to minimise disruption.”

Firefighters led 29 people from surrounding properties to safety.

The brigade said nearly 200 calls had been received in relation to the incident with crews from Hayes, Heathrow, Hillingdon, Southall and surrounding areas on the scene.

Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks said in a post on X there was a large-scale power outage in the area impacting more than 16,300 homes.

“We’re aware of a widespread power cut affecting many of our customers around the Hayes, Hounslow and surrounding areas,” it said.

Emergency services were called to the scene at 11.23pm on Thursday. The cause of the fire was yet to be determined.

Goulbourne said firefighters urged people to take safety precautions as crews worked to extinguish the blaze. “This will be a prolonged incident, with crews remaining on scene throughout the night,” he said.

“As we head into the morning, disruption is expected to increase, and we urge people to avoid the area wherever possible.”

More soon …

London’s Heathrow airport has been closed until midnight on Friday after a fire at an electrical substation supplying the airport caused a “significant power outage” and left thousands of homes without power.

In a statement on its website and shared on social media, Heathrow airport said all passengers were advised not to travel to the airport.

“To maintain the safety of our passengers and colleagues, Heathrow will be closed until 23h59 on 21 March,” the statement said.

An airport spokesperson said: “We will provide an update when more information on the resumption of operations is available. We know this will be disappointing for passengers and we want to reassure that we are working as hard as possible to resolve the situation.”

The fire at an electrical substation in west London has left more than 16,000 homes without power, and forced more than 100 people to evacuate.

The London fire brigade said a transformer within the substation was alight, with 10 fire engines and about 70 firefighters on the scene at Nestles Avenue in Hayes.

About 150 people have been evacuated from surrounding properties and a 200-metre cordon has been put in place as a precaution.

Assistant commissioner Pat Goulbourne said: “This is a highly visible and significant incident, and our firefighters are working tirelessly in challenging conditions to bring the fire under control as swiftly as possible.

“The fire has caused a power outage affecting a large number of homes and local businesses, and we are working closely with our partners to minimise disruption.”

Firefighters led 29 people from surrounding properties to safety.

The brigade said nearly 200 calls had been received in relation to the incident with crews from Hayes, Heathrow, Hillingdon, Southall and surrounding areas on the scene.

Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks said in a post on X there was a large-scale power outage in the area impacting more than 16,300 homes.

“We’re aware of a widespread power cut affecting many of our customers around the Hayes, Hounslow and surrounding areas,” it said.

Emergency services were called to the scene at 11.23pm on Thursday. The cause of the fire was yet to be determined.

Goulbourne said firefighters urged people to take safety precautions as crews worked to extinguish the blaze. “This will be a prolonged incident, with crews remaining on scene throughout the night,” he said.

“As we head into the morning, disruption is expected to increase, and we urge people to avoid the area wherever possible.”

More soon …

Retreating glaciers threaten the food and water supply of 2 billion people around the world, the UN has warned, as current “unprecedented” rates of melting will have unpredictable consequences.

Two-thirds of all irrigated agriculture in the world is likely to be affected in some way by receding glaciers and dwindling snowfall in mountain regions, driven by the climate crisis, according to a Unesco report.

More than 1 billion people live in mountainous regions and, of those in developing countries, up to half are already experiencing food insecurity. That is likely to worsen, as food production in such regions is dependent on mountain waters, melting snow and glaciers, according to the World Water Development Report 2025.

Developed countries are also at risk: in the US, for example, the Colorado River basin has been in drought since 2000, and higher temperatures mean more of the precipitation is falling as rain, which runs off more quickly than mountain snow, exacerbating drought conditions.

Audrey Azoulay, the director general of Unesco, said: “Regardless of where we live, we all depend in some way on mountains and glaciers. But these natural water towers are facing imminent peril. This report demonstrates the urgent need for action.”

The rate of change of glaciers is the worst on record, according to separate research from the World Meteorological Organisation, which published its annual State of the Climate report this week. The largest three-year loss of glacier mass on record occurred in the past three years, the study found, with Norway, Sweden, Svalbard and the tropical Andes among the worst-affected areas.

Eastern Africa has lost 80% of its glaciers in places and, in the Andes, between a third and a half of glaciers have melted since 1998. Glaciers in the Alps and the Pyrenees, the worst affected in Europe, have shrunk by about 40% over roughly the same period.

The decline of glaciers has had a further impact, added Abou Amani, director of water sciences at Unesco, in that the loss of ice replaces a reflective surface with dark soil that absorbs heat. “Glaciers melting have an impact on the reflectivity of [solar] radiation and that will impact the whole climate system,” he warned.

More avalanches will also result, as rain falling on snow is a major factor behind avalanche formation. Pooling water from melting glaciers can also be released, causing sudden floods in valleys or to people living further down the slopes. Permafrost is also melting, releasing methane from the mountain soils that melting glaciers are uncovering.

A previous study, published last month in the peer-reviewed journal Nature, found that half of global glacier mass would be lost by the end of the century, if global heating was not halted. Alex Brisbourne, a glacier geophysicist at the British Antarctic Survey, said: “Mountain glaciers contain some of the largest freshwater reservoirs on Earth. Meltwater released in the summer provides the water supply to a billion people and sustains an enormous amount of industry and agriculture. The impact [of such melting] will be felt way beyond those immediately downstream of the glaciers.”

These impacts are coming at a time when many food sources are already under strain. Alvaro Lario, president of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (Ifad) and chair of UN-Water, called for more support for people who live in afflicted mountain regions. “Water flows downhill, but food insecurity rises uphill. Mountains provide 60% of our freshwater, but the communities that safeguard these vital resources are among the most food insecure,” he said.

“We must invest in their resilience to protect glaciers, rivers, and a shared future for all of us.”

EU leaders – apart from Hungary’s Viktor Orbán – say they are ready to increase pressure on Russia through further sanctions, as summit talks exposed a geographical divide on rearming Europe.

Meeting in Brussels, the bloc agreed it was ready to levy further sanctions on Russia and strengthen existing measures after talks with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who joined by video link.

The show of unity was marred by Orbán refusing to support an EU text declaring support for Ukraine, which stated: “The European Council calls on Russia to show real political will to end the war.” The Hungarian prime minister similarly declined to support the EU position two weeks ago.

Orbán’s growing confidence in diverging from the EU on Ukraine raises questions about the bloc’s ability to impose new sanctions and renew existing ones, although diplomats take comfort from the fact Hungary has always acceded to the plans in the end.

Zelenskyy told the EU leaders: “Please do not ease pressure on Russia over the war. Sanctions must remain in place until Russia starts withdrawing from our land and fully compensates for the damage caused by its aggression.”

In a clear reference to Hungary’s efforts to stymie Ukraine’s EU accession talks, Zelenskyy added, without naming any country: “It is simply anti-European when one person blocks decisions that are important for the entire continent or that have already been agreed upon.”

Separately the Financial Times reported that Europe’s biggest military powers are discussing how to take on greater responsibility for Europe’s defence. Countries including the UK, France and Germany aim to present Donald Trump with a plan to shift the financial and military burden to European capitals, in the hope of a managed transfer over five to 10 years, the paper reported.

Leaving the summit, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, praised the “Buy European” policy as a major doctrine change in Europe that would make the continent more independent. In a victory for Paris, the European Commission has proposed that a €150bn (£125bn) loans rearmament programme should exclude countries without a defence pact with the EU, such as the UK and the US.

Macron also said he would host a meeting of European leaders with Zelenskyy in Paris next Thursday to discuss Ukraine’s defence, including immediate military aid, making any ceasefire work and possibly deployment of troops.

Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, said it was of the utmost importance to develop the defence industrial base in Europe, adding that “associated countries” could be involved. “These are billions and billions of euros that we will spend and we want a return on investment,” she said. “And where they are spent, they will produce good jobs.”

Meanwhile, Jens Stoltenberg, the former Nato secretary general who last month re-entered the Norwegian government as finance minister, said that uncertainty over US commitment to the transatlantic alliance was not a reason to “give up Nato”, but a motivation for European countries and Canada to increase their contributions.

Stoltenberg said that whether or not the US decided to reduce its Nato contributions, it was crucial for other Nato members to “stand together” and “step up”.

“We need to all do what we can to ensure that Nato remains a strong alliance between North America and Europe that has helped to keep us safe for more than 75 years. There have been differences and disagreements before but we have been able to overcome them by realising we are all safer when we stand together,” he said, speaking from Copenhagen shortly before Zelenskyy touched down in Norway on Thursday.

“If the US should decide to reduce their contributions to Nato, it is even more important that we stand together the rest of us in Nato and step up, as European allies now do. And not least the United Kingdom, being the second largest military power in Nato after the United States.”

He added: “I cannot rule out that the US will reduce their contributions to the Nato command structures, to the Nato forces, but I expect the United States to remain a Nato ally. The answer to that is not to give up Nato but to strengthen the European and Canadian contributions to Nato.”

Despite an EU agreement to “urgently step up efforts” to aid Ukraine’s defence, a €40bn (£33bn) EU military aid plan has fizzled out after it failed to win support from larger member states, including France, Spain and Italy. Kaja Kallas, the EU’s foreign policy head, who led the initiative, is now calling on member states to provide 2m shells worth €5bn, a downgrade on her original plan that envisaged every country contributing military aid based on the size of its economy.

Kallas acknowledged the plan had not won universal support: “For every country it is the domestic politics, also the understanding of the public of what needs to be done and that is different in every member state.”

EU talks on an €800bn plan to ensure Europe can deter any potential invaders by 2030 are exposing the geographical fault lines over rearming Europe.

Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, said the EU summit was about “finalising the first stage of perhaps the most important project in decades: making Europe safe, armed and united against the Russian threat”.

Lithuania’s president, Gitanas Nausėda, said Europe was facing a strategic choice that recalled the years before the second world war. “We have to rearm ourselves because otherwise we will be the second, next victim of Russian aggression.”

Spain and Italy, which both spend below the 2% Nato target on defence, say Europe cannot overlook other threats to security. Spain is urging a wider definition of defence spending to encompass cybersecurity, anti-terrorism and efforts to combat the climate crisis.

Its prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, said he did not like the term “rearm”, which the European Commission has used repeatedly in its drive to increase defence spending. It was important, he said, “to take into account that the challenges that we face in the southern neighbourhood are a bit different to the ones the eastern flank face”.

Earlier this month the commission outlined an €800bn plan that included a €150bn loans package and flexibility on EU fiscal rules that would allow countries to take on €650bn in additional debt. EU leaders have endorsed the big picture, but some countries are reluctant to deepen their debts and are seeking EU grants.

The Greek prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, said the EU needed “a more serious discussion” on “the provision of grants to European member states in order to make the important investments that they need to do”. The Netherlands and Germany oppose any common debt that would be used to create such grants.

Stoltenberg said it was “valid” and “fair” of Trump to ask other Nato members to do more, adding: “The good news is that Europeans are doing more.”

Ukraine will have a delegation in Riyadh on the same day the US is holding ceasefire talks there with a Russian negotiating team led by a secretive former FSB chief who played a key role in planning Vladimir Putin’s 2022 full-scale invasion.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said the delegation would meet with US representatives on Monday and supply a list of energy infrastructure that would be off-limits for strikes by the Russian military. The US representatives would then meet the Russian negotiating team, Zelenskyy said on Thursday.

The Ukrainian announcement indicates the US could shuttle between the two sides to try to achieve Donald Trump’s goal of a quick ceasefire. But both Russia and Ukraine have already disputed the White House’s accounts of their earlier talks with the US president, indicating Trump may have misrepresented the progress of the talks – and his chances of striking a quick deal to halt the war.

On Thursday, Zelenskyy contradicted Trump by denying he had discussed a US plan to take over Ukrainian power plants as part of a peace deal, saying that they “belong to the people of Ukraine”.

Trump had announced on Wednesday that US ownership of the plants “would be the best protection for that infrastructure and support for Ukrainian energy infrastructure”.

Zelenskyy denied there had been any discussion with Trump about privatising the plants. “If the Americans want to take the station from the Russians and they want to invest there and modernise it, that is a completely different issue,” he said. “We are open to discuss it, but the issue of property we definitely did not discuss with President Trump.”

Moscow announced on Thursday that Sergei Beseda, the former head of the spy agency’s fifth directorate – who oversaw intelligence operations in Ukraine and orchestrated the recruitment of collaborators before the full-scale invasion – would travel to Riyadh for Monday’s talks with the US.

Both sides said the talks in Saudi Arabia were aimed at finalising a limited ceasefire deal agreed this week, and initiating negotiations on a maritime ceasefire.

Before Russia’s early failures in the invasion, reports surfaced that Beseda had briefly fallen out of favour with Putin owing to flawed intelligence in the lead-up to the war. Beseda will be joined by Grigory Karasin, the chair of the Russian senate’s committee on international affairs, for the new round of talks with US officials.

Zelenskyy has accused Russia of making “unnecessary demands” that will drag out the war, and said Russian strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure had not stopped despite Putin’s claims about his readiness to halt them.

Moscow doubled down on Thursday on its insistence that a requirement for serious peace talks would be the complete cessation of both foreign military aid and the provision of intelligence to Kyiv.

Trump, speaking on Fox News earlier, denied that arms supplies were discussed during his call with the Russian president, despite a Kremlin readout explicitly stating Putin had demanded an end to military aid to Ukraine.

There is still uncertainty over the timing and terms of a limited US-brokered ceasefire agreed this week, with both countries exchanging aerial assaults overnight. Zelenskyy, who was in Oslo on Thursday, said Russia had launched nearly 200 Iranian Shahed drones overnight, wounding at least 10 people, including four children, and damaging “residential buildings, a church, and infrastructure”.

Zelenskyy said in a morning statement on Telegram: “Russia’s strikes on Ukraine continue despite its propagandistic statements … With each launch, the Russians show the world their true attitude toward peace.”

Russian forces also struck a village in the Sumy region and carried out a series of airstrikes on a town near the city of Kharkiv.

Ukraine launched its own mass drone attack on Russia, appearing to hit a key airbase about 435 miles (700km) from the frontlines. The airbase in the Russian city of Engels hosts the Tupolev Tu-160 nuclear-capable heavy strategic bombers that have frequently been involved in strikes against Ukrainian cities.

Roman Busargin, the governor of Russia’s Saratov region, wrote on Telegram: “Engels today suffered the most massive UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle] attack of all time.”

Busargin said the attack had left an airfield on fire and that people living nearby had been evacuated. He did not specifically mention the airbase, but it is the main airfield in the area.

Images shared by Russian Telegram channels showed thick smoke rising from an area west of the airfield, with reports suggesting an ammunition depot cruise missile exploded. Regional officials said 10 people were injured in the strike.

Zelenskyy said on Wednesday he had signed up to a partial ceasefire that Trump had agreed with Putin a day earlier after what the Ukrainian leader had described as a “positive, very substantive and frank” call with the US president.

But there was confusion over what exactly Trump and Putin had agreed after Moscow and Washington gave different readouts afterwards. Trump, in an initial post on Truth Social, said the partial ceasefire would apply to “energy and infrastructure”, giving the impression it would extend to all civilian infrastructure. Zelenskyy, after his call with Trump, spoke about “ending strikes on energy and other civilian infrastructure”.

However, Putin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said on Wednesday the ceasefire would apply only to the energy sector, and a White House statement on Wednesday also referred only to energy.

• Donald Trump said on Thursday the United States would sign a minerals and natural resources deal with Ukraine soon and that his efforts to achieve a peace deal for the country were going “pretty well” after his talks this week with the Russian and Ukrainian leaders. “We’re doing very well with regard to Ukraine and Russia. And one of the things we are doing is signing a deal very shortly with respect to rare earths with Ukraine,” he said during an event at the White House. A day earlier, the White House had said it had “moved beyond” the idea of taking possession of Ukraine’s mineral wealth as part of negotiations, while Trump told the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, that the US could own and run Ukrainian nuclear power plants, including Zaporizhzhia power station, as part of a ceasefire.

• Zelenskyy on Thursday said he could not legally negotiate ownership of the occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station. “We will not discuss it. We have 15 nuclear power units in operation today. This all belongs to our state,” Zelenskyy told a news conference in Oslo, where he held talks with Norway’s prime minister, Jonas Gahr Store.

• Zelenskyy also said Ukrainian and US officials would meet in Saudi Arabia on Monday to make progress on a proposed halt in Russian and Ukrainian strikes on energy facilities. His announcement came shortly after the Kremlin confirmed that Russian officials would also hold talks with the US in Saudi Arabia on Monday.

• EU leaders – apart from Hungary’s Viktor Orbán – said they were ready to increase pressure on Russia through further sanctions. Meeting in Brussels, the bloc agreed it was ready to levy further sanctions on Russia and strengthen existing measures after talks with Zelenskyy, who joined by video link. The show of unity was marred by Orbán refusing to support an EU text declaring support for Ukraine.

• Despite declaring their backing for Ukraine, the leaders did not immediately endorse a call by Zelenskyy to provide at least €5bn for artillery ammunition purchases. “We need funds for artillery shells and would really appreciate Europe’s support with at least €5bn ($5.42bn) as soon as possible,” Zelenskyy told them. The bloc’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, had also called on leaders to match words of support for Kyiv with deeds. Summit chair Antonio Costa said EU members had promised €15bn in aid for Ukraine in recent weeks and he believed they would increase those pledges.

• Senior military officers from more than 30 countries across Europe and beyond met in England on Thursday to flesh out plans for an international peacekeeping force for Ukraine as details of a partial ceasefire are worked out.
  UK prime minister Keir Starmer said he didn’t know whether there would be a peace deal but “we are making steps in the right direction” as a “coalition of the willing” led by Britain and France moves into an “operational phase”. He also threatened Russian President Vladimir Putin with “severe consequences” if he breached any potential peace deal. He did not repeat his promise to put boots on the ground in Ukraine.

• French President Emmanuel Macron said leaders of the coalition would meet again next week, hoping to finalise plans to secure a potential truce in the war with Russia. Macron – who along with Starmer has said he is willing to deploy troops to Ukraine – said the meeting next Thursday will be a chance to “fine-tune” work on ensuring any truce is durable.

• The Financial Times reported that Europe’s biggest military powers are discussing how to take on greater responsibility for Europe’s defence. Countries including the UK, France and Germany aim to present Donald Trump with a plan to shift the financial and military burden to European capitals, in the hope of a managed transfer over five to 10 years, the paper reported.

• Ukraine struck a major Russian strategic bomber airfield on Thursday with drones, triggering a huge blast and fire about 700km (435 miles) from the frontlines of the war, Russian and Ukrainian officials said. Videos verified by Reuters showed a huge blast spreading out from the airfield, wrecking nearby cottages. Other verified videos showed a giant plume of smoke rising into the dawn sky and an intense fire. The base in Engels, which dates back to Soviet times, hosts Russia’s Tupolev Tu-160 nuclear-capable heavy strategic bombers, known unofficially as White Swans.

• Russian forces launched a mass drone attack on Ukraine’s Black Sea port of Odesa late on Thursday, injuring three people and damaging a high-rise apartment building and a shopping centre, the regional governor said. Oleh Kiper, writing on the Telegram messaging app, said there had been strikes in three locations that triggered fires, while three districts of the city were suffering from power cuts.

• Russia’s foreign ministry said on Thursday that Ukraine had already violated a proposed ceasefire on energy sites in the three-year-old war by attacking a Russian oil depot. Authorities in the southern Russian region of Krasnodar said a Ukrainian drone attack caused a fire at an oil depot near the village of Kavkazskaya. The depot is a rail terminal for Russian oil supplies to a pipeline linking Kazakhstan to the Black Sea. A statement issued by authorities in the Krasnodar region on Thursday evening said efforts were continuing to bring the blaze under control.

Vladimir Putin will face “severe consequences” if he breaches a peace deal with Ukraine, Keir Starmer has warned as western military planners begin drawing up plans to enforce any agreement between the two countries.

The British prime minister issued his warning to the Russian president after meeting officials from 31 countries at the Northwood military base outside London, where they have started sketching out which western forces might be deployed to protect Ukraine in the future.

Starmer said Putin would not be allowed to veto how Kyiv decides to defend itself, after the Russian president demanded Ukraine’s demilitarisation as part of any peace deal. But the prime minister did not reiterate his promise to put boots on the ground, instead saying allied forces would be deployed to support Ukrainian troops, including by sea and air, rather than replacing them.

“The point of the security arrangements is to make it clear to Russia there will be severe consequences if they are to breach any deal,” he told reporters after the meeting.

“This is why it will require a US component; because it needs to be clear to Putin that there will be severe consequences if he breaches the lines. So the purpose of this plan is to ensure that we maintain the peace – as it is in Estonia and all the other countries in which we’re deployed.”

Asked whether British troops were ever likely to serve in Ukraine as he has previously suggested, Starmer said the military planners were discussing offering support by air, sea and land. But he added: “There is a strong sense that, because of what’s happened in the last three years, the Ukrainian forces are amongst the strongest now in Europe. They’ve got the capability, they’ve got the numbers, and they’ve actually got the frontline experience.

“We’re not talking about something that replaces the capability, we’re talking about something that reinforces that and then puts around it capabilities in relation to air, water and sea, and land.”

A Downing Street source said Starmer’s comments reflected “the nature of moving to the operational phase”.

The prime minister was speaking after meeting officers from 31 countries involved in planning how what he has referred to as the “coalition of the willing” might work in practice.

Countries represented included France, Poland, the Netherlands, Romania, Canada and Australia.

US and Italian officials also attended, even though the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, has described Starmer’s plans as “risky and ineffective”, while the White House has refused to commit to supporting any western forces in Ukraine.

The talks took place against the backdrop of continuing negotiations between the US, Ukraine and Russia, with talks expected to resume in Saudi Arabia on Sunday. Officials from the three countries will discuss implementing a 30-day pause in targeting each other’s energy infrastructure while they work towards a more comprehensive deal.

“We don’t yet know whether there will be a deal,” Starmer said on Thursday. “The likelihood is there will be a ceasefire and then possibly a full deal after that. And therefore [we are planning for] two different scenarios.”

The pause in attacks on power plants was agreed after a marathon phone call between Putin and the US president, Donald Trump, earlier this week. A Kremlin account of that call said the Russian president had used it to insist Ukraine should demilitarise and the west should stop providing military aid.

Starmer rebuffed those demands on Thursday, saying: “Putin wants a defenceless Ukraine and I think that tells you everything about why we need to do this planning.

“What we’re clear about is that Ukraine needs to be secure and needs to be sovereign. And if you’re sovereign, that means that you decide for yourself what defence capability you have.”

He added: “You don’t let the person who’s invaded your country tell you what defence capability that you have. So I’m not surprised Putin is saying: ‘I would much rather Ukraine didn’t have any defence,’ because that’s exactly what happened before in Minsk [in 2014], and he breached the line, which I think doubly underlines my argument that we need security arrangements in place.

“It does mean that the planning here is on the basis that we continue to build up the Ukrainian forces.”

An exposé by a former employee of Meta has become a bestseller despite the social media company banning the author from promoting the book.

Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former director of global public policy at Meta’s precursor, Facebook, topped the New York Times bestseller chart and will be fourth on the Sunday Times nonfiction hardback chart this weekend.

The book “sold a staggering 1,000 hardbacks a day in the first three days on sale in the UK, despite Meta’s legal tactics to silence the book’s author”, said Joanna Prior, CEO of publisher Pan Macmillan. “This early success is a triumph against Meta’s attempt to stop the publication of this book.”

The book is fourth on the overall Amazon US chart, and 13th on the Amazon UK chart.

Last Wednesday, Meta won an emergency arbitration ruling which placed a temporary hold on Wynn-Williams promoting the book. The American Arbitration Association’s emergency arbitrator, Nicholas Gowen, said that without emergency relief, Meta would suffer “immediate and irreparable loss”. Meta argued that the memoir is prohibited under a non-disparagement agreement signed by Wynn-Williams.

The book was announced just one week before publication, meaning there was only a week-long window for pre-orders, which are normally open for months and help boost a book’s chart position.

Wynn-Williams’ memoir is her account of seven years she spent at the company. She “had become part of what reads like a diabolical cult run by emotionally stunted men babies, institutionally enabled sexual harassers and hypocritical virtue-signalling narcissists”, writes Stuart Jeffries in an Observer review.

The memoir is an “ugly, detailed portrait of one of the most powerful companies in the world”, wrote Jennifer Szalai in the New York Times. Wynn-Williams “had a front-row seat to some of Facebook’s most ignominious episodes”.

Meta has described the book as “a mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about [its] executives”.

The emergency ruling dictated that Wynn-Williams must stop promoting the book, refrain from “amplifying any further disparaging, critical or otherwise detrimental comments”, and retract previous disparaging comments “to the extent within her control”.

It did not order any action by the publisher. “As publishers, we are committed to upholding freedom of speech and her right to tell her story,” said a spokesperson for Pan Macmillan.

An exposé by a former employee of Meta has become a bestseller despite the social media company banning the author from promoting the book.

Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former director of global public policy at Meta’s precursor, Facebook, topped the New York Times bestseller chart and will be fourth on the Sunday Times nonfiction hardback chart this weekend.

The book “sold a staggering 1,000 hardbacks a day in the first three days on sale in the UK, despite Meta’s legal tactics to silence the book’s author”, said Joanna Prior, CEO of publisher Pan Macmillan. “This early success is a triumph against Meta’s attempt to stop the publication of this book.”

The book is fourth on the overall Amazon US chart, and 13th on the Amazon UK chart.

Last Wednesday, Meta won an emergency arbitration ruling which placed a temporary hold on Wynn-Williams promoting the book. The American Arbitration Association’s emergency arbitrator, Nicholas Gowen, said that without emergency relief, Meta would suffer “immediate and irreparable loss”. Meta argued that the memoir is prohibited under a non-disparagement agreement signed by Wynn-Williams.

The book was announced just one week before publication, meaning there was only a week-long window for pre-orders, which are normally open for months and help boost a book’s chart position.

Wynn-Williams’ memoir is her account of seven years she spent at the company. She “had become part of what reads like a diabolical cult run by emotionally stunted men babies, institutionally enabled sexual harassers and hypocritical virtue-signalling narcissists”, writes Stuart Jeffries in an Observer review.

The memoir is an “ugly, detailed portrait of one of the most powerful companies in the world”, wrote Jennifer Szalai in the New York Times. Wynn-Williams “had a front-row seat to some of Facebook’s most ignominious episodes”.

Meta has described the book as “a mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about [its] executives”.

The emergency ruling dictated that Wynn-Williams must stop promoting the book, refrain from “amplifying any further disparaging, critical or otherwise detrimental comments”, and retract previous disparaging comments “to the extent within her control”.

It did not order any action by the publisher. “As publishers, we are committed to upholding freedom of speech and her right to tell her story,” said a spokesperson for Pan Macmillan.

Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday that instructs the US education secretary, Linda McMahon, to start dismantling the Department of Education, seemingly attempting to circumvent the need to obtain congressional approval to formally close a federal department.

The administration may eventually pursue an effort to get Congress to shut down the agency, Trump said at a signing ceremony at the White House on Thursday, because its budget had more than doubled in size in recent years but national test scores had not improved.

The federal government does not mandate curriculum in schools; that has been the responsibility of state and local governments, which provide 90% of the funding to schools. Nevertheless, at the White House, Trump repeated his campaign promise to “send education back to the states”.

The executive order targeting the education department, which has been expected for weeks, directed McMahon to take all necessary steps to shut down key functionalities. Trump added at the signing ceremony that he hoped McMahon would be the last education secretary.

“My administration will take all lawful steps to shut down the department. We’re going to shut it down and shut it down as quickly as possible. It’s doing us no good,” Trump said.

McMahon appeared to smile in acknowledgment as she sat in the front row at the signing event in the East Room. Trump spoke from a stage in front of a row of state flags, and flanked on each side by a group of schoolchildren sitting at small desks.

The bulk of the education department’s budget is made up of federal grant and loan programs, including the $18.4bn Title I program that provides funding to high-poverty K-12 schools and the $15.5bn Idea program that helps cover the education costs for students with disabilities.

The White House said those programs, as well as the $1.6tn federal student loan program, would not be affected by the order. It was not immediately clear what spending cuts the administration would be able to achieve without cutting those initiatives.

The move comes after the administration has already taken steps to undercut the department’s authority by instituting a round of layoffs that has reduced its workforce by nearly half and cancelled dozens of grants and contracts.

The idea of shutting down the education department dates back to efforts by Republicans in the 1980s. But the push has become increasingly mainstream in recent years as pro-Trump grassroots activists took aim at agendas that promoted education standards and more inclusive policies.

Congressman Thomas Massie, a Republican from Kentucky, separately introduced a one-sentence bill in January that would terminate the education department at the end of 2026. Similar efforts have failed to get enough votes to pass in previous years.

The Trump administration’s efforts to shutter the education department have largely followed the playbook in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s rightwing manifesto to remake the federal government, which envisions the department as a “statistics-gathering agency that disseminates information to the states”.

Democrats on Capitol Hill denounced the executive order and warned it could leave in jeopardy millions of low-income families, who rely on federal funding in schools.

“Shutting down the Department of Education will harm millions of children in our nation’s public schools, their families and hardworking teachers. Class sizes will soar, educators will be fired, special education programs will be cut and college will get even more expensive,” Hakeem Jeffries, the US House minority leader, said in a statement.

The progressive wing of the House Democratic caucus also denounced Trump’s order as an unconstitutional attempt to evade seeking congressional approval to implement his political agenda.

“The reality is that the Trump administration does not have the constitutional power to eliminate the Department of Education without the approval of Congress – however, what they will do is defund and destabilize the agency to manufacture chaos and push their extremist agenda,” said the Democratic congressman Maxwell Frost.

But without cutting out the department itself, the incoming Trump administration, buoyed by a rightwing backlash to public schools that intensified after the Covid-19 pandemic, could alter key parts of the department’s budget and policies in ways that would be felt in schools nationwide.

Some Republicans support the idea of sending block grants to states that aren’t earmarked for specific programs, letting states decide whether to fund low-income students or students with disabilities instead of requiring them to fund the programs for those students. Programs that don’t affect students directly, such as those that go toward teacher training, could also be on the chopping block. Expanding the use and promotion of school vouchers and installing “parents’ rights” policies are also likely.

In late January, Trump signed executive orders to promote school choice, or the use of public dollars for private education, and to remove funding from schools accused of “radical indoctrination”. Trump also revived a “1776 commission” to “promote patriotic education”.

The education department boasted that in the first week of the Trump administration it had “dismantled” diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

Soon after Trump took over, the department was loaded with key staffers tied to a rightwing thinktank, the America First Policy Institute, often referred to as a “White House in waiting”. The thinktank has supported driving out diversity programs and banning books, which the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism documented in a report on the institute’s ties to the education department. The policy institute has promoted installing Christianity in government, including in schools.

The department ended investigations into book banning and got rid of a book-ban coordinator position last month in a move announced by Craig Trainor, the acting assistant secretary for civil rights, who previously held a role at the thinktank.

The head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, has been dismissed, according to a statement from the prime minister’s office, a week after Benjamin Netanyahu said he had lost confidence in him, and despite three days of protests against the move.

“The government unanimously approved prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposal to end ISA [Israeli Security Agency] director Ronen Bar’s term of office,” a statement said.

He will leave his post when his successor is appointed, or by 10 April at the latest, the statement said.

Bar, whose tenure was meant to end next year, was appointed by the previous Israeli government that briefly forced Netanyahu from power between June 2021 and December 2022.

His relations with Netanyahu had been strained even before the unprecedented Hamas attack on 7 October 2023, which sparked the war in Gaza, notably over proposed judicial reforms that had split the country.

Relations worsened after the 4 March release of the internal Shin Bet report on the Hamas attack. It acknowledged the agency’s own failure in preventing the attack, but also said “a policy of quiet had enabled Hamas to undergo massive military buildup”.

Shin Bet, which has wide-ranging powers, is also investigating Netanyahu’s close aides for alleged breaches of national security, including leaking classified documents to foreign media and taking money from Qatar, which is known to have given significant financial aid to Hamas.

Netanyahu is also facing a potential jail sentence at the conclusion of an ongoing corruption trial. The 75-year-old politician, who took power in Israel for the first time in 1996 and has served 17 years as prime minister, is giving evidence twice weekly.

Bar had already hinted that he would resign before the end of his term, taking responsibility for his agency’s failure to prevent the attack.

He did not attend the cabinet meeting but in a letter sent to ministers said the decision to fire him was “entirely tainted by … conflicts of interest” and driven by “completely different, extraneous and fundamentally unacceptable motives”.

Over the past three days, demonstrators protesting against the move to sack Bar have joined forces with protesters angry at the decision to resume fighting in Gaza, breaking a two-month-old ceasefire, while 59 Israeli hostages remain in the Palestinian territory.

Israeli bombardments in the past three days have killed at least 592 people according to the Gaza health ministry, mostly women and children.

Protesters in Jerusalem chanted: “Israel is not Turkey, Israel is not Iran,” and pointed to a series of recent moves by Netanyahu they call “red flags” for Israeli democracy. One is the unprecedented effort to dismiss Bar. Another is a bid by the prime minister and his allies to oust the attorney general, Gali Baharav-Miara, who has argued that removing Bar from his post might be unlawful.

Dr Amir Fuchs, a legal expert at the Israel Democracy Institute, said Netanyahu “has a problem he wants to solve by centralising as much power as possible and getting rid of all the gatekeepers and professionals … but this does not align with the interests of the state of Israel, only with those of the prime minister and his government.”

The United States has refused a request by Mexico for water, alleging shortfalls in sharing by its southern neighbor, as Donald Trump ramps up a battle on another front.

The state department said on Thursday it was the first time that the United States had rejected a request by Mexico for special delivery of water, which would have gone to the border city of Tijuana.

“Mexico’s continued shortfalls in its water deliveries under the 1944 water-sharing treaty are decimating American agriculture – particularly farmers in the Rio Grande valley,” the state department’s bureau handling Latin America said in a post on X.

The 1944 treaty, which governs water allocation from the Rio Grande and Colorado River, has come under growing strain in recent years due to the pressures of the climate crisis and the burgeoning populations and agriculture in parched areas.

The treaty sets five-year cycles for water deliveries, with the latest set to end in October 2025.

Under the treaty, Mexico sends water from rivers in the Rio Grande basin to the US, which in turn sends Mexico water from the Colorado River, further to the west. But Mexico has fallen behind in its water payments due to drought conditions in the arid north of the country.

US farmers and lawmakers complain that the neighboring country has waited until the end of each cycle in the past and has come up short in the latest period.

The treaty is very contentious south of the border, where Mexican farmers have been struggling with intense drought in recent years.

A year ago the last sugar mill in southern Texas shut down, blaming a lack of water deliveries from Mexico.

After 18 months of negotiations, the United States and Mexico reached an agreement in November, days after Trump’s election, to improve deliveries.

Hailed then by the Biden administration, the understanding calls for Mexico to work with the United States to deliver water in a more timely way, including earlier in each five-year cycle.

Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, said on Thursday before the state department announcement that the water issue was “being dealt with” through the two countries’ boundary and water commission.

“There’s been less water. That’s part of the problem,” she told reporters.

Tijuana, a sprawling city on the border with the US state of California that has become a hub for manufacturing, depends on the Colorado River for about 90% of its water and has suffered waste from creaky infrastructure.

The Colorado River, also a major water source for Los Angeles and Las Vegas, has seen its water levels shrink due to drought and heavy agricultural consumption in the south-western United States, with around half of its water going to raise beef and dairy cattle.

In southern Texas, farmers have voiced fear for the future of cotton, citrus and other farming products without more regular water deliveries from across the border in Mexico.

Brooke Rollins, the US agriculture secretary, on Wednesday announced $280m in relief funds for Rio Grande valley farmers.

“Texas farmers are in crisis because of Mexico’s noncompliance,” Senator Ted Cruz of Texas wrote on X, praising the state department’s water decision.

“I will work with the Trump administration to pressure Mexico into complying and to get water to Texas farmers.”

The water dispute comes as Trump takes a tough approach to Latin American countries, especially on migration.

Trump on returning to office has vowed to end arrivals of undocumented migrants, who largely come from Central America and Venezuela but transit through Mexico.

Trump deployed troops to the border and announced painful tariffs on Mexico, although he has since put them on hold until 2 April.

The United States has refused a request by Mexico for water, alleging shortfalls in sharing by its southern neighbor, as Donald Trump ramps up a battle on another front.

The state department said on Thursday it was the first time that the United States had rejected a request by Mexico for special delivery of water, which would have gone to the border city of Tijuana.

“Mexico’s continued shortfalls in its water deliveries under the 1944 water-sharing treaty are decimating American agriculture – particularly farmers in the Rio Grande valley,” the state department’s bureau handling Latin America said in a post on X.

The 1944 treaty, which governs water allocation from the Rio Grande and Colorado River, has come under growing strain in recent years due to the pressures of the climate crisis and the burgeoning populations and agriculture in parched areas.

The treaty sets five-year cycles for water deliveries, with the latest set to end in October 2025.

Under the treaty, Mexico sends water from rivers in the Rio Grande basin to the US, which in turn sends Mexico water from the Colorado River, further to the west. But Mexico has fallen behind in its water payments due to drought conditions in the arid north of the country.

US farmers and lawmakers complain that the neighboring country has waited until the end of each cycle in the past and has come up short in the latest period.

The treaty is very contentious south of the border, where Mexican farmers have been struggling with intense drought in recent years.

A year ago the last sugar mill in southern Texas shut down, blaming a lack of water deliveries from Mexico.

After 18 months of negotiations, the United States and Mexico reached an agreement in November, days after Trump’s election, to improve deliveries.

Hailed then by the Biden administration, the understanding calls for Mexico to work with the United States to deliver water in a more timely way, including earlier in each five-year cycle.

Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, said on Thursday before the state department announcement that the water issue was “being dealt with” through the two countries’ boundary and water commission.

“There’s been less water. That’s part of the problem,” she told reporters.

Tijuana, a sprawling city on the border with the US state of California that has become a hub for manufacturing, depends on the Colorado River for about 90% of its water and has suffered waste from creaky infrastructure.

The Colorado River, also a major water source for Los Angeles and Las Vegas, has seen its water levels shrink due to drought and heavy agricultural consumption in the south-western United States, with around half of its water going to raise beef and dairy cattle.

In southern Texas, farmers have voiced fear for the future of cotton, citrus and other farming products without more regular water deliveries from across the border in Mexico.

Brooke Rollins, the US agriculture secretary, on Wednesday announced $280m in relief funds for Rio Grande valley farmers.

“Texas farmers are in crisis because of Mexico’s noncompliance,” Senator Ted Cruz of Texas wrote on X, praising the state department’s water decision.

“I will work with the Trump administration to pressure Mexico into complying and to get water to Texas farmers.”

The water dispute comes as Trump takes a tough approach to Latin American countries, especially on migration.

Trump on returning to office has vowed to end arrivals of undocumented migrants, who largely come from Central America and Venezuela but transit through Mexico.

Trump deployed troops to the border and announced painful tariffs on Mexico, although he has since put them on hold until 2 April.

A federal judge instructed the Trump administration on Thursday to explain why its failure to turn around flights carrying deportees to El Salvador did not violate his court order in a growing showdown between the judicial and executive branches.

James Boasberg, the US district judge, demanded answers after flights carrying Venezuelan immigrants alleged by the Trump administration to be gang members landed in El Salvador after the judge temporarily blocked deportations conducted under an 18th-century wartime law. Boasberg had directed the administration to return planes that were already in the air to the US when he ordered the halt.

Boasberg had given the administration until noon Thursday to either provide more details about the flights or make a claim that they must be withheld because they would harm “state secrets”. The administration resisted the judge’s request, calling it an “unnecessary judicial fishing” expedition.

In a written order, Boasberg called Trump officials’ latest response “woefully insufficient”. The judge said the administration “again evaded its obligations” by merely repeating “the same general information about the flights”. He ordered the administration to “show cause” as to why it didn’t follow his court order to turn around the planes, increasing the prospect that he may consider holding administration officials in contempt of court.

The justice department has said the judge’s verbal directions did not count, that only his written order needed to be followed and that it couldn’t apply to flights that had already left the US. A DoJ spokesperson said Thursday that it “continues to believe that the court’s superfluous questioning of sensitive national security information is inappropriate judicial overreach”.

A US Immigration and Customs Enforcement official told the judge Thursday the administration needed more time to decide whether it would invoke the state secrets privilege in an effort to block the information’s release.

Boasberg then ordered Trump officials to submit a sworn declaration by Friday by a person “with direct involvement in the Cabinet-level discussions” about the state secrets privilege and to tell the court by next Tuesday whether the administration will invoke it.

In a deepening conflict between the judicial and executive branches, the US president and many of his allies have called for impeaching Boasberg, who was nominated to the federal bench by Barack Obama. In a rare statement earlier this week, John Roberts, the supreme court chief justice, rejected such calls, saying “impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision”.

Trump on Thursday urged the supreme court to limit federal judges’ ability to issue orders blocking the actions of his administration nationwide, writing on social media: “STOP NATIONWIDE INJUNCTIONS NOW, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.”

The US attorney general announced charges against three people she accused of “violent destruction of Tesla properties”, amid protests and controversy over Tesla owner Elon Musk’s role in slashing US government staffing and budgets under Donald Trump.

In a statement on Thursday, Pam Bondi said: “The days of committing crimes without consequence have ended. Let this be a warning: if you join this wave of domestic terrorism against Tesla properties, the Department of Justice will put you behind bars.”

The unnamed defendants set to face “the full force of the law” are accused of “using Molotov cocktails to set fire to Tesla cars and charging stations”, according to a justice department release.

One was said to have been “armed with a suppressed AR-15 rifle” when arrested “after throwing approximately eight Molotov cocktails at a Tesla dealership located in Salem, Oregon”.

Another was arrested in Loveland, Colorado, the release said, after “attempting to light Teslas on fire with Molotov cocktails”, and was allegedly found “in possession of materials used to produce additional incendiary weapons”.

A defendant in Charleston, South Carolina, allegedly “wrote profane messages against President Trump around Tesla charging stations before lighting the charging stations on fire with Molotov cocktails”.

The department said each unnamed defendant faced “serious charges carrying a minimum penalty of five years and up to 20 years in prison” – but did not say what those charges were.

Tesla’s share price has taken a battering since Musk took up his role at the head of the so-called “department of government efficiency”, or Doge, overseeing brutal cuts to the federal workforce and taking over governmental department and agencies, often on questionable legal grounds. Judges have issued orders against many Doge directives.

One prominent Tesla backer, Dan Ives, managing director at Wedbush, said this week brand damage caused by Musk’s work for Trump “has spread globally over the last few weeks into what we would characterize as a brand tornado crisis moment”.

Musk claims to have done nothing “harmful”.

“Tesla is a peaceful company, we’ve never done anything harmful, I’ve never done anything harmful, I’ve always done productive things,” he told Fox News. “So there’s some kind of mental illness thing going on because this doesn’t make any sense.”

Musk did acknowledge that he has “upset” people with his work for Doge and unsubstantiated allegations of improper conduct by government workers, though he made another unsubstantiated claim when he said: “It turns out when you take away the money people get fraudulently, they get very upset.

“They basically want to kill me because I’m stopping their fraud, and they want to hurt Tesla because we are stopping this terrible waste and corruption in the government. I guess they are bad people. Bad people do bad things.”

A federal judge has dismissed a copyright lawsuit against Mariah Carey and her smash holiday hit All I Want for Christmas Is You.

The country singer Vince Vance of the band Vince Vance & the Valiants previously alleged that Carey had copied the group’s 1988 Christmas tune of the same name. Vance, whose real name is Adam Stone, accused Carey of exploiting his “popularity” and “style”.

On Wednesday, Judge Mónica Ramírez Almadani rejected the allegations, citing evidence from a musicologist that the songs only shared “commonplace Christmas song cliches” that are found in many other jingles. Carey’s attorneys previously argued that the language in Vance’s song had been been used in “legions of Christmas songs”, according to reporting from Billboard.

In one report, a New York University professor, Lawrence Ferrara, testified that he had found “at least 19 songs” that incorporated the same lyrical ideas that had been released before Vance’s track.

The judge reported that the plaintiffs “have not met their burden of showing that [the songs of] Carey and Vance are substantially similar under the extrinsic test”. The judge also called Vance and his lawyers’ conduct “egregious” and said they caused “unnecessary delay” and “needlessly” increased the costs of litigation, including through “incomprehensible mixtures of factual assertions and conclusions, subjective opinions, and other irrelevant evidence”.

Almadani additionally ordered them to repay Carey’s legal bills incurred while defending the case.

Vance first sued Carey in 2022 with allegations of copyright infringement. He claimed that his original track received “extensive airplay” during the 1993 holiday season – a year before Carey released her now huge hit.

He claimed that Carey “palmed off these works with her incredulous origin story, as if those works were her own”, in his latest complaint.

“Her hubris knowing no bounds, even her co-credited songwriter doesn’t believe the story she has spun,” Vance wrote.

Carey’s All I Want for Christmas Is You is considered a modern Christmas classic, retaking the No 1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 music chart for six straight years. It reportedly earned an incredible $8.5m in global revenue in 2022.

Australians are no longer happy little Vegemites, according to new research.

According to the latest World Happiness Report, Australia failed to make the top 10 world’s happiest countries list.

After just scraping into the top tier in 2024, the report now ranks Australia at 11th, with New Zealand just behind in 12th spot.

Nordic countries continue to lead the rankings, with Finland, Denmark and Iceland listed as the top three happiest nations.

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How do the rankings in the report work?

Each year the World Happiness Report offers an insight into how countries are faring globally in terms of wellbeing, including which countries are leading the way, the countries that are struggling and what’s making a difference globally.

The report draws the majority of its data from the Gallup World Poll which measures the attitudes, behaviours and wellbeing of people from across more than 140 countries, focusing on the quality of peoples lives, how they feel on a daily basis and other key insights.

More than 100,000 across 140 countries are surveyed.

The poll asks respondents to evaluate their current life as a whole using the image of a ladder, with the best possible life for them as a 10 and the worst possible as a 0, with each respondent providing a numerical response.

A country’s overall happiness ranking is based on a three-year average of collected responses, with about 1,000 responses gathered annually from each country since the larger sample size provides a more accurate estimate.

Key findings from the data

This year’s report focused heavily on the impact of caring and sharing on people’s happiness, highlighting the benefits to the recipients of caring behaviour and the benefits to those who care for others.

It found that people are much too pessimistic about the kindness of others. Using the example of when a wallet is dropped in the streets, researchers found that the proportion of returned wallets was far higher than people expected.

It also found that our wellbeing depends on our perceptions of others’ kindness as well as their actual goodwill, so we typically underestimate the kindness of others.

Thirdly when society is more kind, the people who benefit most are those who are least happy.

Finally the report found that kindness increased during Covid in every region of the world since people needed more help and others responded, which resulted in creating a ‘kindness bump’.

So which countries are happiest?

According to the report, Nordic countries are still leading the happiness rankings, with Finland, Denmark, Iceland and Sweden still in the top four and in the same order.

This year’s top 20 includes two countries from Latin America, with Costa Rica at sixth and Mexico at 10th, and one from the Middle East, with Israel ranking eighth.

In general, the report found that western industrial countries are now less happy than they were between 2005 and 2010 and for the first time, none of the large industrial powers ranked in the top 20.

In 2013 the top 10 countries were all western industrial countries, but now only seven are.

Industrial countries that were pushed out of the top 10 happiest countries in the world between 2013 and 2025 included Switzerland (3 in 2013, 1 in 2015, and 13 in 2025), Canada (6 in 2013 and 18 in 2025), and Australia (10 in 2013 and 11 in 2025).

Top 10 happiest countries in the world, 2025:

1. Finland

2. Denmark

3. Iceland

4. Sweden

5. The Netherlands

6. Costa Rica

7. Norway

8. Israel

9. Luxembourg

10. Mexico