Trump ‘slashes aid repayments bill’ to open up minerals deal

The US has slashed its demands for the payback of aid by Ukraine during talks over an economic deal between the two nations.

Following a round of negotiations in Washington last week, Donald Trump‘s administration reduced its estimate of US aid provided to Kyiv to about $100 billion from $300 billion, sources told Bloomberg.

Trump sees the deal – which would allow the US to share profits on Ukraine’s rare minerals – as a means to recover the billions of dollars spent on aid in Ukraine.

Speaking alongside NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte in Odesa president Volodymyr Zelensky said the negotiations on the minerals deal are “positive”.

“When the teams are ready, they will present what they have worked out. So far, both sides have ended the meetings in a positive mood,” Zelensky said.

The talks come after months of stalled negotiations over a deal that would give the US access to Ukraine’s vast reserves of critical raw materials.

Meanwhile, Russia launched a “massive” overnight drone attack on the Black Sea port city of Odesa damaging residential buildings and warehouses.

It came just hours after Nato secretary-general visited the region alongside Volodymyr Zelensky.

Northern Lights to be visible again tonight after dazzling parts of UK

Parts of the UK could be treated to a display of the northern lights across the night sky tonight thanks to recent solar activity.

The Met Office forecast the effects of a coronial mass ejection – a burst of material from the sun into space – would result in the colourful displays across northern parts of the UK from Tuesday evening.

“Strong auroral activity is possible in northern Scotland, but even southern England could catch a glimpse in any cloud breaks,” the Met Office said on social media platform X.

The forecaster said its effects could continue into Wednesday night before easing into background levels.

The aurora borealis is caused by solar storms on the surface of the sun. These storms give out eclectically charged particles which can travel millions of miles and, in some cases, they collide with Earth.

Although most of these solar particles are deflected, some are captured by the Earth’s magnetic field, creating spectacular displays.

Auroras give off several colours, such as purple, blue and pink, and are most visible at night. These colours are created by two primary gases in the Earth’s atmosphere — oxygen and nitrogen.

Usually, the northern lights are visible in Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, Greenland, Canada, the north of American state Alaska and northern Siberia in Russia. They are rarely seen in the UK.

Stephen Dixon, spokesman for the Met Office, said ahead of a recent display last month that people had noticed the northern lights more in the last year due to the sun being in its solar maximum phase of an 11-year cycle, “meaning higher frequency of solar activity on the sun.”

How Arsenal are being gaslit ahead of crunch Real Madrid clash

As David Raya walked out of the cavernous Bernabeu media room, having said Arsenal are “super-convinced” they can win – and then repeating it – Mikel Arteta gave him a knowing nod. The right message had been sent. Something was needed to counter “the narrative”, as the Gunners boss put it.

The main difficulty in Wednesday’s Champions League quarter-final might not even be facing Real Madrid, given what Arsenal did to them in the first leg, but the noise that Real Madrid make.

Jude Bellingham almost laughed when asked which word has been said the most in the dressing room over the last week. The answer was obviously “remontada”, since it is what everyone outside the dressing room has been raving about incessantly.

This is what manifestation looks like. Madrid have almost worked themselves into a fervour. Bellingham insisted “you can’t come into this believing there’s going to be anything other than a comeback”, and Madrid admittedly have the best possible reason for that. They have come back from two-goal-plus first-leg deficits more than any other club in European history.

It’s the great intrigue of this tie, and one challenge that Arteta – and, in truth, very few managers – have ever faced. Arsenal have a 3-0 lead but they’re essentially being gaslit into thinking they are the club facing the pressure, who have it all to do. This is what the Santiago Bernabeu can do to you.

It is one of very few stadiums you can go to with a lead like that and fear that a tie is still alive. The club hierarchy have promised something “special” for the pre-game tifo, which fits with how they’ve been trying to create “ambiente de remontada” all week. Fans have previously had pageantry about how your dream is their reality.

Now, they might well say that what seems impossible for you is inevitable for us.

Real Madrid great Emilio Butragueno was this week telling Madrid’s younger players about the epic comebacks of the 1980s, as Bellingham admitted he’d been watching some of the goals on TikTok. Madrid have naturally put highlights of all of their epic remontadas on social media, which is why Arteta was right to say it’s impossible to shut out.

“That’s the source of education these days,” Bellingham laughed. He did add “it’s infectious”, and spoke about a striking mindset.

“We had one of the worst results that could happen, and now everyone feels it’s nailed on we’re going to come back. It’s a nice feeling… a club like no other, the best in the world.”

This is what Arsenal have to withstand. It does add a genuinely fascinating psychological and sporting dimension to a tie that would otherwise be considered done.

That challenge is sharpened by the relative inexperience and youth of the Arsenal team. The Madrid camp have been all too keen to mention this almost as much as remontadas, pointing to how Arteta’s side have never played together in a stadium like this at a stage like this.

That’s where the Madrid media industrial complex is so effective, for reasons more than transfer campaigns. All of this is of course a vintage attempt to change the feeling around the tie, to make it feel like “anything can happen”. Even Pep Guardiola’s most experienced Manchester City teams have succumbed to that.

That’s precisely what Madrid have to try, though, since this tie proceeding as normal would just see Arsenal go through rather comfortably. There is even the possibility this merely becomes a huge anti-climax, as Arteta’s side just sit and shut Madrid out.

Those within the Arsenal camp even scoff at the idea that youth might be a disadvantage, since they say it has actually afforded this team “a fearlessness”. The travelling fans might understandably be nervous, many of them refusing to book cancellable trips for future rounds out of a fear of tempting fate, but that just hasn’t got through to the dressing room. They’re “super convinced”, you might say. Arteta himself laughed when asked about “fear”.

“I wouldn’t use that word,” the manager said. “It’s respect, and admiration for what they’ve done… but after that it’s just an opposition team.” Arsenal proved that in the first leg, stripping a stale and lethargic Madrid of aura.

“We have the momentum,” Raya said. The goalkeeper then repeatedly said Arsenal are here “to win”, having refused to get into any discussion of remontadas at all. Raya wasn’t going to play that game.

When asked about what game Arsenal would play, Arteta re-iterated that ambition to win. That naturally prompted a question about why he would take such an unnecessary risk.

“Because it’s the way of playing we feel most comfortable with,” Arteta said. “It’s about expression… to be brave, to be better than them.”

That may have revealed a bit of psychology on the other side.

Given how lethal Madrid can be on the break, and how a robust Arsenal don’t need to actually step out, it is hard to believe a manager as canny as Arteta will be so cavalier.

More instructive was actually what he said about “adapting quickly” to whatever happens, and “taking the game where we want”. This was an obvious reference to a Madrid early goal or similar, even if the Basque naturally didn’t want to outright describe that. He doesn’t want his players visualising negatives.

Arsenal have been conscious of this. Arteta and his staff have naturally watched all of Madrid’s recent comebacks, and studied how those games went as they did.

With City’s stoppage-time 3-1 collapse in 2021-22, it was genuinely the “uncontrolled euphoria” that stopped them Guardiola’s side doing what they normally do, while empowering Madrid. Arteta has specifically attempted to prepare for this, if only by working with his players on how to keep at the job at hand rather than dwelling on the potential of actually going behind. Again, “visualisation” is so vital here.

Preparing is one thing, though. The reality is something else.

Such is the history of this stadium that the temptation is almost to call it a “magical realism”. Ancelotti hasn’t got this far by indulging in such talk, though.

“I say nothing of magic, because magic doesn’t exist.”

He instead appealed to much more corporeal elements, saying Madrid have to “play with your head, heart and balls”.

This is where the headlines were coming in, as Raya repeated Arteta’s line of “writing our own history”.

This is all just another part of the noise, though. “Let’s do it on the pitch,” Arteta said. “It’s the only thing that matters.”

There’s no coming back from there.

Starmer told UK must repeal hate speech laws or lose Trump trade deal

Sir Keir Starmer must embrace Donald Trump’s agenda by repealing hate speech laws in order to get a trade deal over the line, sources close to JD Vance have told The Independent.

The warning came after the US vice-president suggested a UK-US agreement may be close, with the White House “working very hard” on it.

He told UnHerd: “I think there’s a good chance that, yes, we’ll come to a great agreement that’s in the best interest of both countries.”

But allies of Mr Vance say he is “obsessed by the fall of Western civilisation” – including his view that free speech is being eroded in Britain – and that he will demand the Labour government rolls back laws against hateful comments, including abuse targeting LGBT+ groups or other minorities, as a condition of any deal.

The Independent was told: “The vice-president expressing optimism [on a trade deal] is a way of putting further pressure on the UK over free speech. If a deal does not go through, it makes Labour look bad.”

Mr Vance’s recent speech to the right-wing Heritage Foundation think tank was cited as an example of his views on Western culture and free speech being linked to securing an agreement.

“No free speech, no deal. It is as simple as that,” the source close to the vice-president said.

It is understood that Britain has already offered to drop its proposed digital services tax as a means of getting a trade deal through. But the US wants to see laws on hate speech repealed as well as plans for a new online safety law dropped.

Labour has made it clear it is not prepared to go that far. A Downing Street source said the subject “is not a feature of the talks”.

However, the issue seems to be one of the main sticking points from the White House’s perspective.

Talks began last month after Sir Keir visited Mr Trump in the White House and intensified earlier this month with the tariffs announcement. While tariffs have been suspended for 90 days, the hope is that a deal can be done before they are brought into force.

Downing Street is aiming not for a traditional trade deal, but one focused on growth industries of the future, such as biotech and artificial intelligence.

Ministers insist this will not mean Britain has to accept imports of chlorinated chicken or beef with hormones, which have long been cited as concerns. However, they hope it will see most, if not all, tariffs removed between the two countries.

While Mr Trump’s trade secretary Howard Lutnick has taken a leading role in the talks with UK business secretary Jonathan Reynolds, the president announced at the start that Mr Vance would take the overall lead in the negotiations. UK sources have said he has been at the forefront of the tech side of the talks.

This has put the issue of free speech front and centre for Mr Vance and his allies in getting a deal with the UK.

The issue has become a central problem in UK-US relations since the summer riots when Mr Trump ally and X (Twitter) owner Elon Musk launched a vitriolic social media campaign against Sir Keir and his government, with people arrested over tweets.

It continued when Sir Keir visited the White House for the first time since Mr Trump took power and clashed with Mr Vance in front of the TV cameras in the Oval Office. The vice-president claimed that free speech was being undermined and also claimed that laws being brought in for online safety were an attack on US tech giants.

Most recently, the trial of Isabel Vaughan-Spruce for silently praying outside an abortion clinic has become a major issue in the US, with Mr Vance criticising the UK legal system over the case.

In his interview with UnHerd, the vice-president expressed optimism about the talks.

He said: “We’re certainly working very hard with Keir Starmer’s government.

“The president really loves the United Kingdom. He loved the Queen. He admires and loves the King. It is a very important relationship. And he’s a businessman and has a number of important business relationships in [Britain]. But I think it’s much deeper than that.

“There’s a real cultural affinity. And, of course, fundamentally, America is an Anglo country.”

Meanwhile, Mr Reynolds on Tuesday said he had been clear with US counterparts that he did not support Mr Trump’s approach on tariffs.

But he said there is a need in some instances to look at how to rebalance world trade to ensure greater fairness.

He said: “I don’t support the kind of approach to unilateral tariffs that the US has pursued. We’ve made that very clear to our US friends and colleagues, but there are issues as to how parts of trading works around the word, and there is a need to look at how we can do that fairly: how we can consider where in some cases countries are not operating to the same rules that we might expect here in the UK?”

YouTuber who ‘left Diet Coke’ for world’s most isolated tribe has bail plea rejected

An American tourist who allegedly stepped onto a remote Indian island to make contact with one of the world’s most isolated tribes was denied bail on Tuesday.

Mykhailo Viktorovych Polyakov, 24, was arrested on 31 March for allegedly sneaking onto the restricted territory of North Sentinel in the Andaman Islands and offering a can of diet coke and a coconut to the tribe as an offering.

A court in Port Blair, capital of the federal territory of Andaman and Nicobar Islands, rejected Mr Polyakov’s bail application and extended his judicial custody, PTI news agency reported.

He was scheduled to appear before the court again on Thursday.

Mr Polyakov, a YouTuber, arrived in Port Blair on 27 March and was arrested three days later after he was reported to local police by some residents who saw him take a boat to North Sentinel Island.

He was charged with entering a prohibited tribal reserve area of the North Sentinel Island, protected under the Andaman & Nicobar Islands Protection of Aboriginal Tribes Regulation 1956.

He could face up to five years in prison and a fine if found guilty.

Indians and foreigners alike are banned from going within 5km of North Sentinel to protect the indigenous tribe from external diseases and safeguard their way of life.

There are only around 150 members of the isolated tribe left on the island, which is cut off from the rest of the world, and not much is known about their way of life.

The Sentinelese last made headlines in 2018, when they killed an American missionary, John Allen Chau, 27, who was trying to enter their territory to preach Christianity. He was killed after the tribespeople shot him with arrows as his boat approached the island.

In 2006 the tribe killed two Indian fishermen who had accidentally drifted near the island. When a military helicopter later flew low over the island, members of the tribe fired arrows at it.

Police say Mr Polyakov sailed nine hours in a rubber dinghy with an outboard motor to reach the island and used binoculars to survey the area but saw no inhabitants. He is said to have recorded his visit to the island, leaving a can of Coke and a coconut on the shore as an “offering” to the North Sentinelese.

Police said Mr Polyakov conducted detailed research on sea conditions, tides and accessibility to the island before launching his journey.

“He planned meticulously over several days to visit the island and make contact with the tribe,” Hargobinder Singh Dhaliwal, a senior police officer in Port Blair, said.

In a statement, police said that the YouTuber’s “actions posed a serious threat to the safety and wellbeing of the Sentinelese people, whose contact with outsiders is strictly prohibited by the law to protect their indigenous way of life”.

Police seized Mr Polyakov’s phone as well as the GoPro camera he is said to have used to record his trip. He allegedly filled a bottle with sand from the island and taken it away with him.

Caroline Pearce, director of Survival International, a charity dedicated to the protection of tribal groups, said the incident was “deeply disturbing”.

“It beggars belief that someone could be that reckless and idiotic. This person’s actions not only endangered his own life, they put the lives of the entire Sentinelese tribe at risk,” she said. “It is very well known by now that uncontacted peoples have no immunity to common outside diseases like flu or measles, which could completely wipe them out.”

The Sentinelese, she said, “have made their wish to avoid outsiders incredibly clear over the years”.

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Triple killer Nicholas Prosper’s sentence referred to Court of Appeal

Triple killer Nicholas Prosper’s 49-year prison sentence has been referred to the Court of Appeal after shadow justice minister Kieran Mullan claimed it was unduly lenient.

Prosper was jailed for life with the specified minimum term at Luton Crown Court in March, after admitting killing his mother Juliana Falcon, 48, and siblings Giselle Prosper, 13, and Kyle Prosper, 16, along with weapons charges.

The violence-obsessed 19-year-old was also plotting a mass shooting at his former primary school in Luton, Bedfordshire, purely with the aim of gaining notoriety.

Passing sentence, High Court judge Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb told Luton Crown Court that her duty to the public was met with the 49-year minimum term, rather than using “the sentence of last resort” and jailing him for the rest of his life.

Conservative shadow justice minister Dr Mullan referred the sentence to the Attorney General’s Office under the Unduly Lenient Sentence scheme on the day Prosper was jailed.

The scheme allows any member of the public to ask for certain crown court sentences to be reviewed, and if necessary the case will be referred to the Court of Appeal.

On Wednesday, an Attorney General Office’s spokesman confirmed the Solicitor General has referred Prosper’s sentence to the Court of Appeal.

The spokesman said: “It will be argued that Prosper ought to have been given a whole life order. It is now for the court to decide whether to increase the sentence.”

Rules were changed in 2022 to allow younger defendants aged 18 to 20 to receive whole-life orders in exceptional circumstances, but none of the orders imposed since then have been on criminals in that age bracket.

The judge said that for defendants over the age of 21, whole-life orders can be considered in cases involving two or more murders with a significant degree of premeditation or planning, or where one child is killed with similar pre-planning.

Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb said: “The court may arrive at a whole-life order in the case of an 18 to 20-year-old only if it considers that the seriousness of the combination of offences is exceptionally high, even by the standard of offences which would normally result in a whole-life order. This is described accurately as an enhanced exceptionality requirement.

“Despite the gravity of your crimes, it is the explicit joint submission of counsel that a lengthy, finite term will be a sufficiently severe penalty, and this is not such an exceptionally serious case of the utmost gravity where the sentence of last resort must be imposed on an offender who was 18 at the time and is 19 today.”

While Prosper was “indisputably a very dangerous young man”, the risk to the public was met with a life sentence, she said.

Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb told the court she would not impose a whole-life order because Prosper was stopped from carrying out the school shooting, having murdered his family earlier than he intended after his mother woke up.

He also pleaded guilty as soon as the charges were put to him after psychiatric reports had been completed, and he was 18 at the time of his crimes which is at the lowest end of the age bracket for whole-life terms.

Dr Mullan said at the time: “What exactly does someone have to do in this country to be sent away for life? This was the most serious of crimes – including the murder of two children. What is the point of making provision for whole-life orders if they aren’t used in cases like this? It makes a mockery of the justice system and is an insult to the victims.

“This is the latest in a series of cases that demonstrate too often there is a gap between what the majority of law-abiding members of the public would see as justice and what the judicial system delivers. It was particularly galling to read the judge give to describe as mitigation for the murderer the fact that they didn’t succeed in a plan to kill even more people. What kind of logic is that?”

One of UK’s largest companies sees £2bn wiped off shares through Trump tariffs impact

One of the UK’s largest public listed companies has seen its share price sink by 25 per cent on Wednesday, after reporting a lower annual forecast for 2025 and warning over the “uncertainty” caused by Donald Trump’s tariffs.

Bunzl is a distributor business which supplies other companies around the world with essential everyday goods such as food packaging and labels for supermarkets, catering equipment for restaurants, and masks, gloves and gowns for hospitals.

Having held a market capitalisation in excess of £10bn, the share price crash of the FTSE 100 company has seen more than £2bn wiped off that total in hours after CEO Frank van Zanten cited a “challenging trading environment”.

No other company on the London Stock Exchange’s biggest index saw a fall of more than four per cent on Wednesday, leaving Bunzl as a huge outlier as it battles with its biggest market operating cautiously amid potential import costs and a weak dollar.

“A profit warning and termination of a share buyback programme, the first such halt by any FTSE 100 firm since the dark days of Covid-19 and lockdowns, are both taking a heavy toll on shares in Bunzl and driving them to a four-year low,” said AJ Bell investment director Russ Mould, explaining why the tariffs had particularly weighed on the company.

“The specialist distributor had already flagged the combination of higher input costs and price pressure in the US business in particular, where sales and profit fell in 2024. These challenges have become even more acute, especially for the food service and grocery segment. Volumes have stayed soft, prices have weakened, a customer has been lost and Bunzl has invested in its sales proposition to reaffirm its competitive position in the market.

“That is all putting a lid on profit margins after a period of strong expansion and also eroding one of the key parts of the investment case for Bunzl’s shares, namely the essential nature of the services it provides for its customers, and the pricing power this brings.”

Bunzl have halted a £200m buyback programme for this year, which sees companies buy their own shares from the market to return value to investors.

No FTSE 100 company had taken this course of action since 2020.

“It’s still all connected with the concerns about global tariffs and slowdowns…there’s nervousness in the market. Any bad news or any hint of bad news is being punished severely,” added Nick Saunders, CEO of Webull UK.

Bunzl has about 27,000 employees, with more than half of its revenue coming from North America.

The company reported higher earnings for the past year, generating an operating profit of £799.3m, about 1 per cent higher than 2023. However, its profit before income tax declined nearly 4 per cent year-on-year, and total revenues came in fractionally lower at £11.78bn. Bunzl said the decline was mainly driven by deflation across the US and Europe, which led to fiercer competition to decrease prices among suppliers.

The volume of sales was also impacted by the firm switching its focus towards own-brand products in its food services division in the US.

In the UK, Bunzl flagged a more challenging sales environment leading to weaker volumes, particularly in its safety division, which includes supplying equipment for building sites, and retail arm, with packaging for luxury fashion and jewellery firms impacted by slower consumer demand.

The company said it had a record year of acquisitions, buying 13 companies in 2024 and pledging to spend £883m.

Matt Britzman, senior equity analyst for Hargreaves Lansdown, said: “It’s been a tough year; prices have been falling in many of Bunzl’s markets after a period of rampant inflation and that’s been bad news for top line growth – but it might finally be at an inflection point.

“Key markets are showing brighter volume trends, and pricing looks set to flip positive soon, setting the stage for a stronger core business, with own-brand gains and cost efficiencies promising sustainably higher margins despite last year’s cost pressures.”

Bunzl said it expects revenues to grow in 2025 “despite significant uncertainties relating to the wider economic and geopolitical landscape”.

Additional reporting by PA